The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism 9780199660896, 0199660891

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

B R I T I SH ROM A N T IC I SM

The Oxford Handbook of

BRITISH ROMANTICISM Edited by

DAVID DUFF

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950860 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​966089–​6 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

List of Illustrations  Notes on Contributors  Introduction  David Duff

xi xiii 1

PA RT I   H I STOR IC A L P HA SE S  1. Romanticism before 1789  Nick Groom

13

2. The Revolutionary Decade  Jon Mee

30

3. The New Century: 1800–​1815  Simon Bainbridge

44

4. Post-​War Romanticism  Kelvin Everest

59

5. The 1820s and Beyond  Angela Esterhammer

74

PA RT I I   R E G ION A N D NAT ION  6. England and Englishness  Fiona Stafford

91

7. Scotland and the North  Penny Fielding

106

8. Wales and the West  Mary-​Ann Constantine

121

vi   Contents

9. Ireland and Union  Jim Kelly

137

PA RT I I I   H I E R A RC H I E S  10. Romantic Generations  Michael Bradshaw

157

11. Poetry and Social Class  Brian Goldberg

173

12. The Spectrum of Fiction  Gary Kelly

188

13. Gender Boundaries  Anne K. Mellor

204

14. Literature for Children  Susan Manly

217

PA RT I V   L E G I SL AT ION  15. Freedom of Speech  David Worrall

233

16. The Regulation of Theatres  Gillian Russell

250

17. Poetic Defences and Manifestos  Anthony Howe

264

18. Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession  William Christie

279

19. Trial Literature  Victoria Myers

294

PA RT V   C O G N I T ION  20. The Subjective Turn  Thomas Keymer

311

Contents   vii

21. Literature and the Senses  Noel Jackson

327

22. ‘High’ Romanticism: Literature and Drugs  Sharon Ruston

341

23. Writer-​Physicians  Catherine Jones

355

PA RT V I   C OM P O SI T ION  24. Orality and Improvisation  Erik Simpson

373

25. Revision and Self-​Citation  Jane Stabler

388

26. Intertextual Dialogue  Beth Lau

404

27. Letters and Journals  Pamela Clemit

418

PA RT V I I   P U B L IC AT ION  28. Book-​Making  Paul Keen

437

29. Oeuvre-​Making and Canon-​Formation  Michael Gamer

449

30. Celebrity and Anonymity  Tom Mole

464

31. Romantic Readers  Felicity James

478

32. Non-​Publication  Lynda Pratt

495

viii   Contents

PA RT V I I I   L A N G UAG E  33. Literary Uses of Dialect  Jane Hodson

513

34. Romantic Oratory  Judith Thompson

529

35. Creative Translation  Michael Rossington

547

36. The Ineffable  Stephen C. Behrendt

562

PA RT I X   A E S T H E T IC S  37. The Romantic Lexicon  Andrew Bennett

579

38. Literature and Philosophy  Tim Milnes

592

39. Practical Criticism  Gregory Dart

608

40. Word and Image  Sophie Thomas

625

41. The Culture of Song  Kirsteen McCue

643

PA RT X   I M P ORT S A N D E X P ORT S  42. The Greco-​Roman Revival  Nicholas Halmi

661

43. Orientalism and Hebraism  James Watt

675

44. Continental Romanticism in Britain  James Vigus

691

Contents   ix

45. British Romantics Abroad  Patrick Vincent

707

46. Transatlantic Engagements  Fiona Robertson

723

Index

739

List of Illustrations

15.1 Anonymous, A Freeborn Englishman! The Admiration of the World!!! And the Envy of Surrounding Nations!!!!! c.1795. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.  234 31.1 Card issued by Hookham’s Circulating Library (c.1800). Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection: Circulating Libraries 1 (71c). 

486

31.2 Interior of the premises of Messrs Lackington, Allen & Co, ‘The Temple of the Muses’, Finsbury Square. From Ackermann’s Repository of Arts 4 (1809), plate 17. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection: London Booktrade L. 

489

32.1 James Gillray, A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism. Frontispiece to Anti-​ Jacobin Review and Magazine (1 Sept. 1798). ©The Trustees of the British Museum.  496 34.1

James Gillray, Copenhagen House. Hannah Humphrey, 16 Nov. 1795. ©The Trustees of the British Museum. 

537

34.2 George Cruikshank, The New Union-​Club. George Humphrey, 19 July 1819. ©The Trustees of the British Museum. 

539

34.3 Anonymous, To Henry Hunt, Esqr. as Chairman of the Meeting assembled on St. Peter’s Field, Manchester on the 16th of August, 1819. Richard Carlile, 1 Oct. 1819. ©The Trustees of the British Museum. 

540

39.1 William Hogarth, Gin Lane. 1 Feb. 1751. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.  618 40.1 William Blake, title page, ‘Songs of Innocence’, Songs of Innocence and Experience (copy Y, 1825). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Rogers Fund, 1917). 

629

40.2

William Blake, The Poems of Thomas Gray, design 57, ‘The Bard’ (1797–​8). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 

632

40.3

James Gillray, Maniac-​Ravings—​or—​Little Boney in a Strong Fit. 24 May 1803. ©The Trustees of the British Museum. 

633

xii   List of Illustrations 40.4 William Wordsworth, ‘The Country Girl’, with engraving by Charles Heath, after James Holmes, in The Keepsake for 1829, ed. Frederic Mansel Reynolds. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 

639

45.1 Catalogue of new publications, A. and W. Galignani, Paris. c.1826. Private collection.  721

Notes on Contributors

Simon Bainbridge is Professor of Romantic Studies at Lancaster University. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (2003), and editor of Romanticism: A Sourcebook (2008). He has published many journal articles and essays on Romanticism, especially in relation to its historical context. He is a past president of the British Association for Romantic Studies. He is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Romanticism and Mountaineering: The Literary Cultures of Climbing, 1760–​1837. Stephen C. Behrendt is George Holmes Distinguished University Professor at the University of Nebraska. He has published and edited widely in Romantic-​era literature and culture, including print and electronic editions of neglected Scottish and Irish women poets and a related monograph, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (2009). He is also a published poet whose fourth collection, Refractions, appeared in 2014. Andrew Bennett is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. He is editor of William Wordsworth in Context (2015), and author of Wordsworth Writing (2007), Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (1999), and Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (1994). His other books include Ignorance:  Literature and Agnoiology (2009), The Author (2005), Katherine Mansfield (2004), and, with Nicholas Royle, This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (2015), An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (5th edn, 2016), and Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (1995). Michael Bradshaw is Professor of English and Head of the Institute of Humanities at the University of Worcester. He has published on a range of Romantic authors and themes, including Darley, Hood, Keats, Landor, the Shelleys, the London Magazine, and Romantic fragment poems. He is the author of Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2001), editor of Death’s Jest-​Book: The 1829 Text (2003), co-​editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2007), and editor of Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind, and Text (2016). William Christie is Head of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, a Fellow and Head of the English Section at the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres, and was founding President of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia. His

xiv   Notes on Contributors publications include Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (2006)—​awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship—​The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain (2009), Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life (2014), and The Two Romanticisms and Other Essays (2015). Pamela Clemit is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She is the author of The Godwinian Novel (1993) and has published many journal articles on William Godwin and his intellectual circle. She has published a dozen or so scholarly and critical editions of Godwin’s and Mary Shelley’s writings, including St Leon (1994) and Caleb Williams (2009) for Oxford World’s Classics. She is the General Editor of the Oxford University Press edition of The Letters of William Godwin, 6 vols: Volume I: 1778–​1797, edited by her, appeared in 2011; Volume II: 1798–​1805, also edited by her, appeared in 2014. She is currently editing Volume IV: 1816–​1828. Mary-​Ann Constantine is Reader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, where she works on British and European Romanticism with a focus on Wales and Brittany. She is particularly interested in travel writing, the dynamics of cultural and linguistic translation, and in the recovery and re-​uses of the medieval past and of popular song. Recent publications include The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (2007), and (ed. with Nigel Leask), Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant’s Tours in Wales and Scotland (2017). Gregory Dart is Professor of Romantic Period Literature at University College London. He is the author of two monographs, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (1999) and Metropolitan Art and Literature 1810–​1840: Cockney Adventures (2012). He has published two editions of Hazlitt’s writings, and co-​edited the collection Restless Cites (2010) with his colleague Matthew Beaumont. He is currently editing three volumes of the new Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, a project for which he is also General Editor. David Duff is Professor of Romanticism at Queen Mary University of London and founder-​director of the London-​Paris Romanticism Seminar. He is the author of Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (1994) and Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (2009), which won the ESSE Book Award for Literatures in the English Language. His edited books include Modern Genre Theory (2000), Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (2007, with Catherine Jones), and the forthcoming Oxford Anthology of Romanticism. He is currently researching the literary history of the Romantic prospectus. Angela Esterhammer is Principal of Victoria College and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Recent publications include Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–​1850 (2008) and The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (2000); the co-​edited volumes Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects (2015) and Spheres of Action: Speech

Notes on Contributors    xv and Performance in Romantic Culture (2009); the edited comparative literature collection Romantic Poetry (2002); and articles on Galt, Byron, and Blake. Her current research project examines interrelations among improvisational performance, print culture, periodicals, and fiction in the early nineteenth century. Kelvin Everest is Bradley Professor of Modern Literature Emeritus at the University of Liverpool. He has published widely on British literary culture of the Romantic period and is currently editing the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of The Poems of Shelley. Penny Fielding is Grierson Professor of English at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century literature. Her books include Writing and Orality:  Nationality, Culture and Nineteenth-​ Century Scottish Fiction (1996), Scotland and the Fictions of Geography:  North Britain 1760–​1830 (2008), and The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson (2010). Michael Gamer is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Romanticism and the Gothic:  Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (2000) and Romanticism, Self-​Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (2017). He is editor of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (2002) and Charlotte Smith’s Manon L’Escaut and The Romance of Real Life (2005), and co-​editor of The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (2003, with Jeffrey Cox) and Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800 (2008, with Dahlia Porter). His essays have appeared in ELH, Studies in Romanticism, PMLA, Novel:  A Forum on Fiction, MLQ, and other journals. Brian Goldberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He has written various essays on Romantic literature and culture and is the author of The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (2007). Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter. Among his books are The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (2002), The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (2012), The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year (2014), The Vampire: A New History (2018), and an edition of Chatterton’s poetry (2003). He has also edited Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (2014), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (2016), Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (2017), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (2018) for Oxford World’s Classics. Nicholas Halmi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and Margaret Candfield Fellow of University College, Oxford. He is the author of The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (2007) and editor of a number of critical editions, including the Norton Critical Edition of Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (2013). He was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship in 2015–​17 to write a book about aesthetic historicism in Western Europe during the ‘long eighteenth century’. Jane Hodson is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the politics of language in the Romantic period and on

xvi   Notes on Contributors representations of non-​standard language in literature. Publications include Language and Revolution: Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine and Godwin (2007) and Dialect in Film and Literature (2014). Her most recent project is an analytical database of novels that represent non-​standard English, ‘Dialect in British Fiction 1800–​1836’, which is available at: www.dialectfiction.org. Anthony Howe is Reader in English Literature at Birmingham City University. He studied at Liverpool before taking a PhD at Cambridge, and has taught at both Cambridge and Oxford. As well as publishing several articles on the second-​ generation Romantics, he is co-​editor of Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron (2008) and The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). His Byron and the Forms of Thought was published in 2013. He is currently writing a book about Romantic-​period letter-​writing and editing a collection of essays on the same subject. Noel Jackson is Associate Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (2008) and of essays on Romantic literature and culture appearing in English Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Modern Language Quarterly, and elsewhere. Felicity James is Associate Professor in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature at the University of Leicester, with research interests in sociability, life-​writing, and religious Dissent. She has published widely on Charles Lamb as writer, reader, and critic, including Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth:  Reading Friendship in the 1790s (2008), and a chapter on Lamb in Great Shakespeareans, ed. Adrian Poole (2010). She is currently editing the children’s writings of Charles and Mary Lamb for the Oxford edition of their collected works, and researching a monograph on Unitarian life-​writing in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Catherine Jones is Senior Lecturer in English and Coordinator of the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Aberdeen. She has published widely on literature, medicine, and the arts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her books include Literary Memory: Scott’s Waverley Novels and the Psychology of Narrative (2003), Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (co-​edited with David Duff, 2007), and Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767–​1867 (2014), awarded the annual book prize of the British Association for American Studies. She is a former president of the Eighteenth-​Century Scottish Studies Society. Paul Keen is Professor of English at Carleton University. He is the author of Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–​1800 (2012) and The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (1999). His edited books include The Radical Popular Press in Britain, 1817–​1821 (2003), Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780–​1832 (2004), Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and

Notes on Contributors    xvii Commercial Modernity, 1700–​1900 (with Ina Ferris, 2009), and The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth-​Century Print Culture (2014). Gary Kelly is Distinguished University Professor in English and in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. He has written on and edited numerous writers and genres from the Bluestockings to the Newgate novel. He is General Editor of the in-​progress multi-​volume Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, coordinator of the World and the Book comparative literature project, and director of the ‘streetprint’ database programme. Jim Kelly is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus. He has authored the monograph Charles Maturin: Authorship, Authenticity, and the Nation (2011) and edited the collection Ireland and Romanticism:  Publics, Nations, and Scenes of Cultural Production (2011). His next book will be on figures of speech in the writing and rhetoric of Irish Romanticism. Thomas Keymer is University Professor and Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His books include Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-​ Century Reader (1992), Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), and numerous edited volumes including The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 1: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750 (2017). He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Poetics of the Pillory:  English Literature and Seditious Libel 1660–​1830 for Oxford University Press’s Clarendon Lectures in English series. Beth Lau is Professor of English Emerita at California State University, Long Beach. She is the author of Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (1991) and Keats’s Paradise Lost (1998), as well as numerous articles on various Romantic writers. She also edited Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790–​1835 (2009), the New Riverside edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (2002), and co-​edited (with Diane Hoeveler) Approaches to Teaching Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1993). Her most recent book is the edited collection Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind (2017). Susan Manly is Reader in English at the University of St Andrews, and the author of Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s:  Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth (2007). She is currently writing a book on late  eighteenth-​and early  ​nineteenth-​ century radical and reformist writing for children, and a political life of Maria Edgeworth. She is also the editor of Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington and Practical Education, and the co-​editor of Helen and Leonora, all in the 12-​volume Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth (1999–​2003); and the editor of Maria Edgeworth: Selected Tales for Children and Young People (2013). Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture and Co-​Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on Romantic song and is editor of James Hogg’s Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd (2014) and his Contributions to Musical Collections and Miscellaneous Songs (2015).

xviii   Notes on Contributors She recently completed, with Pam Perkins, a new edition of Women’s Travel Writings in Scotland (2016), and is currently editing Burns’s songs for George Thomson for The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns. Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-​Century Studies at the University of York. He has published widely on Romanticism, and on the 1790s especially. His most recent books are Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762–​1830 (2011) and Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty (2016). Anne K. Mellor is Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of numerous books, research essays, and edited volumes, including Blake’s Human Form Divine (1974), English Romantic Irony (1980), Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988), Romanticism and Feminism (1988), Romanticism and Gender (1993), and Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–​1830 (2000). She is currently working on the feminist politics of Austen’s fiction. Tim Milnes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (2010) and Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (2003). He is also the co-editor (with Kerry Sinanan) of Romanticism, Sincerity, and Authenticity (2010). His new book The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt will be published by Oxford University Press. Tom Mole is Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Byron’s Romantic Celebrity (2007) and What the Victorians Made of Romanticism (2017), and co-​author (with Michelle Levy) of The Broadview Introduction to Book History (2017). He edited Romanticism and Celebrity Culture (2009), co-​edited (with Michelle Levy) The Broadview Reader in Book History (2014), and led the research group that produced Interacting with Print (2017). He has also edited a selection of reviews from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (2006). Victoria Myers is Professor of English Emerita at Pepperdine University. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on British literature and culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including a series of articles on Romantic-​ era law and drama. Her recent publications include Godwinian Moments:  From the Enlightenment to Romanticism (2011), an essay collection co-​ edited with Robert Maniquis; and William Godwin’s Diary, an annotated transcription of Godwin’s manuscript diary, co-​edited with David O’Shaughnessy and Mark Philp and published online by the Bodleian Library. She is currently conducting research on institutional scepticism and popular legal culture. Lynda Pratt is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Nottingham. She is general editor of The Collected Letters of Robert Southey (2008–​) and of Robert

Notes on Contributors    xix Southey: Poetical Works (2004 and 2012). She has published widely on the Southey circle and is currently working on a study of the culture of non-​publication in the Romantic period. Fiona Robertson is Professor of Eighteenth-​and Nineteenth-​Century Literature at Durham University and a Fellow of University College, Durham. She has long-​standing research interests in late ​eighteenth-​century and nineteenth-​century American writing as well as in British Romanticism, and her chapter in this volume draws on work as a visiting fellow of the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, and the American Antiquarian Society. Her new study The United States in British Romanticism will be published by Oxford University Press. Michael Rossington is Professor of Romantic Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He is currently co-​ ordinating, and editing poems for, the fifth and final volume of The Poems of Shelley in the Longman Annotated English Poets series. Gillian Russell is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is author of a number of studies of Romantic-​period theatre in Britain, including The Theatres of War:  Performance, Politics and Society, 1793–​1815 (1995) and Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (2007), and in 2015 co-​edited with Daniel O’Quinn a special issue of Eighteenth-​ Century Fiction on theatre. Sharon Ruston is Professor of Romanticism at Lancaster University. Her previous publications include Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Science, Literature and Medicine of the 1790s (2013) and Shelley and Vitality (2005). She has also edited Literature and Science (2010) and is currently co-​editing The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy for Oxford University Press. Erik Simpson is Professor of English and Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Professor of Humanities  at Grinnell College. He is the author of Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–​1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (2008) and Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–​1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money (2010). Jane Stabler is Professor of Romanticism at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Byron, Poetics and History (2002) and The Artistry of Exile:  Romantic and Victorian Writers in Italy (2013). She is currently the holder of a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete an edition of Don Juan for the Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of Byron’s Poems. Fiona Stafford is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Her research explores the literary geographies of the British Isles, and in addition to Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (2010) and Starting Lines in Scottish,

xx   Notes on Contributors Irish and English Poetry: From Burns to Heaney (2000), she has published studies of Clare, Crabbe, Hogg, Macpherson, Wordsworth, regional expression, the literature of the Solway, and Irish national identity. Other publications include editions of Emma and Pride and Prejudice, a short biography of Jane Austen, an edition of Lyrical Ballads (2013), and Reading Romantic Poetry (2012). Her most recent book is The Long, Long Life of Trees (2016). Sophie Thomas is Professor of English at Ryerson University. She is the author of Romanticism and Visuality:  Fragments, History, Spectacle (2008), and of articles and chapters that address the crosscurrents between literature, material, and visual culture in the Romantic period. She is currently writing a book on objects, collections, and museums at the turn of the nineteenth century. Judith Thompson is Professor of English at Dalhousie University. She has published widely on the life and work of the radical orator and polymath John Thelwall, including editions of his Selected Poetry and Poetics (2015), his novels The Peripatetic (2001) and The Daughter of Adoption (2013), and his dramatic romance The Fairy of the Lake (2011), and a monograph The Silenced Partner: John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle (2012). She is currently at work on Citizen John, the first full biography of Thelwall, as part of a larger archival-​activist project, Raising Voices, intended to restore his legacy and connect it to living communities that struggle for democratic rights. James Vigus is Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary University of London. His publications include Platonic Coleridge (2009) and the edited collections Informal Romanticism (2012) and Symbol and Intuition:  Comparative Studies in Kantian and Romantic-​Period Aesthetics (2013). He is currently working on a collaborative edition of Henry Crabb Robinson’s Reminiscences and Diary, having previously edited Robinson’s Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics (2010) during postdoctoral fellowhips in Jena and Munich. Patrick Vincent is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Neuchâtel. He is the author of The Romantic Poetess (2004) and has written or co-​edited a number of books and articles on Romantic-​period travel, including La Suisse vue par les écrivains de langue anglaise (2009), an edition of Helen Maria Williams’s A Tour in Switzerland (2011), and a collection of essays, Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects (2015). He is currently finishing a monograph on British Romanticism and Switzerland. James Watt is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict 1764–​1832 (1999) and is completing a study provisionally titled British Orientalisms, 1759–​1835. David Worrall is Emeritus Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton. He has

Notes on Contributors    xxi held fellowships and awards from the AHRC, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Huntington Library, and Australian National University. He is the author of Radical Culture:  Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–​1820 (1992), Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures, 1774–​1832 (2006), and Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage (2013).

I n t rodu ction David Duff

The Romantic movement transformed the literary culture of Britain, and critical analysis of the nature, causes, and effects of that transformation began in the Romantic period itself (1760–1830). Modern scholarly study of Romanticism has continued this investigation and its own transformations have reflected changes in critical methodology and a widening canon of authors and works which can be meaningfully classified as ‘Romantic’. This Handbook charts recent developments in the field, synthesizing and extending previous scholarship, identifying emergent research trends, and proposing new lines of enquiry. Divided into ten sections, each containing four or five chapters, the Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of British and Irish literature of the Romantic period; its historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts; and its connections with the literature and thought of other countries and periods, in particular its relations with European Romanticism, of which British Romanticism is emphatically a part. The structure of the volume, and the titling of the sections and chapters, are intended to strike a balance between familiarity and novelty so as to provide both a guide to current thinking and a conceptual remapping of the field. Several assumptions underpin the volume. The first is that ‘Romanticism’ is not simply a retrospective critical construct (although the term was not used in Britain at the time), but an observable phenomenon whose historical development can be traced and at least partially explained. Contemporary comment on the startling changes the ‘revolution in literature’ (a phrase that was used) entailed—​whether in literary forms and styles, notions of authorship, reading patterns, or critical theory and practice—​are accorded a central place. So too are the processes of transmission by which those innovations spread, the speed and range of their transmission being two of Romanticism’s most salient features. It was, in the full sense, a ‘movement’, and its contagious, mobile quality is part of its fascination, both in the British context and internationally. Rather than taking for granted the affinities shared by the authors and texts we now call ‘Romantic’, the chapters in this Handbook show how these patterns came to be established. Analysis of literary influence is underpinned by evidence about publication and reception, personal contacts and coteries, and the role of cultural institutions. No history of transmission

2   David Duff can ever be complete, but the recent work of book historians, biographers, scholarly editors, and others has made possible a far more detailed picture of the dissemination process than was available to earlier analysts of the Romantic movement. The transcendental qualities of Romantic literature become more, not less, remarkable when we pay attention to the material forms in which they were transmitted. A second premise of the Handbook is that the Romantic movement in Britain went through a number of distinct phases, as outlined in the Historical Phases section which opens the volume. This five-​part chronological survey offers a more nuanced account of the shifting zeitgeist than is available in standard literary histories. The chapters chart discrete historical periods, but also distinct stages in the development of Romanticism, the relationship between history and literature—​and Romantic writers’ awareness of this—​being a central topic of discussion. Two chapters are devoted to particular decades:  the 1790s, approached here through the polemical writing of the French Revolution controversy and the culture wars that surrounded it; and the 1820s, often dismissed by critics for its superficial, market-​driven culture, but redefined here as a key moment of experimentation and innovation at the interface of Romanticism and modernity. Chapter 3 explores the neglected ‘middle’ phase of British Romanticism, 1800–​15, whose most characteristic writing can be defined as war literature, strongly invested in notions of nationhood and more or less explicit ideological agendas. The fourth chapter isolates the post-​war years, 1815–​19, a volatile period in which military triumphalism, colonial expansion, and Regency excess vied with a resurgent political radicalism, the sharp contradictions of British society at this time provoking some of the most complex and challenging works of Romantic literature. The section begins with a chapter examining the origins of the Romantic movement up to 1789, a pivotal moment being the 1760s: the decade of Percy’s Reliques, the Chatterton forgeries, Macpherson’s Ossian, and the first Gothic novels. The various forms of literary revivalism, and of fabricated tradition, examined here are recurrent themes of the Handbook but this chapter also shows that Romantic aesthetic values had their roots in an earlier eighteenth-​century culture of Whiggism, complicating standard narratives about the genesis of revolutionary or counter-​revolutionary Romanticism. A third assumption of the Handbook is that British Romanticism can only be fully understood by attending to the different national and regional traditions of the British Isles and to the connections and tensions between them. This is a guiding principle of the whole volume and many chapters explore these questions. They are addressed directly in in the Region and Nation section (Part II), which adopts an archipelagic, ‘Four Nations’ approach, charting devolutionary trends while also analysing the emergence of ‘British’ as a newly significant category. The first chapter in this section (6) pinpoints a specifically English dimension to British Romanticism, examining the representation of England and Englishness, the shifting relationship between the terms ‘English’ and ‘British’, and the complications inherent in the literary expression of patriotic feeling in Romantic texts. In subsequent chapters (7 and 8), the linkage of Scotland with ‘the North’ and Wales with ‘the West’ makes possible an exploration of national literary identities while also registering the porousness of borders (highlighted by recent work on

Introduction   3 ‘debatable lands’) and the importance of East–​West, North–​South axes in the literary geography of Britain as a whole. Scotland features as both a modern producer of literature, with progressive institutions and a powerful publishing industry, and as a way of imagining modernity’s ancient Romance past. Wales, likewise, is presented as both a native scene of writing, steeped in traditions of Dissent and a politically inflected form of ‘bardism’, and, for English writers, an imaginary space of exotic and utopian possibilities. Chapter 9, on Ireland, examines the traumatic legacy of the 1798 Rebellion and the literary ramifications of the Act of Union of 1800 which brought into being the ‘United Kingdom’ and its emblem, the Union Jack. Instead of resolving the national question, however, the Union is shown to have produced a literature of fragmentation and decline, whose tonal instabilities are explored here. All four chapters in this section also foreground the relationship between the country and the city, analysing rural and urban strands in ‘Four Nations’ Romanticism and the importance of capital cities—​London, Edinburgh, Dublin—​both in imaginative constructions of nationhood and as centres of cultural production (with the regional capital Bristol performing a similar role for the West Country). The fourth major premise of this book is that Romanticism is a contested phenomenon and an internally divided one. Schools, factions, demarcations, position-​taking, and polemic are emphasized throughout. This is especially apparent in the Hierarchies section (Part III), which analyses various forms of differentiation and conflict, including generational splits (more complex than the two-​generational model normally applied to Romantic poets), generic hierarchies (and their link with social class, a similarly complex matter in an age of heaven-​taught ploughmen and poet-​lords), and the sharpening tensions between high and low culture, a development temporarily offset by democratizing trends such as primitivism and political radicalism. Gender boundaries, likewise, are both reinforced and transgressed in the period: the ‘gendering’ of genres (by reviewers and readers as well as writers themselves), the contesting of those identifications, and the shifting contours of sexual identity itself are crucial factors in Romantic literature. A similar dialectic can be found in fiction: Romanticism creates new categories, notably the standardized subtypes we now refer to as ‘genre fiction’, only to combine or dissolve them (‘fiction’ itself is an unstable category, emerging in histories and autobiographies as well as novels and short stories). Chapters 10 to 13 explore these tendencies and counter-​tendencies, all of which overlap and interact. The section concludes with a chapter (14) about imaginative writing for children. This explains the new cultural prominence such writing acquired, the relationship between its didactic and aesthetic function, and the link between children’s literature and broader Romantic interest in the special forms of perception associated with childhood and adolescence. The Legislation section (Part IV) foregrounds other sites of conflict, bringing together the struggle for freedom of speech, a vital public issue which spans the period, with that of the regulation of theatres, which in turn opens into broader questions about ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ cultural forms and performance venues. These explicitly legal matters are then set against the ‘unacknowledged’ legislative function claimed by poets and other writers in their literary manifestos and defences (the prominence of which in

4   David Duff this period is another index of the inherent polemicism of Romantic literary culture), and, on the other hand, against the newly powerful culture of reviewing, with its rigid critical canons and ethos of instant judgement. The close conjunction, in Edinburgh especially, of legal and journalistic institutions (many leading critics were also practising lawyers) helped to set the tone of periodical criticism, and the adversarial manner of the Reviews and magazines had profound implications for the evolution of creative literature in this period, as explained in Chapter 18. Byron’s satirical mythologization of the power struggle between ‘English Bards’ and ‘Scotch Reviewers’ highlights the national tensions that frequently underlay literary reviewing, and the Blackwood’s onslaught on the ‘Cockney School’ is one of many examples of the class prejudice that was another shaping factor. The section concludes with a chapter devoted to trial literature (19), by which is meant here both factual narratives of legal proceedings—​an important subgenre in its own right, popularized by high-​profile political prosecutions—​and fictional representation of trials in Romantic novels and plays such as Caleb Williams, The Cenci, and The Heart of Midlothian. The subsequent three sections examine cognition, composition, and publication. Separating these processes involves a degree of arbitrariness since they manifestly overlap and Blake, for one, insisted on the inseparability of ‘conception’ and ‘execution’, meaning by the latter not only composition but also printing and publication, which he frequently undertook himself. Blake’s total control over the artistic production process—​in his illuminated books—​was the exception, however, and for most writers the three steps involved different kinds of creative activity and different forms of cultural engagement. The Cognition section (Part V) explores the ‘subjective turn’ in late eighteenth-​century writing which gave rise to autobiography, introspection, and Romantic theories of authorship, but then extends this topic into more speculative areas, drawing on recent research in literature and medicine, literature and science, and cognitive poetics. Chapter 21 focuses on Romantic literature’s preoccupation with the senses and sensation, examining the philosophical sources of this preoccupation and its manifestation in experimental forms of writing that linked the poetic imagination to what Wordsworth termed the ‘science of feelings’. A more literal application of science to literature is afforded by Romantic habits of drug use, the mind-​enhancing and (seemingly) creativity-​fuelling possibilities of which are notoriously explored by certain writers. Chapter 22 playfully labels this ‘High’ Romanticism, a rubric intended to cover both the opium-​eating of De Quincey and other pharmaceutical enhancements such as Humphry Davy’s experiments with ‘laughing gas’, in which many writers participated. The final chapter in this section (23) turns from psychopathology to medicine, examining the work of writer-​physicians and the claims made by Romantic authors for literature as a form of medication or therapy, whether it be the medicalized poetry of the surgically trained Keats, Joanna Baillie’s reworking of the principle of catharsis and ‘sympathetic curiosity’ in her Plays on the Passions, or the new genre of physician autography introduced by Benjamin Rush. The Composition section (Part VI) opens with a chapter on orality and improvisation which explores native and foreign models of extempore composition and performance,

Introduction   5 linking these to concepts of spontaneity in Romantic critical theory and to the motif of the Romantic author as ‘ancient bard’ or minstrel. Though very common among both male and female writers, the adoption of this archaic persona by a modern author in an age of print is fraught with contradiction, and the complicated remediation processes such fantasies entail are analysed here as an example of what has been termed the Romantic ‘bibliographic imagination’. A further complication of the idea of spontaneous composition is presented by Romantic habits of revision and self-​citation, the evidence for which is considered in Chapter 25. With some writers, such as William Wordsworth, the habit is persistent to the point of obsession, but even figures such as Byron, who was reluctant to admit he revised or ‘furbished’ his work, made frequent alterations during composition, as his manuscripts demonstrate. Discussion of this topic is also an opportunity to assess the contribution to Romantic studies of scholarly editing, in which many contributors to this Handbook are actively involved, and of digital technology, which has made the comparison of textual versions more widely accessible. Chapter 26 examines the related topic of intertextual dialogue, the prevalence of which in Romantic writing constitutes yet another challenge to the idea of spontaneity and originality. The chapter explores the many forms such citational practices took, showing what is distinctive about Romantic intertextuality, not only in the sphere of poetry (where studies of influence and allusion have traditionally centred) but also in other genres such as essays and novels. The final chapter in this section (27) turns to another form of dialogue, letterwriting, and the related genre of journal writing, both of which enjoyed great popularity in the period. As the analysis offered here shows, letters not only served as vehicles for the exchange of information and opinions, they also brought people together, strengthening relationships and helping to build social networks. As such, they had a poetics of their own, an understanding of which can shed light on Romantic sociability and the creative practices associated with it. The Publication section (Part VII) brings together material facts about the Romantic book trade with exploration of the shifting relationships between authors, publishers, and readers. Chapter 28 looks at how book production in this period was shaped by technological advances in printing, commercial developments in advertising, and new forms of finance, as well as by political factors such as the explosion of print in the French Revolution controversy. Contemporary debate about print culture and the role of the book became part of a broader discussion about the nature and value of literature. Chapter 29 addresses the topic of canon-formation, analysing the techniques used by authors and publishers to construct authorial oeuvres (for instance, through ‘collected works’, an important publishing trend in this period, for living authors as well as dead ones) and the concepts of authorship and intellectual property that underpinned them. This chapter also looks at the formation of national canons within and across genres, a major activity of the publishing industry especially after the 1774 legal decision that ended perpetual copyright. Chapter 30 links the topic of celebrity, an established research theme in Romantic studies, with that of anonymity (or concealed authorship), a publishing strategy which is shown here to be paradoxically connected with celebrity, and that of pseudonymity, a variant of this strategy, serving a similar function. This is

6   David Duff followed by a chapter (31) on Romantic reading practices which discusses the expansion of literacy, bookshops and book prices, new institutions of reading such as the circulating library and the subscription library, and the thematization of reading in works of literature. The final chapter in the section (32) introduces a largely unexplored topic in Romantic studies, ‘non-​publication’, arguing that familiar critical narratives about the primacy of print have overlooked the extensive manuscript culture of the period. This includes not only the vast tally of rejected manuscripts handled by publishers, but also suppressed works, abandoned works, works circulated in manuscript form (or performed viva voce), and works which were projected but never started—​of which there were many. The Language section (Part VIII) gives attention to other areas frequently under-​represented in accounts of Romanticism. The section begins with a discussion of the literary uses of dialect, picking up issues of region, nation, and class explored elsewhere in the Handbook. Written by a linguist, this chapter (33) draws on recent work in historical sociolinguistics and dialectology to make the case that the Romantic period was a transitional one in terms of dialect representation, marking a shift from the representation of a narrow range of dialects for primarily comic purposes in earlier literature to a broader range of dialects serving a greater number of literary functions in the nineteenth century. The chapter also discusses the methodological challenges of analysing dialect use in literature, showing how written representation is not necessarily a reliable guide to actual spoken language, and how authors such as Burns, Clare, and Edgeworth moved between standard and dialect forms for literary effect. Chapter 34, on Romantic oratory, examines another intersection between writing and speech, connecting the rhetorical performances of the period with developments in literary and elocutionary theory. Several forms of oratory are discussed here, including parliamentary, counter-​parliamentary, religious, and theatrical oratory, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of the public subscription lecture, a fashionable genre centred on the newly founded scientific and literary institutions. Chapter 35 turns to the topic of translation, examining theories and practices of translation by leading Romantic writers. Literary translation, this account suggests, served both as a means to enlightenment about poetic traditions outside Britain, as in the Asiatic translations of Sir William Jones, and as an arena for technical experimentation, enabling authors such as Shelley, Byron, and Hemans to escape their native language and then to return to it with renewed force. The Language section concludes with a chapter on ‘The Ineffable’ (36), which discusses three figurative modes Romantic authors employed to represent experiences that eluded ordinary verbal expression: allegory, symbol, and myth. The chapter emphasizes the linguistic context of these terms while also exploring the tendency of Romantic texts to occlude distinctions between verbal and non-​verbal forms of representation, notably through analogies with the visual arts. The Aesthetics section (Part IX) highlights a fifth major premise of this volume, namely that Romanticism is both a literary practice and a conceptualization of that practice, literature and theory being inseparably connected for many writers of the period, and one of its most distinctive cultural products being the self-​theorizing art work. Chapter 37,

Introduction   7 on ‘The Romantic Lexicon’, traces the ascendancy of technical terms such as ‘esemplastic’ and ‘organic’ and of idiosyncratic concepts such as ‘gusto’ and ‘negative capability’, but also the special use made by Romantic writers of more ordinary words such as ‘feeling’, ‘nature’, ‘passion’, and ‘power’. The supercharging of this everyday vocabulary to produce aesthetic key words is shown to be one of the ways in which Romanticism invents itself as a radical literary movement and develops new modes of writing. Chapter 38 examines the relationship between literature and philosophy, analysing the impact on British Romanticism both of German transcendental idealism and—​a less-​often noted influence—​of Scottish common sense philosophy. This chapter shows how the revolutionary debates of the 1790s politicized the disciplines of philosophy and ‘theory’, leading to an anti-​philosophical rhetoric in some Romantic writers, but also how other writers, such as Shelley, used these disciplinary shifts to endow the concept of literature with new philosophical significance. Chapter 39 takes as its focus Coleridge’s term ‘practical criticism’, explaining how, in its original sense (as distinct from its modern, pedagogic application by I. A. Richards), this term was linked to an innovative critical project which emerged in 1811–​12 in the Charles Lamb circle. Rather than implying criticism divorced from theory (its modern meaning), Romantic practical criticism—​also known as ‘genial’ criticism—​embodied a carefully formulated aesthetic and a distinctive practice of critical reading which are largely missing from standard accounts of the history of literary criticism. The two final chapters in this section treat literature’s relation to other art forms. Chapter 40 explores the relationship between word and image, examining the many contexts where the two combine or collide, such as in book illustration, in the literary device of ekphrasis, in theories of poetry and painting as ‘sister arts’, and in exhibitions and galleries. Chapter 41 analyses the Romantic culture of song, tracing the emergence of a new critical discourse about song while examining some of the ways in which Romantic authors creatively worked with songs, from writing texts for existing melodies to finding inspiration in the power of live performance. The relation between words and music is considered here, as is the widespread Romantic phenomenon of the ‘pseudo-​song’—​that is, lyric poetry which purports to be song or which simulates musical form without actually providing music. Though the focus of this Handbook is Britain, Romanticism was a transnational phenomenon and British Romanticism has its own international dimension. The concluding Imports and Exports section (Part X) examines Britain’s intellectual transactions with Europe, America, and the wider world. Chapter 42 explores British Romanticism’s relationship to classical antiquity, bringing together the Greek Revival, a powerful cultural trend affecting all the arts, with what is now recognized as a new and distinctive phase in British engagement with Roman antiquity. The chapter also considers the impact of historicism, which created a greater sense of temporal and cultural distance from antiquity while paradoxically encouraging new forms of identification with it. Chapter  43 pairs another prominent cultural trend, Orientalism, with the less often treated topic of Romantic Hebraism, showing how Eastern writing, much of it translated into English for the first time, served as an imaginative stimulus, introducing new forms and subject matter while also providing allegorical settings to reflect on the politics of

8   David Duff the revolutionary era. Two chapters then focus on connections with Europe. Chapter 44 examines Continental influences on Britain, pinpointing the channels though which that influence exerted itself and showing that British Romanticism, far from being Europhobic, as is often claimed, drew strength from direct contact with Continental sources. British writers in turn played an active role in transmitting Romantic ideas in Europe, a topic taken up in Chapter 45, on ‘British Romantics Abroad’. This considers foreign travel and exile but also the material channels, such as foreign reviews and pirated editions, which enabled the international circulation of British-​authored texts and helped to place Britain’s liberal brand of Romanticism at the forefront of European culture. The final chapter (46) investigates the close but fraught cultural relationship between Britain and the newly formed United States. Attending again both to writers themselves and to their publishing context, the chapter explores the literary effect of emigration, the literature of the anti-​slavery movement, the imaginative allure of Native American culture, and the workings of the transatlantic literary marketplace, including the impact of copyright legislation in the United States. Though this section is necessarily selective in its coverage of Britain’s international relations, it shows how the national and local emphasis of some British Romantic texts is offset by the internationalism and cosmopolitanism of others, and how British Romanticism, despite the national rivalries and ideological conflicts into which it was inevitably drawn, was part of European and global Romanticism, both influencing and influenced by the broader trajectory of the Romantic movement. The comparative and interdisciplinary mindset charted in Paul Hamilton’s Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (2016), to which this volume is a complement, is as much a feature of British Romanticism as of its Continental counterparts. Such, in brief, are the scope and aims of this book. One of the pleasures of editing it has been discovering unexpected parallels and contrasts between the chapters submitted: in finding, for example, that the new form of ‘genial’ criticism developed by the Lamb–​Coleridge circle, the subject of the ‘Practical Criticism’ chapter (39), is an exact antithesis of, and response to, the aggressive and politically biased periodical criticism discussed in the chapter on ‘Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession’ (18); or that the experiments with laughing gas chronicled in the chapter on ‘Literature and Drugs’ (22) produce a mode of writing that is a version of the sublime, a concept analysed in its philosophic aspect in the ‘Romantic Lexicon’ chapter (37), its linguistic aspect in the chapter on ‘The Ineffable’ (36), and its visual aspect in the ‘Word and Image’ chapter (40). The migration of this concept across science, poetry, politics, and philosophy is one of many examples of the cross-​fertilization of genres and discourses charted in these pages. That John Clare, to take another example, should be presented as a case study of the relationship between poetry and social class in Chapter 11 and of the literary use of dialect in Chapter 33 is no surprise, but Clare also features in this Handbook as a key presence in the Romantic culture of song (Chapter 41), a user of the ubiquitous ‘minstrel’ motif (Chapter 24), an exponent of multiple forms of intertextual dialogue (Chapter 26), and an instance of the effects of reading on what Clare called ‘self-​identity’ (Chapter 31). His rapid rise and fall as a literary celebrity are a reminder of shifting public taste in the

Introduction   9 1820s, as the Romantic poetry boom fades and other forms of writing gain ascendancy (Clare’s essay ‘Popularity in Authorship’, cited in Chapter 5, is a moving reflection on this theme, occasioned by his attendance at Byron’s funeral procession in 1824). If the level of attention accorded here to Clare confirms his status as a major Romantic, a similar claim can be made for Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, Iolo Morganwg, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and Leigh Hunt, to mention some other names that recur with remarkable frequency in these chapters. Meanwhile, it says something about the transformation of Romantic studies in the past twenty years that the most cited secondary source in this Handbook is William St Clair’s study of publication patterns and the ‘reading nation’, and that the author-​centric phrase ‘visionary company’ is not used once (though Bloomian influences persist in other forms). Readers of the Handbook can discover such connections and emphases for themselves, assisted by editorial cross-​references (used sparingly here) and by the index, which is as comprehensive as possible. The volume was carefully planned and involved, at times, high levels of editorial intervention in the interests of intellectual coherence and stylistic consistency (an essayistic manner was encouraged throughout, with no subdivisions or subtitles, a preference for suggestive illustration over exhaustive documentation, and a premium on clarity of expression rather than vatic pronouncement). But the Handbook is nonetheless, and quite deliberately, an assemblage of diverse methodologies and critical sensibilities. It is a measure of the artistic richness and intellectual complexity of Romantic literature that it attracts such varied approaches and produces such different forms of scholarship. Laying them side by side provides impressive evidence of the vibrancy of this research field and of the willingness of Romantic scholars to learn from one another even where their assumptions and methods differ. As I complete this large editorial task, which has absorbed my attentions for longer than anticipated, I express thanks to my contributors, who produced such informative and insightful chapters, and responded so constructively to my suggestions. All of them shared my conviction that this should be a book which not only summarizes research but also actively contributes to it, creating new lines of enquiry as well as reporting on existing ones. In several instances, the writing of the chapters has been the starting point for new research projects which will result in monographs and other major publications. I look forward to these and to other research which I hope this volume will inspire. Further thanks must go to the editorial and production staff at Oxford University Press, in particular Jacqueline Norton, who commissioned this Handbook and shared my excitement about it; and to the anonymous readers who gave expert feedback on the original proposal. Finally, I express my gratitude to Mercedes Durham, whose encouragement and support helped me to bring this project to fruition.

Pa rt  I

H I STOR IC A L  P HA SE S

Chapter 1

Romanticism Be fore  1 7 8 9 Nick Groom

It is tempting, as so many critics have done in the past, to regard the movement from eighteenth-​to nineteenth-​century poetics as a shift from neoclassicism to Romanticism. The former is typified as Augustan, urbane, and topical: seeking a formal state role for poetry as a principled corrective to politics and society through didacticism and satire; reflecting philosophical methods of empiricism and ratiocination; relying on understatement and irony, and allusion and imitation (especially of Roman writers); and engaging readers through social commentary, dialogue, and witty conversation. It is literature as an elevated craft and a moral compass. In contrast, the Romantic style is self-​reflexive, introspective, and reclusive: the writer is an individual observer of local distinctiveness with an ear for popular forms and the common voice; the sophistication of the city is abandoned for rural retreats and mystical encounters with nature and the wilderness, haunted by memories and superstition. Such writing is inspired and sublime, passionate and original, and its poetry manifests a supreme, revelatory power: witness to a universal, eternal, and essential imagination embedded in immediate experience. Instances of this Romanticism in the eighteenth century have given rise to terms such as ‘pre-​Romanticism’, ‘incipient Romanticism’, and the ‘age of sensibility’. As Northrop Frye put it, with a deliberate archness, there is among critics ‘a vague feeling that . . . poetry moved from a reptilian Classicism, all cold and dry reason, to a mammalian Romanticism, all warm and wet feeling’.1 In such a scenario, the 1760s appears to be a prehistoric prototype of Romanticism. James Macpherson’s Ossianics (1760–​5), Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), and Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley works (published 1777), as well as the first historical and Gothic novels—​Longsword by Thomas Leland (1762) and The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)—​seemed symptomatic of a break with overriding neoclassical taste. Romantic writers themselves developed this primordial canon: Macpherson and Percy eclipsed Samuel Johnson, Walpole 1 

Northrop Frye, ‘Towards Defining An Age of Sensibility’, English Literary History 23.2 (1956), 144–​52 (p. 144).

14   Nick Groom overshadowed Laurence Sterne, Chatterton surpassed all. But there is a major problem here:  any hunt for precursors to Romanticism is bound to be teleological, first by imposing a retrospective set of literary values on an earlier period and judging selected works by what followed them, and second in assuming that these works share features and have a recognizable unity. Accordingly, there has been a recent trend either to resist such classifications as ‘classic to romantic’ or to reclaim outmoded terms.2 Marshall Brown, while acknowledging the problems of the ‘preromantic’, argues that ‘the period [was] preromantic precisely because it was not yet romantic’.3 For Brown, this is a matter of expression: mid-​ eighteenth-​century writers could not identify the literature they should write. They were experimental, but their innovations were unsustainable and could not be developed into a durable poetic voice. And while Brown’s thesis has been robustly challenged, it is worth noting that Lyrical Ballads was hardly an unqualified success either with readers or with the poets themselves—​Wordsworth did not repeat many of the experiments that characterize the work, and the next generation of Romantics did not slavishly follow his poetic models. But Brown’s approach remains teleological (‘not yet’ Romanticism), as do the milder forms ‘early Romantics’ or even ‘Romanticism before 1789’, denying earlier eighteenth-​century writers a critique on their own terms. Hence, my title should be posed as a question, whose answer lies in the politics of canon-formation and literary reactions to the past that emerged in the eighteenth century. The literary canon bequeathed to Romanticism was shaped by the political factionalism of the early eighteenth century. It was a fashioned as a piece of cultural propaganda against which there was a violent reaction in the ‘modern’ poetry of Alexander Pope. This was in turn followed by a more gradual counter-​reaction against the Popeian hegemony, from which developed the central importance of subjectivity, organicist thinking, the transcendent power of nature, magical primitivism, and other familiar touchstones of the literature of the 1790s and beyond. Romanticism was, in one important sense, the culmination of this anti-​Popeian movement.4 The tone of this reactive Romanticism is apparent, for instance, in Keats’s attack on neoclassicism in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (1817). Neoclassicism had been a ‘schism’ in English poetry, its heroic couplets petty versifications: ‘They sway’d about upon a rocking horse, | And thought it Pegasus’ (lines 186–​7).5 Poetry proper was a manly and antique tradition, but for Keats neoclassical poets have been sleepwalking through the eternal 2 

For example, H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xv. 3  Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 3, 386 n. 5. 4  See Robert Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24–​8; Robert Griffin, ‘The Eighteenth-​Century Construction of Romanticism: Thomas Warton and the Pleasures of Melancholy’, English Literary History 59 (1992), 799–​ 815; and David Fairer, ‘Historical Criticism and the English Canon: A Spenserian Dispute of the 1750s’, Eighteenth-​Century Life 24 (2000), 43–​64. 5  All quotations are from John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Romanticism before 1789   15 powers of nature: ‘beauty was awake! | Why were ye not awake?’ (lines 92–​3). Yet this barbed retort to Pope was simply the latest in a long line of antagonistic responses, for which the battle-​lines had already been drawn by the Warton brothers. Thomas Warton the Younger’s ‘Essay on Romantic Poetry’, the first such essay in the English tradition, was written in 1745—​a quarter of a century before Wordsworth was born. The aspiring seventeen-​year-​old poet and critic wrote that The principal use which the ancients made of poëtry, as appears by their writings, was to imitate human actions & passions, or intermix here & there descriptions of Nature. Several modern authors have employed a manner of poëtry entirely different from this, I mean in imitating the actions of spir[i]‌ts, in describing imaginary Scenes, & making persons of abstracted things, such as Solitude, Innocence, & many others. A Kind of Poëtry which perhaps[s] it would not be improper to call a Romantic Kind of Poëtry, as it [is] altogether conceived in the spirit, (tho with more Judgment & less extravagant) & affects the Imagination in the same Manner, with the old Romances.6

Warton’s aboriginal Romantic poetry is medieval and supernatural, the work of an abstract imagination. Thomas Warton and his brother Joseph subsequently self​consciously delineated their own style of poetry; as Joseph, writing on Pope in 1754, later put it: ‘Wit and Satire are transitory and perishable, but Nature and Passion are eternal.’7 This was to be their credo. The poetic values championed by the Wartons were part of a broader and emerging Gothic cultural tradition. ‘Gothic’ was primarily a political term in the early eighteenth century, deriving from seventeenth-​century debates on the nature of monarchy, the extent of the king’s powers, and the role of Parliament. In brief, this argument ran that the fifth-​century Gothic tribes responsible for the sack of Rome were not merely barbarians responsible for the destruction of ancient civilization, but had actually laid the foundations of constitutional monarchy. They were the primal representatives of a spirit of freedom that instinctively rebelled against tyranny and repression, and which characterized English history. Hence, the Magna Carta, the Reformation, and the Glorious Revolution were all, in different ways, expressions of the evolving Gothic love of liberty. Gothicism therefore offered an historical justification for Protestantism, Parliamentarianism, and the idea of progress that underwrote the principles of the Whig party, implicitly tied to the destiny of the nation.8 Consequently, the word ‘Gothic’ was bandied by Whigs and Tories in both its positive and pejorative senses of freedom and barbarism. These debates rapidly spread into culture, and specifically into literature, and so medieval style became associated either with constitutional values, liberty, and individuality, or with crude and uncultivated

6 

David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–​1789 (London: Longman, 2003), 156. Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756), 334. 8  See Nick Groom, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54–​64. 7 

16   Nick Groom taste—​the result being that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were all enlisted as ‘Gothic’ writers. There was, however, no simple dichotomy between royalist Tory neoclassicism and parliamentary Whig Gothicism. Tories adapted Gothic motifs and style in, for example, architecture (‘Jacobite Gothick’), and writers such as Pope developed Gothic interests from his Chaucerian imitation ‘Lately found in an old Manuscript’ to his edition of Shakespeare, his medievalist ‘Eloise and Abelard’ (a poem preoccupied with memory), and the political allegory of ‘The Temple of Liberty’.9 Indeed, Pope remarked of Shakespeare that one may look upon his works, in comparison of those that are more finish’d and regular, as upon an ancient majestick piece of Gothick Architecture, compar’d with a neat Modern building: The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and more solemn.10

Most notably, Gilbert West’s poem The Institution of the Order of the Garter (1742) was a Patriot masque populated by ancient druids, bards, and minstrels that dramatized the Tory vision of Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke.11 But despite all this, Gothic motifs were used much more extensively by Whig writers: even the sophisticated metropolitan writer Joseph Addison wrote approvingly of the ‘Gothick Manner in Writing’ that characterized popular ballads such as ‘Chevy-​Chace’.12 The Whig cultural programme of the period took its cue from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the consequent emphasis on Parliament and Protestantism (the Act of Settlement, 1701) as part of a Gothic political ideology. In the context of this ‘party political aesthetics’, then, it was the Whig canon that gained supremacy through strategic patronage and the simple fact that the Whigs were in power.13 Within a few years a distinctive literary tradition was proposed and actively promoted through Jacob Tonson’s publications, sponsored by the Whig literati: ‘the post-​Revolution rebirth of native artistic achievement’.14 It was also a poetics that was dominated by male writers, Richard Blackmore’s Advice to the Poets (1706) in particular calling for ‘Master Bards’ to compose a masculine national poetry.15 And yet, being in power meant that Whig poetry tended towards eulogy and panegyric; Tory opposition writers, in contrast, attacked the 9 

Michael Charlesworth, ‘Jacobite Gothick’, The Gothic Revival: 1720–​1870, 3 vols (Mountfield: Helm, 2002), ii. 152–​70. 10  Alexander Pope (ed.), ‘The Preface’, The Works of Shakespear, 6 vols (London, 1725), i. p. xxiii. 11  See Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–​ 1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 224–​9. 12  The Spectator, 70 (21 May 1711). 13  Abigail Williams, ‘Whig and Tory Poetics’, in Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-​ Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 444–​57 (p. 444). 14  Abigail Williams, ‘Patronage and Whig Literary Culture in the Early Eighteenth Century’, in David Womersley (ed.), ‘Cultures of Whiggism’: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 149–​72 (pp. 163–​4). 15  Sarah Prescott, ‘Elizabeth Singer Rowe: Gender, Dissent, and Whig Poetics’, in Womersley, ‘Cultures of Whiggism’, 173–​99 (p. 179).

Romanticism before 1789   17 establishment with satire, or turned their crypto-​Jacobite sympathies inwards with neoclassical pastoral and lyrics. The result was that the Tory vanguard of the Scriblerian writers (Gay, Pope, and Swift) completely eclipsed the vapid effusions of Whig poetry and became the dominant literary style, accounting for Edmund Burke’s later comment to James Boswell: ‘I take the true Genius of this constitution to be, Tory language and Whigg measure.’16 Romanticism materializes in part out of this eighteenth-​century Gothic Whiggery. This has not gone unnoticed by critics, and Richard Terry claims that the rivalry between the classical and gothic still animates our own perception not just of our literary past but also of our present-​day literary possibilities, though the space of the non-​classical has since been lost to gothic and has instead been commandeered by the upstart term ‘Romanticism’.

Things are not quite so simple, however, and Terry’s subsequent remark that the late eighteenth-​century’s ‘key canonical antagonism’ was between ‘Pope and the gothic authors’ requires considerable finessing.17 While it is true that some later writers, such as Keats, do condemn Pope, others, such as Byron, have undisguised admiration for him. But the real issue here is that while the Whigs’ yoking together of liberty and poetics was an attractive model to 1790s writers espousing their own democratic and republican ideals, that very tradition lay in the shadow of history as the butt of so much satire and scorn. From the perspective of the 1790s, the literary culture of the eighteenth century looked as if it was headed by Pope and therefore irredeemably Tory. In an irony that Pope surely would have relished, it was against that perceived political leaning that post-​ 1790s writers reacted: against what was in fact the antagonistic, anti-​establishment voice of the opposition. The Romantic retrieval of Whig poetics as a response to what it considered to be dominant eighteenth-​century literary style is evident in their adoption of the sublime, their enthusiasm for subjectivity and originality, and their commitment to the powers of the imagination. A key figure here is Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, incisively described by Basil Willey as ‘A romantic Augustan’.18 In Shaftesbury’s philosophical dialogue The Moralists (1709), the speaker Philocles considers natural beauty as inspirational: I shall no longer resist the Passion growing in me for Things of a natural kind, where neither Art, nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoil’d that genuine Order, by altering any thing in their primitive State. Even the rude Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the 16  The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas Copeland et al., 10 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–​78), v. 35 (1 Sept. 1782). 17  Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past: 1660–​1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 287–​8, 322. 18  Quoted in James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–​1789 (London: Longman, 1986), 209.

18   Nick Groom irregular unwrought Grotto’s, and broken Falls of Waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness it self, as representing Nature more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery of Princely Gardens.

Theocles suggests that those enamoured in this way are poets—​‘all who are Lovers either of the Muses or the Graces’. Philocles mischievously replies that ‘all those who are deep in this Romantick way, are look’d upon . . . as a People either plainly out of their Wits, or over-​run with Melancholy’.19 As a Whig aristocrat and intellectual, Shaftesbury believed in a system of patronage for the renewal of a national literary culture; as a neo-​Platonist, however, he also endorsed organicism, creativity, and genius. He argued that nature is structured from within by a universal and ideal force, and that all things are connected: ‘Who can admire the outward Beautys, and not recur instantly to the inward, which are the most real and essential, the most naturally affecting, and of the highest Pleasure, as well as Profit and Advantage?’ (note the Whiggishly commercial idiom that concludes this observation).20 Coleridge, though he acknowledged no explicit debt to Shaftesbury—​whom he considered a Deist—​likewise drew on Plato and the seventeenth-​century Cambridge Platonists to make a corresponding observation in ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802): ‘I may not hope from outward forms to win | The passion and the life, whose fountains are within’ (lines 45–​6).21 Similarly, Shaftesbury’s definition of a poet in Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author (1710) was uncompromising in its idealism: a Poet is indeed a second Maker: a just Prometheus, under Jove. Like that Sovereign Artist or universal Plastick Nature, he forms a Whole, coherent and proportion’d in it self, with due Subjection and Subordinacy of constituent Parts.22

This could be Coleridge writing about the poet in Biographia Literaria (1817): ‘He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.’23 Shaftesbury’s neo-​Platonic effusions therefore tied notions of poetic originality and creativity to the Whig cultural enterprise. This empowerment of the imagination is dramatically evident in the period in the attention given to the sublime as an aesthetic effect intimately linked to freedom, lack of restraint, and rebellion. The first English version of

19 

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (London, 1709), 206–​7. 20  Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols (London, 1711), iii. 185. 21  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 22  Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author (London, 1710), 55. 23  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), ii. 16.

Romanticism before 1789   19 Longinus’s treatise on the sublime had appeared in 1652, the work of the republican poet and writer John Hall; as Joad Raymond observes, the translation equated ‘sublime eloquence with the exercise of government, and thus with the needs of the Commonwealth’, and Christine Gerrard has further charted the relationships between poetic passion, originality, and spontaneity with Whig politics in the work of the critic John Dennis.24 Edmund Burke’s highly influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) consequently endorses the Whig sublime and the creative power of the imagination. In addition to Longinus and the earlier tradition, Burke drew on John Baillie’s Lockean Essay on the Sublime (1747) and Edward Young’s long meditative poem Night Thoughts (1742–​5), in which Young faces the sublime annihilation of his subjectivity: ‘I tremble at myself, | And in myself am lost!’25 Two years after Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, Young himself developed the link between the sublime, the perilous subjectivity of Night Thoughts, and the nature of inspiration in Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). Imagination is now matchless:  ‘In the Fairyland of Fancy, Genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of Chimeras.’26 The ‘Fairy way of Writing’, as John Dryden described it, was increasingly respected. Addison considered the blandishments of imagination or ‘fancy’ (synonyms later sharply distinguished by Coleridge) to depict imaginative activity again in terms of property rights: A Man of a Polite Imagination, is let into a great many Pleasures, that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving . . . It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in every thing he sees, and makes the most rude and uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his Pleasures.27

Building on this image of a mental estate, Addison goes on to claim that There is a kind of Writing, wherein the Poet quite loses sight of Nature, and entertains his Reader’s Imagination with the Characters and Actions of such Persons as have many of them no Existence, but what he bestows on them. Such are Fairies, Witches, Magicians, Demons, and departed Spirits.

This form of composition is ‘more difficult than any other’ as it ‘depends on the Poet’s Fancy  . . .  and must work altogether out of his own Invention’; it therefore requires ‘an Imagination naturally fruitful and superstitious’. Addison in particular praises 24 

See Joad Raymond, ‘Hall, John (bap. 1627, d. 1656)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, at: www.oxforddnb.com; Christine Gerrard, ‘Pope, Peri Bathous, and the Whig Sublime’, in Womersley, ‘Cultures of Whiggism’, 200–​15. 25  Edward Young, The Complaint: or, Night-​Thoughts on Life, Death & Immortality (London, 1742), 6 (Night 1, lines 80–​1). 26  Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (London, 1759), 37. 27  The Spectator, 411 (21 June 1711).

20   Nick Groom Shakespeare:  for his ‘Extravagance of Fancy’ which enables him ‘to touch the weak superstitious Part of his Reader’s Imagination’.28 So Shakespeare was, reassuringly, a Whig. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published 1621), Robert Burton had warned against ‘the force of Imagination’ causing ‘phantasticall visions’.29 More than a century later, Johnson’s oriental tale Rasselas (1759) described ‘the dangerous prevalence of the imagination’ in the case of an astronomer who believes he controls the seasons; as Imlac reflects in the novel, ‘All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity’, and Johnson’s own fear of imaginative excess is well documented.30 James Beattie too was fearful of psychological disturbance in alerting his readers to the dangers of a ‘gloomy Imagination, [which] when it grows unmanageable, is a dreadful calamity indeed’.31 But for others, morbid imaginings held the promise of new forms of aesthetic experience. Dreams increasingly materialized in poetry. At the beginning of the century, vivid dreaming was linked with madness as a symptom of the absence of reason—​Pope’s Cave of Spleen in The Rape of the Lock (1714) being a clear Augustan example. Yet the hymn writer Isaac Watts is receptive to the weird potential of phosphenes—​the visualization of flashing lights when the eyes are closed: If I but close my Eyes, strange Images In thousand Forms and thousand Colours rise, Stars, Rainbows, Moons, green Dragons, Bears, and Ghosts, And endless Medley . . . 32

The synaesthetic imagination of Keats seems to have given him similar experiences, which he described in his unpublished play ‘Otho the Great’ (1819): when I close These lids, I see far fiercer brilliances,—​ Skies full of splendid moons, and shooting stars, And spouting exhalations, diamond fires, And panting fountains quivering with deep glows! (V. iii. 43–​7)

Such fleeting visions, coupled with the ‘faery’ aspect of the imagination, opened the door to ghosts and phantasmagoric monsters—​the ‘empire of Chimeras’, as Young had

28 

The Spectator, 419 (1 July 1711). Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989–​94), i. 252. 30  Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. D. J. Enright (London: Penguin, 1985), 133. 31  James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), 198. 32  ‘The Hurry of the Spirits, in a Fever and Nervous Disorders’, lines 21–​4, in Isaac Watts, Reliquiæ juveniles: Miscellaneous Thoughts in Prose and Verse, on Natural, Moral, and Divine Subjects; Written Chiefly in Younger Years (London, 1734). 29 

Romanticism before 1789   21 put it. In his Essay on Original Genius (1767), William Duff portrayed ‘the vigorous effort of a creative Imagination’ that enabled the poet, like Shakespeare’s Owen Glendower, to call ‘shadowy substances and unreal objects into existence. They are present to his view, and glide, like spectres, in silent, sullen majesty, before his astonished and intranced sight’.33 These ineluctable presences haunt Young’s Night Thoughts, creating the poet’s sovereign subjectivity: I widen my Horizon, gain new Powers, See Things invisible, feel Things remote, Am present with Futurities.34

The lines foreshadow the glorious command of poetry revealed by Keats in ‘The Fall of Hyperion’: ‘there grew | A power within me of enormous ken | To see as a god sees’ (Canto 1, lines 302–​4). Like Young, Mark Akenside was a self-​reflexive theorizer and practitioner of Whig poetics. In his ‘General Argument’ to The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), he describes the business of the imagination as being motivated by nature and art to produce an originality characterized by the sublime. These were the works of poetic genius: The pleasures of the imagination proceed either from natural objects, as from a flourishing grove, a clear and murmuring fountain, a calm sea by moon-​light; or from works of art, such as a noble edifice, a musical tune, a statue, a picture, a poem  . . .  there are certain particular men whose imagination is indowed with powers, and susceptible of pleasures, which the generality of mankind never participate. These are the men of genius, destined by nature to excell in one or other of the arts.35

In the poem itself, the imagination is formidable, independent, and driven by the force of liberty: wherefore darts the mind, With such resistless ardour to imbrace Majestic forms? impatient to be free, Spurning the gross controul of wilful might; Proud of the strong contention of her toils; Proud to be daring?36

33 

William Duff, Essay on Original Genius; and its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly in Poetry (1767), 177. 34  Edward Young, The Complaint (London, 1743), 24 (Night 5, lines 339–​41). 35  Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, and Other Poems (London, 1788), 123–​4 [italics reversed]. 36  Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (London, 1744), 15 (Book 1, lines 169–​74).

22   Nick Groom Adam Rounce describes these ‘clamours for liberty’ (in Johnson’s resonant phrase from Lives of the Poets, 1779) as positioning Akenside within the Whig poetic pantheon. The very title of his poem derives from Addison’s Spectator essays on ‘Taste and the Pleasures of the Imagination’, and he accordingly takes Milton as the absolute point of reference of English poetic liberty.37 Akenside’s imagination is also, appropriately enough, a capacious faculty, incorporating an Hellenic theme—​‘tune to Attic themes, the British lyre’—​and an Hellenic aesthetic—​‘truth and good are one, | And beauty dwells in them’, a sentiment later echoed by Keats. Mixed with this commemoration of ancient Greece is a primitivist British identity, and so in The Pleasures the poet is exhorted to encounter nature in order to ‘breath [sic] at large | Ætherial air; with bards and sages old’.38 Among these ‘bards and sages old’, Spenser, the English model for the ‘Fairy way of Writing’, was a particular favourite. Addison had already included Spenser in his ‘Account of the Greatest English Poets’ (1694), although he was reluctant to welcome him fully into the Whig canon: Old Spenser, next, warm’d with poetick rage, In ancient tales amus’d a barb’rous age; An age that yet uncultivate and rude, Where-​e’er the poet’s fancy led, pursu’d Thro’ pathless fields, and unfrequented floods, To dens of dragons, and enchanted woods . . . We view well-​pleas’d at distance all the sights Of arms and palfries, battels, fields and fights, And damsels in distress, and courteous knights. But when we look too near, the shades decay, And all the pleasing landschape fades away.39

Addison judges Spenser by classical critical tenets, but as John Hughes argued in his edition of Spenser (1715), to compare The Faerie Queene with Homer or Virgil wou’d be like drawing a Parallel between the Roman and the Gothick Architecture. In the first there is doubtless a more natural Grandeur and Simplicity: in the latter, we find great Mixtures of Beauty and Barbarism, yet assisted by the Invention of a Variety of inferior Ornaments.40

As indicated, Pope later made a similar comment regarding Shakespeare; Warton reiterated the point in his ground-​breaking contextual analysis of The Faerie Queene in 1754 (revised in 1762), as did Walpole in Anecdotes of Painting in England (also 1762) and Richard Hurd in Letters on Chivalry and Romance (again 1762). By then, Spenserian 37 

Adam Rounce, ‘Akenside’s Clamors for Liberty’, in Womersley, ‘Cultures of Whiggism’, 217–​8, 225–​7.

39 

Joseph Addison, Works, 4 vols (London, 1721), i. 37. Edmund Spenser, Works, ed. John Hughes, 6 vols (London, 1715), i, p. lx.

38 Akenside, Pleasures (1744), 30, 22, 11 (Book 1, lines 604, 374–​5, 41–​2). 40 

Romanticism before 1789   23 imitations were a popular niche for aspiring poets, from the retiring William Shenstone’s ‘The School-​Mistress’ (1737, 1742)  to the best-​selling poet James Thomson’s Castle of Indolence (1748). Spenser was a model of indigenous English literature that reflected the cultural qualities of Gothic liberty, endorsed by Anglican Whigs and best summed up as freedom steadied by morality. Thomas and Joseph Warton’s Gothic Spenserianism was reflected in their own poetry. Joseph Warton’s ‘Advertisement’ to his 1746 Odes on Various Subjects is typical of their shared ambition: the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far, and as he looks upon Invention and Imagination to be the chief faculties of a Poet, so he will be happy if the following Odes may be look’d upon as an attempt to bring back Poetry into its right channel.41

There was no moralizing in the school of Warton, and politics were submerged. Their target was unmistakeable. Joseph criticized Pope’s celebration of Viscount Cobham’s estate at Stow, for example, as cosmetic, far removed from nature: Can gilt Alcoves, can Marble-​mimick Gods, Parterres embroider’d, Obelisks, and Urns Of high Relief; can the long, spreading Lake, Or Vista lessening to the Sight; can Stow With all her Attic Fanes, such Raptures raise, As the Thrush-​haunted Copse . . . ?42

The Wartons’ friend and fellow Old Wykehamist William Collins was part of their poetic brotherhood. Collins’s ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ was both Spenserian and celebrated Spenser, while his ‘Ode to Fear’ was more deliberately supernatural. But it is his ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland’ (1749, published 1788), that is the most distinct exemplar of Collins’s voice. Again, Spenser haunts the lines—​‘Strange lays, whose power had charmed a Spenser’s ear’—​but there is a more daemonic power here too: Yet frequent now, at midnight’s solemn hour The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold, And forth the monarchs stalk with sovereign power In pageant robes, and wreathed with sheeny gold, And on their twilight tombs aerial council hold.43

41 

Joseph Warton, Odes on Various Subjects (London, 1746), [4]‌[italics reversed]. Joseph Warton, The Enthusiast: or, The Lover of Nature (London, 1744), 5–​6 (lines 5–​10). 43  The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), 504, 512 (lines 39, 150–​4). 42 

24   Nick Groom The poem moves from Augustanism, adapting the close of Virgil’s first Georgic in which rusty javelins, empty helms, and bones are buried in the ground, to describe a British, specifically Scottish, landscape steeped in an uncanny history. More impassioned is Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’ (1757), which brings together the bloody magic and minstrelsy of British antiquity, specifically Welsh in this case, in the supernatural figure of the poet who calls on the spirits of the dead: ‘They do not sleep. ‘On yonder cliffs, a grisly band, ‘I see them sit, they linger yet, ‘Avengers of their native land . . .’44

Thomas Warton’s own poetry, meanwhile, is less vehement, more meditative of the legendary past. His antiquarian imagination excavates, for example, the English grave of Arthur, catachthonically recreating Henry II’s discovery of the subterranean tomb: ‘There shalt thou find the monarch laid, ‘All in warrior-​weeds array’d; ‘Wearing in death his helmet-​crown, ‘And weapons huge of old renown.’

It is King Henry, a remote historical figure himself, who attempts to reanimate the heroic age in an act of national memorialization: Ev’n now fond hope his fancy wings, To poise the monarch’s massy blade, Of magic-​temper’d metal made; And drag to day the dinted shield That felt the storm of Camlan’s field.45

Thus, history is historicized.46 A final strand weaves together Whiggish liberty, Spenserian adulation, and Wartonian history: the subject of Coleridge’s first published (and frequently revised)

44  Poems of Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, 188 (lines 43–​6); see Nick Groom, ‘Romantic Poetry and Antiquity’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 45  Thomas Warton, Poems (London, 1777), 70, 72. 46  The claim for a Wartonian school of poetry, ‘the true English school’, was afterwards made by fellow Poet Laureate Robert Southey in 1824. Southey identifies Warton’s followers as William Lisle Bowles, Henry Headley, Thomas Russell, and John Bampfylde, and the school came of age in 1789 with Bowles’s Fourteen Sonnets (see Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 14–​15). Fairer adds Henry Kett, George Richards, and Thomas Park (all of whom published after 1789), as well as Edward Gardner and Charlotte Smith: see David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–​1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 95–​117.

Romanticism before 1789   25 poem, ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ (1790). Chatterton was a writer of the 1760s, a decade as remarkable for its political turbulence and the meteoric rise of John Wilkes as for its distinctive literary identity. For some, the spirit of Pope lived on in both the fierce satires of Charles Churchill and the Scriblerian playfulness of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, but for others there was a bardic alternative. Inspired most immediately by Gray, Collins, and the Wartons, but also drawing more generally on the Whiggish commemoration of national cultural history, Macpherson, Percy, and Chatterton helped to forge a new poetic sensibility. Macpherson’s first collection, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Galic or Erse Language (1760), claimed to be the literary remains of the third-​century bard, Ossian. The Ossianic works emerged gradually, like a series of echoes, and after Fragments the six-​book Fingal (1762) reworked some of those pieces into an epic whole. The mysterious lines deliberately appealed to the cult of the Burkean sublime, weaving the fatalistic atmosphere of Gray’s ‘Bard’ into daringly uncultivated scenes of rugged wilderness. Macpherson’s repetitive, spectral style is exemplified by the ‘Songs of Selma’, which Goethe later transcribed at the end of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774): It is night;—​I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms. The wind is heard in the mountain. The torrent shrieks down the rock. No hut receives me from the rain; forlorn on the hill of winds.47

As the Scottish Enlightenment professor Hugh Blair argued: Accuracy and correctness; artfully connected narration; exact method and proportion of parts, we may look for in polished times . . . But amidst the rude scenes of nature, amidst rocks and torrents and whirlwinds and battles, dwells the sublime. It is the thunder and the lightning of genius. It is the offspring of nature, not of art.48

This poetic prose comes from another world, like the alien utterance heard by Wordsworth when he puts his ear to the seashell in Book 5 of The Prelude (1805). The medium of Ossian is intensely oral: Macpherson claimed that the poetry had been preserved by oral tradition, and in his lines the bard’s voice mixes with the ghostly murmurs of the past: hence authenticity is in presence, performance, and the power of speech. By the end of the century, nostalgia had come to be recognized as a disturbing and debilitating mental condition of the individual; for Macpherson, however, the lost and irrevocable past is a constituent of national history and identity, memorializing the recent massacre of the Jacobites but also reflecting on the more insidious risk that Scottish distinctiveness would be subsumed into the British union. But although Macpherson’s 47  James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 166. 48  Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (London, 1763), 68.

26   Nick Groom emphatic primitivism apparently challenged notions of progress, he was shrewd enough not to distance dominant Whig interests, and so his account of ancient society, influenced by Scottish Enlightenment thinking, confirmed the positive accounts of ancient Gothic society given in classical sources. The cultural remains of British antiquity thus provided a credible political alternative to classical civilization. Macpherson’s Romanticism—​sublime, primaeval, and forthrightly Scottish (despite Irish claims on Ossianic history)—​was rapidly countered by Thomas Percy’s Anglocentric model of medieval minstrelsy. Percy’s emphasis was on the physical survival of ancient indigenous poetry. Not for him the elusive intangibility of the oral tradition (later to be summarily dismissed by Johnson); rather, Percy treated verses as antiquarian artefacts. Texts could be exhumed as archaeological evidence, as the relics of lost realms. Hence, Percy directly responded to Macpherson’s Ossian with Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763), an anthology of Old Norse verse; Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), a three-​volume collection of old ballads; and Northern Antiquities (1770), which offered a Gothicizing account of ancient northern culture and an edition of the Edda. Despite the oral qualities of his texts, then, Percy emphasized their physical status as printed objects, hemming them in on the page with prefaces, essays, footnotes, endnotes, and glossaries. Percy’s influence ran deep in succeeding generations. In a similar way that Thomas Warton’s contextualization of Spenser revived interest in The Faerie Queene, Percy gave ballads an intellectual dignity and a literary credibility. He argued persuasively that ballads were a cornerstone of the English canon, devoting a book to Shakespeare’s engagement with the ballad tradition. England may not have discovered its Ossian, but in contrast to Macpherson’s sombre, quasi-​classical epics, popular English literature was democratic and free, witty and unexpectedly sophisticated, candid and inspirational. Percy also demonstrated how his ballad aesthetics could inform contemporary poetry: his Hermit of Warkworth (1771) was a long narrative ballad, mixing sentiment with medievalism. In playing the bard, Percy’s was a somewhat different role to the doomed avatar envisaged by Thomas Gray. If the Reliques set an agenda for Romanticism, it was by restating that ballads were part of the Gothic Whig culture of national progress in which the bardic poet enjoyed a central responsibility. Macpherson and Percy were both dutifully acknowledged by later writers and helped inspire the later poetic genre of the antique fragment, but the most admired influence, on a par with Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, was Thomas Chatterton. The abiding impression of Chatterton was of a young, poverty-​stricken genius who had committed suicide: he was a blend of poetic furor, anti-​classicism, and impetuous madness who composed in an ecstasy of spontaneous inspiration. He was a visionary, creating a complex fifteenth-​century world of arts and commerce, as well as writing abolitionist poetry pervaded by imagined African mythology and mysticism. His work recast the myths of Gothic migration into a bewilderingly intense English medievalism: Whanne Scythyannes, salvage as the wolves theie chacde, Peyncted in horrowe1 formes bie nature dyghte, Heckled2 yn beastskyns, slepte uponne the waste,

Romanticism before 1789   27 And wyth the morneynge rouzed the wolfe to fyghte, Swefte as descendeynge lemes3 of roddie lyghte Plonged to the hulstred4 bedde of laveynge seas. 1 unseemly, disagreeable 2 wrapped 3 rays 4 hidden, secret49

Chatterton’s calligraphic manuscripts stretched the definitions of authenticity and composition. His visual artefacts helped to inspire William Blake’s illuminated books; he was phenomenally precocious, and at a stroke created the Romantic cult of juvenilia; he was a radical vegetarian, outlandish in his dress, and may also have been an early experimenter with opium; and his cruelly premature death meant that his was a corpus of potential literature—​of the unwritten. And yet, for all this excitement surrounding Chatterton—​the outsider who had apparently and posthumously exposed the scholarly shortcomings of the establishment through the works of his pseudo-​medieval monk Thomas Rowley—​he was also deeply perplexing. Southey, for example, who with Joseph Cottle edited Chatterton’s works, was dispirited to discover that Chatterton had squandered his talent on local satires: ‘wit and genius wasted’.50 The Chatterton he reluctantly prepared for the press was as much a Churchillian satirist as a sorcerer of the archaic. He was a writer who dabbled in dozens of different styles and opinions, who was committed to professional, paid work, and for whom cultural production was directed by the values and mechanisms of the metropolis. In this, despite his Wilkesite enthusiasms, Chatterton was thoroughly imbued with Whig thinking and his poetics were characterized by mercantile interest, national heritage, and Gothic aesthetics. At the same time, Chatterton’s unironic revival of antiquarian authenticating mechanisms, such as prefaces and footnoting, suggest that he ‘unparodies’, in Claude Rawson’s resonant term, satirical texts such as The Dunciad (1729)—​texts which, not coincidentally, had formed the Tory canon.51 Chatterton could never be contained by his own Romantic myth: he was too multifarious and dazzlingly diverse a writer to be straitjacketed as a starry-​eyed fatality. Certainly he was avidly read—​John Clare, for example, praised his descriptions of flowers, Keats dedicated Endymion (1818) to his memory, even Byron echoes his lines—​ but he also flummoxed Romantic writers expecting to find a perpetually youthful poetic forefather. Like William Blake, who himself mentions and alludes to Chatterton several times (‘I own myself an Admirer of Ossian equally with any other Poet whatever[,]‌ Rowley and Chatterton also’), Chatterton was an enigma.52

49 

‘Englysh Metamorphosis’, lines 1–​6, in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald Taylor, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), i. 279. 50  Quoted in Nick Groom, ‘ “With Certain Grand Cottleisms”: Joseph Cottle, Robert Southey, and the 1803 Works of Thomas Chatterton’, Romanticism 15 (2009), 225–​38 (p. 230). 51  Claude Rawson, ‘Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton’, in Nick Groom (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (London: Macmillan, 1999), 15–​31. 52  G. E. Bentley (ed.), William Blake’s Writings, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), ii. 1512.

28   Nick Groom Blake was in fact the first to embrace the antiquarian muse. In his distinctive vision the myths and primitive religion of England were developed into a radical reiteration of the literary concerns that had originally arisen from Whig culture. The wider ambition of Whig poetics was to define the new British identity following the Act of Union in 1707. Great Britain was a challenging new category: it was an imaginative territory as much as it was a physical and political reality—​hence, perhaps, the enthusiasm for the visionary reconstruction of countries and regions, from Ossian’s Celtic twilight to Rowley’s medieval Bristol, that find their mystic apotheosis in Blake’s prophetic books. But, appropriately enough, it was ultimately politics that fully inaugurated Romanticism after 1789 with the publication of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Edmund Burke—​sublime theorist, politician, and Revolutionary historian—​presented an ‘organic and developmental model’ of the past that drew on a century of Whig thinking. It was the beginning of Romanticism as we know it, but at the time it looked like the end of the predominant Whig medievalist aesthetic. David Fairer argues that the anti-​Burke polemic of Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and James Mackintosh ‘assumes that the French Revolution has brought to its end a romantic age, of which the Reflections represents a final perverse flowering’.53 It was, in fact, only the end of the beginning.

Further Reading Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination:  English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997). Brown, Marshall, Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Fairer, David, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–​1789 (London: Longman, 2003). Gerrard, Christine, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole:  Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–​1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Groom, Nick, ‘Catachthonic Romanticism: Buried History, Deep Ruins’, Romanticism 24.2 (2018), 118–33. Kidd, Colin, British Identities before Nationalism:  Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Mee, Jon, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Mitchell, Sebastian, Visions of Britain, 1730–​1830: Anglo-​Scottish Writing and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Ribeiro, Alvaro, SJ, and James G. Basker (eds), Tradition in Transition:  Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-​Century Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Sitter, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Smiles, Sam, The Image of Antiquity:  Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 53  David Fairer ‘Organizing Verse: Burke’s Reflections and Eighteenth-​Century Poetry’, in Thomas Woodman (ed.), Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 9–​29 (pp. 12, 26).

Romanticism before 1789   29 Watson, J. R. (ed.), Pre-​Romanticism in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century: The Poetic Art and Significance of Thomas Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Cowper, Crabbe. A  Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1989). Williams, Abigail, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–​1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Woodman, Thomas (ed.), Early Romantics:  Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

Chapter 2

The Revolu t i ona ry Deca de Jon Mee

In May 1792, the first meeting of the Society for the Literary Fund (from 1842, the Royal Literary Fund) took place at the Prince of Wales coffee house in Conduit Street, London. Like so many eighteenth-​century voluntary associations, the Fund had begun in a coffee-​house conversation between literary men, in this case in the 1770s.1 After two decades of prevarication and frustration, the idea that came to fruition in 1792 was to set up a charity for authors in debt. Sustained by subscribers who formed the membership of the society, the Literary Fund had initially also aimed to raise the public profile of the profession of letters: Princes are influenced, ministers propose measures, and magistrates are instructed by the industry of literature; while the authors of hints, suggestions, and disquisitions, may be languishing in obscurity, or dying in distress.2

Three areas defined the field of literature supported by the Fund: ‘general science, political disquisition, and the belles lettres’.3 For the founder, the Welshman David Williams, a former Dissenting minister who had become notorious in the 1780s as ‘the Priest of Nature’, the middle term of this triad was crucial. He was already a noted political theorist. Later, in 1792, he was to try his hand at composing a constitution for the republican colleagues of his friend Jacques-​Pierre Brissot in France.4

1 

For an account of the origins of the Fund from the founder’s perspective, see David Williams, Claims of Literature: The Origin, Motives, and Objects, and Transactions, of the Society for the Establishment of a Literary Fund (London, 1802). 2  [Literary Fund], Constitutions of a Society to Support Authors in Distress (London, 1790), title page. 3  Constitutions of a Society, 2. 4  For an account of his career, see J. Dybikowski, On Burning Ground: An Examination of the Ideas, Projects, and Life of David Williams (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993).

The Revolutionary Decade   31 The framing of constitutions, recently embodied by debates in America and France, was the foundational act of writing for Williams. It was the activity that most directly justified his idea of writers as benefactors of society who deserved charitable support. By 1792, Rousseau and Voltaire were widely understood as the begetters of the French Revolution, whatever the socio-​economic realities of its origins. By the end of the decade, the assumption had been consolidated, not least in John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797), which traced the origins of the Revolution to Enlightenment men of letters organized in masonic societies. Robison’s perspective inverted the perspective on the republic of letters imagined by Williams. What had been the chief virtue of the republic of letters in 1792 was now its secret shame. By 1799, the Literary Fund was defining its remit only in terms of ‘general science and the Belles Lettres’.5 ‘Political disquisition’ was now excluded from its philanthropy, and implicitly also from its definition of what constituted the literary in a decade that was witnessing a ‘crisis of literature’.6 Few writers escaped the effects of the Revolution in shaping their careers one way or another, as we shall see in this chapter, but it was not just a matter of consequences for individuals: the idea of what constituted literature itself was transformed in the revolutionary decade. The British reception of events in France might be traced in terms of an arc from delighted welcome and millenarian expectation though to disappointment and reaction by the end of the decade, except that the reality was far more varied than such a narrative would suggest. Britain’s sense of itself as a nation was predicated on its position as self-​appointed bastion of freedom, where the liberty of the press and the tradition of Protestant print had created the first modern nation, but confidence in its position at the forefront of history had been dimmed by the experience of the American War. The need for reform was felt in many parts of the country. In the 1780s, spurred by the dissemination of cheap tracts by the Society of Constitutional Information, such issues were debated in newspapers and periodicals, discussed in coffee houses and clubs, and argued over at the new sites of leisure and public assembly. Not everyone had been happy at the expansion of the public sphere over the previous few decades, especially when it seemed to allow too much room either for female opinion or for the aspirations of the lower classes, but many still regarded the freedom of the press as distinctive to British modernity. When news of the events of 14 July 1789 in France entered this circuit of opinion, it was quickly assessed in terms of its implications for Britain. One short-​term perspective was to see the Revolution as simply disabling Britain’s greatest rival. Others saw the Revolution as bringing France into line with British constitutional liberties. Still others, more radical, refused to see the settlement of 1688 as the perfection of politics, and saw the Revolution as further reason for Britons to reflect on their pretensions to be the leaders of the free world.

5 

An Account of the Institution of the Society for the Establishment of a Literary Fund (London, 1799), 5. Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6 

32   Jon Mee Among those who thought the French Revolution ought to give Britons pause for reflection on their place in the world was the veteran Dissenting minister Richard Price. Although not a member of the Church of England, Price was a respected figure, recently consulted by the Americans when debating their new constitution, but also widely known for his mathematical research. Educated within the strong Welsh nonconformist tradition, he had become an important figure in London Dissent (where he was an early influence on Mary Wollstonecraft). Together with his friend Joseph Priestley, Price was one of the two best-​known figures on the radical wing of Dissent. In November 1789, he gave a sermon, ostensibly to celebrate the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, but which placed events in America and France in the eschatological narrative of the Bible: After sharing in the benefits of one Revolution, I have been spared to be a witness to two other Revolutions, both glorious.—​And now, methinks, I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.7

Price’s delighted response to the Revolution gave the spur to a much less positive account being incubated by Edmund Burke. Although Burke had been sympathetic to the American colonists and was widely associated with moderate reform, he shocked his contemporaries with his brilliant invective Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke argued that Price was fulfilling the dark logic of his nonconformist inheritance, traceable back to the English Civil War, allowing faith in individual conscience to obscure the practical realties of what was happening in France. France was sacrificing its cultural traditions to the baseless imaginings of men of letters and to the mob he saw their promiscuously circulated ideas arousing. Atheists or not, men such as Rousseau and Voltaire were little better than religious enthusiasts to Burke, not least when they trusted their own ideas over time-​tested institutions.8 Rather than providing a close analysis of what had happened in France, Burke presented the Revolution as a fundamental shift in the nature of European politics. He argued against the self-​assurance of Enlightenment thinking in a prose style distinguished by its idiosyncratic brilliance and passionate language. His opponents quickly attacked him on the grounds of this paradox. Among the earliest into the fray was Mary Wollstonecraft with her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), published only a few weeks later. Part of what was distinctive about Wollstonecraft’s argument was her acceptance of Burke’s central claim that it was a change in manners (in the larger sense of

7 

Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (London: Cadell, 1790), 49–​50. On the role of ‘enthusiasm’ in Burke’s attack, see Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 84–​93. 8 

The Revolutionary Decade   33 ‘culture’) that was at issue.9 Political arrangements, she agreed with Burke, could not be separated from questions of human social relations broadly construed, including the formation of the domestic sphere. Whereas Burke believed the revolutionaries were sacrificing the lived practices of social and family life to their theories, Wollstonecraft represented aristocracy as an inauthentic and artificial system that corrupted and deformed the natural feelings of human beings towards each other. Chief among these corruptions was the relegation of women to a position of less-​than-​rational beings, an argument she was to develop fully in her Vindications of the Rights of Woman (1792), one of the most important texts to emerge from the revolutionary decade. There were many other negative responses to Burke, accusing him of backsliding on Whig principles, inaccuracy, hysteria, and even—​as an Irishman—​of a crypto-​Catholic sympathy for the French monarchy. Among the most celebrated of these attacks was James Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae (1791), which chided Burke with jeopardizing the gains of the Enlightenment in deference to an outmoded reverence for tradition. A London journalist at the time of his pamphlet’s publication, Mackintosh soon gained access to Whig circles sympathetic to reform. Like many others from this background, he was to renege on his support for the Revolution later in the decade. Mackintosh’s initial success was earned partly because his performance operated within generic assumptions about political writing. Its reception was very different from that of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, the first part of which was published in 1791. Paine already had a reputation as a political writer. His journalism in America, most famously Common Sense (1776), had been credited with inspiring the colonists to a decisive confidence in the validity of their cause. Paine was close to events in France and knew several of the key participants in the Revolution well before he answered Burke (with whom he had also been on friendly terms). His book attacked Burke directly, and took no prisoners in a language that was self-​conscious in its appeal to a broad political audience. The preface he published with Part 2, early in 1792, declared his aim of making a political intervention ‘written in a style of thinking and expression different to what had been customary in England’.10 If Paine and Burke shared more aspects of style than this boast seems to allow, they did not share the irreverence towards traditional authority that provides the distinctive tone of Rights of Man: What is called monarchy, always appears to me a silly, contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident,

9  For a sustained analysis of Wollstonecraft’s two Vindications in these terms, see Gregory Claeys, ‘The Divine Creature and the Female Citizen: Manners, Religion, and the Two Rights Strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications’, in Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism, 1550–​ 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10  Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second. Combining Principle and Practice (London: Jordan, 1792), vii.

34   Jon Mee the curtain happens to be open—​and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.11

This questioning of the basic terms of political discourse, Paine supplemented by a campaign to make cheap editions of his pamphlet available through the various societies stirred into action by Part 1. These included the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), revivified from the organization of the 1780s, which Paine attended, but also the London Corresponding Society (LCS), formed in January 1792. The idea for a society of unlimited membership seems to have originated with the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. A typically literate Scots Presbyterian, Hardy, with his wife Lydia, was already an activist in the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade.12 Whereas William Wilberforce did all he could to decouple abolition from other campaigns for reform, Hardy regarded political freedom as the prerogative of black and white alike. The black writer Olaudah Equiano lodged with him while writing his Interesting Narrative (1789), and recommended sympathetic correspondents to Hardy when he started to set up the LCS.13 Hardy also took advice from Lord Daer, the reformist Scottish nobleman, and John Horne Tooke, the veteran campaigner in the SCI. Although the SCI was the politer grouping (its membership overlapped in some significant ways with the Literary Fund, in 1792 at least), Tooke and his allies collaborated closely with the LCS to try to knit together a network of reform societies. These fed off the networks of improvement that already linked together different parts of the nation through clubs and societies such as the Society of Antiquaries, founded in Edinburgh in 1780 by the radical Earl of Buchan, or associations such as the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, but they also brought out into the open, as in both these instances, the ideological differences that had always haunted such organizations. Out of the ferment surrounding Paine’s pamphlet, a popular radical culture emerged in London that—​however variously—​understood itself as the fulfilment of the dissemination of Enlightenment principles. For its opponents, of course, it was a parody of Enlightenment, the fulfilment of Burke’s prophecy that revolution principles would see learning cast down under the hooves of ‘a swinish multitude’.14 Many of those drawn to participation in the popular political societies had already gained experience in the expanding public sphere of the 1780s. John Thelwall, for instance, had been a stalwart of 11  Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second, 36. On the similarities of their style, see Jane Hodson, Language and Revolution in Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 117–​18. 12  On Lydia Hardy and abolitionism, see Claire Midgeley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–​1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 39. 13  In March 1792, soon after the formation of the LCS, Hardy wrote to a clergyman in Sheffield on Equiano, recommending him as ‘a zealous friend for the Abolition of that accurs’d traffick denominated the Slave Trade’. Hardy inferred ‘that you was a friend to freedom on the broad basis of the Rights of Man for I am fully persuaded that no man who is an advocate from principle for liberty for a Black Man but will strenuously promote and support the rights of a White Man’. See Place Papers, British Library, Add. MSS 27811, 4–​5ff. 14  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings of Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), 117.

The Revolutionary Decade   35 the debating society at Coachmakers Hall for several years before 1792, when he had to fight hard to preserve it against magistrates seeking to enforce the Royal Proclamation against seditious speech and writing issued in May. Defeated in his attempt to keep the Society of Free Debate open, Thelwall threw himself into composing political songs and poems, and his remarkable Shandean prose medley The Peripatetic (1793). By 1793, he had become the leading political lecturer in London, supported by publishers and pamphleteers such as Daniel Isaac Eaton and Thomas Spence, both members of the LCS, who from 1793 began to publish cheap periodicals under the titles of Hog’s Wash and Pig’s Meat respectively.15 Newspapers like the Morning Chronicle printed a battery of brilliant satirical poems in the 1790s, including those of the Scots-​Catholic radical, Alexander Geddes, better known as a pioneer biblical critic.16 Perhaps the most widely read poet of the decade was Peter Pindar (John Wolcot), who showed little mercy to either Pitt or George III, although he was no Painite, and seems to have been more or less bought off by mid-​ decade.17 Much of this newspaper satire was anthologized in The Spirit of the Public Journals in 1797, whose editor boasted that the radicals had all the best jokes.18 This plenitude of radical print was tracked by hostile newspapers subsidized by the government, and, from November 1792, also by the activities of John Reeves and his Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. Reeves and his associates not only sponsored prosecutions, but also tried to produce their own version of popular literature. Benefiting from official networks of distribution and the support of local clergy, the Association’s tracts sought to convince the populace of their relative prosperity under British liberty. Hannah More, already famous as a playwright and poet, added her own evangelical contribution in the form of a series of Cheap Repository Tracts published between 1792 and 1795. These initiatives always struggled with the paradox of popular conservatism, explored by Kevin Gilmartin, whereby they were appealing to a populace they believed had no business in political matters.19 Even those Rational Dissenters who had sometimes been regarded as ornaments of the British Enlightenment were presented as enemies within. A mob burned down Priestley’s library and laboratory in Birmingham in 1791, while the magistrates seemed to look the other way or even to connive in the assault (see David Worrall, Chapter 15 in this volume). The poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld was vilified when she was discovered to be

15  For Thelwall’s career in this period, see The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); and John Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Judith Thompson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). 16  Gerard Carruthers, ‘Alexander Geddes and the Burns “Lost Poems” Controversy’, Studies in Scottish Literature 31.1 (1999), 81–​5. 17  For Peter Pindar’s poetry in this context, see John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 103–​44. 18  The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797, 3rd edn, vol. 1 (London: Ridgway, 1802), iv. 19  On the complexities of popular conservatism in the period, see Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–​1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and on More’s position in particular, 55–​95.

36   Jon Mee the author of the anonymous pamphlet Sins of the Government, Sins of the Nation (1793), which attacked the government’s decision to go to war with France in 1793. Texts sympathetic to reform were not without their own ambivalences when it came to popular politics, especially once their authors witnessed the emergence of a popular political culture on the one hand and increasing government surveillance and repression on the other. The best example of this is William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), the book that probably had the greatest impact on liberal intellectuals in the period. Godwin’s book was predicated on a willingness to subject all traditions to the scrutiny of reason. Underpinning his approach was a utilitarian weighing of benefits to the community against the claims of any inherited affiliation, including family. As an example, exaggerated to make his point, he weighed rescuing a servant or family member from a fire against saving the French philosopher Fénelon. It was to prove a hostage to fortune, a gift to those opponents who wanted to exploit Burke’s point about the willingness of men of letters to sacrifice the ties of nature to their own theories. The measure of the public good for Godwin was a disinterested rationality, which if pursued long enough might bring human beings to a state of perfection. Godwin was—​ and still is—​often represented as a cold fish of Enlightenment, whose role for literary critics has been to play the fall guy to Coleridge and Wordsworth’s discovery of something far more deeply interfused than his utilitarian calculations. More recent scholarship, including the editing of his letters and diaries, has revealed Godwin to be a complex figure, not least because he manifested many of the contradictions of literary men of his time.20 Godwin was a product of the aspirations associated with the development of an expanding print culture. Abandoning a career as a Dissenting minister, he had come to London in the early 1780s seeking a career as a writer, publishing several novels. He followed up the success of Political Justice with an attempt to get his ideas to a wider public via the novel Caleb Williams (1794), often identified as the defining Jacobin novel, although authors such as Charlotte Smith in Desmond (1792) had already been using the medium to express opinions sympathetic to the Revolution.21 Godwin’s novel provides a brilliant study of the ways institutions penetrate individual psychologies, producing a claustrophobic sense of paranoia. This aspect of the novel is often seen as a distinctive development towards a Romantic interest in abnormal states of consciousness, but it also reproduces the sense of constantly being under surveillance that writers experienced from at least the time of Paine’s sedition trial (in absentia) in December 1792, which Godwin attended and wrote about.22

20 

For Godwin’s diary, see http://​godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. For his correspondence, see The Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols in progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–​). 21  See Amy Garnai, Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Inchbald (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 15–​23. 22  Mark Crosby, ‘The Voice of Flattery vs Sober Truth: William Godwin, Thomas Erskine and the 1792 Trial of Thomas Paine for Sedition’, Review of English Studies 62, no. 253 (2011), 90–​112.

The Revolutionary Decade   37 That month also saw the holding of the Edinburgh Convention, the culmination of what was a key year for the growth of radical societies in Scotland, as elsewhere in the Four Nations. Representatives of the United Irishmen, formed a few months earlier in Belfast, attended, but the other delegates judged the Irishman William Drennan’s address too nationalist.23 Faced with what he saw as sedition, the Home Secretary, Henry Dundas (whose brother Robert was Lord Advocate of Scotland) began to move against the radicals. Something of the broader effects of this tightening situation on the Scottish public sphere can be glimpsed in the fate of James Anderson’s periodical The Bee (1791–​4). Originally aligning diverse interests in agricultural, commercial, and political reform, as well as the antiquarian interests of the Earl of Buchan (who published many of his essays there) and the poetry of Robert Burns, who was a subscriber, Anderson presented his periodical as a portable coffee house with permissive terms of entry. Among those Anderson allowed in was J. T. Callendar, who over the course of 1792 provided a series of eight essays under the signature ‘Timothy Thunderproof ’. Later collected together as The Political Progress of Great Britain (1794), these essays constituted a fierce attack on the entire Hanoverian settlement as a conspiracy of rich against poor. Days after the Edinburgh Convention, Dundas moved against The Bee and attempted to force Anderson to divulge the essayist’s identity. Callendar fled to the United States—​like many others already mentioned in this essay, Eaton and Robert Merry among them—​and Anderson was soon enjoining his readers ‘to turn their thoughts to literary subjects instead of politics’.24 The Bee limped on for another year or so. In the mean time, the Edinburgh Convention had been followed by the so-​called British Convention at the end of 1793, attended by delegates from the United Irishmen and now also various English societies. This time the main actors were quickly arrested and convicted in highly dubious court proceedings. The severity of their sentences shocked public opinion across Britain and reinforced the sense that Pitt’s government was abolishing traditional freedoms. The situation in Wales was rather different from Scotland and Ireland. Wales did not have the thriving periodical and newspaper presses found in Edinburgh or Dublin in the 1790s, but interest in events after 1789 was sustained by news from the Chester and Shrewsbury Chronicles and Welsh-​language almanacs. When the Baptist minister Morgan John Rhys returned from Paris in 1792, he turned his attention to the poor in his own country. Early in 1793, he published the first number of his Cylchgrawn Cynmraeg (‘Welsh magazine’) and began to attack Britain’s war policy against the Revolution he thought was the fulfilment of a divine plan. Fearing arrest, he too fled to America in

23 

Bob Harris, The Scottish People and the French Revolution (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 95. See the account of Callendar and The Bee in Michael Durey, ‘With the Hammer of Truth’: James Thomson Callendar and America’s Early National Heroes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 28–​30 and 44–​6. For the Scottish publishing context, see Gordon Pentland, ‘Pamphlet Wars in the 1790s’, in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 2: 1707–​1800, ed. Stephen W. Brown and Warren McDougall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). 24 

38   Jon Mee 1794.25 The poet Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg), a key figure in the revival of interest in Welsh-​language culture in this period, also considered migrating to America. In 1790, Iolo had begun to look for subscribers for the collection eventually published in 1794, in two volumes, as Poems, Lyric and Pastoral. Williams came before the public as a journeyman mason, conscious of the success of Burns, but his plan to publish by subscription collapsed over 1791–​2, before Joseph Johnson eventually came to his aid. In his notes to the poems, Iolo sought to identify the culture of the Ancient Britons with political and religious freedom, closely identifying their beliefs with Unitarianism. Although he cemented a role as the ‘Welch bard’ within London’s radical circles, meeting regularly with Coleridge, Godwin, Holcroft, and Thelwall during 1794–​5, he could not find a secure place within the unstable vortex of London print culture. Increasingly anxious about prosecution, Iolo returned to Wales where he devoted himself to the transmission, preservation, and, to some extent, forgery of the native poetic tradition, but without ever abandoning his spiky hostility towards the English compact of Church and State. His efforts played a major part in creating new forms of resistance to English cultural hegemony, but radicalism in Wales seems to have been confined to a vocal minority, surrounded by an eagle-​eyed loyalist gentry. No one was more prominent among them than the topographical writer Thomas Pennant, whose enthusiastic patriotism won him the praise of Hester Lynch Piozzi, another vocal Welsh loyalist.26 Interestingly, Iolo’s involvement with Joseph Johnson came at a time when he might have encountered William Blake at the bookseller’s shop. Blake had been developing his own version of the bard of liberty. Issues of patronage and independence shaped Blake’s career, as they did Iolo’s. His decision to stake his creative future on the distinctive illuminated books had its origins in the burgeoning book trade of the early 1790s—​before the French wars bit—​and a desire to be free to combine his talents as he saw fit. The unpublished epic The French Revolution (1790) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790–​3) are full of millenarian expectation at the new age Richard Price had associated with the French Revolution, but there is a discernible darkening in The Book of Urizen (1794) and the other mid-​decade works, which develop both a critique of the ‘mind-​ forg’d manacles’ imposed by institutions such as the Church and the sense of crippling psychological damage done in a world where every creative ambition seemed now to be subject to assessment of its loyalty. The year Blake engraved The Book of Urizen saw the suspension of Habeas Corpus in preparation for the arrest of the principal figures in the popular radical societies in May. The government’s case revolved around the plan of the radical societies to call a convention. By filling the newspapers with stories of plots and releasing the results of a parliamentary committee of secrecy, the government attempted

25  See Marion Löffler, Welsh Responses to the French Revolution: Press and Public Discourse 1789–​1802 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). 26  Hywel Davis, ‘Loyalism in Wales, 1792–​1793’, Welsh History Review 20.4 (2001), 687–​7 16. On Piozzi’s fears that Pennant’s loyalism would cost him his life, see The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784–​1821 (formerly Mrs. Thrale), vol. 2: 1792–​1798, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (London: Associated University Presses, 1991), 285–​7.

The Revolutionary Decade   39 to prepare public opinion for a guilty verdict. Meanwhile, its lawyers began to develop the tortuous legal path towards making a case that the LCS and SCI had been imagining the death of the king.27 This involved a blurring of the legal sense of ‘imagining’ as plotting via overt acts intended to cause the death of the king with a much looser idea of what such imagining might be. The trials finally began in October, starting with Hardy, before moving on to Tooke and Thelwall at the beginning of December. Each was acquitted, as the brilliant Whig barrister Thomas Erskine, younger brother of the Earl of Buchan, exposed the dubiousness of the government’s legal machinations. The acquittals were met in some quarters with a confidence that they signalled a triumph for English liberties and freedom of opinion, although several members of the LCS remained incarcerated for weeks and even months without trial. Hardy, Tooke, and Thelwall withdrew from the societies. Thelwall published a volume of poetry written in the Tower that may have been a source for poems such as Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’.28 To some extent Thelwall went his own way in 1795, although he continued to lecture on reform, feeding off the glamour of his trial and attracting large audiences. For the LCS, 1795 was a peak year. Buoyed by the acquittals, its membership swelled. A bad harvest further encouraged discontent. By June, the society felt bullish enough to launch a new initiative, and held a public meeting in St George’s Field. From the chair, John Gale Jones addressed the king, calling on him to heed the call for reform and warning of the fate of monarchs who ruled contrary to the interests of the people.29 Wittily provocative pamphlets flew from the press of Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee, who had made a name for himself, in the LCS at least, with a moving poem on the death of Hardy’s wife after his arrest.30 There were riots in London in July, and for a few days the authorities lost control. Then, in October, the LCS called another huge open-​air meeting, this time at Copenhagen House, addressed by several speakers, including Thelwall.31 While these developments seemed a cause for optimism among radicals, the government was planning new legislation. When the king’s coach was attacked on the way to the opening of Parliament, the government exploited it as a pretext to introduce bills that would bring some of its machinations at the treason trials into law (as Thelwall warned they were plotting to do in his speech a few days before). Loyalist writers had been calling for the law to be updated to take account of what they saw as the newfangled treason of republicanism.32 ‘Citizen’ Lee was arrested for publishing, among other 27   See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–​1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 28  Jon Mee, ‘ “The Dungeon and the Cell”: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall’, in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). 29  The text of Gale Jones’s speech appears in Narrative of the Proceedings at a General Meeting of the London Corresponding Society (London, 1795). 30  See Jon Mee, ‘The Strange Career of Richard “Citizen” Lee’, in British Literary Radicalism, 1650–​ 1830: From Revolution to Revolution, ed. Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 31  Proceedings of a General Meeting of the London Corresponding Society (London, 1795). James Gillray’s cartoon of this event is reproduced in Judith Thompson, Chapter 34 in this volume. 32 Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 570–​1

40   Jon Mee things, a broadside called King Killing and the pamphlet The Happy Reign of George the Last—​useful evidence for the government’s claim that the reform movement was regicidal. Two pieces of legislation were brought forward while Lee was in custody: the Seditious Meetings Bill, primarily concerned with regulating meetings, debating societies, and Thelwall’s lectures; and the Treasonable Practices Bill, which, its opponents claimed, consolidated the government’s attempts to broaden the idea of imagining the king’s death. Resistance to the ‘Two Acts’, as they became known, brought together both the Parliamentary Whigs and all parts of the extra-​parliamentary movement, but without success. Although the Two Acts were little used, they proved very effective in silencing radical authors and booksellers, terrified that even squibs and parodies of royal authority might be construed as imaging the king’s death. Thelwall continued to lecture, using Roman history as a cover for radical politics, but the sense of a broader movement for reform began to atrophy. Lee escaped from prison early in 1796, perhaps allowed to do so because he had served his purpose, and fled to the United States. The LCS did not disappear after the Two Acts, but struggled on in the face of increasing repression, until it was proscribed in 1799. Nowhere was the weight of Pitt’s policies felt more heavily than in Ireland. In the 1780s, attempts to win a degree of political reform had been promoted by Henry Grattan and the Irish Volunteers, who campaigned for free trade and some degree of parliamentary independence. Antiquarian interest in the culture of the people—​in the English and Irish languages—​had also begun to develop, even in some places within the Anglo-​Irish elite, such as Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789).33 The gentle chiding of prejudice against Irish culture found in her work was not easy to sustain in the atmosphere of the 1790s, although it did later feed its way into Maria Edgeworth’s novels. The United Irishmen had been banned as early as 1794, but their ideas retained a powerful ally in the pages of the Northern Star newspaper until it, too, was closed down in 1797. Drennan had been swept up in the arrests of 1794. Acquitted, he withdrew from direct involvement in the radical movement, but produced a series of songs, which became an essential part of the patriot canon, influencing the Irish melodies that Thomas Moore made popular a decade later.34 British policy in Ireland was haunted above all by fear of a French invasion. A French fleet set sail for Ireland at the end of 1796, but the landing was aborted very close to shore in Bantry Bay. When the French did land, in Fishguard, Wales, in February 1797, locals quickly rounded up the small force. Ireland continued to be the focus for the anxieties of Pitt’s government, not least after naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore in the summer of 1797. In March 1797, a proclamation demanding the surrender of arms had effectively put Ulster under martial law. Plans for a co​ordinated insurrection across Britain and Ireland were thwarted by arrests in the spring of 1798. When a rising finally came 33 

See Leith Davis, ‘Refiguring the Popular in Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry’, in Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland, ed. Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 34  See M. H. Thuente, The Harp Re-​Strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Literary Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 100–​14.

The Revolutionary Decade   41 in Ireland, it seems to have been provoked by the military terror that drove the United Irishmen into guerilla bands in the countryside. For a few weeks the outcome seemed to hang in the balance, but French support did not arrive quickly enough. By the time a small force waded ashore in August, winning a few skirmishes before defeat at the beginning of September, the opportunity had been lost. The suppression that followed was savage. Many of those sympathetic to reform fled to England or Scotland, and others on to France or the United States. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads was first published against this background in 1798. Although silent about political events, traces of the revolutionary decade are discernible everywhere in the collection, even if, like so many other texts from the period, in ways marked more by evasion and displacement than explicit reference. By the time they came to collaborate, Coleridge and Wordsworth had already had their careers shaped by events in France.35 Coleridge had already made a name for himself as a radical journalist and lecturer in Bristol. His poetry was read in the Dissenting circles whose heroes he celebrated in his ‘Religious Musings’ (1796), the poem on which, he told Thelwall, he rested most of his pretensions to poetical fame. Over 1796–​8, Coleridge developed a more restrained form of private verse in what are now called the ‘conversation’ poems. These poems develop an aesthetics of retreat, partially out of a guilty poetic exchange with Thelwall, who was wrestling with being forced into internal exile himself.36 Wordsworth had been in France, although not much in Paris, during some of the key events of the early stages of the Revolution. He seems to have entertained turning to political journalism on his return in December 1792, attracted by Godwin’s ideas, but the conditions of mid-​1790s London did not offer much encouragement (his republican pamphlet of 1793, A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, was left unpublished). This perception must have been reinforced by the intensification of other forms of cultural policing. Satirical poetry always played its part in patrolling the boundaries of taste in eighteenth-​century Britain, but it returned with new vigour in the 1790s. The poetry of Robert Merry, Mary Robinson, and others had been censured in William Gifford’s The Baviad (1791) and Maeviad (1795). T. J. Mathias followed Gifford’s success with Pursuits of Literature (1794), which ran to several expanded editions, bolstering its poetic satire with detailed notes, making clear exactly who his targets were. With The Anti-​Jacobin (1797–​8), edited by Gifford, and then the Anti-​Jacobin Review and Magazine (1798–​1821), this policing of culture was given even sharper focus and implicit support from very close to the seats of government. Gifford and his collaborators made Coleridge a regular target. His ‘France: An Ode’ and ‘The Recantation’, published in the Morning Post, followed the newspaper’s editorial policy by vacillating about politics at a time of general anxiety about invasion from France and insurrection in Ireland, although the three 35  For their careers in the earlier part of the decade, see Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 36  Judith Thompson, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), esp. 59–​81.

42   Jon Mee poems gathered together in Fears in Solitude (1798), published by Joseph Johnson, seem designed to insist at least on the domestic virtues of radicals.37 Those virtues were under constant attack from around 1795 in a multitude of anti-​Jacobin novels such as George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799), mainly focused on parodies of Godwin’s ideas, especially in relation to his perceived disparagement of family ties, and often on his relationship with Wollstonecraft.38 A sense of the corruption of public culture pervades Wordsworth’s preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, which presents his poetry as a healthful corrective to the corruptions of ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’. Wordsworth aligns the collection with the neglected genius of Milton and Shakespeare against a ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’.39 The anxiety about cultural degeneration indicates something of the crisis of literature brought about by the revolutionary decade, but not any specific ideological position. When David Williams came to justify the importance of literature to an age of improvement in his Claims of Literature (1802), he no longer situated it in relation to political reform, but to triumphs of industry and empire. Williams was writing in a very different world from 1792. From around 1797, indeed, there was a self-​conscious push from loyalists such as John Reeves and James Bland Burges to take over the Fund for their own purposes. Wordsworth was making his own claims for literature in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. He sent a copy to Burges early in 1801. Wordsworth’s letter, possibly with tongue in cheek, credited Burges’s eighteen-​book epic Richard Coeur de Lion (1798) with ‘a pure and unmixed vein of native English’, but he went on to bemoan the fact that authors were cooperating ‘to injure the simplicity of our national character and to weaken our reverence for our ancient institutions and religious offices’.40 Whether or not this ought to be viewed as a defensive move to protect his experiments in verse, these comments give a different perspective on Wordsworth’s complaints about frantic novels in his 1800 preface. A critique of the corruptions of modern society might be glimpsed here teetering towards a Burkean reverence for the institutions of the past.41 Certainly by the end of the decade the relations between literature and reform, and even literature and improvement, were increasingly fraught issues. If these developments look like the foundation of an ethos of Romanticism wherein the aesthetic increasingly emerges as a space beyond such claims, it is worth remembering that the revolutionary decade

37  For analysis of Coleridge’s poetry of this period in its newspaper context, see Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 67–​94. 38  M. O. Grenby, The Anti-​Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 39  William Wordsworth [and Samuel Taylor Coleridge], Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Longman and Rees, 1800), i, xix. 40  The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 1: The Early Years, 1787–​1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 683. 41  For a strong version of this account of Wordsworth’s development, see James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

The Revolutionary Decade   43 did not persuade everyone that literature and politics were incommensurable. For many other writers, there remained an indissoluble link, even if in some cases, as in Percy Shelley’s, the writers were to be understood primarily as ‘unacknowledged legislators’ rather than the acknowledged writers of constitutions.

Further Reading Barrell, John, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–​1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Barrell, John, The Spirit of Despotism:  Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006). Bugg, John, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Clemit, Pamela (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Connell, Philip, and Nigel Leask (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Gilmartin, Kevin, Writing against Revolution:  Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–​1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Harris, Bob, The Scottish People and the French Revolution (London:  Pickering and Chatto, 2008). Johnston, Kenneth, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Keen, Paul, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s:  Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Löffler, Marion, Welsh Responses to the French Revolution: Press and Public Discourse 1789–​1802 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). Mee, Jon, William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Mee, Jon, Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s:  The Laurel of Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Roe, Nicholas, Wordsworth and Coleridge:  The Radical Years (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1988). Thompson, Judith, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle:  The Silenced Partner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Thuente, M. H., The Harp Re-​Strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Literary Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994).

Chapter 3

The New Centu ry: 1 8 00–​18 15 Simon Bainbridge

In the opening year of the new century, William Wordsworth argued that the extraordinary and unprecedented historical events of the current age were having a profound effect on literary production and reception. Writing in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he stated that a ‘multitude of causes unknown to former times’ were reshaping the literary landscape, identifying as the two most important developments ‘the great national events which are daily taking place’, a reference to the global war being fought in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and the ‘encreasing accumulation of men in cities’, one of the major consequences of the Industrial Revolution. In a context in which political and social changes were detrimentally affecting ‘the discriminating powers of the mind’, Wordsworth claimed that it was literature itself that could respond to this historical and cultural crisis, though with a modest admission of shame at his own ‘feeble efforts’ and a hope that he would be followed by ‘men of greater powers, and with far more distinguished success’.1 Wordsworth’s famous statement is one of many examples of the contemporary sense of the dynamic interrelations between history and literature in the middle decade and a half of the Romantic age. However, compared to the revolutionary decade of the 1790s that preceded it and the post-​Waterloo years of radical protest that followed, the period 1800 to 1815 remains relatively understudied in these terms, perhaps because its defining historical context, Britain’s war with France, is less amenable to certain critical agendas than ideas of revolution and radicalism. Indeed, this middle phase of Romanticism is somewhat overlooked in literary terms too, and is a striking example of how contemporary understandings of the literary landscape may differ from modern ones. Before examining in greater detail the links between the era’s major historical events and its

1 

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–​1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 746–​7.

The New Century: 1800–1815    45 literature, it is worth briefly identifying some of the important literary landmarks of these years, as they appeared to both contemporary and modern observers. For most modern literary scholars, the nineteenth century’s opening year is associated with the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, with its significantly expanded contents and new preface. However, the publishing phenomenon of 1800 was actually the loco-​descriptive poem The Farmer’s Boy by the uneducated farmer poet Robert Bloomfield, which sold 20,000 copies by 1802 (as against 1,500 for Lyrical Ballads).2 There is a similar critical discrepancy between contemporary and modern assessments of the middle years of the century’s first decade. While 1805 marks the date of Wordsworth’s completion of the first full-​length version of his epic autobiography The Prelude, his masterpiece remained unpublished until after his death in 1850. Similarly, Blake’s magnificent ‘prophetic books’ of these years—​Milton: A Poem (c.1804–​11), and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–​c.1820)—​were produced in very limited numbers (there are only four and ten copies of each known to be in existence). While these epics remained unknown to all but the smallest circles of readers, the publication in 1805 of The Lay of the Last Minstrel launched Walter Scott’s career as by far the best-​selling and most ​popular poet of the decade. It has been calculated that during the years 1809–​11 Scott sold in excess of 50,000 copies of his metrical romances, the most popular of which was The Lady of the Lake (1810).3 Lord Byron acknowledged Scott as the ‘Monarch of Parnassus’ in a journal entry of 1813, and his additional comments again illustrate the unfamiliarity of contemporary judgements: ‘I should place Rogers next in the living list—​(I value him more as the last of the best school)—​Moore and Campbell both third—​[then] Southey and Wordsworth and Coleridge.’4 Here, the three ‘Lake poets’ feature only in a metrical fourth division, relegated below Samuel Rogers, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Campbell—​of whom only Moore enjoys any critical esteem today. Byron had himself usurped Scott’s position of poetic pre-​eminence in the year previous to his journal entry, gaining celebrity with the publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of his verse travelogue Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and achieving phenomenal sales over the next few years with his ‘Turkish Tales’ (The Corsair sold 10,000 copies on its day of publication in 1813). Byron’s success prompted Scott to turn away from poetry towards prose, publishing the first of his historical novels, Waverley, in 1814. In consolidating the status of this new form—​one of the most important literary achievements of the Romantic period which would significantly influence nineteenth-​century European culture—​Scott was able to draw on the formal development produced since the turn of the century by popular novelists such as Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane and Anna Porter, and, particularly, Maria Edgeworth, a writer whom

2  William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 582, 661. 3  Peter T. Murphy, Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 139. 4  Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​82), iii. 220. For more detailed figures, see St Clair, The Reading Nation, 632–​5.

46   Simon Bainbridge one critic has described as ‘the most respected new fiction writer in the very early nineteenth century, the major woman novelist between Burney and Austen’.5 If the centrality of the Irish novelist Edgeworth and the Scottish writer Scott to this middle phase of Romanticism illustrates the limitations of other maps of the literary movement, such as those based on the ‘two generations’, it also emphasizes the extent to which the Romanticism of the new century was a product of the ‘Four Nations’ at the very moment when those nations were being redefined by the Acts of Union of 1800. One way to characterize the writing of these years is as ‘war literature’. The armed conflict with France was the major defining context for those living and writing in the newly created United Kingdom, dominating their daily lives, providing the subject matter for many texts, and shaping literary developments in a number of ways. Britain had joined the war of the ancien régime powers Austria and Prussia against revolutionary France in February 1793 and continued to fight as a member of a series of armed coalitions until the victory of the Duke of Wellington’s allied army over Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. During these years there were only two brief periods of peace, in 1802–​3 and 1814–​15. The first of these, the Peace of Amiens, lasted from March 1802 until May 1803, and is often used to mark the transition between the ‘Revolutionary Wars’ and the ‘Napoleonic Wars’, a change in nomenclature which illustrates the transformation of the nature of the war, and indeed of global politics, by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Described by Walter Scott as the ‘master spirit of the age’,6 Napoleon was the dominant historical figure of these years, and of Romanticism more generally. The Corsican general of the French Revolutionary army seized power as First Consul in a coup d’état of December 1799, and consolidated his position by becoming Consul for Life in 1802 and Emperor in 1804—​an event which Wordsworth described in The Prelude as ‘the dog | Returning to his vomit’,7 disgustedly implying that France had restored the institutions of monarchy and Catholicism that he had hoped the Revolution had abolished forever. Napoleon remained on the throne of France until his first abdication in April 1814, making an extraordinary return from exile on Elba in March 1815, the beginning of the so-​called ‘Hundred Days’ that ran until his defeat at Waterloo and exile to St Helena, where he died in 1821. For the vast majority of the fifteen years covered by this chapter, then, Britain was facing the military genius and Grande Armée of Napoleon, who threatened to reshape global political structures and conquer the British nation itself. The fact that Britain’s major military campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars were fought abroad—​in the Iberian Peninsular campaign of 1808–​14, in the Waterloo campaign, and in the colonies—​has sometimes been used to suggest that the inhabitants of Britain were sheltered from the conflicts, with critics pointing to the fact that Jane Austen makes little reference to the global struggles occurring beyond the towns and 5 

Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–​1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 74. Sir Walter Scott, Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, with a Preliminary View of the French Revolution, 9 vols (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1834–​49), v. 168. 7  1805 version, Book 10, lines 934–​5, in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Subsequent quotations from The Prelude are from this edition. 6 

The New Century: 1800–1815    47 villages of her novels. But the British war effort was huge during this period (as large as in France), with the regular army expanding from 40,000 soldiers in 1793 to 250,000 in 1813, and the navy from 45,000 sailors in 1793 to 145,000 in 1812.8 These regular armed forces were supported by various volunteer units, members of which regularly feature in Austen’s novels, such as the regiment quartered in Meryton in Pride and Prejudice (1813). These volunteer units grew significantly during the invasion crisis of May 1803 to July 1805 when Napoleon’s army camped on the shores of the English Channel with 2,000 vessels, awaiting the weather conditions to enable what would have been the first major invasion of Britain since the Norman conquest (a small French force had actually landed in Wales in 1797, though had swiftly surrendered). In 1803, the year in which the Prime Minister Henry Addington described the nation’s martial enthusiasm as ‘an insurrection of loyalty’,9 British volunteer forces numbered as many as 400,000 men, and it has been estimated that during this period as many as one in six of all adult males was involved in the armed forces in some capacity.10 As a result, around one in four families had direct involvement in the wars, and many of the writers of the period, including Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, and Felicia Hemans, had family members who fought in the conflict. The war with France was also seen to be a new type of war involving the whole nation. Mass conscription in Revolutionary France during the 1790s had transformed international conflict, turning the eighteenth-​century ‘limited’ clashes of professional armies into the titanic confrontations of the new century, ‘total’ war, as it was later influentially termed by the Prussian soldier and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Conducted on an unprecedented scale, war was being redefined as fought not just for territory or trading rights, but also for ideological and religious reasons; to quote Robert Southey writing in 1808 about the Peninsular conflict, the struggle against Napoleonic France was not ‘a common & petty war between soldier & soldier’, but ‘a business of national life or death, a war of virtue against vice, Light against Darkness, the Good Principle against the Evil One’.11 It is in this context of global conflict that Walter Scott’s phenomenal success and unprecedented sales are best understood, with his exciting, action-​packed verse narratives offering a Romantic transformation and displacement of contemporary conflicts onto the Border skirmishes and national struggles of the medieval period. As his biographer

8  Geoffrey Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770–​1870 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 125; David Gates, ‘The Transformation of the Army, 1783–​1815’, in David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 133. 9  Jon Newman, ‘ “An Insurrection of Loyalty”: The London Volunteer Regiments’ Response to the Invasion Threat’, in Mark Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Napoleon, 1797–​1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 175. 10  Ian R. Christie, ‘Conservatism and Stability in British Society’, in Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 170. 11  To Humphrey Senhouse, 19 Oct. [1808], The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part 3:  1804–​1809, ed. Carol Bolton and Tim Fulford, Romantic Circles Electronic Edition (2013), available at:  www.rc.umd.edu/​editions. Other parts of this edition referenced below can be accessed at the same site.

48   Simon Bainbridge John Gibson Lockhart declared in 1833, Scott ‘must ever be considered as the “mighty minstrel” of the Antigallican war’,12 arguing that much of the poetry’s popularity stemmed from its heroic and Romantic presentation of set-​piece battles and single combats and its inherent martial spirit. Scott had composed The Lay of the Last Minstrel while recovering from an injury received during cavalry exercises with the Royal Edinburgh Light Dragoons. During these years, Scott was celebrated as the greatest war poet not only of the period, but of all time. One reviewer described his verse portrayal of the Battle of Flodden in Marmion (1808), which Scott had composed on horseback during intervals in Dragoons drilling, as ‘the most picturesque of all the fields of battle that were ever exhibited in poetry’,13 while Francis Jeffrey wrote of the same passage that ‘of all the poetical battles which have been fought, from the days of Homer to those of Mr Southey, there is none, in our opinion, at all comparable, for interest and animation,—​for breadth of drawing, and magnificence of effect,—​with this of Mr Scott’s’.14 While Scott’s poetry gave voice to his own ‘feudal taste for war’ and had the power to ‘transport us at once into the days of knightly daring and feudal hostility’, according to Jeffrey15 it also linked these past conflicts to the current struggle with France. In Marmion, for example, Scott framed his tale of the sixteenth-​century conflict between Scotland and England with a series of verse epistles, including an elegiac account of the state of Britain in the aftermath of the deaths of William Pitt, Charles James Fox, and Lord Nelson, and in so doing transformed the current wars into romance, fought according to the laws of chivalry. At the same time, Scott made the earlier Anglo-​Scottish conflict that is the narrative’s main focus part of a necessary historical progress towards the construction of a unified Britain, addressing the poem to ‘every British heart’.16 Through his poetry, Scott sought to turn his readers into ‘warriors’, vicarious if not actual participants in the struggle against France (a passage from The Lady of the Lake was even read to British troops under enemy bombardment during the Peninsular War). This poetic call to arms was characteristic of the period’s literature. Betty Bennett has argued that war was ‘perhaps the principal poetic subject’ of the age, and estimates that there were more than 3,000 short poems on the war published in newspapers, periodicals, and magazines in the Romantic period.17 While the 1790s produced a significant amount of anti-​war verse (with the young Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth among its most powerful practitioners), with the rise of Napoleon and the increasing threat posed by France there was a much greater unanimity in support of the war in the writing

12 

John Gibson Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott, 10 vols (Edinburgh: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1902), iii. 54.

13 ‘Scott’s Rokeby: a Poem’, British Critic 42 (July 1813), 117. 14 

[Francis Jeffrey], ‘Scott’s Marmion: a Poem’, Edinburgh Review 12, no. 23 (Apr. 1808), 1–​35 (p. 22). [Francis Jeffrey], ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel: a Poem’, Edinburgh Review 6, no. 11 (Apr. 1805), 1–​20 (pp. 10–​11). 16  ‘Introduction to Canto First’, line 69, in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., Author’s Edition, ed. J. G. Lockhart (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1869), 77. 17  Betty T. Bennett (ed.), British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism: 1793–​1815 (New York: Garland, 1976), introd., ix. 15 

The New Century: 1800–1815    49 of the new century. As the Gentleman’s Magazine commented in 1805, ‘In poetry or prose the universal object of patriotic Britons is, to pursue and expose the Invader of the rights of human kind.’18 Major national events, such as Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 (a victory which in effect brought to an end the invasion threat by securing the seas for the British Navy), prompted innumerable verses that often combined the celebratory with the elegiac. The war also became a major subject of the period’s drama, with productions such as the ‘Loyal Musical Impromptu’ of Nelson’s Glory staged at Covent Garden in November 1805, a performance culminating in a recreation of the Battle of Trafalgar.19 Theatres provided an arena where audiences, many of which included soldiers or sailors, could imaginatively perform their own involvement in the conflict. The culmination of both the war and this martial phase of Romanticism came with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the stimulus for another great outpouring of poetry; to quote again from Francis Jeffrey: ‘All our bards . . . great and small, and of all sexes, ages, and professions, from Scott and Southey down to hundreds without names or additions, have adventured upon this theme.’20 The war against Napoleonic France gave shape to individual literary careers, creating a charged political climate that contributed to the rise of certain writers and the fall of others. The Lake poets, for example, conducted their own literary campaign against Napoleon during these years, adopting a wide range of forms for their attacks, from Southey’s elaborate romance allegory The Curse of Kehama (1810), about which the author said that he hoped the MP George Canning would ‘compare Bonaparte to Kehama in the House of Lords’,21 to Coleridge’s prose assaults on the ‘upstart Corsican’ and ‘Horrible Monster’ in the Morning Post and The Courier.22 Though all three writers had voiced their dismay since before the turn of the century at French political and military developments, it was the Spanish people’s rising in May 1808 against Napoleon’s diplomatic trickery and his subsequent invasion of the Iberian Peninsula that enabled them to reinterpret the war as a battle conducted on behalf of liberty and freedom and against oppression. As Coleridge commented, ‘it was the noble efforts of Spanish Patriotism, that first restored us, without distinction of party, to our characteristic enthusiasm for liberty’.23 After a decade of political uncertainty and despondency, the British government’s military support of the Spanish and Portuguese peoples enabled the Lakers to realign themselves not only with ‘liberty’, but also with their countrymen and their nation (despite the temporary setback of the Convention of Cintra, by which

18 

Gentleman’s Magazine 75 (Feb. 1805), 145. Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society 1793–​1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 82–​3. 20  Edinburgh Review 27, no. 54 (Dec. 1816), 295. 21  The Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey, ed. Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850), iii. 303. 22  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on his Times in The Morning Post and The Courier, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), i. 386; ii. 237. 23 Coleridge, Essays on his Times, ii. 38. 19 

50   Simon Bainbridge the British government allowed a defeated French army safe passage away from the Peninsula). While the Peninsular War was important in reshaping the political allegiances and literary careers of established writers, it also provided the subject matter for the early works of two writers who went on to became major poets. Felicia Hemans, who would become the best-​selling British poet of the nineteenth century, wrote England and Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism in 1808 when she was only sixteen, presenting the British and Spanish forces in romantic and chivalric terms as champions who defend Freedom’s sacred cause, a theme to which she would return frequently in her later work. Four years later, Lord Byron set the first canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in the war-​torn landscape of Portugal and Spain, offering a powerful critique of both the conflict and the chivalric literary presentation of it that had become so prevalent, focusing instead upon war’s ‘hideous sight[s]‌’ (stanza 77).24 Byron, like Hemans, would continue his poetic assessment of war throughout his life, even representing the trajectory of his career in terms of the battles of these years. Commenting in Don Juan on the public’s ‘reckon[ing]’ of him as ‘The grand Napoleon of the realms of Rhyme’, Byron added: ‘But Juan was my Moscow, and Faliero | My Leipsic, and my Mont Saint Jean seems Cain’ (Canto 11, stanza 56). Here, the culminating conflicts of the French Emperor’s reign (Moscow 1812, Leipzig 1813, and Waterloo 1815) provide the shape for Byron’s own self-​representation. In more earnest vein, Wordsworth, who had joined the Grasmere Volunteers during the invasion threat in 1803 and conducted his own war against Napoleon in a range of texts including the political sonnets written between 1802 and 1815 and the prose pamphlet The Convention of Cintra (1809), celebrated the Battle of Waterloo as a crucial moment in his poetic career—​indeed, in the life of poetry more generally—​describing in his ‘Ode. The Morning of the Day Appointed for General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’ how ‘Imagination, ne’er before content, | . . . | Stoops to that closing deed magnificent, | And with the embrace is satisfied’ (lines 1–​7).25 For Wordsworth, the end of the Napoleonic Wars produced an unprecedented and culminating union of history and imagination. The war brought about the culmination of literary careers in other ways, however, most notably in the case of the poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Her visionary poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), which was critical of British war policy and of the British Empire more generally, met such a hostile reception that Barbauld published no more poetry during her lifetime (though she did continue to write it). The Napoleonic Wars played an important part in one of the other major historical developments of this period: the creation (and contesting) of a sense of national identity following the union of the constituent parts of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland into the United Kingdom. In July and August 1800, Parliament passed the two Acts of Union with Ireland that created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, an 24  All quotations are from Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 25  Quoted from William Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–​1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

The New Century: 1800–1815    51 entity that formally came into being on 1 January 1801. Though building on the 1707 Acts of Union, which had created Great Britain by joining together the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, and their respective parliaments, the acts of 1800 were passed primarily in response to the Irish rebellion of 1798, during which the United Irishmen had sought to gain complete independence from Britain. The advent of the new nation coincided with the start of the new century, and throughout the war years the issues of national identity and national literature remained highly charged. Linda Colley, in her influential study Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​1832 (1992), argues that British identity was formed principally during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of the series of wars with France, during which the Protestant nation came to define itself against its Catholic enemy. While Colley’s argument has received some criticism (not least for its relative neglect of Ireland), her account of the nation-​ making effect of war is valuable for thinking about the period 1800–​15, with its mass volunteering and huge war effort (in which, as Colley illustrates, women were able find a role in the public sphere). Much of the vast invasion literature sought to create a united British response to the French threat and to incorporate the Four Nations within that response. For example, an anonymous 1803 version of David Garrick’s ‘Heart of Oak’ entitled ‘The Voice of the British Isles’, published in the European Magazine and the Gentleman’s Magazine and also produced as a broadside, celebrated the contributions of Ireland and Scotland to the war effort: With lies, and with many a Gallican wile, [The French] spread their dire poison o’er Erin’s green isle; But now each Shillalah is ready to thwack, And baste the lean ribs of the Gallican Quack. All around Erin’s shores, hark! the notes loudly ring, United, we’re ready, Steady, boys, steady, To fight for our Liberty, Laws, and our King. Stout Sandy, our brother, with heart and with hand, And his well-​tried Claymore, joins the patriot band. Now JACK, PAT, and SANDY, thus cordial agree, We sons of the waves shall forever be free, While around all our shores, hark! the notes loudly ring, United, we’re ready, &c. 26

Representing Ireland and Scotland through their national stereotypes—​ ‘Pat’ and ‘Sandy’—​and their national weapons—​the shillalah and claymore—​these stanzas illustrate the centrality of martial identities to the attempt to create a British voice and identity that could take into account national differences.

26 

Reprinted in Bennett (ed.), British War Poetry, 295–​6.

52   Simon Bainbridge The textual insistence on unity in this time of crisis was all the more necessary given the nation’s potential fractures, with the 1798 rebellion an ongoing theme in Irish poetry. In the same month that ‘The Voice of the British Isles’ was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1803, the Irish Republican Robert Emmet led an abortive uprising in Dublin, and after his execution become a national hero and the subject of one of Thomas Moore’s popular Irish Melodies of 1808 (‘Oh! Breathe not his name’). Moore’s Irish Melodies can be seen as one of many cultural celebrations of a specific national identity within the newly created kingdom, the continuing popularity of Robert Burns’s poetry being another (Robert Bloomfield’s success, outlined above, can in part be explained by understanding him as a specifically English version of a Burns-​like ‘natural genius’27). The complexities of national identity in the period’s literature are illustrated by the work of the Scots-​born poet Thomas Campbell, who wrote some of the best-​known patriotic verse of these years, such as ‘Ye Mariners of England’ with its celebration of the flag which ‘has braved a thousand years | The battle and the breeze’ (lines 3–​4)—​a reference to the English ‘St George Cross’ rather than the new ‘Union Jack’.28 Campbell wrote this poem on a visit to Germany in 1800 during which he also met the United Irishman Anthony McCann, the inspiration for his poem ‘Exile of Erin’. The latter is something of a test piece for interpreting the politics of such popular, nationalist texts. On the one hand, the poem seems to articulate nostalgically and sentimentally the exile’s attachment to Ireland, as he wanders alone by the beach and on the wind-​beaten hill, sighing for his country. As in Moore’s Irish Melodies, the expression of Irish sentiment seems possible and permissible in mainstream culture only once the political cause has been defeated. On the other hand, Campbell’s exile repeatedly invokes the slogan ‘Erin go Bragh’ (‘Ireland Forever’), which had become associated with the United Irishmen and with dangerous radicalism more generally. In the poem’s conclusion, the exile turns from the past to the present, calling on Ireland’s ‘harp-​striking bards’ to ‘sing aloud with devotion | Erin mavournin [Ireland, my love]—​Erin go bragh!’ (lines 39–​40). Three years later, Robert Emmet would attempt his rebellion under a green flag bearing the same slogan. The origins and identity of the nation became a key subject in the British literature of the Napoleonic period, and with the increasing critical interest in recent years in ‘Four-​ Nations’ Romanticism there has been considerable debate over whether the term ‘British Romanticism’ should be used, or whether separate stands of ‘Scottish’, ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, and ‘English Romanticism’ should be identified, while recognizing their artistic and cultural interconnectedness. The recreation of the nation through the Acts of Union can be seen to have shaped a number of the period’s literary developments. One feature of these years was the continuation of the eighteenth-​century project of the recovery of national bodies of literature, seen in collections such as Joseph Ritson’s Ancient English Metrical Romances (1802), Walter Scott’s three-​volume Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

27 

28 

See Brian Goldberg, Chapter 11 in this volume. Thomas Campbell, The Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Phillips, Samson, 1853), 149.

The New Century: 1800–1815    53 (1802–​3, with an additional volume 1804), George Ellis’s Specimens of Early English Metrical  Romances (1805), and Henry Weber’s Metrical Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries (1810). Another literary response to both the war with France and the sharpened sense of the importance of ideas of the nation was the revival of the genre of epic, many examples of which dealt with national themes or celebrated British triumphs both past and present, as in the case of Hannah Cowley’s The Siege of Acre: An Epic Poem, in Six Books (1801). One critic commented in 1802 that ‘Posterity will consider it a singular phænomenon, that at so late a period as the beginning of the 19th century, the number of candidates for epic fame should exceed, as is the case at present, those of the early and middle ages of the world.’29 This comment was made in response to John Ogilvie’s Britannia: A National Poem. In Twenty Books (1801), which tells of how the Trojan Brutus discovered Britain, offering a poem of national origin that draws on a Miltonic visionary structure to prophesy the future glories and military triumphs of the British Empire. King Alfred, whose defeat of a Danish invasion force made him an obvious choice for such poems, was the subject of epics by Henry James Pye, the Poet Laureate, and Joseph Cottle, the publisher of Lyrical Ballads, though the latter used his work as a means to question the martial values associated with the form. In the context of this ‘epomania’, as Southey termed the period’s obsession with what was deemed the highest literary form,30 it is worth remembering that one of the greatest literary works of 1800–​15, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, had its origins in a similar national project, with the poet considering and rejecting ‘some British theme, some old | Romantic tale, by Milton left unsung’ (1805: Book 1, lines 179–​80) before embarking on his innovative epic of the self. In many ways it was the more modern form of the novel that was best suited to engaging with, representing, and negotiating these issues of nationhood and national identity. The new century opened with the publication in 1800 of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, the first of her series of Irish novels and the first example of the subgenre often referred to as the ‘national tale’, a category derived from the subtitle of another popular Irish novel, Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson)’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806). Writers in Scotland also turned to the novel, with notable examples being Elizabeth Hamilton’s bestseller The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) and Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810), a novel about William Wallace which developed the historical approach of her earlier works such as Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803). These ‘national tales’ presented the people, languages, and cultures of Ireland and Scotland and explored the countries’ relationships to England and the larger idea of ‘Great Britain’. The novel’s formal properties—​framing devices, narrative perspectives, multiple settings, wide range of characters, use of dialogue and dialects—​made it possible to treat the issues 29 

Anti-​Jacobin Review 11 (1802), 272. For other contemporary comment on the improbable revival of epic, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 158–​79. 30  To John Rickman, [c.29–​31] Oct. 1800, Collected Letters of Southey, Part 2: 1798–​1803, ed. Lynda Pratt and Ian Packer (2011).

54   Simon Bainbridge of national identity with sophistication and sometimes ambiguity. Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, for example, is unreliably narrated by the Irish Catholic servant Thady Quirk, who is representative of the dying values of pre-​Union Ireland both in his language and his attitudes (see Jim Kelly, Chapter 9 in this volume). This sense of a dying culture is reinforced by the novel’s plot, which satirically traces the failure of four generations of Rackrents to save their estate, eventually bought by the modern, professional figure of Thady’s son, Jason. The novel’s implicit argument for transition from what is presented as outdated feudal misrule into modern British governance is enacted at the formal level. Thady’s Irish dialect narrative is contained within an editorial framework of footnotes and a ‘glossary’ which is offered on the basis that ‘Some friends who have seen Thady’s history since it has been printed have suggested to the Editor, that many of the terms and idiomatic phrases with which it abounds could not be intelligible to the English reader without farther explanation.’31 As Gary Kelly argues, while these ‘national’ tales of Ireland and Scotland, such as Castle Rackrent and The Cottagers of Glenburnie, provided narratives of progress for the new nation, they also brought a new realism to the novel and their popularity came in part from their focus on the dialects and cultures they were seeking to criticize as pre-​modern.32 It was Scott who most fully developed the novel’s potential to provide national narratives through the series of historical novels he initiated with the publication of Waverley in 1814, drawing on the models of Edgeworth, Porter, and others to trace the transformation of Scotland from a romantic but feudal society into a part of the modern, professional nation (though a part that retains some allegiance to its own nationhood). With his ongoing series of Waverley novels, Scott established what would become one of the dominant literary forms of nineteenth-​century Europe, a genre particularly suited to treating the issues of historical change and national and international conflict that had been such a feature of the recent past. The literature of these years was also deeply concerned with the internal condition of the nation, with Britain and Ireland feeling the effects of the ongoing series of social, economic, and demographic upheavals often known as the ‘Industrial Revolution’, most famously symbolized in the period by Blake’s image of the ‘dark Satanic mills’ that threatened to despoil ‘England’s green & pleasant land’.33 The first census of 1801 makes it possible to gauge the extent to which Britain was being transformed from a rural to an urban nation, with Wordsworth’s anxiety about ‘the encreased accumulation of men in cities’ gaining support from the fact that by this date half of the population was now living in cities. London’s population doubled between 1700 and 1810, making it the largest city in the world and a site of horror and fascination for the period’s writers. Blake’s poems Milton and Jerusalem depict the growth of industrial London but, in the capital’s ‘Spiritual Fourfold’ version, Golgonooza, also make it the site of potential imaginative apocalypse. 31 

Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, ed. George Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 98.

32 Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 89–​92. 33 

‘Preface’ to Milton, in William Blake, The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson, 3rd edn (London: Longman, 2007), 502–​3.

The New Century: 1800–1815    55 The technological advances of previous decades, such as James Watt’s harnessing of steam power for the textile industry, contributed to the development of the ‘factory system’ and the growth of industrial cities in the north and midlands of England. By 1801 Manchester had a population of 89,000, but it remained unrepresented in Parliament until the Great Reform Act of 1832. The period saw the first Factory Act of 1802, which placed some limitations on the employment of children, but the legislation was ineffective and there was no further regulation until 1819. While the remarkable acceleration of industrial processes transformed production, with the consumption of raw cotton almost doubling in the decade 1801–​11, this was also a period of economic hardship for many, especially for the new industrial workforce, partly as a result of Napoleon’s Continental System which from 1806 restricted Britain’s international trade and led to a significant decline in exports. There were several episodes of workers’ protests, particularly by Lancashire weavers, with calls for a minimum wage and for the negotiation of peace with France amid a growing atmosphere of war-​weariness. In 1809, for example, a 6,000-​strong gathering of weavers at St George’s Field in Manchester was dispersed by a combined force of police and Dragoons (anticipating the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ in the same city a decade later). The Luddite destruction of machinery that began in Nottinghamshire in 1811 prompted a strong government reaction, including use of the army (at one stage involving more soldiers than were being deployed in the Peninsular War), a mass trial, and legislation that imposed the death penalty for frame-​breaking (a development which Byron spoke against in his maiden speech in the House of Lords). The passing in 1815 of the Corn Laws, which restricted the importation of corn and maintained the high price of a stable food source to the advantage of landowners, caused further hardship for the urban working classes in the period after Waterloo (the Laws were not repealed until 1846). The rural economy too was in the process of radical transformation, most fundamentally through the process of enclosure that strengthened the positions of landowners and larger farmers to the detriment of cottagers and rural workers no longer able to use the enclosed common land. Enclosure was at its height during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, when nearly half of all English enclosure acts were passed. It was in 1809 that John Clare’s village of Helpston was enclosed, and the poet powerfully described the devastating effect through analogy with foreign invasion, writing in his later poem ‘Remembrances’ (c.1832) that ‘Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain | It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill | And hung the moles for traitors’ (lines 67–​9).34 In terms of Britain’s global position and activities, the years 1800–​15 also saw the development and acceleration of pre-​existing trends, as well as some significant changes. The period is best remembered in these terms for the passing of the ‘Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ in 1807, the culmination of the efforts of William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and others who had been campaigning since the 1780s (a campaign in which

34 

John Clare: The Oxford Authors, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 260.

56   Simon Bainbridge literature had played an important part). This act made it illegal to trade slaves, but it was not until 1833 that slavery itself was abolished in the British colonies. A now much-​ discussed literary illustration of how slavery continued to underpin the economic and social structures in Britain during these years is Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), in which Sir Thomas Bertram is required to return to his sugar plantations in Antigua (the debate focuses on whether the novel is blind to the political implications of this action, or is seeking to offer an implicit critique of the source of Bertram’s wealth).35 While the war against France was being seen as a new kind of ideological conflict, as described above, it nonetheless enabled Britain to strengthen its global position in terms of trading and colonies. As a result of various wartime actions and consequent peace treaties, Britain made territorial gains in the Mediterranean, Africa, and Australia, and extended its influence in the Caribbean and Asia, while the eventual victory over its major colonial rival, France, at Waterloo in 1815 greatly increased the nation’s sense of its divinely endorsed imperial mission, preparing the way for the huge growth of the British Empire in the following century. The so-​called ‘Pious Clause’ of 1813 is a significant milestone in Britain’s shifting self-​perception from a nation that traded and gained colonies to one that had an imperial mission to spread moral, political, and religious values around the world. First proposed by William Wilberforce in 1793, this clause was inserted into the Act of Parliament which renewed the charter of the East India Company. The clause, which sought to promote ‘the interests and happiness of the inhabitants of the British Dominions in India’, argued that ‘such measures ought to be adopted as may gradually tend to [the inhabitants’] advancement in useful knowledge, and to their religious and moral improvement’, advocating sending missionaries to India for this purpose.36 Literary developments in the opening years of the nineteenth century were closely tied to Britain’s global role. It is to 1798, the date of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, that the critic Edward Said has traced the origin of what he has influentially termed ‘Orientalism’, the literary and cultural representation of the East that he argues is a type of imaginative imperialism and part of the ideological process by which the West gained its dominance.37 Eastern and oriental subjects certainly became highly fashionable in literature during these years, as in other cultural areas, such as design and interior decoration. In 1813 Byron advised his fellow poet Thomas Moore to ‘Stick to the East’, adding that the literary ‘oracle’ Madame de Staël ‘told me it was the only poetical policy . . . if [the little I have done] has had any success, that also will prove that the public are orientalizing, and pave the path for you’.38 As Byron here indicates, his own popular success 35 

See, for example, Susan Fraiman, ‘Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 21.4 (1995), 805–​21; and George E. Boulukos, ‘The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39.3 (2006), 361–​83. For other literary engagements with slavery, see Fiona Robertson, Chapter 46 in this volume. 36  14 May 1793, Journals of the House of Commons, 778, quoted in Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–​1858 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 37. 37  Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). 38  Byron’s Letters and Journals, iii. 101.

The New Century: 1800–1815    57 had been in part a product of his use of oriental locations, characters, and trappings in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and his ‘Turkish Tales’ (and Moore would successfully benefit from his friend’s advice with the publication in 1817 of Lalla Rookh). Novelists also engaged with Eastern subjects and settings, two popular and influential examples being Charlotte Dacre’s Gothic romance Zofloya: or, The Moor (1806) and Lady Morgan’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811). Some texts of the period contributed to the nation’s new imperial and religious mission, such as Robert Southey’s Madoc (1805), a tale of the attempted settlement of a Welsh Prince in the Americas, which Lynda Pratt has described as ‘an epic of colonization and conversion’.39 Other works, however, use narrative, form, and character to question such imperial plottings. In Byron’s first ‘Turkish Tale’, The Giaour (1813), the conflict of the two male protagonists, the European Giaour and the Turk Hassan, leads not to the salvation of the heroine Leila, but to her destruction, suggesting through allegory the devastating consequences of territorial ambitions, even when presented in the guise of liberation. The poem’s fragmentary form embodies the fall away from the heroic values of the classical past, emphasizing the seeming impossibility of valid action in the modern, war-​torn world. The period 1800–​15 was extraordinary in terms of both the far-​reaching significance of its historical events and the richness of the literature it produced. This chapter has sought to illustrate some of the different ways in which the two were interrelated. In 1815, in response to news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, the astonished poet and journalist Leigh Hunt wrote that ‘We want nothing new now, to finish the Romantic history of the present times, but a visit from the Man in the Moon.’40 It is a comment that captures the remarkable nature of this period and which, in its characterization of the ‘present times’ as a ‘romantic history’, emphasizes the powerful synergies between literature and history in the middle phase of British Romanticism.

Further Reading Bainbridge, Simon, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Bainbridge, Simon, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars:  Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Clery, Emma, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven:  Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​1837 (1992; London: Vintage, 1996). Cox, Jeffrey N., Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Cronin, Richard, The Politics of Romantic Poetry:  In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

39  Lynda Pratt, ‘Epic’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 342. 40  Leigh Hunt, ‘Bonaparte in France Again’, Examiner (12 Mar. 1815), 161–​2.

58   Simon Bainbridge Davis, Leith, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–​ 1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Ferris, Ina, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Leask, Nigel, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Leerssen, Joep, Remembrance and Imagination:  Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representations of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: University of Cork Press, 1996). Makdisi, Saree, Romantic Imperialism:  Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Russell, Gillian, The Theatres of War:  Performance, Politics, and Society 1793–​ 1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Shaw, Philip, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Shaw, Philip (ed.), Romantic Wars:  Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–​ 1822 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism:  The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Watson, J. R., Romanticism and War:  A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Chapter 4

P ost-​War Rom a nt i c i sm Kelvin Everest

Matthew Arnold’s essay of 1864, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, helped prepare the way for English as an academic discipline. Its profoundly influential argument understands the critical faculty as complementary with creativity. The critic’s special character of ‘disinterestedness’, ‘a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches’, is essential to the cultivation of fallow periods in the creative cycle of a culture. Criticism selflessly prepares the ground in which great literature can flourish. Its task is ‘to know the best that is known and thought in the world’ and to articulate afresh the abiding values and qualities of the best thinkers and artists.1 Arnold’s essay inexplicitly but unmistakably derives its central notion of disinterestedness by contrast with a mode of biased critical commentary which is warped from the honest and truthful appraisal of literature by overt political affiliation and practical polemic. This is the opposite of ‘disinterestedness’, and the type of commentary he has in mind is the vibrantly combative and destructive British intellectual journalism which was at its most intense in the five years or so following the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. This kind of journalism had only properly begun at the very end of the eighteenth century. Burgeoning print culture and a widening reading public gave rise to a new form of politically engaged serious journalism which developed rapidly under the stimulus of the drama of Revolution in France and its impact in Britain.2 The most important journals were the Whig Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, and the Tory Quarterly Review (1809), but many other quarterlies, monthlies, and ‘magazines’ sprang up. Through the years of war with France they were a central battleground of ideas. Their rise to prominence and influence was significantly bound up with the fact that British intellectual life at the time was in its last phase of what might be termed full integration. A cultivated, literate person might reasonably be expected to maintain an informed interest across the whole range of mental enquiry. The ‘Reviews’ were just that: contemporary commentary 1  The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–​77), iii. 268, 270. 2  On the emergence of this new critical culture, see William Christie, Chapter 18 in this volume.

60   Kelvin Everest on every facet of intellectual endeavour through the medium of comprehensive long reviews of new publications embracing the entire spectrum of publishing. Works of history and science, biographies and philosophy, travel writings and philology, memoirs and dramas, and every kind of commentary on past and present were alike liable to be judged in the periodical press, and to be treated well or harshly as political allegiance might dictate. All genres of literary writing were similarly subjected to praise or invective according to their identification with the conservative or the liberal side of contemporary controversy. The extremes to which such politically motivated reviewing could reach can still startle us today. The most notorious example is the treatment handed out to John Keats, who was identified by the Quarterly and others as an associate of the radical journalist Leigh Hunt and therefore a legitimate target for cruelly sneering invective, notably in the British Critic and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.3 Not only the eccentricities of the young Keats’s early style (admittedly more than a little indebted to Hunt), but his training in medicine, his assumed lowly social origin, and even his personal appearance were seized upon and gleefully derided. Shelley, when he heard of these attacks and their supposed effect on Keats’s health, gathered the impression that the Tory attacks had literally killed him. His brilliant elegy in response, Adonais (1821), wears a complex classical rhetoric in honour of the young poet whose socially inappropriate pretensions to poetry had been mocked as the ravings of a cockney guttersnipe. Adonais may indeed be read as, amongst other things, an impassioned critique of the party-​dominated reviewing culture which hounded Keats. Shelley himself suffered badly at its hands, and a distinctive feature of his poem’s organization is a determination to affirm the immortality of great poetry, in contrast with the ephemeral spite of enviously untalented critics with a political axe to grind.4 The pervasively political character of journalism in the years following Waterloo is unsurprising. With the cessation of twenty-​three years of almost continuous war across Western Europe came an end to the tacit consensus of national interest which had served to paper over profound rifts and tensions in the fabric of the newly industrialized society. Waterloo itself is often thought of as a decisive victory which was yet a perilously close-​run thing, on which the future of Europe hinged. In fact, it seems certain that even a Napoleonic victory on Sunday 18 June 1815 would have brought only a temporary delay to the inevitable victory of the allied monarchies ranged against the Republic. The French armies were exhausted and depleted, and the tide had already turned irreversibly. It is probably also true to say that the real British victory was not Wellington’s on the battlefield, but Castlereagh’s brilliant diplomatic manoeuvring at the Congress of Vienna. The Congress had been convened to manage the creation of a new European order following Napoleon’s abdication after the fall of Paris to the armies of the sixth coalition in March 1814. With Napoleon exiled to Elba, the major victorious diplomatic powers gathered to parcel out territories and spheres of influence, in a settlement which 3  Quarterly Review 19 (Apr. 1818), 204–​7; British Critic new series 9 (June 1818), 649–​54; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3 (Aug. 1818), 519–​24. 4  See Kelvin Everest, ‘Shelley’s Adonais and John Keats’, Essays in Criticism 57 (2007), 237–​64.

Post-War Romanticism   61 was effectively to maintain a general peace across the continent for the next hundred years. They were in the midst of protracted discussions when Napoleon broke out of exile in March 1815 to initiate the ‘hundred days’ of his attempt to revive the fortunes of Republican France, leading to the final defeat at Waterloo. Just nine days before that battle, in its final and only formal Act, the Congress confirmed Great Britain as the major beneficiary of the settlement, its European influence and global presence consolidated by Castlereagh’s skill in dealing with the competing machinations of Metternich, Talleyrand, and the Russian Tsar. As one historian has cogently stated, ‘it can safely be said that Britain’s military and diplomatic prestige reached a pitch it has never reached before or since’.5 This pitch of prestige comprised a great deal more than diplomatic pre-​eminence. The British army had been transformed by the exigencies of a long war for national survival from a small, ill-​equipped, and poorly disciplined body, into the formidable fighting machine of the nineteenth century. The Royal Navy was by far the most powerful military force in the world, its strength greater than the combined force of all other comparable navies. A further consequence of the settlement in Vienna was a consolidation of Britain’s imperial domain, which military power placed on a newly superior footing. National self-​confidence could look to a remarkable extent of colonized peoples and territory, providing a vast bounty of raw materials, labour, and captive markets. The conclusion of the Anglo-​American War of 1812—​overshadowed by the massive European conflict, but nonetheless significant in clarifying major issues hanging over from the American War of Independence—​established a clear British territory and sphere of influence in Canada. British and French interests in the West Indies were newly clarified in the post-​Napoleonic period, with a resultant rapid growth in profits from the slave-​ based sugar and other industries. There was a gradual building of implicitly military pressure on the Qing Empire in China, source of numerous luxury consumer goods, but above all of tea, imports of which contributed a staggering proportion of customs revenue. The East India Company grew increasingly frustrated by Chinese refusal to permit direct trade through any port other than Canton (modern Guandong), and countered this obstinacy with a tacit encouragement of the opium trade. This had tangential effects on the Romantic sensibility, with the ubiquitous availability of opium-​based mixtures such as laudanum.6 The opium trade depended on large-​scale production of the drug in India, particularly Bengal. India was the supreme possession of the British Empire. The growth of Britain’s Indian Empire was never part of any grand plan, but a matter of steady 5 

Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–​1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 237. See also N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 2: 1649–​1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2004); and Charles J. Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon (London: Longman, 1995). 6  Colonial exploitation of the Qing Dynasty is analysed in Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (London: Picador, 2011); and Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–​1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011). For literary constructions of China, see Peter J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-​British Cultural Exchange 1760–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

62   Kelvin Everest expansion as established areas of British control came under threat from bordering regions, prompting stabilizing military action which in turn brought more territory under management. This process ended with the consolidation of British control or protection over vast swathes of the subcontinent by 1818, from Bengal west and north to Delhi and beyond, and in the south the whole of Karnataka and the Island of Ceylon. In the latter years of the eighteenth century, British India was a source of cultural enrichment, with scholarly interest in languages and religions and a respectful curiosity about social and aesthetic forms. Romantic literary culture was strongly marked by these interests, notably in the widely read Eastern epic poems of Robert Southey such as Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810). These poems exerted a strong influence over the subsequent generation, in such fashionable productions as Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817). Shelley appears to have known Southey’s Eastern epics almost by heart.7 However, as Britain’s Indian dominion grew larger and more stretched, so underlying tensions between the indigenous people and their colonial masters rose to the surface, exacerbated by British suspicion and contempt, and the proselytizing zeal of missionaries. By the 1820s British rule had grown in the main into a wholly imperialist project driven by greed for profit rather than any plausible civilizing motive, let alone interest in the intrinsic value of an alien culture.8 Victory in Europe and massively expanded imperial sway across the world produced a newly confident sense of national superiority and cultural insularity.9 The feeling of national superiority after Waterloo could feed on a direct experience of mainland Europe which had not been possible for a quarter of a century. Byron’s 1811 tour round the Mediterranean coast to Albania had been constrained to that route because of the war. But when the twenty-​one-​year-​old Shelley ‘eloped’ to Europe with Mary Godwin and her stepsister Claire Clairmont in July 1814 they were able to travel across a war-​ ravaged France to Switzerland because hostilities were at a (temporary) end. Many deep currents in taste and the cultural components of the later Regency were shaped by these simple geographical verities. The first two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) initiated an exoticism which drew heavily on the Eastern Mediterranean. The ménage of the Shelleys, Byron, and Polidori on Lake Geneva in 1816 was similarly enabled by the final peace of 1815. The settings of Rousseau’s novels merged with extreme cold weather (caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies and its global dust-​cloud) to produce both Frankenstein (1818) and the new Wordsworthian 7 

For these and other examples, see Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Michael J. Franklin (ed.), Romantic Representations of British India (London: Routledge, 2006). 8  Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Lawrence James, Raj: The Making of British India (London: Little, Brown, 1997). 9  Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–​1830, rev. edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

Post-War Romanticism   63 manner of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto 3 (1816). Shelley’s mature classicism, on the other hand, is inseparable from his travels in 1818 and 1819 around the great Italian sites of classical antiquity, from Rome to Naples and the ruins of Paestum and Pompeii. For an intellectual deeply immersed in Latin and especially Greek literature this was a profound experience, which produced the rapt and challenging density of Prometheus Unbound (1820). In broad terms, after 1815 Western mainland Europe became again, as it had been throughout the eighteenth century, a finishing school for the aristocratic and well-​to-​do merchant classes. Its damaged and impoverished peoples, and the plain effects of military conflict, enhanced a feeling of British superiority and power. Its landscapes, ruins, art, and cities could, on the other hand, supply a direct encounter with classical and Renaissance culture, which hugely enriched the realms of taste and artistic endeavour. It is deceptively easy for retrospective commentary to discern a vigorous emergent dominance in post-​war British culture of the themes and styles associated with Romanticism: the symbolic and moral value of nature; the power of imagination, in contrast with a rationalist dependence on the senses as the source of knowledge; the force of personal emotion and subjectivity. But that culture is evidently more conflicted, even within the work of its central ‘Romantic’ exemplars. Keats’s urge to escape the pain and constraints of ordinary experience issues in a conception of the ideal firmly grounded in space, time, and the senses. Byron’s heroizing of the self is supplanted by irony and comedy. Even Shelley veers between visionary idealism and demotic radicalism. Perhaps the greatest and most subtle artistic embodiment of these dualities in post-​war literary culture is Jane Austen’s Persuasion.10 Though published posthumously in 1818, the novel is conspicuously set in the time of its composition. Austen began work on it in the late summer of 1815 and completed a first draft by July 1816. We learn in the first chapter that its heroine, Anne Elliott, was born on 9 August 1787, and that she is twenty-​seven at the start of the action, which places it around September 1814, running through to February 1815. This characteristically precise specification underpins the novel’s central concern with the British Navy and its officers. Following Napoleon’s abdication and exile, together with the end of the American War, peace meant that the great majority of British naval officers were obliged to relinquish their commands and return home on half pay. These officers, from Captain Wentworth to Admiral Croft and his wife, play pivotal roles in the narrative. In some ways Persuasion can be read as a small-​scale novel of social manners, balancing up the advantages and disadvantages of the young taking counsel from their elders. ‘Persuasion’ plays on the ambivalent interplay of inner disposition and external pressure, and the poignantly understated emotions of the novel plot out a shift from marriage as a means to dynastic consolidation towards the imperatives of personal love. But this reading is complicated by a breadth of vision—​implicit, but nevertheless 10  For the novel’s relation to contemporary culture, see especially Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), ch. 12; and Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), ch. 7.

64   Kelvin Everest insistent—​which develops new kinds of questioning about personal integrity and social change. As precise as the setting is, overall Persuasion is less precise than any preceding Austen novel, sometimes a touch shadowy in plotting and with some incoherence by her standards. She seems to have departed from her custom of using an almanac (a type of annual calendar popular in this period) to manage time in the novel, and there are unusual gaps in explanation (for example, Captain Wentworth’s whereabouts between Lyme Regis and Bath are mysterious). It is unlike the preceding novels in other ways. There is a personal quality which bears biographical interpretation. Being twenty-​seven may carry a special resonance: it is the age at which Austen herself is conjectured to have had some kind of love affair in 1802; it is Charlotte Lucas’s age when she accepts Mr Collins’s marriage proposal in Pride and Prejudice. There is also a recurring representation of solitude and introspective patience, echoing on words such as ‘alone’, and ‘nothing’, which at times, as in the account of Mrs Smith in Bath, approaches something suggesting depression, or in the vocabulary of the novel and its time, ‘lowness’. These qualities go with a general openness to new modes of feeling more commonly associated with the kind of Romantic subjectivity targeted by Austen’s irony in the earlier novels. The two-​part structure of Persuasion offers a first half where the free indirect narration makes the heroine’s consciousness strikingly dominant. There is an almost Jane Eyre-​ like power to project meaning from the narrated consciousness onto external reality, so that social realism blurs with a symbolic embodiment of personality. The effect is amplified by the rural English setting, the sea at Lyme Regis, and the delicately suggested seasonal cycle. It brings Austen into disconcerting affinity with the Wordsworth of ‘Tintern Abbey’, and with other canonical Romantic representations of the creative power of the mind in perception, such as Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’ or Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’. This strain suggests a readiness to acknowledge the cultural presence of Scott and Byron, notwithstanding the novel’s advocacy of prose over poetry, its impatience with fashionable melancholy, and its ironization of Captain Benwick’s excessive emotionalism. This critique of Romanticism is embodied in the contrast between the two equal halves of the novel, where the second set of twelve chapters is set entirely in elegant, straight-​lined Georgian Bath, and a claustrophobic, lonely, and introspective atmosphere sees the subjective projection of the earlier narrative mode supplanted by Anne Elliot’s reliance on external sources of information such as gossip and correspondence. Nevertheless, Persuasion is pervaded by a new and different sense of the power of emotion and the effects of its extremes. A tendency to depression is balanced by the presence of a sort of heady and heedless joy and passion. The elegant poise of Austen’s prose also registers different possibilities, more nervy and less periodic. Above all, there is a poetic sense of the changes wrought by time, and the manner in which a mature consciousness discovers that it can negotiate with dignity, and ultimately with strong rewards of happiness and self-​reliance, the shifting possibilities and constraints of adulthood. In short, Persuasion is the story of an isolated personality in a changing society, and as such it points towards modernity. There is no more acute and encompassing artistic synthesis of the contrary impulses at play in British cultural life in the latter part of the Regency. It was a short intense period when that society enjoyed the farther

Post-War Romanticism   65 reaches of aristocratic licence and excess, and expressive freedoms in literature and art, which were soon enough to be left behind by the advent of a self-​righteous full-​blown Victorian imperialism. The literary scene in Britain immediately after Waterloo offers no female novelists of comparable depth and artistic authority. But Persuasion is an interesting contrast with Frankenstein, also published in 1818, which has to be acknowledged as the single work of this period which has enjoyed the longest and most varied cultural legacy. Mary Shelley’s ghost story could hardly be more remote from Austen. Its narrative structure is a monster in itself, drawing freely on a jumble of dates from her own life and family, including, for example, the setting of Walton’s story in the months from December 1796 to September 1797 corresponding with the period from her own conception through to the death, following her own birth, of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. There are simple anachronisms throughout, and numerous radically incoherent features. What language are the characters speaking (and reading)? Why is the monster’s brain empty? How does he come to be so big, given he is assembled from body parts? Clearly these are not appropriate questions to ask, as the spatial and temporal discipline of an Austen plot, with its minute observance of the credible and the plausible, is evidently not in play. The sources of the novel’s enduring cultural power are thereby all the more interesting. Something may be attributed to the role of the Anglo-​American academy, which has found the text particularly serviceable in recent decades. But the cultural potency of Frankenstein derives from the strongly charged atmosphere it generates around a Gothic romance of family life. This has proved extraordinarily suggestive of multiple complex interpretations. Through the unfettered play of fantasy it readily opens itself to political and sexual undercurrents which can only ever be implicit in Jane Austen. In this respect the novel can be understood as a fictional equivalent of William Blake’s ‘prophetic books’ of twenty years earlier (the tormented creation story in The Book of Urizen [1794] enters similar psychic territory, as does the familial and sexual psychodrama of Visions of the Daughters of Albion [1793]). Frankenstein uses family names (‘Elizabeth’, Percy Shelley’s sister; ‘Victor’, his pen-​name; ‘William’, her father, and son, and step-​ brother), her own struggles with procreation, and her parents. Mary Wollstonecraft’s novels Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman (1798) deal with the social entrapment of women, the importance of education, the darker urgings of sexuality. The doubled and inverted hunter/​hunted relations in Frankenstein clearly derive from her father William Godwin’s pursuit novel Caleb Williams (1794).11 Indeed, all elements of the story seem variations on each other. Whatever force or concept can be understood as embodied or symbolized in the monster, it is very clearly destructive of the family, and reads like

11  See Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘Rewriting the Family: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in its Biographical/​ Textual Context’, in Stephen Bann (ed.), Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity (London: Reaktion, 1994); Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), ch. 4; and Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), ch. 5.

66   Kelvin Everest a critique of her poet husband’s recklessly destructive idealism, and his perceived irresponsibility as a parent. But there is a case too for understanding the monster as ‘a female in disguise’, newly liberated women wreaking havoc on the family; or, alternatively, the monster has been read as figuring a domineering patriarchal maleness that violates ‘mother nature’.12 Given the novel’s historical moment, and the Shelleys’ strong radicalism, there is also definitely a reading which sees the monster’s destructive rampage as a parable of class conflict.13 Well-​educated and socially privileged intellectuals promote a revolutionary political creed which has the potential to unleash bloody chaos as it is espoused by the oppressed multitude. This is Percy Shelley’s own analysis of the French Revolution and its aftermath, in the Preface to his political epic Laon and Cythna, or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century (1818). In these years of post-​war instability, Britain did indeed begin for the first time seriously to countenance the possibility of its own revolution. The Empire drove British wealth and continuing industrial expansion, and created a wide range of opportunity for self-​advancement, and sometimes enrichment, across all social classes. But social class in Britain offered entirely new challenges for the first fully industrialized nation on Earth. Social forces, which had been to an extent held in check by the exigencies of wartime unity in a fight for national survival, were now released. Radical sentiment and organization in Britain had been nurtured in the last decade of the preceding century by the coincidence of revolution in France and the emergence of a new ‘working class’, the product of fundamental technological advances in agriculture and industrial production.14 The first overt indications of a radical challenge to the status quo were met with legal suppression, and a long war served to subdue oppositional fervour in the name of patriotism. The latter years of the Napoleonic Wars, however, saw hard winters and bad harvests, and once the soldiers started to return home and economic life resumed its novel paths of development, tensions surfaced and found expression. Even during the final years of conflict there were pockets of violence—​for example, in the East Midlands, where mechanized modes of production were driving traditional workers in cottage industries such as lace-​making to unemployment and penury. This led to ‘frame-​breaking’, the smashing of machines by ‘Luddites’, disguised men vowing allegiance to a legendary ‘King Lud’, a symbol of working-​class resistance to economic oppression and the shadowy forces driving economic change. Radical calls for a reform of the franchise increasingly found voices and structures in the years following Waterloo. A corresponding body of legislation and other means of state control 12  Influential discussions along these lines include Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-​Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), ch. 7; and Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1988). 13  For a Marxist reading of this kind, see Franco Moretti, ‘Dialectic of Fear’, in his Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: NLB, 1983). 14  The classic account is E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963).

Post-War Romanticism   67 was articulated. Political reform was an inevitable corollary of the nation’s shifting economic character, and it was equally inevitable that events would sooner or later usurp rational dialogue and rhetoric. A little more than four years after Waterloo, they did so in bloody and dramatic fashion on a hot summer’s day at St Peter’s Field in Manchester, on 19 August 1819. This pivotal event in British history quickly became known as ‘Peterloo’, in ironic analogy with Wellington’s victory. A Manchester group agitating for parliamentary reform organized a meeting to be addressed by the well-​known radical orator Henry Hunt. The crowd had started to form before seven in the morning, and by the time of the disastrous climax of the event around two in the afternoon, numbers were by any contemporary standard vast. At something between 60,000 to 70,000 people, the meeting had emptied Manchester and represented about 10 per cent of the population of the entire County of Lancashire. These tens of thousands were packed tight. Arrangements to police the crowd spiralled out of control. The cavalry were ordered in, lost their heads, and started to hack about them. The toll of death and injury will never be clear, but at least eleven were killed and more than 400 wounded. A disproportionate number of them were women, conspicuous in their all-​white dresses (a colour denoting radical sympathies) and by all accounts specifically targeted. It was nobody’s explicit intention to wreak such havoc, but the scale of conflicting economic and social forces had created the conditions for violence. The immediate consequence was a government crackdown on reform through measures such as the ‘Six Acts’ of 1819.15 Shelley was certainly familiar with British radical culture, and had written of the possibility of violent revolution. But he was still deeply shocked by news of the Peterloo Massacre, which came like cold water thrown onto the distracted self-​absorption of his Italian exile. It shook him into a new kind of verse: As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.16

The Mask of Anarchy is partly voiced in a characteristic mode of ‘Poesy’ that employs a symbolic landscape and a visionary complexity of abstract emblems and narrative. But this is mixed with a direct and demotic style, recalling the caricaturing allegorical

15 

Donald Read, Peterloo: The Massacre and its Background (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973); John Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-​Class Radicalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). For literary responses to Peterloo, see John Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), chs 1–​4. 16  The Mask of Anarchy, lines 1–​4, in The Poems of Shelley, vol. 3, ed. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, and Michael Rossington (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2011), 36. Other Shelley quotations are from this edition.

68   Kelvin Everest cartoons of Gillray and Cruikshank.17 The poem reaches for a common and accessible voice which might serve as a popular call to passive resistance. This taxing fusion of visionary and demotic is distinctive of much important writing of the years between the end of the war and Peterloo. The major poetry produced in this period is marked by a stylistic complexity which resists generalizing definition. There is a drive to accommodate the incursion of an uncomfortable social reality, troubling the visionary mode and ironizing it. Peterloo crystallized the situation, but there was already a distinctive strain of this kind in major British poetic writing after the summer of 1815. Each of the three young poets who developed to maturity in this brief period—​Byron, Shelley, and Keats—​worked within an immediate tradition dominated by the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge. This was a contradictory inheritance. Both older poets had turned completely away from the radical commitments of their youth in the 1790s, to embrace the Establishment and the Anglican Church. But their poetry had broken decisively with the components of a tired late ​eighteenth-​century style—​stock diction, closed couplets, a declamatory and stilted voice—​to open new possibilities. Lyrical Ballads and Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) were major presences for the younger generation, but the latter also worked with the contemporary publications of these still-​productive figures. Wordsworth’s Excursion was published in 1814, and while its reception was mostly one of disappointment, there is an obvious pervasive response to its meditative blank verse manner, for example in Shelley’s Alastor (1816). Wordsworth continued to publish new verse on a regular basis, often prompting direct and immediate poetic responses. But perhaps the most striking element in the post-​ war literary scene was the re-​emergence of Coleridge as a contemporary rather than a historical presence. Major poems from his younger peak of creativity saw conventional publication after many years of private circulation. Christabel and ‘Kubla Khan’ were published in 1816, followed the next year by both Sibylline Leaves—​his collected poems—​and Biographia Literaria. The latter elicited at the time mainly bewilderment or comedy (as in Byron’s ‘I wish he would explain his explanation’18), but the shortened lines and chanting syllabic measures of Christabel are picked up in Shelley and Keats, and there is a general debt to the subtle, voice-​inflected blank verse of the conversation poems, both in the immediate poetic culture and in later nineteenth-​century poets such as Browning and Tennyson. A further dimension of the cultural milieu was the emergence of the short discursive essay, pitched in a variety of tones from fierce polemic to broad humour, and open to engagement with every imaginable topic of interest. The development of the form was driven by the popularity of the Reviews, Quarterlies, and Monthlies, which, as noted above, commissioned long reviews which were essentially independent essays 17 

See Richard Hendrix, ‘The Necessity of Response: How Shelley’s Radical Poetry Works’, Keats-​ Shelley Journal 27 (1978), 45–​69. For visual caricature about Peterloo, see Ian Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 6. 18  Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), ‘Dedication’, stanza 2.

Post-War Romanticism   69 on the subject matter of the work under consideration.19 But the post-​war period, with its heightened political emotions and its newly enriched cultural materials drawing on science, travel in Europe and across the territories of Empire, and art and architecture, proved an ideal context for the sharply articulated opinion piece or shared meditation. In fact, as had proved the case with the sudden development of English drama to a high point at the end of the sixteenth century, the fruitful coincidence of historical moment, literary form, and gifted individuals saw the essay as a literary form ascend rapidly to what has remained its peak of achievement. Keats’s early mentor Leigh Hunt was an innovative exponent. His radical journal The Examiner (subtitled ‘A Sunday paper, on politics, domestic economy, and theatricals’), largely written by himself and widely read amongst London intellectuals, started publication in 1808 and continued under his editorship through to 1821. Hunt built on this experience to produce the groundbreaking collection The Round Table, published in 1817. This was two volumes of pieces mainly taken from The Examiner and written either by Hunt or by his fellow radical William Hazlitt. It met with limited success at the time of publication, but engendered a series of books by Hazlitt which set the standard for compressed and fiery eloquence in matters of taste and politics. His Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays followed in 1817, and then Lectures on the English Poets (1818) and Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819). These and other volumes culminated in Hazlitt’s masterpiece The Spirit of the Age in 1825. Many of Hazlitt’s essays were written to be delivered as public lectures. The phenomenon of a series of lectures on a historical, literary, or scientific theme, open to a paying audience in a central London location, came to the fore at this time and was itself a significant focus for new ideas, and for reappraisal of the past. They anticipated the advent of a national university system beyond the exclusive and classics-​dominated traditions of Oxford and Cambridge (one of the leading public lecturers, the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, went on to help found London University, which opened its doors in 1826). In the hands of major critics such as Hazlitt and Coleridge, they also brought a new rigour and comprehensiveness of knowledge to bear on criticism of the British literary tradition, and made literary history a subject open to intelligent people of all ranks in society. Their direct influence on the major poets was also great, typified in the impact made on Keats by Hazlitt’s literature lectures, notably his discussion of the aesthetic issues raised by the arrival of the Elgin Marbles in London. The vocabulary of Hazlitt’s lectures and essays appears, hardly modified, in the climactic formulation of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, and the impact of his lecturing can be felt elsewhere in Keats’s work.20 19  For the journalistic contexts of the Romantic essay form, see Simon P. Hull, Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). 20  Sarah M. Zimmerman, ‘The Thrush in the Theater: Keats and Hazlitt at the Surrey Institution’, in A Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2011). See also Peter J. Manning, ‘Manufacturing the Romantic Image: Hazlitt and Coleridge Lecturing’, in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–​1840, ed. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Gillian Russell, ‘Spouters or Washerwomen: The Sociability of Romantic Lecturing’, in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–​1840, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

70   Kelvin Everest By 1825, when Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age offered a definitive overview of the cultural scene in Britain, the brief intensity of the immediate post-​war years had already been entirely supplanted. Beau Brummel, doyen of ‘dandyism’ and the epitome of stylish Regency excess, was forced abroad by gambling debt and spent the last quarter-​century of his life in France. George III died in 1820, bringing his son, the debauched Prince Regent, to the throne as George IV. The Whigs had courted him assiduously throughout the Regency, but as king he promptly dashed their long-​cherished hopes of government by supporting a Tory administration. Princess Charlotte, the Regent’s daughter, had attracted the hopes and adoration of the British people as an attractive contrast to her loathed father and ‘mad’ grandfather. But she died in childbirth in November 1817, to a tremendous outpouring of national grief. Had she lived she would have become queen after George IV, her death thus leaving the way open for Victoria. The other central literary figures of the post-​war years died young and in exile. Almost the whole of Keats’s poetic career was confined to the period between Waterloo and Peterloo. He left for Rome in September 1820, already mortally ill with tuberculosis, and died the following February. He was twenty-​five. The Shelleys left for Italy early in 1818, partly to escape the possibility that Shelley would be deprived of his children by Mary, having already lost custody of his children by his first wife because of his blasphemous publications. He was never to return, drowning off Livorno in July 1822, just before his thirtieth birthday. Byron had left London two years earlier, in 1816, to escape the scandal surrounding the collapse of his marriage, and he too never returned, dying of a fever in Missolonghi in 1824 at the age of thirty-​six while assisting in the campaign for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Their achievements, however, were already secure, though it took Victorian enthusiasms for Keats and Shelley to raise their critical esteem to a level with Byron’s. Their major work is distinguished by a balancing of ideals and transcendent values against the limitations of real time and historical circumstances. They are entirely of their period, and at the same time preoccupied by what in their experience is not limited to individual time and place. Shelley’s masterpiece Prometheus Unbound, published in 1820 but composed in the preceding two years, is ‘set’ probably in 1816.21 The dramatic action is entirely symbolic, but the insistence on a need to break the cycle of revolution followed by new tyranny clearly has the failure of the French Revolution in mind. In Act I the Furies in chorus torment Prometheus first with the failure of Christ’s mission, and then with the bloodbath that followed the liberation of a ‘disenchanted nation’ (a phrase Shelley borrowed from Coleridge’s ‘France: An Ode’ [1798]22), inaugurating a ‘vintage-​time for Death and Sin’ (I. 574). Asia represents a pure love which must join with intellectual idealism in order for its victory not to be undermined by an urge to vengeance and new

21  At the beginning of Act I Prometheus laments his ‘three thousand years of sleep-​unsheltered hours’ (I. 12); the Fall of Troy, understood by antiquarian convention as the beginning of recorded history, was traditionally dated to 1184 BC, which places the action of Shelley’s play at the time of the Congress of Vienna. 22  Prometheus Unbound, I. 567; Coleridge, ‘France: An Ode’, line 28.

Post-War Romanticism   71 dominion. The drama’s characters are embodied abstractions, but they can only ever assume specific form in a real historical context. The play envisages no end to this interplay between abstract idealism and human reality. At the end of the third act Shelley accepts that humanity will always live with the possibility of regression from true civilization, even after the ultimate revolution: The painted veil, by those who were, called life, Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, All men believed and hoped, is torn aside—​ The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains, Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed:—​but man: Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree,—​the King Over himself; just, gentle, wise:—​but man: Passionless? No—​yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his will made or suffered them, Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended Heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. (III. iv. 190–​204)

The passage plays on the equivocal expression ‘but man’. There is the libertarian Shelley’s insistence that distinctions of rank are destructive social impositions on a common humanity. ‘But man’ in that sense connotes ‘simply nothing more than man, unencumbered by the trappings of inherited or tyrannical power and wealth’. Yet the phrase cannot but resonate with a kind of shadowy countermanding: ‘but man’, meaning ‘still, when the revolution has brought its changes, the human creature familiar to history in all its faults and disposition to revert to the bad’. Shelley’s striking deployment of the metaphor of kingship in a celebration of democratic self-​rule echoes the contradiction. The impression of an optimistic avowal which is subverted in the expression is reinforced by the eloquent enumeration of those ‘clogs’ but for which we could be confident that the celebrated transformation can never be reversed. Byron’s voice went through striking changes in the years from his overnight fame with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to the brilliant sophisticated comedy of Don Juan. It is, however, unquestionably in Don Juan that he establishes his own inimitable mode of Romantic irony. The first two cantos appeared from his Italian exile in 1819, developed from the initial success of the terza rima comic style of Beppo the previous year. There is a satiric vitality and a constant revelling in the possibilities of the terminal couplet in each stanza which is clearly indebted to Pope, and the open biographical and topical references which abound in plot and incidental detail seem to bind the poem close in to its historical moment (or, at least, the moment Byron had left behind in London in 1816). But there is also a complex interplay between the accessible personal worldliness

72   Kelvin Everest of the narrative voice, and the dramatic situations in which strong human feeling runs up against banal or cruel or comic reality. Don Juan manages to convey the authentic power of strong emotion and yearning, while also ironizing it through plot or commentary. This effect approaches the rich emotional countercurrents and contradictions of Mozart’s operas, in passages such as Julia’s letter and its disconcerting conclusion in stanzas 192–​8 of Canto 1, or in the account of Haidee’s love for Juan in the closing stanzas of Canto 2. The latter passage perfectly captures the presence, in a Regency rake of great genius, of contrary impulses to contemporary satire and eternal love. Keats’s short career, always preoccupied with its own transience, always anxious about its own claims to greatness and permanence, embodies the defining co-​presence of real and ideal, time and immortality, the pressing current world of politics and illness and debt with human experiences shared across time and space. His odes of 1819 all refer in their titles to things which are familiar to mortals but themselves immortal: a goddess, a season, a species, an emotion, a work of art. When a mortal person experiences these things they are in commune for the time with something that transcends time, and take on a kind of temporary immortality. The ode ‘To Autumn’ perfectly expresses this Keatsian quality of reaching through real historical experience to immortality. It has been argued that the poem is an oblique response to the Peterloo Massacre, and that does seem plausible.23 It was composed in the days immediately following news of the event, and the reaper’s poised hook in the second stanza may recall cartoon images of the cavalry attacking people in the crowd with their swords (one such cartoon is reproduced in Judith Thompson, Chapter 34 in this volume [Fig 34.3]). But the point is not that any such contemporary reference serves to ‘explain’ the poem by linking it with the news of the day. On the contrary, the whole movement and poise of the three stanzas serve to arrest things which are defined by their impermanence, to represent the impossible still centre of moving events. Like his great contemporaries, Keats could not have existed at any other time, but his transcendence of that fact has made his work permanently alive. Keats offers a poetic vision poised between the historical immediacy of events and a transhistorical perspective extending beyond past and future to the immortal and the timeless. Shelley’s passionate preoccupation with the politics and social conflicts of the day comes increasingly to be set in an invocation and representation of transhistorical forces driving through events. The ‘Ode to the West Wind’ offers the quintessential embodiment of this duality, but it finds other remarkable expressions, as, for example, in the strange and difficult attempt in Prometheus Unbound to place a revolutionary moment in frames of understanding stretching back to the relics of the early Earth and of 23 

The extended debate around the historical reference of ‘To Autumn’ became a test case for historicist methodology. See, for example, Jerome J. McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, Modern Language Notes 94 (1979), 988–​1032; David Bromwich, ‘Keats’s Radicalism’, Paul H. Fry, ‘History, Existence, and “To Autumn” ’, and William Keach, ‘Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style’, all in Susan J. Wolfson (ed.), ‘Keats and Politics: A Forum’, Studies in Romanticism, 25.2 (1986); Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 9; and Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 253–​67.

Post-War Romanticism   73 pre-​historical civilizations (IV. 280–​314), and forwards to a future of ‘arts, though unimagined, yet to be’ (III. iii. 56). It has been argued that the period after Waterloo was ‘an age of the spirit of the age’.24 This seems right, at least in the sense that the major poets who came to creative maturity in those years are quite consciously both engaged with and resistant to engagement with the turmoil of their times. A habit of cultural self-​examination was no doubt born of a pervasive and long-​persisting consensus, right through the years of war with France, that contemporaries were living through an epoch of revolutionary change that was fundamentally new in human experience. But its reflex was a preoccupation with historically alternative experiences, places, and times, and also with processes altogether beyond history.

Further Reading Bennett, Andrew, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999). Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–​1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Chandler, James, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Cox, Jeffrey N., Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Cronin, Richard, Paper Pellets:  British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010). Dart, Gregory, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–​1840: Cockney Adventures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Hilton, Boyd, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–​1846 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2006). Klancher, Jon P., The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Rowland, William G., Literature and the Marketplace: Romantic Writers and their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004). Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963). White, R. J., Waterloo to Peterloo (1st edn 1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

24 

James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 105.

Chapter 5

T he 1820s an d  Beyond Angela Esterhammer

‘Standard histories of English poetry do not very well know what to make of the 1820s’, one critic wrote twenty years ago; only recently have we begun to pay closer attention to this era’s episteme.1 The decade was traditionally considered an age of superficiality, conservatism, mediocrity, and ‘toned-​down romanticism’2—​even ‘a no-​man’s land that no one is fighting for’.3 Yet in light of new research on print culture and media history, the 1820s are now taking shape as a key moment of experimentation and innovation at the interface of Romanticism and modernity. The features for which this decade was once dismissed are the very features that now make it look trend-​setting: the market-​conscious attitude of writers and publishers, the prominence of fashion and celebrity, the emergence of new genres that challenge the boundary between fiction and non-​fiction. Taking a new approach to the writings of these last (and, until recently, lost) Romantics, we witness their wonder at the rapid spread of information through print, visual media, and an increasingly mobile populace. We discover their fascination with the way a volatile economy, unpredictable markets, and larger and more diverse readerships influence cultural production. We realize their concern over the proliferation of conspicuous consumption and superficial entertainment at the same time that the mission of public education, improvement, and progress takes on new urgency. We may also identify with their nostalgia for authenticity amidst an age of artificiality. All these conditions render the 1820s a recognizably modern and distinctly relevant age. In Britain, this decade coincides with the reign of George IV, who acceded to the throne on 29 January 1820 and died on 26 June 1830. The former Prince Regent set the tone for the era with his patronage of the arts, his habits of extravagance and 1 

Herbert F. Tucker, ‘House Arrest: The Domestication of English Poetry in the 1820s’, New Literary History 25.3 (1994), 521–​48 (p. 521). 2  Virgil Nemoianu, The Triumph of Imperfection: The Silver Age of Sociocultural Moderation in Europe, 1815–​1848 (Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2006), ix. See also Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 3  Tucker, ‘House Arrest’, 522.

The 1820s and Beyond    75 consumption, and the ostentatious enactment of monarchy that began with an elaborate coronation ceremony in July 1821. The theatricality of the coronation extended to the very public legal proceedings with which George IV sought to prevent his estranged wife Caroline, newly returned from Italy, from assuming her role as Queen Consort. The coronation was re-​enacted on the stage at Drury Lane, and the artist Henry Aston Barker realized his greatest career success with an elaborately detailed 360-​degree panorama painting of the event.4 The Trial of Queen Caroline, 1820 also became the subject of a massive history painting by George Hayter that was exhibited in Pall Mall in 1823. The royal visit of George IV to Scotland in August 1822 was equally theatrical in actuality and in after-​the-​fact representations. Stage-​managed by Walter Scott, the ceremonies that took place in and around Edinburgh were documented by other leading novelists such as John Galt, who reflects on the overwhelming showiness of the London coronation and the king’s visit to Scotland, respectively, in his novels The Steam-​Boat (1822) and The Gathering of the West (1823). Britons experienced these performances of royal privilege and royal scandal in the form of visual, theatrical, and textual enactments and re-​enactments in which patriotism can be difficult to distinguish from parody. Contemporary writers themselves frequently commented on the theatricality of the era, including the similarities between stage performance and societal mores. ‘Never was the theatre in higher fashion than at the present moment’, the European Magazine remarked in January 1825; ‘We not only often borrow our characters from the stage, making our whole life a scenic representation, but we take our companions, nay, even our wives, from the pupils of Thalia and Melpomene.’5 The writer, identified only as ‘An Elderly Gentleman’, extrapolates on the prominence and diversity of stage performances in the mid-​1820s: Never had we more lovely women, nor more able and sensible actors; never a greater variety of style, the taste of the foreign and true British drama in our first theatres, with all the talent of the Continent, in every department of the vocal and instrumental; of the dance, the pantomime, and pageantry, in our opera house and winter theatres; together with the equestrian, gladiatorial, and the gymnasia of the ancients, on our summer and minor theatres; the vast addition of which, in numerical strength, evinces national wealth and prosperity . . . and afford[s]‌a bill of fare for every palate, whilst no expence is spared to delight the public.6

The performativity of 1820s culture further manifests itself in off-​stage spectacles and diverse forms of spectatorship: athletic contests, public lectures, exhibits, and museums such as London’s National Gallery, which was founded in 1824. New media and multi-​ media productions proliferated, including panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas, and other experiments with light and movement. Jonathan Crary has theorized that the ‘new

4 

Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 177–​8. ‘Theatricals; Their Influence and Abuses’, European Magazine 87 (Jan. 1825), 18–​21 (p. 18). 6 ‘Theatricals’, 18. 5 

76   Angela Esterhammer valuation of visual experience’ during the 1820s and 1830s ‘produced a new kind of observer’ whom he conceives of in a Foucauldian manner as ‘an effect of an irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations’.7 The prominence of visuality and of material culture in the form of fashions, furnishings, and commodities is clearly reflected in the themes, genres, and forms of publication that characterize the literature of the period. Complementing the theatricality and artificiality of the 1820s, there is a strong emphasis on spectatorship and on speculation—​a word that was used frequently at the time, still with traces of its visually oriented root meaning of ‘examination or observation’.8 The rapidly evolving media environment is closely tied to technological progress, to the economic prosperity that set in within a few years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and perhaps also to the end of an era dominated by international celebrities such as Lord Byron and Madame de Staël. Among other things, this was the decade that saw the invention of the electric motor and photography, the introduction of steamships, and the first steam-​powered passenger railway. But investment in these ventures was interrupted in the mid-​1820s by a severe boom-​and-​bust market that political economists recognize as the first ‘modern’ financial cycle—​that is, the first financial crisis to be generated primarily by the market itself rather than by external forces.9 High-​risk investment in canals, railways, mining companies, and foreign government bonds, especially in South and Central America, made this an era of financial as well as visual and intellectual speculation. In 1825 the speculative bubble burst; the over-​inflated British stock market began to crash, numerous bank failures followed later that year, and a catastrophic collapse was averted only by the intervention of the Bank of England in December. Historians and sociologists of literature have explored the direct effect of the financial collapse on the literary marketplace: major publishing houses went bankrupt, resulting in realignments within the publishing industry that produced new genres and formats.10 Equally important, however, is the climate of speculation itself—​financial, visual, intellectual, and imaginative—​which can be regarded as a defining condition of late Georgian culture. These speculative impulses arose alongside, and partly out of, the atmosphere of defeat and resignation with which the 1820s began. The political events of 1819, notably the Peterloo Massacre in England and the Carlsbad Decrees that curtailed the freedom of universities and the press in the German states, reaffirmed conservatism and repression. In response, second-​generation Romantics—​poets who had been born at the time of the French Revolution—​continued to write powerful critiques of tyranny and power. 7 

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 14, 3, 6. 8  Oxford English Dictionary (at: http://​www.oed.com/​). 9  Two classic historical studies that make this claim are S. G. Checkland, The Rise of Industrial Society in England 1815–​1885 (London: Longman, 1964), 13; and Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–​1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), 862, 889. 10  See especially John Sutherland, ‘The British Book Trade and the Crash of 1826’, The Library 6th ser., 9 (1987), 148–​61.

The 1820s and Beyond    77 Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci (both 1820), Byron’s dramas Marino Faliero (1820), The Two Foscari (1821), Sardanapalus (1821), and Cain (1821), and the four issues of the journal The Liberal (1822–​3) produced through the collaboration of Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt while they were in self-​imposed exile in Italy are vivid examples of the reformist impulse in literature during the early years of the decade. Exploiting parallels between past and present and extending history into myth, Byron and Shelley explore tyranny and resistance as archetypal conditions and psychological states. In other ways, the creative experimentation characteristic of the 1820s arises out of an elegiac consciousness. International celebrities who had a determining effect on the politics and culture of the preceding age of revolution had died by the middle of the decade (Madame de Staël in 1817, Napoleon in 1821, Byron in 1824), as had the leading lights of the younger generation of poets (Keats in 1821, Shelley in 1822). Scholars have traced the emergence of a ‘celebrity culture’ during the Romantic period,11 and in the mid-​1820s the effects of this development manifested themselves above all in response to the death of Byron. When his body was returned to England from Greece, where he had died of a fever while supporting the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Turks, the death of this celebrity was experienced by the English public as a visual spectacle that included an opportunity to view the body as it lay in state in London in July of 1824, followed by a funeral procession through the city and north to Nottinghamshire for burial. Byron’s spectacular and scandalous life and death dominated literary culture in the form of memoirs, reminiscences, and retrospective evaluations for the months and years that followed. The media and institutions that manufacture celebrity were at work, too, in the rise of young poets such as Letitia Elizabeth Landon in Byron’s wake. Landon quickly became known, like Byron, for her physical attractiveness and social presence as well as for her poetry. The volume that first brought attention to Landon’s verse, The Improvisatrice and Other Poems, appeared at the exact time of Byron’s funeral, and drew in no small measure on the taste for exotic locales and melodramatic romance that had been created by Byron. In other ways, however, the gap opened up by the death of dominating personalities is ironically filled by producers of culture who are multiple, institutional, and anonymous. As Tom Mole notes in Chapter 30 of this volume, the phenomenon of Romantic celebrity contrasts strikingly with the anonymity that characterizes many publications during the 1820s—​novels and volumes of poetry (including Landon’s Improvisatrice) as well as contributions to periodicals, a medium in which anonymous or pseudonymous publication is the norm. Landon, who usually published semi-​veiled under the initials ‘L. E. L.’, and above all Walter Scott, whose anonymity was officially preserved until 1826 by the epithets ‘The Author of Waverley’ or ‘The Great Unknown’, illustrate a phenomenon typical of the age. It might be termed anonymous celebrity. By actively soliciting 11  Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Tom Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Claire Brock, The Feminization of Fame, 1750–​1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

78   Angela Esterhammer speculation about the personal identity of the author, these games of authorial hide-​ and-​seek feed on the prevalence of spectatorship and voyeurism and contribute to the evolving relationship between writers and readers. Anonymous authorship is one of many effects of the booming periodical culture of the 1820s. The rapid expansion of periodical publications, which encompassed daily and weekly papers, monthly magazines, quarterly reviews, and literary annuals, exerted a more powerful influence than any other factor on innovations in genre, ideology, and forms of communication. Mark Parker affirms not only that ‘Periodicals . . . never dominated the literary market as they did in the 1820s’, but also that, in the 1820s, ‘periodicals themselves were literature’.12 Mark Schoenfield, meanwhile, identifies another key socio-​ political function of periodicals: they ‘became the repository of “public opinion” (a term popularized during the Romantic period)’.13 The new importance accorded to the tastes and opinions of a magazine-​buying public, the popularity of the personal essay, the rise of short fictional genres and serialized fiction, a new style of writing ‘to the moment’, and numerous other developments in authorship and reading habits can be ascribed to the active periodical market. Journalists themselves frequently commented on the proliferation of magazines and what it meant for the relationship of writers and readers. In ‘The Periodical Press’, an essay that appeared in the Edinburgh Review in May 1823, William Hazlitt includes an only slightly tongue-​in-​cheek celebration of periodical literature and its appeal to the reading public: We exist in the bustle of the world, and cannot escape from the notice of our contemporaries. We must please to live, and therefore should live to please. We must look to the public for support . . . Therefore, let Reviews flourish—​let Magazines increase and multiply—​let the Daily and Weekly Newspapers live for ever! We are optimists in literature, and hold, with certain limitations, that, in this respect, whatever is, is right!14

Despite the hyperbolic echoes of divine creation, monarchical ceremony, and Pope’s Essay on Man, Hazlitt makes a serious point about the value of critical discussion and medial experimentation. In one of many notably gendered formulations, he implies that a period of splendid and consummate art gives rise to admiration, repose, and 12  Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 110. For indicative surveys of production and circulation figures for periodicals, see Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–​1900, 2nd edn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 391–​6; William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 572–​7; and David G. Stewart, ‘Charles Lamb’s “Distant Correspondents”: Speech, Writing and Readers in Regency Magazine Writing’, Keats-​ Shelley Journal 57 (2008), 89–​107 (pp. 92–​3). 13  Mark Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ‘Literary Lower Empire’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1. 14  ‘The Periodical Press’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), xvi. 220.

The 1820s and Beyond    79 ‘effeminate delicacy’, while a struggling and critical period calls forth ‘masculine boldness and creative vigour’.15 The paradox of Hazlitt’s essay—​that a deficient age can actually be superior to a literary golden age insofar as it encourages creative and critical boldness—​reflects a far-​reaching paradox in the self-​image of the 1820s. Despite its often self-​deprecating or elegiac rhetoric, the post-​Waterloo period in Britain is also an era of public education, improvement, and progress, conditions encompassed in another phrase that appears constantly in periodical literature: the ‘march of intellect’ or ‘march of mind’. Indeed, journalists often cite the increased number and circulation of periodicals themselves as evidence of the rapid improvement in philosophical, literary, and scientific knowledge. In addition to the quantity of information and its public impact, the pace at which information is being mobilized astounds readers and writers in the 1820s. Hazlitt marvels at the sheer speed of journalistic production—​‘The public read the next day at breakfast-​time (perhaps), what would make a hundred octavo pages, every word of which has been spoken, written out, and printed within the last twelve or fourteen hours!’16—​and notes that the quality of ‘extempore writing’ compares favourably with ‘more laboured compositions’: ‘what is struck off at a blow, is in many respects better than what is produced on reflection, and at several heats’.17 But while Hazlitt regards the need to adapt nimbly to the market as an opportunity for creativity and healthy experimentation, the historian and economist James Mill, writing almost simultaneously for the inaugural issue of the Westminster Review in January 1824, is much more negative about the dependence of periodicals on readers’ opinions and ‘the applause of the moment’.18 Mill fears that this market dependence cannot be reconciled with the traditional responsibility of literature to educate the public and correct its taste. The challenges posed by time pressure, information overload, and a largely anonymous yet demanding public thus generate palpable anxiety, but—​for some at least—​they also call forth creative vigour. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, above all, was imitated throughout the 1820s for its innovations in style and content. Among the many influential innovations made by the politically conservative but stylistically radical Blackwood’s in 1817 was its change of format from a standard ‘review’ into a ‘magazine’ containing creative writing and coverage of metropolitan popular culture. Imitators and rivals of Blackwood’s, the most successful of which were the London Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine, dominated the print culture of the decade with their appeal to a broadly middle-​class readership, although the groundwork was simultaneously being laid for the cheaper weekly ‘penny press’ that would bring useful knowledge within reach of the working classes by the 1830s. Technological advances played an important part in these developments. The effect of inventions made at the beginning of the nineteenth century, such as the steam-​powered printing press, stereotype printing, and mechanized paper production, 15 

Complete Works of Hazlitt, xvi. 213. Complete Works of Hazlitt, xvi. 224. 17  Complete Works of Hazlitt, xvi. 222. 18  James Mill, ‘Periodical Literature’, Westminster Review 1 (Jan. 1824), 206–​49 (p. 207). 16 

80   Angela Esterhammer really began to be felt after 1820 in the form of lower book prices, dramatically increased circulation of printed material, and large-​scale shifts in the dominance of certain genres and forms. At least as important as technology and materials were the institutions that regulated and standardized reading habits: the major publishers (most of whom were invested in periodicals as well as book publishing), booksellers, circulating libraries, and the reviewing industry.19 All these factors are relevant to the increasing dominance of prose forms during the 1820s, while the market for poetry shrank and became more specialized and feminized. A distinctive context for the consumption of poetry was created by the popular new literary annuals or gift-​books: anthologies of poems and short prose pieces, illustrated with prints from steel-​plate engravings, sometimes also including fold-​out sheet music and lyrics, lavishly bound and supplied with spaces for inscribing the book to a female relative or friend to whom it would typically be given as a Christmas or New Year’s present. Annuals were a European import; the first English one, the Forget-​Me-​Not, was published in London in 1822 by the enterprising German expatriate Rudolf Ackermann. In their content as well as their material appearance, annuals appealed to middle-​class readers’ aspirations to gentility. They were a medium that foregrounded occasion, display, and performance, and a way of packaging poetry that provided young middle-​class women with ‘safe’ if sentimental and mildly scintillating reading material. A notably successful marketing experiment, the literary annual changed how poetry was published and read during the 1820s and 1830s. Annuals competed for celebrity authors; although many, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, complained about the dominance of this heavily commercial format, most of them contributed to annuals at one time or another because the editor-​publishers were willing to pay well for big-​ name contributors. A notable example is the best-​selling volume The Keepsake for 1829, which included contributions by, among others, Scott, Moore, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, Hook, Hemans, Landon, and the ‘Author of Frankenstein’ (listed here in the order in which they were advertised on the contents page, presumably an indication of the respective selling power of these names in the late 1820s). The first observation that the Keepsake’s editor, Frederic Mansel Reynolds, makes in his preface to readers is that the volume constitutes a major financial ‘speculation’—​that is, the publisher has spent ‘the enormous sum of eleven thousand guineas’ on its production.20 Literary annuals thus provide first-​generation Romantic poets, who are by this time regarded as ‘establishment’ figures, with a new audience of young female readers. Coleridge explicitly thematizes this role in the tone and settings of his gift-​ book poems:  often they feature a scene of instruction in which the poet responds

19  Besides Altick, The English Common Reader and St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, see Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), who shows how early ​nineteenth-​century printed books in Germany, France, Britain, and America altered readers’ ways of communicating and processing information. 20  Frederic Mansel Reynolds (ed.), The Keepsake for 1829 (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006), iii.

The 1820s and Beyond    81 philosophically to a question posed by a female auditor (examples are the poem ‘Reply to a Lady’s Question Respecting the Accomplishments Most Desirable in an Instructress’ and the hybrid prose-​and-​poetry text entitled ‘The Improvisatore’).21 Other poems describe the way they themselves came to be written. Coleridge’s poem ‘The Garden of Boccaccio’, for instance, which was commissioned for the 1829 Keepsake, self-​reflexively relates how the poet is inspired to write when a friend places an illustration of Boccaccio’s garden before him—​the same engraving that was printed alongside Coleridge’s poem in The Keepsake.22 Annuals and gift-​books, as well as literary magazines, provided a launching pad for the careers of female poets who were very active as contributors and editors. Letitia Landon wrote for annuals throughout her career and served as editor of Heath’s Book of Beauty and Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-​Book. The poet and dramatist Felicia Hemans, whose volumes of poetry sold well, also contributed prolifically to annuals and to literary magazines including the New Monthly and Blackwood’s. Hemans’s lyrics, especially in Records of Woman (1828), reaffirm the strength, virtue, and artistic genius of heroines both historical and imaginary, even if their strength often consists in silent endurance or self-​sacrificing devotion to husbands or children, and many of them die as victims of unhappy love. Hemans’s cosmopolitan and historical scope manifests itself in the choice of heroines from Joan of Arc (‘Joan of Arc, in Rheims’) to the wife of the medieval Swiss patriot Werner Stauffacher (‘The Switzer’s Wife’) to Native American women (‘Indian Woman’s Death Song’). ‘The Sicilian Captive’, first published in the New Monthly Magazine and then included in Records of Woman, illustrates Hemans’s typical themes and her skill with poetic form. Choosing an epigraph from Landon (who similarly gives a voice to female protagonists but then has them die of a broken heart), Hemans depicts a Sicilian maiden who has been torn from her fiancé and carried northward by invading Norsemen as part of their spoil. The Sicilian captive is made to perform a song at the Norsemen’s feast, but after singing nostalgically of her homeland and her lost fiancé, she falls dead, stunning her drunken captors into temporary silence. The binary oppositions around which this poem is constructed—​Norse versus Sicilian, multiple male victors versus solitary female victim, strength versus fragility—​are hauntingly conveyed by Hemans’s accomplished use of different verse forms for the frame narrative (‘The Scalds had chaunted in Runic rhyme, | Their songs of the sword and the olden time’) and the Sicilian girl’s lamenting song: They bid me sing of thee, mine own, my sunny land! of thee! Am I not parted from thy shores by the mournful-​sounding sea? Doth not thy shadow wrap my soul?—​in silence let me die, In a voiceless dream of thy silvery founts, and thy pure deep sapphire sky; . . .23

21  The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 16: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, part 1: Poems (Reading Text), 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), ii. 1106–​7, 1055–​62. 22 Reynolds, Keepsake, 282–​5. 23  F. H. [Felicia Hemans], ‘The Sicilian Captive’, New Monthly Magazine 14 (Aug. 1825), 122–​3.

82   Angela Esterhammer The scope of this short lyric illustrates Hemans’s range over Continental European history, and in particular her frequent use of southern European themes and settings despite the fact that she never left Britain, identified with Wales, and was co-​opted throughout the nineteenth century as an icon of ‘Englishness’. This geographic range also links up with the popularity of travel literature. Reflecting the increased mobility of people across Europe and further afield during the post-​Napoleonic period, magazine articles, panoramas, and exhibits of exotica fed the appetite for information about the world abroad. In contrast to the middle-​class, European-​and American-​oriented, and commercially successful Hemans, the peasant poet John Clare inhabited a narrower sphere, but he is now emerging in retrospect as a significant poetic voice of the 1820s. As a rural labourer who taught himself to read and write poetry, Clare seemed to fit the Romantic ideal of the ‘natural genius’. The title page of his first volume of poetry in 1820, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, seeks to capitalize on Clare’s lower-​class status and confer authenticity by identifying the author as ‘A Northamptonshire Peasant’. This volume and his subsequent trip to London gained him brief celebrity; he went on to publish The Village Minstrel (1821) and The Shepherd’s Calendar, with Village Stories and Other Poems (1827), as well a single magazine essay, ‘Popularity in Authorship’, a reflection on poetic celebrity occasioned by his attendance at Byron’s funeral procession in July 1824.24 Yet after his initial success Clare struggled for recognition by patrons and readers, and as of 1837 he resided in a mental asylum. Clare writes about place and displacement, stability and change, and often about the obscure and hidden in nature; his descriptive poetry of rural life uses what he calls, in his poem ‘Pastoral Poesy’, ‘a language that is ever green’,25 and his manuscripts are marked by idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and metrics. Caught between the heritage of Wordsworthian and Coleridgean nature poetry, the operations of the early nineteenth-​century celebrity industry, changes in the marketing of poetry during the 1820s, and the constraints of class, Clare’s poetry opens another window on the era’s longing for authenticity. Clare’s intimate observation of nature and his politically inflected poetry of peasant life invite comparison with two contemporaries who chronicled rural life in prose: William Cobbett and Mary Russell Mitford. That both Cobbett and Mitford reached significantly larger readerships than Clare reaffirms, among other things, the importance of periodicals as media of communication during the 1820s. Through his large-​circulation weekly pamphlet The Political Register and in the collection of articles entitled Rural Rides (1830), Cobbett promoted the era’s leading radical causes, from protest against the Corn Laws to Catholic Emancipation to the push for electoral reform that culminated in the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832. Mitford, for her part, contributed stories and essays to various periodicals, including the Monthly Magazine, the Lady’s Magazine, and John 24  ‘Popularity in Authorship’, European Magazine new series 1 (Nov. 1825), 300–​3. Annotated transcription available at www.johnclare.info/birtwhistle.htm 25  ‘Pastoral Poesy’, line 9, in John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period 1822–​1837, gen. ed. Eric Robinson, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996–​2003), iii. 581.

The 1820s and Beyond    83 Thelwall’s short-​lived Panoramic Miscellany. Her depictions of life in rural Berkshire, collected as Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery in 1824, sold so well that they generated four sequels under the same title by 1832. Mitford’s interlinked prose idylls contribute to the innovations in genre that characterize the 1820s—​more specifically, to the rise of short prose and of narratives that are hard to categorize as either fiction or non-​fiction. Her sketches are comparable to the familiar essay popularized by Lamb (who admired Mitford’s writing), Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Hunt, yet distinctive for their minute observation of nature and seasonal changes and for their interweaving of storytelling with quasi-​sociological observations of village life. Mitford’s frequent allusion to her writing as accurate visual representation, as sketching or painting done ‘on the spot and at the moment’,26 recalls the importance of visual observation during this era. The quasi-​documentary perspective and the appeal of authenticity are manifested alike in Clare’s detailed descriptions of nature, Cobbett’s first-​hand documentation of agricultural conditions, and Mitford’s observations—​sometimes amounting to surveillance—​ of the life of her village and its residents. The 1820s are an era of stark dichotomy between urban and rural, rich and poor, and theatricality and authenticity. If Mitford, Cobbett, and Clare occupy the more rural and authentic side of this binary, the other side manifests itself in the proliferation of periodicals devoted to urban life and of ironic and satirical writing, often focused on the ostentatious lifestyles of the aristocracy. Pierce Egan set the tone for the former with his popular journal Life in London, which appeared monthly from 1821 to 1828 and chronicled sport, amusement, and vice in the metropolis by following the adventures of a set of semi-​fictional men about town. The perspective of the partly subjective, partly objective observer appears again, this time to comedic effect, in novels of fashionable life and in their poetic counterpart, the last cantos of Byron’s mock-​epic Don Juan. Published in 1823–​4, Cantos 13 to 16 of Don Juan reached a broad readership across the class spectrum, being sold in cheap formats by the radical publisher John Hunt and in pirated editions. In these ‘English Cantos’, Byron brings his sardonic narrator and his young protagonist Don Juan to a house-​party at the country estate of the politician Sir Henry Amundeville and his beautiful, brilliant, and bored wife Lady Adeline to present a mocking yet nostalgic depiction of a Regency lifestyle that consists mainly of match-​making, flirting, feasting, and performing. While they satirize contemporary and traditional literary forms including the heroic epic, the novel of manners, and Gothic romance, these last cantos of Don Juan closely resemble another emerging popular genre: the silver-​fork novel. According to Hazlitt, the ‘silver fork’ school, as he pejoratively called it,27 took its lead from Sayings and Doings: A Series of Sketches from Life (1824), a three-​volume collection of short fiction by the dramatist and journalist Theodore Hook. Having ‘formed the chief table-​talk of London for considerably more than nine days, and . . . subsequently enjoyed no trivial share of popularity, even in the 26  Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery (London: Whittaker, 1824), v. 27  ‘The Dandy School’, in Complete Works of Hazlitt, xx. 146–​7.

84   Angela Esterhammer remotest of our provinces’ as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine archly but admiringly put it,28 Sayings and Doings generated multiple editions, a three-​volume sequel in 1825, and a third series consisting of another three volumes in 1828. Despite the sometimes ironic, sometimes melodramatic character of the stories in Sayings and Doings, from the outset the first-​person narrator claims to be an accurate observer of societal behaviour. ‘I have watched the world, and have set down all that I have seen’, he writes in the ‘Advertisement’ prefixed to the first volume.29 Hook explicitly introduces Sayings and Doings as a ‘curious matter of speculation’,30 invoking the visual and the cognitive connotations of ‘speculation’ by assuming the position of a spectator who comments in a pseudo-​sociological mode on the way status is negotiated in upper-​class Regency society. Not only the narrator but also the characters in Sayings and Doings are preoccupied with external appearance, dress, furniture, and accessories such as silver forks; based on these external indicators of class and income, they speculate (i.e., conjecture) about one another’s character and worth. Frequently, Hook’s fictional world also features another kind of spectatorship, as the drama of his protagonists’ lives is played out in front of ever-​present servants. As the same dull round of servant life goes on in the background, the noble households in Hook’s fiction effectively become private theatres in which servants form an audience for the doings of the gentry, who are quite explicitly referred to as ‘performers’ ‘subject to the surveillance of the attendants’.31 This hybrid of mildly ironic sociological observation on the part of the narrator, artificial and sometimes melodramatic behaviour on the part of the characters, and a setting of heightened ostentation and mutual spectatorship finds further development in silver-​fork novels such as Thomas Henry Lister’s Granby (1826) and Edward Bulwer-​ Lytton’s Pelham (1828). Reflecting the volatile economy of the mid-​1820s, silver-​fork fiction often features another kind of speculation in its plots and sub-​plots—​that is, gambling and risky investment. The classic silver-​fork novel Vivian Grey (1826–​7) was produced by Benjamin Disraeli, a stock-​market speculator and promoter of a high-​ stakes attempt to found a new periodical, when he was ruined by the crash of 1826 and immediately wrote his experiences into a novel as a way of writing himself out of debt. Even Walter Scott’s novels reflect the influence of these themes: St. Ronan’s Well (1824) is uncharacteristically set in the present day and features the social jockeying of a clique of guests at a fashionable watering-​place, while the plot is shaped by a character’s gambling addiction. As writers engage directly with the climate of financial speculation, they also extend speculation into intellectual and imaginative contexts by undertaking bold experiments with genre and staging bizarre intersections between real and fictional 28 

‘New Series of Sayings and Doings’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 17 (Feb. 1825), 221. Theodore Hook, Sayings and Doings: A Series of Sketches from Life, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Colburn, 1824), i, p. iv. 30 Hook, Sayings and Doings, i, p. v. 31 Hook, Sayings and Doings, i. 278–​9. 29 

The 1820s and Beyond    85 worlds. Speculative fiction in the modern sense of science fiction, futuristic fiction, and alternative histories begins to proliferate in the 1820s. Mary Shelley picks up a theme that was circulating at the time in her novel The Last Man (1826), which speculates about a future world in which a mysterious plague kills all but one member of the human species. The Irish writer John Banim takes risks with genre and produces a bizarre form of satire in Revelations of the Dead-​Alive (1824), an interlinked series of quasi-​essays and quasi-​tales told by a narrator who claims the ability to visit the future and dares to compare the manners, science, art, fashion, and print culture of 1824 with London in 2024. Scott incorporates overt speculation into his historical fiction with Redgauntlet (1824), a historical novel centring on the return of an aging Prince Charles Edward Stuart to England in the summer of 1765 to lead another attempt at rebellion—​that is to say, on a ‘historical’ event that never took place in reality. James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner also makes ironic use of the dominant prose forms of the 1820s—​Gothic, historical fiction, and journalism—​ and pushes beyond them to speculate on the limits of rationality and the powers of the supernatural. Hogg plays satirically but hauntingly on his own journalistic involvement with Blackwood’s when he brings his alter ego, the boorish ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ who was frequently caricatured in the magazine, into the novel in support of its claim to historical accuracy. The fictional editor of the Private Memoirs purports to guarantee the authenticity of his fantastic narrative by citing an actual Blackwood’s article that Hogg himself had published in the magazine two years earlier (for further details, see Penny Fielding, Chapter 7 in this volume). This ironic self-​referentiality, which amounts to a tongue-​in-​ cheek performance of authenticity, is typical of the 1820s. Also typical, especially in Scottish fiction, is the metafictional border-​crossing between the world within Hogg’s text and the actual world of print culture inhabited by its author and readers. In the prefaces to Peveril of the Peak (1822) and Quentin Durward (1823), and in other frame narratives of the many novels he produced during the 1820s, Scott engages in a similar kind of metafictional play when he makes his alter ego, an anonymous figure who goes by the epithet ‘the Author of Waverley’, into a full-​fledged character who visits and converses with the (fictional) editors and narrators of the tales. Whether in fictional worlds or in the real-​world literary marketplace of the 1820s, speculation seems to manifest itself everywhere in risk-​taking behaviour, in attempts to capitalize on market opportunities, and in an awareness that value is ephemeral and vulnerable to volatile forces beyond the control of the individual writer or protagonist. In the print-​culture world of London and Edinburgh, critics and reviewers often accused writers and publishers of another form of literary speculation: repackaging already published work for sale in new formats in order to profit from the booming but volatile market for printed material. Speculation on the book market frequently shaded over into fraud and forgery, especially when publishers sought to capitalize on the tremendous popularity of Walter Scott. The most notorious and elaborate Scott forgery may be the novel Walladmor that was written in German by G. W. H. Häring (a.k.a. Willibald Alexis), marketed as a German translation of the latest novel by Scott, and reviewed

86   Angela Esterhammer for the London Magazine by Thomas De Quincey,32 who then perpetuated the hoax by ‘translating’ Walladmor ‘back’ into English for sale to readers in Britain.33 Heavily mediated by a combination of authentic and fictional paratexts, the German Walladmor (1824) and the English one (1825) are indicative of the rampant hoaxing, parody, and forgery in the decade’s print culture, but also of the more serious questioning of personal and legal identity that underlies these practices. The volatility and experimentation that characterized the literary scene during the 1820s can be summed up with a brief survey of the career of John Galt, the third Scottish writer, besides Scott and Hogg, who was constantly (albeit anonymously) before readers’ eyes. Paradoxically, Galt is representative of his times because of his innovation and originality, but equally because of his secondariness and imitativeness. Writing to make money, Galt was bound to the expectations of the market and the standards imposed by publishers and circulating libraries; his publications in fiction and non-​fiction, drama, poetry, and other genres thus serve as a weathervane of popular trends. Then and now, Galt is known primarily as a writer of regional fiction set in the west of Scotland. With gentle parody, his tales map the fortunes of this region in terms of its changing relations to Edinburgh, London, and international movements that include North American settlement and Caribbean trade. Galt’s first real success was The Ayrshire Legatees (1821), a partly epistolary novel in which the family of a rural Scottish minister visits London and writes letters filled with their impressions of the city to friends back in Ayrshire. The family members’ distinctive perspectives on historical events such as the funeral of George III in 1820 and the coronation of George IV, as well as fashionable entertainments including ‘Almack’s balls, the Argyle-​rooms, and the Philharmonic concerts’,34 constitute an alternative, cross-​border take on the fashionable novel of the 1820s. Galt produced notable and reasonably successful renditions of every popular trend:  the historical novel (Ringan Gilhaize [1823]), the historical romance (Rothelan [1824]), the Gothic tale (The Omen [1826]), the transatlantic novel (Lawrie Todd [1830] and Bogle Corbet [1831]), travel literature (Eben Erskine; or, The Traveller [1833]), and—​capitalizing on his acquaintance with the most popular poet of the day—​a Life of Lord Byron (1830). His three-​volume novel The Entail (1823), now generally considered his most accomplished work, is a family saga set in Glasgow and the west of Scotland that follows three generations of the Walkinshaw family through the economic speculations, marriage alliances, and legal manoeuvring by which they seek to enrich themselves and tighten their hold on property.

32 

[Thomas De Quincey], ‘Walladmor: Sir Walter Scott’s German Novel’, London Magazine 10 (Oct. 1824), 353–​82. 33  Willibald Alexis (Georg Wilhelm Heinrich Häring), Walladmor: Frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott (Berlin: Herbig, 1824); Thomas De Quincey, Walladmor: ‘Freely Translated into German from the English of Sir Walter Scott’: And Now Freely Translated from the German into English, 2 vols (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825). 34  John Galt, The Ayrshire Legatees; or, The Pringle Family (Edinburgh: Blackwood; London: Cadell, 1821), 240.

The 1820s and Beyond    87 Despite his habitual adaptation to the market, Galt also typifies the spirit of the age in his readiness to experiment with form and genre. Some of his fiction—​like that of De Quincey and Mitford—​made the jump from literary magazines to publication in book form, bringing about generic innovation along the way. The Steam-​Boat, for instance, first appeared in serial form in Blackwood’s in 1821. Engaging in the border-​crossing between real and fictional worlds that was typical of that magazine, The Steam-​Boat is also important for the development of a new genre of interlinked short tales, which in this case are told by travellers on the new steam packet that conveys them between Scottish and English ports. Galt excels in the creation of fully realized first-​person narrators with their own psychological profiles and idiolects. Insofar as he ‘performs’ these diverse narrative personae, his fiction is highly performative, calling attention to itself as a narrative construct and straddling the boundary between real and imaginary worlds. Galt’s use of idiosyncratic first-​person narrators and innovative temporal structures was, like many other phenomena of the 1820s, a significant model for mid-​century writers such as Poe, Dickens, and Thackeray. ‘Excellence is [Sir Walter Scott’s] characteristic’, Galt commented when comparing one of his own historical novels to Scott’s, ‘and, if I may say so, originality is mine, and the approbation of time is required to the just appreciation of that quality’.35 Whereas the 1820s have traditionally been neglected by literary history as a superficial, market-​driven, purely transitional age, a revalorization is well underway: precisely because it is self-​consciously market-​driven, this decade increasingly reveals the emergence of modern media relations. The era abounds in periodicals and literary magazines, non-​traditional stage performances and spectacles, popular novels and serialized fiction, curious hybrids of prose, poetry, drama, fiction, and non-​fiction. These forms of expression are often ephemeral but also refreshingly experimental in their use of genres and media under the influence of the contemporary orientation towards visuality and observation. The speculative aspect of the literary field can be seen in the market-​conscious yet risk-​taking attitude of writers and publishers within the sphere of print culture, as well as in the prevalence of the term ‘speculation’ to denote cognitive and imaginative ventures. The forms of performance and publication that characterize the decade are improvisational, contingent, and responsive to the moment, producing the image—​and the self-​ image—​of an age in transition. The 1820s might thus be redefined and reinterpreted as an ‘age of information’ as well as an ‘age-​in-​formation’—​a time when literature thematizes and reflects on rapid changes in the conditions of communication.

Further Reading Copeland, Edward, The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

35 

John Galt, The Literary Life, and Miscellanies, of John Galt, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood; London: Cadell, 1834), i. 262.

88   Angela Esterhammer Cronin, Richard, Paper Pellets:  British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010). Cronin, Richard, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–​1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Dart, Gregory, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Erickson, Lee, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Fang, Karen, Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-​Napoleonic Authorship (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). Higgins, David, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine:  Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London: Routledge, 2005). Jenkins, Alice, Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815–​1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Klancher, Jon P., The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Stewart, David, The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Stewart, David, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Wilson, Cheryl, Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel: Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012).

Pa rt  I I

R E G ION A N D NAT ION

Chapter 6

E ngl and and Eng l i sh ne s s Fiona Stafford

On 12 November 1809, Byron was in Prevesa, on the coast of Turkey, writing a letter home. What his mother thought when she received it is not recorded, but at least she did not have to worry about her son suffering from homesickness: ‘I have no desire to return to England, nor shall I unless compelled by absolute want.’1 A few sentences later, the point was reiterated: ‘I have no one to be remembered to in England, & wish to hear nothing from it but that you are well.’ Byron was abroad for the first time, and with Athens, Asia, and Africa still to be explored, he was resolutely uninterested in what was happening in the small, chilly island off the north-​western reaches of Continental Europe. From early poems such as The Curse of Minerva (1811) to later works such as The Island (1823), Byron delighted in travelling the world, in transporting readers to exotic destinations, and in adopting alien perspectives on his native land. In Don Juan (1819–​24), he chose a Spanish protagonist for his epic, as a retort to what seemed, at best, the increasing parochialism, and, at worst, the toadying jingoism of so much contemporary British poetry. Byron’s cosmopolitan stance is emphasized throughout his long and highly mobile poem, but in the tenth canto, the scene suddenly shifts to Britain. The figure of the foreign visitor, astonished by what he sees of the nation to which most of his readers belong, was already well established in eighteenth-​century European tradition, recalling Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721), Voltaire’s L’Ingenu (1767), and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1760–​1), and Juan’s arrival in Dover raises expectations of extended satire accordingly. This outsider perspective was hardly likely to raise a laugh among the contemporary English reading public, however: Alas! could She but fully, truly, know How her great name is now throughout abhorred, How eager all the earth is for the blow Which shall lay bare her bosom to the sword, 1 

Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​94), i. 230.

92   Fiona Stafford How all the nations deem her their worst foe, That worse than worst of foes, the once adored False friend, who held out freedom to mankind, And now would chain them to the very mind;—​ Would she be proud or boast herself the free, Who is but first of slaves? (Canto 10, stanzas 67–​8)2

By 1822, the early aversion to England expressed in Byron’s Turkish letter had deepened into abhorrence, apparently shared by ‘all the earth’. The cosmopolitan poet, who had turned his back so publicly on his native land in 1816, now seemed bent on enlightening his former countrymen about the opprobrium in which they were held elsewhere. Whether Byron regarded England as his own country, however, is complicated not just by the ambivalence provoked by Dover, but also by earlier passages in Canto 10 which recall his Scottish childhood: But I am half Scot by birth, and bred A whole one, and my heart flies to my head,—​ As ‘Auld Lang Syne’ brings Scotland, one and all, Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, and clear streams, The Dee, the Don, Balgounie’s Brig’s black wall, All my boy feelings . . . (Canto 10, stanzas 17–​18)

Byron’s declaration of love for ‘the land of “mountain and of flood” ’ (stanza 19)3 provides something of an exemption clause to the negativity of Juan’s arrival on the south coast. And yet, when the narrator presents ‘that spot of earth’, it is made to rhyme with ‘my birth’: I have no great cause to love that spot of earth, Which holds what might have been the noblest nation; But though I owe it little but my birth, I feel a mixed regret and veneration For its decaying fame and former worth. Seven years (the usual term of transportation) Of absence lay one’s old resentments level, When a man’s country’s going to the devil. (Canto 10, stanza 66) 2  All quotations from Don Juan are from Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​93). 3  Byron is slightly misquoting Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Canto 6, line 20.

England and Englishness    93 The emotional complexity acknowledged here reveals much about Byron’s relation to England. Rather than simply exacerbating the old aversion, his extended absence had also softened ‘old resentments’ into a mixture of frustration, dismay, ‘regret and veneration’. And while just as conducive to satire, as Juan’s pride in being among ‘Those haughty shop-​ keepers, who sternly dealt | Their goods and edicts out from pole to pole’ (stanza 65) makes plain, such powerful abstract nouns stand out in a poem so often scornful of tender feeling. The acknowledgement of patriotism as something deeply felt had already been highlighted only ten stanzas earlier: ‘He loved the infant orphan he had saved, | As patriots (now and then) may love a nation’ (stanza 55). Amor patriae, the Latin ideal of love of country, associated especially with Ovid’s exile from Rome, was echoing in the background of Canto 10, albeit only ‘now and then’, as the poem returns to the author’s homeland. The adjectival pun in ‘dear Dover’ (stanza 69) is a brilliantly concise epitome of Byron’s ambivalence. If the focus turns explicitly to England in Canto 10, however, Byron had been preoccupied with questions of Englishness from the start. The original, discarded Preface to Don Juan had invited readers to imagine that the ‘epic narrative is told by a Spanish gentleman in a village in the Sierra Morena’, but since the poem was written in English, this narrator must have been ‘either an Englishman settled in Spain, or a Spaniard who had travelled in England’. By Canto 10, the fictional gentleman, whose existence had more to do with Byron’s parody of Wordsworth than with Juan’s narrative, has been displaced by the distinctive voice of the poet-​narrator; but still the tensions between the English language, Englishness, and England itself remain, as the stanzas on her once ‘great’, but now ‘abhorred’ name demonstrate. Was the narrator of Don Juan Spanish, Scottish, English, British, or European? And did it matter to Byron or his readers? This is a question that has certainly exercised modern scholars, becoming more urgent with the development of ‘Four-​Nations’ criticism and related arguments for ‘devolving English Literature’ (to use Robert Crawford’s influential term).4 In The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (2011), Byron merits an entire chapter, in which Brean Hammond presents the evidence for understanding Byron’s work as that of a ‘Scottish aristocrat’.5 Michael Ferber’s A Companion to European Romanticism (2005), on the other hand, includes an essay by Peter Cochran which describes Byron as ‘the most European of the English so-​called “Romantic” writers’.6 Byron has always been a divisive figure, and though many modern critics are as keen to assert his Scottish identity as his admirers in nineteenth-​century Greece were to hail him as an honorary national hero, it is also worth recalling the views of those who have been content to see him remaining in cultural exile.7 If M. H. Abrams’s explicit omission of 4 

Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Brean Hammond, ‘Byron’, in Murray Pittock (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). 6  Peter Cochran, ‘Byron’s Influence on European Romanticism’, in Michael Ferber (ed.), A Companion to European Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 69. 7  See, for example, Angus Calder, Byron and Scotland (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990); Bernard Beatty, ‘The Force of Celtic memories in Byron’s Thought’, in Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes (eds), English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and 5 

94   Fiona Stafford Byron from his influential analysis of Romanticism, Natural Supernaturalism (1971), has been roundly challenged by subsequent critics, Jerome McGann’s counter-​emphasis on the historical and political currents in which Byron features so prominently is part of a long-​running debate over the nature of English Romantic poetry which goes back to the poets, philosophers, and reviewers of the ‘Romantic period’ itself.8 That this debate has developed a new dimension with the devolution of political power in the United Kingdom is unsurprising, and, for the early twenty-​first century, questions about the nature of English Romantic poetry are also questions about the Englishness of Romanticism. Murray Pittock’s wide-​ranging book, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2007), for example, welcomes the ‘possibility of a properly archipelagic understanding of British Isles Romanticism’ and proceeds to define a set of key principles for developing this more inclusive, nationally conscious ideal.9 A difficulty that sometimes arises from laudable efforts to redress a perceived marginalization of Scottish and Irish literature, however, can be the consequent reduction of space for English texts. While Pittock himself is alert to this problem, warning against any wholesale rejection of kinds of criticism more focused on subjective and aesthetic questions, the range of Scottish and Irish writing under discussion in his own book inevitably leaves little room for any English texts: as ever, the pluralist ideal is tested by practical constraints. Given the existing body of criticism relating to major English Romantic poets, the decision to focus on their Scottish and Irish contemporaries seems entirely justifiable in this case, but a paradox remains in that the larger ‘archipelagic’ claim to inclusivity is so often premised on the exclusion of English writings. A further—​but productive—​complication is the uncertainty surrounding any sense of national identity during the Romantic period. Byron’s identity is especially complicated, in terms of class and gender as well as national affiliation, but many other writers of the period were also registering the complexities of nationhood in their work. The twenty-​first century has seen renewed emphasis on the desirability of global perspectives, which makes Byron’s self-​consciously European stance seem rather less expansive than it might have once appeared. As the English language has become less and less firmly attached to England, the formal traditions and periodization of ‘English Literature’ have begun to seem correspondingly less fixed. In a recent book entitled The Importance of Feeling English (2007), for example, Leonard Tennenhouse explored the debates about the relationship between language and national identity that took place in early ​nineteenth-​century America. To what extent were American writers who chose to read English poetry, write in English, and use English verse forms still part of the English

Roderick Beaton, Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 8 

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 13; Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Jerome McGann, Don Juan in Context (London: John Murray, 1976). 9  Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.

England and Englishness    95 literary tradition? That one of the first poems to be discussed as an ‘English counterpart’ to Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1794) is The Deserted Village (1770) demonstrates the complexity of any such analysis of transnational influence, given Goldsmith’s Anglo-​ Irish identity and related uncertainties over the location of ‘Sweet Auburn’.10 The subtitle of Tennenhouse’s study, ‘American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750 and 1850’, points to a central complication for critical analyses of new national literatures in that the people who emigrated to the United States might be described as British, but no one on either side of the Atlantic would be writing in the ‘British language’. The problem of equating ‘Literature in English’ with ‘English Literature’ has exercised scholars in many fields of literary studies, but for those whose focus is on late ​ eighteenth-​century and early ​nineteenth-​century Britain and Ireland, it takes on particular national complexions. The Romantic period may be understood primarily in terms of significant historical developments, whether this is seen to begin with the rise of the East India Company, or the European discovery of Australia, or the American War of Independence, or the French Revolution, and running on through a remarkable sequence of shifting international relations to the 1820s, ’30s or even ’40s, depending on the interpreter’s perspective.11 The experience of individual countries was inevitably conditioned by international politics, but within these global shifts in power, internal dramas were also unfolding. Britain was not only involved with most of the key international crises, but also subject to major internal reconfigurations, with the rising of the United Irishmen in 1798, the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1800, significant emigration from Scotland, demographic movements relating to the growth of industrial cities and military recruitment, the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the long campaign for Catholic Emancipation, and the First Reform Act of 1832. Increasing mobility and literacy combined to increase awareness of the internal differences within the British Isles, while providing the means and momentum for a recognized standard of written English. In conversation, people in Aberdeen or Penzance might sound very different from each other, though in formal correspondence their use of language was indistinguishable. But for those in Highland Scotland, or Dublin, or Aberystwyth, choosing to write in English did not mean becoming an Englishman or -​woman. Writers could indicate a regional—​or indeed American—​identity through the use of place settings, dialect, or choice of publisher, but they could also disguise it by using standard English and publishing in London. The English language offered a kind of Englishness to anyone who chose to use it, irrespective of their background. At the same time, however, certain personality traits and cultural styles were increasingly being recognized

10  Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750 and 1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 25–​6; see also Michael Griffin, ‘Delicate Allegories, Deceitful Mazes: Goldsmith’s Landscapes’, Eighteenth-​Century Ireland 16 (2001), 104–​17. 11  Timothy Fulford and Peter Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and the Empire, 1780–​ 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

96   Fiona Stafford by natives and visitors alike as characteristically English, as Paul Langford has demonstrated.12 This meant that a British citizen in the early nineteenth century could feel distinctly English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh, and recognize similar national distinctions in fellow Britons. Throughout this turbulent period, then, the people of the islands were adjusting to a new idea of ‘Britishness’, which, as Linda Colley has argued, was strengthened by the long War and the associated perception of a common enemy.13 At the same time, the international turmoil and internal transformations combined to heighten awareness of local and regional senses of belonging.14 The complexities of national identity are often most evident in the public expressions of sentiment inspired by the international conflict. This is reflected, for example, in the much-​anthologized elegy for one of the more high-​profile casualties of the Peninsular War, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’. Published in Ireland in 1817, the poem, recalling ‘the grave where a Briton has laid him’,15 was written by the Irish poet Charles Wolfe in commemoration of a Scottish general who died leading the British army against the French in Northern Spain. In the popular naval ode ‘Ye Mariners of England’ (1800), by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, the British Navy is celebrated for guarding ‘our native seas’, while ‘England’ and ‘Britannia’ seem largely interchangeable.16 But if poems in the tradition of ‘Rule Britannia’ stirred a sense of unity in the face of foreign foes, the long war with France was also heightening awareness of much more tangible, local things. The popularity of Burns’s songs, Scott’s poetry, or Edgeworth’s novels, suggests a readership eager for local and national distinctiveness, whatever new, all-​encompassing, British identity might be emerging in the United Kingdom. A sense of powerful local character also characterizes much of the work of English writers of the period, from George Crabbe on the coast of Suffolk, to William Wordsworth on the shores of Grasmere, to Charles Lamb in the Strand, to John Clare in the fields of Helpston. The local was foundational to any larger sense of Englishness or Britishness. Since feelings of local and national identity are so pervasive in the period, this chapter now turns to focus on three writers whose work explores both: Jane Austen, William Cowper, and William Wordsworth. That the consciousness of local value was intensified by a widespread awareness of the changing nature of the nation was demonstrated by Austen in Emma (1816), in a rare reference to national politics which issues from one of her least mobile characters. As Miss Bates regales the company with news of Miss Campbell—​now Mrs Dixon—​and her life 12 

Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–​1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Mary Ann Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–​1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 13  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–​1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 14  See Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Michael Baron, Language and Relationship in Wordsworth’s Writing (London: Longman, 1995). 15  Henry Newbolt (ed.), An English Anthology (London: Dent, 1921), 673. 16 Newbolt, English Anthology, 635–​6.

England and Englishness    97 in Ireland, she makes a telling comment on the need for friends and family: ‘till she married last October, she was never away from them so much as a week, which must make it very strange to be in different kingdoms, I was going to say, but however different countries’.17 Since Emma was published fifteen years after the Act of Union had come into effect, Miss Bates is hardly in the vanguard of political reaction, but her sense of the abiding otherness of Ireland is brilliantly conveyed—​and the lapse of time only emphasizes that whatever might be decided in Westminster, the personal feelings of ordinary citizens often took rather longer to amend. Austen’s apparently inconsequential conversational details reveal much about the influence of local feelings and habitual experience on larger perceptions of nationhood. As far as Miss Bates—​and the Campbells—​are concerned, Highbury is Jane Fairfax’s home and her health will benefit more from ‘her native air’ than by crossing the Irish Sea to another country. Emma, as Brian Southam has argued persuasively, is a novel deeply conscious of national difference, conditioned as it is by the moment of relief experienced in Britain at the end of Napoleon’s long domination of Europe.18 Expressions of national feeling in the novel are very much English rather than British, however, and even Miss Bates’s tentative acknowledgement of the United Kingdom is rather more inclusive than Mrs Elton’s insistence that Surrey is ‘the Garden of England’ (254), or the famous eulogy on George Knightley’s estate at Donwell: ‘It was a sweet view—​sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive’ (338). The sweet view, of course, belongs to the heroine of the novel, whose own experience extends little further than her native village, and who, as the novel opens, has increasingly been restricted to the garden of her father’s house: ‘Her father never went beyond the shrubbery, where two divisions of the land sufficed him for his long walk, or his short, as the year varied; and since Mrs Weston’s marriage, her exercise had been too much confined’ (27). The rare trip to Donwell allows Austen to demonstrate the immobility of an apparently highly privileged young woman of the period, and the related tendency to extrapolate wider generalizations from very limited experience. Donwell embodies an idea of Englishness for Emma because she has very little personal knowledge on which to base more abstract concepts. Jane Austen, who never travelled beyond the borders of her native country either, has often been seen as a quintessentially English writer, with passages such as the Donwell paean upheld as evidence of her patriotism.19 Since almost every other chapter in the novel reveals the heroine’s tendency to misinterpretation, however, any rapid equation of Austen and Emma seems unwise. Emma’s view of Donwell, coloured as it is by her still

17 

Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Fiona Stafford, rev. edn (London: Penguin, 2003), 149. All further references are to this edition, incorporated in the text. 18  Brian Southam Jane Austen and the Navy (London: Hambledon, 2000), 241. 19  See, for example, Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, ‘From the Polar Seas to Australasia:  Jane Austen, “English Culture,” and Regency Orientalism’, Persuasions 28.2 (2008), at:  www.jasna.org/​p ersuasions/​on-​line/​vol28no2/​windsor-​liscombe.htm; and Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

98   Fiona Stafford unrecognized feelings for its owner, is hardly a reliable indication of her creator’s attitude to the nation. What is visible, however, is Austen’s interest in national consciousness, and its complexity, as shown through the passing comments of contrasting characters. Donwell may be the embodiment of all things English as far as Emma is concerned, but it is filled with signs of other places—​‘Books of engravings, drawers of medals, cameos, corals, shells’ (339). It is at Donwell, where Emma and Frank Churchill are gazing at ‘views of Swisserland’, that the most unpatriotic words in the entire novel are uttered, when Frank exclaims, ‘I am sick of England—​and would leave it tomorrow if I could’ (342). Frank, the would-​be Childe Harold, is barred from adventure by his social position and the wealthy aunt from whom he has acquired his thoroughly English surname. As Emma points out, Frank’s being ‘sick of England’ means being sick of ‘prosperity and indulgence’—​an impromptu observation that rings rather truer than many of her more considered ideas. Within a single chapter, Austen has brought together unthinking national loyalty and unthinking national disaffection, exposing both as consequences of limited experience and excess confidence. In neither case, however, does Britain figure. For Emma and Frank, the country is England—​and the contemporary English tendency to neglect Ireland is gently emphasized by Austen in the careful references to Mr Dixon’s Irish estate and mixed reactions to the Campbells’ visit. Neither Scotland nor Wales is mentioned at all, since they do not enter the imagination of the novel’s heroine or the conversation of her acquaintances. Emma is as much an anatomy of Englishness as a celebration. But if Emma sees Englishness in the view from Donwell, the Abbey’s owner seems to find something very un-​English about Emma, judging by his final declaration. Addressing her in what the narrator subsequently describes as the ‘plain, unaffected gentleman-​like English, such as Mr Knightley used even to the woman he was in love with’ (419), he suddenly praises Emma (rather surprisingly) for her long-​suffering nature: ‘I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it’ (403). If Austen’s novel was indebted to the new nationally inflected trends of Romantic period-​fiction, she seems to have been rejecting any tendency to allegorize the heroine as symbol of the nation, by emphasizing Emma’s uniqueness more than her representative qualities; unless, of course, Austen, like many of her contemporaries, regarded the leading characteristic of the English to be their individuality or originality.20 For despite Mr Knightley’s consciously held view of his beloved as being unlike any other woman in the country, his attachment carries odd echoes of national feeling, as is evident when he heads for Hartfield after learning of Frank Churchill’s engagement to Jane Fairfax, ‘to see how this sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults, bore the discovery’ (405). Knightley’s fond reflection on the flawed object of his love, ‘faultless in spite of all her faults’, has long been

20 

Langford includes ‘eccentricity’ as one of the major ‘supposed traits’ of the English character in Englishness Identified, section 6.

England and Englishness    99 recognized as an allusion to Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700),21 but since readers of Emma have already heard him quoting a much more recent poet, they might well detect a rather different echo. Mr Knightley knows Cowper’s The Task (1785) well enough to find it running through his mind when he is doubting his ability to interpret the behaviour of other characters in an earlier scene (‘Myself creating what I saw’ (323)) so it is not impossible that when he thinks of Emma, and ‘all her faults’, his tender thoughts are accompanied by Cowper as much as by Congreve. For in the second book of The Task, when Cowper addresses his country, he writes: ‘England, with all thy faults, I love thee still’.22 Though in the eyes of her lover, Emma is exceptional and unrepresentative, she is nevertheless capable of provoking deep and complicated feelings not unlike those that Cowper had expressed in relation to his country. Emma’s Englishness is after all, a kind of Englishness characteristic of the Romantic period—​imperfect, unfathomable, and yet profoundly felt. Although the success of Cowper’s Task owed much to its celebration of the ordinary details of contemporary rural life, it was by no means a straightforward pastoral poem. The poet’s delight in his surroundings is evident throughout, from the description of trees by the Ouse to the affectionate references to his own garden and the ‘peaceful home’ he shared with his pet hares (Book 3, line 347). His address to the country at large, however, is as qualified as it is heartfelt: England, with all thy faults, I love thee still My Country! And while yet a nook is left Where English minds and manners may be found, Shall be constrained to love thee! (Book 2, lines 206–​9)

Being ‘constrained’ to love his country is hardly more emphatic than Byron’s confession in Don Juan to having ‘no great cause to love that spot of earth’ (Canto 10, stanza 66). And if Byron’s readers deduce from Canto 10 that at least part of its anti-​English animus derived from the poet’s overt attachment to Scotland, in his use of the capaciousness of an epic framework for critiquing rather than eulogizing the nation, Byron was more typical of his age than he pretends. For in that most English of poems by that most English of poets, The Task, Cowper’s gently mock-​heroic tone is frequently abandoned for passionate expressions of dismay over contemporary society. Though composed more than thirty years earlier than Don Juan, and before the Storming of the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, and the long War, Cowper’s poem was still full of anxiety about the condition of England. In the second book, entitled ‘The Time-​Piece’ because it dealt with ‘signs of the times’ and was ‘intended to strike the hour that gives notice of approaching judgment’

21 

F. W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 74. The Task, Book 2, line 206, in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), ii. 144. All further references are to this edition. 22 

100   Fiona Stafford (line 350 n.), echoes of Jeremiah resound through the world of 1783, as the narrator muses on the end of the American War and the iniquities of the continuing trade in slaves. Although the law banning slavery in Britain is celebrated, in lines that would not be out of place in a national epic (‘where Britain’s power | Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too’ (lines 46–​7)), the surrounding anxieties about earthquakes, religious corruption, and divine displeasure, make this sound more like Byron’s frustration over failed promises than any straightforward display of patriotism. In The Task, as in Don Juan, the acknowledgement of amor patriae is part of a puzzle over why England should provoke such deep feelings of attachment. Cowper’s self-​ conscious bewilderment is conveyed through his apparently unaccountable preference for the native climate: Though thy clime Be fickle, and thy year most part deform’d With dripping rains, or wither’d by a frost, I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies, And fields without a flow’r, for warmer France With all her vines . . . (Book 2, lines 209–​14)

Cowper’s fondness for home plays on a light-​hearted stereotype—​the English preoccupation with the weather—​while drawing on more serious Enlightenment theories, which went back to Montesquieu, about the climatic influence on national character. Gentle self-​mockery rapidly turns to more hard-​hitting analysis of the state of the nation, however, for no sooner has Cowper confessed to loving England almost in spite of his better judgement, than the reasons for disapprobation come pouring out, mixing devotion with dismay: And I can feel Thy follies too, and with a just disdain Frown at effeminates, whose very looks Reflect dishonor on the land I love . . . (Book 2, lines 221-​4)

Mr Knightley’s sympathy with this passage is not difficult to imagine, given his views of the ‘coxcomb’ Frank Churchill’s haircut, conduct, and manners—​summed up in the charge of being ‘aimable’ (in the French sense of having ‘very good manners’ and being ‘very agreeable’) rather than truly ‘amiable’—​that is, possessing ‘English delicacy towards the feelings of other people’ (141). For Knightley, as for the narrator of The Task, language is the mark of character, and the threat to English truthfulness from some creeping, faintly alien modernity a cause for profound agitation. Cowper’s catalogue of England’s faults concludes with a wistful comparison of past and present, and a wish that great leaders such as Wolfe and Chatham might rise again to

England and Englishness    101 rescue the nation. The plaintive acknowledgement that ‘all we have left is empty talk | Of old achievements, and despair of new’ (Book 2, lines 253–​4) is very similar to Byron’s later dismay over England’s ‘decaying fame and former worth’ (Canto 10, stanza 66), and both express one of the most painful aspects of conflicted patriotism: that sense of a once great nation in irreversible descent. This is a striking aspect of English patriotism in the period, especially in the light of Pittock’s identification of the ‘taxonomy of glory’ as a key characteristic of national literatures. But while some Irish or Scottish poets dwelt on memories of a glorious national past in order to inspire hope for an equally splendid future, their English counterparts were often rather less optimistic—​especially those for whom past glory had had little to do with power or material prosperity. In Book 3 of The Task, for example, modern metropolitan advances were seen as agents of decline rather than redemption: Were England now What England was; plain, hospitable, kind, And undebauch’d. But we have bid farewell To all the virtues of those better days . . . (Book 3, lines 742–​4)

There is little sign here of either the progressive spirit or the self-​satisfaction so often associated with eighteenth-​century England. For both Cowper and Byron, ‘empty talk’, ‘cant’, or superficial rhetoric was indicative of England’s catastrophic decline. It was not a problem of words rather than actions, but rather that words themselves had become a kind of corrupt currency. For writers, however, this was a challenge to be seized rather than evaded, for who better placed to renew worn-​out language than the poet? Though The Task reaches moments of almost apocalyptic anxiety, its shifting tone and flexible form offer considerable opportunity not only for social comment, but also for plain speaking. Don Juan, too, for all its apparent cynicism, rages against the obscenity of warfare or the hypocrisy of modern society in language that is accessible and direct. Though so different in character, they are each ‘mock epic’ in the double sense of playing with old generic and rhetorical conventions and of employing epic form to ridicule contemporary society. The severity of England’s ills seemed to demand epic treatment, even though this might be expressed in a more condensed form: Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men . . . 23

23  ‘London, 1802’, lines 1–​6, in Stephen Gill (ed.), 21st-Century Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 244. All further references to Wordsworth’s sonnets are to this edition.

102   Fiona Stafford Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnet is among the most heartfelt expressions of dismayed amor patriae, and his choice of form is part of his tribute to England’s greatest political sonneteer and epic poet. The apostrophe to Milton is even more emphatic than Cowper’s evocation of Wolfe and Chatham and, though strongly influenced by Cowper, Wordsworth placed more emphasis on the responsibility of poets in society. Rather than stand distant from his country’s faults, Wordsworth casts himself and his readers as both victims and participants (‘We are selfish men’), equally mired in the stagnant fen. Though fully aware of the many ‘Great men’ who ‘have been among us’, the hero of Wordsworth’s sonnets was Milton, in whose imperishable words some hope for the modern nation might still be found. For Wordsworth at this time, the country’s future depended on a shared sense of the freedom embodied in its language and literature: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue | That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold | Which Milton held’ (‘It is not to be thought of that the Flood’, lines 11–​13). English poetry provided a kind of covenant between the ages, and the best assurance that old values might yet be recovered. Wordsworth’s ‘Oh! Raise us up, return to us again; | And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power’ (lines 7–​8) is more hopeful than Cowper’s address to General Wolfe, because anyone could still turn to Milton’s living words, should they think to do so. Instead of the straightforward expressions of patriotism that might be expected from a wartime publication, Wordsworth’s political sonnets, mostly composed in 1802–​3, reveal feelings as disconcerting in their variety as in their strength. The denunciation in ‘London, 1802’ of England as a ‘fen of stagnant waters’, for example, comes in the wake of the very different sonnet, ‘Composed in the Valley, near Dover, On the Day of Landing’, where the sheer delight of returning home is palpable: Thou art free My Country! And ‘tis joy enough and pride For one hour’s perfect bliss, to tread the grass Of England once again . . . (lines 10–​13)

Unlike Byron’s later imaginative return to Dover, when his native land would be cast as ‘first of slaves’, for Wordsworth returning from France in 1802, England represented the last bastion of liberty in Europe. A year later, with the renewal of hostilities and an invasion apparently imminent, his sonnet ‘To the Men of Kent, October 1803’, with its echoes of Henry V, represented the local militia as the ‘Vanguard of Liberty’, the white cliffs a ‘haughty brow’ confronting the coast of France (lines 1–​3). Such stirring patriotic expressions sit uncomfortably beside ‘London, 1802’, ‘Great Men have been among us’, ‘Written in London, September, 1802’ or ‘England! The time is come when thou shouldst wean | Thy heart from its emasculating food’. At one moment, Wordsworth’s sonnets are declaring faith in the courageous Men of Kent; at another, they are echoing Cowper’s concerns over the nation’s growing effeminacy. Was England the land of the free—​or was that ancient dower now lost, serving only to accentuate the corrupt, craven, and commercially obsessed state of the nation?

England and Englishness    103 Wordsworth’s ambivalence towards his native country emerges with particular clarity when England was being viewed from a greater distance, as in ‘Composed by the Sea-​ side, near Calais, August 1802’: Fair Star of Evening, Splendor of the West, Star of my Country! On the horizon’s brink Thou hangest stooping, as might seem to sink On England’s bosom; yet well pleased to rest, Meanwhile, and be to her a glorious crest Conspicuous to the Nations. Thou, I think, Should’st be my Country’s emblem; and should’st wink, Bright Star! With laughter on her banners, drest In thy fresh beauty. There! That dusky spot Beneath thee, it is England; there it lies. (lines 1–​10)

The idea of a guiding star brings home the deep-​rooted connection between nativity and nation. Instead of marking a divine place of hope and peace, however, the Evening Star is hanging, ‘stooping’, ready to ‘sink’, as if worn out by the ‘dusky spot | Beneath’. The ‘Bright Star’, which is the ‘Splendor of the West’ in that it appears with the setting sun, should be an emblem for the small island off the western coast of Europe, but instead of standing as a sign of renewal, it seems in danger of disappearing into the universal darkness. Wordsworth’s sonnet ends not with a triumphant or even consoling message of eternally returning light, but with ‘many a fear | For my dear Country’. There is none of Byron’s caustic wordplay here; the ‘dear’ country is one that is held in an affection deepened by the realization of its vulnerability. Wordsworth’s anxieties about England’s decline were inseparable from an awakening consciousness of the depth of his devotion, as he acknowledged in ‘When I have borne in memory what has tamed’, which not only deplores contemporary avarice but also recognizes the connection between such apparently ‘unfilial fears’ and the deepest amor patriae: What wonder, if a Poet, now and then, Among the many movements of his mind, Felt for thee as a Lover or a Child. (lines 12–​14)

In many of these sonnets, Wordsworth addresses England directly, but he also invokes Britain. The French invasion of Switzerland, for example, provokes the ‘Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’, while the poem on the possibility of a similar fate for his own country, ‘Anticipation, 1803’, imagines victory ‘On British ground’ (line 2). The unity implicit in ‘Britain’ is most obvious in ‘To the Men of Kent’, where the entire population is imagined joining forces behind the vanguard on the south coast: ‘In Britain is one breath; | We all are with you now from shore to shore’ (lines 12–​13). The

104   Fiona Stafford effect of a very real foreign threat made the idea of a larger, consolidated body of defence suddenly very attractive. If ‘England’ was provoking the most conflicted feelings, Britain, at least, might be invoked to withstand French aggression. It is in this context, too, that the inclusion of a sonnet on the seventeenth-​century Battle of Killiecrankie under the same title as poems deploring contemporary England, ‘October, 1803’, makes more sense. Wordsworth’s fear of Napoleon’s gathering forces prompted him to turn to memories of the Highlanders’ victory to inspire ‘the Men of England’ (line 13). For a modern audience, especially in Scotland, Wordsworth’s sonnets can strike an uncomfortably imperial and somewhat chauvinistic note, but when seen in the context of 1803, the references to ‘Men of England’ suggest desperation rather than complacency. Reference to the ‘Flood of British Freedom’ recalls an idea of a glorious past, now in danger of being lost for ever, rather than calling for a programme of expansionism (‘It is not to be thought of that the Flood’, lines 1–​2). Unlike Cowper when he was engaged on The Task, or Austen composing Emma, or Byron writing Don Juan, for Wordsworth 1802–​3 was very much a moment of being in medias res. He had no idea when he composed the political sonnets whether England or Britain would remain free, because Napoleon’s power was still in the ascendancy. By 1807, when the sonnets were published, the French conquest of Europe seemed even more complete. With the outcome of the war—​and therefore the nature of England’s story—​still so uncertain, what exactly should a modern Milton attempt? That Wordsworth felt the responsibilities of the poet profoundly is abundantly clear in the additions he made to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1802, but just how the poet should fulfil his great duty was less so. It is the question that prompts The Prelude, where Wordsworth casts himself as a poet preparing for national service and yet unable to settle on a suitable theme for his great poem. In The Prelude, Wordsworth probed his deeply conflicted feelings about national loyalty in relation to the French Revolution and ensuing war, but his analysis remained private rather than being published as a national epic in the year of Trafalgar. If the choice of theme for a modern epic seemed difficult for him to make in 1805, it nevertheless prompted Wordsworth to celebrate the small region of England that he had come to recognize as the very ground of his poetic being. If Jane Fairfax’s health depended on her ‘native air’ in Surrey, Wordsworth drew deeply on the ‘gentle breeze’ of the Lake District. In the world of ‘getting and spending’, places in which the deepest, personal feelings had taken root could still provide stability, hope, and inspiration for a kind of verse that might express the best of his country’s character. For all his ambivalence about England, Wordsworth’s passionate amor patriae emerged most powerfully when he wrote about his native Cumbria. The question of what might constitute a modern national epic continued to challenge poets, however, even after the war had ended. For Byron, searching for a hero at the start of Don Juan, the problem was not so much an absence of national material but an excess. Cowper’s hero, Wolfe, appears in Byron’s lengthy roll-​call, but only in a long list of British and French generals, admirals, and political leaders. As Byron embarked on his explicitly non-​national epic, he was nevertheless offering a defence of poetry when he pointed out that great men were only as durable as the poems they inspired.

England and Englishness    105 And for all his refusal of national pride, so noticeable in Juan’s arrival at Dover, Byron still upheld Milton as an exemplary figure, imagining him rising ‘Like Samuel from the grave’ (Dedication, stanza 11). Once Byron had transported his Spanish hero to England, he also seemed very reluctant to remove him thence, judging by the seven cantos following the arrival in Kent. By 1824, Byron himself had gone to fight in the Greek War of Independence, but despite the heroic endeavour and Homeric environment, he was still drawn imaginatively to England, with the last completed stanzas of Don Juan set in a Norman Abbey remarkably similar to Byron’s ancestral home at Newstead. He might have had little cause to love ‘that spot of earth’, but the pull of England, with all her faults, still held Byron as powerfully as any writer of the period.

Further Reading Batey, Mavis, Jane Austen and the English Landscape (London: Barn Elms, 1996). Carruthers, Gerard, and Alan Rawes (eds), English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–​1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Crawford, Robert, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Davis, Leith, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation 1707–​1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Duff, David, and Catherine Jones (eds), Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007). Higgins, David, Romantic Englishness:  Local, National and Global Selves, 1780–​ 1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Kelly, James (ed.), Ireland and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). Langford, Paul, Englishness Identified:  Manners and Character, 1650–​1850 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000). Makdisi, Saree, Romantic Imperialism:  Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Pittock, Murray, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Roe, Nicholas (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). Stafford, Fiona, Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish and English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Stafford, Fiona, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism:  The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Chapter 7

Sc otl and and t h e  Nort h Penny Fielding

To think about Romanticism in national terms—​the possibility that there might be a ‘Scottish Romanticism’ distinct from an English, British, German, European, or any other national form—​asks us first to set down some ideas about space and time upon which such a concept might be predicated. First of all, dating ‘Romanticism’ as a period requires some expansion when the whole of Britain is included. Interest in Romance as a non-​realist narrative genre or a literary form of feeling looks outward from English metropolitan and cultural centres towards Celtic regions in the poetry of Thomas Gray and William Collins in the 1750s, and spreads from Scotland throughout Europe with the emergence in the 1760s of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems. In another way of thinking about periodicity, Scottish Romanticism did not demand a radical severance with past cultural traditions, but spun them into a complex web of contrasts, continuations, and ironic reflections. What we might think of as a ‘predecessor’, the Scottish Enlightenment, retains a presence in Scottish Romanticism. The ‘science of man’ developed by David Hume and others was an approach to commercial society as distinctively modern, marking a break from superstition, civic violence, and faction. In a modern civil society, citizens would form relations with each other as feeling, sympathetic individuals. In a seeming paradox typical of the way Scottish culture was constructing itself, the best example of this modern civic society is the supposedly ‘primitive’ poet Robert Burns. Burns presents an opportunity to think about the varieties of Romanticism in a British context that takes account of developments in Scottish literature and thought. On the one hand, he was a significant influence on English Romantic poets: here was a poet who, beyond any doubt, wrote in ‘language really used by men’, and who could represent ‘low and rustic life’, two of the criteria for poetry in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.1 The idea that proximity to nature gave the poet greater access to his or her own feelings and a clearer expression of them fitted Burns well, and Wordsworth’s experience of 1  William Wordsworth, The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), i. 869. All quotations from Wordsworth are from this edition.

Scotland and the North    107 reading him was that ‘every where you have the presence of human life’.2 Wordsworth visited Burns’s grave on his tour of Scotland with his sister Dorothy in 1803 and imagined his connection with the earlier poet: True friends though diversely inclined; But heart with heart and mind with mind, Where the main fibres are entwined, Through Nature’s skill, May even by contraries be joined More closely still.3

This stanza is not only written in Burns’s characteristic metre (though perhaps without his characteristic energy), it is also a reminder that Burns was a poet of the eighteenth century. When Keats visited the same grave fifteen years later, he was reminded of the solitariness and pain of human life (‘All is cold Beauty; pain is never done’4), but Burns clearly thought of himself as a social figure interested in that Enlightenment combination of physiology and psychology where the ‘fibres’ of heart and mind are joined, and in that Scottish emphasis on a society bound together by feeling and imaginative engagement. Among Burns’s finest poetry are his epistles, which temper the Romantic characterization of him as a poet of direct natural feeling. Burns, a poet as ambitious as any other of his day for social acclaim and patronage, brilliantly exploits the classic form of eighteenth-​century sociability, the verse epistle. His epistle to John Lapraik describes a social gathering. Burns hears a song he has not heard before, which, like Wordsworth’s fibres of friendship, impresses him with a bodily sensation through the heart strings: There was ae sang, amang the rest, Aboon them a’ it pleas’d me best, That some kind husband had addrest, To some sweet wife: It thirl’d the heart-​strings thro’ the breast, A’ to the life. I’ve scarce heard ought describ’d sae weel, What gen’rous, manly bosoms feel; Thought I, ‘Can this be Pope, or Steele, Or Beattie’s wark;’ They tald me ’twas an odd kind chiel About Muirkirk.5 2  Letter to Coleridge, 27 Feb. 1799, in Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald A. Low (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 131. 3  Wordsworth, ‘At the Grave of Burns’, lines 43–​8. 4  ‘On Visiting the Tomb of Burns’, line 8, in John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003). 5  ‘Epistle to J. L[aprai]k, an old Scotch Bard’, lines 13–​24, in Robert Burns, Selected Poems and Songs, ed. Robert P. Irvine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

108   Penny Fielding In the Epistle to Lapraik, the song—​natural, spontaneous, immediate—​is not presented directly but described in the social form of a letter, and the poem plays ironically with ideas about writing and value. The song Burns hears could, he imagines, be by the neoclassical satirist Alexander Pope, the journalist Richard Steele, or the Professor of Moral Philosophy James Beattie. With the revelation that it is by ‘an odd kind chiel’ in a neighbouring village in rural Ayrshire, Burns poises himself between bathos (as if he cannot tell the difference) and a tribute to his friend who is just as skilled as these eminent writers. Later he claims to be not a real poet, but ‘a Rhymer like by chance’ (line 50), while simultaneously building into the poem his knowledge of the classics. The poem is at once witty, urbane, and detached, and celebratory of feeling, emotion, and sensibility. One of Burns’s most famous poems, ‘To a Mouse’, also pulls in two directions: Burns is both the solitary figure in the landscape, beset by sentiments of inexpressible doubt and anxiety, and the educated classicist, speculating on the nature of the bonds that hold human society together in a reference to Pope’s Essay on Man.6 To think about Scotland and Romanticism in temporal terms immediately conjures up spatial ones and ways in which history and geography sustain a complex relation of causes and effects that seek to demonstrate forms of cultural progress and historical difference, while simultaneously questioning the nature of progress itself. In a simple sense, the map of Scotland calls attention to possible national difference, both from England and internally within Scotland. The visual map of Britain becomes fluid and variable when cultural–​regional geographies are laid over it. Is ‘Britain’ an island? Two islands? An archipelago? On the one hand, Scotland seems to invite a clear bipartite division of Britain into nations formerly independent of each other. But on the other, it acts as a reminder that Britain is also a fragmentary nation of multiple islands. This is how Scotland seemed to Samuel Johnson in 1776 on his journey with James Boswell to the Western Islands of Scotland. Johnson organizes his journal sequentially with headings corresponding to the islands he visits, but there are always more in view and too many to see them all. They are ‘scattered in the sea’ and the sea is ‘broken by the multitude of islands’.7 The far north of Scotland also seemed to visitors to dissolve into a fractured (and fractal) geography that appeared to Walter Scott on his 1814 coastal tour to be ‘indented by capes and studded with isles’.8 Alongside the indeterminacy of its exterior borders, however, Scotland seemed to offer a very clear internal division into Highlands and Lowlands, not only because of its physical geography but also because of the way this conformed to certain ideas of geographic determinism. Scottish writers (though not uniformly) pursued versions

6 

For a more extensive survey of Burns in relation to English poets, see Nigel Leask, ‘Robert Burns’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism, ed. Murray Pittock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 134–​8. 7  Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Mary Lascelles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 69. 8  Walter Scott, ‘Voyage in the Lighthouse Yacht to Nova Zembla, and the Lord knows where’, in J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 7 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1837), iii. 158.

Scotland and the North    109 of the French political theorist Montesquieu’s concepts of climate that traced forms of character and types of government to the temperature and fertility of locations. Montesquieu’s argument that the people of northern climates and infertile soils are tougher and less susceptible to conquest by other nations could be summoned in support of cultural and political causes. In part this gave a national character to a nation that was no longer a state, especially after the traumatic military consequences of the Jacobite rising of 1745–​6. From the 1760s, a therapeutic image of Scotland recurs: warlike but democratic; poor but hardy; simple but moral. James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771–​4) makes an explicit contrast between a richer but corrupt south (here Chile, but with a glance towards luxury and political corruption nearer home) and northern, impoverished, hardy, freedom-​loving Scotland: With gold and gems if Chilian mountains glow, If bleak and barren Scotia’s hills arise; There plague and poison, lust and rapine grow; Here peaceful are the vales, and pure the skies, And freedom fires the soul, and sparkles in the eyes.9

The interaction of geography and society was itself closely interwoven in the Scottish Enlightenment’s adoption of stadial models of history that plotted the history of human life from ‘savagery’ to modern, commercial societies. Scotland seemed to offer examples of different stages existing at the same time—​an agricultural Lowlands with developed urban centres speaking English and Scots, and a wild Highlands, Gaelic-​speaking and with an economy based on hunting and herding. Scotland was at once a modern society, developing civic projects in Edinburgh’s architecturally sophisticated New Town and cultivating the arts and philosophy, and a society of ancient tribes preserving the primitive original impulses of art, song, and poetry. One consequence of this perceived division was that Scotland seemed a place to be discovered—​a site of ethnographic difference and anthropological interest rather than the location for recognizable social behaviours, or ‘manners’ that are likely to be shared by the reader. Scotland (like Ireland) was subject to a distancing effect that offered a chance to study characters not only as individual people, but also as populations. Novels that take place in Scotland, most famously Scott’s Waverley (1814) and Rob Roy (1817), are often framed by the protagonist’s travelling there on a voyage of discovery. The first readers of Waverley would have recognized in it the peripatetic narrative of the Irish national tale, a well-​established genre in which a protagonist from the metropolitan centre travels to the Celtic regions to negotiate social, and usually emotional, relations (see Jim Kelly, Chapter 9 in this volume). Susan Ferrier, the most brilliant Scottish practitioner of the novel of manners, also uses this comparative method, which colours her characters nationally as well as socially or morally. Marriage (1818) tells the story of a spoiled English young woman transplanted (by her marriage to a Scottish aristocrat) to 9 

James Beattie, The Minstrel; or The Progress of Genius. Book the First (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1771), 5.

110   Penny Fielding Scotland and shocked by the ‘primitive’ scenes she finds there. Her daughter, Mary, later visits London, where she is tempted by its luxury and aesthetic sophistication, which she duly rejects. The ethnography that drives interest in the Scottish-​set novel was sustained by both a new focus on the ‘science’ of populations and the growing influence of Malthus, and by the fact that the demographic and agricultural bases of Scotland were undergoing a process of visible change. Following punitive changes in the laws of inheritance and landownership after the Jacobite rising of 1745–​6, Highland society in particular saw a shift of some people onto concentrations of newly ‘improved’ land, and the extensive depopulation of formerly populous areas. Many Scots emigrated, either from economic choice or in the forced evictions of the Clearances in the Highlands, and Scottish national identity began to form diasporic versions of itself not obviously bounded by the geographic determinants of Highlands and Lowlands. Scotland’s history, then, was at once exemplary—​illustrating the geographical reasons for social variance and the inevitable process of historical change—​and also disjunctive—​the same nation with closely contiguous peoples contained vastly different social orders. Instead of one stage calmly developing into another, different stages existed at the same time, while changes were wrought not by temporal evolution but by swift and, to many observers, shocking legal, economic, and political change. All of which leaves Scotland occupying a complex position in relation to its own temporality. On the one hand, it is a rapidly changing place with unstable social formations and links to North America, the subject of modern academic inquiry in the social sciences. On the other, Scotland becomes an ancient or even timeless place—​a window onto the original passions and experience of the human race. The negotiation of a course between these two positions persists throughout Scottish Romanticism, constructing it as a form of troubled modernity and raising the question of how a past that, according to Enlightenment historicism, should have been superseded by the present can still live in and inform that present. We can pick up this story in 1760. Both Highland and Lowland Scotland were rapidly adjusting to modern Britain—​though for different reasons. The traumatic rift of the Jacobite defeat and the subsequent suppression of Highland society, alongside the opportunities afforded to Scots in the (Scottish) Lord Bute’s government, are a clear example of the temporal disjunction against which James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) emerges. Macpherson’s ‘translations’ of Gaelic poetry (actually new poems building on Scottish and Irish myths and linguistic idioms) were dismissed as forgeries by some, but their popularity opened up interest in writing about the Highlands as well as in Gaelic writing, of which there was a flourishing tradition.10 Macpherson voices a Highland landscape bearing the scars of recent wars—​ depopulated, or populated only by the ghosts of its former inhabitants. These shadowy figures, reduced to fleshless voices, mourn the passing of their society:

10 

For the complex relations of English and Gaelic in the period, see Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-​Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Scotland and the North    111 I sit by the mossy fountain; on the top of the hill of winds. One tree is rustling above me. Dark waves roll over the heath. The lake is troubled below. The deer descend from the hill. No hunter at a distance is seen; no whistling cow-​herd is nigh. It is mid-​ day: but all is silent. Sad are my thoughts alone.11

The bard Ossian is the last of his race, an audible link to an ancient Celtic past, albeit one on the verge of extinction, and a fleeting glimpse of a vanished culture. But the historicism of Scottish Romanticism is a complex affair, a doubled or uncanny state in which history is haunted by myth, while myth is also produced as historical evidence of the past. Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh and one of the earliest champions of Macpherson, saw the poems less as historical records than as aesthetic texts. Ancient poems, he wrote, present to us, what is more valuable than the history of such transactions as a rude age can afford, the history of human imagination and passion. They make us acquainted with the notions and feelings of our fellow-​creatures in the most artless ages; discovering what objects they admired, and what pleasures they pursued, before those refinements of society had taken place, which enlarge indeed, and diversify the transactions, but disguise the manners of mankind.12

Macpherson’s imagined Ossianic past is both distant (a ‘rude age’) yet also modern—​its people pursue pleasure as if they were members of a commercial society whose ‘transactions’ produce the leisure time to do so. This is both an ‘artless’ age and one that has a developed sense of aesthetic choice in the objects it admires. At the same moment that Scotland recognizes the loss of its ‘primitive’ past, it restores that past to new forms of cultural life. Paradoxically, it is the evidence of the primitive past that shows modern subjects how to experience their own lives in more sophisticated and complex societies. Thus, far from the stadial model in which one age succeeds another, Blair sees modernity preserving and perfecting the ancient past. The example of Macpherson shows how assumptions about Enlightenment historicism are modified and challenged in Scottish Romanticism. Instead of stadial history’s sequence of stages, we see a spectrum of continuities, modifications, echoes, and reinventions. In the attempt comprehensively to describe the fullness, richness, and variety of modern life, reference is inevitably made to the primitive conditions it has left behind. This is not, of course, exclusively Scottish. The idea of ‘primitive’ or original societies in which, in the words of Scott, ‘the rude minstrel has melted in natural pathos’,13 was to underpin many Romantic claims to the authenticity of natural utterance, or, in the case of Herder in Germany, the original voice of a people or Volk. But for Scotland 11 

‘Fragment I’, in James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 9. 12  Hugh Blair, ‘A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’ (1763), in Poems of Ossian, 345. 13  Walter Scott (ed.), Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Longman and Rees, 1803), i, p. cxvi.

112   Penny Fielding the question was particularly acute and complicated. In an abstract sense, the questioning of how the past lives within modernity characterizes Scottish literature in the Romantic period with a very complex and non-​linear sense of temporality. The two most significant events for the development of Scottish Romanticism—​the 1707 Act of Union and the 1745 Jacobite uprising—​are breaks with a past that must then be reincorporated into Scottish cultural history in ways that are not always straightforward. The practice of history enacted these uneven temporalities. Antiquarianism was enthusiastically embraced by Scots in the later eighteenth century, as it was in Wales, but Scottish antiquarianism had a specific political context. Lord Kames’s Essays on Antiquities (1747), published just after the Jacobite rising, explicitly announced itself as a remedy for the ‘Calamities of a Civil War’ in the form of ‘a Spirit among his Countrymen, of searching into their Antiquities’, commencing with a study of the introduction of Feudal Law into Scotland.14 But if antiquarianism started off as an exemplary study of the ancient past for the present while making a claim for a clearly delineated modernity, it rapidly moved away from Kames’s exposition of the development of constitutional law, and became associated with much less progressive forms of history. Antiquarians, in their recovery of ancient texts and in their notoriously obsessive collections of objects, clung to the past in both metaphorical and literal ways. Antiquarian objects, experienced in direct or tangible ways very different from the detached speculation of stadial history, were a way of preserving the past not in linear sequence, but in random order, with each object occupying the present in the same way. Defying the logical, causal order of Enlightenment history, the texts or objects of antiquarianism persisted in fragmented but immediate and corporeal forms.15 For Scottish Romantic literature, the uneasy accommodation of the past within the present is a consistent theme. Ina Ferris introduces the idea of the ‘remnant’, a figure (or sometimes an object) who circulates through Scottish literature. The remnant is both an obsolete figure from the past, and one who clearly lives and functions in the present (the beggar Edie Ochiltree in Scott’s The Antiquary [1816] is a good example). The effect is to render the present ghostly and unsubstantial and to ‘block the abstracting moves through which bridging narratives and categories recuperate and consolidate what has been left behind’.16 Alternatively, the energies from the savage or Romance past, far from being superseded, prove to be a model of the seemingly more sophisticated present: the outlaw Rob Roy in Scott’s novel of that title, ostensibly a ‘primitive’ Highlander, is strikingly good at negotiating the modern world of political intrigue and commercial expansion in which he finds himself. As Ian Duncan says of Rob: ‘who better than

14 

Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays Upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1747), unpaginated. 15  See Susan Manning, ‘Antiquarianism, Balladry, and the Rehabilitation of Romance’, in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 16  Ina Ferris, ‘ “On the Borders of Oblivion”: Scott’s Historical Novel and the Modern Time of the Remnant’, Modern Language Quarterly 70.4 (2009), 473–​94 (pp. 478–​9).

Scotland and the North    113 a freebooter should thrive in the new economy?’17 Or, using Scott again as an example, the supposedly last minstrel, in The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) is also a model of the modern poet, reanimating history in the form of Romance. Scott dedicates his poem to the contemporary family of the Duke of Buccleuch just as his ancient minstrel sings the narrative to an earlier incarnation of the same family.18 And the poem generated a modern fashion for the ancient in the form of literary tourism: the section describing ruined Melrose Abbey by moonlight was repeatedly extracted for guide books, to satisfy the curiosity of visitors who flocked there. 19 Scottish Romanticism, then, is animated, or sometimes reanimated, by dislocations and ruptures that are commemorated or preserved in literature, and these ruptures in turn give the idea of national history an ironic self-​awareness in Scottish writing. Britain—​at war with France for much of the period—​was enthusiastically in search of heroic national leaders. In England, a favourite literary character was King Alfred the Great, who featured in (among many other works) a twenty-​four book epic poem by Joseph Cottle, the Bristol publisher of Lyrical Ballads. To an extent, Scottish authors participated in the search for heroes who could be co-​opted as British. The popularity of William Wallace as a poetic hero demonstrates what Nancy Goslee calls ‘the appropriation of [Scottish] legendary events into the eclectic myths of a larger British nationhood’. 20 But alongside this are myths of doomed heroism. There was a small-​scale revival in interest in Calgacus, supposedly the leader of the last of the Caledonian tribes to have fought the Roman occupying forces in open battle (Captain Hector M’Intyre in Scott’s The Antiquary is composing an epic poem on the subject), but the Caledonians were not the victors in that encounter and the dominant strain of mythic heroism that characterized Scottish writing was the haunted absences of the Fragments of Ancient Poetry or the defeat of the Jacobite army in Waverley. English heroes and their promotion of ‘liberty’ were not solely the preserve of English authors, and Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) explores the relations of the English Saxons to the invading French Normans, resolved by the triumphant return of Richard the Lionheart. But Scott’s command of the novel, extending to the reinvention of the genre, is founded on an ironic awareness of how history is remembered in the present as well as how it presents itself to memory. He is careful to point out that this Richard may not be exactly the same as his popular legend: his reign was like the course of a brilliant and rapid meteor, which shoots along the face of heaven, shedding around an unnecessary and portentous light, which is instantly swallowed up by universal darkness; his feats of chivalry furnishing themes 17 

Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 113. 18  See Maureen McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 129–​32. 19  See Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 93–​8. 20  Nancy Moore Goslee, ‘Contesting Liberty: The Figure of William Wallace in Poems by Hemans, Hogg, and Baillie’, Keats-​Shelley Journal 50 (2001), 35–​63 (p. 35).

114   Penny Fielding for bards and minstrels, but affording none of those solid benefits to his country on which history loves to pause, and hold up as an example to posterity.21

In Waverley, Romance is often a matter of stage management. The Jacobite Flora McIvor, hoping to enlist Edward Waverley in her cause, stages an elaborate spectacle of Celtic Romanticism, enlisting her Gaelic-​speaking maid to pose with a harp against the dramatic background of a waterfall. The popularity of Waverley led to some very stagy displays of Scottishness, and the hero of Sarah Green’s Scotch Novel Reading (1824) can only persuade the Walter Scott-​obsessed heroine to fall for him by dressing up (unconvincingly) as a battle-​scarred Scottish solider named Macgregor. But the point is not that Romance is either a relic of a long-​dead, superstitious past or a cynical modern act of public relations, but rather that no such distinction can be sustained. Romance, rather, questions how the past might survive in, or reanimate, or model a present that, according to progressive versions of history, should have left it behind. The Romance mode is not exclusive to the novel, and we can see this form of temporality in the renewed interest in the late eighteenth century in the ballad, a revival that challenges not only the historical, but also the spatial divisions of the nation. Despite the popularity of national histories, Romanticism also witnesses a turn to the local and regional. This regionalism was in part a response to the growing fashion for picturesque travel and was driven by guide books’ needs to differentiate between different localities, but it was also fed by a turn to localism in poetry and history that did not strictly respect national boundaries. The cultural geography of Britain had already identified a certain ‘north country’ that had no definite physical limits but signified the north of England and the south of Scotland. Travellers from England to Scotland frequently experienced the change in vocal accent as a gradual one and ‘The Borders’ constituted an area that was both Scottish and English. Wordsworth said that he had no difficulty in reading Burns’s poems in Scots because of his familiarity with the English spoken in Cumberland and Westmorland. This ‘north country’ was predominantly a place of music and ballads. The English ballad-​collector Thomas Percy commented in 1765: ‘There is hardly an ancient Ballad or Romance, wherein a Minstrel or Harper appears, but he is characterized by way of eminence to have been “of the North Countrie”.’22 The Scottish antiquarian John Pinkerton concurred in Ancient Scotish Poetry (1786) that ‘the old English bards being all of the north countrie, and their metrical romances being almost Scotish, because the language spoken in the North of England and the South of Scotland was anciently almost the same; as it is at this day’.23 The ‘north country’ functions as a place where the primitive energies and stories of the past have been preserved in a vital form. These stories frequently narrate violent events and their characters act upon equally violent impulse. The borderers from either side of the official national division have loosened their ties to the centralized 21 

Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Graham Tulloch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 365. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), i, p. xxi. 23  John Pinkerton, Ancient Scotish Poetry, 2 vols (London: Charles Dilly, 1786), i, p. xvii. 22 

Scotland and the North    115 monarchies of England and Scotland and live as clans or as outlaws, engaging in theft, murder, and revenge. The supernatural narratives of ballads and quatrain verse were to inspire Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ and Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, but it was Wordsworth who identified in his early verse drama The Borderers how the cross-​ border rivalries of local families generated transnational passions. Here, however, there is a difference as well as a similarity between Wordsworth’s borderers and the figures in the ballads as they were collected and edited by Scott in the early nineteenth century. Wordsworth’s localities, especially in Lyrical Ballads, are reflections of internal states as much as historical events. Although they are often marked by objects that give access to the past—​the sheepfold in ‘Michael’ or the staff in ‘The Brothers’—​these are not antiquarian objects open to academic scrutiny. Rather, they speak of social bonds in the present or very recent past that depend on emotional and unique ties between individuals, as much as on the tribal identities of past cultures. Ballad collections, as their editors would have it, emerge just in time to transfer the preservation of these energies into forms of cultural capital. For Scott, the conservation of ballads could not be entirely entrusted to the people among whom they circulated, as these transmitters were prone to forget the words, or recite them unclearly owing to their propensity for drunkenness. Ballads now needed editors—​middle  ​class and educated—​to keep them alive. There had been collections of songs and ballads since the seventeenth century, but in the later eighteenth century the ballad collection moves from being a social object to a more specifically cultural one. From its position as an object for social consumption, it begins to bear the role of commentary on the history of society. As ballads move into the domain of the antiquarian they start to perform the additional function of articulating a national history that finds its characteristic forms in local traditions. As he finishes the introduction to the Minstrelsy, Scott hopes that he may ‘contribute somewhat to the history of [his] native country; the peculiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and ally’.24 In a move characteristic of Scottish writing in the period, it is the death of history that calls history into being. The Minstrelsy, as a literary artefact that translates Scottish history into modern culture, is itself part of a broader history of cultural capital. After the end of the Scottish Parliament in 1707 the idea of ‘Scotland’ is deflected away from political forms and onto cultural ones. Coterminous with the loss of national independence is the growth of a literary tradition that transfers Scottishness from a political to a literary plane. That this development has its origins with Allan Ramsay—​poet, literary entrepreneur, impresario, and founder, in Edinburgh’s High Street, of the first circulating bookshop in Britain—​is significant. The titles of Ramsay’s two collections of Scottish song, balladry, and poetry, The Tea-​Table Miscellany and The Ever-​Green, both of which first appeared in 1724, tell us much about their cultural status. First, unlike the cheap broadside ballads that circulated through different social classes, these collections were designed for the

24 

Scott (ed.), Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, i, p. cxxxii.

116   Penny Fielding middle-​class tea table; and, secondly, the idea that older Scottish poetry remains ‘ever-​ green’ inaugurates a self-​conscious tradition of literature that preserves the cultural objects of the past as a part of modernity. Literature was simultaneously ancient and modern. In the case of the ballads, there was an unbroken continuity between reproduced or edited ballads and those composed by modern poets in what Susan Stewart has called a ‘distressed genre’: modern works ‘antiqued’ by their authors.25 After the initial success of the Minstrelsy, Scott added further volumes including imitation ballads to those he had collected and edited. In a social context, this gave Scottish culture a sense of the commercial value of its literary past. Allan Ramsay sold his Edinburgh-​published collections in London, and the anthologizing of popular Scottish poetry was a success for Burns, in partnership with James Johnson, in The Scots Musical Museum as well as for Scott in the Minstrelsy. The ‘north country’ was not just an imaginary space for the circulation of ballads, but also had an important concentration of regional publishing. Many ballad collections, including those by Joseph Ritson, were published in Durham and Newcastle. The first edition of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published in Kilmarnock, and the initial two-​volume edition of Scott’s Minstrelsy in the Borders market town of Kelso. At the same time, Edinburgh was rapidly becoming a major centre for publishing and reviewing. The phenomenal success of Scott’s poetry and his Waverley novels, the rival quarterly journals the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review, and the upstart monthly Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine all worked to give Edinburgh the status of a literary capital that could produce widely read literature and direct literary taste. In the opinion of Lord Cockburn, one of the many lawyers who participated in this republic of letters, Edinburgh ‘had the glory of being at once the seat of the most popular poetry, and the most powerful criticism of the age’.26 Writing, publishing, and reviewing were not clearly differentiated roles; Scott, a partner in Ballantynes, the firm that printed his novels, did all three. For many Scottish writers, the sense of being part of a commercial world of cultural capital is itself the subject of literature. James Hogg had worked as a shepherd and tenant farmer in the Scottish Borders before coming to Edinburgh, where he entered, with equal parts of enthusiasm and scepticism, into its literary hotbed. The Queen’s Wake (1813), Hogg’s most successful work during his lifetime, gives a poetic form to modern literary Edinburgh and its relation to a Scottish past. The poem describes a song contest between a number of bards who have congregated in the capital to celebrate the return to Scotland of Mary, Queen of Scots. Hogg is both the narrator of the poem and,

25 

Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Literary Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), esp. chs 3 and 4. See also David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 128–​32. 26  Henry Cockburn, Memorials of his Time (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1856), 212. For Edinburgh as a contested ‘Republic of Letters’, see Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, esp. ch. 1. On the connection between the city’s legal and literary culture, see William Christie, Chapter 18 in this volume.

Scotland and the North    117 in a ‘distressed’ antique version of himself, appears as one of the competing poets as he mediates between himself as a modern author in literary Edinburgh and the ancient fictional bards of the past. The royal court, like the institutions of literary taste-​formation in modern-​day Edinburgh, is riven with rivalries that threaten to obscure the authentic voice of natural poetry in the form of the simple shepherd-​poet. It seems as if the over-​ sophistication, class divisions, and consequent corruption of the modern poetic world cannot recognize its own past in the current of Scottish song: But when the bard himself appeared, The ladies smiled, the courtiers sneered; For such a simple air and mien Before a court had never been. A clown he was, bred in the wild, And late from native moors exiled, In hopes his mellow mountain strain High favour from the great would gain. 27

Hogg articulates a doubleness in Scottish culture. He identifies a heterogeneous, sophisticated literary scene that can produce bards to compose in a variety of modes and styles, together with a simple strain of Scottish song that gives access to a natural feeling that has been lost to English writers who can only produce ‘an useless pile of art, | Unfit to sway or melt the heart’ (Introduction, lines 201–​2). But the poem is simultaneously aware that Scotland’s ‘simple native melody’ (line 204) is also produced by the highly sophisticated, competitive literary marketplace in which Hogg, who advertised himself as ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’, himself was a participant.28 The contest ends with a confirmation of Scottish literary tradition from the entrepreneurial Allan Ramsay to the international celebrity poet Walter Scott, and with the idea that a Scottish canon has been formed. Hogg’s great novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) draws together a number of the ideas raised in this chapter. A story of determinism, alienation, and persecution, Confessions has much in common with William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). But where Godwin’s novel is about Things as They Are (its original title),29 Confessions entangles its keenly ironic account of early ​nineteenth-​century Edinburgh and its literary culture with the irruption into the moment of its own publication of a text from an earlier time. The structure follows a modern-​day ‘Editor’

27 

James Hogg, The Queen’s Wake: A Legendary Poem, ed. Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), Night the Second, lines 243–​50. 28  See Jason N. Goldsmith, ‘Hogging the Limelight: The Queen’s Wake and the Rise of Celebrity Authorship’, Studies in Hogg and his World 16 (2005), 52–​60; and Erik Simpson, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–​1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 117–​25. 29  Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. By William Godwin, 3 vols (London: B. Crosby, 1794).

118   Penny Fielding pursuing, through local records and oral tradition, the story of a fratricide—​the murder of George Colwan, apparently by his brother Robert Wringhim, who disappears at the end of the story and is presumed to have killed himself. During the course of his investigations, the Editor discovers the autobiographical account, from the early eighteenth century, of the supposed murderer, in which it emerges that Robert’s actions have been driven by either a form of insanity and hallucination or by the literal Devil. The latter, going by the name of Gil-​Martin, convinces the intensely religious Robert that if, according to the tenets of Calvinism, he cannot be damned, then it is his duty to rid the world of sinners by murdering them. The novel gives a disturbing Gothic voice to the literary self-​consciousness of Romantic-​period Scotland. The Editor starts the novel confident in the ‘powerful monitors’30 of historical record and local tradition—​the mainstays of Scottish antiquarian practices—​as if these were self-​evident pathways to historical truth. But Hogg baffles us, not so much by withholding information as by giving us too much and in too many forms. The novel is full of instances of books, reading, printing, antiquarian research, and the publishing culture of literary Edinburgh. Robert not only writes his account, he goes to some lengths to have it printed. In the present day, the Editor reads (and reproduces) a letter from one James Hogg to Blackwood’s Magazine describing the discovery of the body of a young man believed to have hanged himself. Attentive readers of 1824 would recall that this letter had indeed appeared in the historical Blackwood’s as well as in the fictional novel. The Editor then sets out to find the body himself, and when it is re-​exhumed he describes the clothing in great detail, remarking on its historical provenance as if the body were an antiquarian object. With the decayed corpse is Robert’s own account—​a text from the past literally exhumed and preserved in the modern text of the Editor’s narrative. Yet none of this addresses the mystery that the novel proposes: who killed George Colwan and why? The Editor is left admitting: ‘With regard to the work itself, I dare not venture a judgment, for I do not understand it. I believe no person, man or woman, will ever peruse it with the same attention that I have done, and yet I confess that I do not comprehend the writer’s drift.’31 If Confessions marks the failure of antiquarianism it also—​in a peculiarly Scottish way—​renders the tradition of Romantic autobiography strange and uncommunicative. Hogg’s title recalls Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater (1821) and other ‘confessions’ narratives, and two years before the publication of the Private Memoirs and Confessions, the Edinburgh Magazine, in an article on autobiography, drew attention to ‘the insatiable appetite of the public for every species of Private Memoirs and Correspondence’.32 Alone, persecuted, alienated, and possibly insane, Robert seems to bear all the qualifications of a Romantic anti-​hero of his own autobiography, yet for 30  James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. Peter D. Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 3. 31 Hogg, Confessions, 174. 32  [Anon.,] ‘On Auto-​biography’, Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany (June 1822), 742.

Scotland and the North    119 all the details that he supplies of the events of his life and his changing mental states, he remains distanced from and unknowable to the reader. This is in part because of the novel’s terrible sense that nothing can be known because everything is already known, though that knowledge is not transparent. The Calvinist belief in a predestined elect who will be saved—​in fact, are already saved—​is represented in the novel as an already-​ written book: the ‘book of life’, in which the names of the elect have been eternally inscribed. Hogg’s intensely textually aware novel exposes the psychological load of a text that is not susceptible to interpretation but which cannot be understood without some form of reading. Susan Manning sums this up: ‘The burden of proof of election falls on the self-​investigating conscious, but its findings might be radically untrustworthy.’33 As his autobiography progresses, Robert’s self-​consciousness becomes increasingly fractured, divided between faith and doubt and finally unable to trust language itself as he recognizes Gil-​Martin’s double meanings: ‘I objected to the words as equivocal, and susceptible of being rendered in a meaning perfectly dreadful’. At the end (we assume) Robert kills himself, leaving his own book to be unearthed, read, but not understood in the literary cultures of the 1820s, a strange, inexplicable object that is both essential for the Editor’s modern project yet not assimilable by it.

Further Reading Davis, Leith, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation 1707–​1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Davis, Leith, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (eds), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Duff, David, and Catherine Jones (eds), Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007). Duncan, Ian, Scott’s Shadow:  The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2007). Duncan, Ian, and Douglas S. Mack (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Fielding, Penny, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Lamont, Claire, and Michael Rossington (eds), Romanticism’s Debatable Lands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Leask, Nigel, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Lumsden, Alison, Walter Scott and the Limits of Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). McLane, Maureen, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 33  Susan Manning, The Puritan-​Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11.

120   Penny Fielding O’Halloran, Meiko, James Hogg and British Romanticism: A Kaleidoscopic Art (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Pittock, Murray (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Chapter 8

Wa les and t h e  W e st Mary-​A nn Constantine

Having made application to go to Bristol my time was come when I  was to be received—​The first object I  had in view was to learn the English tongue so as to preach in it—​my mind was so fully bent in bringing poor sinners to Jesus Christ that I could not give the application I wished to other languages . . .1

This is the Welsh Baptist preacher Morgan John Rhys, who was born in 1760 to a farming family in the hamlet of Llanbradach a few miles north of Caerphilly, and who died in his mid-​forties in Pennsylvania, attempting to establish a new, just, and liberal ‘Cambria’. He is writing to a Baptist colleague in 1791 from Revolutionary France, where, he feels, his preaching will hasten God’s work. As for other millenarian Dissenters, the scientist Joseph Priestley among them, the events in France seemed to signal the dawn of a new era. Rhys’s short intense life, spanning a period of vast social and political change and deeply involved in some of its most powerful forces, was the historian Gwyn Alf Williams’s retort to the notion that ‘Romanticism’ somehow failed to evolve in Wales. When Williams was writing in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘Romantic’ still tended to evoke a particular kind of introspective lyricism that was not much evident in the Welsh literary tradition before the mid-​nineteenth century.2 But his instincts were right. As the study of Romanticism itself has become more historicized, widening its focus to include a broader range of texts and authors, and tracking the spread of ideas and information between groups, so the notion of Romantic Wales has sprung back into life. The growth of archipelagic or ‘Four Nations’ criticism, itself now further devolving into regionally sensitive perspectives, has also reinvigorated earlier debates about concepts of ‘Welshness’ and ‘Britishness’ in this period. With such large horizons ahead of him, Rhys’s journey from Cefn Hengoed, where he began his ministering, to the Baptist College in Bristol, where he studied in 1787, 1 

Morgan John Rhys, letter to John Rippon, 23 November 1791; British Library Add. MS 25388, 399–​402 (p. 400). 2  Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Romanticism in Wales’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For Morgan John Rhys, see Gwyn A. Williams, The Search for Beulah Land: The Welsh and the Atlantic Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1979).

122   Mary-Ann Constantine seems comparatively tame. But the journey is significant for the twin reasons behind it: the acquisition of a Dissenting education, and the improvement of his English ‘so as to preach in it’. Dissenting academies provided religious training, usually in conjunction with a liberal education, for those from a variety of denominations who could not subscribe to the Thirty-​Nine Articles and were thus barred from attending Oxford or Cambridge.3 Dissent, historically strong in Wales and the south-west, forms a cultural connection with England, a shared structure of thought dating back to the seventeenth century. The language issue, however, is a stark reminder of just how foreign Wales was during this period: in 1801, it is estimated that ‘nine of every ten of the population spoke Welsh and seven of every ten were monoglot’.4 That combination of familiarity, where Welsh life and thought map readily onto wider British ideologies and institutions, and strangeness, where language, literature, history, and custom appear exotic and deeply un-​English, forms a fascinating double-​skeined thread throughout this period. Reading Romantic Wales requires a dual perspective, one capable of inhabiting two cultures, two languages. While this has historically been a weak point in criticism on both sides of the border, the wider availability of texts and images through new editions, translations, and digitization has begun to change matters, and some of the most interesting recent work has explored particularly charged moments of cultural overlay or intersection. Bristol figures in this chapter primarily as a site where various Welsh, English, and British currents flowed into each other, but it had its own fierce independence as Britain’s second city, facing away from London towards the innumerable possibilities—​ adventurous, mercantile, military, political—​of the Atlantic. Its importance to the Romantic movement is well attested. In the 1760s, it was home to the teenage prodigy Thomas Chatterton, who brought the medieval city to life through the Rowley poems and a wealth of brilliant historical forgeries. Chatterton died aged seventeen in London in 1770, the prototype of the starving and rejected artist, and is a familiar ghost in the work of many Romantic writers. In the 1780s, the ‘Bristol Milkwoman’ Ann Yearsley struggled for authorial identity in a very public row with her patron, the educationalist and evangelist Hannah More (for further details, see Brian Goldberg, Chapter 11 in this volume). At Hotwells, a radically minded group of scientists that included Thomas Beddoes, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and the Cornishman Humphry Davy experimented with ‘pneumatic’ cures for various diseases, involving local writers such as Southey and Coleridge in their tests on the newly discovered gas nitrous oxide (see Sharon Ruston, Chapter  22 in this volume). Bristol was the setting for many iconic Romantic moments: a troubled Wordsworth passed through the city in 1793, heading towards Tintern; his return, in 1798, with his sister Dorothy resulted in ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’. In 1795, Southey (a native of Bristol) and his friend Coleridge married Edith and Sara Fricker, and planned their emigration to Pennsylvania 3 See Dissenting Academies Online at: www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/​research/​the-​dissenting-​ academies-​project/​. 4  Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), Language and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), 2.

Wales and the West    123 to set up a ‘Pantisocratic’ community of equals (Morgan John Rhys, and many others, were already out there attempting to do much the same). At Bristol Docks that June, Coleridge would deliver his famous lecture against the slave trade, and in 1795, too, he met Wordsworth, who shortly afterwards settled at Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey, to form one of the most productive creative partnerships in British literary history. The Bristol publisher of their 1798 Lyrical Ballads was Joseph Cottle, who had opened his bookshop on Corn Street in 1791, creating a venue for a constellation of young poets and radicals: ‘so many men of genius were there congregated’, Cottle would later claim, ‘as to justify the designation “The Augustan Age of Bristol” ’.5 The ‘new school’ of English poetry (which we now label Romantic rather than Augustan) effectively begins not in the Lakes, but here.6 As has been recently emphasized, Coleridge’s lecture owes much of its exhortative style to the language of Dissent; in Bristol, the young Unitarian poet would have moved in circles familiar to Morgan John Rhys, absorbing their rhetoric and engaging with their abolitionist stance.7 Throughout the period, nonconformists of many denominations raised their voices in opposition to the wars with America and France, and called for parliamentary reform; many were prominent West Country preachers, such as Bristol’s John Prior Estlin, or Joshua Toulmin of Taunton, who vocally supported both Revolutions (an effigy of Paine was burned outside his front door). The most influential of these voices, however, was that of Glamorgan-​born Richard Price, one of the founders of the Dissenting New College at Hackney, where both William Godwin and William Hazlitt would study; he was also an important mentor to Mary Wollstonecraft, who moved to be near him at Newington Green and set up a school there. Price, a measured and rational soul, was a close friend of Prime Minister Lord Shelburne, as well as of Benjamin Franklin. That he was portrayed in cartoons of the day as a black-​clad, atheistical king-​killer was the direct result of a sermon delivered in November 1789 and published shortly after as A Discourse on the Love of Our Country. In this sermon—​which directly provoked Edmund Burke into penning his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)—​Price welcomed the recent news from France, much of which he received at first-​hand from his nephew, George Cadogan Morgan (also a tutor at the New College), who had sent him eyewitness accounts of the uprising in Paris.8 5 

Cited in Paul Cheshire, ‘William Gilbert and his Bristol Circle, 1788–​98’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 86. See also Richard Cronin, ‘Joseph Cottle and West-​Country Romanticism’, in the same collection; and Basil Cottle, Joseph Cottle and the Romantics: The Life of a Bristol Publisher (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2008). 6  Peter A. Cook, ‘Chronology of the “Lake School” Argument: Some Revisions’, Review of English Studies new series 28, no. 110 (1977), 175–​81. 7  For Bristol Dissent, see Timothy Whelan, ‘S. T. Coleridge, Joseph Cottle and some Bristol Baptists’; P. J. Kitson, ‘Coleridge’s Bristol and West Country Radicalism’; and Anthony John Harding, ‘Radical Bible: Coleridge’s West Country Politics’, all in Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country. 8  For Price and his circle, see D. O Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). His nephew’s letters can be found in George Cadogan Morgan and Richard Price Morgan, Travels in Revolutionary France and A Journey Across America, ed. Mary-​Ann Constantine and Paul Frame (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012).

124   Mary-Ann Constantine Another prominent Welsh figure, again educated in Dissent and also much involved in French politics, was David Williams of Waunwaelod near Caerphilly, founder of the Literary Society and, by the 1780s, a practising Deist. Rejecting all aspects of organized religion bar a belief in a creator, he, with Benjamin Franklin and others, devised a liturgy which was admired by Voltaire; he also opened a Deist chapel in Margaret Street, London. Williams was close to several of those involved in early stages of the French Revolution and went over to Paris in 1792 to help frame a new Constitution.9 Rhys, Price, Cadogan Morgan, and Williams are all sterling products of Welsh Dissent: intellectual, questioning, fervent, and independent-​minded. Yet although all spoke Welsh at least in childhood, none makes much of possessing access to a distinct culture and language. Both Price and Morgan describe themselves as ‘citizens of the world’: their ideas and beliefs were universalist, and (though David Williams would write a history of Monmouthshire in later life) their public and published personae appear relatively little inflected by their Welsh origins. ‘Our first concern’, declared Price, ‘as lovers of our country must be to enlighten it’: that ‘country’ for him was not Wales, but, as for Thomas Paine, effectively the ‘world’.10 There were, though, other ways of being Welsh in Romantic-​era Bristol and London. All along the ‘Welsh Back’ where the River Avon cuts into the heart of Bristol, small vessels unloaded slate and stone from the Glamorgan coast, and Welsh would have been one of the languages heard on the cobbled streets. In the 1770s, a young stonemason from Flimston near Cowbridge could easily have been among them. Edward Williams was a mason, on and off, all his life; he never escaped economically from the ‘labouring class’ bracket in which (mindful of the recent successes of Robert Burns and Ann Yearsley) he very deliberately placed himself in the introduction to his Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794). Intellectually, however, if in a somewhat maverick mode, he was one of the most dynamic and influential Welsh characters of the age. Bilingual, self-​educated, a voracious reader of books and journals, he learned the art of traditional strict-​metre Welsh verse from neighbouring poets in the Vale of Glamorgan. The work of the fourteenth-​ century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, which he read at the Welsh School while working as a stonecutter in London, had an electric effect on him, and he began reading and copying from medieval manuscripts, absorbing and then coining a poetic vocabulary and technique with which he created a corpus of ‘lost’ Dafydd ap Gwilym poems. He persuaded the editors of the first published collection of the poet’s work, Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym (1789), to include many of these in an appendix: they were among the most admired poems in Dafydd’s oeuvre for well over a century.11

9 

J. Dybikowski, On Burning Ground: An Examination of the Ideas, Projects and Life of David Williams (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993); Damian Walford Davies, Presences That Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), 21–​54. 10  Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London, 1789), 11–​12. 11  See Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005); and Mary-​Ann Constantine, The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007).

Wales and the West    125 Besides inhabiting the work of a variety of Welsh poets (some of them entirely made up), Williams also wrote, in English, as himself. By the end of the 1780s he had enough poems to publish a collection through subscription. This involved the delicate manipulation of influential supporters, and in 1790 he returned to Bristol and Bath to make his mark in the literary salons of figures such as Harriet Bowdler and Hannah More, both of whom promoted his work. His literary persona at this time was a striking fusion of the familiar and the exotic, the ‘self-​educated journeyman mason’ modelled roughly on Burns, and the ‘Ancient British Bard’, virtual sole inheritor of what he asserted was a near-​extinct tradition of bardism (other Welsh writers being merely ‘poets’).12 Williams claimed to derive his knowledge from oral tradition, but he also knew full well that Welsh manuscripts, scattered throughout private libraries and poorly known to scholars either inside or outside Wales, held arcane treasures waiting to be dug out and burnished for modern audiences. Over the years, bardism, a moral and poetic system of education (handed down, he claimed, from the time of the druids) became an increasingly elaborate construction not unlike the worlds created by William Blake. The two men may, indeed, have met in Joseph Johnson’s bookshop in London, and Blake was certainly influenced by some of Williams’s ideas.13 Bardism was expressed principally in the form of ‘triads’, a three-​line epigrammatic classification system known from early Welsh and Irish literature, which Williams freely adapted for his own purposes: ‘in Songs and in Aphorisms of this description’, he explained, ‘were the Theological, Ethical, and Scientifical, Maxims of the Ancient Bards of Britain delivered, and these were easily retained by the public memory’.14 In Bristol and Bath, Williams also helped to propagate the legend, periodically revived from Elizabethan times, that a Welsh prince named Madog had been the first person to discover America, and that he and his followers had generated a tribe of Welsh-​speaking Indians. The Madog story (believed by many, especially in Welsh circles) appealed to Robert Southey, who made it the basis for his epic poem Madoc (1805) and consulted Williams on matters bardic.15 It also intrigued various bluestocking ladies: Harriet Bowdler wrote in September 1791 ‘on behalf of Mrs Montagu and some first rate Litterati’, declaring that her ‘Welsh blood’ was ‘up’ at hearing the story denied: ‘I hope you will enable me to ascertain the right of my Unkle Madoc to the discovery of America’. And in a rather pious letter to Hannah More, Williams declared himself ready to undertake a transatlantic expedition ‘to teach my poor Welsh brethren those truths of Religion which, tho’ they formerly knew, I fear they have now quite

12  Both phrases appear in an article on Williams, probably penned by himself, in the Gentleman’s Magazine 59.2 (1789), 976–​7. 13  See Jon Mee, ‘ “Images of Truth New Born”: Iolo, William Blake and the Literary Radicalism of the 1790s’, in Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius. 14  Edward Williams, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 2 vols (London, 1794), ii. 220. 15  Caroline Franklin, ‘The Welsh American Dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc Legend’, in Gerald Carruthers and Alan Rawes (eds), English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979).

126   Mary-Ann Constantine forgot’.16 Like the Pantisocrats (who had briefly considered South Wales as a fallback for their utopian scheme), Williams did not make it that far west, and the challenge was taken up instead by the young John Evans from near Caernarfon. He set off in 1792 and spent seven years travelling more than 1,800 miles up the Missouri, passing the bitter winter of 1796 as a guest of the Mandan Indians—​who did not, after all, speak Welsh.17 Williams was persuaded to take his quest for subscriptions to London, and to find a printer there. It was a decision that, at his lowest point, he regretted bitterly. The business of seeking support in London seems to have been far more humiliating than anything he encountered amongst the literati of Bath and Bristol. Although, as Geraint Jenkins has argued, he was a vocal critic of power from early on, his treatment here radicalized him further.18 His endlessly revised book was increasingly scored through with angry footnotes, declamations against war, tyranny, and kings. His time in London (1792–​5) coincided with a period of intensive political opposition channelled through societies such as the London Corresponding Society and the Society for Constitutional Information, and, though there is no record of him attending their meetings, he fully absorbs their radical style, developing what Damian Walford Davies (again capturing the notion of grafting something culturally specific to Wales onto a broader ideology) has termed ‘bardic jacobinism’.19 That fusion can be seen in Williams’s Welsh-​language poem, Breiniau Dyn, performed at a Glamorgan meeting of Welsh bards in the summer of 1798, which adapts and expands Robert Thomson’s earlier God Save the Rights of Man, published by the SCI in 1792.20 In contrast to its effect on Price, Cadogan Morgan, and David Williams, London life seems only to have accentuated Edward Williams’s Welshness. For Murray Pittock, this ‘performance of the self in diaspora’ is a key element in the development of a national Romanticism.21 In Iolo Morganwg’s case, the performance was literal: perhaps his most famous, and one of his most lasting, creations was the bardic initiation ceremony known as the Gorsedd. This involved gatherings on special days (solstice and equinox), in an elevated location (the first was held on Primrose Hill in London), during which new bards were admitted to the order, poems were recited, and certain ritual gestures (the sheathing of a sword to signify peace) were performed. Membership of the order naturally enhanced a sense of ‘Welshness’ within the group, giving them a deeply felt,

16   For these and other exchanges, see Mary-​Ann Constantine, ‘ “A Subject of Conversation”: Iolo Morganwg, Hannah More and Ann Yearsley’, in Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt (eds), Wales and the Romantic Imagination (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). 17  For John Evans, see Williams, The Search for Beulah Land. 18  Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty: The Political Radicalism of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 79–​121. 19  Walford Davies, Presences that Disturb, 152. 20  Mary-​Ann Constantine and Elizabeth Edwards, ‘ “Bard of Liberty”: Iolo Morganwg, Wales and Radical Song’, in John Kirk, Andrew Noble, and Michael Brown (eds), United Islands? The Languages of Resistance (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). 21  Murray H. Pittock, ‘Introduction’, in Murray H. Pittock (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 5.

Wales and the West    127 if not wholly reliable, connection with their past. The government, not unreasonably, suspected the Gorsedd of dissident tendencies, and although it would be more than a century before Iolo’s various forged traditions were fully exposed as such, some contemporaries detected a suspiciously political slant in the proceedings: ‘I do not recollect to have seen this doctrine’, remarked the antiquarian Edward Davies sourly of the Gorsedd’s supposedly druidical credentials, ‘before a certain period of the French Revolution’.22 The Gorsedd ran alongside and overlapped with another revivalist gathering, this time a more genuine resurrection of the medieval Welsh sessions, or poetic competitions, known as eisteddfodau. These events took place across Wales from 1789, and their principal sponsors were the Gwyneddigion, the most dynamic of the London-​Welsh societies, headed at the time by the Meirionethshire fur-​trader, Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr).23 Established in 1770, the society had revived many of the earlier aims of the Society of the Cymmrodorion, founded by the Morris brothers, William, Richard and Lewis, in 1751. The Morrises had presided over an earlier cultural revival, encouraging the clergyman Evan Evans (Ieuan Brydydd Hir) to complete and publish his Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards (1764), a work situated firmly in the Macpherson/​Percy/​Gray debate about British origins, the primacy of different ethnic groups, and the authenticity of their sources.24 The financial generosity and enthusiasm of Owen Jones lay behind projects such as Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym, and, at the turn of the century, the hefty three-​volume collection of medieval texts known as the Myvyrian Archaiology (1801–​7). He was aided by William Owen Pughe, an indefatigable editor as generous with time as Jones was with money, whose passion for Welsh culture made him especially vulnerable to the bardic evangelism of Edward Williams (though he would later, to his friend’s disgust, become a disciple and intimate of the prophet Joanna Southcott). He was a major conduit for his friend’s ideas, publishing a lengthy essay on bardism (written by Williams himself) in the introduction to his Heroic Elegies of Llywarç Hen (1792). It was Pughe who commissioned The Ancient Britons, the ambitious and tragically lost painting by William Blake which figures in his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809.25 The various London Welsh societies had important intellectual aims, but a primary reason for their existence was sociability, a desire to strengthen their sense of themselves as Welshmen. Sociability seems to have been the main purpose of the Caradogion (Caractacan) Society, which met at the Bull’s Head in Walbrook. The atmosphere of these meetings is entertainingly captured in a poem describing the ‘Dadl erxyll’ (fierce 22 

Edward Davies, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (London, 1809), 60. Geraint Phillips, Dyn heb ei gyffelyb yn y Byd: Owain Myfyr a’i Gysylltiadau Llenyddol (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2010). 24  Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-​Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008); Shawna Lichtenwalner, Claiming Cambria: Invoking the Welsh in the Romantic Era (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2008). 25  Glenda Carr, ‘An Uneasy Partnership: Iolo Morganwg and William Owen Pughe’, in Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius. 23 

128   Mary-Ann Constantine debate) held in 1791 on the existence, or otherwise, of the Welsh Indians. The Padouca Hunt: An Heroic Poem, with Notes Critical and Explanatory, was written by one of the group’s liveliest members, David Samwell (Dafydd Ddu Feddyg), a naval surgeon who had sailed with Cook, and author of an eye-​witness account of the captain’s death in Tahiti. The poem is a witty tour-​de-​force, its notes a gossipy running commentary on Welsh personalities and events: In Walbrook stands a famous inn Near ancient Watling street Well stored with brandy, beer and gin Where Cambrians nightly meet (lines 1–​4).26

The social circles overlap in interesting ways. ‘Compliments’, writes Edward Williams from Wales, somewhat wistfully, to the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson in 1795, ‘to literary friends that frequent your shop, Dyer, Disney, Aikin, Mr & Mrs Barbauld, G & W Morgan & all others.’27 This group has a predominantly Unitarian cast: ‘Aikin’ is here probably John, son of the Unitarian divine Dr Aikin and brother of Anna Letitia Barbauld, poet and passionate abolitionist. Williams was one of the founders of the Unitarian cause in Wales, composing a liturgy and more than 3,000 hymns for the society.28 A fellow radical, Carmarthenshire weaver Thomas Evans (Tomos Glyn Cothi), became the first Unitarian minister in Wales; he translated Joseph Priestley into Welsh, started a short-​lived journal, Trysorfa Gymmysgedig, and was arrested and tried (and sentenced to the pillory and two years in jail) for allegedly singing the Carmagnole.29 Literary and historical accounts of the period are irresistibly drawn to these energetic artisan radicals, but many Welsh voices of the Romantic era were far from critical of the monarchy or the policies of the state. Edward Jones, author of an important collection, The Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784) was harp tutor to the Prince of Wales from 1790, and took his bardic name ‘Bardd y Brenin’ (King’s Bard) on the latter’s accession. The Gwynedd-​based weaver/​schoolmaster David Thomas (Dafydd Ddu Eryri) produced a squib lambasting ‘Twm Paen’ and his Rights of Man, while, in a 1790 ode to Rhyddid (Liberty), the young curate Walter Davies had his chorus of ragged French revolutionaries look across the Channel for their salvation to

26 

W. Ll. Davies, ‘David Samwell’s Poem “The Padouca Hunt” ’, National Library of Wales Journal 2 (1941–​2), 141–​52. See also W. Ll. Davies, ‘David Samwell (1751–​98), Surgeon of the Discovery, London-​ Welshman and Poet’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1926–​7), 70–​133. 27  The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Ffion Mair Jones, and David Ceri Jones, 3 vols (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), i. 772. 28  A selection of these can be found in Cathryn Charnell-​White, Detholiad o Emynau Iolo Morganwg (Aberystwyth: University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2009). 29  Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “A Very Horrid Affair”: Sedition and Unitarianism in the Age of Revolutions’, in R. R. Davies and Geraint H. Jenkins (eds), From Medieval to Modern Wales: Historical Essays in Honour of Kenneth O. Morgan and Ralph A. Griffiths (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004).

Wales and the West    129 Siôr enwog sy ar ynys Brydain hoyw, yn ei loyw lys. Bwriadwn fod fel Brydain, A’i dynion, rhyddion yw rhain

famous George, in his resplendent court on the happy island of Britain. We intend to be like Britain and her people, for they are free.30

The political temperature of the country as a whole, judged from the evidence of printed ballads and the newspapers, was more loyal than not. The border newspapers coming out of Chester, Shrewsbury, Hereford, and Bristol served a vast, if not heavily populated, hinterland of Welsh readers, many of them enthusiastic contributors to the letters’ pages, and many wholeheartedly in support of the government.31 The more radical Welsh-​language journals of the 1790s (one of which, Y Cylchgrawn Cynmraeg, was edited by Morgan John Rhys) made a point of translating parliamentary information, informing readers of their rights, and encouraging them to educate themselves. That Wales was no Ireland bubbling with potential rebellion, however, was made abundantly clear during the failed French invasion of Fishguard in 1797, when the efforts of the local people to repel the invaders received praise across the national press. Welsh militia were also engaged in more proactive forms of loyalism: the ‘Ancient British Fencibles’ formed by Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, MP for Denbighshire, played a notorious part in the implementation of British policy during the Irish uprising in 1798.32 Using a very broad brush, it is possible to paint the country in two colours: the conservative northern Welsh-​speaking poetic tradition expressing loyalty to the crown; and the south, especially the south-​west, more readily writing in English, and engaged, often through religious Dissent, in opposition. Closer up, the picture is not so neat. From Denbighshire came Huw Jones’s rather surprising Welsh folk-​play (anterliwt) on ‘The Life and Death of The King and Queen of France’ (1796). Uniquely combining contemporary events and traditional elements, it plays dangerously, given the tight censorship of the London stage at the time, with taboo topics: the queen (literally, and farcically) loses her head on stage.33 Another powerful Denbighshire voice was that of John Jones (Jac Glan-​y-​Gors) from Cerrig y Drudion. His pamphlet Seren Tan Gwmmwl (1796) is a vibrant Paineite attack on war and taxes, and unashamedly revolutionary in tone: Pan gyhoeddodd pobl America eu hunain yn rhyddion oddiwrth bob llywodraeth arall, yr oedd hynny megis seren foreu rhyddid; ac er i frenin Lloegr ddanfon milwyr 30  For Thomas and Davies, see Cathryn A. Charnell-​White, Welsh Poetry of the French Revolution 1789–​1805 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 252–​3, 290–​317. 31  Marion Löffler, Welsh Responses to the French Revolution: Press and Public Discourse 1789–​1802 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). 32  Hywel M. Davies, ‘Terror, Treason and Tourism: the French in Pembrokeshire 1797’, in Mary-​Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston (eds), “Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt”: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013). 33  Ffion M. Jones, ‘ “Brave Republicans”: Representing the French Revolution in a Welsh Interlude’, in Constantine and Johnston (eds), “Footsteps of Liberty”. For a Welsh-​language edition of the play: Ffion Mair Jones, Y Chwyldro Ffrengig a’r Anterliwt: Hanes Bywyd a Marwolaeth Brenin a Brenhines Ffrainc gan Huw Jones, Glanconwy (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2014).

130   Mary-Ann Constantine megis yn gwmmwl i orchuddio’r seren, ymddangos a wnaeth hi; a phan ddaeth gwynt cyfiawnder i chwythu yn demheslyd o’r gorllewin, mi chwalodd y cymmylau tu a’r dwyrain; felly ar doriad y dydd ymddangosodd y seren yn ei phelydr ger bron y byd. When the people of America proclaimed themselves free from every other government, it was like the morning star of liberty; and although the king of England sent soldiers like a cloud to cover the star, it did indeed appear; and when the winds of just­ ice came to blow tempestuously from the west, they dissipated the clouds towards the east; so at the break of day the star appeared in all its rays before the world.34

Just as Edward Williams’s adaptation of radical English songs brought a new tone to Welsh-​language poetry, so did Glan-​y-​Gors’s emulation of Paine’s forthright style open up new possibilities for Welsh prose. This was, for both cultures, a period of dynamic cross-​fertilization, as Welsh topics and themes were taken up by English writers, partly via Iolo Morganwg and William Owen Pughe, but more indirectly too through Thomas Gray’s influential poem ‘The Bard’ (1757), which voiced the legendary defiance of the last Welsh poet in the face of Edward I’s army, capturing the imagination of writers and artists on both sides of the border. ‘Welsh bardic’ in fact proved a highly flexible mode for decades to come, from the visions of Blake to the satirical novels of Thomas Love Peacock, who lived for a year in Maentwrog, near Porthmadog, marrying Jane Griffith, the daughter of the local rector. Peacock learned Welsh and mined its literature for his witty critiques of modernity.35 And then there was the place itself. An extraordinary number of British writers crossed Offa’s Dyke in this period. With the Continent hazardous for travelling from 1793, the peripheries of Britain saw a huge increase in visitors; Snowdonia became a kind of poor man’s Alps, and Welsh rivers and waterfalls were much sketched and described and rhapsodized over in verse. The Wye Valley was a hugely popular destination after 1782, when William Gilpin published Observations on the River Wye, one of an illustrated series designed to highlight the aesthetic merits of different types of landscape. The ‘Wye tour’ developed into a brisk local business, with tourists descending by river from Ross to Chepstow, many providing vivid accounts in their letters and diaries. The grander scenery of North Wales rewarded those who made the effort. Wordsworth, who stayed with his college friend Robert Jones of Llangynhafal, later recalled their painfully slow ascent of Snowdon by night, and the sudden overwhelming effects of mist and moonlight on the mountains: ‘the perfect image of a mighty Mind, | Of one that feeds upon infinity’.36 Less energetic visitors travelling the coach-​road to Holyhead and Dublin might stop in the Vale of Llangollen to admire the craggy ruins of Dinas Bran, the modern miracle of Telford’s Pontcysyllte aqueduct, or, with Anna Seward, ‘ivy’d Valle Crucis, time decay’d, | Dim on the brink of Deva’s

34 

John Jones (Jac Glan-​y-​Gors), Seren Tan Gwmmwl, in Marion Löffler with Bethan Jenkins (eds), Political Pamphlets and Sermons from Wales 1790–​1806 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), 129, 151. 35  Lionel Madden, ‘ “Terrestrial Paradise”: The Welsh Dimension in Peacock’s Life and Work’, Keats-​ Shelley Memorial Bulletin 36 (1985), 41–​56. 36  The Prelude (1805), Book 13, lines 69–​70, in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Wales and the West    131 wandering flood’.37 Seward, like Wordsworth and scores of others, spent time with those much-​visited ‘recluses’, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the Ladies of Llangollen. Further west, in the Conwy Valley tourists would look for the spot where Thomas Gray’s (imaginary) bard leapt to his (imaginary) death, an iconic image figured in the paintings of John Martin, Thomas Jones, and Philippe de Loutherbourg. Painters and artists shaped the way travellers read the landscape around them. It was not all bardic sublimity: Thomas Rowlandson, travelling in 1797, captured snapshot scenes of market towns and rural life, while the paintings of Ruthin-​born, Welsh-​speaking artist Edward Pugh testify to social and political tensions in the landscape that other artists missed or ignored.38 A young J. M. W. Turner visited Wales five times in eight years, producing a wealth of intense sketches and images on which he drew for the rest of his life. Land and landscape became artistic projects in themselves through ventures such as the estate at Hafod, where from 1780 Thomas Johnes set about the aesthetic and agricultural transfiguration of a barren valley in the uplands of mid-​Wales. Hafod became the focus of many tours; the mansion was painted by Turner in 1798, and Coleridge may have visited in 1794 while on a walking tour with his college friend Joseph Hucks (they certainly went to nearby Devil’s Bridge). Johnes’s ‘earthly paradise’, with its glasshouses, waterfalls, and famous library, has been suggested as a presence behind the Xanadu of ‘Kubla Khan’.39 The notion of Wales as a utopian alternative space, a place of social experiment and possibility, did not fade with the retreat of the Pantisocrats. In 1812–​13, Shelley and his new wife Harriet Westbrook twice attempted to settle there, first in the Elan Valley (where plans for a self-​sufficient commune involving the Godwins soon broke down), and then in Tremadog, a progressive model town on the north-​west coast built by William Madocks in 1798 (Robert Owen of Newtown, Powys, was busy constructing his New Lanark in Scotland at almost exactly the same time). As Cian Duffy has shown, Shelley’s engagement with a radically inflected ‘Welsh sublime’ is part of a tradition associating places of natural grandeur with libertarian ideals.40 Much of Queen Mab was composed during this period, as was his autobiographical poem ‘On leaving London for Wales’, which firmly rejects the idea that relocation to Cambria might be construed as flight from political reality: And shall that soul, to selfish peace resigned So soon forget the woe its fellows share? Can Snowdon’s Lethe from the freeborn mind So soon the page of injured penury tear? (lines 28–​31)41 37 

Anna Seward, Llangollen Vale, with Other Poems (London, 1796), 10. John Barrell, Edward Pugh of Ruthin (1763–​1813): A Native Artist (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013). 39  Elizabeth Inglis-​Jones, Peacocks in Paradise (London: Faber and Faber, 1950); Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Kubla Khan in Wales: Hafod and the Devil’s Bridge’, Cornhill Magazine 970 (Spring 1947), 275–​83. 40  Cian Duffy, ‘ “One Draught from Snowdon’s Ever-​sacred Spring”: Shelley’s Welsh Sublime’, in Walford Davies and Pratt (eds), Wales and the Romantic Imagination. 41  Part of Shelley’s projected ‘Volume of Minor Poems’ (the Esdaile Notebook), in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 2, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, with Nora Crook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 38 

132   Mary-Ann Constantine Shelley’s challenge to ‘the conventional and essentially conservative British discourse on the natural sublime’ was not without its own conflicts, internal and social, and the Tremadog attempt—​ rather dramatically—​ also collapsed.42 John Thelwall’s earlier three-​year retreat to Llyswen on the Wye was, in a sense, an escape from politics: a flight from government harassment after 1798, and a form of internal exile. But this healing idyll was destroyed by the death of his six-​year-​old daughter, whose loss, written into the now emptied landscape of the ‘echoing Wye’, is the subject of ten anguished ‘Effusions’ in his Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801).43 Many literary responses to Welsh landscapes in English are, as one might expect, the outsider perspectives of visitors or temporary residents, but there are exceptions: the Anglesey-​born ‘Bard of Snowdon’, Richard Llwyd, another labouring-​class writer (he spent his early life as a servant), produced a fifty-​page topographical poem on ‘Beaumaris Bay’, dense with historical and genealogical information.44 The Flintshire naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant, having gained considerable success with two tours of Scotland undertaken in 1769 and 1772, produced the equally influential Tour in Wales (1778–​83).45 Pennant became the Romantic traveller’s indispensable guide to the northern counties, a counterpart to Gilpin, though quite unlike him in style. Densely antiquarian, his historically layered landscapes are crammed with castles and ancient monuments, and his influence can be traced across a wide range of genres, from poems and song collections to novels.46 Fictional works set in Wales by Welsh and non-​Welsh authors used material from the Tours as a kind of historical wallpaper, exploiting the Gothic possibilities of a landscape littered with symbols of a repressive (and repressed) past.47 The domestic tour in this period is both a highly popular genre and a fascinatingly hybrid and porous one, absorbing and influencing other forms. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater (1822), which vividly recalls his ‘vagabondage’ in Wales as a fugitive schoolboy in 1802, plays, as Damian Walford Davies has shown, with some of the Welsh tour’s typical tropes. These include an intriguing ‘Methodist’ episode (the curious and supposedly seditious behaviour of Welsh Methodists features significantly in visitors’ accounts from the 1790s) whose

42 

Duffy, ‘ “One Draught from Snowdon’s Ever-​sacred Spring” ’, 187.   See Judith Thompson, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), ch. 6. 44  Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Richard Llwyd: Beaumaris Bay and Other Poems (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2015). 45  R. Paul Evans ‘Thomas Pennant (1726–​1798): “The Father of Cambrian Tourists” ’, Welsh History Review 13.4 (1987), 395–​417. 46  Mary-​Ann Constantine, ‘ “To Trace thy Country’s Glories to their Source”: Dangerous History in Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales (1778–​83)’, in Porscha Fermanis and John Regan (eds), Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–​1845 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 47  For Welsh-​based novels, see Jane Aaron, Welsh Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), 13–​49; Andrew Davies, ‘The Reputed Nation of Inspiration: Representations of Wales in Fictions from the Romantic Period 1780–​1829’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Cardiff University, 2001). 43

Wales and the West    133 cultural and political complexities Walford Davies teases out within the context of a contemporary pamphlet controversy.48 Methodism itself, that ‘dangerous enthusiasm’ of the age, in Jon Mee’s phrase,49 is a powerful force in Welsh, and especially Welsh-​language, Romanticism. The hymns of William Williams (Pantycelyn) channelled the passion of thousands from the 1740s onwards; but the classic Romantic ‘vita’ of the Welsh hymn tradition is that of Ann Griffiths, of Dolwar Fach, Llanfyllin, Montgomeryshire. As with the Brontës, Griffiths’s short, circumscribed life has become an inextricable part of her reception: her entire oeuvre consists of a handful of letters and some thirty hymns, the product of an intense and passionate faith lived out in her home and small community after her conversion to Calvinistic Methodism. Born in 1776, she died in childbirth, aged twenty-​nine, a few months after her marriage. Her hymns combine lyricism with intellectual rigour, and are still sung today: Wele’n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd Wrthrych teilwng o fy mryd; Er mai o ran, yr wy’n adnabod Ei fod uwchlaw gwrthrychau’r byd: Henffych fore Y caf ei weled fel y mae

There he stands among the myrtles, Worthiest object of my love; Yet in part I know his glory Towers all earthly things above; One glad morning I shall see him as he is.50

Griffiths’s rejection, during the 1790s, of the cyclical sociability of the Anglican Church’s feasts and fairs in favour of a highly introspective and literate form of Calvinist Methodism has been described as a microcosm of what happens to Wales as whole during this period.51 Traditional popular culture became problematic for potential collectors, who were confounded by irreverence or bawdy (or worse, lurking Catholicism) in their material. Folk tunes rather than words were collected, and redeemed in the service of newly minted hymns—​which themselves then rapidly became part of Welsh folk culture.52 An exception seems to have been the pennillion, short free-​floating epigrammatic stanzas often sung to the harp, which deal in love, or humour, or sometimes, very beautifully, miniature landscapes; they are noted by Pennant, and further discussed by Edward Jones in his Musical Relicks. Songs and harp tunes

48  Damian Walford Davies, ‘ “Sweet Sylvan Routes” and Grave Methodists: Wales in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater’, in Walford Davies and Pratt (eds), Wales and the Romantic Imagination. 49  Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 50  For texts, translations, and biographical context, see the Ann Griffiths website at Cardiff University: www.anngriffiths.cardiff.ac.uk/​contents.html. 51  See the section ‘Persecution and Ridicule’ on the Griffiths website cited in note 50. 52  See E. Wyn James, ‘The Evolution of the Welsh Hymn’, in Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes (eds), Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

134   Mary-Ann Constantine became emblematic of Wales and Welshness in collections of ‘national airs’, such as those of George Thomson (1809–​17) and Felicia Hemans and John Parry (1820). Aimed at a genteel, drawing-​room audience, these works tend to evoke a mildly exotic, medievalist Welsh past of bards and mountain shepherds; their purpose-​written lyrics are in English, not Welsh.53 One other powerful current in British Romanticism which makes of Wales and the West a broader intelligible cultural space is archaeology—​the revelation of the deep past in the landscape.54 The presence of megaliths all down the western half of the British Isles preoccupied scores of local vicars and other enquiring minds from Henry Rowlands in Anglesey (the ‘chief seat’ of the druids, as he claimed) to William Borlase in Ludgvan (who found sacrificial ‘druid-​cups’ in the weathered granite of Penwith). Competing explanations of their origins and purpose—​with Stonehenge a particular focus—​went back to earlier writers such as Leland, Lhuyd, and Stukeley, but the debate was by no means settled in the Romantic period, and the ‘Lines, circles, mounts, a mystery of shapes’ of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude (Book 12, line 340) continued to tease. The Wiltshire antiquarian Sir Richard Colt Hoare was involved in early excavations of Salisbury Plain, and corresponded with Edward Williams; his colleague William Cunnington wrote to the Welsh bard in 1804, inviting him to join their next dig: ‘I have been examining the tumuli, camps, &c of your ancestors. I  lately met with a Briton inturrned at the depth of six feet in the chalk.’55 ‘Your ancestors . . . a Briton’: the link between language and artefact proved hard to resist. Welsh, strongest claimant to being the language of the Ancient Britons, became for many the key to the meaning of the stones. Williams’s determination to make Glamorgan Welsh the purest vehicle of bardism led to a further strengthening of that south-​west cultural swathe: he used Borlase’s Cornish word-​lists to fortify his ‘Silurian’ Welsh, which he contrasted with an upstart northern Welsh poetic tradition contaminated by Scandinavian influence. The earlier philological work of Edward Lhuyd, and latterly that of the orientalist Sir William Jones, produced a growing public awareness of the nature and connections between the surviving Celtic languages, and strengthened the sense of a ‘Brythonic’ West stretching from Cumbria to Brittany.56 When Edward Williams visited the Rollright stone circle, west of Oxford, in 1802, he was ‘impressed with ideas of seriousness’ and mused on ‘the pure primeval religion’ to

53 

George Thomson, A Select Collection of Original Welsh Airs, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1809, 1811, 1817); A Selection of Welsh Melodies: with Symphonies and Accompaniments by John Parry, and Characteristic Words by Mrs. Hemans (London, 1822). 54  Joanne Parker, ‘ “More Wondrous Far than Egypt’s Boasted Pyramids”: The South West’s Megaliths in the Romantic Period’, in Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country. 55  Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ii. 628. 56  Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-​1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Wales and the West    135 which it testified. But a stone circle in England was, for him, a profoundly dislocated monument, bereft of the continuity provided by an ‘ancient language’: No tradition whatever remains of the occasion or use of this circle. Where ancient languages are lost the knowledge and traditions contained in them sink with them into oblivion.57

Loss and oblivion mark Romantic Wales profoundly: in the figure of the last Welsh bard leaping to his death, taking his native poetry with him; in the manuscripts rotting in the damp libraries of gentry families who no longer understand the language in which they are written; in the emptying farmsteads of hungry families heading for America. But the responses to loss are equally overwhelming: a bardic tradition summoned to life in the heart of London, a vivid medieval literature recovered, and Welsh travellers, like Morgan John Rhys, crossing the Atlantic with a whole new world before them.

Further Reading Carruthers, Gerard, and Alan Rawes (eds), English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Constantine, Mary-​Ann, ‘Beauty Spot, Blind Spot: Romantic Wales’, Literature Compass Online 5.3 (2008), 557–​90. Constantine, Mary-​Ann ‘ “Viewing Most Things Thro’ False Mediums”: Iolo Morganwg (1747–​ 1826) and English Perceptions of Wales’, in Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington (eds), Romanticism’s Debatable Lands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Constantine, Mary-​Ann, and Dafydd Johnston (eds), ‘Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt’: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013). Lichtenwalner, Shawna, Claiming Cambria:  Invoking the Welsh in the Romantic Era (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2008). Morgan, Prys, ‘From Death to a View: The Search for Wales in the Romantic Period’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Prescott, Sarah, Eighteenth-​Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). Roe, Nicholas (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country (London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Walford Davies, Damian, Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002). Walford Davies, Damian, and Lynda Pratt (eds), Wales and the Romantic Imagination (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). Williams, Gwyn A., ‘Romanticism in Wales’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

57 

National Library of Wales MS 13174A, 5–​7.

136   Mary-Ann Constantine Websites relating to Romantic-​period Wales www.iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk www.frenchrevolution.wales.ac.uk www.curioustravellers.ac.uk

Chapter 9

Irel and and  U ni on Jim Kelly

On Thursday 21 August 1823, a literary salon was held by the novelist Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) at her house in Dublin. Distinguished guests included the Italian opera singer Angelica Catalani, the poet Thomas Moore, the novelist Charles Maturin, and the playwright Richard Lalor Sheil. There is no record of the evening’s conversation, but Moore had recently completed a tour through southern counties of Ireland wracked by agrarian violence, and earlier that year Sheil had played a foundational role with Daniel O’Connell in the formation of the pro-​Emancipation Catholic Association. It is hard to believe that Moore’s and Sheil’s Catholic politics would have remained unchallenged, particularly when Protestant opinion in the room ranged from Morgan’s liberalism to Maturin’s virulent anti-​Catholicism. Although it is impossible to reconstruct these particular discussions, thinking of Irish Romanticism as a series of overlapping conversations in which local politics, Continental aesthetics, and gender questions converged may help us tackle a body of work that can often seem tonally and thematically incoherent. As a way into the tangled literature and politics of post-​Union Ireland, we might consider how writers in the period imagined social interaction itself as a means of understanding historical agents and epochs. The Preface to Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1801), a novel that has become central to accounts of nineteenth-​century Irish literature, notes that ‘it is from their careless conversations, their half-​finished sentences’ that readers might hope to garner the ‘real characters’ of historical figures.1 Anecdotes and conversations, Edgeworth suggests, offer moments of unfiltered insight into human nature and historical change. Using source materials such as these, she and her contemporaries experimented with new ways of recording and representing experience, and the formal, generic, and thematic hybridity that resulted is in part a reflection of the political and sectarian conflict that was a defining feature of the period. When reporting on Lady Morgan’s evening, the Freeman’s Journal described the salon as ‘a re-​union of talent, national and foreign, now rarely to be met with in the 1 

Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 61. The ‘Preface’ was possibly written by her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth.

138   Jim Kelly drawing-​rooms of this deserted capital’.2 The intrusion of a pessimistic political viewpoint into the article illustrates a fundamental facet of Irish writing in the Romantic era. As Tom Dunne noted in his pioneering essay on Irish Romanticism, literature in this period was ‘intensely and undisguisedly political’.3 The ‘deserted capital’ was a result of the Acts of Union which came into effect on 1 January 1801 and led, over the next three decades, to ‘the steady withdrawal of Irish peers and the richest gentry from Dublin’4 and their replacement by a professional suburban middle ​class. The city therefore paradoxically became figured as culturally deserted whilst the actual population rapidly increased. One form of desertion which became a particular concern of Irish writers was absenteeism (Irish landlords living abroad, usually in London): Edgeworth made it the theme of one of her novels (The Absentee [1812]), and Morgan later wrote a book-​ length essay on the subject (Absenteeism [1825], originally published in parts in the New Monthly Magazine), arguing that the incorporation of Ireland in the United Kingdom had ‘converted a local disease into a national pestilence’.5 This was just one of a series of motifs of decline in nineteenth-​century Irish writing which can be ultimately traced to the Union, a topic that dominated political and cultural discussion in Ireland for the rest of the century. Indeed, if we were to draw a figurative map of Irish writing in this period, we might find ourselves taking political events, rather than literary publications, as our trigonometric points. In this, we have some sanction from the writers themselves, who were aware of how their work was entering a fractious public arena. ‘To live in Ireland and to write for it’, wrote Morgan in the Preface to her novel The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827), ‘is to live and write poignard sur la gorge [knife to the throat]’.6 Ireland was to be written ‘for’, not ‘of ’: a choice of preposition that situates writing as advocacy rather than imitation. Ina Ferris has suggested that Irish fiction, particularly in the guise of the national tale, ‘placed itself directly inside properly public discourse’.7 The irreducibly political character of Irish literature of this period may help to explain the separation between Irish Studies and Romantic Studies as scholarly fields in the twentieth century. Given that much of the critical history of Romanticism interpreted literature as a retreat from political disappointment into imaginative compensation, it is not surprising that the works of Irish Romanticism should often have been neglected, nor that the reawakened interest in this literature in recent years has developed alongside historicist engagements with the ideological underpinnings of canonical Romantic writing. If we are no longer comfortable with the vatic claims made on behalf of mainstream Romanticism, then it is time to return to Irish 2 

Freeman’s Journal (23 Aug. 1823), 1. Italics in the original. Tom Dunne, ‘Haunted by History: Irish Romantic Writing 1800–​50’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 69. 4  Oliver MacDonagh, ‘Ideas and Institutions, 1830–​45’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), Ireland under the Union, 1801–​70 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 191. 5  Lady Morgan, Absenteeism (London, 1825), 153. 6  Lady Morgan, The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (London: Pandora Press, 1988), xv. 7  Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11. 3 

Ireland and Union   139 writing as a site for those contested negotiations between the aesthetic and historical that concern us most today. Ireland, described by Coleridge as ‘that vulnerable heel of the British Achilles’,8 often provided the major British Romantic poets with a testing ground for their own developing political convictions. Coleridge’s distaste at the means by which the Union was achieved was gradually replaced by concerns about the implications of Catholic Emancipation for the security of the new United Kingdom, with a Romantic figure like Robert Emmet reminding him of his own misguided revolutionary enthusiasm.9 For Southey, Ireland was a unique and troubling combination of extremes: ‘no other country has ever had one part of its inhabitants savage enough to commit [barbaric] deeds, while the other has been in such a state of civilization, as thus regularly to record them’.10 Southey’s hostility to Catholic Emancipation—​a recurrent theme in his journalism—​represented one end of the political spectrum, but the same issue also became a cause célèbre for liberals. Ireland was vitally important, for example, to the young Percy Shelley’s attempt to formulate his ideals of political and religious liberty. In 1812, the poet travelled to Dublin to speak in favour of Emancipation; his impassioned Address to the Irish People, written beforehand and published as a pamphlet soon after his arrival, describes Ireland as ‘a beacon at which the world shall light the torch of Freedom’, and links the cause of Catholic Emancipation to a ‘universal emancipation . . . that shall comprehend every individual of whatever nation or principles’.11 In a second pamphlet, Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists (1812), he goes even further, calling on the Irish to embark on a process of political and moral reform that would avoid the mistakes of the French Revolution and bring into being the kind of ideal rational society projected in Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin himself had been interested in Irish affairs through his friendship with the lawyer John Philpot Curran; after visits to Dublin in 1800, he was appalled by the poverty he witnessed but also wary of the potential violence of the Irish situation. He wrote angrily to Shelley after the latter’s Dublin visit to warn about the impossibility of bringing enlightened politics to Ireland: The people of Ireland have been for a series of years in a state of diseased activity; and misjudging that you are, you talk of awakening them. They will rise up like Cadmon’s seed of dragon’s teeth, and their first act will be to destroy each other.12 8 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend: A Series of Essays (London, 1812), 431.   See Timothy Webb, ‘Coleridge and Robert Emmet: Reading the Text of Irish Revolution’, Irish Studies Review 8.3 (2000), 303–​24. 10  ‘On the Catholic Question’ (1812), in Robert Southey, Essays, Moral and Political, 2 vols (London, 1832), ii. 313. For Southey’s views on Ireland and Catholic Emancipation, see Stuart Andrews, Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), esp. chs 1, 2, 9. 11  An Address to the Irish People, in The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vo1. 1, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 13, 29. See Timothy Webb, ‘ “A Noble Field”: Shelley’s Irish Expedition and the Lessons of the French Revolution’, in Nadia Minerva (ed), Robespierre & Co., 3 vols (Bologna: Edizione Analisi, 1990), ii. 553–​76; and Paul O’Brien, Shelley and Revolutionary Ireland (London: Redwords, 1992). 12  Letter to Shelley, 14 Mar. 1812, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), i. 74. See Timothy Webb, ‘Missing Robert 9

140   Jim Kelly Godwin’s novel Mandeville (1817) contains a vivid depiction of the bloody events of the Ulster Rebellion of 1641, giving historical ballast to his earlier concerns about Shelley’s political preaching. The year 1812 also saw Ireland act as another opening point into wider political issues for a young Lord Byron, who memorably described the Union in a speech to the House of Lords as ‘the union of the shark with his prey’.13 Byron would return to Ireland in his writing and thought throughout his career, his interest fuelled by both his political involvement with Whig circles and his personal friendship with Thomas Moore. Eighteenth-​ century Irish literature had already developed a strong sense of Ireland’s separateness from Britain, writers such as William Molyneux and Jonathan Swift being two of the most prominent representatives of a particularly strong form of Protestant patriotism. The apotheosis of this brand of patriotism would be found in the granting of a measure of legislative independence in 1782 and the establishment of the new Irish Houses of Parliament on College Green in Dublin. Despite being oligarchic, exclusively Protestant, and notorious for corruption and venality, the Irish Parliament of 1782–​1800 would nevertheless become swathed in nostalgia in the post-​Union period as a concrete expression of Irish independence. The Union led to a renewed focus on Irish identity; literature was now concerned to give what Maria Edgeworth called ‘an exact representation of the manner of being’14 of the Irish populace and its customs and culture. The abolition of the Protestant Parliament and the movement for Catholic Emancipation meant questions about who had access to a public voice, and how that voice would be mediated or enunciated, became central to Irish writing. The Union was described by Thomas Moore in 1824 as ‘the phantom by which the dawn of the Nineteenth century was welcomed’.15 Far from providing an image of wholeness and unity, the Union came to be experienced as a disjunctive disturbance, a colonial fiction which resulted in discontent and dislocation. William Parnell, a liberal Member of Parliament for Wicklow, denounced the Union as ‘a name, a sound, a fiction; there is no Union; the nominal Union is only an additional source of discord’.16 For Parnell, ‘national dignity . . . is the great source of national wealth; and, on the contrary, national degradation, arising from a want of sympathy or interest in a

Emmet: William Godwin’s Irish Expedition’, in Anne Dolan, Patrick M. Geoghegan, and Darryl Jones (eds), Reinterpreting Emmet: Essays on the Life and Legacy of Robert Emmet (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007). 13 

‘Roman Catholic Claims Speech’, in Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 41. 14  Maria Edgeworth, ‘Preface’, Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, by Mary Leadbeater (London, 1811), iv. Italics in original. 15  Thomas Moore, Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824), ed. Emer Nolan (Dublin: Field Day Press, 2008), 363. 16  William Parnell, Enquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland, by an Irish Country Gentleman, 2nd edn (London, 1805), 81.

Ireland and Union   141 Government, is the origin of national poverty’.17 Dignity and degradation became the twin poles of Irish experience in the post-​Union period, a culturally rich and proudly separate ideal of Irish nationality existing alongside a materially and politically impoverished present. In the sphere of publishing, the Union harmonized copyright law, devastating an Irish publishing industry reliant on reprints of British material, with one novelist interrupting a character’s speech to mention ‘the fact of the Dublin press now being kept open only by pamphlets and newspapers’.18 Such angry interjections were rooted in real difficulties, although they obscured an overall rise in literacy rates and demand for reading material.19 Irish writers, though, found themselves publishing with both Edinburgh and London firms. The collaboration resulting from the former in particular led to the creation of what Katie Trumpener has termed a ‘transperipheral literary life’,20 in which writers from one part of the newly United Kingdom were aware that the market for their work was composed of an audience not always acquainted with local customs and culture. In Irish fiction, the result was, on the one hand, an ‘auto-​exoticism’ (Joep Leerssen’s phrase21) in which cultural differences were deliberately heightened for aesthetic effect, and, on the other hand, the frequent incorporation of footnotes, glossaries, and other paratextual material explaining local colour. Other forms of literary production suffered a more material movement to Britain. This was felt particularly in drama, with contemporary and subsequent accounts of Irish theatre in the period emphasizing the role the patent theatres in London played in drawing away Irish talent. A minor pamphlet war was initiated by John Wilson Croker’s Familiar Epistles to Frederick Jones Esq. (1804), a poem satirizing the eponymous manager of the Dublin’s Theatre Royal. Croker accused Jones of ‘a total inattention to the production of Irish abilities’ and asked ‘where is the soul of drama fled?’22 The answer was London, to where Maturin and Sheil, along with many others, had been attracted by the patent theatres at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Maturin’s most successful play, Bertram, or, The Castle of St Aldobrand (1816), created a vigorous debate about the standards of British theatrical culture (the participants included Coleridge, who later reprinted his attack on Bertram in Biographia Literaria

17

 Parnell, Enquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents, 55. Charles Maturin, The Wild Irish Boy, 3 vols (London, 1808), iii. 139. 19  For the post-​Union publishing industry, see Charles Benson, ‘The Irish Book Trade in the Romantic Period’, in Jim Kelly (ed.), Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations, and Scenes of Cultural Production (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and James H. Murphy (ed.), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, vol. 4: The Irish Book in English, 1800–​1891 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 20  Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 17. 21  Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth-​century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 35–​8. 22  John Wilson Croker, Familiar Epistles to Frederick Jones, Esq. on the Present State of the Irish Stage, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1804), xiv, 28. 18 

142   Jim Kelly [1817]23). This was partly connected to the Byronic hero’s acknowledgement of his own dislocated situation: The wretched have no country: that dear name Comprizes home, kind kindred, fostering friends, Protecting laws, all that binds man to man—​ But none of these are mine. (II. iii. 82–​5)24

In the same year as Maturin’s greatest success on the London stage, however, the Dublin Examiner was lamenting the increasing recourse to popular musical entertainments on the Dublin stage; not surprising, it suggested, as ‘for a considerable time past, the numbers of the opulent and educated have been daily decreasing’.25 While such prejudices against musical entertainments were present in London theatrical circles, the Union provided Irish critics with a much more specific causal factor in the decline of public taste. Such ‘decline’ narratives initiated by the debate about the Union meant that the political undercurrents of ruin-​writing and nostalgic Weltschmerz prevalent in European Romanticism became all too visible in Ireland. The Irish Parliament that the Union abolished had been located on College Green; its purchase by the Bank of Ireland in 1801 symbolized for many the replacement of a proud symbol of Protestant patriotism with sordid commercial modernity, as if in fulfilment of their countryman Edmund Burke’s famous warning that the age of chivalry had been replaced by that of ‘sophisters, economists, and calculators’.26 In Maturin’s novel Women, or, Pour et Contre (1818), the heroine, an opera singer modelled on Madame Catalani, views the Irish Houses of Parliament and is led to a Burkean declamation: I behold a building which would have embellished Athens in the purest days of its architectural pride—​It was the Senate-​house of Ireland—​It is now the Bank; and along those steps, worthy of a temple of Minerva or of Jupiter, the inhabitants of this impoverished city, without trade and without wealth, are crawling to pay bills.27

23 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), ch. 23, essentially a reprint of five letters Coleridge contributed to The Courier in Aug. and Sept. 1816. 24  Charles Maturin, Bertram, or, The Castle of St Aldobrand (London, 1816). 25  ‘Some Observations on the Present State of Musical Taste in Ireland’, Dublin Examiner 2 (Dec. 1816), 140. 26  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1986), 170. 27  Charles Maturin, Women, or, Pour et Contre, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1818), iii. 296. Emphasis in the original.

Ireland and Union   143 As Claire Connolly notes, such acknowledgements of architectural splendour and political or moral ruin ‘are systematically noted in novels from 1801 on’, where ‘Ireland’s natural beauties and economic decay compete for narrative space . . . as if no one were quite sure yet which were the more compelling’.28 However, Burkean celebrations of tradition required an investment in a fabricated nostalgia, and, as recent critics have argued, Burke’s celebration of organic community had different implications in Ireland, where colonial power relations had sundered Catholic and Gaelic communities from ancestral lands.29 Notions of authenticity, sincerity, and originality, central to other versions of Romanticism, were complicated by the situation in Ireland, where writers had to acknowledge the contingency of any identity claims. The novel became a particularly important mode for constructing self-​reflective representations of Irish culture. This often led to fictions which refused to conform to accepted literary conventions, to the exasperation of British readers: The last book I have read is Florence Macarthy, which most assuredly is not short in any sense of the word; it is not only long but tedious. You know, of course, the Dramatis Personae—​a hero, compounded of Buonaparte and General Mina; a hero, en second, Lord Byron; a villain, Mr Croker; and a heroine, Lady Morgan herself; this, with a plot half made of O’Donnel and half Guy Mannering, —​a vast deal of incredible antiquarianism, and Ireland! Ireland! Ireland! as the one single sauce to all these viands.30

The Irish novel here is a polygeneric mishmash unified only, if at all, by an overbearing interest in nationality. For modern critics, however, the generic experimentation, formal innovation, and thematic variation characteristic of Irish fiction of this period are one of its most fascinating features, and an important clue to the way history impacted on literature. The two novelists who, from the start, have dominated accounts of post-​Union fiction are Sydney Owenson (who after her marriage in 1812 published under the name Lady Morgan) and Maria Edgeworth. The latter, after moving to Ireland in 1782, was to spend most of her life in County Longford on her family’s estates, yet her novels engaged with international issues, set a critical benchmark for prose fiction in the period, and, through her influence on Walter Scott’s model of the historical novel, had a formative influence on nineteenth-​century realism. Edgeworth’s first book, Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), introduced a set of concerns about the interconnections

28 

Claire Connolly, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–​1829 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 41. 29  See Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1–​48. 30  Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, 2 vols (London, 1872), i. 42, cited in ‘Anecdotal Records’ for Lady Morgan’s Florence MacCarthy (1818), in British Fiction, 1800–​1829: A Database of Production, Circulation and Reception, at: www.british-​fiction.cf.ac.uk.

144   Jim Kelly between private and public life that would resonate throughout her work. Rejecting the idea that the domestic and the political could be separated, the book instead proposed that ‘human affairs are chained together; and female influence is a necessary and important link, which you cannot break without destroying the whole’.31 Her work would subsequently explore what it meant to have public agency, and insist on the importance of education as the bedrock of female authority in the domestic sphere, and thus moral stability in the public. Belinda (1801), for example, uses the traditional form of the courtship novel to plot the transformation of a dissolute and cancer-​ridden woman of fashion into a proper mother and wife. Early in the novel Lady Delacour recalls that ‘economy was a word which I had never heard of in my life’, though ‘it was true, I had heard of such a thing as national economy’,32 her dangerous ignorance of the domestic variety signalling one the reasons for her decline. Edgeworth’s fiction repeatedly demonstrates the link between the domestic and the national, and, while its central plots involve the conventional themes of courtship and marriage, it aims to reveal the broader application of the principles of political economy and improvement, both in Britain and Ireland. Perhaps her most famous work, and certainly the most influential in an Irish context, Castle Rackrent (1801), is also one of her most formally experimental, constructed around a monologue by an Irish servant, Thady Quirk, recounting three generations of an improvident Anglo-​Irish family. Here is a comic illustration of the dangers of ignoring the types of rational economic principles more didactically outlined in novels such as Belinda. Castle Rackrent is a deeply ironic novel, where ‘honest’ Thady’s narration consistently invites contrary readings. Edgeworth based it on conversations with a Longford servant John Langan, and while its publication date links it conveniently to the passing of the Act of Union (to which it explicitly refers), its tale of an Anglo-​Irish family gradually being usurped by a native Irish lawyer, Thady’s son Jason, ties it more closely to the volatile 1790s. Maturin referred to Edgeworth’s ‘sacred horror of anything like exaggerated feeling, or tumid language’,33 and while Edgeworth did cast a sceptical eye on sentimental excess in Irish and British fiction, her work constantly investigates the styles of language that could be employed in mediating experience in fiction. Ennui (1809) is indicative of Edgeworth’s acknowledgement of the different literary registers that Ireland can invite. An enervated English aristocrat travels to his Irish estates in search of new stimuli, and, like many travellers, brings a perspective moulded by Gothic and Romantic literary antecedents. This leads to what is a characteristically Edgeworthian deployment of bathos: The state tower, in which, after reiterated entreaties, I was at last left alone to repose, was hung with magnificent, but ancient tapestry. It was so like a room in a haunted castle, that if I  had not been too much fatigued to think of any thing, I  should 31 

Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, ed. Claire Connolly (London: Dent, 1993), 31 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 39. 33  Charles Maturin, ‘Novel-​writing’, British Review and London Journal 11 (1818), 57. 32 

Ireland and Union   145 certainly have thought of Mrs Radcliffe. I am sorry to say that I have no mysteries, or even portentous omens, to record of this night; for the moment that I lay down in my antiquated bed, I fell into a profound sleep.34

Ennui, as with much Irish fiction in the period, is marked by intertextual allusion. The narrator, Lord Glenthorn, has to be educated by the benevolent Scottish land-​agent McLeod in the best principles of political economy, and he can only become a legitimate landlord once he has settled into a career in the law. He thus reverses the trajectory outlined in Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), in which the English traveller rejects careers in politics and law in favour of adopting a romanticized vision of Irish culture. Edgeworth’s father sent an ambivalent compliment to Morgan on her third novel that suggests the deep stylistic differences between the two major Irish novelists of the period: Maria, who reads (it is said), as well as she writes, has entertained us with several passages from the Wild Irish Girl, which I thought superior to any parts of the book which I had read. Upon looking over her shoulder, I found she had omitted some superfluous epithets.35

Those ‘superfluous epithets’ were a stylistic result of Morgan’s heavy investment in the culture of sensibility, which had been prevalent in her first two novels, St Clair, or, The Heiress of Desmond (1802) and The Novice of Saint Dominick (1805). Morgan portrayed a version of national feeling centred on female cultural genius. In Woman, or, Ida of Athens (1809) she asserts that ‘the heart is always a patriot’, and that ‘it is by the influence of natural sentiment that the ties of society are harmonized and reunited’.36 Sentiment in Morgan’s writing does not indicate an emotional interiority that rejects public agency; rather, as Julia Wright notes, sensibility and sentiment form pathways for national and international cultural definition.37 For Morgan, ‘natural’ and ‘national’ were complementary terms (they appear together in both Woman and The Wild Irish Girl). Yet, in spite of this, her fiction is marked by a deeply ironic self-​reflexivity that belies its investment in ‘authentic’ Irish culture. Lady Morgan was the daughter of the actor and theatrical manager Robert Owenson, and her fiction abounds with theatrical displays and dramatic tableaux. With The Wild Irish Girl, she used ‘national tale’ in her subtitle as a descriptor for her generic experiment, with its motif of the English traveller, the reconciliatory marriage plot, and extended disquisitions on national character. Her work partakes of a wider Continental trend, exemplified by Madame de Staël’s Delphine (1802) and Corinne, ou, L’Italie (1807), in placing a highly gifted woman at the centre of the imaginative life of the nation (see 34 Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 179. 35 

Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries, and Correspondence, ed. W. Hepworth-​Dixon, 2 vols (London, 1862), i. 294. 36  Sydney Owenson, Woman, or, Ida of Athens, 4 vols (London, 1809), iv. 61–​2, 65. 37  Julia M. Wright, Ireland, India, and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 16.

146   Jim Kelly Erik Simpson, Chapter 24 in this volume). In Patriotic Sketches of Ireland (1807), Morgan writes that ‘politics can never be a woman’s science, but patriotism must naturally be a woman’s sentiment’.38 This focus on sensibility and sentiment enables Morgan to draw imaginative and affective links between the situation in Ireland and a wider colonial world—​as, for example, in the emotive footnote in The Wild Irish Girl linking British policy in Ireland during 1798 to Spanish cruelty against natives in South America.39 A novelistic culture interested in excessive emotion, sublime landscapes, violent historical legacies, and sectarian strife all contributed to the development of Gothic fiction in Ireland. The eighteenth century saw important precedents in this respect. Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796) retained its popularity across the nineteenth century, while Stephen Cullen’s The Castle of Inchvally (1796) utilized the Gothic’s interest in religious conflict to subtly argue in favour of the United Irishmen’s message of toleration. While the case for a coherent tradition of the ‘Irish Gothic’ has sometimes been overstated, there is no doubt that the work of Charles Maturin brought the themes of historical violence, internecine conflict, and religious fanaticism to a new pitch of intensity. In Maturin’s novels the sensibilities required to sustain the romantic investment of the national tale break down into madness. His work is densely allusive and refers repeatedly to Staël, Morgan, Edgeworth, and James Macpherson, as well as conventional Gothic authors. Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is a series of interlocking tales, originally conceived as a mix between Moore’s oriental poem Lalla Rookh (1817) and James Hogg’s The Queen’s Wake (1813).40 Its lack of stable structure collapses the readerly distance experienced in the national tale and historical novel. For Maturin, ‘the drama of terror has the irresistible power of converting its audience into its victims’.41 The central figure of the Wanderer travels across history, a Satanic parody of the reader of historical novels, able to speak anecdotally about historical characters, but having little or no agency over historical events. As Katie Trumpener has noted, the national tale’s synchronic presentation of differing cultures provided the groundwork for the historical novel’s diachronic narrative of succeeding stages of development.42 The 1820s saw an increase in the number of historical novels written in or about Ireland, many of them taking Scott’s Waverley novels as a model. In tandem with political developments, this decade also witnesses the increased prominence of Catholic writers who embed pro-​Emancipation politics in their fictions. Reviewing a selection of Irish novels for the Edinburgh Review in 1824, Thomas Moore suggested that ‘it is pleasant, after ages of bad romance in politics, to find thus, at last, good politics in romance’.43 The novels he reviewed included work by John Banim, who, 38 

Sydney Owenson, Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, 2 vols (London, 1807), i, p. xxi. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 176–​7. 40  Jim Kelly, Charles Maturin: Authorship, Authenticity, and the Nation (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), 148. 41  Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 257. 42 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 128–​57. 43  Thomas Moore, ‘Irish Novels’, Edinburgh Review 43 (1825–​6), 372. 39 

Ireland and Union   147 both alone and in partnership with his brother Michael, published a series of stories incorporating Irish folk superstitions (Tales of the O’Hara Family [1825]), studies of psychological realism (The Nowlans [1826]), and historical novels (The Boyne Water [1826], The Croppy; A Tale of 1798 [1828]). John Banim’s The Anglo-​Irish of the Nineteenth Century (1828), with both its national tale plot and its title (historicizing the previous three decades of Irish fiction), demonstrated the newly prominent public voice of middle-​class Catholic aspiration that would increasingly dominate Irish political and cultural life. In The Wild Irish Girl, Morgan had briefly and damningly characterized Ulster as ‘a Scotch colony’ where the mind is ‘not too deeply fascinated by the florid virtues, the warm overflowings of generous and ardent qualities’.44 Fictional representations of Ulster were comparatively rare in the post-​Union period, perhaps surprising given the vigour of the literary culture of the province in the 1790s. Some of the most inventive writing to precede the Union came from a collection of rural poets in Ulster. The Weaver Poets, including James Orr and Samuel Thomson, varied between Ulster–​ Scots poetry modelled on Robert Burns and georgic poetry in an English neoclassical idiom.45 With many links to the radical Presbyterian hinterland of the Belfast United Irishmen, their work exemplifies both the heterogeneity and the transnational nature of Irish poetry in the period. The epistolary community of poets centred around Thomson, for instance, looks east to Scotland and west to America (but very rarely south to Dublin). Orr’s poetry in particular is an early example of a transatlantic sphere of interest in Irish poetry, a result of his temporary exile in North America following 1798. His 1804 collection contains both loco-​descriptive poetry based around his townland of Ballycarry in County Antrim, and poems such as ‘Song Composed on the Banks of Newfoundland’.46 The figure of the forced emigrant became a popular trope, although ironically one of the most famous examples, ‘The Exile of Erin’, was composed by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell. Along with the growth of antiquarian interest in Gaelic bardic poetry, the eighteenth century witnessed the development of topographical poetry that attempted to use picturesque locales as aids to comprehending historical development in Ireland. The latter half of the century in particular saw the celebration of sublime landscapes such as Killarney in County Kerry. John Leslie’s Killarney (1772), Anna Maria Edward’s ‘The Princess of Killarney’ (1787), and Joseph Atkinson’s Killarney (1798) all attested to the growing centrality of Killarney to picturesque tours of Ireland. Killarney’s status as a fashionable tourist destination was well established by the end of the eighteenth century, but Irish landscape poetry was complicated by having to either acknowledge or

44 Morgan, Wild Irish Girl, 198. 45 

For the influence of Burns, see Frank Ferguson and Andrew R. Holmes, Revising Robert Burns and Ulster: Literature, Religion and Politics, c. 1770–​1920 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). 46  See Carol Baraniuk, James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014). For the literary circle around Thomson, see Jennifer Orr (ed.), The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766–​ 1816) (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012).

148   Jim Kelly smooth over the threat of insurgency that mountainous landscapes could hold. In the background of later poetry on Killarney, or the similarly picturesque Glendalough in County Wicklow, was an uneasy awareness of radical violence behind the sublime landscape.47 Violence, by both rebels and yeomanry, intrudes. A striking example of this is in Mary Leadbeater’s Poems (1808), which sets side-​by-​side a georgic poem, ‘Ballitore’, celebrating her townland in County Kildare, and a later, post-​1798, ‘View of Ballitore, Taken from Mount Bleak’, incorporating a ‘raging host, on blood and plunder bent’.48 The pastoral tranquillity of the earlier poem is replaced in the later one by a scene of military occupation during the time of the rebellion. The appreciation of landscape and refined emotion could easily devolve into morbid mania after the trauma of the rebellion and Union. Irish poetry in this period shows a fascination with the figure of the female maniac, suffering material and mental depredation as a result of 1798. Popular ballads grew around the figure of Mary le More, a young woman on the Cork/​Kerry border who tells the narrator about how her father and lover were murdered by the yeomen who raped her. 49 In Leadbeater’s poem ‘The Triumph of Terror’, an old man is rescued from the yeomanry by his daughter, ‘but epileptick fits were the consequence of the shock which she received, and which caused her untimely death’.50 This somatic consequence of extreme emotional stress occurs in much Irish literature in the period, as a poetry of sensibility grounded in an individual’s emotional receptivity encountered overwhelming historical events. On the loyalist side, there was a proliferation of stories of rebels slaughtering mother and child. The rebellion certainly provided a traumatic experience that invited poets to incorporate imagery and rhetorical strategies that were more prevalent in violent Gothic fiction. The Catholic poet Denys Shyne Lawlor demonstrates how a paean to ‘The Genius of Erin’ can suddenly descend into a bloodbath when the larger forces of history are acknowledged: Visions of horror! Visions of despair! Why, ever hover round our Emerald shore? Grief in her homes, and weeping in the air, Ireland is pillowed on a couch of gore.51

Images of blood and gore proliferate, especially in chapbook and pamphlet literature. History understood as violence bursts upon the private, invading both the home and the body, and leaving only traumatized victims. If there is a meta-​narrative to Irish poetry in 47 

Luke Gibbons, ‘Topographies of Terror: Killarney and the Politics of the Sublime’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Special Issue on Irish Cultural Studies, ed. John Paul Waters, 95 (1996), 23–​44; Julia Wright Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014). 48  ‘View of Ballitore’, in Mary Leadbeater, Poems (Dublin, 1808), 353. 49  See Siobhán Kilfeather, ‘Terrific Register: The Gothicization of Atrocity in Irish Romanticism’, boundary 2 31.1 (2004), 49–​7 1 (p. 63). 50 Leadbeater, Poems, 309. 51  Denis Shyne Lawlor, The Harp of Innisfail (London, 1829), 5.

Ireland and Union   149 the years surrounding the rebellion and Act of Union, it involves the attempt to accommodate sentimental literature to brutal historical experience. Mary Tighe’s poetic career is another illustration of how sentimental poetry that seems initially to be completely focused on interiority also has a public bearing. Tighe was raised in a strongly Methodist household and entered into an unhappy marriage of convenience with her cousin Henry Tighe, a Member of Parliament. Her unpublished novel Selena (completed in 1803)  deals frankly with alcoholism, domestic violence, and disappointment in conjugal love—​the reconciliatory narrative of marriage prevalent in other Irish fiction is undermined in this autobiographical novel. Her poem ‘Bryan Byrne, of Glenmalure’ (1811) can also be read in light of the national tale’s reconciliatory plot. Here, a mixed marriage between Catholic and Protestant is destroyed by the 1798 rebellion, when vengeful yeomanry kill the Catholic Bryan Byrne and leave his Protestant wife Ellen a maniac roaming the Wicklow hills with her orphan child. As with much poetry about 1798, the infant covered in blood is a central image: Still to the corse by horror joined, The shrinking infant closely clung, And fast his little arms intwined, As round the bleeding neck he hung.52

Tighe’s poetry displays an intense sensibility, related both to the emotional intensity that was central to eighteenth-​century Methodism and to her own physical frailty (her later years were spent struggling with consumption). Her long Spenserian poem Psyche, or, The Legend of Love (1805), an important influence on Keats, has become prominent in accounts of women’s poetry in the period.53 Defending her poem against those critics ‘ever disgusted by the veiled form of allegory’, Tighe claims in her preface to have ‘endeavoured to let my meaning be perfectly obvious’, a claim that speaks of a poetic consciousness anxious about communicability and interpretation.54 Psyche is a poem that seems to reinforce poetic disengagement from society, celebrating the ‘silence and solitude the Muses love’ (l. 505). As we will see, Tighe’s atmosphere of languorous eroticism appealed to Thomas Moore, who had begun his poetic career with the far more risqué Odes of Anacreon (1800) and The Poetical Works of Thomas Little, Esq. (1801), but later incorporated the sighs, silences, and solitudes of Tighe’s poetry into the image patterns and tonalities of his Irish Melodies (1808–​34), reinforcing the connection between melancholy sensibility and political sentiment.

52  ‘Bryan Byrne of Glenmalure’, lines 209–​12, in The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe, ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 25. 53  See Greg Kucich, ‘Gender Crossings: Keats and Tighe’, Keats-​Shelley Journal 44 (1995), 29–​39; Andrea Henderson, ‘Keats, Tighe, and the Chastity of Allegory’, European Romantic Review 10.3 (1999), 279–​306. 54  Collected Poems and Journals of Tighe, 53–​4.

150   Jim Kelly By contrast, the United Irishman William Drennan’s Fugitive Pieces, in Verse and Prose (1815) lament the loss of republican masculinity and express suspicion of overly emotional men. Drennan’s ‘To Ireland’ addresses ‘a nation of abortive men’,55 and his verse registers the failure of Irish manhood adequately to live up to ideals of classical public virtue. His earlier ‘Wake of William Orr’ had urged its audience to avoid feminine displays of emotion in favour of manly stoicism: Here we watch our brother’s sleep; Watch with us, but do not weep: Watch with us, thro’ dead of night—​ But expect the morning light.56

Yet poetry, with its emphasis on emotional interiority and sensibility, frequently invites tears, and even Drennan opens Fugitive Pieces with his lachrymose poem ‘Erin’, in which thoughts of the past make ‘tears gush from her eyes’.57 As Kenneth Johnston suggests, this is a ‘lyricism of loss’.58 At the centre of the collection is ‘Glendalloch’, a poem composed in the years immediately following the Union, which combines sentiment and political realism to register the sense of decay and decline that was pervasive in Irish writing. The Romantic celebration of ruins here transmutes into a political meditation on the Union’s wrecking of Irish nationality, and the ruins at Glendalough become a cemetery for Ireland’s parliamentary autonomy: On the round tower of Glendalloch was often blown the horn of war. Amidst a silent and melancholy waste, it still raises its head above the surrounding fragments, as if moralizing on the ruins of our country, and the wreck of its legislative independence.59

‘Silent and melancholy’ had been the dominant mood of Celticism established by James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry of the mid-​eighteenth century, and post-​Union Irish poetry would continue to echo Macpherson.60 The relationship between silent tears and defeated nationality characterizes much Irish poetry in the period, and the ease with which tears were called on in Thomas Moore’s poetry provoked stinging criticism from William Hazlitt:

55 

William Drennan, Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose (Belfast, 1815), 13. William Drennan, ‘The Wake of William Orr’ (1797), in Irish Literature, 1750–​1900: An Anthology, ed. Julia Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 138. 57 Drennan, Fugitive Pieces, 1 58  Kenneth Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 158. 59 Drennan, Fugitive Pieces, 116. 60  See Leith Davis, ‘Malvina’s Daughters: Irish Women Poets and the Sign of the Bard’, in Kelly (ed.), Ireland and Romanticism. 56 

Ireland and Union   151 If these prettinesses pass for patriotism, if a country can heave from its heart’s core only these vapid, varnished sentiments, lip-​deep, and let its tears of blood evaporate in an empty conceit, let it be governed as it has been. There are here no tones to waken Liberty, to console Humanity.61

Hazlitt’s accusation of insincerity in Moore’s Irish Melodies has dogged critical discussion of his work. However, Moore never claimed some antique origin for his brand of sentiment, perhaps gesturing towards Macpherson’s Ossian when he noted that ‘we may look no further than the last disgraceful century for the origin of most of those wild and melancholy strains which were at once the offspring and solace of grief ’. Moore’s characterization of Irish music as ‘the tone of defiance, followed by the languor of despondency’62 brings to mind Wordsworth’s use of the word ‘despondency’ in The Excursion (1814) to describe the depression that follows from the disappointment of Revolutionary hopes. Moore’s Irish Melodies should be seen as not only capturing a prevalent post-​ Union Irish structure of feeling, but also tying into a wider despondency in liberal political and literary circles. The silent mourning of Drennan’s ‘Wake on William Orr’ is given an emotional undercurrent in Moore’s elegy on the United Irishman Robert Emmet: Oh! breathe not his name; let it sleep in the shade, Where cold and unhonoured his relics are laid; Sad, silent, and dark be the tears that we shed, As the night-​dew that falls on the grass o’er his head.  . . .  And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls Shall long keep his memory green in our souls. (lines 1–​4, 7–​8)

Emmet is here transformed into a secular saint, the romance of his love for Sarah Curran and famous speech from the dock removed from the messy reality of the abortive 1803 rebellion in Dublin. The Irish Melodies are full of ‘silent tears’ (‘Erin! The Tear and the Smile in Your Eyes’), ‘mute’ harps (‘The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls’), and sighs pregnant with memory (‘Let Erin Remember’). Moore’s melancholic sentimentalizing of Irish insurgency was often attacked for promoting a quietist political stance, but the repeated invocations to silence may in fact be signalling the unrepresentability of the Irish situation; in response to a failure in language the reader (or listener) is told to remember. Though the sentimental diction of the Melodies left them open to parody, Moore’s influence on European national movements was immense. The Young Ireland ballad-​ collector Charles Gavan Duffy suggested that ‘Moore’s songs bear translation. They not 61  The Spirit of the Age (1825), in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), vii. 225–​6. 62  ‘Prefatory Letter on Music’ (1810), in Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 10 vols (London, 1840–​1), iv. 120–​1, 118. Except where indicated, Moore’s poems are quoted from this edition.

152   Jim Kelly only have appeared in every European language, but they supplied the Poles with their most popular revolutionary and national songs.’63 There is a certain irony in the fact that Moore was remembered as a quietist, given that he was one of the most successful and prominent satirists of the period. The savage indignation of Corruption and Intolerance (1808) is the obverse side of the melancholy memorializing of the Irish Melodies. Here the language of the heart becomes violently political: And oh! my friend, wert thou but near me now, To see the spring diffuse o’er Erin’s brow  . . .  Thy heart would burn.64

The 1820s saw an increased level of Protestant missionary activity in Ireland, which along with the mass political mobilization of the Catholic population in favour of Emancipation led to a particularly fraught atmosphere of sectarian conflict. Moore increasingly turned to prose to satirize those who ‘make this life hell, in honour of the next!’ (‘Intolerance’, line 62). Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824) and Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (1833) both bring a hard satirical edge to Moore’s critique of British policy in Ireland, and to Protestant vilification of the Catholic Church. While Moore went on adding to the Irish Melodies until 1834, the 1820s is, as with fiction, a convenient endpoint for a discussion of poetry in the post-​Union period. Only six years after her celebrated soirée, Lady Morgan captured the feeling that 1829 marked an epochal shift in Irish literature, writing that among ‘the multitudinous effects of Catholic Emancipation, I do not hesitate to predict a change in the character of Irish authorship’.65 After the achievement of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, political energy moved into Repeal of the Union, and the political and social scene that a new generation of poets such as Thomas Davis and James Clarence Mangan encountered had changed beyond recognition.

Further Reading Connolly, Claire, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–​1829 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012). Deane, Seamus, Strange Country:  Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Duff, David, and Catherine Jones (eds), Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007).

63 

Charles Gavan Duffy, ‘Thomas Moore’, in Seamus Deane (gen. ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), i. 1251. 64  ‘Intolerance’, lines 43–​4, 53, in Jane Moore (ed.), The Satires of Thomas Moore, vol. 5 of British Satire, 1785–​1840, gen. ed. John Strachan (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 39–​40. 65  Lady Morgan, The Book of the Boudoir, 2 vols (London, 1829), i, p. vii.

Ireland and Union   153 Dunne, Tom, ‘Haunted by History:  Irish Romantic Writing 1800–​50’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Ferris, Ina, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Kelly, Jim (ed.), Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Kilfeather, Siobhán, ‘Terrific Register: The Gothicization of Atrocity in Irish Romantic Writing’, boundary 2 31.1 (2004), 49–​7 1. Leerssen, Joep, Remembrance and Imagination:  Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). Orr, Jennifer, Literary Networks and Dissenting Print Culture in Romantic-​Period Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Pittock, Murray, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Rafroidi, Patrick, Irish Literature in the Romantic Period, 1789–​ 1850, 2 vols (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Welch, Robert, Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980). Wright, Julia M., Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014).

Pa rt  I I I

H I E R A RC H I E S

Chapter 10

Rom antic Gene rat i ons Michael Bradshaw

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is Truth, truth beauty’—​that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.1

The final stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, written in 1819, considers the survival of a cultural artefact after the era in which it was fashioned. The urn—​and by implication, the text of the ode—​outlives the distinctive social and economic conditions that gave rise to it, becoming an isolated voice from an extinct generation. Although this stanza is sometimes cited as a precarious declaration of poetry’s transcendent power, Keats’s point could alternatively be called ‘historicist’: the text acknowledges that the meaning of a work of art is contextual and specific to the generation that produced it, and that its survival into subsequent alien generations will distort this meaning and make interpretation partisan and incomplete. In the phrase ‘in midst of other woe | Than ours’ Keats imagines every age or social environment as being characterized by suffering; this note of pessimism echoes in another poem from his 1820 volume, in the seventh stanza of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! | No hungry generations tread thee down’ (lines 61–​2). All generations are hungry and oppressed in this melancholy vision; and yet they may be connected and compensated by the work of art, as it moves across historical boundaries. In the twenty-​first century, both the term and the concept ‘generation’ continue to inform, and to some extent regulate, the ways in which Romantic writing is read, studied, and imagined. It is a challenge for newcomers to the subject to comprehend how and why the work of such radically different authors as Wordsworth and Keats are contained within the single term ‘Romantic’:  the ruralism and solemnity of one 1 

‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, lines 46–​50, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1989). All Keats quotations are from this edition.

158   Michael Bradshaw contrast sharply with the aestheticized classicism and sensuousness of the other, and it is only when concepts of imagination, subjectivity, and self-​expression are invoked that transgenerational continuity can be established. The student is also commonly reminded that ‘the Romantics’ did not use this label, nor did they consider themselves a single coherent group. But being part of a recognizable generation, and playing a role in the continuing drama of inheritance, continuity, and challenge between generations, was very much a part of the Romantic writers’ experience, and they actively debated the concept of generational succession. The complexity of the idea has roots in the etymology of the word itself, as can be seen in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which charts the extension of the original biological meaning of ‘generation’ into questions of family, race, and history:

1. The act of begetting or producing . . . 2. A family; a race . . . 3. Progeny; offspring . . . 4. A single succession; one graduation in the scale of genealogical descent . . . 5. An age.2

Johnson’s illustrative quotation for ‘offspring’, taken from Shakespeare’s King Lear, connects the word with strife and invective through Lear’s cursing of Cordelia: ‘The barb’rous Scythian, | Or he that makes his generation messes, | To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom | Be as well neighbour’d’ (I. i. 116–​19). The cultural use of the term ‘generation’ is informed by all of these various meanings: a generation is an act of procreation, a family, a group of children with a distinctive sense of parentage and legacy; it is ‘an age’, but also an age within an age. In the early nineteenth century, the idea that the age had a distinctive ‘genius’ or ‘spirit’ was a recurrent theme of writers—​even if there was little agreement about what that spirit might be. James Chandler has noted how not only the spirit itself, but also the phenomenon of trying to capture it, became a familiar topic of discussion in the literary press.3 In his gallery of ‘contemporary portraits’ The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt famously offers the ‘genius’ of Wordsworth as ‘a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age’, claiming that his commitment to human and natural themes and his rejection of poetic elitism make him uniquely suited to an age of revolution and popular reform.4 And yet there are careful strategies in Hazlitt’s collection to guard against simplification or totalization; his decision to characterize the age by evaluating a whole series of diverse individuals is a statement in itself, an assertion of plurality. Introducing his

2  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, rev. edn, 3 vols (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827). 3  James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 105–​14. 4  ‘Mr. Wordsworth’, The Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), xi. 86.

Romantic Generations   159 essay on William Godwin, Hazlitt’s argument focuses not on the subject himself, but on popular reaction to him: ‘The Spirit of the Age was never more fully shown than in its treatment of this writer—​its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission to prejudice and to the fashion of the day.’5 The radicalism of the early 1790s embraced and revered Godwin, but the temper of the times shifted so far in the next twenty years that he was latterly regarded not with hostility but with total indifference. Part-​way through his essay on Byron, Hazlitt gives another demonstration of the historical introspection of his age when he registers the breaking news of the poet’s death: he pauses, then continues with his critical evaluation, claiming not to have been deflected by popular or national sentiment: We had written thus far when news came of the death of Lord Byron, and put an end to a strain of somewhat peevish invective, which was intended to meet his eye, not to insult his memory . . . We think it better and more like himself, to let what we had written stand, than to take up our leaden shafts, and try to melt them into ‘tears of sensibility’, or mould them into dull praise, and an affected show of candour.6

Hazlitt is aware that Byron’s death has already become a cultural landmark; he knows that the ‘age’ is about to shift in its attitude to the Byronic idea, with the urge to memorialize, and he chooses for the present not to be part of this. His point about the period’s love of change and paradox is relevant to the wider theme of reading Romantic generations: if an age can be typified not by an idea (‘the age of reason’) or cause (‘the age of revolution’) but by its dominant personalities, the ‘spirit’ of that age can incorporate contradiction and yet still be itself. As in life, so in literature: generations overlap. Generations do not have essential characteristics, but are defined comparatively, in relation to each other; this is always a matter of construction, representation, and reading. The idea that generations can be culturally isolated from each other, to the extent of mutual incomprehension, is a modern convention. We encounter this conceit in late-​twentieth-​century cultural texts such as Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), or the song ‘My Generation’ by The Who (1965): a rebellious younger generation expresses itself in a radical new language that its elders greet with bemusement, and regards the values of its predecessors with a cleansing hostility and intolerance. Intergenerational conflict and miscommunication are a standard of modern drama, both comic and tragic. The specific application of the metaphor to literary tribes and movements can be said to have begun with the Romantic age. ‘The Romantics’ and ‘Romanticism’ are retrospective organizational terms, introduced in Anglo-​German literary and aesthetic criticism in the later nineteenth century. But the Romantic generations are not back-​formations of this kind: Romantic-​era writers themselves developed the idea, constructing themselves and others—​allies and

5 

6 

‘William Godwin’, Complete Works of Hazlitt, xi. 16. ‘Lord Byron’, Complete Works of Hazlitt, xi. 77–​8.

160   Michael Bradshaw opponents—​within loose but coherent groups based on age, affiliation, aesthetic taste, and, above all, in their stance in relation to the sublime historical moment, the French Revolution. Generations, like other generalizing categories, are easy to knock down with a well-​ aimed counter-​example. Take Walter Savage Landor, who lived from 1775 to 1864 and was active as a writer throughout what is called the Romantic period. In the 1790s and 1800s, Landor’s contemporaries and fellow writers included Coleridge, Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth; his epic poem Gebir was first published in 1798, the same year as Lyrical Ballads. But Landor published the first series of his great prose project Imaginary Conversations in 1824, the year of Byron’s death and of the publication of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems and Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The very antitype of Keatsian tragic early death, Landor survived as an active and acclaimed writer well into the Victorian world, and ended his life as the colleague of Browning and Swinburne. With stubborn integrity, Landor held fast to his unfashionable classicism throughout an age which celebrated instinct, immediacy, and organic form. Which generation, therefore, does he occupy? In fact, the famously durable Landor bestrode several distinct generations of writers, without conforming to the typical qualities of any of them. The question cannot therefore be answered meaningfully, and is unhelpful in understanding Landor’s disposition as a writer. Among the great prose writers of the Romantic era, De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Lamb are other examples of figures who transcend chronological boundaries, being contemporaries of Wordsworth and Coleridge who wrote and published their most significant work in the time of Keats and Shelley. Yet that does not make the concept of literary generations invalid in other instances. It is in the poets and the poetry of the age that the concept of generational succession is most strongly articulated. Traditional criticism has drawn on the period’s self-​ descriptions in recognizing two poetic generations, the first centred on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, the second on Byron, Shelley, and Keats, who were born approximately twenty years later and frequently defined themselves in opposition to the earlier generation. While exploring this familiar paradigm, in this chapter I will also posit the idea of a third generation of poets, one which extended the Romantic achievement and Romantic idioms into the Victorian era. It will be useful, I argue, to think about three generations of British Romantic writing—​overlapping, complex, contradictory, and yet sharing qualities which may be typified. In what follows, I identify salient characteristics of the three generations, but also consider how and to what effect Romantic writers themselves use the idea of generational change to define and organize their identities. The story is generated by the Romantics’ self-​aware myth-​making as much as by chronological fact. The generation of Wordsworth and that of Keats constitute the two broad traditional groupings of Romantic literature, illustrated primarily by their non-​dramatic poetry, both lyrical and epic. The first is clustered around the nature-​veneration and subjective philosophy of Wordsworth, and takes its aesthetic keynote from the ruralism of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads; the first generation includes writers who were mainly active in the 1780s to 1800s, including Anna Laetitia Barbauld, S. T.

Romantic Generations   161 Coleridge, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Robert Southey, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley. The second Romantic generation consists of writers who were mainly active in the 1800s to 1820s, including Lord Byron, John Clare, Felicia Hemans, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Mary and Percy Shelley. The second generation proceeds from the first and overlaps with it: although stylistically divergent, often eschewing pastoral simplicity (or the appearance thereof) in favour of conspicuous complexity of form, second-​generation Romantic writers also exhibit continuity with their forebears, especially in their commitment to the value of different kinds of subjective experience. To this traditional pairing can be added another adjacent phase of writing and culture: the third Romantic generation of the 1820s and 1830s, including often overlooked writers such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes, George Darley, Thomas Hood, and Letitia Landon, who extended Romantic themes of imaginative creativity into the commodity culture of the mid-​nineteenth century. Although the first generation of Romanticism is traditionally defined by its response to the French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars, some of the characteristic features of this mode emerge in writing of the 1780s. Charlotte Smith is an example of an early Romantic writer who helps to inaugurate key Romantic idioms such as the cult of nature and a belief in the creative power of individual consciousness. The intensified focus on the natural world can be seen in Smith’s sonnet ‘To the South Downs’: Ah, hills beloved!—​where once, an happy child, Your beechen shades, ‘your turf, your flowers among’, I wove your bluebells into garlands wild, And woke your echoes with my artless song. Ah, hills beloved! your turf, your flowers remain; But can they peace to this sad breast restore, For one poor moment soothe the sense of pain, And teach a breaking heart to throb no more? And you, Aruna, in the vale below, As to the sea your limpid waves you bear, Can you one kind Lethean cup bestow To drink a long oblivion to my care? Ah no! When all, e’en Hope’s last ray, is gone, There’s no oblivion but in death alone.7

The poem, published in the first edition of her Elegiac Sonnets (1784), includes some conventional classicisms as Smith’s speaker invokes her native landscape—​personifying and gendering the River Arun with a pastoral address—​while also developing a connection between a specific location and unique personal grief. Smith’s speaker searches for consolation in a known landscape of beech trees and bluebells which allows her to commune with her childhood self. This is poetic style in transition: something that may 7 

‘Sonnet V’, in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

162   Michael Bradshaw be called ‘Romantic’ is emerging from the eighteenth-​century literature of sensibility, which used vulnerable and aestheticized emotion to declare a common humanity; Smith’s feelings are not held in common with humanity or with nation, but are entirely her own. This shift from sensibility as a humane moral experience towards something more subjectively inflected is observed in Claire Knowles’s reading of the poem, which also stresses the catalyzing value of specific landscape: ‘Smith personalises the poetic experience of melancholy through her deployment of the affective discourse of sensibility, while claiming the sincerity of her display of emotion through her poem’s natural settings.’8 It is this functioning partnership between natural imagery, specific location, and personal memory, with its powerful assertion of the validity of subjective experience, that inspired the young Wordsworth, who subscribed to a later edition of Elegiac Sonnets and was to credit Smith with the revival of the genre of which he, like other poets of the time, made extensive use. This same commitment to subjectivity is evident in Smith’s political poetry, notably her long blank-​verse narrative The Emigrants (1793), which explores the plight of refugees from the French Revolution. The poem was written while Marie Antoinette was still on trial and shows Smith boldly going on record with her ethical reaction to the Revolution at a time when others were reserving judgement. Beginning with appeals for compassion for French refugees, the poem then moves towards forthright condemnation of the ancien régime. Though she was criticized in reviews for intruding her autobiographical presence into what was ostensibly an objective narration, it was her capacity to integrate complex personal feeling with a shifting response to political crisis, combined with her talent for the revitalization and repurposing of older poetic genres, that made her a model for other writers. Smith’s approach to political subject matter in The Emigrants can be compared with Wordsworth’s in The Prelude, for instance in the scene in Book 9 where he recalls visiting in 1791 the site of the Bastille, now demolished, his description grasping the very texture of the event and re-​evaluating this multi-​ layered experience in the mental space of his autobiographical blank verse: Where silent zephyrs sported with the dust Of the Bastille I sate in the open sun And from the rubbish gathered up a stone, And pocketed the relick in the guise Of an enthusiast; yet, in honest truth, Though not without some strong incumbencies, And glad—​could living man be otherwise?—​ I looked for something which I could not find, Affecting more emotion than I felt, For ’tis most certain that the utmost force

8  Claire Knowles, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–​1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 49. See also Jacqueline M. Labbe (ed.), Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008).

Romantic Generations   163 Of all these various objects which may shew The temper of my mind as then it was, Seemed less to recompense the traveller’s pains, Less moved me, gave me less delight, than did A single picture merely, hunted out Among other sights, the Magdalene of le Brun, A beauty exquisitely wrought—​fair face And rueful, with its ever-​flowing tears. (1805: Book 9, lines 63–​80)9

Visiting the epicentre of the Revolution, an experience that might be expected to inspire, the poet instead recoils in embarrassment, realizing his behaviour resembles that of an idle tourist. In this moment of self-​alienation, Wordsworth finds that he can respond with more sincerity to the religious pathos of a painting of the weeping Mary Magdalene. Le Brun’s painting portrays a penitent renunciation of the material world, a theme which is in tension with the democratic conviction that poverty and material oppression had driven the populace to a justifiable use of force. Wordsworth’s representation of his changing mental state in passages such as this goes beyond Smith’s melancholy, in that he discriminates restlessly between forms of emotional experience, searching for unperformative intensity. The poet rejects the term ‘enthusiast’, searching for an elusive authenticity which will satisfy his own internally imposed standards. Wordsworth’s blank-​verse meditation finally achieves a kind of political logic which restores the poet’s fading convictions by allowing him to access the deep feeling in which they first originated. The woman’s ‘ever-​flowing tears’, frozen on the canvas, symbolize the resonance and endurance of this fleeting moment, the now of Wordsworth’s thought. The myth of lost political faith and broken continuity, and the project of repair through imaginative literature, are a common topos shared by Wordsworth and Coleridge which is fundamental to the version of Romanticism which has taken shape around their names. The French Revolution continues to be regarded as the master-​narrative of the Romantic era, and generations of writers and artists may be distinguished by whether they lived through the Revolution and Revolutionary Wars and had first-​hand memories, or alternatively experienced these events through narrative and representation. Writers of the second generation did not live through the tragic collapse of revolutionary ideals, as Wordsworth did in his reaction to the September Massacres of 1792, when the democratic dawn began to degenerate into a vengeful new tyranny; the younger writers of Shelley’s generation grew up with the knowledge that the Revolution had already failed, and if they wished to use their writing to promote liberal ideals, they had first to overcome a well-​founded despair of political change. Often, this involved a direct challenge to writers of the older generation, the erstwhile ‘worshippers of public good’

9  William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception, Recent Critical Essays, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979).

164   Michael Bradshaw such as Wordsworth and Coleridge who, in Shelley’s eyes, had been ‘morally ruined’ by what they saw as ‘the desolation of all their cherished hopes’ and had retreated into reactionary pessimism and religious orthodoxy. These reflections by the young Shelley on the stagnation of his elders culminate in an indictment of the age itself: ‘Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live.’10 Political disagreement lies at the heart of the quarrel between the ‘Lake School’ and the poets of Shelley’s generation, and this literary conflict often has the flavour of an intergenerational family feud. The opening salvo is fired in Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a comprehensive attack on the literary fashions and critical orthodoxies of the time, but Byron’s most scathing denunciation of the Lake School comes in the unpublished Dedication to Don Juan (written in 1818), where Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, above all, the ‘epic renegade’ Southey are held to epitomize all that was wrong with modern poetry, its political hypocrisy as much as its self-​absorption and narrowness: You, Gentlemen! by dint of long seclusion From better company have kept your own At Keswick, and through still continued fusion Of one another’s minds at last have grown To deem as a most logical conclusion That Poesy has wreaths for you alone; There is a narrowness in such a notion Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean. (Dedication, lines 33–​40)11

In lampooning the ‘Lakers’ with ironic salutes to their insularity and obscurantism, Byron does not so much announce a challenge to his seniors in the literary establishment, as denounce them for being upstarts themselves. Byron’s idea of a credible establishment in poetry was based on his much-​admired satirists of the Augustan age—​ writers such as Dryden, Goldsmith, and Pope. In this celebrated stanza, with its trademark devastating couplet, Byron seems most incensed by the idea that the Lakers claim an oceanic power and profundity for what is in reality a parochial and complacent solipsism; Byron’s comic wit here attempts to apply the remedy that this kind of arrogance invites—​a dose of sceptical rationality. As texts like this demonstrate, second-​generation poets felt themselves to be radically different from their precursors, shaped by different historical experience and differently equipped to both survive and create the age. Unlike Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake, who had experienced the blissful dawn of the French Revolution and the apocalyptic expectations it awakened, Byron’s generation were brought up in an age of political reaction

10  ‘Preface’ to Laon and Cythna (1818), in The Poems of Shelley, vol. 2: 1817–1819, ed. Kelvin Everest, Geoffrey Matthews, Jack Donovan, Ralph Pite, and Michael Rossington (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 37. 11  All quotations are from Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Romantic Generations   165 and counter-​revolutionary war. How, then, did the new generation of writers use the idea of generational change to express their values and identities? Some major poetic texts of this period imagine political and aesthetic change in terms of mythic struggle between the young and their elders, unwilling to let go and cede territory. The scientific sense of generation is sometimes invoked, in order to articulate questions of inheritance, succession, and overthrow. In the third act of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), for example, a horrified Jupiter recognizes the monstrous avenging Demogorgon as his own ‘detested progeny’ (III. i. 62).12 Shelley is making the political point that violent and undiscriminating revolution is the natural consequence of tyranny: Jupiter has generated Demogorgon by the dictates of Necessity, as all tyrants spawn their own destroyers. The horror of the moment lies not in the unseen power of Demogorgon, but in the appalled recognition of the familiar, as the two generations regard each other. Shelley consistently images ‘generation’ as a combination of fruitful increase and historical flux, with cycles of struggle and overthrow, even from the early revolutionary epic Queen Mab (1813), in which the influence of his mentor William Godwin is particularly marked: ‘They rise, they fall; one generation comes | Yielding its harvest to destruction’s scythe’ (IV. 227–​8). In the satirical drama Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820) Purganax debates the queen’s lewd behaviour in the council scene in ‘the Public Stye’, claiming that she will pollute ‘the purity and | Religion of the rising generation | Of sucking pigs’ (II. i. 54–​6). Here Shelley deploys the word ‘generation’ satirically from his pro-​reform perspective on the trial of Queen Caroline for alleged adultery, attacking the opportunistic moralism of the state; the queen’s popular espousal of political reform had given added force to the public’s indignation at the king’s hypocrisy in bringing such charges. Similarly, in Hellas (1822) Shelley uses the term ‘generation’ primarily to mean production or increase, but with an immediate connotation of cyclical destruction, of the kind that makes a fool of Shelley’s Ozymandias or Byron’s Cheops:13 the great age of Ahasuerus gives him a trans-​ historical perspective, as he has ‘survived | Cycles of generation and of ruin’ (lines 154–​5). But the richest meditation on transition and inheritance in Romantic writing is found in Keats’s ‘Hyperion’ poems. Keats began ‘Hyperion’ in autumn 1818, abandoned it by April 1819, and three months later began an oblique reconstruction of the theme in ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, continuing until around September 1819 before breaking off again. A poem which explicitly addresses the theme of generational transition, ‘Hyperion’, as many commentators have noted, is also characterized by themes of silence, inevitable defeat, and passive waiting. Andrew Bennett, for example, has discussed the poem specifically in terms of failure, suggesting that ‘the stilling of narrative may be understood to be generated by the fear or anxiety that there will be no audience for this poem, and a consequent paralysis of narrative’.14 Kenneth Muir argues 12 

Shelley’s dramas are quoted from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002). 13  Don Juan, Canto 1, stanza 219. 14  Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 150.

166   Michael Bradshaw that Keats abandoned his epic project because he realized he had undermined its design by introducing the climactic transformation of the dreamer in Canto I of ‘The Fall’.15 In an influential archetypal reading, Dorothy Van Ghent engages with the same problem: succession can only be interpreted as progressive if the new generation is superior in some way to the old, whether this is aesthetically, morally, or in terms of brute power.16 This dilemma in the moral structure of Keats’s myth points to an ambivalence about the nature of generational change. The resentful stagnation of Saturn and the other fallen Titanic gods, as they wait for the Olympians to supersede them completely, has been compared to various political analogues, such as the decline of Napoleon between his escape from Elba and final defeat at Waterloo, and the disempowerment of the ‘mad’ George III and his replacement by the Regency.17 But an allegorical reading in terms of an ongoing literary history is more straightforward and at least as convincing. In this line of interpretation, Saturn represents the poetic egotist which Keats felt he saw in Wordsworth and Byron, whose titanic self-​presence is questioned by Keats’s new human poetics, with its associations of Apollonian healing. It is possible to read the fallen state of Saturn and the Titans as a tragic condition; the primitive nature of their power and glory does not preclude compassion for them. And the convulsing sickness of the suffering Apollo as he grows into his new identity shows the transition between generations to be painful for all parties, even as change is both natural and inevitable. The Titans had to go, to make space for a rising progressive generation; as Susan Wolfson remarks, ‘by no sin do the Titans fall from Heaven, just inevitable progress’.18 But the civilization of the Olympians, and of the Apollonian writer and reader, consists partly in their ability to empathize with the Titans’ pain. Change may be inexorable (or even a Necessity); but Hyperion’s impotent rage against the dying of the light is magnificent, and invites the reader to mourn what is lost with the fall of the Titans: Fall!—​No, by Tellus and her briny robes! Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible right arm Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove, And bid old Saturn take his throne again. (‘Hyperion’, Book 1, lines 246–​50)

15  See Kenneth Muir, ‘The Meaning of Hyperion’, in Kenneth Muir (ed.), John Keats: A Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969). 16  Dorothy Van Ghent, Keats: The Myth of the Hero, rev. and ed. Jeffrey Cane Robinson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 185. 17  See, for example, Vincent Newey, ‘Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions’, in Susan J. Wolfson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 18  Susan J. Wolfson, ‘John Keats’, in Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 372.

Romantic Generations   167 This Satanic discourse is later softened considerably by Oceanus, who rationalizes the Titans’ overthrow as a natural process. The sense of literary history spins around, as Keats imagines his own rising generation being overthrown by future forces—​and yet he can only envisage this unknown posterity from within the terms of his own sensuous nature language: Say, doth the dull soil Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, And feedeth still, more comely than itself? Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? Or shall the tree be envious of the dove Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings To wander wherewithal and find its joys? We are such forest-​trees, and our fair boughs Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves, But eagles, golden-​feather’d, who do tower Above us in their beauty, and must reign In right thereof. For, ’tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might; Yea, by that law, another race may drive Our conquerors to mourn as we do now. (Book 2, lines 217–​31)

Oceanus’s decree that beauty constitutes power seems to have a law-​giving finality, and yet also resonates with the final stanza of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, where Keats evokes the fragility and transience at the heart of such a claim. Oceanus knows that not only Titans but also Olympians will be superseded, and finds beauty rather than anger in this knowledge. This is Keats projecting beyond the horizon of his own time. The introspective quality of later Romantics, their awareness of being of an age, is sometimes conducive to sensations of pessimism and impotence. The generation who followed Keats, writers of the 1820s and ’30s such as Beddoes, Darley, and Landon, were to pursue this poetics of alienation to extremes: they shared with Keats and Shelley a shrewd awareness of their distinctive literary moment and how it was in some measure the creation of their predecessors. Stylistically, they exhibit a great deal of continuity with the elaborate stanzaic verse of Keats and Shelley; yet the satirical macabre of Beddoes, the lyrical sensuous of Darley, and the exquisite brittle aesthetics of Landon all constitute a narrower range of poetic experimentation, coupled with an apparent loss of faith in both poetic transcendence and the power of their generation. Third-​generation writers are characterized by self-​conscious belatedness and status anxiety: this is most evident in the way Darley measures and analyses his value and reputation against great forebears, and in Beddoes’s self-​sacrificing prophecy of a new Shelley, as he laments the mediocrity of his ‘darkling’ generation. Yet third-​generation writers are also characterized by their proficiency in adapting to the book trade in the 1820s and ’30s:  good examples of this are Hood’s and Landon’s expert management

168   Michael Bradshaw of their careers as professional poets, reflecting the decorative and domestic tastes of their readers back to them in well-​crafted lyrics. Awareness of and accommodation to new readerships is a distinguishing quality of what I am calling the third generation of Romantic writers. The new generation adapted pre-​existing Romantic styles in relation to the rising commodity culture of the 1820s and ’30s. Earlier generations had addressed a predominantly genteel readership, often in tension with their social radicalism. But for poets writing in the 1820s, the commercial book trade now reached wider constituencies of middle-​class readers, with a crucial increase in the role of women readers. Writing for mass-​market distribution, and aware of the value of the book as a cherishable object, these writers increasingly addressed the reader as a consumer characterized by fashion, sociable taste, and economic means, rather than as a solitary kindred imagination. Landon, in her public writing persona of ‘L. E. L.’ is the prime example of success in this mode—​a lyric poet of Romantic inheritance who understood and brilliantly exploited the literary marketplace of her time, reliably pleasing her devoted readers with decorative and sentimental poems in The Amulet and the Literary Gazette; yet Landon’s poetic voice is acutely self-​aware, and takes the public self-​fashioning of the desirable author as one of its themes, as here in ‘The Altered River’ (1829): On—​on—​though weariness it be, By shoal and barrier cross’d, Till thou hast reach’d the mighty sea, And there art wholly lost. Bend thou, young poet, o’er the stream—​ Such fate will be thine own; Thy lute’s hope is a morning dream, And when have dreams not flown? (lines 37–​44)19

In Romantic Victorians (2002), Richard Cronin discusses the growing power of female readership in the poetry market, and how various writers thrived or failed in relation to their willingness to adapt. In 1819, Byron and Keats both suspected each other of deliberately courting female taste in poetry, and in the 1820s this ‘feminizing’ of Romanticism became even more apparent.20 The years in which Hemans and Landon dominated the reading of poetry coincided with financial crisis in the publishing industry, causing a collapse in the sale of poetry books.21 Narrow profit margins and a crowded market meant that literary authors felt pressure to provide a safe product which appealed to 19 

First published in The Keepsake for 1829; quoted from Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997). 20  Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–​1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), ch. 3: ‘Feminizing Romanticism’. 21 Cronin, Romantic Victorians, 97. See also Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 33–​9

Romantic Generations   169 established taste. Recent scholarship on early nineteenth-​century print culture has shown how these commercial imperatives impacted upon the poetic representation of subjectivity. Tom Mole, for example, has discussed how the publishing industry contributed to the construction of Byron’s celebrity status: the success of the poetry book as product depended on a concealment of industrial process, and the reader’s illusion of an intimate relationship with the author.22 Hemans and Landon were the most immediate inheritors of this process; Anne K. Mellor has observed how they constructed themselves—​and were marketed—​as icons of domesticity and desirable feminine beauty respectively.23 This decorative intimacy was affected by the volatility of the industry that they relied upon. Third-​generation Romantic writers have generally not been highly valued for literary originality. The skilful adaptation shown by Landon and Hood entailed an acceptance of literature as commodity, which some continue to see as taming and domestication. Later Romantic writing, moving into the early Victorian period, has sometimes been interpreted primarily in material and economic terms, with apparent disregard for content and craft. Roger Henkle, for example, writes of the poetry of Thomas Hood: ‘The commodification of the verse situates it in a kind of social/​cultural commerce, in which products/​discourses are readily exchangeable, and thus do not bear import or meaning in themselves.’24 This argument, a product of the materialist turn in literary scholarship, disparages the avowed content of the poetry and equates its significance with this implied commentary on its production and distribution. Materialist interpretation seeks to expose all ‘transcendence’ as a fiction. There have lately been more balanced interventions: a recent interpretation of Hood by Sara Lodge qualifies Henkle’s extreme position and argues that Hood’s writing shows awareness of market and materiality while also making a distinctive statement as poetry, ‘call[ing] transcendence into question’.25 George Darley felt keenly his failure to achieve poetic fame with such works as The Errors of Ecstasie (1822) and his lyrical drama Sylvia (1827). Although he was an aggressive critic of drama, Darley’s own poetry and verse drama—​and also his private letters—​ frequently include submissive confessions of defeat, sometimes abasing himself before ‘strong poets’ such as Milton and Shakespeare, and sometimes indulging resentful feelings about his failure to win admiration:

22   Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 23  Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 123. For Landon’s poetic self-​fashioning in the new commercial environment, see Glennis Stephenson, Letitia Landon: The Woman Behind L. E. L. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997); and Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk (eds), Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 24  Roger B. Henkle, ‘Comedy as Commodity: Thomas Hood’s Poetry of Class Desire’, Victorian Poetry 26.3 (1988), 301–​18 (p. 310). 25  Sara Lodge, Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-​Century Poetry: Work, Play and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 25.

170   Michael Bradshaw I am the living personification of those ridiculous characters which people the works of the novelist & satirist, those ludicrous yet melancholy pictures of literary obscurity . . . tho I sing like a dying swan no one would hear me.26 Why have a score of years not established my title with the world? Why did not ‘Sylvia,’ with all its faults, ten years since? It ranked me among the small poets. I had as soon be ranked among the piping bullfinches.27

Darley’s contemporary Thomas Lovell Beddoes was another poet keenly aware of the deficiencies of the present generation, writing powerfully of the decline and deterioration of the national literature, as in this often-​quoted damnation of the literary scene circa 1824: The disappearance of Shelley from the world seems, like the tropical setting of that luminary  . . .  to which his poetical genius alone can be compared with reference to the companions of his day, to have been followed by instant darkness and owl-​ season: whether the vociferous Darley is to be the comet, or tender fullfaced L. E. L. the milk-​and-​watery moon of our darkness, are questions for the astrologers: if I were the literary weather-​guesser for 1825 I would safely prognosticate fog, rain, blight in due succession for it’s dullard months.28

Beddoes’s casting of various personalities as sun, moon, and comet is a complimentary allusion to Shelley’s Epipsychidion. In elevating Shelley with extravagant praise, Beddoes lets his own generation sink into ignominious obscurity, and mobilizes a specialized intertextual language to deliver this verdict. A recent revival of critical attention on Beddoes has done much to develop a sense of the third generation as a distinctive phase of Romantic writing; Beddoes typifies a third-​generation consciousness in many ways. His first publications came in 1821 (The Improvisatore) and 1822 (The Brides’ Tragedy), coinciding with notable second-​ generation deaths; he is associated with the memorialization and transmission of Shelley’s texts, subscribing to the 1824 edition of Posthumous Poems:  his emergence therefore coincides with the ‘disappearance . . . from the world’ of his precursor generation; and he has a self-​critical awareness of his own generation’s state of indebtedness. But whereas Hood and Landon forged successful careers by adapting to a new economic climate, Beddoes, like Darley, experienced frustration and defeat. If Darley resented failure with a sense of injured entitlement, Beddoes seems almost to have embraced it in later life, imagining his own extinction as a precondition for the appearance on the national stage of a poetic prophet who will be a worthy successor to his admired mentor 26  George Darley, letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836, quoted in Mark Storey, ‘George Darley: The Burial of the Self ’, Keats-​Shelley Memorial Association Bulletin 31 (1980), 22–​38 (p. 22). 27  George Darley, letter to Bryan Waller Procter, 1840, quoted in Leslie Brisman, ‘George Darley: The Poet as Pigmy’, Studies in Romanticism 15.1 (1976), 119–​41 (p. 119). 28  Letter to Thomas Forbes Kelsall, 1824, in The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. H. W. Donner (1935; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1978), 589. Subsequent quotations from Beddoes are from this edition.

Romantic Generations   171 Shelley. The passage quoted above and the one below, with their pessimistic focus on extinction, apostasy, and mediocrity as the literary keynotes of his own age, also demonstrate Beddoes’s isolation from contemporary anglophone literary culture: Beddoes’s creative addiction to anachronism, not only as a writer of pastiche Renaissance tragedy but also in his devotion to the revolutionary prophecy of Shelley, was reinforced by years of self-​imposed exile in the German states and in Switzerland, writing and rewriting his satirical tragedy Death’s Jest-​Book between 1825 and his death in 1849. Beddoes returns to the generational theme frequently, but perhaps nowhere with as much intensity as ‘Lines Written in Switzerland’, written around 1844, in which he laments the death of Keats, sneers at the conservatism of the establishment figure Wordsworth, and cries out for a new poetic voice with the prophetic power of Shelley to shake the age out of its complacency: We, who marked how fell Young Adonais, sick of vain endeavour Larklike to live on high in tower of song; And looked still deeper thro’ each other’s eyes At every flash of Shelley’s dazzling spirit, Quivering like dagger on the breast of night, That seemed some hidden natural light reflected Upon time’s scythe, a moment and away; We, who have seen Mount Rydal’s snowy head Bound round with courtly jingles; list so long Like old Orion for the break of morn, Like Homer blind for sound of youthful harp; And, if a wandering music swells the gale, ’Tis some poor, solitary heartstring burst. (lines 8–​21)

The lines show something of Beddoes’s mastery of dramatic blank verse, conveying both tragedy and haughty invective. Both writer and reader appear as initiates in the poetic scene, an effect achieved by Beddoes’s explicitly intertextual style: in ‘young Adonais’, the reader recognizes not only Keats, but specifically Shelley’s sentimental memorialization of Keats. In ‘Mount Rydal’s snowy head | Bound round with courtly jingles’, Beddoes expresses contempt for Wordsworth’s recent acceptance of the Laureateship (after the death of Southey in 1843), which sealed his political apostasy with subservience to the British monarchy. The phrase ‘courtly jingles’ strongly suggests that poetic mediocrity has accompanied this retreat into conservatism, but the fleeting glimpse of Wordsworth’s home in the sublime Lake District seems to allow that he was once a majestic figure. Beddoes’s poem is an outpouring of scorn and despair at the sorry state of contemporary English poetry, and by extension the hypocrisy and dullness of the imperialist nation; he delivers this judgement by colliding three distinct generations of Romantic writers—​the Lakers who sold out, the youngsters who burnt out, and his own stranded generation, unable to reignite the guttering radicalism of an age of revolution.

172   Michael Bradshaw It is the torment of Beddoes’s generation to see the crisis clearly and still lack the potency to remedy it.

Further Reading Abrams, M. H., ‘English Romanticism:  The Spirit of the Age’, in Northrop Frye (ed.), Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). Bennett, Andrew, Keats, Narrative and Audience:  The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Berns, Ute, and Michael Bradshaw (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Bradshaw, Michael, ‘Third-​ Generation Romantic Poets:  Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon’, in Michael O’Neill (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Chandler, James, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Cronin, Richard, Romantic Victorians:  English Literature, 1824–​1840 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Knowles, Claire, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–​1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). Lodge, Sara, Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-​ Century Poetry:  Work, Play and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Lovejoy, Arthur O., ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms’, in his Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948). Mole, Tom, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Radford, Andrew, and Mark Sandy (eds), Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Rawes, Alan (ed.), Romanticism and Form (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Stephenson, Glennis, Letitia Landon: The Woman Behind L. E. L. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Sweet, Nanora, and Julie Melnyk (eds), Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Wolfson, Susan J., Formal Charges:  The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

Chapter 11

P oetry and So c ia l  C l as s Brian Goldberg

During the Romantic period, poetry and social class were intimately connected. Many of the political arguments that defined the years between the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill—​for example, about poverty, manufacturing, land use, parliamentary representation, and the role of the Church and the aristocracy in the governance of the nation—​could be expressed as questions about the prevailing social hierarchy: whether Britain’s existing ‘orders, ranks, and distinctions’ would indeed be ‘confounded’, as Edmund Burke feared, or the status quo preserved.1 These debates wove their way through the poetry of the period, from the early, radical verse of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge to the complex conservatism of Felicia Hemans. Further, individual poets were themselves necessarily located within the prevailing order, and a poet’s social origin had much to do, directly and indirectly, with what he or she wrote and how that writing might be understood. The rank of a poet could not always be determined precisely. Specific configurations of family background, education, and source of income, each inflected in turn by national and regional variations, were describable in multiple (although not infinite) ways. One distinction, though, was fundamental: reviewers, publishers, and other audiences assumed that a legitimate poet would have a classical education and that such an education would generally be unavailable to writers below a certain rank. Poets regularly attempted to challenge or alter perceived class distinctions, sometimes by experimenting with the voices and viewpoints of other ranks, sometimes by seeking social mobility in the literary marketplace. Throughout the period, such attempts at class transit could be treated as dangerous insofar as they raised the prospect of social levelling, whether the threat was construed as ‘Jacobin’, as in the early part of the period, or associated with ‘Reform’ later on. Alternatively, conservative thinkers might welcome the ability of poets to cross status borders, imaginatively or otherwise, if such crossings were taken to indicate that British society recognized and

1 

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 48.

174   Brian Goldberg rewarded merit, or if they meant that the nation’s various ranks were closely and organically linked rather than inherently antagonistic and divided. Publishers and patrons often marketed writers who were self-​educated, worked mostly with their hands in agriculture or industry, or came from families where these occupations were the norm, by reference to their day jobs. They were ‘peasant poets’ or ‘cobbler poets’, for example, and these labels indicated a potential difference in kind. A ‘cobbler poet’ was an intriguing hybrid, a ‘natural genius’ who may or may not have been ‘worthy the title of “poet” ’.2 Robert Burns is a special example of the type. He was ‘formidabl[y]‌literate’, and, as a tenant farmer, he ‘occupied the middle rung on the social hierarchy of the Lowlands’, but he was aware that potential readers would inevitably identify him as a labouring prodigy.3 Self-​consciously, he exploited a ‘pastoral mask’ that allowed him both to attract subscribers as yet another peasant poet and to lay claim to originality and inspiration.4 An anonymous quatrain on the title page of the first, Kilmarnock edition of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) notes that ‘the Simple Bard, unbroke by rules of Art’ is tutored by Nature instead, and the Preface moves smoothly from the idea that Burns is unable to translate Theocritus and Virgil to the observation that he is inspired by direct experience: ‘he sings the sentiments and manners, he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers’.5 The ‘rustic’ poet cannot read Georgics and Bucolics, but he knows more about his subject than do his more learned counterparts. If there remains an element of tactical deference to ‘the Learned and the Polite’6 in the Preface, the collection that follows defers not at all. It features poems that comment sharply on disparities between rich and poor (for example, the first poem in the collection, ‘The Twa Dogs’), that humorously denounce Parliament (‘The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer’), and that present the working-​class poet as an independent and clear-​sighted ‘commoner of the air’ whose access to ‘Nature’s charms’ is unimpaired by his poverty and could never be improved by luxury (‘Epistle to Davie’, lines 43, 46). The success of the Kilmarnock edition, the publication of the second, Edinburgh edition, and Burns’s later placement as an Excise officer—​all facilitated by various patrons, including the banker John Ballantine, the Earl of Glencairn, and the Excise Commissioner Robert Graham—​would have seemed especially appropriate in light of the author’s exceptional giftedness, but the apparatus of subscription and patronage that enabled the publication of his writing and provided him with financial support and a degree of social mobility was standard.7 In other cases, subscribers to a working-​class 2  William J. Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–​1830 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 26. 3  Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-​Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11, 18. 4 Leask, Burns and Pastoral, 76. 5  The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), iii. 971. All quotations from Burns are from this edition. 6  Poems and Songs of Burns, iii. 972. 7 Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses, 28.

Poetry and Social Class    175 volume, usually recruited by a particular patron or patrons, subsidized its publication as a purely philanthropic act, meant to provide support but not to change the basic circumstances of the poet.8 This was particularly true for working-​class women poets, for whom many paths to mobility, for example by way of the professions, were unavailable. Because of presumed disparities of education and culture, patrons often wanted to give literary advice as well as financial aid, and the client/​patron relationship, a contact point in the relations between ‘ranks’ or ‘orders’, was not always sustainable. ‘Corporeal friends are spiritual enemies’, William Blake would write, with his wealthy supporter William Hayley in mind, 9 and John Clare, thinking about how ‘the polished’ ‘paid me in my after days’, would reflect that ‘’Twas then I found that friends indeed | Were needed when Id less to need’.10 The conflict between Ann Yearsley and Hannah More was an especially public example of the potential disagreements between poets and patrons.11 In 1785, More and Elizabeth Montagu helped Yearsley, a Bristol milkwoman, publish a subscription edition of her first volume, Poems on Several Occasions. The preface to that edition, a letter from More to Montagu, introduces Yearsley as a writer who is extremely talented but is also virtuous, deserving, and will not be ‘seduced to devote her time to the idleness of poetry’ and abandon her tasks as a wife and mother.12 She is not really a poet, that is, but a milkmaid-​poet, entitled to verse expressions of piety but not to the ‘idleness’ that poetic devotion paradoxically requires. However, readers who paid attention to the formal and thematic ambitions of the collection, as well as to More’s own description of Yearsley’s writing, might have realized that Yearsley intended to take her craft, and her developing career, seriously. The resulting conflict erupted quickly. The fourth edition of Yearsley’s Poems, published in 1786, reprints the letter to Montagu, but adds to it Yearsley’s own narrative in which she explains how she fell out with More over control of the proceeds of the first volume. This narrative is a compelling depiction of class conflict: Yearsley asserting her rights as a mother and a poet; More losing her temper and accusing Yearsley of drunkenness and savagery; and Yearsley, ultimately, insisting that she will do what she has to do to defend her character and promising to demonstrate that her writing owed nothing important to More’s interventions.13 Yearsley struggles 8 Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses, 212 9 

Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, plate 4, line 26, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. edn (New York: Anchor, 1988), 98. 10  ‘The Progress of Rhyme’, lines 298, 301–​2, in John Clare, The Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–​1837, vol. 3: The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 502. On Clare and his patrons, see Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 49–​66. 11  Kerri Andrews, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry: The Story of a Literary Relationship (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 55. 12  Hannah More, ‘A Prefatory Letter to Mrs. Montagu. By a Friend’, in Poems, on Several Occasions, By Ann Yearsley, a Milkwoman of Bristol (London: T. Cadell, 1785), xi. 13  Ann Yearsley, ‘To the Noble and Generous Subscribers who so Liberally Patronized a Book of Poems, Published Under the Auspices of Miss H. More’, in her Poems, on Several Occasions, 4th edn (London: J. J. and G. Robinson, 1786), xviii–​xxxi.

176   Brian Goldberg for her intellectual and economic independence, but, more broadly, Yearsley and More fight to define each other, a fight in which feminine solidarity is not enough to overcome class-​consciousness: as Donna Landry observes, ‘promoting the working-​class prodigy does not mean promoting class deracination’.14 As a mediator between Yearsley and the landed, wealthy, and well-​connected Montagu, the middle-​class More required a client in order to play the role of patron, while, as a poet and a British subject, Yearsley intended to establish that customs of deference applied neither to her domestic affairs nor to her work as a writer. Yearsley stood on her rights not only by resisting More but by ranging across didactic and meditative modes and by trafficking comfortably in references to classical literature. Neoclassical diction was one way any late ​eighteenth-​century author might establish credentials, but More suggests that Yearsley’s choices represent a kind of deception. In her letter to Montagu, More, who had been educated at home and at her father’s boarding school, reports that Yearsley garnered her knowledge of Greek and Roman culture from prints in store windows, and speculates that this may also have been how Thomas Chatterton ‘caught some of those ideas which diffuse through his writings a certain air of learning, the reality of which he did not possess’.15 After her break from More, Yearsley continued to write exhortative and allusive verse while More, trying to reach a labouring-​class audience, assumed a colloquial diction far from the Augustanisms of her earlier poetry and verse drama. In 1796, while More was publishing her Cheap Repository Tracts in an attempt to inoculate the poor against revolutionary thought, Yearsley published her final volume, The Rural Lyre, which contains a syntactically elaborate prophecy in blank verse entitled ‘The Genius of England, on the Rock of Ages, Recommending Order, Commerce, and Union to the Britons’.16 Yearsley, pursuing a patriotic commercialism that, at least in contrast to levelling impulses at home and abroad, complemented More’s nostalgic Toryism, continued to exploit linguistic resources More elected not to use in the Tracts. In doing so, Yearsley reaffirmed her right to address an educated and enfranchised audience, the professionals, merchants, and gentry who made up her Bristol readership. In their different ways, More and Yearsley both articulated conservative aims that prevented most readers from interpreting their linguistic code-​switching as especially subversive. In other cases, alarms went off when writers proficient in high literary modes tried to utilize what Wordsworth called ‘the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’.17 When the anonymously published first edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared two years after The Rural Lyre, Charles Burney, reviewing it for the Monthly, detected Jacobinism in the collection both because of its sympathetic portraits

14  Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-​Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–​1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 20. 15  More, ‘Letter to Mrs. Montagu’, ix–​x. 16  Ann Yearsley, The Rural Lyre (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796), 94. 17  ‘Advertisement’ (1798), in William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–​1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 738.

Poetry and Social Class    177 of displaced veterans, female vagrants, and out-​of-​place huntsmen and because of what he took to be its rustic, antique style, an affront because it seemed clear that this poetry was the work of someone capable of conventional poetic diction. Burney’s focus on politics in this poetry is literal-​minded. He imagines, for example, that the bereft shepherd in ‘The Last of the Flock’ might have been relieved by a personal act of charity on the part of the author, but he also emphasizes that enough has already been done by the nation to support the impoverished, and he is on guard against any kind of redistributive ‘agrarian law’ as had been contemplated by the French National Convention. ‘Is it certain’, he asks, ‘that rigid equality of property as well as of laws could remedy this evil?’18 What Burney never quite articulates, however, is the paradoxical threat to the comfortable acceptance of hierarchy that is posed by the Lyrical Ballads’ twin experiment in form and subject matter. One element of the threat is that the obviously schooled poet who could execute the high lyricism of ‘Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ and the extravagantly baffling ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (supposing, as Burney did, that the anonymous author was one person instead of two) could enter deeply enough into the perspective of the labouring poor to tell the stories of Goody Blake, Simon Lee, or Johnny Foy with absolute sympathy. This ongoing act of high imagination is destabilizing insofar as it suggests that the experiences of the rural poor are as accessible and urgent as any other subject matter. The other element is the Lyrical Ballads’ implication that certain social boundaries absolutely cannot be crossed. For the genteel speakers of ‘The Old Huntsman’, ‘We Are Seven’, and ‘The Last of the Flock’, the experience of the working-​class subject is ineffable. Simon Lee’s gratitude leaves the Wordsworthian speaker mourning in part because it gestures towards an unbridgeable gap between class positions. If rural labourers and the indigent are as endowed with subjectivity as the middle-​class poet or reader, then the social hierarchy is inherently unjust. If they are absolutely alien—​if they are not bound to their betters by ties of affection, common interest, and common understanding—​then there may be no reason to believe the hierarchy is based on anything but exploitation and coercion. Burney was unnerved by the class-​crossing diction of the Lyrical Ballads just as More was made uneasy by Yearsley’s unapologetic classicism, but even writers who appeared to work, reassuringly, from simple and fixed class positions might demonstrate that such positions were really unstable and complex. While the second edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1800, the year’s best-​selling volume of poetry was Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy: A Rural Poem. Bloomfield had grown up in Sussex and was working as a shoemaker in London when he composed and published this long account of rural life, which is told from the perspective of the farmer’s boy Giles, who lives in a state of ‘constant cheerful servitude’ (line 30), and which describes agricultural labour across the seasons in rich detail.19 No doubt part of the poem’s success can be attributed to its evocation of a culture held together, not riven, by social difference. Among Giles’s few 18 

[Charles Burney], rev. of Lyrical Ballads, Monthly Review 29 (June 1799), 207. Quotations are from Robert Bloomfield, Selected Poems, ed. John Goodridge and John Lucas, rev. edn (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2007). 19 

178   Brian Goldberg complaints—​though it is a major one—​is that a once-​functioning hierarchy that had ‘cemented’ (Bloomfield’s metaphor) master to servant has been undone by new wealth and new forms of status consciousness. The problem is not that new ways of organizing agriculture and industry exploit workers, but that a fractured culture has undone the sympathetic connections among people who formerly understood their places in the system. The new luxury of the wealthy classes, generated primarily by new kinds of land ​ use, creates resentment on the one hand, arrogance on the other, and ‘Destroys lifes intercourse, the social plan | That rank to rank cements, as man to man’ (lines 341–​2). Enclosure, rural depopulation, and the growing distance between rich and poor were long-​standing targets of radical critique. The first issue of Thomas Spence’s Pig’s Meat (1793), for example, reprints under the title ‘Lamentation for the Oppressed’ a passage from Goldsmith’s anti-​pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770) which describes how ‘wealth accumulates, and men decay’ (line 50) as enclosure produces new social inequities and dislocates rural populations.20 Bloomfield’s nostalgic lament, on the other hand, is part of a broader reaction. The poem’s remedy, unlike Spence’s, is not to radically reorganize an unequal society, but to long for emotional ties that would make inequality palatable and would redirect some spending from unnecessary luxuries back to proper charity: ‘Let labour have its due, then peace is mine, | And never, never shall my heart repine’, Giles concludes, but the hard-​working labourer must receive his ‘due’ at least in part from the master’s beneficence (lines 399–​400). Though welcomed by readers, this sentimental conservatism was no more a direct, authentic expression of the author’s ‘rural’ experiences than Yearsley’s classicism was inherently fraudulent.21 The poem was inspired by a return to Suffolk but composed in a shoemaker’s urban garret, and if we allow for these circumstances (communicated to readers in a series of prefaces included in the first three editions of the poem), Giles’ viewpoint is doubly removed from the author’s. The Farmer’s Boy gives us a remembrance of a remembrance that reaches back from London to Suffolk and from the poet’s early adulthood to his childhood. Like Wordsworth in the Wye Valley, Bloomfield finds in his visit back food for future years, and also for future writing, but the home he can never return to is replaced by a simulation, a ‘social plan’ that only exists in the memory of the imaginary speaker. Bloomfield is as distant from Giles as Wordsworth is from his younger animal self. Readers who believed otherwise mistook class for something elemental and internally consistent, rather than something that was always being redescribed in the face of real constraints.

20 

Thomas Spence (ed.), One Pennyworth of Pig’s Meat, or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (London: T. Spence, 1793), 33. 21  This is not to lose sight of the fact that, at least as his work was presented to the public, Bloomfield was caught between the radical agenda of his patron and the more orthodox needs of his publishers. On these matters, see, respectively, William J. Christmas, ‘The Farmer’s Boy and Contemporary Politics’, and Bruce Graver, ‘Illustrating The Farmer’s Boy’, both in Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keegan (eds), Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006).

Poetry and Social Class    179 While a vocabulary for introducing the poetry of ploughmen, cottagers, and shoemakers, long exploited by publishers and newly consecrated by the success of Burns, was firmly in place, poetry written by successful professionals and traders, upper gentry, nobility, and others who laid claim to social distinction might also come with indications of the author’s status. Samuel Rogers, the wealthy ‘banker poet’, was one of many writers to be designated ‘esq.’ on the title pages of his collections, and, before 1818, the advocate and Sheriff-​Depute Walter Scott was another; afterwards, he was Sir Walter Scott, ‘Bart.’ or ‘Baronet’. Robert Southey began appearing as ‘Robert Southey, esq.’ once he was appointed Poet Laureate. Glancing higher, the title page of the Earl of Carlisle’s 1801 collection of poems properly included his family crest, which in turn announced his membership in the Order of the Garter. As Capel Lofft, Bloomfield’s promoter and patron, had observed in his preface to The Farmer’s Boy, ‘with some a person must be rich, or titled, or fashionable’ before their writing is to be ‘thought worthy of notice’; Lofft might also have mentioned that the rich, titled, and fashionable could generally subsidize their own writing and were thus not beholden to the machinery of patronage, subscriptions, or editorial selection.22 They could also draw on personal connections to influence reviews.23 However, high status did not guarantee a positive reception. It is tricky to court fame, and the nineteen-​year-​old Lord Byron, sixth Baron of Rochdale, made a tactical error when, on the title page and in the preface to his first published collection, Hours of Idleness (1807), he emphasized his minority and the fact that, as announced by the collection’s title, the poems were the products of his ‘idle hours’. The young lord made things worse by repeatedly referring to his own status while simultaneously claiming that he ‘would rather incur the bitterest censure of anonymous critics, than triumph in honours granted solely to a title’.24 Byron got his wish when Henry Brougham demolished the collection in the Edinburgh Review: ‘It is a sort of privilege of poets to be egoists’, Brougham allows, but the privilege should not be abused, and Byron ‘should not know, or not seem to know, so much about his own ancestry’.25 While working-​class poets were in danger of being perceived as prodigies or sports, authors from the upper ranks could be sharply reminded that, as Horace Walpole had written decades before, ‘however venerable monarchy may be in a state, no man ever wished to see the government of letters under any form but that of a republic’.26 Walpole did not, however, anticipate such a direct attack on a living noble poet, and in this case it is likely that

22  Capel Lofft, ‘Preface’, in Robert Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy: A Rural Poem, in Four Books (London: Vernor and Hood, 1800), i. 23  William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 188. 24  Hours of Idleness, A Series of Poems Original and Translated, By George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor (Newark: S. and J. Ridge, 1807), ‘Preface’, x. 25  Edinburgh Review 9 (Jan. 1808), 285. 26  Horace Walpole, A Catalogue of the Noble and Royal Authors of England, vol. 1 (Strawberry Hill, 1758), vi.

180   Brian Goldberg the aesthetic really was political. Brougham’s attack on Lord Byron’s pretensions was unusual, and it was of a piece with his broader, progressive project against aristocratic privilege.27 For the author who did not have wealth or family to capitalize on but who was able to acquire the standard literary education, upward mobility was possible, but it was difficult to shake off one’s initial position entirely. Henry Kirke White was a Nottingham butcher’s son who had acquired a classical education, apprenticed himself to a lawyer, and begun studying at Cambridge in order to prepare for the Church when he died, in 1806, at the age of twenty-​one. He was also a poet and essayist, whose one published volume, Clifton Grove, a Sketch in Verse, with Other Poems (1804), had attracted the attention of Robert Southey. After his death, Southey published The Remains of Henry Kirke White (1807), a best-​seller which went into multiple nineteenth-​century editions. Kirke White was both a working-​class author who rose through merit and hard work, and a genius who died before his potential could be realized, and for Southey his story suggested that the social order functioned correctly. In the Preface to Clifton Grove, Kirke White had announced his intention to find ‘an honourable station in the scale of society’, and Southey believed that these efforts would eventually have been rewarded: ‘They who are thus lamented as the victims of genius’, Southey wrote in the Remains, ‘have been, in almost every instance, the victims of their own vices . . . In this age, and in this country, whoever deserves encouragement is, sooner or later, sure to receive it.’28 Rather than drinking to fatal excess, as Burns was believed to have done, or killing himself outright, as Chatterton apparently had, Southey suggests that Kirke White studied himself to death (in fact he probably died of consumption). This is the apotheosis of the bourgeois poet manqué, whose butcher’s-​ boy roots do not keep him from being virtuous or meritorious and whose writing talent is merely the prelude to his ascent from trade, to law, to Church, to that heaven for which he was already so ‘ripe’.29 His death, as Southey has it, is a kind of sacrifice on behalf of more wayward geniuses and a lesson to others insofar as it demonstrates that genius properly channelled has nowhere to go but up. Kirke White himself had reasoned differently about the fate of the mute and inglorious. Where Southey saw an age and country that were certain to reward ‘genius’ as long as it did not destroy itself, Kirke White understood that for the working-​class intellectual, ‘merit’ itself could be a problem: The very consciousness of merit itself often acts in direct opposition to a stimulus to exertion, by exciting that mournful indignation at supposititious neglect, which

27 

William Christie, ‘Going Public: Print Lords Byron and Brougham’, Studies in Romanticism 38.3 (1999), 443–​75 (p. 454). For a different interpretation of this confrontation, see Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 28–30. 28  The Remains of Henry Kirke White, ed. Robert Southey, 2 vols (London: Vernor, Hood, Sharpe, 1807), ii. 3; Southey, ‘Account of the Life of H. K. White’, in Remains, i. 55–​6. 29  Southey, ‘Account of H. K. White’, Remains, i. 1.

Poetry and Social Class    181 urges a sullen concealment of talent, and drives its possessor to that misanthropic discontent which preys on the vitals, and soon produces untimely mortality.30

In Southey’s telling, the butcher’s boy is transformed into a lawyer’s clerk and then into a Cambridge undergraduate, each stage left behind for the next, but for Kirke White no such transformation can ever be complete. ‘Consciousness’ can be a soporific or a poison instead of a stimulant, and in consciousness the past is continuous with the present. Kirke White separates himself from those impoverished ‘bards’ whose ‘consciousness of merit’ eventually kills them, but he is also working out and through the basis of his solidarity with them. Like Southey, he finds hope in the ‘present age’, but unlike Southey he is not convinced that British culture is a merit-​detecting machine. Writing about Bloomfield and his brother Nathaniel, two rare contemporary examples of ‘poverty bursting through the cloud of surrounding impediments into the full blaze of notoriety and eminence’, Kirke White explains why it must have been hard for Nathaniel to write at all: Rousseau very truly observes, that with whatever talent a man may be born, the art of writing is not easily attained. If this be applicable to men enjoying every advantage of scholastic initiation, how much more forcibly must it apply to the offspring of a poor village tailor . . . whose only time for rumination was such as sedentary and sickly employment would allow; on the tailor’s board, surrounded with men, perhaps, of depraved and rude habits, and impure conversation.31

Kirke White’s clerkly account of depraved, rude, and impure tailors should be balanced against George Bloomfield’s description of Robert’s actual literary education as a shoemaker, which was not the education Wordsworth, for example, received at Hawkshead or Coleridge at Christ’s Hospital, but did bring him into contact with newspapers, dissenting sermons at Old Jewry, debating societies, books on geography and history, The Seasons, Paradise Lost, and the two-​page Review section of the London Magazine.32 Yet Kirke White’s snobbery is forgivable because he really is talking about himself. His Clifton Grove volume had been uncharitably reviewed in the Monthly: ‘We commend his exertions and his laudable endeavours to excel: but we cannot compliment him with having already learned the difficult art of writing good poetry.’33 Kirke White exhumes the insult, deflects it from himself, and reapplies it to Nathaniel Bloomfield with a new lesson attached. It is hard for anybody to learn how to write, but, for reasons Capel Lofft and the Monthly Review may not understand and that have nothing to do with merit, it is much, much harder for the manual labourer.

30 

Kirke White, ‘Melancholy Hours [No. VI]’, Remains, ii. 252. Kirke White, ‘Melancholy Hours [No. VI]’, Remains, ii. 253–​4. 32  Lofft, ‘Preface’, vi–​vii. 33  Monthly Review 43 (Feb. 1804), 218. 31 

182   Brian Goldberg Regency audiences were as susceptible to fantasies of aristocratic wealth, freedom, and power as they were to religiously leavened tales of working-​class self-​improvement, as became particularly evident upon the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. One element of Byron’s dominance of British literature after 1812 was that his poetry offered readers vicarious access to his ‘subjectivity’, which, because of his title, was deemed ‘special’. 34 Other authors exploited the interest in aristocratic experience without themselves belonging to the upper ranks. Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini (1816), for example, itself read and corrected in manuscript by Byron (to whom it is dedicated), was designed to appeal across readerships to a Regency love of noble spectacle and romance.35 In fact, the poem presents its ‘dream of bliss’ as a kind of escape for Hunt, who was confined in Surrey Gaol during the early stages of its composition for libelling the Prince Regent. The ‘caged hours’ of the middle-​class radical are alleviated and illuminated when he contemplates the pleasures and woes of ‘things far hence’—​ that is, things that are distant in time, in space, and on the social scale. 36 Predictably, the Quarterly noticed this tendency and developed a critique that responded both to the poem and to the poem’s dedication ‘to my dear Byron’. In his anonymous review, John Wilson Croker writes that ‘we never, in so few lines, saw so many clear marks of the vulgar impatience of a low man . . . labouring, with coarse flippancy, to scramble over the bounds of birth and education, and fidget himself into the stout-​heartedness of being familiar with a LORD’.37 This is nothing compared to the six-​essay screed against the ‘Cockney School’ that John Gibson Lockhart would launch in Blackwood’s, a series best known for its class-​based review of Keats (‘back to the shop Mr. John’)38 but which single-​mindedly pursues the more general thesis suggested by Croker. The primary sin of the Cockney School is that it seeks to impress vulgar audiences and to climb the social ladder by peddling bad imitations of supposedly genteel behaviour: ‘All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings; but Mr. Hunt cannot utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the Shibboleth of low birth and low habits.’39 Hunt’s purported ‘scramble over the bounds of birth and education’ is a scramble over the cultural authority, not only of the Reviews, but of the protocols of the poetic career. Writers were allowed to ascend through the ranks, but the ascent had to be gradual and distinctions preserved. Kirke

34

  Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51. Jeffrey Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 70. See also Michael Eberle-​Sinatra, Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene: A Reception History of His Major Works, 1805–​1828 (New York: Routledge, 2005), esp. 74–​91. 36  Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini, A Poem (London: J. Murray, 1816), 43. 37  Quarterly Review 14 (Jan. 1816), 481. 38  [John Gibson Lockhart], ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. 4’, in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–​ 25: Selections from Maga’s Infancy, vol. 5: Selected Criticism, 1817–​1819, ed. Tom Mole (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), 202. 39  [Lockhart], ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. 1’, in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–​25: Selections, v. 58. 35 

Poetry and Social Class    183 White’s systematic quest for a better station was appropriately ambitious (the Monthly hoped that ‘alma mater’ would improve his writing40), and Croker’s editor at the Quarterly, William Gifford, had himself apprenticed with a shoemaker before patronage enabled his attendance at Oxford, a fact that his literary enemies, including Hunt, never forgot or allowed him to forget. Cockney vulgarity approached its readers through different channels entirely, basing its claims to attention and its parity with aristocrats not on standard intellectual attainments gained through hard work and, often, patronage, but on an imaginative levelling that ignored the distinction between vulgarity and gentility entirely. The combination of Hunt’s politics and the claims of his preface and dedication made The Story of Rimini an especially provocative product of the Cockney School, but it was possible for middle-​class poets to approach aristocratic subject matter without being condemned as ‘tuft hunters’ or boundary-​jumpers. Felicia Hemans’s Tales and Historic Scenes in Verse (1819), for example, also dwell on acts of royal or noble treachery as well as of valour. In ‘The Widow of Crescentius’, Guido harangues the crowd that has gathered around Otho’s dead body: ‘Mourn ye a guilty monarch’s doom? |—​Ye wept not o’er the patriot’s tomb!’ (Part II, lines 298–​9).41 This talk of guilty monarchs and dead patriots might have been radical in other contexts, but Hemans’s audiences seem to have believed that ‘The Widow of Crescentius’ was irrelevant to domestic politics. To substantiate the point, the poem ends by absorbing its own tragedy into oblivion: ‘Oh! thus with tempests of a day | We struggle, and we pass away’, the narrator instructs us, our ‘pangs’ and ‘conflicts’ ‘unknown’ by the living and ‘forgot’ by the dead (Part II, lines 327–​ 8, 333–​4).This depoliticization of a highly suggestive tale about liberty furthers a cultural rapprochement between the ruling classes and everyone else. In fact, Hemans perfectly managed the literary culture of the late teens forwards, and a rightward cultural swerve, particularly after 1819, ensured that her class reconciliations, rather than subversive Cockneyism, would extend a version of Byronism as the major force in the writing of poetry—​as Richard Cronin notes, Byron was especially ‘the Muse of the new school of women poets’.42 On the other hand, Byron and his associates could find their radical self-​expression curbed. John Murray would only publish the first five cantos of Don Juan anonymously (it was left to the radical John Hunt to publish the rest), while Leigh Hunt determined that Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘England in 1819’ could not be published at all. Having spent two years in prison, the younger Hunt rightly feared that he might have faced worse reprisals after the passage of the Six Acts, and he would wait until after the passage of the Reform Bill to publish these pieces, which Shelley had aimed at a working-​class audience.43 40 

Rev. of Clifton Grove, Monthly Review 43 (Feb. 1804), 218. Quotations are from Susan J. Wolfson (ed.), Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 42  Richard Cronin, Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 215. 43  Donald H. Reiman, ‘Introduction’, in The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 2:’The Mask of Anarchy’ (New York: Garland, 1985), xiv. 41 

184   Brian Goldberg The prospect of parliamentary reform in the late 1820s and early 1830s brought renewed attention to the question of whether the nation’s orders were to be confounded and how the dividing lines among them might be defined and defended. Southey’s Lives of Uneducated Poets (1831) argues that the nation would continue to improve as long as it retained its distinctions of rank. The occasion for Southey’s long essay was a subscription edition for John Jones, a servant-​poet who, Southey claims, might well be the last of his kind. ‘As the Age of Reason had commenced’, Southey writes, ‘and we were advancing in quick step in the March of Intellect, Mr. Jones would in all likelihood be the last versifyer of his class’.44 As education becomes more widespread, the ‘uneducated poet’ will become extinct, but John Jones’s ‘class’, and the system of class distinction thus entailed, will ideally remain intact. Just as, in Southey’s brief history of this literary tradition, the Anglo-​Saxon thane spoke the same vulgar language as his churl but remained in command, hierarchies of the future will ring melodiously up and down as the poorer sort are given the chance to learn the more refined language of society’s upper reaches.45 Southey’s point is that much has already been accomplished, but that there is danger in going too far. He trusts to the march of intellect as long as it is not ‘beat . . . to the tune of Ça ira’.46 Southey believed that the nation had more to lose by altering the constitution than it had to gain by widening the franchise, but middle-​class critics who supported reform also worried about the border between the respectable and the vulgar. In 1831, James Montgomery, lecturing before the Royal Institution, expressed regret that the young Lake Poets had been too willing to lower their tone. Montgomery recognized that Lyrical Ballads had marked the beginning of a new literary period, and he understood that the national readership was well prepared for experiments in form and subject matter by the excitement attending the French Revolution. That was the problem, though: ‘The charm of their song was too often interrupted by coarseness of vulgar manners and the squalor of poverty—​too nearly associated with physical disgust, to be the unpolluted source of ideal delights.’47 Montgomery, a prolific poet and hymnist, a successful publisher and printer, and himself a veteran of the 1790s fight against political repression, raises the spectre of vulgarity that had so disturbed Croker, but he has different concerns. When Croker resisted the efforts of the Cockney School to ‘scramble over the bounds of birth and education’, his defence of traditional social arrangements was linked to matters of literary decorum. People who do not know their place behave badly, think badly, and write bad poetry. Montgomery, on the other hand, means to separate poetry from politics. Like Burney, he recognizes and draws back from the challenges posed by Lyrical

44  Attempts in Verse by John Jones, an Old Servant . . . and an Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of Our Uneducated Poets, by Robert Southey, Esq., Poet Laureate (London: John Murray, 1831), 12. 45  Attempts in Verse, 13. 46  Attempts in Verse, 167. 47  James Montgomery, Lectures on Poetry and General Literature, Delivered at the Royal Institution in 1830 and 1831 (London: Longman, 1833), 371.

Poetry and Social Class    185 Ballads. Sometimes, revolutionary poetry traffics in ‘vulgar manners’ and the ‘squalor of poverty’, leaving no mood of the polite reader, including the reformist one, undisturbed. Montgomery is to this extent one of Carlyle’s ‘mechanical’ men, content to compartmentalize his religion, his politics, and his literary taste.48 Alternatively, for the High Tory writer in the years after the First Reform Bill, even radical energies of the past could signify a now-​lost unity of culture. As Thomas De Quincey would suggest in 1837, Burns, at least, was authentic: Burns . . . with his peculiarly wild and almost ferocious spirit of independence, came a generation too soon. In this day, he would have been forced to do that, clamorously called upon to do that, and would have found his pecuniary interest in doing that, which in his own generation merely to attempt doing loaded him with the reproach of Jacobinism.49

‘A generation too soon’ is fiercely ironic. Burns may, in his lifetime, have been reproached as a Jacobin because of his ‘independence’, but in post-​Reform Britain that independence would, worse, have been turned to mere party uses. De Quincey’s memoir describes a world in which the nation’s traditional elites are being replaced by a self-​serving, hypocritical middle class who believe in ‘democracy’ only to the extent that they will benefit from it. ‘The society of Liverpool wits on whom my retrospect is now glancing were all Whigs—​all, indeed, fraternizers with French Republicanism’, De Quincey continues, but rather than sympathizing with Burns, ‘I heard every one, clerk or layman, heartily agreeing to tax Burns with ingratitude’ towards his patrons.50 The rising powers of industrial capital and professional prestige, already visible and complete in this Liverpool coterie, ‘held it right to look down upon Burns as upon one [who was] . . . jacobinical in a sense which “men of property” and master manufacturers will never brook, albeit democrats by profession’.51 When men of property and master manufacturers are at the top of the hierarchy, as De Quincey imagined would soon take place, the cement of human relations would be shattered entirely. In one sense, the story of Romantic poetry and class ends in anticlimax. The demands and promises of 1789 culminated not in Blake’s Mutual Covenant Divine or the immortal Day of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, nor yet in the conservative Age of Reason that Southey had hoped for, but in reform legislation that, while extending the franchise, deepened class differences and left existing structures of power largely intact.52 However, Romantic poetry would leave its mark on the conflicts to come. Burns would 48 

‘Signs of the Times’ (1828), in Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1961), ii. 63. 49  [Thomas De Quincey], ‘Autobiography of an English Opium Eater: Literary Connexions or Acquaintances’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine new series 4 (Feb. 1837), 72. 50  ‘Autobiography of an English Opium Eater’, 72. 51  ‘Autobiography of an English Opium Eater’, 73. 52  Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, Dangerous People? England 1783–​1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 435.

186   Brian Goldberg remain a model for working-​class writers, and Byron and Shelley quickly entered the ‘radical canon’.53 Ebenezer Elliot, yet another poet who received advice and support from Robert Southey, would rise to prominence by writing against the Corn Laws, expressing mock surprise in 1833 that his ‘Corn Law Rhymes’ (published two years earlier) had met with critical approval: ‘What! in the land of castes and cant, take a poor self-​ educated man by the hand and declare that his book is worth reading!’54 In his concern with political economy, Elliot looked ahead to Britain’s bourgeois future. He also looked to its eighteenth-​century past, imagining in one poem that Burns had come back to write his own anti-​corn-​law poetry. The present is grim, but the future is unwritten, and the past Burns returns from and to represents the collapse of class antagonism into a redemptive complex of nature and eros: And the moon and the stars, over mountain and moor, Look’d slyly on Bobby, the honest and poor, While he thought of the sprees o’ the bonny lang syne, When the gloss of his hair was like gold from the mine.55

Mined by the ‘honest and poor’, gold here represents not only Burns’s individual genius and charismatic waywardness but also, taken as a literary echo, human dignity and worth antecedent to the deformations of culture. Or, as Burns himself puts it: ‘The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, | The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.’56

Further Reading Blair, Kirstie, and Mina Gorji (eds), Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-​Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780–​1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Burke, Tim (ed.), Eighteenth-​ Century English Labouring-​ Class Poets, vol. 3:  1780–​1800 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003). Goldberg, Brian, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Gilmartin, Kevin, Writing Against Revolution:  Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1780–​1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Goodridge, John, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Janowitz, Anne, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998). Keegan, Bridget, British Labouring-​Class Nature Poetry, 1730–​1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).

53 

St Clair, The Reading Nation, 337. ‘Preface’ to Corn Law Rhymes, in Ebenezer Elliot, The Splendid Village: Corn Law Rhymes, and Other Poems (London: Benjamin Steill, 1833), 47. 55  Elliott, ‘Burns, from the Dead’, lines 61–​4, in Splendid Village. 56  ‘Song—​For a’ that and a’ that—​’, lines 7–​8, in Poems and Songs of Burns. 54 

Poetry and Social Class    187 Klancher, Jon, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Krishnamurthy, Aruna (ed.), The Working-​Class  Intellectual in Eighteenth-​and Nineteenth-​ Century Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). McEathron, Scott (ed.), Nineteenth-​Century English Labouring-​Class Poets, vol. 1: 1800–​1830 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005). Stedman Jones, Gareth, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–​1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Wahrmann, Dror, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Waldron, Mary, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton:  The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–​1806 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). White, Simon J., Robert Bloomfield, Romanticism and the Poetry of Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Chapter 12

The Spectrum of Fi c t i on Gary Kelly

‘Spectrum of fiction’ suggests a material phenomenon subject to repeatable observation and verification, whereas it is a spectre created in reading, variable according to person and circumstances.1 Thus, ‘Romantic fiction’ would be anything read as ‘fiction’ by someone reading in a ‘Romantic’ way. This chapter accordingly offers a readerly historicist spectrum of Romantic fiction (emphasizing prose) in terms of its sociocultural uses in its time, material attributes, production and distribution, names and innovations, and reception then and since. Most fiction circulating during the Romantic period was read for modernization as a field of contest between differing interests. Fiction was both part of modernization and a major vehicle for representing contending versions of it. Modernization was underway before the Romantic period, but was stimulated during it by the financial, technological, and administrative demands of international and imperial, commercial and military conflicts. It involved accelerating economic, social, political, and cultural change integrating local, regional, national, and international economies and communities. It produced and was facilitated by new and interconnected social and cultural conditions and practices enabling individuals, families, and communities to manage the ‘consequences of modernity’.2 These included increased anxiety over change; enhanced risk and trust; greater individual and local reliance on abstract systems, from banking to government; perceived need for new knowledges and ‘experts’; pressure on many to ‘disembed’ from local networks, supports, and knowledges and ‘re-​embed’ in different, unfamiliar, and often distant ones; and the resulting usefulness of adaptable self-​reflexive personal identity, supported by affective and intimate conjugal, domestic, and social relationships.3 While newspapers and magazines represented the day-​to-​day

1 

Alec McHoul, Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). 2  Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 3  Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).

The Spectrum of Fiction    189 details of modernization local to global, fiction represented the systemic consequences of modernity in readers’ here and now. Readers facing different life chances could find illustrations of modernization appropriate to their different interests in the spectrum of Romantic fiction as objects and acts of reading. Reading is not produced by an object, but it requires one. Romantic modernization multiplied fiction vehicles for those engaged in it. These included the ballad-​and story-​ sheet; the pamphlet novelette, play, and ‘garland’ of songs; the magazine or newspaper containing fiction; the weekly or monthly ‘number’ or portion of a book; the literature anthology for school or drawing-​room; the volume-​form novel; various multi-​volume collections of British Novelists, Poets, and Dramatists; and, later, Christmas gift-​books with verse and prose fiction commissioned from celebrity authors. Short fiction and serialized novels in magazines often appeared alongside book and theatre reviews; news of public events, fashions, and the arts; notices of professional appointments and births, marriages, and deaths; stock and commodity prices; and weather information. Here, fiction was one representation among others of the readers’ world. Earlier, magazine fiction contributors were often amateurs, but later usually professionals, modern ‘experts’. This proliferation stimulated and was enabled by convergent technological and commercial modernizations.4 From the 1790s, the development of the printing press, new type designs, sturdier and subtler illustration media, mechanized paper-​making, book-​binding cloth, and transport infrastructure increased productivity, improved quality, decreased cost, diversified formats, modernized appearance, and extended and accelerated distribution. From 1800, stereotyping, or taking casts of typeset pages, enabled the pieces of type to be used for setting new pages and different books, while metal impressions from the casts printed further editions as required. With number-​selling, stereotyping enabled more efficient use of capital, as proceeds from sales of early numbers were invested in printing subsequent ones, rather than requiring substantial outlay for an entire work before any return. Travelling agents, using improved transport networks, marketed stereotyped numbers across the nation and beyond. The different fiction vehicles these innovations made possible were shaped in format and content for different markets. The cheapest volume-​form fiction came in pamphlets or ‘chapbooks’. Historically, fiction sold by ‘chapmen’ or travelling peddlers was printed poorly on coarse paper and decorated with woodcuts, and comprised a repertory of familiar narratives from history, legend, trickster tales, prosified verse romance, and picaresque rogue stories.5 This mega-​text embodied the lottery mentality of historic subsistence economy, where individuals had little control over life chances without luck, magic, or extraordinary personal gifts. The fiction’s form reflected life-​as-​ lottery in paratactic unprogressive plots, emphasis on incident, generalized chronotopes

4  See Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing 1800–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 5  For another account, see Victor Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide (London: Woburn Press, 1977).

190   Gary Kelly (representations of time-​space6), and type-​characters, to which readers could apply their own life-​ particulars. Such fiction continued to be sold in historic formats throughout the period, indicating some indifference or resistance to ‘modern’ goods. By 1800, however, many of these tales were also absorbed into a growing body of pamphlet fiction, original or taken from magazines, abridged from full-​length novels, or adapted from successful plays, with ‘modern’ physical appearance.7 These targeted plebeians increasingly conscious of the relationship between fashion and status, eager for versions of what their ‘betters’ consumed, but cheaper and addressing their own interests. While historic chapbook fiction often adopted fashionable modern dress, new pamphlet fiction similarly dressed was reshaped from upmarket sources to resemble the old by emphasizing incident, type-​character, melodramatic incidents, generalized settings, ‘poetic’ justice, and stylized dialogue, and reducing plot explanations, descriptions of subjectivity and chronotope, and other markers of the upmarket fiction embodying the investment mentality of its readers’ modernization. Full-​length fiction originally published earlier but amenable to Romantic reading was reprinted in serial ‘numbers’ and/​or volumes and collections purportedly ‘selected’ for literary quality, moral instruction, and ‘entertainment’. Reprint fiction likely targeted the socioculturally aspiring anxious to avoid ‘vulgarity’, reduce risk, respect cultural authority, get lasting value for money, and invest in objects merging cultural and material capital that were displayable, heritable, and vendible.8 For those pursuing riskier modernness, there were ‘novels of the day’ or ‘fashionable novels’ in volumes and magazine serials. Publishers risked more with fictions claiming novelty, for an unpredictably fashion-​conscious readership, requiring upfront investment; they reduced risk and elevated prices by shortening print runs to a few hundred energetically advertised copies, mainly for commercial circulating libraries which bore any loss from unrented fiction. For readers, library rental reduced the cost of fiction that was fashionable but ephemeral and rarely considered worth purchasing. ‘Circulating-​library novels’, supposedly typified by those of the Minerva Press, were widely condemned, and more widely consumed.9 Size was significant. Most fiction vehicles were ten to twenty-​five centimetres high, in gatherings of two-​page leaves totalling sixteen (16mo, sextodecimo), twelve (12mo,

6   See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 7  See Gary Kelly, ‘Fiction and the Working Classes’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 8  For reprinting practices, see William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chs 6–​7. 9  See K. A. Manley, ‘Booksellers, Peruke-​makers, and Rabbit-​merchants: The Growth of Circulating Libraries in the Eighteenth Century’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds), Libraries and the Book Trade: The Formation of Collections from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New Castle: Oak Knoll, 2000).

The Spectrum of Fiction    191 duodecimo), or eight (8vo, octavo). Depending on thickness, a book’s price usually corresponded with its size, which usually corresponded with its claim to artistic, intellectual, and moral worth. In 1847 a writer blamed the 1832 Reform Act for a ‘deluge of democratic shapes and prices’ including ‘duodecimo, post-​octavo, eighteenmo, sixteenmo, and a hundred other vos and mos’, though the formats were common earlier.10 All prose fiction had relatively low status and usually appeared in correspondingly smaller formats. While most volume-​form new fiction came in duodecimo, fiction claiming ‘serious’ intellectual, political, or artistic purpose, such as John Moore’s novels, sometimes came in the larger octavo. Reprint-​series publishers palliated the smaller format as a convenient ‘pocket’ size for the leisure hour of genteel mental recreation. Prose fiction for youngsters was usually 12mo, 16mo, or smaller—​diminutive readers with diminutive minds supposedly requiring diminutive books. Poetry enjoyed higher cultural status: while formats of reprint poets and novelists were similarly small, new verse fiction often appeared in larger octavo or quarto. Most people can tell a book by its cover. Pamphlet fiction promised intense pleasure—​ attractively (and defiantly?) ephemeral and temptingly portable (and concealable?), using ‘modern’ typefaces and enclosing an enticingly melodramatic engraved frontispiece in paper covers (commonly blue, yellow, beige, or white) printed front (title) and back (advertisements) to indicate both contents and membership in a larger spectrum of works. Sensational contents matched appearance for readers understandably more interested (in several senses) in ‘entertainment’ than in cultural capital, in lottery mentality’s immediacy and intensity than in investment mentality’s deliberation and deferred gratification. New book-​form fiction claimed more substance (in several senses), sold in ‘sheets’ (sewn signatures), (paper-​covered) ‘boards’, part-​leather, or (later) cloth binding, or custom bound, often lavishly; suitable binding-​cloth was invented late in the period. Most bindings were flimsy, and different kinds indicated different material, cultural, and social valuation of copies of the same work. Bentley’s ‘Standard Novels’ of the 1830s, for example, survive in publisher’s plain cloth as well as a wide spectrum of bespoke leather and part-​leather bindings. Important sociocultural distinctions could also be designed or discerned in paper, type design, font size, page layout, and illustrations. Paper, a major production cost, made from rag pulp by hand but later mechanized, ranged from coarse to ‘super-fine’, signifying by texture, heft, and colour its location on a spectrum of material, cultural, and social values. New type designs gave a distinctively ‘modern’ look. Earlier number-​ trade republishers such as John Bell and Charles Cooke claimed in advertisements to use ‘super-​fine’ paper and specially designed ‘modern’ type, and offered higher-​ priced copies on ‘hot-​pressed’ (smoother) paper. In the 1800s and 1810s the printer Whittingham, working with mid-​and downmarket booksellers, was famous for beautifully produced books, including reprint fiction. In the 1820s and ’30s the upmarket firm of Colburn and Bentley was famous for fine book design, hot-​pressed paper, and

10 ‘Booksellers’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 7, no. 162 (6 Feb. 1847), 87.

192   Gary Kelly wide margins, especially in ‘novels of the day’. The number of illustrations diminished proceeding upmarket; perhaps the socioculturally aspiring considered illustration in fiction distracting, vulgar, or juvenile. Font size also indicated quality, with most reprint fiction in smaller sizes and ‘novels of the day’ in a larger format, corresponding to book size. Like ‘pocket’ format, small font was made a merit, as with Jones and Co.’s 1820s ‘Diamond Classics’ of reprint literature including fiction, printed in ‘diamond’, a recent and at that time the smallest typeface, but also suggesting beauty and lasting value, marketed as furniture books with a mantel display case. Sociocultural meanings of material features and pricing interacted. During the Romantic period a labourer in London would earn about ten shillings (120 pence) a week to support a family.11 A large breadloaf was a penny; the cheapest theatre seat a shilling (twelve pence) or sixpence; a ballad, story-​sheet, or old-​style chapbook a penny or less; a ‘modern’ fiction pamphlet or serial ‘number’ of a novel sixpence, the established downmarket price point or threshold of profitability and affordability accepted by publishers and purchasers.12 The writer who deplored the ‘deluge of democratic’ book sizes supposedly loosed in 1832 also deplored the correspondingly widened access to print by prices being reduced to ‘brown money’: copper coins worth less than the silver sixpenny and threepenny. Through the period, a volume-​length novel could cost a few shillings, a several-​volume novel ten to thirty, and a reprint series several pounds (each twenty shillings). The well-​to-​do could afford any fiction, but while elite culture disdained ‘penny’ print and ‘sixpenny’ fiction, plebeian readers welcomed them as addressing their interests. Spectrums of source corresponded with those of format and price. Much fiction circulating in the period was first published earlier but proved amenable to Romantic reading, while much upmarket fiction of the period was republished downmarket. Quashing of perpetual copyright in 1774 allowed innovative ‘number-​trade’ specialists such as Bell and Cooke to challenge the entrenched publishers’ consortium by reprinting in sixpenny weekly numbers literature already accorded social and cultural prestige and moral, intellectual, artistic, and entertainment value. Reprint fiction typically appeared with good-​quality paper, modern-​looking types, and engraved illustrations, either in larger format but double-​column, such as Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine of the 1780s and ’90s and Limbird’s British Novelist of the 1820s, or in smaller 16mo or 12mo, such as Bell’s, Cooke’s, and their successors’ series. Defensively, advertisements insisted these were both ‘cheap’ and ‘elegant’. The entrenched publishers countered with pricier reprint sets in volume-​form only, implying superior quality and cultural status, ‘selected’ and introduced by notable authors and intellectuals giving cultural authority and social respectability. The 1810 British Novelists was published by a large ‘conger’ (ad hoc booksellers’ consortium) and selected and introduced by the well-​known middle-​class 11  For figures and issues in calculating earnings and cost of living, see L. D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 161–​78. 12  See James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–​1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

The Spectrum of Fiction    193 cultural and social modernizer, Anna Lætitia Barbauld. Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1820) was introduced by (unnamed) Walter Scott, the most famous novelist of the time and a social and cultural modernizer for the landed and professional elite. Scott probed market levels in republishing his own fiction, culminating with the late 1820s ‘Magnum Opus’ edition of his ‘Waverley Novels’ in five-​shilling monthly illustrated and annotated volumes.13 The innovation was soon imitated. The upmarket firm Colburn and Bentley issued monthly six-​shilling, single-​volume, illustrated ‘Standard Novels’ selected from the period, usually with introductions by the authors. The period’s spectrum of reprint fiction changed as publishers and editors selected what they thought would sell from what copyright made available, addressing their middle-​class market’s desire for both ‘entertainment’ and ‘improvement’ in several senses—​fiction that would enable them to entertain alternative experiences and sensations and imagine things being otherwise, to acquire moral and intellectual capital meriting upward social mobility and accession to ‘respectability’, and to learn from novels the social and cultural skills appropriate to such status. Some collections and works tended more to ‘entertainment’, others to ‘improvement’. French, Italian, and Spanish authors included earlier were later dropped, perhaps reflecting a growing leeriness of foreign literature, often perceived as ‘indecent’ and ‘immoral’, and demand for ‘British’ ‘national’ literature. Different and ‘modern’ foreign authors, especially German and French, were included, according more with British middle-​class interests. Later upmarket reprint collections added recent English works of ostensible intellectual value, moral-​didactic use, social-​critical content, and artistic achievement, and dropped earlier works by then judged too ‘sentimental’, ‘merely entertaining’, risqué, harshly satirical, or vulgarly picaresque. Later downmarket collections retained such works and added recent similar ones. Early in the period, for example, Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine included fiction by Henry Fielding, Hawkesworth, Goldsmith, Langhorne, Smollett, Sterne, Dodd, Kelly, Swift, Sarah Fielding, Richardson, Lennox, Kimber, Paltock, Haywood, Longueville, Shebbeare, Frances Sheridan, Johnson, Collyer, Coventry, Hill, Le Sage, Graffigny, Gueulette, Voltaire, Marivaux, Fénelon, Vergy, Marmontel, Mouhy, Goethe, Avellaneda, and Cervantes, as well as Persian Tales, the Arabian Nights, Peruvian Tales, and Gaudentio di Lucca. Cooke’s British Novelists was similar. Today these would be classed as sentimental, moral-​didactic, satirical, comic-​picaresque, exotic, or orientalist, or a combination of these. Barbauld’s upmarket British Novelists of 1810 rejected much in Harrison’s and Cooke’s collections, especially the satirical and comic-​picaresque, and French novels, but not Fielding; retained a selection of the sentimental and moral-​ didactic such as Johnson, Goldsmith, and Mackenzie, and also Richardson (elsewhere pronounced by Barbauld the founder of the ‘modern’ novel14); and added recent 13  Jane Millgate, Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987). 14  The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Lætitia Barbauld, 6 vols (London, 1804), i, pp. xxi–​xxii.

194   Gary Kelly novels by women and social critics representing subjectivity in relation to social inequality and injustice, including Burney, Moore, Smith, Radcliffe, Bage, Inchbald, and Edgeworth. Later collections such as Ballantyne’s and Limbird’s made more concessions to earlier comic and picaresque fiction and similar works from the Romantic period. Another spectrum of fiction within a broader one came from number-​trade specialists such as Hogg (London), Gleave (Manchester), Fisher (Liverpool), and Kelly (London). Their lists included the Bible and religious works, manuals and handbooks, arts and sciences reference, historiography, accounts of major current events (deaths of royalty, Napoleonic Wars, public scandals, notorious crimes), criminal biography, and earlier fiction of proven popularity, such as moralizing yet titillating novels (Pamela, translations from French), adventures (Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe), and comic satire (Don Quixote, Smollett’s novels, the narrative verse satire Hudibras). After 1810, the successful republishing in numbers of moralizing and titillating circulating-​library novels such as Fatherless Fanny (1811) led Kelly and others to commission similar ones from writers such as Sarah Green, Hannah Maria Jones, and Catherine Ward, reprinted and imitated through the century. Like historic chapbook literature, this spectrum of fiction and non-​fiction comprised a mega-​text converging puritan religion, practical knowledge for modernization, and narratives of social vicissitudes, moral testing, and endurance or failure in it. This popular library likely targeted the commercial and manufacturing middle and lower-​middle classes, with the self-​discipline, reliable earnings, and motivation to sustain weekly outlay of sixpence a number over months to acquire imposing ‘furniture books’ that, even unread, could signify to owners, family, and others participation in the culture of plebeian and petty bourgeois modernity. This was served from the 1830s through the century by Milner of Halifax’s similar spectrum of attractive sixpenny and shilling books, including much Romantic fiction. What, then, did people see as the spectrum of fiction? Subtitles are suggestive. ‘Novel’, ‘romance’, ‘tale’, and ‘story’ occur frequently, ‘narrative’ and ‘history’ less often, and ‘fiction’ seldom. These descriptors, chosen by author or publisher, carefully or carelessly, for literary and/​or commercial purposes, were likely marketing points more than reliable indicators of content, form, or style. While ‘novel’ rarely indicated verse fiction, ‘romance’, ‘tale’, and ‘story’ often did. All terms were used for longer fictions, ‘novel’ and ‘romance’ less often for shorter ones. Some melodramas were subtitled ‘a romance’, aptly indicating analogies of form and content. Most longer fictions had the subtitle, ‘A Novel’, only occasionally with further descriptor, including:  satirical, historical (several), modern, fashionable, romantic, sentimental, comic sentimental, tragic, characteristic, Hibernian, founded on facts (several), in a series of letters (many in the 1780s), inscribed to the beau-​monde, and founded on a recent event. Fiction subtitled ‘a romance’ commonly had additional labelling, including: comic, pastoral, English, modern, ethical, Spanish, Norman, founded partly on historical facts, Sicilian, of the forest, historical (many), rhapsodical, of the eighteenth century, of former times, of real life, German, original, of Franconia, of the thirteenth century, Gothic, of a summer, of a century ago, of the sixteenth century, Russian, Neapolitan, of the twelfth century, terrific, of the fifteenth century, in futurity, Polish legendary, serio-​comic, interesting, crusade, highland,

The Spectrum of Fiction    195 of the Hebrides, historical and moral, mock heroic, of the seventeenth century, Bavarian, utopian, political, political and amatory, of chivalry, historical and political, from the mountains, philosophical, Irish historical, Irish, Scottish, Bedoueen, of ancient times, baronial, border, New-​England, of the present times, of the English histories, of real life, national, domestic, of the times of William the Conqueror, of the fourteenth century, psychological, of Mexico, of the Thirty Years’ War, of the free traders, of the seventeenth century, of the nineteenth century.15 Comment and terminology of the period indicate roughly analogous and interconnected historical-​generic, moral-​intellectual, and formal spectrums of fiction. The phrase ‘modern novel’ commonly distinguished prose fiction since Richardson and Fielding from the often risqué prose fiction of the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries, and writers such as Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley. Less often, ‘modern romance’ distinguished recent prose fiction from medieval to seventeenth-​century chivalric and courtly verse and prose romances. Discussion of ‘modern’ longer prose fiction commonly characterized the ‘novel’ as plausible portrayal of contemporary ‘real life’, ‘romance’ as implausible and exaggerated portrayal of life in other times and places, and the ‘tale’ as ‘simpler’ in form than the ‘novel’ or ‘romance’, with the ‘sentimental tale’ portraying common life more than high society and emotions more than incident, and the ‘traditionary’ tale’ resembling oral narrative (later called ‘folktale’) in suspenseful and sensational portrayals of the supernatural, the ‘barbaric’, the ‘feudal’, the exotic. Some condemned the ‘novel’ as representing ‘artificial’ society and hence being itself artificial, and the ‘romance’ as representing the ‘extravagant’ and ‘improbable’ and hence being itself ‘unnatural’, while praising the ‘tale’ for representing ‘nature’ rather than ‘art’ and hence being itself ‘authentic’. In the preface to her novel Belinda (1801), Maria Edgeworth declared it a ‘moral tale’ and not a ‘novel’ because ‘so much folly, error, and vice are disseminated in books classed under this denomination’. Short fiction proliferated for contested modernity. ‘Short story’ meant brief story rather than the ‘high’ literary form prescribed in the late nineteenth century and promoted by literary Modernism in opposition to popular forms. Most histories of short fiction are teleological, searching earlier periods for ‘precursors’ of modern forms, such as ghost, local colour, crime, detective, and dramatic stories.16 Fiction meeting later criteria can be found in the Romantic period, such as McNish’s ‘The Metempsychosis’, published, with similar prose and verse, in the upmarket Blackwood’s Magazine.17 The Lee sisters, Edgeworth, Opie, Irving, Mitford, Hook, and others also collected their short fiction and novellas into successful upmarket volumes for circulating libraries. Downmarket 15 

Titles retrieved from searches on OCLC Worldcat database (see: www.oclc.org/​en/​worldcat.html). See also Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 16  Non-​teleological studies include Barbara Korte, The Short Story in Britain: A Historical Sketch and Anthology (Tübingen: A. Francke, 2003); and Tim Killick, British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Rise of the Tale (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 17  Blackwood’s Magazine 19 (May 1826), 511–​29.

196   Gary Kelly collections such as the Arabian Nights and pamphlet fiction remained favourites, typically without attribution; publishers and readers, for different reasons, showed little interest in source or authorship, in contrast to upmarket investment in ‘originality’ (as distinct from ‘mere’ novelty) and celebrity author branding. Newspapers and magazines needed ever more short fiction as fillers and fillips. Much earlier material was republished in the period. Though brief, risqué, and humorous ‘novels’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were republished, they were increasingly deplored as ‘indecent’ and ‘immoral’. Reprints of periodicals such as The Spectator and The Rambler included many stories, also republished separately in magazines and anthologies. Aesop’s ‘Fables’, like ‘fairy tales’, were frequently reprinted and often adapted and imitated for satirical or polemical use. Other named forms included the anecdote, parable, jest, vision, sketch, fragment, and philosophic (social criticism) tale. Didacticism was welcomed: ‘short story’ was often preceded by ‘plain’ and/​or followed by ‘in illustration’ (of some moral point). Justified by classical rhetorical theory, analogous to life-​learning, and aesthetically satisfying in itself, the embrace of ‘moral’ and ‘story’ evidently pleased many. In the industrializing West Midlands, from the 1790s to the 1810s George Nicholson published and distributed via the expanding canal system his ‘Literary Miscellany’ of pamphlets that were elegant and cheap, purposely short, mainly fictional, published in various combinations, and, like the number-​trade mega-​ text, merged edification and entertainment to address the interests of and be assembled into furniture books by lower-​middle-​class modernizers like himself. One surviving set (in the British Library) belonged to the family of Jedediah Strutt, farmer-​wheelwright turned inventor of industrialized textile manufacture. Proliferating short fiction, like long forms, addressed general and particular issues of modernization. In the French Revolution crisis, religious Evangelicals led by Hannah More saw historic chapbook and oral fiction as the site of a plebeian culture mobilized politically by Tom Paine and others. Despite pious antipathy to fiction as ‘lying’, More responded in the mid-​1790s with a programme of countervailing pamphlet fiction or ‘Cheap Repository’. Though purposely imitating historic chapbook format, it was largely purchased for distribution to the ‘lower ranks’ by middle-​and upper-​class people, who could read therein fantasies of plebeian ‘idleness’, ‘insubordination’, and ‘vice’ converted, often by print power, to piety, deference, and hard work. In 1799 the Religious Tract Society assumed and expanded the project. Similar short fiction for youngsters promoted modernization and aimed to displace ‘fairy tales’ and chapbooks considered ideologically contaminating. Partly faked prose ‘translations’ of ‘fragments’ from ancient Gaelic bard ‘Ossian’ simultaneously disguised, validated, and heroized modern ‘patriotism’ in elites’ interest by ‘finding’ it in the past. ‘Ossian’ became Napoleon’s favourite ‘poet’ and a transatlantic craze. Similarly, elite culture ‘collected’, ‘edited’, and adapted oral narratives, later termed ‘folktales’, expropriating them for the ‘national’ literature while attempting to extirpate them through imposition of literacy and the likes of Cheap Repository. The new-​fashioned downmarket pamphlet fiction appearing around 1800 ignored such print, offering sentimental, Gothic, adventure, and titillating fiction alongside and often echoing pro-​reformist pamphlets and racy accounts

The Spectrum of Fiction    197 of upper-​class scandals and government corruption. Late in the period Martineau’s novella series Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–​33) fictionalized, purportedly for artisans and petty bourgeoisie, modernization serving elites’ interests. Fiction’s prolificacy prompted consumer anxiety and elites’ moral panic, addressed by professional ‘philosophers’ (public intellectuals), critics, and editors. Prose fiction at best was long regarded as mental recreation from serious study or business, and most discussion remained dismissive and more attentive to verse fiction. Earlier, reviews were few, brief, and usually denigrating, but became more frequent, analytical, and sometimes positive with increased novel reading, new fiction varieties, fiction-​writing by notable intellectuals and intellectual nobles, editing of novel collections by professional literary modernizers, and engagement of many novels with major issues of modernity. Pamphlet fiction was ignored, but reprint novel collections were sometimes welcomed as signs of ‘improving’ public ‘taste’. ‘Philosophers’ from Godwin to Hazlitt theorized fiction in service of elite middle-​class modernity. Taxonomies from Reeve’s Progress of Romance (1785) to Dunlop’s History of Fiction (1814) offered guidance, but modern diversity perplexed analysis. Dunlop briefly described three modern kinds and examples: ‘serious’ (Richardson, Godwin), ‘comic’ (Fielding, Smollett), and ‘romantic’ (Walpole, Reeve, Radcliffe). In 1828 the Monthly Review declared, ‘There are as many distinct kinds of novels as there are of poems, and these, if we believe poetical theorists, are almost infinite in number’, but named only the ‘novel of manners’, the ‘novel of sentiment’, and the novel of ‘action’.18 Most mainstream commentary converged moral, intellectual, and aesthetic criteria in condemning prose fiction’s effect on modernization. As ‘mere’ entertainment it distracted readers of all classes from accumulating moral, intellectual, and cultural ‘capital’, or self-​and social discipline and ‘solid and useful’ knowledge. Further, it destabilized the socioeconomic order in several ways. It stimulated ‘improper’ and unrealistic desires behind personal and social indiscipline in all classes. By inspiring unachievable social emulation in the lower and middle classes it created discontent. By glamourizing excessive and inappropriate consumption, or ‘extravagance’, ‘luxury’, and ‘dissipation’, it encouraged all classes in behaviour harmful to the household and national economies. Many novels condemned such ‘vices’ while detailing them. Some commentators defended ‘superior’ novels as promoting the accumulation of moral, intellectual, and cultural capital and as sources of such capital for readers, though probably ‘superior’ was applied to a novel more often in advertisements than in criticism. Probably, too, most readers were influenced little if at all by such discussion. Readers of the Romantic period can no longer be asked how they read, but we can speculate about this, using diaries and memoirs, ‘effective’ (everyday life) semiotics, ethnomethodology,19 and other investigatve tools. There were many kinds of fiction, but arguably the prevalent story-​form in all markets was the identity-​mystery 18 

‘Novels of the Day’, Monthly Review new series 9 (Oct. 1828), 232–​47.

19 McHoul, Semiotic Investigations; Graham Button (ed.), Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also Felicity James, Chapter 31 in this volume.

198   Gary Kelly romance. Originating in ancient Greek ‘new comedy’, it was adapted in sixteenth-​to eighteenth-​century dramas restaged through the Romantic period, and was elaborated in eighteenth-​century prose fictions republished in the period. Having long dramatized anxieties of social change, in the Romantic period the form addressed need to negotiate change and dislocation, acquire moral and intellectual capital for the purpose, ‘read’ risk and trust in unfamiliar chronotopes, and form ‘modern’ intimate, domestic, and social relationships. In the positive version, a protagonist is unjustly or mistakenly ejected (orphaned, disowned, abducted, lost, displaced, absconded) from ‘home’ (family, name, community, status, wealth) and precipitated on the ‘road’ (actual, subjective); undergoes vicissitudes of mistaken (including self-​mistaken), false, or misrepresented identity imperilling liberty and life; survives by deploying innate and/​or acquired inner resources and new social networks; and is rewarded with revelation or discovery of ‘true’ identity (moral and intellectual worth, family name, social standing), followed swiftly by restoration or (increasingly often) assignment to ‘proper’ (merited and/​or inherited) status and property, with marriage and prospects. This form reconstructed the lottery-​mentality plot to mythicize the experience, aspirations, and resentments of a largely middle-​class readership increasingly numerous, wealthy, and self-​confident, but excluded by the ‘old order’ from status and the state. Examples include novels by Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Smith, Radcliffe, Austen, and Scott. In the negative version, increasingly common upmarket in the Romantic period and reflecting its distinctive modernity, restoration to status and family is unachieved but there are moral–​intellectual–​spiritual rewards, ostensibly superior to social–​material ones. The protagonist’s romance journey closes not with ascent to merited status, wealth, and society, but with self-​knowledge, sublime understanding, or transcendent modern selfhood, for better or worse, often validated by martyrdom. Examples include ‘sentimental’ novellas, Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman (1798), Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), Byron’s verse tales (1810s), Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and Bulwer-​Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830). The ‘moral’ is explicit in didactic fiction, including female conduct novels such as Wollstonecraft’s Mary (1788) or More’s Cælebs in Search of a Wife (1809) and fiction for youngsters. In pseudo-​popular, middle-​class fantasy religious fiction, from Cheap Repository (1795–​98) to Richmond’s Annals of the Poor (1809–​14), young women, youngsters, plebeians, and ‘primitives’ are mentored in a limited version of modern subjectivity for martyrdom serving the interests of social ‘betters’ (the well-​to-​do, adult men, parents) ostensibly possessing such subjectivity in fullness. Fiction variants were named and classified during the period (indicated here by quotation marks) or later. The ‘novel of manners’, or manners, sentiment, and emulation, usually built on the identity-​mystery romance plot, dominated upmarket and was abbreviated and imitated downmarket, emphasizing different aspects of modernization and modernity. The novel of contemporary life (usually high society but often humble) instructed the socially aspiring in subjective-​social identities for modernity while

The Spectrum of Fiction    199 critiquing false or mistaken kinds of modernization (Burney, Bage, Le Noir, Austen, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Mitford). The bildungsroman or novel of education represented self-​formation and testing for modernity (Charlotte Smith, Inchbald, Holcroft, Scott). The roman-​à-​clef novelized news of falsely or misguidedly modern intellectual and/​or social elites (Peacock, Lady Caroline Lamb, Byron, Disraeli). ‘Gothic’, historical, and ‘oriental’ romances and ‘national tales’ gave antique, picturesque, and/​or exotic dress and setting to modern manners, sentiment, and emulation while critiquing varieties of the unmodernized (Radcliffe, Owenson, Scott, Johnstone, Mary Shelley, Hope, Morier). ‘Philosophical’ romances were developed from Enlightenment fiction; they included Jacobin and Anti-​Jacobin novels (referring to sympathizers and opponents of French Revolutionary ideas) and later ‘Newgate’ (criminal life) novels combining aspects of the bildungsroman and critique-​romance to expose aspects of unmodernized or mistakenly modernized systems and institutions (Moore, Holcroft, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Hays, Hamilton, Peacock, Whitehead, Ainsworth). The ‘Silver-Fork’ novel centred on high society, its homes and haunts, where modernization was contested, often with excursions into low life and border country at home or the alien and exotic abroad, depicted as unmodernized or unmodernizable, amusing and dangerous (Horace Smith, Egan, Normanby, Ward, Lister, Hook, Bury, Gore, Bulwer-​Lytton). The quasi-​novel adapted the classical Menippean (‘mixed dish’) satire tradition to mediate, defamiliarize, popularize, or problematize non-​fiction matter (poetry, antiquarianism, social reportage, autobiography) in a fictional romance-​ discovery frame, exposing unmodernities and false modernities (Thelwall’s The Peripatetic, 1793; Dibdin’s Bibliomania, 1809, 1811; Moore’s Lalla Rookh, 1817; Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris, 1823; Southey’s The Doctor, &c., 1834–​47).20 Fiction reformulated subjectivity, social relations, time–​space, and the relation between them by refashioning formal elements of narration, plot, structure, character, action, incident, setting, description, dialogue, language, reference and allusion, and tone. Upmarket, most fiction was reformed better to embody and teach the investment mentality needed to maximize participation in and profit from modernization; downmarket, material from fashionable upmarket novels was adapted to the structure of historic lottery-​mentality fiction and identity-​mystery romance. New fictional techniques supported invention of a self-​reflexive subjectivity for elites needing to negotiate social, geographical, epistemological, and emotional dislocations of modernization in their own interest. Further, among Western European elites, possession of such ‘sensibility’ or complex plenitude of inner self, contrasting 20 

For these various subtypes, see Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780–​1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); M. O. Grenby, The Anti-​Jacobin Novel: The French Revolution and British Conservatism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 1830–​ 1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens and Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963); Gary Kelly, ‘General Introduction’, in Kelly (ed.), Newgate Narratives, 5 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), vol. 1; Edward Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–​ 1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 252–​6.

200   Gary Kelly with ‘merely’ social identities, became a marker of moral–​intellectual merit and ‘sovereign’ or self-​directing subjectivity. This validated ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ advanced in the public–​political sphere and formation of constitutional modern states excluding those supposedly lacking such selfhood (women, plebeians, colonized peoples). Elite modernizers’ need for instruction in such identity elicited new youngsters’ literature, revived literature of spiritual experience, instigated modern autobiography and biography, elevated personal lyric past and present to the top (from near bottom) of the hierarchy of poetic genres, and transformed upmarket narrative verse and prose fiction elements of narration, description, characterization, plot, language, and structure. Apart from novels by writers such as Richardson, Prévost, and Rousseau and verse narratives such as Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, earlier fiction, upmarket or down, in first-​or third-​person narration, largely represented character from ‘outside’, socially rather than subjectively, addressing all classes’ interest in social identity and relations. This interest remained predominant downmarket and important upmarket where, however, fiction foregrounding modern subjectivity became increasingly esteemed, but contested. Earlier downmarket forms of first-​person narration from Defoe and Continental picaresque fiction were augmented upmarket in the Romantic period with description, often extensive, of inner experience. Richardson was celebrated for pioneering modern fiction of subjective experience. ‘Sentimental’ fiction, especially novellas, truncated other structural elements to foreground representation of emotion. Gothic and other romances incorporated lyric poems (by protagonist or narrator) alongside ‘poetic’ descriptions of landscape, ruins, artworks, from the subjective viewpoint of protagonist and narrator, assumable by the reader. Jacobin novelists’ first-​person narration authenticated and intensified protagonists’ accounts of injustice under the unmodernized system of ‘things as they are’, the title of Godwin’s political novel of 1794, while Anti-​ Jacobin novelists’ third-​person authoritative narration distanced readers from their gullible protagonists’ ‘dangerous’ political and amatory enthusiasms. Narrative verse fiction adapted poetry’s verbal and rhythmic ‘music’ to expression, representation, and evocation of subjective experience, culminating in Byron’s bestsellers. Scott’s verse and prose fiction eschewed Byronist subjectivity for the narratorial transhistorical overview available to men of the landed-​professional elite such as himself. A compromise had appeared alongside the 1780s efflorescence of epistolary fiction and displaced it: free indirect discourse, or reported inward speech and thought of a character by an omniscient narrator, converged intimacy of first-​person and critical detachment of third-​person narration, exemplified in Austen and Byron. Language was a marker. In upmarket fiction, modern subjects and omniscient narrators ‘speak’ and think in standard written English, only recently formalized by and for social elites, while the unmodernized or unmodernizable (plebeians, provincials, the colonized) only ‘speak’, and then in dialect or sociolect. Downmarket pamphlet fiction that was abbreviated from upmarket novels typically truncated and formularized description of characters’ inner experience to emphasize action and social relating. New techniques representing modern subjectivity underwrote fictional reformulation of social relations. Modernized subjects pursued ‘authentic’ and ‘pure’ relationships

The Spectrum of Fiction    201 uninfluenced and unvitiated by the ‘merely’ social relations of power and self-​interest, patronage and clientage, sordid passion or pelf, motivating the unmodernized. Heterosexual love and homosocial friendship as personal subjective absolutes founded modern domesticity and sociality. The domestic circle of family and friends nurtured and restored the modern subject challenged by both consequences of modernity and the unmodernized. Most fiction of the period depicted successful achievement of social elites’ modernity even in a world as yet not fully modernized, but some did not, exploiting, often for political motive, fascination with victims of unmodernized ‘things as they are’. Similarly, Jacobin novelists adapted Enlightenment arguments that unmodernized societies and governments produced vicious individuals and vitiated social relations, and much upmarket fiction specified the effect of family and social structures on formation of individuals for better or worse. The identity-​mystery romance was accordingly tightened structurally to represent the causal relationship between socio-​political circumstances; individual character, action, and closure; and the relationship between moral, ethical, and intellectual investment in self and others and success or failure in life chances. Fiction downmarket, according with its readers’ experience, was less interested in such structural concatenation but nevertheless indicted unmodernized institutions, practices, culture, and individuals, making it, like historic pamphlet fiction, a seedbed of plebeian dissidence or more. Romantic fiction’s varied chronotopes were settings in several senses of the struggle for such modern subjective and social (re)formation. The chronotope in much fiction, upmarket and down, symbolized the crisis of modernization’s onset. Negatively unmodernized or erroneously modernized spaces and their corresponding and sustaining institutions and practices oppressed, exploited, corrupted, confined, violated, or destroyed protagonists pursuing their identity-​mystery romance journeys in particular chronotopes, past or present, while both idealized unmodernized spaces and ‘properly’ modernized ones produced ‘good’ modern subjects. As indicated by the ‘romance’ subtitles listed earlier, novelists (and poets) created various chronotopes, mainly ‘historical’, ‘Gothic’ (medieval broadly understood), alien (southern, northern, and eastern Europe), and ‘oriental’ (from Moorish Spain to east Asia), and sometimes (mainly in verse) otherworldly, with occasional ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’ (New World, mountains, ancient, pastoral), and ‘national tales’ where the regional or colonial chronotope is a synechdoche, version, or analogue of the ‘British’. All these forms required extensive yet particularized description, often authenticated by footnotes, concretizing abstractions of ‘national’ identity supposedly immanent in each locale. Poetry’s ‘licence’ enabled, more than in prose fiction, creation of diversely fantastic chronotopes, from Landor through Porden and Southey to Pollok, for heroic subject-​formation and figuring the crisis of modernization as apocalypse. Language again was a marker, dialect users being irredeemably localized, and users of standard written English being implicitly participants in the ‘national’ chronotope and elite. Fewer ‘novels’ had chronotopic subtitles, being understood as typically set in contemporary, often ‘fashionable’ life, including country and town houses and places and occasions of fashionable resort. This chronotope of the landed class was normative because they dominated society and state

202   Gary Kelly and drove modernization, making their ability or inability to modernize themselves crucial to the national and imperial destiny. Little of its fiction survived the Romantic period: mainly downmarket, mostly ‘historical’, ‘Gothic’, ‘Newgate’, adventure, love-​romance, and social-​criticism fiction. After 1900, some upmarket Romantic fiction was included in reprint series for the culturally aspiring, such as Everyman’s Library and the Oxford World’s Classics. The surge in higher education from the 1960s elicited annotated editions in the Oxford World’s Classics and other series for a global English language and literature industry that needed a spectrum of Romantic fiction larger than one refracted through modernist aesthetic–​formalist ‘literary value’. This was accordingly refashioned in aligned political and theoretical approaches from historicist and structuralist through feminist and Marxist to post-​structuralist, postcolonial, queer, and ‘book-​history’ (as here), usually converging on originally upmarket works such as Frankenstein, 1790s political novels, ‘gynocentric’ fiction, Austen, some Scott, some Gothic romances, and novels of ‘nation’ and empire. Meanwhile, romances of adventure, crime, love, and history as formulated in the Romantic period have, with their cognates melodrama and popular song, increased and diversified to dominate globally as the major forms of popular (in several senses) modernity. Outside the classroom, readers, publishers, and popular artists continue to reappropriate works from it, creating new spectrums and spectres of Romantic fiction in ‘real-​life’ reading, mass-​market editions, downmarket and ‘literary’ imitations, fan fiction, comics, film and television adaptations, websites, blogs, and videogames.

Further Reading British Fiction, 1800-​ 1829:  A Database of Production, Circulation, and Reception, at: www.british-​fiction.cf.ac.uk. Buchanan, David, and Gary Kelly, Popular Romanticism, at: http://​poprom.streetprint.org. Erickson, Lee, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing 1800–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Ferris, Ina, ‘Transformations of the Novel—​II’, in James Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Garside, Peter, and Karen O’Brien (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 2: 1750–​ 1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds), The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Gillespie, Gerald, Manfred Engel, and Bernard Dieterle (eds), Romantic Prose Fiction (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008). Kelly, Gary, English Fiction of the Romantic Period (London: Longman, 1989). Kiely, Robert, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1972). Korte, Barbara, The Short Story in Britain: A Historical Sketch and Anthology (Tübingen: A. Francke, 2003).

The Spectrum of Fiction    203 Lynch, Deidre, ‘Transformations of the Novel—​I’, in James Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Raven, James, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–​1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004). Tompkins, Joyce, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–​1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Chapter 13

G ender B ou nda ri e s Anne K. Mellor

What difference does gender make—​to an author, text, or genre? This is the question which feminist theory brings to the understanding of Romantic-​era writing. The answer, it has now become clear, is all the difference. In this chapter I shall explore the ways in which the social construction of gender has informed our recent interpretations of ‘Romanticism’. How was gender constructed in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century? Both sexes were educated to believe in what was commonly called ‘the doctrine of the separate spheres’.1 Males were prepared to enter the public sphere—​the worlds of commerce, law, medicine, politics, the military, as well as physical labour out of doors (in the fields, mines, building trades, etc.). Females were consigned to the private sphere—​ the domestic world of homemaking, childcare, elder care—​and taught the skills needed inside the house. Alfred Lord Tennyson summed up this ideology, which prevailed throughout the nineteenth century, in his poem The Princess in 1849: Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion. (Part 5, lines 437–​41)2

This doctrine of the separate spheres was enforced by the legal condition under which women existed, the status known since medieval times as ‘couverture’. The feminist

1  For a historical study of this doctrine, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–​1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 2  The Poems and Plays of Tennyson (New York: Random House, 1938), 273.

Gender Boundaries   205 reformer Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon succinctly summarized this legal doctrine in 1854: A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirely absorbed in that of her husband. He is civilly responsible for her acts; she lives under his protection or cover, and her condition is called couverture. A woman’s body belongs to her husband; she is in his custody, and he can enforce his sexual right by a writ of habeas corpus. What was her personal property before marriage, such as money in hand, money at the bank, jewels, household goods, clothes, etc., becomes absolutely her husband’s, and he may assign or dispose of them at his pleasure whether he and his wife live together or not . . . The legal custody of children belongs to the father. During the lifetime of a sane father, the mother has no rights over her children, except a limited power over infants, and the father may take them from her and dispose of them as he thinks fit.3

When Mary Wollstonecraft, in her radical feminist polemic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), called all British women ‘slaves’—​‘When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense’4—​she was reminding her readers of the law of couverture. Even though Lord Mansfield, in his famous anti-​slavery judgement of 1772, in Somerset v. Stewart, had ruled that ‘the air of England is too pure for slaves to breathe in’, and had established slavery as illegal in England (although still legal in her colonies), he had allowed the institution of marriage as a form of villeinage (feudal serfdom or couverture) to stand.5 Since 85–​88 per cent of women in the Romantic era married,6 including many of the authors I shall be discussing, we must evaluate their representations of gender relations against this legal and social reality. Under the law, females were virtual non-​ persons: they could not make contracts, initiate lawsuits, or bear witness in court; they could not own property, keep the wages they earned, or possess custody of their children. Middle-​class women were educated solely to attract and please husbands; they were taught ‘the accomplishments’ (reading, writing, arithmetic, dancing, fine sewing, sketching in water-​colours, singing, piano-​playing, enough French and/​or Italian to

3  Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women; Together with a Few Observations Thereon (London, 1845), 6. 4  Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, ed. Anne K. Mellor and Noelle Chao (New York: Longman, 2007), 202. 5  The English Reports 98 (King’s Bench Division 27), Easter Term, 12 Geo. 3, 1772, K.B.: Somerset against Stewart, 14 May 1772. 6  Louise A. Tilly and Joan Wallach Scott, Women, Work and Family (1978; London: Routledge, 1987), 92. See also Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen (eds), Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-​Century England, France, and the United States (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981); and Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-​Century England (London: Routledge, 1989).

206   Anne K. Mellor sing arias). Because they were taught very few useful skills, they could be ‘respectably’ employed in only a few positions: as a lady’s companion, as a governess, or, increasingly in the Romantic era, as a paid writer. The advent of the circulating libraries in the late eighteenth century had opened up a new and often very lucrative career for middle-​class women who had to stay at home: that of professional writer.7 For the first time, women were able to publish their creative efforts across all the genres: poetry, fiction (a genre in which they excelled, almost equalling their male competitors), drama, children’s books (a field they quickly dominated), and hack-​writing (for the new women’s magazines, encyclopaedias, newspapers). The doctrine of the separate spheres produced two very different ‘Romanticisms’, two different ways of conceptualizing and valuing the role of the creative writer and the nature of society: what I have elsewhere called ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ Romanticism.8 I have space here only to offer a brief and necessarily crude summary of these differences; as I shall indicate, there are numerous differences between the male writers of the era, equally many between the female writers, and some striking similarities between both men and women. But before we can trouble these gender borderlines, as Susan Wolfson and many others have effectively done,9 we must first map the larger terrains or separate spheres that each gender inhabited in this period. The male writers of the Romantic period—​the traditional canon of the Big Six of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, together with a host of others discussed in this volume –​shared, to a greater or lesser degree, certain assumptions and social privileges that profoundly influenced their writing. As a group, they produced a distinctive ideology, one that for many years scholar-​critics defined as ‘Romanticism’. They promoted a ‘masculine Romanticism’ that celebrated the development of an autonomous self, that legal ‘person’ whom John Locke defined as having ‘a property in his own person’.10 This autonomous self has free will, agency, independence. It endures over time as a coherent and unique entity sustained by memory. This self is capable of initiating activity and, above all, is aware of itself as a self. This is the self that Wordsworth constructs, however tenuously, in his autobiographical epic The Prelude. But we should recognize that this self, in the writings of the 7  See Mary A. Waters, British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789–​1832 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–​1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 3–​4; and Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–​1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 45, 65–​72, 213–​39. 8  For a fuller discussion of this distinction, see Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993). 9  Susan J. Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); see also Elizabeth A. Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Sonia Hofkosh, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–​1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 10  John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), Second Treatise, sect. 27.

Gender Boundaries   207 six canonical male poets, is a specifically masculine self. This self is represented as the struggling hero of an epic in which Wordsworth asserts without irony that the growth of a poet’s mind can represent the growth of the mind of the common man. Further, this self follows the classical Oedipal model of male development: it first identifies with the mother (in Wordsworth’s case, Mother Nature), then separates itself from that mother, and is left with a lifelong but unsatisfiable desire for reunion with that maternal presence. Nonetheless this self, which has a clear beginning, middle, and end, finally achieves maturity by standing alone against the mother, by triumphing over Nature, by speaking for Nature as well as for all of mankind. The Wordsworthian self becomes a Kantian transcendental ego, a spectactor ab extra, the ‘philosophic mind’ that transforms Nature into a male ‘mighty mind’ identical with his own: ‘a genuine Counterpart | And Brother of the glorious faculty | Which higher minds bear with them as their own’.11 The human faculty that enables this assimilation of the Other into the self is the imagination, the faculty that all these six Romantic male poets at one point or another hail as the presence of a divine creative power in the human mind. As Coleridge most memorably put it, ‘The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’12 It is the imagination that enables the self to be free: as Blake’s spokesman Los puts it in Jerusalem (1804–​c.1820), ‘I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s. | I will not Reason & compare; my business is to Create’ (plate 10, lines 20–​1).13 This masculine Romantic imagination pits itself against the Enlightenment, the age of reason—​‘We murder to dissect’, proclaims Wordsworth in ‘The Tables Turned’ (1798), and Keats echoes him in Lamia (1820)—​‘Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, | Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, | Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—​| Unweave a rainbow’ (Part 2, lines 234–​7).14 Opposing rational logic, self-​regulation, and caution, masculine Romanticism promotes passion, emotion, erotic desire –​Blake’s ‘energy’ or free love. Celebrating the irrational, the spontaneous, and the ‘natural’ leads these poets to reconceptualize childhood as the site of perfect freedom, creative agency, spiritual innocence. This new ‘Romantic’ child is celebrated repeatedly, in Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789), in Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), and most memorably in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (composed in 1802–​4) where the poet hails the four-​year-​old child as the ‘best Philosopher’, ‘Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!’ (lines 110, 114). Again and again these poets seek to experience and articulate a Kantian or Burkean sublime, a moment

11 

The Prelude (1805), Book 13, lines 88–​90, in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, rpt. 2000), 580. All quotations from The Prelude are from this edition. 12  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), i. 304. 13  The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 151. All Blake quotations are from this edition. 14  John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 431.

208   Anne K. Mellor in which time and space are transcended, the poet confronts both infinity and omnipotent Power (or what Shelley calls ‘Intellectual Beauty’), and then speaks ‘eternal’ truth. Politically, the first generation of male Romantic writers—​ Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge (and many other Jacobin sympathizers such as William Godwin, Richard Price, and John Thelwall)—​supported the French Revolution, a sudden overthrowing of the ancien régime, not only of the monarchy but also of the established Church and such social institutions as the military, the law, and even marriage. They looked to the newly established democratic republics in America and France for a model of good government based on the liberty, equality, and fraternity of all its citizens. As Blake proclaimed in ‘A Song of Liberty’ at the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–​3), while ‘the gloomy king . . . promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay’, ‘the son of fire in his eastern cloud . . . stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying Empire is no more!’ (plates 26–​ 7, sects. 17–​20). Such democracies would, in the minds of these Jacobin loyalists, over time eliminate the imperial nations of both the West and the East. This masculine Romanticism has specific implications for genre as well as for ideological content. These poets insisted that poetry is the highest art form, whether it is the epic of heroic conquest (or, in the case of The Prelude, the epic as autobiography), the lyric of self-​conscious self-​analysis, the ‘greater ode’ or ‘odal hymn’ in which the poet speaks directly to the divine, or the ballad, the so-​called ‘voice’ of the common man. As Shelley insisted in his Defence of Poetry (1821), poets systematically create new metaphors—​or what Coleridge called ‘symbols’—​that linguistically construct the ways in which we can perceive the world and impose meaning both on the world in which we live and on our own lives. As such, ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’.15 Just below poetry in this masculine Romantic ranking of the genres came verse drama, modelled after Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. Several of these poets wrote plays, but often not for performance, as is the case with Byron’s Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (1817) and Shelley’s ‘lyrical drama’ Prometheus Unbound (1820). Both these plays attempted to blur the boundaries between drama and poetry, to gain a public audience for a private meditation on the nature of human consciousness, to create what Alan Richardson has called a ‘mental theater’.16 That the genre of drama was regarded by these poets as a masculine preserve is strikingly revealed in Byron’s grudging admiration for the tragedies among Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions (1798): ‘When Voltaire was asked why no woman has ever written even a tolerable tragedy? “Ah (said the Patriarch) the composition of a tragedy requires testicles.”—​If this be true Lord knows what Joanna Baillie does—​I suppose she borrows them.’17

15  Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 508. 16  Alan Richardson, A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). 17  Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–​94), v. 203.

Gender Boundaries   209 In contrast, the ideology of ‘feminine Romanticism’ embraced by the majority of the women writers of the Romantic period (Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Mary Shelley, and a host of others) promotes a very different set of values, what might be called a ‘family politics’. They advocate not only the rights of the common man but also those of the common woman—​as well as the indentured servant and slave. When Mary Wollstonecraft called for ‘a REVOLUTION in female manners’, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was demanding a complete social reconstruction of gender. In place of the separate spheres, she argued that women should be treated equally with men in all respects: that they should have access to a publically supported co-​educational system that prepared boys and girls for all the possible vocations and professions. She insisted that women should be trained to work as lawyers, doctors, businesswomen, that they be given the same access to respectable work as men. She further demanded that the law of couverture be ended, that women be legal subjects, able to earn and possess wages and property, to have custody both of their own bodies and of their children, and even to vote for parliamentary representatives. Her call for equality for British women was extended by her female peers to the plight of African slaves both in the British colonies and at home in England. Ann Yearsley, most notably, in A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-​Trade (1788), denounced the ‘destructive system’ that allowed so-​called ‘Christian’ British men to purchase ‘human blood’ and become the ‘seller of mankind’ (lines 368, 83–​4),18 while Hannah More the same year denounced the ‘White Savage[s]‌’ who brutally tore ‘the shrieking babe, the agonizing wife’ from the captured slave only in order to satisfy their ‘sordid lust of gold . . . | The basest appetite of basest souls’ (lines 211, 100, 127–​8).19 Gender makes a definable difference in abolitionist writing in this period: male writers tend to base their claim for the abolition of slavery on the innate and therefore universal human rights of Africans; female writers instead denounce slavery as a systematic destruction of the family and of the domestic affections.20 The feminine Romantic ideology celebrates rationality, prudence, and self-​discipline rather than the excesses of the imagination, sense rather than sensibility. Or, if we take Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) as paradigmatic, it acknowledges the claims of sensibility (or emotional sensitivity) but redefines it, no longer as the overflow of powerful feelings but rather as sympathy, as a powerful empathy with others, what Wollstonecraft in The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798) calls ‘true sensibility’: ‘True sensibility, the sensibility which is the auxiliary of virtue, and the soul of genius, is in society so occupied with the feelings of others, as scarcely to regard its own sensations.’21

18 

Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-​Trade (London, 1788), 26, 7–​8. Hannah More, Slavery, A Poem (London, 1788), 15, 8, 9. 20  For further elaboration of this argument, see Anne K. Mellor, ‘ “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?”: Slavery, Romanticism, and Gender’, in Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (eds), Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780–​1834 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 21 Wollstonecraft, Vindication and Wrongs of Woman, 336. 19 

210   Anne K. Mellor Hannah More further insists, in her poem ‘Sensibility: A Poetical Epistle to the Hon. Mrs. Boscawen’ (1782), that this ‘social sympathy’ leads directly to philanthropic endeavours, to repeated acts of charity that directly relieve the needs and sufferings of the poor, the sick, and the elderly.22 Although many male novelists and poets embraced sympathy as the basis of moral virtue, as had Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759),23 for these women writers the celebration of sympathy led to a very different concept of the self—​not the autonomous self of liberal democratic theory, but rather a relational self, one that defines itself as always already formed by its relation to other selves. As Nancy Chodorow has noted in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), the cultural expectation that girls’ primary role in life is to become mothers has socialized females into thinking of themselves first as daughters, then as wives, and finally as mothers. In other words, they develop into maturity with what Chodorow calls ‘permeable ego boundaries’24 or what Keats called ‘Negative Capability’.25 When making decisions, when taking action, such relational selves consider the impact on others as well as on their individual selves. As Carol Gilligan has argued, they endorse an ethic of care—​in which the primary objective is to ensure that no one gets hurt—​rather than an ethic of justice—​in which every individual is treated the same under an abstract law.26 This is the self that Dorothy Wordsworth images as a ‘floating island’ that appears and disappears, that is entirely domesticated, that exists to support and nurture others: Food, shelter, safety there they find There berries ripen, flowerets bloom: There insects live their lives—​and die: A peopled world it is;—​in size a tiny room.27

For a more developed version of this feminine relational self, we might look to Jane Austen’s Emma, who suffers most intensely when she is left alone, whether at the beginning of the novel when her governess Miss Taylor has married and left Hartfield, or toward the end of the novel when all her match-​making schemes have failed and she remains isolated at Hartfield with her father, reminded only ‘of their first forlorn 22 

Hannah More, Sacred Dramas: Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: the Subjects taken from the Bible. To which is Added, Sensibility, a Poem (London, 1782), 278. 23  For the role of sympathy in the culture of sensibility, see G. J. Barker-​Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 24  Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 471. 25  To George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 (?) Dec. 1817, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 193. 26  Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 27  ‘Floating Island at Hawkeshead: An Incident in the Schemes of Nature’ (lines 13–​16), in ‘Appendix: The Collected Poems of Dorothy Wordsworth’, in Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 207–​8.

Gender Boundaries   211 tête-​à-​tête’ and overcome with the realization that ‘If all took place that might take place among the circle of her friends, Hartfield must be comparatively deserted; and she left to cheer her father with the spirits only of ruined happiness’.28 Despite the fact that Emma remains ‘first in consequence’ in Highbury (9), she responds to her ‘solitary grandeur’ (195) only with an overwhelming sense of ‘loneliness’ (397). The contrast with William Wordsworth’s exaltation upon standing alone on the top of Mount Snowdon could not be more striking. Emma needs other people to be happy, hence her conviction that ‘Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself ’ (382). The relational self seeks fulfillment through its relationships with others; this is why the female novelists of the Romantic era write courtship novels. These feminine Romantic writers celebrate marriage and the endurance of the family over the achievements of the individual, and see the community as the basis of the political state. While a few might endorse the conservative preservation of the estate, they almost all called attention to the patriarchal oppression of women inherent in Edmund Burke’s concept of a ‘little platoon’ guided by ‘our canonized forebears’.29 The primary obligation of the nation-​state, in their view, is to ensure that the needs of all its members are met. Charlotte Smith, both in The Emigrants (1793) and in Beachy Head (1807), reminds her readers of their social responsibility to care for all, even those ‘enemies’, those French men, women, and children fleeing the Revolutionary Terror in France: Poor wand’ring wretches! Whosoe’er you are, That hopeless, houseless, friendless, travel wide O’er these bleak russet downs; . . . Poor vagrant wretches! Outcasts of the world! Whom no abode receives, no parish owns . . .30

These women writers see gradual evolutionary reform as the best road to social just­ ice, rather than a sudden political revolution—​in which, as the French Revolution had taught them, innocent bystanders can become victims. That evolution will come about not through the mastery of Nature, but rather through co​operation with Nature, whom they conceive of as a woman with her own needs as well as an infinite variety of resources. Charlotte Smith, whose lists of the variety of botanical species flourishing on the Suffolk Downs repeatedly reminds us of the incalculable abundance of Nature, represents just such a shift from the violence

28 

Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Fiona Stafford, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 395. Subsequent page references in parenthesis are to this edition. 29  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), 66, 399. 30  The Emigrants, Book 1, lines 296–​8, 303–​4, in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

212   Anne K. Mellor of political wars to the gradual improvement of the land. In Beachy Head, the evening sun reveals the ruined battlements Of that dismantled fortress; rais’d what time The Conqueror’s successors fiercely fought, Tearing with civil feuds the desolate land. But now a tiller of the soil dwells there, And of the turret’s loop’d and rafter’d halls Has made a humbler homestead—​Where he sees Instead of armed foemen, herds that graze Along his yellow meadows; or his flocks At evening from upland driv’n to fold . . . (lines 496–​505)

It is no accident that the only member of the Frankenstein family left alive at the end of Mary Shelley’s novel of terror, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), is Victor’s brother Ernest, the son whom his father wanted to become a lawyer, but who instead has insisted on becoming a farmer, a man who lives in co​operation and harmony with Nature, rather than trying, as Victor does, to ‘penetrate into [her] recesses’31 and steal the secret of life. And finally, these feminine Romantic writers promote the novel as the highest genre, well above the genre of poetry, because the novel can most realistically represent the moral growth of a human community over time and space, in a vernacular language available to all readers. By doing so, the novel can most plausibly provide its readers with a viable model of good government, both at home in the private sphere and at large in the public realm. As all these writers knew well, the personal is the political; only by changing the domestic relationships in the estate can one change the political and military relationships of the state. As Anna Letitia Barbauld proclaimed at the end of her introductory essay to her canon-​forming collection of British novelists, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-​Writing’ (1810): It was said by Fletcher of Saltoun [the Scottish nationalist politician], ‘Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws.’ Might it not be said with as much propriety, Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the systems?32

In addition to elevating the genre of the novel, at least one of these female novelists, Jane Austen, changed the very style of the novel. By developing the technique of what we now 31  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 31. 32  Anna Letitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 416–​17.

Gender Boundaries   213 call ‘free indirect discourse’, Austen dramatically blurred the boundaries between the mind of the character and the author, enabling the reader to experience the very movements of the character’s thought processes as she engages with the world around her. By doing so, Austen transformed the novel into a genre that could democratically represent the interior subjectivity of ‘real’ people of all sexes, classes, and races, enabling its rise to the predominant genre of the modern era. Women wrote and published in all the genres during the Romantic era, but often with a difference. Instead of epics (with the notable exceptions of Margaret Holford’s Margaret of Anjou [1816] and Esme Stewart Erskine’s Alcon Malanzore [1815]33), women wrote ‘occasional verse’—​poems that focused on the quotidian, personal, domestic experiences of women.34 If they were inspired by classical models, they preferred the georgic, as did Charlotte Smith in Beachy Head, with its emphasis on agrarian labour and meditative solitude. When they turned to drama, they tended to focus on comedies of courtship and marital strife, as did Elizabeth Inchbald and Hannah Cowley. Or, as did Joanna Baillie, they wrote ‘closet dramas’ intended to be staged in small theatres similar to our current ‘equity-​waiver’ theatres (unlike the unstageable ‘mental theatre’ of the male poets): dramas that uncovered the interior subjectivity of their characters through soliloquies that, in Baillie’s case, revealed the destructive passions of men and the necessity for prudent female management of affairs both of the heart and of the state.35 They excelled in children’s literature—​Anna Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788, illustrated by William Blake), Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–​8) and Mary Godolphin (Lucy Aikin)’s Books in Words of One Syllable (published posthumously, in 1868, and still in print) were all bestsellers for many years. And they published all types of non-​fiction prose: histories (Catherine Macaulay and Lucy Aikin were widely regarded as among the best history-​writers of the age), memoirs, travel writing, journals, letters, encyclopaedia entries, magazine essays. As Mary Waters has shown, the career of the professional ‘hack writer’ first became available to women during the Romantic period.36 It needs to be emphasized that the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ Romanticism are ideological or socially constructed terms, not biological, sex-​based terms. In other words, a male can subscribe to the major tenets of feminine Romanticism, as John Keats

33  See Adeline Johns-​Putra, Heroes and Housewives: Women’s Epic Poetry and Domestic Ideology in the Romantic Age (1770–​1835) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001). 34  See Stuart Curran, ‘Romantic Poetry: The “I” Altered’, in Anne K. Mellor (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 35  On the female-​authored drama of the Romantic period, see Catherine B. Burroughs, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Ellen Donkin Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776–​1829 (London: Routledge, 1995); and Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–​1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 39–​68. 36  Mary A. Waters, British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789–​1832 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

214   Anne K. Mellor largely did, both in his celebration of empathy or ‘Negative Capability’ and in his definition of the ‘poetical Character’ as one which ‘has no character’ and which ‘has no Identity—​he is continually in for—​and filling some other Body’.37 And several female writers celebrated the powerful overflow of feeling for its own sake. Helen Maria Williams, in her poem ‘To Sensibility’ (1786), applauds the ‘melting eye’, the bleeding heart, the secret sighs, and lonely tears, of the excessively sensitive person who refuses to take refuge from pain in ‘hard Indifference’.38 We might think too of those ‘Fatal Women of Romanticism’ whom Adriana Craciun has so perceptively analysed,39 all of whom rejected an ethic of care in favour of an ethic of personal ambition, revenge, or sexual gratification. Most notable here might be Charlotte Dacre, whose Gothic novel Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) represents the aggressive erotic desire of the cruel, selfish Victoria, a desire that can be satisfied only in an inter-​racial alliance with the Moor (or Satan). Turning to politics, the most ardent, loyal, and unwavering supporter of the Revolution in France was a woman, Helen Maria Williams, who emigrated to France and sent back eight volumes of her Letters from France (1790–​6), as well as A Narrative of the Events which have Taken Place in France (1816), all of which applauded the progressiveness of the new French Republic, even during the Terror and the reign of Napoleon, over the systemic corruption and injustice of the British monarchy.40 The development of the Gothic novel during the Romantic era offers a fascinating insight into the way that both the social construction of gender and the social construction of sexual identity inform the writing of the period. The major Gothic novels written by men, from Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) through William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), were written by homosexuals or bisexuals. These novels increasingly locate the source of terror in the body of a woman, whether Vathek’s cruel and manipulative mother Carathis or the monk Ambrose’s sexual temptress and devilish co-​conspirator Matilda. In these novels, the ultimate Gothic horror (for the author) lies in a social regime of compulsory heterosexuality. Hence evil finally resides in the female body as such. In contrast, the Gothic novels written by women, from those of the ‘Great Enchantress’ Ann Radcliffe, through the ‘Horrid Mysteries’ by Eliza Parsons, Regina Maria Roche, and Eleanor Sleath, to Jane Austen’s parodic endorsement in Northanger Abbey (1818), all locate the source of terror

37

  To Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct. 1818, Letters of Keats, i. 386–​7. Helen Maria Williams, Poems, 2 vols (London, 1786), i. 22, 26 (lines 17, 71). 39  Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 40  On the responses of Romantic-​era women writers to the French Revolution, see Anne K. Mellor, ‘English Women Writers and the French Revolution’, in Sara E. Melzer and Leslie Rabine (ed.), Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–​1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (eds), Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); and Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 38 

Gender Boundaries   215 for women in the figure of the father—​whether an actual father (such as General Tilney in Northanger Abbey) or a father-​figure such as a step-​uncle (in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794]) or a priest (such as ‘Father’ Schedoni in Radcliffe’s The Italian [1797]). Here the ultimate danger to females lies in the patriarchal authority of the father (or a husband who assumes his father’s patriarchal privileges, as does Henry Tilney). In some cases, this can lead to the explicit danger of ‘father–​daughter’ rape and incest, the very incestuous desire so brilliantly uncovered in Mary Shelley’s novella Mathilda (written in 1819–​20, first published in 1959). For if Mary Wollstonecraft was correct in asserting that the females of her society were ‘kept in a state of perpetual childhood’,41 then every heterosexual union between a patriarchal man and a ‘daughter-​like’ woman is a metaphorical example of father–​daughter incest.42 Much work needs still to be done to explore the myriad ways in which the ‘gender boundaries’ between masculine and feminine Romanticism are troubled by individual writers and texts. The first move, to enlarge the canon of Romanticism from an exclusive focus on the writings of the ‘Big Six’ to include the works of their female and male peers, has been largely successful, as this volume amply demonstrates. But given the restrictions in academic curricula and publishers’ agendas, this effort has largely resulted in a new canonical formation of ‘the best’ Romantic women writers, the ‘Big Three’ of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. This has made it harder to see the entire spectrum of women’s writing in the Romantic era, a spectrum which included literary criticism, drama, political prose, the national tale, travel writing, memoirs, children’s writing, and poetry as well as fiction. Only when we can speak authoritatively of the full range of Romantic-​era writing, by men and women, by heterosexuals and homosexuals, by people of varying races, will we be able to make persuasive generalizations concerning the final difference that gender makes to ‘Romanticism’.

Further Reading Brock, Claire, The Feminization of Fame, 1750–​1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–​1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Dow, Gillian, and Jennie Batchelor (eds), Women’s Writing, 1660–​1830: Feminisms and Futures (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Fay, Elizabeth A., A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Feldman, Paula R., and Theresa M. Kelley (eds), Romantic Women Writers:  Voices and Countervoices (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995).

41 Wollstonecraft, Vindication and Wrongs of Woman, 25. 42 

For further discussion of this point, see Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 81–​93; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (London: Routledge, 1988); and Robert M. Polhemus, Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

216   Anne K. Mellor Guest, Harriet, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–​1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Kelly, Gary, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–​1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Johnson, Claudia L., Jane Austen:  Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1988). Labbe, Jacqueline, Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Levy, Michelle, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Mellor, Anne K., Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993). Mellor, Anne K., Mothers of the Nation:  Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–​1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). Mellor, Anne K. (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Ross, Marlon B., The Contours of Masculine Desire:  Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Taylor, Barbara, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Wolfson, Susan J., Borderlines:  The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

Chapter 14

Literature for C h i l dre n Susan Manly

In a series of notebook entries and manuscript fragments written between 1798 and 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge reflected on the words and actions of his sons. Originally intending to write about ‘Infancy & Infants’, he added further observations as his children grew, often associating their perceptions and pleasures with scenes of nature, as in this entry of c.27 September 1802: Children in the wind—​hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated Trees, below which they play’d—​the elder whirling for joy, the one in petticoats, a fat Baby, eddying half willingly, half by the force of the Gust—​driven backward, struggling forward—​both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their hymn of Joy.1

Here the game played by Hartley and Derwent (born in 1796 and 1800 respectively) seems a continuation of the motion of the trees and the wind itself, the younger boy only half impelled by voluntary movement, both children closely allied to and taking active ‘Joy’ in being part of nature, ‘whirling’ and ‘eddying’ in sympathy with the gust. A fragment from a letter written in the same year similarly dwells on the purity and naturalness of children’s thinking, as Coleridge recalls asking Hartley, lost in contemplation on a river bank, ‘what his Thoughts were’: ‘he hugged me, & said after a while “I thought, how I love the sweet Birds, & the Flowers, & Derwent, and Thinking; and how I hate Reading, & being wise, & being Good”.’2 Earlier, Coleridge comments on Hartley’s ‘Brahman love & awe of Life’ and resolves ‘to commence his Education with natural History’.3 For Coleridge, a child’s thinking powers were instinctive, a natural energy and 1 

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 5 vols, ed. Kathleen Coburn and others (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–​2002), i. 330 (21.32); cited by volume, page, and (in parenthesis) entry number. A similar description, with the children’s names, appears in Coleridge’s letter to William Sotheby, 27 [28] Sept. 1802, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–​7 1), ii. 872. 2  To Sara Hutchinson, [early summer 1802], Collected Letters of Coleridge, ii. 804. 3 Coleridge, Notebooks, i. 959 (4.84).

218   Susan Manly motion continuous with that of birds and flowers, to be encouraged to flow freely, not to be forced into artificial channels through the imposition of uncongenial reading. Such an education would constitute an erroneous attempt to mould what was already naturally right. A training in ‘being wise, & being Good’ through the medium of moral tales, such as those published by the Anglo-​Irish children’s writer Maria Edgeworth between 1796 and 1801, is accordingly condemned in an 1805 notebook entry. Edgeworth and others, Coleridge felt, delivered ‘detailed Forewarnings’ that were harmful to the natural growth of a child’s mind, creating ‘an impression of Fatality, that extinguishes Hope’.4 Yet much of the literature written for younger readers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Edgeworth’s, is informed by a body of educational theory that sought to liberate children from unnatural constraints, and to ensure that their voices were heard and their ways of seeing respected. The two seminal influences were John Locke and Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, both of whom had described childhood as a time of relative liberty. In ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’ (1693), Locke had advised of children that ‘[a]‌ll their innocent Folly, Playing, and Childish Actions are to be left perfectly free and unrestrained’, especially open-​air play in the sun and wind.5 Seventy years later, in Emile (1762), Rousseau had similarly urged his readers to ‘[l]ove childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts’, and, anticipating Coleridge’s dislike of moral tales as a means of curing ‘evil tendencies’, remarked: ‘What a poor sort of foresight, to make a child wretched in the present with the more or less doubtful hope of making him happy at some future day.’6 Both Locke and Rousseau had laid emphasis on the importance of listening carefully and imaginatively to children, advice that Coleridge clearly took to heart, and that Edgeworth echoed both in her educational theory and in fiction based on her observations of her numerous younger siblings. On the socializing effects of education, however, opinions were sharply divided. While Locke had emphasized children’s rationality and approved of their eagerness to learn the culture of the society in which they found themselves, Rousseau had highlighted the tendency of conventional education to produce a child who was, paradoxically, both ‘slave and tyrant, crammed with knowledge but empty of sense’, obedient to adult authority, but utterly dependent. Rousseau explicitly rejected Locke’s idea of inducting the child into an overtly hierarchical community in which it consciously learned to be an ‘obedient Subject’ under adult government.7 These contrasting attitudes inform the very different view of children’s reading in Locke and Rousseau. Whereas Locke had taken for granted that a child needs to learn to read as soon as he can talk, preferably by being ‘brought to desire to be taught’ and by being made to associate reading with ‘Honour, Credit, Delight and Recreation’, Rousseau was more doubtful about the value of books for children.8 He regarded the conventional 4 Coleridge, Notebooks, ii. 2418 (21.583). 5 

‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’, in The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 156, 121. 6  Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or Education, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1911), 43. 7  Locke, ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’, 145. 8  Locke, ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’, 255.

Literature for Children    219 rote learning of historical dates and of words such as ‘king, emperor, war, conquest, law, and revolution’ as a ‘flood of words [that] overwhelms [a]‌sad and barren childhood’. In its place, he argued that the child’s memory is better employed in trying to make sense of the world for himself: ‘everything he sees and hears makes an impression on him, he keeps a record of men’s sayings and doings, and his whole environment is the book from which he unconsciously enriches his memory, till his judgment is able to profit by it’.9 The children’s literature that emerged from this long-​running debate about how best to preserve or shape ‘the child’ was intimately connected to the post-​Rousseau explosion of interest in educational theory and in the promise represented by childhood. From the mid-​eighteenth century on, a vigorous and constantly expanding market for children’s books existed, initially focused on London, but gradually extending into the provinces, and into Scottish and Irish metropolitan centres. By the end of the century, the conservative Sarah Trimmer, one of the pioneers of children’s literature, expressed disquiet about the sheer number of new books aimed at the rising generation, a ‘daily supply’ produced for their ‘gratification’ but not necessarily, she thought, for their good.10 One of the grounds for her anxiety about this burgeoning publishing industry was the increasing politicization of writing for children. Locke and Rousseau had focused attention on the analogy between the familial order, in which adults exerted power over children, and what could be construed as an unjust social order. In addition, they had analysed the differences between an education that aimed to recognize children’s intrinsic equality with adults as human beings and one that treated them as slaves, possessions, or playthings. These enquiries into the purposes and effects of early education had strong resonances in the French revolutionary period, when the revision of children’s place in the family order was a significant part of the revolutionary overturning of hereditary authority. Lynn Hunt notes that the revolutionary era saw increasing emphasis on the ‘independent sphere of action of children’ and an attack on the idea of paternal power, closely associated with the unnatural authority accorded to the French king.11 Similarly, Jay Fliegelman argues that late ​eighteenth-​century American debates about the family focused on the move towards ‘filial autonomy and the unimpeded emergence from nonage’, and entailed broad changes in the understanding of the paternal role, no longer seen as inhering in the use of unlimited, legitimate patriarchal power to extort children’s obedience, but as a responsibility to prepare children to govern themselves.12 Fliegelman traces these shifts in a number of fictional works widely read in late ​eighteenth-​century America. We can also see these politicized changes in the representation of family hierarchies at work in the books for children produced between 1781 and 1806 by Anna Barbauld,

9 Rousseau, Emile, 75, 76.

10 

Sarah Trimmer, The Guardian of Education: A Periodical Work, 5 vols (London: J. Hatchard, 1802–​6), i. 15. 11  Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 1992), 27, 65. 12  Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–​ 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3.

220   Susan Manly John Aikin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. In 1784, Immanuel Kant had declared that the ‘courage to use your own reason’ was the central precept for progress towards an enlightened society and culture, envisaging the result as ‘man’s emergence from his self-​incurred immaturity’.13 This was an idea that the five writers named above, on whom I will focus in this chapter, took as a maxim from which children as well as adults could benefit. Wollstonecraft and Godwin were among those who associated this freedom of enquiry and thought with a questioning of established family hierarchy. For them, the traditional patriarchal family was a means of training children in subjection and passive obedience, which not only damaged them as individuals but also hindered the furthering of the public good. Wollstonecraft criticizes the ‘absurd duty, too often inculcated, of obeying a parent only on account of his being a parent’; this, she argued, ‘shackles the mind, and prepares it for a slavish submission to any power but reason’.14 Godwin likewise argues that political justice entails the ability to see and to speak truthfully, hampered by a mistaken ‘principle in regal states . . . to think your father the wisest of men because he is your father, and your king the foremost of his species because he is a king’.15 The clearest expression of this radical enlightenment critique is in Wollstonecraft’s posthumously published Lessons, originally written for her daughter, Fanny Imlay, in 1795, where she schools her child to think of herself as strong and capable, telling her stories about the mistakes ‘mamma’ and ‘papa’ made as children to show her that just like her, they were once small and fallible. The fragment ends by reassuring the child that she does already ‘know how to think’ and to reason from her experience, and by holding out the hope that this is the beginning of her existence as a rational being: ‘Another day we will see if you can think about any thing else.’16 In the early years of the French Revolution, both French and British radicals made direct connections between the promise held out by children and a new era of political equality. For Joseph Priestley, writing in 1791, a proper education is one that responds to the new light which is now almost every where bursting out in favour of the civil rights of men . . . While so favourable a wind is abroad, let every young mind expand itself, catch the rising gale, and partake of the glorious enthusiasm; the great objects of which are the flourishing state of science, arts, manufactures, and commerce, the extinction of wars, with the calamities incident to mankind from them, the abolishing of all useless distinctions, which were the offspring of a barbarous age.17

13  Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’, trans. H. B. Nisbet (1970; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009), 1. 14  Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson, 1792), 351. 15  William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2 vols (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793), ii. 427–​8. 16  [Mary Wollstonecraft], Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1798), ii. 195–​6. 17  Joseph Priestley, The Proper Objects of Education in the Present State of the World (London: J. Johnson, 1791), 30.

Literature for Children    221 Priestley’s metaphor of a ‘rising gale’ stirring a ‘glorious enthusiasm’ in ‘every young mind’ anticipates Coleridge’s observation of his sons’ joy in a windy day, but whereas Coleridge focuses on proximity to nature as a source of pleasure, Priestley links the naturalness of progressive politics to children’s enthusiasm for knowledge and enlightenment. Isaac Kramnick takes Priestley’s words as confirmation that late ​eighteenth-​ century literature for children was ‘part of the political assault on aristocratic England’, and one of its distinctive features is that it frequently addressed actual social problems and conflicts (the title of Wollstonecraft’s novel for adolescent girls, Original Stories from Real Life, is indicative).18 The aim of such writings was to make ideas and current debates available to children, sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly, and encourage them to use their imaginations to empathize with others, stimulating independent, open, and compassionate powers of judgement, and enabling child readers to see and think critically and reflectively. This did not necessarily entail losing sight of what Coleridge called ‘a love of “the Great,” & “the Whole” ’: the access to a sublime vision that he associated with early exposure to fairy tales and the fantastic, rather than with the realism of the new children’s literature that he despised.19 Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose (1781), an influential collection of meditations on natural phenomena, presents nature to the child as a kind of book that he or she can learn to read, telling of God’s presence and character. In Hymn VI, for instance, Barbauld invokes her reader as a ‘child of reason’, a child who thinks but who needs to be stirred to more profound perceptions.20 The child’s vision is initially confined to what is evident to the physical senses: ‘I saw the moon rising behind the trees: it was like a lamp of gold . . . Presently I saw black clouds arise, and roll towards the south; the lightning streamed in thick flashes over the sky; the thunder growled . . . I felt afraid, for it was loud and terrible.’ The adult voice, entering into dialogue with that of the ‘child of reason’, urges: ‘Did thy heart feel no terror, but of the thunderbolt? Was there nothing bright and terrible, but the lightning? Return, O child of reason, for there are greater things than these.—​God was in the storm, and didst thou not perceive him?’21 Barbauld imagines herself as simultaneously both child and adult in this dialogue; the child who recites the hymn similarly occupies the subject-​position of both learner and teacher. We might read this as the child’s internalization of adult doctrine and the disciplining of its mind, as Alan Richardson has suggested, but the child is given access through this exchange to the sublime, encouraged to travel imaginatively beyond mere appearance, to ‘return’ to the world with new eyes.22

18 

Isaac Kramnick, ‘Children’s Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’, in Culture and Politics: From Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Pérez Zagorin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 227. 19  To Thomas Poole, 16 Oct. 1797, Collected Letters of Coleridge, i. 854. 20  Anna Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children (London: J. Johnson, 1781), 36. 21 Barbauld, Hymns in Prose, 40–​1. 22  Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 64–​77.

222   Susan Manly Coleridge might also have been surprised to read a manuscript draft for a children’s book completed by Godwin (supposedly an atheist) in 1806, written in the form of a familiar, affectionate letter to a small boy, recounting the events experienced and conversations enjoyed during a walk together in the country. Godwin begins with straightforward descriptions of the rural scenes the two have witnessed—​cows grazing in a field, a village church—​but the piece ends with an extended and rapturous evocation of ‘the great invisible principle acting every where, which maintains the life of every thing’.23 Godwin communicates a Blakean sense of the equal holiness of all living things, showing the child reader how he arrives at insight through initial error. At first, as a solitary walker in nature, he mistakenly perceives the world as something he alone possesses, ‘the sole and undisputed lord of the whole country’. But his second thoughts teach him that he is not alone, and not set above and apart from others: ‘ “every thing about me lives, & when I observe of them that they like me have life & health, & are continually experiencing those changes which are indications of health, I can almost say to the tree & the shrub, Thou art my brother!” ’24 The insight into the fraternity of all of creation that Godwin makes available both to his fictional and his projected child reader recalls Barbauld’s emphasis in Hymns in Prose on God’s tender care for all of his ‘family’ on Earth. For Barbauld, God is not a threatening patriarch, but a nurturing, maternal presence. In contrast with Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs (1715), the best-​selling collection of hymns for children to which her Hymns in Prose is a response, Barbauld never threatens her child reader with divine punishment: in Hymns III and VIII, it is kings, not children, who are warned of retribution for their injustice. Watts’s ‘All-​seeing God’ has a ‘piercing Eye’ that sees the ‘secret Actions’ of the child and keeps a written record of ‘every Fault’; Barbauld’s God likewise has an ‘eye that never sleepeth’, but only because he is continually watching over and caring for his children as they sleep.25 Barbauld portrays the divine parent in Hymn V as arranging everything for the comfort of his family: As the mother moveth about the house with her finger on her lips, and stilleth every little noise, that her infant be not disturbed; as she draweth the curtains around the bed, and shutteth out the light from its tender eyes; so God draweth the curtains of darkness around us; so he maketh all things to be hushed and still, that his large family may rest in peace.26

William Blake similarly repudiates Watts’s punitive vision of an authoritarian God in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789–​93). In one of the many poems in this collection that satirize and criticize Watts, Blake’s lullaby, ‘A Cradle Song’, reimagines

23 

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Abinger.c.24, fol. 26r. MS Abinger.c.24, fols. 28r, 28v. 25  Isaac Watts, Divine Songs, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), ‘Song IX: The All-​Seeing God’, lines 1, 3, 24; Barbauld, Hymns in Prose, 30. 26 Barbauld, Hymns in Prose, 32–​3. 24 

Literature for Children    223 Barbauld’s evocation of God’s maternal nurturance, and rejects Watts’s earlier focus on ‘burning flame, | Bitter groans and endless crying’.27 Watts’s ‘A Cradle Hymn’, the poem that Blake is targeting, presents troubled and angry reflections on the ‘cursed sinners’ who failed to recognize the Christ-​child as a ‘lovely babe’ whose face was ‘Spotless fair, divinely bright!’ Instead of deriving comfort and joy from the sight of her own infant, the mother in Watts’s poem is disturbed by the ‘affront’ offered by human sinners to their ‘King’, which ‘makes me angry while I sing’. She hopes that her child will look on God’s face after death, if he learns to praise him, but Watts’s mother dwells on the distance between her human infant and the divine ‘blessed babe’.28 In contrast, Blake’s ‘Cradle Song’ focuses on the congruence between the tranquil happiness of a sleeping baby and the ‘happy silent moony beams’ that tell of God’s love. For the mother speaker of this poem, her baby mirrors the ‘holy image’, transmitting God’s smiles through his own natural closeness to the divine: ‘Thou his image ever see, | Heavenly face that smiles on thee’. Through her contemplation of her child, the mother learns that God smiles ‘on thee, on me, on all’, that ‘Infant smiles are his own smiles’, and that God thus ‘Heaven & earth to peace beguiles’.29 Even the ambiguous verb ‘beguiles’ is significant, shedding any uneasy associations with guile or sinful cunning to suggest something closer to ‘reconciles’: the human baby, effortlessly and uncomplicatedly mediating Christ, eradicates the distance between the human and the divine. Subversively, Blake displaces the powerful mother of Barbauld’s Hymn V in favour of an apparently powerless infant. Similarly, in ‘The Little Black Boy’ he quietly dismisses Watts’s ‘pity [for] those that dwell | Where ignorance and darkness reign’, and Barbauld’s more humane but still condescending evocation of an enslaved ‘negro woman’ weeping over her child in Hymn VII: the black boy is the enlightened evangelist here, the communicator of God’s ‘beams of love’ to the white child.30 Frequently, the child characters in the children’s books written by radicals and reformists are invited to see themselves as capable of achieving great things, whether in the exercise of artistic prowess, philanthropic action, or moral virtue. Maria Edgeworth’s stories are distinguished by their markedly secular tone and focus on real social situations—​‘imitations of real life’ (Preface)—​in place of the natural supernaturalism of Barbauld’s Hymns and the politicized spirituality of Blake’s Songs. Yet many of her tales echo Barbauld’s and Blake’s liberating emphasis on children’s agency. ‘Waste Not, Want Not’, for example, a short story published in 1800 in the third edition of Edgeworth’s tales for children, The Parent’s Assistant, emphasizes the inventive capacities of children, and connects this problem-​solving potential with social good, suggesting children’s

27 

All Blake quotations are from Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York: Norton, 1979). 28  Watts, ‘A Cradle Hymn’, lines 46–​7, 19, 22, 37, 18, 24, 30, 32, 17. This poem was added to the eighth edition of Divine Songs in 1727. 29  Blake, ‘A Cradle Song’, lines 4, 22, 27–​8, 29, 31, 32. 30  Watts, ‘Song V: Praise for Birth and Education in a Christian Land’, lines 13–​14; Barbauld, Hymns in Prose, 60; Blake, ‘The Little Black Boy’, line 14.

224   Susan Manly transformative role as citizens of the future. Their capacity to address economic injustice and create a more unified society is imagined as emerging from secular innovations, from the growth of knowledge and ‘abolition of useless distinctions’ identified by Joseph Priestley—​not from religious conviction. Edgeworth uses her narrative of two contrasting boys to interrogate the conspicuous excess of aristocratic presumption and to show the value of reciprocal social bonds. Both concepts are symbolized by the two boys’ treatment of a piece of whipcord used to bind a parcel at the outset of the story: one of the boys, ambitious to be a member of an elite group of rich children, discards the string as worthless; the other, less conformist boy preserves the whipcord out of respect for its potential usefulness, and his valuation of the humble binding is vindicated. It proves crucial to his eventual triumph in the archery competition which closes the tale, and Edgeworth shows that his attentiveness to the importance of ordinary, workaday objects is the foundation for his conscientious commitment to the just distribution of wealth, and his rejection of the ‘useless distinctions’ which Priestley saw as ‘producing an absurd haughtiness in some, and a base servility in others’.31 In other stories by Edgeworth, such as ‘The Orphans’, ‘Lazy Lawrence’, and ‘Simple Susan’, the child heroes and heroines overcome economic disadvantage and social marginalization through their resilience and determination, their capacity to learn new skills and invent solutions to their problems, their curiosity and willingness to think for themselves, and their independence, to a greater or lesser extent, from adult assistance. Strikingly, many of these heroes or heroines have missing or inadequate parents, pioneering the trope of the brave and resourceful lone child so important in later children’s fiction. As Edgeworth does in ‘Waste Not, Want Not’, John Aikin invites his readers to review their understanding of ‘greatness’ and of conformity in several stories from Evenings at Home, the six-​volume work co-​written with his sister, Anna Barbauld, between 1792 and 1796. In ‘The Cost of a War’, a dialogue between a child and his father, Aikin takes up Priestley’s idea that early education should assist children to form enquiries that will lead to the extinction of war and its associated calamities. The father tells his son that he wants to give him ‘some idea of the cost of a war to the people among whom it is carried on’, in order to warn Oswald, and the child reader of the tale, against ‘the admiration with which historians are too apt to inspire us for great warriors and conquerors’. Taking the example of the Rhineland campaign of Louis XIV and his ministers and generals, the father shows Oswald the immorality of obedience to unjust authority (‘Right and wrong are no considerations to a military man. He is only to do as he is bid’), and describes the destruction that is the consequence of this uncritical obedience. He ends the dialogue by inviting Oswald to join him in his disapproval of conquerors (‘pest[s]‌of the human race’) and of soldiering as ‘a profession which binds a man to be the servile instrument of cruelty and injustice’, and therefore not ‘an honourable calling’.32 The point is reiterated in ‘Great Men’, in which Mr C. and his son Arthur discuss what constitutes 31 Priestley, Proper Objects of Education, 30. 32 

[John Aikin and Anna Barbauld], Evenings at Home; or the Juvenile Budget Opened, 6 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1792–​6), v. 55, 58, 63.

Literature for Children    225 true greatness. Mr C. argues that ‘the external advantages of rank and power’ can be mistaken for heroism, but signal only ‘greatness of station’ rather than ‘greatness of character’; and recommends James Brindley, the consulting engineer for the construction of the Bridgewater canal, as someone who, though a ‘mere countryman’ has triumphed through ‘the force of his own genius’.33 The extent to which the ideas in Aikin’s writing for children engaged with the political preoccupations of the early 1790s becomes clearer when we examine biographical evidence. In her Memoir of John Aikin (1823), Lucy Aikin quotes from a letter of 1792 or 1793, when the Evenings at Home stories and dialogues were being written, in which her father refers to ‘the horrible events that are now going on in the political world’, attributing their causes to ‘the accursed spirit of military despotism’, and expressing his ‘resentment against tyranny’ and his attachment to ‘liberty and mankind’.34 A subsequent letter of his to a friend, enclosing the third volume of Evenings at Home, protests against the viciously punitive sentencing of the Scottish democrats, Thomas Muir and Thomas Palmer, in August and September 1793 on charges on sedition. Aikin cites their confinement in the hulks as ‘an example of tyranny scarcely, I think, legal, certainly not decent’, and implies that he is among those ‘enemies to the present system’ who felt ‘much emotion’ at the outcome of the trials (161). Increasingly, Aikin acknowledged that government restrictions on freedom of speech and the fact that Britain was at war with revolutionary France made it difficult to publish controversial views that might lead to accusations of ‘rejoic[ing] in the calamities of our country’, although he privately expressed his loathing of this ‘bloody, expensive, and I think, unjust war’ in another letter of 1793. It was impossible to speak or write openly of dissent from government policy, for fear of being accused of ‘maintaining French principles’, Aikin complained; ‘the state of public opinion in this country’ was thus endangered, turning the British public into ‘persecutors and slaves. If persons of reading and reflection are hurried along with this torrent of false opinion, what is left on which to found a hope of saving us from the lowest degradation?’ (159–​61) What was left was the hope that might be placed in a new generation of readers, thinkers, and enquirers. Lucy Aikin comments that faced with Evenings at Home, ‘an intelligent reader of mature age’ would discern ‘notices of [Aikin’s] opinions on many highly important topics’, presumably including his politics (157). Although younger readers might not have been able to identify the nature of the political ideas expressed, the fact that Aikin chose to use the dialogue form for pieces critical of unjust wars and of established notions of ‘honour’ and ‘greatness’ suggests the modelling of debate and enquiry that he wanted to survive the era of Pitt’s Terror. Lucy Aikin comments that this promotion of discussion was an important element of the Aikin children’s own upbringing: the narrative forms used in Evenings at Home were a reflection of ‘his manner of living and conversing with his children in the bosom of their home’ (157). She later 33 

Evenings at Home, vi. 13, 16, 10, 11. Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, M.D., 2 vols (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1823), 156. Subsequent references to the Memoir are given in parenthesis in the text. 34 

226   Susan Manly recounts how valuable Aikin considered his children’s comments when working on his General Biography, a series of lives of great men and women: he ‘invited and encouraged the freest strictures even from the youngest and most unskilful of those whom he was pleased to call his household critics’, enjoying their discussion of each article, ‘carried on under the indulgent guidance of one who did not desire even from his own children a blind and prejudiced adherence to his opinions’ (200, 201). This ideal of enquiry and discussion was also central to Godwin’s Juvenile Library project, a children’s literature publishing house which he launched in 1805 and which quickly rose to be one of the most successful of the children’s booksellers in London. Other Juvenile Libraries pre-​existed Godwin’s, including that of John Harris, who had inherited the thriving business of the children’s publishing pioneer, John Newbery. Like these other firms, Godwin published fables, Bible stories, histories, nursery rhymes, and moral tales, written by a range of authors, Charles and Mary Lamb among them. Godwin himself wrote an impressive range of books for children under various pseudonyms, the most common of which was ‘Edward Baldwin’. He had prepared for his new venture by reading many of the children’s books published by his close friend, the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, whose list included Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, Barbauld, and Aikin, and who had employed Blake as the illustrator for a number of works, including Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (1788) and her translation of Christian Salzmann’s Elements of Morality (1790). Cannily, Godwin echoed the titles of other best-​selling children’s authors: in 1813 he published a Parent’s Offering to rival Edgeworth’s much-​reprinted Parent’s Assistant (1796), and his biography of the illustrator William Mulready, The Looking-​Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist (1805), consciously echoes the title Newbery chose for his selection of tales by Arnaud Berquin, a popular French writer for children, The Looking-​Glass for the Mind, or Intellectual Mirror (1787, with many subsequent editions). Berquin’s tales are grim, the sort of moral tales that Coleridge thought extinguished hope with their too detailed ‘forewarnings’. Perhaps this is why one child reader changed Newbery’s subtitle in her copy of Berquin’s tales to register her opinion of the book as an ‘inelegant collection of the most disagreeable silly stories and uninteresting tales with twenty-​four ugly cuts’.35 The ‘Looking-​Glass’ genre has a long history, traditionally focusing on great men and offering tales of instruction by example. Godwin instead makes his ‘Looking-​Glass’ a biography of Mulready, a boy from a working-​class family who taught himself to draw, illustrated with reproductions of Mulready’s early sketches to show readers how he improved over time. Godwin’s text encourages ambition, telling its child readers: ‘You are informed here of what has actually been done, of what was done, for a long time under every disadvantage of a humble situation.’ The artist ‘was a child like others, but he was a child of merit. Merit, my young friend, is within your reach too.’36 Godwin’s conception of the child and of what reading is for, visible in this 35 

M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader 1700–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 272. Theophilus Marcliffe [William Godwin], The Looking-​Glass: A True History of the Early Years of an Artist (London: Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1805), viii, ix. 36 

Literature for Children    227 early example of his writing for children, is not modelled on the preservation of ‘naturalness’ so important to Coleridge. As Julie Carlson comments, Godwin believed that children’s books constituted a means of ‘alter[ing] the preconditions of the future by re-​ forming the child’, functioning as ‘spaces of rational possibility that should be as free from censorship and illusory notions of freedom as possible’.37 Accordingly, Godwin is honest about Mulready’s errors and failings and about the difficulties he faced. For the Anti-​Jacobin Review (as yet unaware of the true identity of ‘Theophilus Marcliffe’, the ostensible author of The Looking-​Glass), this realistic portrayal compromised the moral lesson that the exemplary life traditionally communicated, but Godwin’s frankness was of a piece with his determination to tell his story with ‘all the plainness of truth’.38 Another of Godwin’s earliest Juvenile Library productions, Fables, Ancient and Modern (1805), similarly challenges rival collections, eschewing the lengthy morals common in eighteenth-​century books of fables such as Samuel Croxall’s frequently reprinted Fables of Aesop. To communicate with children, Godwin declares, ‘we must become in part children ourselves’, introducing ‘quick, unexpected turns’ into the narration to retain the child’s interest, adopting an informal conversational style, and conjuring up pictures ‘visible to the fancy of the learner’. Godwin’s fables are gentle, the traditional stories reworked to ‘end in a happy and forgiving tone’ in order to encourage the compassion and kindness ‘which a kind and benevolent father would wish to cultivate in his child’. He avoids abstract moralizing, since he wants to ‘[form] the mind of the learner to habits of meditation and reflection’ rather than thinking for his reader.39 Sarah Trimmer’s reaction to this statement of intent is telling: Godwin’s Fables were ‘destitute . . . of moral, and every thing that should characterize a Fable Book’.40 The philosophy behind Godwin’s children’s books was painstakingly thought through in his 1797 work, The Enquirer. Here, Godwin repeatedly, almost obsessively, returns to the question of children’s freedom, contrasting an education founded on the ‘tyranny of implicit obedience’ with a schooling that preserves liberty of mind.41 He therefore urges a radical review of the balance of power between adult authority and the child-​ subject, a plan ‘calculated entirely to change the face of education . . . Strictly speaking, no such characters are left upon the scene as either preceptor or pupil. The boy, like the man, studies, because he desires it . . . Everything bespeaks independence and equality’ (80). The young reader’s mind should gain the ‘habits of intellectual activity’, learning ‘to think, to discriminate, to remember, and to enquire’ (5–​6). Uncensored reading and the avoidance of prescriptive moralizing was therefore important.

37 

Julie Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 213, 217. 38  Anti-​Jacobin Review 25.102 (Dec. 1806), 424; Marcliffe, The Looking-​Glass, viii. 39  Edward Baldwin [William Godwin], Fables, Ancient and Modern (London: Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1805), iv, ii. 40 Trimmer, Guardian of Education, v. 296. 41  William Godwin, The Enquirer (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797), 60.

228   Susan Manly Godwin’s The Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome . . . For the Use of Schools, and Young Persons of Both Sexes (1806), one of his most commercially successful books, underlines his determination to supersede outmoded approaches to children’s reading, and to foster their powers of mind and ability to enquire. This was among the works that met with strong disapproval from the government spy who informed against the Juvenile Library in 1813. In his report, the spy alleged that The Pantheon was ‘insidious and dangerous’ and ‘calculated to mislead’, improperly promoting ‘heathen morality’ and an appetite for the ‘grossest stories’ in Greek and Roman mythology.42 Godwin’s dedication had explicitly set his new mythology against the ‘elaborate calumny’ upon the Greek religion in conventional literature for children.43 By showing children the beauty, imaginative power, and idealism of the stories about the gods, Godwin’s stated aim was to ‘conciliate the favour of young persons to the fictions of the Greeks’ (vi). He rejects his rivals’ dismissal of the Greek religious imagination as superstitious and idolatrous, instead praising its capacity as a system of ideas to ‘awaken the imagination; imagination, which, it cannot be too often repeated, is the great engine of morality’ (viii). In ­chapter 2, entitled ‘Genius of the Grecian Religion’, Godwin discourses on the tendency for the ancient Greeks to give ‘animation and life to all existence’ (5). This animating impulse, Godwin intimates, is deeply implanted in the human mind, not only in ancient Greece but in modern England, since as imaginative and social beings we delight ‘to talk to the objects around us, and to feel as if they understood and sympathised with us: we create, by the power of fancy, a human form and a human voice in those scenes, which to a man of literal understanding appear dead and senseless’ (5–​6). Godwin accounts for religious feeling, the peopling of the world with gods of the human mind, by thinking about human psychological needs: ‘we love, as Pope says, to “see God in clouds, and hear him in the wind” ’ (5). This love of stories and visions is for Godwin a profoundly embedded and powerful impulse in humans, often associated dismissively with childhood, but in reality a lifelong characteristic, and one that impels thought through its capacity to arouse strong feeling. The kind of imagination that these Romantic writers sought to nurture in children was one fully engaged with real events and real passions. They produced books in which stories prompted thought and fancy, but at the same time wanted to introduce children to the adult world of political reality, because, like Locke and Rousseau, they regarded children as beings ‘of the same nature with ourselves; born to have passions and thoughts and sentiments of [their] own; born to fill a station, and act a part’.44 For most of the writers I have discussed, opposition to the restriction of what children might read or think, feel, or imagine, was deeply rooted in their political convictions and their sense

42  Domestic, Geo. III., 1813. Jan. to Mar. No. 217, Public Record Office, quoted in Pamela Clemit, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom: William Godwin’s Juvenile Library, 1805–​22’, Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 9.1/​2 (2000/​2001), 44–​70 (p. 45). 43  Edward Baldwin [William Godwin], The Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome, 2nd edn (London: M. J. Godwin at the Juvenile Library, 1809), v. 44 Godwin, Enquirer, 142.

Literature for Children    229 of the means by which progress might be achieved. Dissent and disagreement, the encouragement of free enquiry and speculation, were essential elements of their conception of an improved social order. Wordsworth retains this idea of the promise symbolized by childhood in the 1799 version of The Prelude, a work which responds passionately to the ‘fructifying virtue’ of what is experienced and felt in early life. For Wordsworth, childhood was associated with an intensity of hope—​a bosom ‘beat[ing] with expectation’ and with ‘desire | Resistless’. Wordsworth’s adult understanding and his poetic energy are illuminated by his child-​self ’s ‘obscure sense | Of possible sublimity’, that teaches him that there is yet ‘something to pursue’, ‘meanings of delight’ still legible in ‘[t]‌he surface of the universal earth’. This is vital to the ‘growth of mental power’, especially the ‘imaginative power’, in which he locates his hope for the future beyond the disasters of the revolutionary years. But childhood was also reconstructed by him as a time of unthinking, visceral pleasure, when, ‘A naked savage in the thunder-​shower’, he enjoyed the ‘grandeur in the beatings of the heart’, without needing to understand it.45 Like the ‘boy of Winander’ who is taught only by ‘old Grandame Earth’, Wordsworth’s remembered childhood is decisively set apart from the world of books, and is essentially a natural education, not a social one.46 Coleridge’s ecstatic conclusion to ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798) similarly locates his baby’s education in ‘far other scenes’ in which the child will hear the ‘shapes and sounds intelligible’ of an ‘eternal language’ in ‘lakes and shores | And mountain crags’.47 These visions of a ‘natural’ childhood emerge out of moments of introspection and retrospection, and tend towards what Alan Richardson calls ‘a sort of primitivism, which closes off the prospect for intellectual development’.48 Yet, while distinct from the socially engaged imagination that the new realists of children’s literature sought to nurture in their readers, the Wordsworthian or Coleridgean idealized ‘natural’ imagination was nonetheless an educative force and potentially an engine of change. As Godwin had argued, ‘The human imagination is capable of representing to itself a virtuous community, a little heaven on earth. The human understanding is capable of developing the bright idea, and constructing a model of it.’49 To foster these capabilities, whether by writing educational works for children or by recollecting and interpreting the visionary energies of childhood, was a shared preoccupation of Romantic writers and part of the broader transformational dynamic of Romanticism.

45 

The Prelude (1799), Book 1, lines 290, 41–​3; Book 2, lines 366–​7, 371; Book 1, lines 197–​9, 257, 293, 26, 141. All quotations are from William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). 46  The Prelude (1805), Book 5, line 346, part of Wordsworth’s extended contrast between the hot-​ housed infant ‘prodigy’ (line 320) and the boy, like himself, educated by the sights and sounds of nature. 47  S. T. Coleridge, Fears in Solitude: Written in 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion. To which are added, France, an Ode; and Frost at Midnight (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 22. 48 Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 106. 49  William Godwin, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1801), 80–​1.

230   Susan Manly

Further Reading Anderson, Robert, ‘Godwin Disguised: Politics in the Juvenile Library’, in Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers (eds), Godwinian Moments:  From the Enlightenment to Romanticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). Carlson, Julie A., England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Clemit, Pamela, ‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom:  William Godwin’s Juvenile Library, 1805–​22’, Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 9.1/​2 (Fall 2000/​Spring 2001), 44–​70. Grenby, Matthew, The Child Reader 1700–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Grenby, Matthew, ‘ “Very Naughty Doctrines”: Children, Children’s Literature, Politics and the French Revolution Crisis’, in A. D. Cousins, Dani Napton, and Stephanie Russo (eds), The French Revolution and the British Novel in the Romantic Period (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). Levy, Michelle, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Manly, Susan, ‘ “Take a ’poon, pig”: Property, Class, and Common Culture in Maria Edgeworth’s “Simple Susan” ’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37.2 (2012), 306–​22. McCarthy William, and Olivia Murphy (eds), Anna Letitia Barbauld:  New Perspectives (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013). McGavran, James Holt (ed.), Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-​Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991). Myers, Mitzi, ‘Reading Children and Homeopathic Romanticism: Paradigm Lost, Revisionary Gleam, or “Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose” ’, in James Holt McGavran (ed.), Literature and the Child:  Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999). O’Malley, Andrew, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003). Paul, Lissa, The Children’s Book Business:  Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2011). Plotz, Judith, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Richardson, Alan, Literature, Education, and Romanticism:  Reading as Social Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Rowland, Ann Wierda, Romanticism and Childhood:  The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Ruwe, Donelle, British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Era:  Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Trumpener, Katie, ‘The Making of Child Readers’, in James Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Pa rt  I V

L E G I SL AT ION

Chapter 15

F reed om of  Spe e c h David Worrall

A stark visual reminder of contemporary perceptions of the restriction on freedom of speech in this period is the anonymous etching A Freeborn Englishman! The Admiration of the World!!! And the Envy of Surrounding Nations!!!!! (Fig. 15.1). A  man in rags is bound, hands behind back and wearing leg and waist manacles; in his hand he grasps a pen and a piece of paper bearing the words ‘Freedom of the Press | Transportation’; grotesquely, his lips are padlocked.1 First published around 1795, at the time of the ‘Gagging Acts’, the image became ubiquitous, and so recognizable was its iconography that by 1796 the radical activist Thomas Spence could issue a subversive token coin simply picturing a padlock and the single word, ‘Mum’.2 For students of British Romanticism, there lies a familiar historiography, even a pantheon, of (mainly male) muscular heroes who confronted charges of seditious, treasonable, or blasphemous utterance (meaning the crime of ‘publishing’ in writing or speech words likely to disturb civil order) from the 1790s to the 1820s.3 While this tells part of the story, the full situation is more complex, and the overarching direction of travel in terms of state control of freedom of expression can best be described as government gradually taking less notice of the symbolic registers of individual utterances while increasingly turning its attention to suppressing the possibility of communal unrest through physical disturbance or riot. The legislative and judicial background is complicated, with the categories of seditious libel (provoking civic unrest), treason (plotting the death of the monarch), and

1 

M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum, 7 vols (London: British Museum, 1935–​54), vii. 214–​5 (no. 8711); see also no. 8710. The image was later copied by George Cruikshank, among others. 2  That is, ‘Keep Mum’, or silent. Reproduced in David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum, 1989), 200 (no. 206. t; see also k). For other examples of the padlocked-​mouth motif, see John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 35–​7. 3  The standard histories are Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of The French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979); and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

234   David Worrall

Fig. 15.1 Anonymous, A Freeborn Englishman! The Admiration of the World!!! And the Envy of Surrounding Nations!!!!! c.1795. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

blasphemy (offending Christian beliefs) often seamlessly merging. The case of Rex v. Taylor in 1676 established that blasphemy was encompassed by common law, so that calling Christ a ‘bastard’ or ‘whoremaster’ was ‘not only an offence to God and religion, but a crime against the laws, State and government’.4 In other words, from the seventeenth century onwards, blasphemy was construed as a branch of sedition. Where sedition could be linked to an intention to overthrow the monarch, the indictment could be upgraded to treason, for which the punishment was almost invariably capital rather than gaol, fine, or transportation. Government’s basic desire to control public expression took many legislative forms. For example, the 1737 Theatre Licensing Act established a 4 

Cited in G. D. Nokes, A History of the Crime of Blasphemy (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1928), 52–​65.

Freedom of Speech   235 framework for censoring the texts of stage plays, but this was later augmented by the Disorderly Houses Act of 1751, aimed at ‘regulating Places of publick Entertainment’, a catch-​all category capable of including political debates in taverns. Moral pressure-​ groups such as William Wilberforce’s Proclamation Society of 1788 and its offshoot, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, also proved politically influential. Arguably, even the Engraver’s Copyright Act of 1735, along with other copyright legislation, decreased the acceptability of creative anonymity. The historical trajectory, however, was not straightforward, and attempts either to limit or to defend freedom of speech often had unintended consequences. Fox’s Libel Act of 1792, widely considered a milestone in the history of civil liberties for enabling juries (rather than judges) to rule on seditious libel, was itself an attempt to clarify the case of Rex v. Shipley, a prosecution first heard at Denbigh assizes in Wales in 1783. In Rex v. Shipley, the Dean of St Asaph had stood accused of publishing a seditious libel, A Dialogue between a Gentleman and a Farmer, a pamphlet which had argued (by analogy) for an enlarged political franchise. The jury found Shipley ‘Guilty of Publishing, But Whether a Libel or Not the Jury Do Not Find’, thus creating the judicial impasse Fox’s Libel Act aimed to clarify but actually only further compounded. The Shipley verdict was significant because it demonstrated that juries in cases of seditious libel could act autonomously, deflecting the power of judges (they ‘wanted to confound it’, presiding Justice Buller remarked of Shipley’s case).5 The fact that this legal principle was established in the provinces during peacetime illustrates a recurrent theme in the procedural resilience and pragmatic resourcefulness of the British jury system. Nevertheless, if legal case history was often autonomous, the legislative framework was formidable. The cornerstone of human rights in England was the Habeas Corpus Act, which stated that there could be no imprisonment without charge. However, it says much for the contemporary political climate that Habeas Corpus was suspended three times (1794–​5, 1798–​1800, 1817–​18), mirroring government anxiety over the domestic situation. There was also other suppressive legislation. The most notorious were the Seditious Meetings Act (1795) and Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act (1795), often referred to collectively as the ‘Two Acts’ or ‘Gagging Acts’. Other pieces of legislation aimed at covering blind spots in government control included the Aliens Act (1793) and Newspaper Publications Act (1798), attempts to register foreign visitors and printing presses respectively; the Unlawful Oaths Act (1797), aimed at clandestine political organizations; the Corresponding Societies Act (1799), which banned the London Corresponding Society and similar groups; the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, which outlawed trades unions; another Seditious Meetings Act in 1817; and the ‘Six Acts’ of 1819, a comprehensive set of repressive measures passed in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre.

5 

The Whole Proceedings on the Trial of the Indictment, the King, on the Prosecution of William Jones, Gentleman, Against the Rev. William Davies Shipley, Dean of St. Asaph, for a Libel (London, 1784), 51.

236   David Worrall For the reason indicated above, legal process did not always work as the legislation intended, and literary scholars have sometimes miscalculated the actual scale of suppression.6 There were up to 200 prosecutions for sedition or treason in the 1790s,7 a significant increase on previous decades but far fewer than during the Jacobite hunts of the 1710s and 1740s. The figure for 1808–​21 is approximately 100 prosecutions.8 Still largely unexamined is the number of provincial prosecutions brought before county Quarter Sessions (three-​monthly assize courts) which were not referred up to the court of King’s Bench, the contemporary supreme court. The provincial prosecution best known to students of literature is the one brought against William Blake in 1803 for allegedly uttering seditious words to a local soldier trespassing in his garden at Felpham, Sussex. Blake—​ the only canonical Romantic writer to be prosecuted for sedition—​was acquitted at Chichester Assizes, under circumstances only recently fully understood.9 Although his acquittal meant his case never reached King’s Bench, his prosecution had clearly been the subject of due legal processes such as the filing of information, an indictment, and a trial. It provides a good example of provincial legal mechanisms at work and their impact on individuals, with Blake’s mythological figures of Rintrah and Palamabron in Milton: A Poem (c.1804) both representing aspects of the poet’s traumatized perception of persecution. The only definitive way of counting metropolitan prosecutions for seditious libel or blasphemy is by working through the six-​foot-​long vellum scrolls of the King’s Bench papers. Philip Harling’s systematic trawl through these documents in 2001 revealed a noticeable disparity between ‘informations’ (intentions to prosecute) and actual indictments (where proceedings began).10 Although Harling’s evidence covers only King’s Bench and not the provincial courts, overall the numerical ‘hot spot’ years are 1792–​ 3, 1808–​11, 1817, and 1820–​1. However, except for 1821, ‘informations’ vastly outnumber indictments. In other words, the climate of repression may have been greater than the quantity of cases actually brought to trial, let alone conviction. The numbers imply that our understanding of the extent of suppressive legal action, at least as far as jury trials are concerned in King’s Bench, should be revised downwards, particularly for the 1790s, a period often referred to, then and since, as Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror’.11 For seditious libel and blasphemy, there was one indictment in King’s Bench in 1792; six in 1793; none in 6 

For details of the suppressive legislation and its mixed effects, see Clive Emsley, ‘Repression, “Terror” and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution’, English Historical Review 100 (1985), 801–​25. 7  Clive Emsley, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s “Terror”: Prosecutions for Sedition during the 1790s’, Social History 6 (1981), 155–​84 (p. 174). 8  Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–​1830 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 367. 9  Mark Crosby, ‘ “A Fabricated Perjury”: The [Mis]Trial of William Blake’, Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009), 29–​47. 10  Philip Harling, ‘The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790–​1832’, Historical Journal 44 (2001), 107–​34. 11  Examples of contemporary use of the ‘Reign of Terror’ analogy are cited by Emsley, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s “Terror” ’, 155. See also Kenneth Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Freedom of Speech   237 1794; one in 1795. By far the biggest group of indictments occurred in 1820 and 1821 (eleven and twenty-​five, respectively), nearly all against Richard Carlile’s journals The Republican and Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register.12 Again, disparities between conditions in London and the provinces, including the collection of information against defendants, can be extremely complicated. For example, John and Leigh Hunt were indicted but acquitted in 1811 for an article in their London-​published journal The Examiner condemning military flogging, but the same article in the rural Stamford News, published by John Drakard, resulted in a King’s Bench prosecution at which Drakard was given an eighteen-​month sentence and £200 fine, despite all three defendants having Henry Brougham as their defence counsel. Even so, the publisher William Cobbett successfully pushed legality to its limits by reprinting Drakard’s version of the Examiner article in his Political Register, citing the Hunts’ acquittal. In 1813, the Hunt brothers were again prosecuted for libel, for an article denigrating the character of the Prince Regent: both were convicted and sentenced to a £500 fine and two years’ imprisonment (during which they continued to publish The Examiner). Recounting this story in his Autobiography (1850), Leigh Hunt notes that the prosecution attempted to settle with them out of court but they refused, interpreting this as bribery.13 The cumbersome complexity of these attempts at government control is also apparent at the colonial peripheries. In Ireland, then a British colony, the extirpation of political crimes, particularly treason, was pursued with much more ruthless vigour than on the mainland. Nevertheless, Irish case history reveals both parallels and contrasts with the legislative situation on the mainland.14 For example, while Habeas Corpus was historically enshrined in English law, Ireland had no Habeas Corpus until 1781. Principal amongst the fears of the colonial power in Ireland was the possibility of an actual armed, treasonous, rebellion of the type which eventually occurred in 1798. Paradoxes abounded. Armed militia volunteer forces were increasingly chosen by successive governments to supplement the regular army and became a feature of overall military capacity in England, Ireland, and Scotland. When a United Irish nationalist, William Drennan, published an article ostensibly giving vociferous support for local Volunteers (‘Citizen Soldiers, to arms, take up the shield of freedom’), he was prosecuted for seditious libel. Despite the trial taking place in Dublin with an Irish jury, the court sat under the aegis of King’s Bench in its role as the supreme court of the colonial power. He was acquitted.15 12  Michael Lobban, ‘From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing Face of Political Crime c.1770–​1820’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 10 (1990), 307–​52 (p. 327 n. 107). 13  The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. Edmund Blunden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), 281. 14  Kathleen S. Murphy, ‘Judge, Jury, Magistrate and Soldier: Rethinking Law and Authority in Late Eighteenth-​Century Ireland’, American Journal of Legal History 44 (2000), 231–​56. 15  A Full Report of the Trial at Bar, in the Court of King’s Bench, of William Drennan . . . upon an Indictment, Charging Him with Having Written and Published a Seditious Libel (Dublin, 1794), 4. See Michael Durey, ‘The Dublin Society of United Irishmen and the Politics of the Carey-​Drennan Dispute, 1792–​1794’, Historical Journal 37 (1994), 89–​111.

238   David Worrall These and other case histories underline regional differences and the autonomy of provincial juries. However, one must be cautious about making assumptions about jury autonomy because of the number of anomalies encountered in actual case histories. The unusually harsh prosecution (resulting in transportation to Australia) of Joseph Gerrald, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, and others in Scotland in 1793 for sedition, carefully detailed by John Barrell, displays a regionally devolved power imposed with exceptional local rigour.16 Across the Romantic period as a whole, there were undoubtedly significant numbers of metropolitan convictions, and it is these which have been the principal focus of recent scholarship. Many of the writers and publishers capable of being firmly, often serially, linked to the struggle for the freedom of speech were London-​based and include Daniel Isaac Eaton, convicted in 1796 and 1812 for the sale of Charles Pigott’s Political Dictionary (1795), Edward Henry Iliff ’s A Summary of the Duties of Citizenship! (1795), and Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason: Part the Third (1811); Joseph Johnson, sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for selling Gilbert Wakefield’s Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Llandaff ’s Address to the People of Great Britain (1798), proceedings Fox claimed had ‘virtually destroyed’ the ‘liberty of the press’;17 William Hone, tried and acquitted on charges of blasphemy and sedition for publishing The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member and his own Political Litany Diligently Revised to be Said or Sung until the Appointed Change Come, and The Sinecurists’ Creed or Belief, as the Same Can or May be Said (all 1817); Richard Carlile, gaoled repeatedly between 1819 and 1825 for his journal The Republican; and William Cobbett, who fled to America following the publication of his Soldier’s Friend (1792), returning there again in 1817 for fear of persecution while editing his long-​running newspaper, The Political Register (latterly with William Sherwin). Eaton similarly self-​exiled to America in 1796 but was tried in absentia, not being gaoled until his return in 1803. To this list should be added Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, John Thelwall, Thomas Holcroft, and eight others, all indicted for high treason in 1794 on account of their alleged activities within the London Corresponding Society and the Society for Constitutional Information. This is a good example of political activity which was only potentially seditious being upgraded into a charge of high treason. Amidst ample evidence of government manipulation, the defendants were all either acquitted or their cases abandoned. In this particular group, the principal ideologue was William Godwin, author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793): although he himself was never indicted, he helped to undermine the credibility of the prosecution case by exposing the arbitrariness of the concept of ‘constructive treason’ in his pamphlet Cursory Strictures (1794). Another important supplementary figure, representing a distinctive agrarian-​ panacea and physical-​force strand in contemporary radicalism, was Thomas Spence, arrested under the 1794 and 1798 Suspensions and gaoled for a year for his seditious 16  John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–​1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chs 4 and 9. 17  Correspondence of the Late Gilbert Wakefield, B.A., with the Late Right Honourable Charles James Fox (London, 1813), 67.

Freedom of Speech   239 pamphlet, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State (1802). The cause of Spence and his followers had significant ideological longevity through its links to physical-​force-​mode United Irish nationalists. A common factor in the sentencing of Eaton and Carlile was their role in promoting the group of deistical (or atheistical) works later collectively known as The Theological Works of Paine (the title of Carlile’s 1818 edition), based around his Age of Reason (1794), which had been banned since 1797. Yet sensitivities around writing on religion did not always align in the ways one might expect, given Romanticism’s emphasis on individual liberty. For example, the United Irishman, the Reverend William Jackson, took the trouble to write an anti-​Paine Observations in Answer to . . . Paine’s Age of Reason (1795) while confined in Dublin prison charged with high treason for plotting a French invasion. Upon conviction, he spectacularly poisoned himself, dying ‘in the dock, without being moved from the position in which he had died, until nine o’clock of the following morning’.18 As far as Paine’s own fate is concerned, he was indicted for Rights of Man, Part the Second (1792) and Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation (1792), but escaped prosecution by fleeing to France. Printed accounts of his trial, which took place in his absence, spread further his political ideas and became bestsellers in their own right, in part because of the brilliant defence speech by Thomas Erskine, still regarded as a landmark in the history of the freedom of speech and of legal practice. Shortly afterwards, Erskine presided at the first meeting of the Friends of the Liberty of the Press, an organization which for a while became the vanguard for this cause.19 Although high-​profile cases such as these have dominated the scholarly record, their unpredictable diversity has led to some loss of the greater macro picture. Ultimately, between 1789 and 1832 the British political system successfully adapted to changing democratic pressures from within, even while lurching between periods of repression and relative openness. However, the tendency of literary scholars to calibrate the Romantic poets against a parallel set of radical activists as a kind of ‘shadow canon’ of political merit substantially underestimates the constraints on the freedom of speech suffered by the generality of the population. The only systematic state control over literature in this period was by the Lord Chamberlain (see Gillian Russell, Chapter 16 in this volume). The account book of the Examiner of Plays, John Larpent, shows that censoring averaged one episode per week in the specimen season of 1801–​2.20 At this time the London stage—​with the exception of Covent Garden and Drury Lane—​was restricted to musicalized drama and pantomime. As one commentator put it in 1822, ‘Prince Hamlet, and his Courtiers, may safely (and legally) play upon a Pipe, but if they speak of it, they become liable to fine or imprisonment.’21 In many ways, anti-​theatricality became a proxy 18 

A Full Report of all the Proceedings in the Trial of the Rev. William Jackson, at the Bar of His Majesty’s Court of King’s Bench, Ireland, on an Indictment for High Treason (Dublin, 1795), 140. 19  Robert R. Rea, ‘ “The Liberty of the Press” as an Issue in English Politics, 1792–​1793’, Historian 24 (1961), 26–​43. For primary documents, see The Friends to the Liberty of the Press: Eight Tracts, 1792–​1793 (New York: Garland, 1974). 20  HMs. 19926, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 21  Henry Lee, The Manager: A Melo-​Dramatic Tale (London, 1822), 63.

240   David Worrall for other types of suppression. There can be little doubt that methods deployed to subjugate theatre were simply adapted to prevent sedition. Despite contemporary theories of moral sentiment, an awareness of literary drama coexisted with extensive suppression. This is nowhere better seen than in an obscure incident in 1766 in the village of Newport, twenty miles east of Shrewsbury. Richard Hill’s A Letter from Richard Hill, Esq; To His Friend near Shrewsbury (1767) is an account written by a magistrate who gaoled, without trial, ‘a company of strolling players’. Although the players had committed no felonies or disturbances, Hill received two letters from ‘persons who . . . desired I would keep their names secret (which I promised to do)’, ‘apprehensive of the ill consequences which must ensue’ if the actors were permitted to perform, so instead he goaled them.22 In other words, involvement with the distribution of English literature was used as a pretext for imprisonment. As Hill knew, the royal patents issued to Covent Garden and Drury Lane automatically rendered all other actors and actresses arrestable vagrants. A striking aspect of his narrative is how his anti-​theatricality existed alongside an extensive knowledge of the contemporary dramatic repertoire, as is clear when he enumerates the ‘pernicious consequences’ he feared from allowing the company to perform: how many diseases left uncured, how many pockets emptied, how many minds corrupted how many apprentices and servant-​maids commence Othellos, Desdemonas, Altamonts, Calistas, Lady Wrongheads, Lady Betty Modeishes, Mr. Fribbles, Roman Emperors, Tragedy Queens and what not, to their high improvement in the arts of debauchery, intrigue, dissimulation and romantic love, the great loss of their time and neglect of their masters’ business.23

The repertoire Hill refers to, with Othello the most recognizable play, includes Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband (1705) and The Provok’d Husband (1728), Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (1703), and David Garrick’s Miss in Her Teens (1747), all staples of the Georgian stage. What is fascinating about the Newport incident is not merely that it was fashionable drama which provoked the response, but that the same disparities between provincial and metropolitan culture, the rule of law, local vindictiveness, and the use of secret informants were as apparent in the 1760s as they were twenty-​five years later during the infamous Birmingham Riots of July 1791 which targeted the scientist and Unitarian preacher, Joseph Priestley. When Priestley’s house was attacked by a loyalist mob searching for him after what they deemed to be a provocative Bastille-​day dinner at a local hotel (which he had not actually attended), he was undoubtedly lucky to escape lynching. The rioting, which lasted for four days, resulted in the burning of several substantial private houses, including Priestley’s. Despite the seriousness of the events, and

22  A Letter from Richard Hill, Esq; To His Friend near Shrewsbury, Containing Some Remarks on a Letter Signed by a Player Which Letter is also Prefixed . . . Sold for the Benefit of the Prisoners in Shrewsbury Goal (Shrewsbury, 1767), 11–​12. 23  Letter from Richard Hill, 14.

Freedom of Speech   241 the weight of evidence against the rioters, only four of the twelve people indicted at the subsequent trial were found guilty.24 An intensely local religious sectarianism between Dissenters and Church of England clergymen swirled around the incident, some laying the blame on Priestley himself despite his insistence that ‘all that I am charged with is the freedom of my writings’.25 His account of how ‘At my house the rioters said, “The justices will protect us” ’, together with another victim’s testimony to him about ‘meeting a party of the rioters who . . . said they were going to burn his house by order from just­ ice Carles’, suggests the possibility of riot leaders covertly headed by local Justices of the Peace (a type of devolved royal appointment holding some of the powers of magistrates).26 Extraordinarily, meeting Joseph Carles three years later, Anna Larpent, the wife of the Examiner of Plays, realized her husband had links of patronage to him, noting in her diary that, ‘In the Riots that were levelled at Priestley he shewed himself a violent High Churchman & loyalist . . . Government have rewarded his zeal by giving him the Clerkship of Privy Seal & Mr. Larpent the deputy’s place which he holds for his Brother.’27 The 1766 Shrewsbury and 1791 Birmingham incidents reveal the turbulent asymmetry of the rule of law and the freedom of expression in peacetime provincial England, as well as the social promiscuity of its executive middle classes. What both incidents demonstrate is the unaccountability of the state’s powers when exercised through devolved agents. The 1794 ‘traitors’, along with Paine, Eaton, Spence, Hone, and Carlile, were unfortunate to be close to the metropolitan centre, but what happened to them was merely symptomatic of a nationally distributed model of authority aimed at repressing freedom of speech through the use of autonomous local agencies. As autonomous Justices of the Peace, Hill and Carles ruled over local citizens. In other words, far from freedom of speech being decided by an overarching government (although the Lord Chamberlain’s office is a significant exception), control was principally exerted at the provincial level. The mechanisms of the processes were an assemblage with unpredictable outcomes. The incoming reports filed in Britain’s National Archives from the Manchester authorities immediately after the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 reveal a government in disarray, disconnected from an autonomous local yeomanry and flooded with unexpected and fragmentary information.28 In 1791 the effects of the loyalist-​driven Birmingham riots were similarly immediately national, precipitating an immense organizational response from government. The diarist and composer John Marsh, situated in far-​off Chichester, on the south coast, reported a long-​planned town and garrison ball cancelled because ‘on ye day of the Ball [Tuesday 19th July] an order arrived for the Buffs to march

24 

Joseph Priestley, The Trials of the Birmingham Rioters, at the Court-​House, Warwick (London, 1791). Joseph Priestley, An Appeal to the Public, on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham (Birmingham, 1791), viii. 26  Joseph Priestley, An Appeal to the Public, on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham, Part II (London, 1792), 60. 27  Diaries of Anna Magaretta Larpent, vol. 1, 19 Mar. 1794, Huntington Library. 28  Home Office 42/​193 and 42/​197, National Archives, Kew. 25 

242   David Worrall immediately to Reading (on their Route to wds. Birmingham) for which the 1st Division set off that same night’, all on account of ‘the Riots at Birmingham’ ‘when Dr. Priestley’s House was demolish’d’. As Marsh noted wryly as a favoured musician for such events, ‘Thus Chichester lost its Gaity, & ye Ladies their flirtations.’29 To this pattern of local enforcement of repression, which was not invariably linked to threats of external invasion or internal rebellion, should be added official declarations permitting further controls. Although issued during peacetime, the primary French Revolutionary era edict was a one-​page Royal Proclamation in May 1792 against ‘divers wicked and seditious Writings’, requiring ‘Officers and Magistrates’ to ‘take the most immediate and effectual care to suppress and prevent all Riots, Tumults, and other Disorders’.30 This was the document which effectively banned Paine’s Rights of Man, Part the Second and his Address to the Addressers. Although Paine himself absconded to France, booksellers offering his works for sale were indicted, with one of the chief specimen actions being that against Jeremiah Samuel Jordan in the court of King’s Bench.31 The lack of distinction between the writer and seller is an important one because although the authors of ‘seditious Writings’ could be prosecuted, the proclamation expressly permitted ‘Officers and Magistrates’ to ‘prevent all . . . other Disorders’, including those construed as actions by accomplices. The catch-​all prevention of ‘other Disorders’ was something with which, as the Newport example demonstrates, magistrates and justices were already familiar. The overall picture presented here is of a massively devolved system of surveillance and prosecution with control mechanisms fully in place by the time of the war with France in February 1793. However, no example more forcibly demonstrates the dangers potentially lurking for writers than the often overlooked case of William Winterbotham, the seditious preacher to whom the youthful Robert Southey entrusted the manuscript of Wat Tyler.32 There can be little doubt that Winterbotham’s successful prosecution and, by the standards of the time, substantial gaol sentences and fines resulted in later writers observing a margin of safety within their choice of language to avoid or obscure potentially seditious sentiment. The circumstances of his conviction highlight a complex array of contemporary conditions surrounding freedom of speech. Winterbotham’s £200 fine and four-​year imprisonment ‘State-​side’ (that is, as a political prisoner), served mainly in London’s Newgate gaol, arose after he preached two sermons at an ‘Anabaptist meeting’ house in Plymouth in November 1792. Both sermons were judged seditious, each carrying a two-​year gaol sentence and £100 fine. Confusingly, in June 1794, while still in prison, Winterbotham published the sermons as The Commemoration of National Deliverances, and the Dawning Day: Two Sermons, Preached November 5th and 18th, 1792, at How’s-​Lane Chapel, Plymouth, protesting 29 

Jul. 1791, John Marsh, HMs 54457, vol. 14, Huntington Library. By the King. A Proclamation (21 May 1792). 31  Treasury Solicitor 11/​726, Rex v. Jeremiah Samuel Jordan, National Archives, Kew. 32  See Susan J. Mills, ‘Winterbotham, William’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, at: www.oxforddnb.com. 30 

Freedom of Speech   243 fidelity to the original speeches but actually having silently redacted their content. Cumulatively, Winterbotham probably managed eventually to print the majority of the sermons’ content, but only because the Commemoration pamphlet excluded seditious material legitimately reprinted as a trial transcript, The Trial of Wm. Winterbotham, Assistant Preacher at How’s Lane Meeting, Plymouth; Before the Hon. Baron Perryn, and a Special Jury, at Exeter; on the 25th. of July, 1793, for Seditious Words. The latter, which ran through three editions in 1794, was published from Newgate at his own expense, each edition slightly different but including his ironic glosses. However, the Treasury Solicitor’s original manuscript case notes corroborate the primacy of The Trial over The Commemoration as a source for understanding its illegal content. Winterbotham’s conviction is significant because the figurative language of his sermons drew heavily on biblical typologies common to secular poetry but upon which the prosecution placed absolute constructive meanings. Some of the indicted phrases (italicized here as in the original) demonstrate how closely Judaeo-​Christian poetic tropes then bordered on illegality: ‘Darkness has long cast her Veil over the Land (meaning amongst others this Kingdom) Persecution and Tyranny have carried Universal Sway (meaning amongst others this Kingdom) Magisterial powers (meaning amongst others Magisterial powers in this Kingdom) have long been a Scourge to the Liberties and Rights of the People (meaning amongst others the People of this Kingdom).’ ‘The Yoke of Bondage among our Neighbours (meaning the French) seems now to be pretty well broken and it is expected the same Blessing is awaiting Us (meaning the Subjects of this Kingdom).’33

In a context where phrases such as ‘the Land’ and ‘our Neighbours’ could take on constructively seditious meanings, apparently ordinary language became politically implicated in unpredictable ways. At the very least, these texts suggest the wry rationale for Pigott’s humorously seditious Political Dictionary (1795). However, Winterbotham’s adoption of the prophetic mode is also striking. The sermons invite direct comparison with phrases in William Blake’s contemporaneous illuminated books in relief etching. The line ‘For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease’ was twice used by Blake: first in the ‘Song of Liberty’ appended to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-​ 3), and again in America: A Prophecy (1793).34 Arguably, Blake only narrowly avoids the possibility of a seditious construction on the word ‘Empire’, yet distances himself from prosecution more certainly by allegorizing ‘the Lion & Wolf ’, choosing deliberately gnomic terms equivalent to Winterbotham’s ‘Persecution and Tyranny’. This kind of tactical deflection of prosecution was widely practised by Romantic authors. With Winterbotham imprisoned until late November 1797, the consecutive gaol sentences and 33 

The Trial of Wm. Winterbotham, 89–​90. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 27; America, plate 6, in David V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. edn (New York: Doubleday, 1965). 34 

244   David Worrall doubled-​up fines must have cast a long shadow over many emerging writers, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. As previously noted in this chapter, controls over the freedom of speech occurred on a provincially distributed model of local autonomy. This increasingly meant the use of directed informants (spies), often persons holding local minor public offices. Winterbotham was probably never aware of it, but in the event of a faltering prosecution at the Exeter assizes, the Treasury Solicitor had a back-​up plan to use entrapment evidence. John Terrell, a Plymouth exciseman (not called at the trial), trailed Winterbotham a few weeks after the second sermon, intercepting him at the London Inn, Ivy Bridge, on the coaching road between Plymouth and Exeter. Engaging him in conversation, Terrell prompted him to say ‘that his Sermon was calculated to mislead the Vulgar’, and, according to his affidavit, Winterbotham then added, ‘that he was and always should be an Advocate for the liberty of the press and liberty of speech’—​whereupon the Witness [Terrell] used these Words ‘Circumscribed I should hope?’ to which Winterbotham cried out ‘No’ and this Witness asked[,]‌what[,] do you mean ‘unlimited?’ and Winterbotham answered ‘Yes’.35

What this illustrates is that the stranglehold on ‘unlimited’ speech was already in place in provincial England after the Royal Proclamation but before the outbreak of war. With a witness whom the prosecution could be confident in fielding, the reserve evidence—​if needed—​was reasonably robust and almost certainly the concoction of local authorities. Paralleling the rationale for licensing restrictions on Westminster theatres, Winterbotham’s trial shows very clearly that it was the venues of seditious utterance—​ in his case, How’s Lane chapel—​rather than the utterances themselves which tended to activate the mechanisms of suppression. The linguistic symbolic registers of sedition were permissible (in trial transcripts, for example), but provoked reaction if auditors were located in high-​density populations, however fleeting and however small (as in weekly ‘meeting House’ sermons). Where the materiality of sedition existed amongst low densities of population (even on a larger scale), suppression was less frequent. The predictive axiom, taken from the work of Manuel DeLanda, is that ‘The identity of an assemblage is not only embodied in its materiality but also expressed by it.’36 The crucial factors denoting an assemblage’s capacity to mutate and take on new, meta-​levels of emergence are high concentrations of population co-​presence and density (as opposed to larger-​scale activities with diffused population densities). This is why booksellers were pursued more frequently than authors. Government could tolerate Godwin’s

35 

Treasury Solicitor 11/​458/​1524, National Archives, Kew. Manuel DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London: Continuum, 2011), 200. See also two other studies by DeLanda: A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006) and Deleuze: History and Science (New York: Atropos Press, 2010). 36 

Freedom of Speech   245 Political Justice, but not the massive excerpting and quotation spun out of Paine’s Rights of Man by the radical press. DeLanda’s theoretical model can also be adapted to encompass, for example, attitudes to caricature prints, where the symbolic registers were largely visual and thus much harder to capture under English common law. Treasury Solicitor case papers prepared for the printer James Belcher’s seditious libel trial at Warwickshire assizes in 1793 for selling Charles Pigott’s The Jockey Club, or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age (1792) and Paine’s outlawed Rights of Man, Part the Second and Address to the Addressers included information that Belcher sold ‘Pamphlets and Publictns of a Seditious Nature And also of Exhibit.g in his window for sale a variety of Caracture Prints such as the Farm House of Windsor Farmer George & Ch-​l-​tte going to Market a Voluptuary under all the horrors of Digestion’.37 Pigott’s Jockey Club was a series of lightly redacted personal satires on (mainly) aristocratic morals. With both Pigott’s and Paine’s pamphlets on sale, Belcher’s shop at the Bull Ring, Birmingham, provoked prosecution, but it is significant that the evidence assembled against him alluded to his habit of displaying caricature prints in his window. Print-​shop windows drew crowds which were small but (according to contemporary sources) dense enough for pick-​pockets to work through. This amplified perceptions of Belcher’s danger to civil order. To set against this distributed model of provincial autonomy, activities at the metropolitan centre grew in intensity and efficiency. At the end of the century, London’s chief magistrate was Sir Richard Ford, the first person to have a role similar to later heads of MI5.38 The following is a typical example of the kind of internal exchange taking place during Ford’s term as spymaster: 28 Nov[ember 1803] I inclose an anonymous account I have received in which your Name is mentioned do you know any thing of the Matter—​perhaps [‘]tis only some old Stuff of J[ames]. P[owell].’s—​A Letter from Thos Paine—​Stating the superior advantages of a Republican form of Government compared with Monarchical—​Read in Companies at Public Houses,—​near & in Carnaby Market—​Many of the Butchers & Most of the Butchers Men are considered as staunch to the cause. Thomas & Thomas Thorney Grocers—​King Street. They go a hunting (that is Smuggling) Durkham a Carpenter in the Street leading from Maddox Street to Conduit Street. Moody—​a Shoemaker—​in that Neighbourhood—​Richards a Butt Maker King Str[eet].39

The letter, addressed to John Moody, alias ‘Notary’, then Ford’s covert mole amongst the Spenceans, relates how Ford has found a file in which Moody is named as a dangerous radical, ‘staunch to the cause’. Ford realizes this internal dossier is probably an outgoing spy’s surveillance report (probably that of James Powell, deployed to Hamburg 37 

Treasury Solicitor 11/​578/​1893, National Archives, Kew. For details, see Elizabeth Sparrow, ‘Ford, Sir Richard’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, at: www.oxforddnb.com. 39  Privy Council 1/​3117, Part A, National Archives, Kew. 38 

246   David Worrall from 1798, possibly trailing Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others), a person obviously not security-​cleared on the identities of other agents in the field. In other words, this document is indicative of both the saturation of official surveillance in central London and its organizational complexity (an aspect of an assemblage’s population density). In this report, the content of Paine’s pamphlet is clearly only of secondary importance compared to how it functioned at its venues, ‘Read in Companies at Public Houses,—​near & in Carnaby Market’, amongst co-​present readers and auditors.40 Ford was himself an interesting figure, the son of Dr James Ford, a substantial shareholder in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, almost bankrupted by R. B. Sheridan’s mismanagement. Ford Jr remained a creditor and, with his magistrate’s office in Bow Street (the site of the Covent Garden theatre) and familiarity with stage censorship practices, he was well placed to direct close surveillance. Theatre was a central feature of contemporary London cultural life, even becoming a route eventually taken by the austere publisher, Richard Carlile. Carlile’s sheer anti-​authoritarian persistence raised issues surrounding the freedom of speech to an altogether higher level. His long imprisonment for blasphemy, from 1819 to 1825, should be seen as a continuation of Eaton’s and Hone’s confrontations with the law. Carlile had published the posthumously collected set of Paine essays known as The Theological Works, but Eaton’s title gives a better sense of their explosive content: The Age of Reason. Part the Third. Being an Examination of the Passages in the New Testament, Quoted from the Old and Called Prophecies Concerning Jesus Christ. To which is Prefixed, An Essay on Dream, Shewing by what Operation of the Mind a Dream is Produced in Sleep, and Applying the Same to the Account of Dreams in the New Testament; With an Appendix Containing My Private Thoughts of a Future State, and Remarks on the Contradictory Doctrine in the Books of Matthew and Mark (1811). A larger number of actions aimed at restricting freedom of speech after 1794 are connected to Paine’s Age of Reason than to any other single book. As with the example of William Jackson, its contents split radicals and loyalists alike. Contemporaneous with Carlile’s struggle was the sudden growth in women’s radical activism, much of it independent of issues of concern to male precursors but accessing established repertoires and structures. The two primary catalysts were the deaths of at least four women (and wounding of scores of others) at the hands of a volunteer militia during the Peterloo Massacre in August 1819, and—​on an unprecedentedly national scale—​agitation by women surrounding the Prince Regent’s attempt in 1820 to deny his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick (‘Queen Caroline’), the role of consort. Amidst a peaceful, gradually more prosperous country, sporting a gaslit central London, a new ‘Waterloo’ bridge, and a resurgent theatreland, the fates of the Manchester women and the attempt by Gillray’s old ‘Voluptuary’ to dislodge Caroline left no room for equivocation. The women were dead, and exuberant support for the queen’s rights was deftly beyond construction as sedition or treason. 40  Carnaby Market is off present-​day Regent Street. The Paine ‘Letter’ could be a number of works from Common Sense (1776) onwards. Ford may be signalling it was not The Age of Reason or its supplements.

Freedom of Speech   247 Provincial radicalism continued to be as striking as anything in London. Barely eight weeks after Peterloo, the Boston-​based newspaper The True Briton reported that near Halifax, the marching Gauckliffe ‘Female Union’ displayed a flag showing ‘A Parent with her Child, which she holds affectionately by the hand, directing it to a scroll, upon which is written “The Rights of Women”; reverse, a Painting of a Cap of Liberty, surmounted with laurel; motto, “We are Women, but will not be trampled on”.’41 Although by that time confined to Dorchester gaol, under a dispersal policy, Carlile continued to edit The Republican since it was for individual issues rather than the journal itself for which he had been convicted. To support him appeared, among others, a series of ‘shopgirls’ who ran his business on his behalf, principal amongst them being Carlile’s wife, Jane, and his sister, Mary Ann, with Jane rapidly convicted on her own account.42 Communal resilience based upon kinship and friendship is an often underestimated feature of late Regency print culture. Convictions leading from Carlile’s work quickly implicated women. In December 1819, a Glasgow bookseller and his wife were charged with ‘circulating or causing to be circulated seditious and blasphemous publications’, including The Republican, T. J. Wooler’s The Black Dwarf, and Paine’s Age of Reason (presumably Part Three).43 Susannah Wright, also a Carlile volunteer, was tried at the instigation of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Acting as her own counsel, Wright said what she liked and ignored the judge: ‘ “It is notorious that Mr. Carlile is not a Christian, and I wish it to be as notorious that I am not.” . . . Chief Justice [Abbott]:—​“I cannot sit here to hear the Clergy abused in this manner.” (Mrs. Wright proceeded [speaking] without noticing this interruption)’.44 This chapter has stressed the provincial distribution of challenges to the freedom of speech, particularly with reference to England, and how these challenges were connected to the material assemblages composing them. As a general principle, the reactive work of government was always to disperse and diffuse organizations threatening its homogeneity. The existence of high-​density populations within an assemblage always indicates a capacity to mutate from homogenous genotypes. The symbolic registers of contemporary print, if taken on their own, are poor indicators of an assemblage’s emergent capacities (which always defer to the materialities of the assemblage). Fleeting, high-​density, co-​present populations (such as Winterbotham’s auditors) contain this ability just as much as the larger-​scale but dispersed fraternities of the regionalized London Corresponding Society. A final example will confirm the usefulness of this predictive model for the innumerable interventions against freedom of expression characteristic of this period.

41 

The True Briton (13 Oct. 1819). The Republican (27 Oct. 1820) 293. Jane’s indictment is at King’s Bench 10/​63 Part 1, National Archives, Kew. 43  The Republican (31 Dec. 1819), 300–​1. 44  Report of the Trial of Mrs. Susannah Wright, for Publishing, in His Shop, the Writings and Correspondences of R. Carlile; Before Chief Justice Abbott . . . Monday, July 8, 1822. Indictment at the Instance of the Society for the Suppression of Vice (London, 1822), 14, 17. 42 

248   David Worrall A handwritten spy’s report on ‘The Polemics’, a Spencean ‘debating Society’ meeting in a tavern in Moorfields, London, in 1817 captures many of the characteristics outlined above. It reads: Information of the Proceedings of a debating Society called ‘Polemics’ held at the Mulberry Tree—​who are promulgating Atheism . . . Wedderburn, a noted Spencean is very active—​he boldy asserted a few days since, that there was no Deity or a future State—​at the end of this speech Wedderburn sold or distributed seditious Pamphlets . . . On a Sunday Evening they read Cobbett, Wooller [sic], Sherwin . . . 45

This is an historically precise venue with co-​present participants; a complex organization directing and maintaining its surveillance; a genotype mutating into two local ideological organisms (‘Polemics’ and Spenceans); and a print distribution method connected to secondary social networks. The final element—​beyond the assemblage model—​is charismatic leadership. Robert Wedderburn, later confined in Dorchester gaol but kept separate from Carlile, was the semi-​literate son of a Jamaican slave.46 As another spy report on the ‘Polemics’ put it, ‘a Mr Wedderburn a West Indian . . . in a strain of the most impious Manner denied the existence of a supreme Being’.47 Black leadership of the English working class was an altogether new mutation emerging from characteristics inherent in the genotype. Wedderburn was already struggling for freedom of speech, already under surveillance.

Further Reading Aspinall, Arthur, Politics and the Press, c.1780–​1850 (London: Home and Van Thal, 1949). Barrell, John, The Spirit of Despotism:  Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006). Behrendt, Stephen C. (ed.), Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press (Detroit:  Wayne State University Press, 1997). Booth, Alan, ‘ “The Memory of the Liberty of the Press”: The Suppression of Radical Writing in the 1790s’, in Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (eds), Writing and Censorship in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992). Bugg, John, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). Epstein, James A., Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–​ 1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

45 

Home Office 40/​7(3) 17; 13 Nov 1817, National Archives, Kew. Iain McCalman was the first scholar to draw attention to Wedderburn’s unique position in British radicalism, in Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For Wedderburn’s renown as an orator, see Judith Thompson, Chapter 34 in this volume. 47  Home Office 40/​8.170; 15 Dec. 1817, National Archives, Kew. 46 

Freedom of Speech   249 Gilmartin, Kevin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Harrison, Stanley, Poor Men’s Guardians: A Record of the Struggles for a Democratic Newspaper Press, 1763–​1973 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974). Johnston, Kenneth, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Mee, Jon, ‘ “Examples of Safe Printing”:  Censorship and Popular Radical Literature in the 1790s’, in Nigel Smith (ed.), Literature and Censorship (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993). Powers, Elizabeth (ed.), Freedom of Speech:  The History of an Idea (Lewisburg:  Bucknell University Press, 2011). Wickwar, William, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819–​1832 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928). Worrall, David, ‘Kinship, Generation and Community: The Transmission of Political Ideology in Radical Plebeian Print Culture’, Studies in Romanticism 43 (2004), 283–​95.

Chapter 16

The Regu l at i on of Theat re s Gillian Russell

On a wintry day in late 1785, a group of men assembled in Wellclose Square in the East End of London to witness the laying of the cornerstone of a new place of entertainment, the initiative of a well-​known actor, John Palmer. Reading from a proclamation subsequently placed in the foundation stone, the Recorder of Maidstone declared that ‘the edifice  . . .  shall be called, THE ROYALTY THEATRE. Sanctioned by authority, and liberally patronized by subscription’.1 This act of bravado can justifiably be claimed to have inaugurated the Romantic period as an era of transformation in the British theatre. Palmer’s gesture, carefully orchestrated for media coverage, was a deliberate challenge to the authority of what were known as the ‘major’ or ‘patent’ theatres at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. In the mid-​1780s the hierarchy of the British theatre seemed stable: Covent Garden and Drury Lane, the winter theatres of London, were at the apex, below which were the two summer playhouses: the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, and Sadler’s Wells on the margins of the city in semi-​rural Islington. Beyond London there existed a network of playhouses in major capitals and towns, such as Dublin, Edinburgh, Bath, Bristol, Norwich, York, and Manchester. These theatres shared repertoires, personnel, and rituals with a more informal, less respectable theatrical tradition of itinerant or strolling players, who performed in fairs, rooms at inns, barns, or sometimes even in the open air. Famous actors of the period, such as Sarah Siddons, John Philip Kemble, and Edmund Kean, had their origins as itinerant performers. Complementing the professional or public theatre of the 1780s was the increasing popularity of amateur or private performance, encompassing all classes of society ranging from apprentices or clerks ‘spouting’ Shakespeare in taverns to the aristocratic and fashionable elite who in some cases built their own theatres in the grounds of their country and town houses. Aristocratic performers emulated the professional theatre in various ways, recruiting 1 

Quoted in Watson Nicholson, The Struggle for a Free Stage in London (1906; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), 100.

The Regulation of Theatres    251 famous actors and ensuring that their activities were closely monitored in newspapers and periodicals. All those involved in the eighteenth-​century theatre, from the humble strolling player to the elite amateur actor, were to a greater or lesser degree liable to regulation by the law. Theatrical performance was the most strictly monitored art form and mode of public entertainment in the period, the result of acting’s traditionally dubious moral and philosophical status and the suspicion of the playhouse as a potential site of disorderliness and political dissent. The dispensation which Palmer challenged in 1785 was the result of the Licensing Act of 1737, designed by the government of Sir Robert Walpole to stifle the oppositional theatre of John Gay and Henry Fielding. The measure included provision for the censorship of all texts prior to performance (which endured in the British theatre until 1968), as well as restricting theatrical entertainment—​i.e. ‘any interlude, tragedy, comedy, opera, play, farce, or other entertainment of the stage’ to the city of Westminster and the royal residences.2 This latter provision reinforced the already privileged status of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, whose owners and their heirs had been granted authority or ‘patents’ to perform drama by Charles II in 1662. These two dimensions of the Licensing Act—​the imposition of censorship, and the effective restriction of control over what constituted drama to the patent houses—​have tended to receive the most attention from theatre historians. Often neglected is the fact that the Licensing Act was based on a particular definition of the status of the actor. The Act was an amendment of a 1714 vagrancy law which clarified the definition of ‘rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars and vagrants’ to also include actors, making anyone who violated the 1737 Licensing Act liable to punishment as a vagrant. The subsequent development of the theatre as a polite, rational, and liberal art, the bastion of Shakespeare as well as of great stars such as David Garrick and Sarah Siddons, was therefore underpinned by the potential for legal and cultural stigmatization: the actor as sublime artist was continually shadowed by the legal identity of the actor as vagrant ‘other’. Even forms of theatre which were not theoretically subject to the law, such as non-​professional private theatricals, were conditioned by the politicization of the theatre which the Licensing Act created: in publicizing their activities, elite amateur performers in particular could cast themselves as untouchable by the law, as well as flirting with the thrill of cultural illegitimacy which acting always represented. The influence of the Licensing Act was augmented by that of another piece of legislation, ‘An Act . . . for regulating places of public entertainment’ in London, first passed for a three-​year trial period in 1752 and made permanent in 1755. Designed to police the venues and practices of lower-​class sociability in the name of public order and morality, the Public Entertainments Act required any ‘house, room, garden or other place kept for public dancing, music or other public entertainment’ in London and Westminster, and to a radius of twenty miles beyond, to have a licence approved by a Justice of the Peace,

2 

See David Thomas (ed.), Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 208.

252   Gillian Russell publicly displayed outside.3 The theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, the opera house in the Haymarket, and any forms of entertainment authorized by the crown or licensed by the Lord Chamberlain under the 1737 Licensing Act, were specifically excluded from the measure. The main effect of the 1752 Act was to reinforce the already privileged status of the patent theatres and the power of the Licensing Act, creating a two-​tier system that contemporaries identified in terms of the distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ theatres. The Act secured the legal status of Sadler’s Wells theatre, enabling it to flourish as a ‘holiday’ entertainment in the summer months when Covent Garden and Drury Lane were closed. It also led to the establishment of the London circuses: Astley’s Amphitheatre, opened in Lambeth in 1773, and Hughes’s Royal Circus, also in Lambeth, established in 1782. These venues were quasi-​theatrical spaces, staging elaborate equestrian spectacles and entertainments that appealed to all ranks of society. Their success and broad social appeal confounded the class distinction between major and minor theatres encoded by the 1752 Act, as indeed did the association of the minor theatres with other forms of entertainment and sociability, also regulated by the 1752 Act, such as fashionable pleasure gardens and concert and assembly rooms. These spaces amplified the scope of polite culture and who was entitled to it by catering to the metropolis’s emerging middle class—​a spectrum that included the artisans and the lower-​middling class as well as the aspiring professional and commercial ranks of society. This was the social group that was also increasingly consuming the Georgian print media, including imaginative literature, and frequenting institutions such as the bookseller’s shop, the coffee  ​house, and the circulating library. The 1752 Public Entertainments Act is therefore one of the most important pieces of legislation relating to public culture in the Georgian period, with long-​term effects on the development of sociability, leisure, and public life as a whole. It was to this more expansive idea of the public that John Palmer sought to appeal when he laid the foundation stone of the Royalty theatre in 1785. Best known as the original Joseph Surface in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), Palmer was a versatile performer whose stamping grounds included the fairground booth as well as the stages of the patent theatres. His considerable ambitions for the Royalty are indicated by publicity about its design and opulence: decorated in a manner rivalling that of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, the Royalty was dominated by its semi-​circular galleries, in line with current opinion about the best design for theatres and in advance of its West End rivals. The galleries were traditionally the domain of the artisan class and lower middling orders, and the emphasis given to them in the design of the Royalty suggested Palmer’s desire to place that section of society at the centre of a reconfigured idea of the theatre-​going public. The cultural politics of his project were strikingly demonstrated in the bill for the Royalty’s opening night on June 1787: the audience was to be entertained not by dumb-​show or acrobats, but by Shakespeare, in the form of As You Like It, followed by a farce, Miss in her Teens, by Shakespeare’s greatest Georgian interpreter,

3 Thomas, Theatre in Europe, 225.

The Regulation of Theatres    253 David Garrick. Palmer’s authority for his theatre, which he had tried to enact in the ceremony in late 1785, was a fabricated one, a combination of the approval of the magistrates of Tower Hamlets, in line with the 1752 Public Entertainments Act, and the support of the Governor of the Tower of London as de facto representative of the monarch, the theatre being situated within the royal liberty of the Tower. The opening of the Royalty was therefore, for Palmer, an extremely risky test of the current legislation relating to theatrical entertainments. The owners of Covent Garden and Drury Lane and also of the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, the profits of which were threatened by the Royalty’s opening in the summer season, mounted an all-​out media assault on Palmer and his theatre, arguing that the Royalty represented a direct challenge to the prerogatives of the patent theatres, as reaffirmed by the 1752 Public Entertainments Act. These prerogatives consisted not merely of an exclusive right or monopoly over the literary drama, exemplified by Shakespeare, but a right to define the ‘regular drama’ in general, in effect to prevent other theatres competing with them by determining what they could perform. The wide-​ranging definition of theatrical entertainment in the 1737 Licensing Act—​ ‘any interlude, tragedy, comedy, play, farce, or other entertainment of the stage’—​was an extremely flexible instrument with which the patent theatres could threaten their opponents. Virtually any kind of performance could therefore be defined as coming within the ambit of the privileges defined by the Licensing Act. The patent theatre managers subsequently used the Royalty controversy to extend this flexibility even further, claiming that their monopoly included not only particular dramatic forms but also the spoken word itself, thereby making the right to unaccompanied dramatic speech one of the key battlegrounds in the struggle between the major and minor theatres in the Romantic period. It is also worth reiterating at this point that the minor theatres, such as Sadler’s Wells and the circuses, were not illegal, as the description of them as ‘illegitimate theatres’ might suggest. They could only become illegal when they violated the terms of their licence under the 1752 Public Entertainments Act, or when, as in the case of the Royalty, they deliberately challenged what the 1737 Licensing Act prescribed they could perform. ‘Illegitimacy’ is thus a discursive category, derived from the attempt of the patent theatres to police the boundaries of the privileges—​legal, political, and economic—​that had been conferred on them by the Licensing Act. The triumvirate of the two patent theatre managers, Thomas Harris of Covent Garden and Thomas Linley of Drury, and the manager of the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, George Colman, moved against Palmer by invoking the roots of the Licensing Act in the 1714 vagrancy law. A number of the Royalty actors, including the well-​known comedian Charles Bannister Sr and Palmer’s brother William, were charged and jailed briefly as rogues and vagabonds. The disciplining of these actors, related to the idea of theatre as subversive of cultural norms and values, only served to heighten the intensity of the controversy. The legal threat to the actors resonated with radical emphases on the liberty of the subject, with the behaviour of the West End managers being represented as a form of petty tyranny. References to Harris as acting in ‘the true Turkish style’, and to Palmer himself as a ‘rebellious Eastern potentate’ rising up against his masters, resonated with contemporary discourses about Empire, particularly the behaviour of the Governor

254   Gillian Russell of the East India Company, Warren Hastings, whose impeachment trial began the year after the opening of the Royalty theatre.4 In a fundamental sense the controversy raised the question of whether the purchase of culture as a commodity entitled the individual to any rights or status in the widening public sphere. What right had the West End managers to determine what the predominantly middling order and lower-​class patrons of the Royalty were allowed to see? As Palmer said in an address on the opening night: ‘Tumblers and Dancing Dogs might appear unmolested before you: but the other performers and myself, standing forward to exhibit a moral play, is deemed a crime.’5 Palmer thereby articulated an alternative idea of legitimacy as something that could be conceived or imagined as transcending the letter of the law or one’s fixed place in the social order—​what might be called a ‘Romantic’ legitimacy. While in London the power of the patent theatres as defined by the Licensing Act was strengthened by the defeat of Palmer in the late 1780s, the situation in the provinces was different. Hitherto, there had been no national legal framework for theatre outside London and the royal residences. Playhouses such as those of Norwich, Liverpool, or Bristol could only be established by a complex and expensive process of individual acts of Parliament. The growth in many towns and cities in the late eighteenth century, their outstanding qualifications as centres of politeness and civility, and, most pertinently, the fact that they were located too far away to be a threat to the coffers of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, led in 1788 to the passing of legislation enabling magistrates outside London to license the performance for limited periods of the regular drama as defined by the 1737 Licensing Act. Playhouses in Canterbury or Stamford could therefore perform the spoken drama that was deemed off limits to any theatre in London except for Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Haymarket. Such drama, however, still had to be that which was approved by the Lord Chamberlain’s office: i.e. there was no possibility of an alternative independent dramatic tradition being developed outside the metropolis. Nonetheless, the 1788 ‘Act to enable Justices of the Peace to licence theatrical representations occasionally’ (hereafter referred to as the ‘Theatrical Representations Act’), led to a boom in theatre-​building throughout the British Isles, a development given further stimulus after 1793 by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Soldiers and sailors were inveterate playgoers as well as performers in their own theatricals; throughout the country, but particularly in garrison and port towns, theatres grew up to cater to this market. The transformations wrought by the combination of war, prosperity, and the 1788 Theatrical Representations Act were recorded by the actor, stage manager, and theatre chronicler James Winston, who in 1805 published The Theatric Tourist, a collection of views of the main provincial theatres with accompanying brief histories.6 Winston’s 4 

The Times, 25 June 1787; A Review of the Present Contest between the Managers of the Winter Theatres (London: Charles Stalker, 1787), 78. 5  Quoted in Nicholson, Struggle for a Free Stage, 106. 6  James Winston, The Theatric Tourist 1805, facsimile edn (London: Society for Theatre Research and The British Library, 2008).

The Regulation of Theatres    255 venture was based on information he had amassed about roughly 280 playhouses in Britain and Ireland. In its emphasis on how the impermanent barns and tents of strolling players had been replaced by more solid bricks and mortar, The Theatric Tourist marked an important transition in the cultural politics of the Georgian theatre. It demonstrated that the world of the rogue and vagabond, which still underpinned the legal status of the actor, was being eclipsed by a more recognizably modern theatre, identified with the playhouse as an institution of civic life and with the idea of the actor as a respectable artist-​professional, analogous with a similar view of the imaginative writer that was also being consolidated at this time. Winston’s project was also significant in promoting an idea of a distinctively British theatre, consisting of shared architectural styles, a common repertoire, and universally recognized conventions of audience behaviour, marking the emergence, for the first time in British history, of theatre as a truly national institution. While legally subordinate to the authority of the patent theatres, the provincial theatre network that developed after 1788 inevitably challenged the authority of Covent Garden and Drury Lane by highlighting the arbitrariness of these theatres’ monopoly over definitions of the drama in the metropolis. In London itself, the victory that the patent theatres had achieved over their competitors as a result of the quashing of Palmer’s Royalty was ultimately a pyrrhic one. A crucial event in this, as in many other respects, was the French Revolution of 1789. The British public, which initially viewed events in France positively, was eager for news in all guises; the minor theatres, particularly the Royal Circus and Astley’s Amphitheatre, were able to use the circumstances of Covent Garden and Drury Lane being closed in the summer months, and also the constraints of the Licensing Act, to gain a march on their patent theatre rivals by producing elaborate re-​enactments of events in France. A Bastille ‘war’ developed in the summer of 1789s as the two circuses, and also Sadler’s Wells, staged competing ‘irregular’ representations of the fall of the prison. The Royal Circus’s production The Bastille, by John Dent, featured John Palmer in the leading role; ironically, the man who had failed to overcome the twin citadels of the patent theatres was representing a man who had dismantled the symbol of the ancien régime in France. (Palmer was also briefly imprisoned in October 1789 for daring to speak prose during the performance of The Bastille.) The theatre had always been the place to which eighteenth-​century men and women came in order to understand what was happening in their world—​the topical immediacy of many of the plays of the period is one reason why they are not so accessible to audiences and readers today—​and in the highly charged political atmosphere of the 1790s the theatre’s role in this respect was only intensified. The system of censorship instituted by the Licensing Act of 1737 meant that explicit political commentary or critique via the drama was impossible, but the effect of this was to sensitize audiences to contextual and possibly uncontrollable readings of both contemporary and ‘old’ plays. A  notable example of this tendency occurred in 1795 when John Thelwall, the radical lecturer, journalist, poet, and activist, used a performance at Covent Garden of a well-​known seventeenth-​century tragedy, Venice Preserv’d by Thomas Otway, to stage a political demonstration: when a character in the play, Jaffier, declared ‘curs’d be your

256   Gillian Russell senate, curs’d your constitution’, Thelwall and his supporters cheered and clapped loudly, knowing that the application of the play to currently high levels of political tension in London would gain publicity, both within the theatre and in the newspaper press.7 Thelwall’s gesture was designed to demonstrate that privilege, symbolized by the monopoly over the legitimate, spoken drama, could not silence an independently minded audience exerting their right to performative speech. In this respect he was indirectly affirming the centrality of both the patent theatres and the legitimate drama to British cultural and political life. Increasingly, however, it was the minor theatres rather than Covent Garden and Drury Lane which were better able to respond to the crisis of the 1790s—​not through explicitly political forms of entertainment which would have been banned in any case by the censor, but by their capacity to represent a new sense of the pressure and immanence of change after the French Revolution and the advent of war. William Wordsworth drew attention to this development in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads when he claimed that ‘discriminating powers of the mind’ had been ‘blunted’ by ‘the great national events which are daily taking place’, producing ‘a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies’. The ‘theatrical exhibitions’ of Britain, Wordsworth claimed, had ‘conformed’ to this ‘tendency’.8 By ‘exhibitions’ he may have been referring to the spectacles of the minor theatres such as Sadler’s Wells and the two circuses which, like the newspapers, were daily feeding the appetite for news. The circuses in particular were able to mount pageants of movement, explosion, sound, and colour that conveyed a sense of the rapidity of change that Wordsworth found so disquieting. Banned from performing the legitimate spoken drama, the minor theatres instead gave expression to the energies of illegitimacy, particularly in terms of space and scale. The larger space of the circus ring evoked the sense of history being newly magnified as the result of the French Revolution. The boundaries of the stage for political action and change might now be limitless. The managers of Covent Garden and Drury Lane responded to these changes by also ‘scaling up’ their enterprise. In the 1790s both theatres were enlarged and remodelled to accommodate more playgoers and elaborate scenic spectacles that would compete with those of the minor theatres. These architectural innovations were a significant break with the smaller, more intimate playhouse associated with David Garrick and the ideal of the unified but socially diverse public that the Garrick theatre represented (a model which continued to be the basis for the many theatres being developed in the provinces and the empire at this time). This change was exemplified by the new Drury Lane designed by Henry Holland and opened in 1794. Dominating the London skyline as a material sign of its legitimacy, Drury Lane was the largest theatre in Europe. Holland’s innovations included the provision of a second tier of boxes, behind the boxes facing the stage, which became known as the ‘basket’: cramped and with poor sightlines, the 7  See Daniel O’Quinn, ‘Insurgent Allegories: Staging Venice Preserv’d, The Rivals, and Speculation in 1795’, Literature Compass 1 (2004), 1–​31 (p. 7). 8  William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 249.

The Regulation of Theatres    257 basket was used to attack the management of Drury Lane for its pursuit of income at the expense of the comfort of the audience. Two years previously, the managers of Covent Garden were criticized on similar grounds when they proposed alterations to the one-​ shilling gallery that would have restricted access to the theatre by the lower orders—​the very social group which Palmer had explicitly catered for in the design of the Royalty. One commentator, John Adolphus, claimed that the new Drury Lane and comparable changes at Covent Garden represented an epochal change: ‘A theatre was now become a sort of political, financial association [more concerned with] pushing a trade that promoting a liberal art.’9 By ‘political’ Adolphus was referring to specific factional political interests, Drury Lane being well known as a de facto headquarters and slush fund for its manager-​owner Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the Whig party. The ‘financial association’ was the group of what were known as the ‘new renters’, a group of three hundred individuals who, in return for an investment of capital in the reconstruction of the theatre, received a share of each night’s takings and free admission. This commitment was an enormous drain on the theatre’s resources that endured as a liability even after Drury Lane was destroyed by fire in 1809. The new Drury Lane had lasted for only fifteen years, but the ambitions of its designers had long-​term effects in highlighting the contradictions within the ideology that underpinned the privileged status of the patent theatre. The failure of Sheridan’s attempt to secure the future of Drury Lane exposed the conflict between the private interests of capital in the form of the body of the new renters and the wider collective interests of the body politic. Increasingly, people began to question what the patent theatres were for: were they a trade, a financial association, an embodiment of the political nation, or a disinterested liberal art serving the public as a whole? Such questions were only intensified by the patent theatres’ own increasing reliance on illegitimate modes of performance in the 1790s. The cavernous stages of the remodelled Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres facilitated and indeed necessitated investments in large-​scale scenography and a dramaturgy of choreographed mass movement and dumb-​show, diminishing the communicative power and authority of the spoken word with which legitimacy was associated. Even the actress Sarah Siddons, well known for her sonorous voice and statuesque physicality, found it difficult to dominate the larger stage of the 1790s in the way she had done the decade before. At the same time, however, the patent theatres’ adaptations of spectacle enabled them to re-​ instantiate their political role through the staging of patriotic pageants and topical afterpieces commemorating events in the unfolding war with France. One of Sheridan’s greatest successes was his 1799 drama Pizarro, an adaptation of a play by August von Kotzebue about the Spanish conquest of the Incas of Peru, which was also a clarion call to patriotic resistance against the French enemy. A lavish spectacle, Pizarro featured as a much-​illustrated moment the rescue of a child by the hero Rolla, played by John Philip Kemble.10 The play exemplifies the emergence in the 1790s of hybrid dramatic forms, 9 

John Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, Comedian, 2 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1839), i. 331. See, e.g., Sir Thomas Lawrence, John Philip Kemble as Rolla in Pizarro (oil painting, 1800), Victoria and Albert Museum. 10 

258   Gillian Russell combining and adulterating genres in ways that confounded the distinctions, if they had ever been stable, between legitimate and illegitimate forms. This meltdown of genres was most obvious in the rise of Gothic drama and melodrama. The celebrated coup of Matthew Lewis’s 1797 Gothic drama hit, The Castle Spectre, was the silent appearance of the ghost of the heroine’s murdered mother in a blood-​spattered white dress. The success of this scene, like Rolla’s rescue of the child in Pizarro, exemplifies how much the patent theatres had learnt from the minor theatres’ investments in visuality, space, movement, and the communicative power of the body. Lewis’s ghost scene was superior dumb-​show or pantomime, enhanced by the lavish Gothic scene designs of William Capon, but it was dumb-​show nonetheless. Melodrama was similarly reliant on the expressivity of bodies in extremis, subordinating the spoken word to the alternative languages of laughing, crying, running, static, prone, grouped, and, in particular, mute bodies. The first melodrama in British theatre is widely regarded to be Thomas Holcroft’s adaptation of Gilbert de Pixérécourt’s Coelina as A Tale of Mystery: A Melo-​drama, staged at Covent Garden in 1802, though the melodramatic ‘tendency’, as Wordsworth might have termed it, is evident earlier in ostensibly ‘legitimate’ dramas such as The Castle Spectre and Pizarro, as well in the popularity of translations of August von Kotzebue’s domestic melodramas, The Stranger (1798) and Lovers’ Vows (1798). By the turn of the century, therefore, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama had become more attenuated, a process that was only accelerated by the proliferation of forms of visual entertainment such as the panorama, the transparency, and the phantasmagoria that confirmed London’s status as the pre-​eminent world city of shows. Wordsworth registered these changes in Book 7 of The Prelude, which contextualizes the activities of the minor theatre of Sadler’s Wells in terms of the promiscuous spectacles of the city as a whole. Wordsworth represents himself as part of the audience, taking his seat among the ‘untaught minds’ of the people around him, observing their rapt involvement in the performances of ‘singers, rope-​dancers, giants and dwarfs’ and, in particular, ‘Jack the Giant-​killer’ with his ‘cloak of darkness . . . the word | Invisible’ blazoned on his chest (lines 289–​310).11 In this respect, Sadler’s Wells exemplifies the estrangement from the spoken word that was supposed to distinguish the illegitimate from the legitimate theatre, the actor playing ‘Jack the Giant-​killer’ being liable to prosecution as a rogue and vagabond, as John Palmer had been, if he had acted differently and ‘spoke’ the condition of his invisibility. However, Wordsworth also shows that rather than being the natural antithesis of legitimacy, the illegitimacy embodied by ‘Jack the Giant-​ killer’ was galvanizing a protean and fluid ‘theatre of the world’ that was expressing and channelling the energies of rapid historical change. This fluidity was realized in 1804 with the replacement of the stage at Sadler’s Wells with a water tank for the staging of naval battles and melodramas and the renaming of the Wells as the ‘Aquatic theatre’. In

11 

William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). This and subsequent references are to the 1805 version.

The Regulation of Theatres    259 transforming the space of the stage into water, rendering the boundaries of theatrical representation uncertain or indeed virtual, the ‘Aquatic theatre’ was both adapting and competing with the reality effects of other entertainments such as the panorama, as well as taking further the illegitimate theatre’s testing of the boundaries of theatre, resonating with the expanded horizons of Romantic historicity.12 Wordsworth alludes to the latter in his reference to Sadler’s Wells’ ‘dramas of living men, | And recent things yet warm with life. A sea fight, | Shipwreck, or some domestic incident’ (Prelude, Book 7, lines 313–​ 15). Illegitimacy in all its forms was increasingly the predominant medium for the apprehension of what was ‘recent’ and palpitatingly ‘warm’ in Romantic-​period life. Melodrama was not only being enacted on the stages of the major and minor theatres; it also came to characterize the wider cultural politics of theatre in the first decade of the nineteenth century, dominated by two sensations: the rise in 1804–​5 of the child actor William Henry West Betty, known as Master Betty or the Young Roscius; and the Old Price riots at Covent Garden in 1809. The events of Master Betty’s rise to stardom and the Old Price wars were melodramatic both in their histrionic excess and for how they signified deeper, inexpressible shifts of feeling and understanding in the Georgian body politic. Betty was English-​born but brought up in the north of Ireland, where he first made his name acting in the Belfast theatre. His fame was the product of the newspaper press, beginning in the Belfast News-​Letter, and spreading throughout the country, making Betty the first truly national media phenomenon of the theatre. He made a triumphant tour of Ireland and Britain, playing in the network of theatres that had been established after 1788, and by the time he reached London the interest in him was at fever pitch. When Betty made his debut at Covent Garden on 1 December 1804, the crowd outside the theatre was so great that soldiers were deployed to control it; inside, men and women clambered over each other to get a view of him. The fanaticism for Betty was such that the public, according to a later biographer, ‘went temporarily out of its mind’.13 Betty appealed to Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, who followed his career from the vantage point of the Lake District, as an experiment in the conjunction of natural genius and theatricality: the boy actor’s career exemplified the same power of print publicity in which Wordsworth was himself engaged, and the possibility of dazzling, stratospheric immortality. For theatre history, the Betty phenomenon was important as a manifestation of the new kind of national theatre that had come into being since the late 1780s. Betty’s fame had its origins outside the metropolis and had been created primarily by the press. His celebrity conferred distinction on the legitimate theatre rather than the other way round, marginalizing performers such as Siddons who exiled herself from the stage at the height of Betty’s fame, a sign that he represented something different, a popularity that did not fit into the paradigms of legitimate versus illegitimate or majors 12 

For the ‘Aquatic theatre’, see Gillian Russell, ‘Reality Effects: War, Theater and Re-​enactment around 1800’, in Satish Pradiyar, Philip Shaw, and Philippa Simpson (eds), Visual Culture and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 13  Giles Playfair, The Prodigy: A Study of the Strange Life of Master Betty (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967), 11.

260   Gillian Russell versus minors. The extremity of the audience response to Betty—​the way in which the public went ‘out of its mind’—​was partly an exploration of the meaning of this new kind of ‘pop’ fame: in clamouring to see him, the audiences at Covent Garden were unconsciously enacting an encounter between a pre-​Romantic idea of the public and its new mass-​media configuration. The Old Price riots were similarly over the top. They were caused by the increase in ticket prices for the new Covent Garden theatre, rebuilt and enlarged after a fire destroyed the original building in 1808. The new Covent Garden not only raised prices, but also controversially introduced a tier of boxes for private hire, in which the business of privileged patrons, including the entertaining of prostitutes, could be conducted out of the view of the audience as a whole. These innovations were consistent with the trend that had been initiated by the new Drury Lane in 1794, the ‘pushing’, as Adolphus put it, of theatre primarily as a cultural commodity or trade for the benefit of its investors rather than commerce in the service of the general social good. The opposition to the changes made at the new theatre was immediate, beginning with the first night of the season in September 1809 and continuing for more than two months. The rioters usurped the Covent Garden management and company by staging their own nightly performances of catcalls, hooting, whistling, displays of placards, ritualistic dances, and general mayhem, to which management responded by deploying prize fighters, leading to pitched battles in the pit and the arrest and imprisonment of O.P. (the common abbreviation for ‘Old Price’) offenders. The catchcry of ‘O.P.’ dominated the newspaper press, pamphlets, and satirical prints; there were even O.P. souvenir medals, handkerchiefs, and fans. Like the response to Master Betty, the O.P. riots exhibited melodramatic excess, indicating that much more was at stake than ticket prices. The rioters were engaged in an enactment of a particular ideal of the theatre as a form of moral economy in which all classes of society were entitled to a place. They were also articulating the right to public expression which Thelwall had exercised when he interrupted the performance of Venice Preserv’d in 1795. Ironically, this ideal of theatre as the embodiment of an holistic body politic rather than a public of sectional, competing interests was more aligned with the paternalism underpinning the ideology of legitimacy. It was the Covent Garden management, rather than the rioters, which were in fact the ‘revolutionaries’ by pushing the idea of theatre as a trade, furthering the hollowing out of the authority of legitimacy. The performances of the Old Price rioters can therefore be seen as a kind of dance of death, an unconscious acknowledgement of the eclipse of the idea that the two patent theatres could stand for the British polity as a whole. The Old Price riots were a watershed for the Romantic-​period theatre. Though theoretically the rioters ‘won’ because the old prices were restored, neither side in the controversy can be said to have achieved victory, as the privatization of the patent theatres and the consequent erosion of their claim to privileged status under the law if anything gained greater momentum. The period after 1809 represented the triumph of the illegitimate theatre in London; whereas in 1787, when Palmer built the Royalty, there were six theatres in the capital, by 1827 there were twenty-​two. Those theatres situated in Westminster, such as the Sans Pareil, were licensed by the Lord Chamberlain under the

The Regulation of Theatres    261 terms of the 1737 Licensing Act, whereas those beyond Westminster, such as the transpontine theatres, the Surrey (1810), and the Royal Coburg (1818), were subject to the local magistracy according to the 1752 Public Entertainments legislation. None of these theatres was entitled to perform the spoken drama, being compelled to instead stage a form of entertainment known as the burletta. Originally introduced to the British theatre as a form of light Italian comic opera, by the Regency period the burletta had evolved into drama with a varying degree of accompanying music, song, or recitative, primarily designed to avoid the scrutiny of the patent theatre managers. After 1809 the minor theatres tested the boundaries of the law by liberal interpretations of the category of the burletta, leading to hybrid entertainments such as the many treatments of Pierce Egan’s novel Life in London (1820). Beginning with the adaptation of Egan’s book at Astley’s Amphitheatre as a ‘New Whimsical Local Melo-​Dramatic Pantomimical Drama’, Tom and Jerry plays, referring to ‘Corinthian’ Tom and his co-​frère Jerry Hawthorn, spread across the landscape of the minor theatres.14 The phenomenon, which culminated in W. S. Moncrieff ’s highly successful Tom and Jerry at the Adelphi in 1821, exemplified the increasingly multi-​and intermedial character of the post-​Waterloo theatre, particularly its symbiosis with the novel, also apparent in the many melodramatizations of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. By the early 1820s, then, though still working under the constraints of the Licensing Act, the minor theatres were very far from offering a debased alternative to the legitimate offerings of the patent theatres, but had created a vital, artistically and technologically sophisticated mode of entertainment that was particularly responsive to the energies of the transforming Regency city. As David Worrall has argued, the Tom and Jerry plays helped to define an increasingly cosmopolitan and multiracial metropolis through a theatre that while implicitly critical of the upper classes did not risk outright opposition and possible censorship: ‘Tom and Jerry were the perfect vehicles of social criticism because they did not attempt social subversion head-​on.’15 The patent theatres themselves were not immune to these changes. Increasingly, they catered to the type which Egan’s Tom and Jerry represented—​the box-​lobby lounger: young men whose main aim in going to the theatre was to socialize with their kind or with the prostitutes who became increasingly visible in the lobbies and saloons of the larger patent houses. The box-​lobby lounger begins to be noticed in the 1780s and is the subject of representation in prints, drawings, and plays, as well as extensive commentary in the newspapers and periodicals. Not confined to a particular social class, the type ranged from the sociopathology of aristocratic rakes such as Thomas Pitt Lord Camelford, who was at the centre of a riot in the box lobby of Drury Lane in 1799, to clerks and apprentices, tanked up for a night on the town. Such men signified how the commercialization of leisure since the mid-​eighteenth century, specifically the public recognized by the 1752 Public Entertainments Act and for which Palmer tried to cater, combined with economic and social change more generally, had led to a 14  BL Playbills 171, quoted in David Worrall, The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–​1832: The Road to the Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 167. 15 Worrall, Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 205.

262   Gillian Russell mode of masculine self-​fashioning that could not be described or contained by established categories of rank and custom. As Gregory Dart notes in relation to Pierce Egan, the early nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a ‘semi-​professional class’ which was ‘neither entirely “Respectable” nor straightforwardly “Mechanical” ’; such men ‘were . . . creatures without a home, caught uneasily between different elements, the social amphibians of their age’.16 Increasingly, after 1809 the theatres, both majors and minors, were a ‘home’ for this class, as the box-​lobby lounger and the ‘Tom and Jerry’ phenomenon suggested, the progenitor of the latter being the celebrated ‘amphibious’ man-​child, Master Betty. It is also possible to recognize in the attraction of the theatre to some of Romanticism’s canonical writers—​Wordsworth himself, William Hazlitt, and John Keats—​an exploration of their own uncertain status in society, their own search for a kind of ‘home’. For Keats in particular, theatre sociability was an intrinsic part of the maintenance and development of his male friendships and his often fraught negotiation of the theatricality of the literary public sphere. In January 1818, for example, he went with his friend Charles Jeremiah Wells to a private theatre in the vicinity of Drury Lane, an establishment of the ‘lowest order’, ‘all greasy & oily’. To relieve the prospective tedium of an entire evening in this ‘dirty hole’, Keats decided to go to Drury Lane, where he caught the star actor Edmund Kean performing as Shakespeare’s Richard III, before returning to the private theatre.17 Keats’s night out is a striking illustration of how the polarities of the Romantic theatre—​the legitimate and the illegitimate, the glittering pleasure palace and the ‘dirty hole’—​were not so far apart and, indeed, could frame and define each other. By moving between these theatres, Keats enacted the condition of his own, uncertain ‘amphibian’ class status and the possibility/​impossibility of mobility and transformation. Theatre regulation could therefore licence Romantic dreams, as much as it sometimes constrained and disciplined them. The prerogatives of the two patent theatres which underpinned the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy were eventually removed in the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, though the ideological and artistic justification of the patent houses’ privileges had been eroding for many years previously. Covent Garden and Drury Lane were given the same status as the other theatres in London, which were collectively regulated by the Lord Chamberlain, with magistrates responsible for theatres in the provinces. The system of censorship of plays prior to performance remained in place, lasting until 1968. However, an earlier legislative change is also worth noting. In 1822 the laws against vagrancy were reformed, partly in order to deal with the perceived increase in public disorderliness as a result of the social dislocation which followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Controversially, the new Vagrant Act retained the penalties against actors as rogues and vagabonds which underpinned the Licensing Act of 1737 and had been 16  Gregory Dart, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–​1840: Cockney Adventures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 113. 17  The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1958), i. 215–​16.

The Regulation of Theatres    263 used against Palmer in the 1780s. The fact that the legal definition of the actor in these terms endured until as late as the 1820s is a sign of the deep-​seated suspicion of theatre as threatening to the established order and its embeddedness in pre-​industrial conceptions of cultural and social hierarchy. In 1824, when the Vagrant Act lapsed and had to be renewed, the clause referring to actors as rogues and vagabonds was excised, a change which marked the emergence of acting as a legitimate profession in the modern sense. Like the imaginative writer who was also securing his or her professional legitimacy in this period, the actor’s status was now substantiated as something above the law, governed by the criteria of artistic genius and taste. It was this change, more than later reforms, which signalled the separation of the theatre from the itinerant, unrespectable world of the strolling player, leading ultimately to its consolidation as a ‘legitimate’ part of British national culture and modernity.

Further Reading Baer, Marc, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Bratton, Jacky, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003). Conolly, L. W., The Censorship of English Drama, 1737–​1824 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1976). Davis, Tracy C., The Economics of the British Stage 1800–​ 1914 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000). Moody, Jane, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–​1840 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000). Moody, Jane, and Daniel O’Quinn (eds), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–​ 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Russell, Gillian, ‘Keats, Popular Culture and the Sociability of Theatre’, in Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Russell, Gillian, The Theatres of War:  Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–​1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Swindells, Julia, and David Francis Taylor (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737–​1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Worrall, David, Theatric Revolution:  Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773–​1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Chapter 17

P oetic De fe nc e s and M ani fe sto s Anthony Howe

Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, written early in 1821, invokes in its title the Renaissance tradition of Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesie), published posthumously in 1595.1 Where Sidney had rushed to poetry’s defence in response to the Puritan moralism of Stephen Gosson’s The Schoole of Abuse (1579), Shelley was replying to The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), another unchivalrous slighting of the art penned by the poet’s friend Thomas Love Peacock. Beside this personal dimension to the Defence, the recollection of Sidney is timely as an expression of Shelley’s historical moment. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were an age in which poetry was once again on the defensive.2 As well as having to contend with the totalizing claims of post-​Enlightenment science, poetry emerged onto a scene of global revolutionary activity that had politicized all forms of literary expression. The echoes of political revolution in writers’ pronouncements about literature, especially where picked up by a conservative reviewing establishment, guaranteed controversy, notably over works such as Wordsworth’s democratically inclined Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads and the writings of the so-​called ‘Cockney School’. In this polemical environment of political pinch-​hitting and quick-​fire moral judgement, claims and counter-​claims about the nature and significance of literary writing proliferated. This more direct, typically prose-​based, and often rugged aspect to Romantic critical reflection interacts with and influences the

1  The alternative titles derive from separate editions, both published in 1595. On Shelley’s use of Sidney, see Lucas Verkoren, A Study of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry: Its Origin, Textual History, Sources and Significance (1937; New York: Haskell House, 1970), 68–​77. 2  For the broader theoretical context of Shelley’s exchange with Peacock, and other Romantic-​era defences of poetry, see David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 75–​6, 192–​7. For the philosophical context, see Tim Milnes, Chapter 38 in this volume.

Poetic Defences and Manifestos    265 gentler self-​consciousness through which Romantic poetry attempts to follow the contours of its own happening.3 Peacock had taken to the field to argue that poetry had run its course as a serious contribution to human knowledge. Shelley’s Defence is a refutation of this argument. Both begin by allowing Sidney’s idea of poetry as primal illumination, ‘the first light giver to ignorance, and first nurse whose milke litle and litle enabled [men] to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges’.4 Yet where Shelley sees continuity between this originary poetry and the best contemporaneous poetic writing, Peacock extrapolates a narrative of decline in which the modern age, from a poetic point of view, is taken to be a dilapidated Age of Bronze. For Shelley, the ‘first light’ of poetry maintains its brightness as a distinct mode of knowing bequeathed through tradition; for Peacock ‘tougher knowledges’ require more advanced and accurate modes of investigation and description than those offered by the jejune cognitions of the poet. History, which for Shelley is cyclical, dialectical, utterly present, and forever arching into the future through its poetic testimonies, is for Peacock too strong a force for the poet, whose only real sphere of power is the superstitious murk of primitive society. The ancient poet-​prophet is for Peacock little more than a jack of all trades jobbing at an (as yet) undeciphered beyond: Their familiarity with the secret history of gods and genii obtains for them, without much difficulty, the reputation of inspiration; thus they are not only historians but theologians, moralists, and legislators: delivering their oracles ex cathedrâ, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity: building cities with a song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.5

Shelley deliberately avoids a point-​by-​point refutation of Peacock’s argument (he claims his own essay is ‘devoid of the formality of a polemical reply’) and structures his Defence, rather, as a series of reflections ‘set down . . . according to the order in which they were suggested to my mind by a consideration of the subject’.6 His riposte, in other words, is not shaped by the norms of polemical exchange but emerges as a form representative of the creative mind. Concomitantly, Shelley’s prose is notable for its sheer poetic energy, its stirring up of the very forces Peacock would dismiss from serious 3   Michael O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-​Conscious Poem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For the combative review culture of the period, see William Christie, Chapter 18 in this volume; and for the mode of ‘genial’ criticism developed by Coleridge, Lamb, and others in response, see Gregory Dart, Chapter 39. 4  The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), iii. 4. 5  The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F. B. Brett-​Smith and C. E. Jones, 10 vols (London: Constable, 1934), viii. 6. Peacock is alluding to Sidney: ‘Amphion, was said to move stones with his Poetry, to build Thebes, and Orpheus to be listened to by beasts, indeed stonie and beastly people’ (Prose Works of Sidney, iii. 4). 6  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 700.

266   Anthony Howe enquiry; it is the poet’s grasp of metaphor more than the philosopher’s rigour that characterizes the work, right through to its triumphant conclusion: Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.7

This is to unleash literary language as much as it is to clinch an argument about it. The Defence participates in what it defends, notably in that final sentence which picks up Peacock’s ‘legislators’—​a word used by him in a modern, jaded sense—​and re-​immerses it in the possibilities of language. Shelley summarizes his case for poetic writing as an unofficial but pervasively meliorative force working upon human social and psychological relations, but he also acts out his theory of poetry by discovering new life within the endless possible modifications of thought. In being both an argument and a work of prose poetry, the Defence raises important questions about the nature of literary-​critical practice. Shelley argues passionately for a distinct, meliorative poetic agency and his argument has been taken up into the canons of High Romantic theory. The Defence is also inescapably political in its emphasis on poetic experience as visionary, transformative, and profoundly social; in these terms, it is an important manifesto within the broader sphere of politicized literary criticism. Any such description, however, will require some qualification because it races past the questions pondered by Shelley’s critical forms. ‘Manifesto’ is a word that dates back to the seventeenth century, although its artistic use derives from the avant-​garde movements of the early twentieth century, whose radical pronouncements are part of the legacy of The Communist Manifesto, a work that, as Martin Puchner notes, ‘defined for many subsequent writers what a manifesto should be’.8 In the Romantic period the word applies most obviously to political documents such as the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America (1776) and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Such declarations are concerned with identifying, as clearly as possible, what are taken to be self-​evident truths; they thus necessarily avoid features such as ambiguity that are typically and often positively associated with literary writing. These key products of Enlightenment tally with—​and, indeed, depend upon—​a philosophy of language such as Locke’s in which the vitally creative possibilities of language are held in suspicion as potential threats to the more important business of conveying ideas. Writing a manifesto about literature, especially the semantically and symbolically rich literature of Romantic poetry, thus becomes a potentially problematic enterprise. A manifesto wants 7 Shelley, Major Works, 701. 8 

Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-​Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 11.

Poetic Defences and Manifestos    267 to make its object outspokenly lucid; a poem, however, will often find its significance in resisting the will to clarify and illuminate. For many Romantic thinkers, to attempt to translate the latter into the terms of the former would be to miss an important point about the nature of poetry, one forcefully present in Shelley’s words ‘unapprehended’ and ‘unacknowledged’.9 By harnessing the formal aspects of the critical text to the purposes of argument, Shelley enlivens his polemic but he also shakes off and challenges particularized historical (post-​Enlightenment) assumptions about what it means to understand the human mind through its deepest productions. In the same year that Shelley wrote his Defence of Poetry, Byron published his less​remembered defence of Alexander Pope (and poetry more generally), a pamphlet known as the Letter to John Murray. Where Shelley saw a threat in narratives such as Peacock’s, Byron was provoked by the narrow and inapposite theorizing (as he saw it) of the poet-​critic William Lisle Bowles.10 Bowles, who had recently proclaimed his literary beliefs in a pamphlet entitled The Invariable Principles of Poetry (1819), was for Byron guilty of turning poetry into something too explicable, too available to a modish, cut-​and-​dried poetics of Nature borrowed (as Byron thought) from his old Winchester schoolmaster Joseph Warton. Byron’s response, both at the edge of his ad hominem satire and through the dashing, compendious forms of his prose, is that poetry is unavailable to the kind of manifesto-​criticism preferred by Bowles: it is a ‘thing to be felt—​more than explained’.11 As well as being sceptical about Bowles’s theorizing, Byron also wanted to put forward an argument of his own against the critical downgrading of Pope by Warton, Bowles, and others. This anti-​Popeian consensus was for Byron objectionable both in its disrespect for the classical virtues carried forward by the English Augustans and in its tendency to narrow the poet’s range of materials according to ephemeral cultural imperatives—​notably the fetishization of ‘Nature’. However, by making this argument while simultaneously proposing that poetry resists full explanation, Byron involved himself in a delicate balancing act, one he found less easy in prose than amidst the complex, ironic structures of Don Juan, the first instalments of which he had published two years earlier, in 1819: If ever I should condescend to prose, I’ll write poetical commandments, which Shall supersede beyond all doubt all those That went before; in these I shall enrich 9 

Friedrich Schlegel concluded, more directly, that ‘one cannot really speak of poetry except in the language of poetry’: Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 54. 10  For details of Byron’s involvement in the controversy, see the notes to Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 73–​105; and my Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 11  Byron: Complete Miscellaneous Prose, 160.

268   Anthony Howe My text with many things that no one knows, And carry precept to the highest pitch: I’ll call the work ‘Longinus o’er a Bottle, Or, Every Poet his own Aristotle.’ Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; Because the first is crazed beyond all hope, The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey: With Crabbe it may be difficult to cope, And Campbell’s Hippocrene is somewhat drouthey: Thou shalt not steal from Samuel Rogers, nor—​ Commit—​flirtation with the muse of Moore. (Canto 1, stanzas 204–​5)12

Byron predicts his later condescension to critical prose and also anticipates the broad thrust of his argument in the Letter to John Murray. Yet he is more evasive here than when he later commits to pamphlet warfare. Byron on the whole means what he says in the second stanza (that Milton, Dryden, and Pope are to be preferred to the noted poets of his own day), but at the same time he wants to distance himself from shrill argumentation of the kind he came to associate with Bowles. He makes his case while holding at bay the methodology of those bent upon the analysis of poetic writing in unpoetic terms. He establishes a mock-​creed, a direct parody of critical manifestos such as Bowles’s, while also asserting classical allegiances and denigrating contemporary poetry. The seriousness of much of this poetry—​and its supporting criticism—​is simultaneously opposed by the joyous (and partly Popeian) irreverence running through Byron’s rhymes and imagery. Yet while he attacks innovative writers such as Wordsworth for disrespecting tradition, the Byron of Don Juan is far from being reactionary in his thinking about poetry. More traditional poets such as Crabbe, Rogers, and Moore (Byron is careful here as he knew Rogers personally and was friends with Moore) are also held off because they have little sense of the future and the demands it will place upon the poet. Don Juan, in rejecting both untethered innovation and ‘drouthey’ traditionalism, proposes itself as a genuinely original mode of poetry, as ‘The feeling of a Former world and Future’,13 something that dwells in historical and imaginative perceptions that resist direct explication. By using his attack on Bowles to draw into question the nature of critical practice and its relation to literary thought, Byron demonstrates the intellectual reach of his satire, a mode of writing that was crucial to the dynamics of Romantic self-​reflection. Satirical poems, both conservative and radical in political orientation and—​as befitting such contentious times—​more often Juvenalian than Horatian in tendency,14 abound in 12  Byron’s poetry is quoted from Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​93). 13  Byron’s ludic definition of poetry in his Ravenna Journal: see Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​94), viii. 37. 14  See Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39–​66.

Poetic Defences and Manifestos    269 the period. Byron’s earlier English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) is an aggressive, ad hominem blunderbuss of a poem (Byron was later to regret parts of it) that showcases the talents that a decade later would produce some of the period’s most trenchant verse satire. As well as Juvenal and Pope, Byron’s poem draws from the vitriolic Baviad (1791) and Maeviad (1795) of the poet’s (then) literary advisor William Gifford, a member of the John Murray circle. In his Baviad, Gifford, who would later translate Juvenal and Persius and become the editor of the staunchly Tory periodical the Anti-​Jacobin Review, had gone for the throat of the sentimental, unconventional, and politically liberal Della Cruscan poets. Although from an obscure background himself, Gifford defends establishment interests by scourging unorthodox literary pretensions, including those of intellectual women (‘bluestockings’) and the non-​classically educated. The Della Cruscan verse of Robert Merry is dismissed as ‘Merry’s Moorfields whine’ (line 30),15 an allusion to an area of London that in the eighteenth century was associated with trade, poverty, highwaymen, and rioting (notably during the Gordon Riots of 1780). In contrast to a poem such as Keats’s anti-​neoclassical ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (1817), satires such as Gifford’s insist not only upon the continuing relevance of Pope as a critic, but also upon his crucial importance as a model within the English tradition. Yet while it reveres its Augustan inheritance—​partly as a way of arguing against Pope’s detractors—​Gifford’s poetry diverges from its model in its use of prose and, consequently, in its manner of argument. Although Pope’s The Dunciad Variorum (1729) comes with an extensive prose apparatus, much of this material is ironically intended to suggest the burgeoning, cacophonous, pseudo-​intellectual prose culture with which the Scriblerian writers take issue. Pope pastes in (or makes up) a number of voices in order to mock them; the latter appear absurd by contrast with Pope’s own sculpted grace and transmitted wisdom. Gifford, while extending Pope’s mode of critique to his own enemies, deploys his prefaces and voluminous annotations in a more straightforwardly supportive role, thus suggesting a collaborative rather than an antagonistic relationship between poetry and its critical prose apparatus. As with Shelley’s exhaustively philosophical (and politically very different) Queen Mab, Gifford’s verses are often outweighed, overwhelmed even, by their copious prose explications. Where Pope creates this swamping effect quite deliberately, Gifford seems unable to avoid it as he is drawn back, repeatedly, to his polemical, journalistic manner. The period’s close compression of literary, journalistic, and polemical cultures is also evident at the other end of the political spectrum, in Leigh Hunt’s The Feast of the Poets, a densely annotated poem (in its 1814 second edition) that looks back to the seventeenth-​ century ‘Sessions of the Poets’ genre exemplified by writers such as John Suckling. This was a pointed choice on Hunt’s part, given the genre’s basis in a mock-​legislative tradition and Hunt’s own dicing with the law (in 1812 Hunt, along with his brother John, was imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent). As so often in the period, the defence of particular ideas of poetry (and the attack on others) had an immediate political charge, one potentially associated with very real legal consequences. The poem had initially 15 

William Gifford, The Baviad, and Mæviad (London: John Murray, 1811), 24.

270   Anthony Howe appeared by itself in the short-​lived periodical The Reflector, but its success there encouraged Hunt to publish a stand-​alone version with prose accompaniments, mainly in the form of (often long and laborious) notes that consider in detail the kinds of issues, such as the status of the Lake School and the reputation of Pope, that Hunt, as editor of the liberal Examiner, was familiar with from the literary press of the day. The result is another imbalanced hybrid, one decidedly insecure about its own status as poetry. Hunt makes no claims to high art, describing his work’s ‘unambitious ballad-​measure’ and its aim of producing ‘idiomatical easiness’.16 Yet there is nothing easy in this encounter of verse and prose. While we sense Hunt trying to keep his prose instincts in check (‘[as] the present notes are written for the poem to which they belong, not the poem for the notes, it is high time to conclude the one before me’ (37)), he fails utterly to do so (in the 1814 edition, for twenty pages of poetry there are 111 pages of notes). The resulting clutter has more of the mired forms of Hunt’s enemy Gifford than it does the controlling irony of Pope.17 Hunt’s political and critical confidence contrasts with a lack of formal assurance, the latter reflecting wider concerns—​dealt with so differently by Shelley and Peacock—​about poetry’s traditional status as a superior and self-​justifying mode. His poem, while underpinned by the ethos of manifesto, is also unsettled by typically Romantic questions about literary value and singularity In surveying the contemporary literary scene, Hunt assumes a quasi-​Horatian position, describing himself (not without a smile) as ‘an honest and friendly critic’ (130); this evocation of tradition is politically freighted in that it aims to distinguish Hunt’s more balanced and humane criticism from coruscating, neo-​Juvenalian (and often Tory) satires such as The Baviad. That said, Hunt’s poem does have its sharp edges, particularly in the notes, which snipe at Hunt’s political adversaries, including Walter Scott, a founding contributor to Gifford’s Quarterly Review, of whose ‘innate and trusting reverence for thrones and dominations, the reader may find specimens abundantly nauseous in the edition of Dryden’ (62). Hunt also attacks the Lake Poets in political terms, accusing them of having degenerated into ‘servile place-​hunters’ (78), although he saves his most scathing assaults for the ‘sour little gentleman’ (8), Gifford himself, who is lambasted for his complete and ungenerous immersion in political and polemical writing. While drawn into and dependent upon the very journalistic discourse in which his enemy is apparently mired, Hunt also wants to suggest that true literary writing can never be understood entirely from such a vehemently polemical perspective. The problem with a critic such as Gifford is that his mindset is exclusively polemical and political, a fact that, for Hunt, makes him a bad critic as well as a bad poet. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the idea of the isolated Romantic genius is inadequate to the realities of literary production for many British writers of the period. 16 

Leigh Hunt, The Feast of the Poets, with Notes, and other Pieces in Verse (London: James Cawthorn, 1814), 34. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 17  This is to differ with Lucy Newlyn, who places Hunt’s poem closer to The Dunciad, arguing that it ‘devises a method for crossing the creative-​critical divide’: Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 186.

Poetic Defences and Manifestos    271 Collective composition, coterie writing, and literary sociability are all crucial to the period’s literary culture. Hunt was at the centre of much of this activity and brought together a wide range of anti-​establishment intellectuals and writers. Most notably, he saw the promise in—​and sought to develop—​the young John Keats. Keats seems one of the least likely of the major English poets to write a prose manifesto about poetry and, unlike some of his major contemporaries, he had no ambitions in that direction. Yet Keats’s prose reflections on his art—​mostly in the form of personal letters not intended for publication—​are now canonized as literary criticism and will often be found in anthologies alongside more obvious critical works such as Wordsworth’s Preface and Shelley’s Defence. To encounter Keats’s ideas in such a context, however, can distract from their original environment of epistolary exchange. Keats’s arguments in defence of poetry and imagination are not systematic but emerge en passant, repeatedly rising out of, and melting back into, the weave of personal experience. His is a poetics of ‘In passing’ and ‘But, as I was saying’, phrases that both appear in a letter to Benjamin Bailey of 22 November 1817, along with the following: it will all go on well—​so dont because you have suddenly discover’d a Coldness in Haydon suffer yourself to be teased. Do not my dear fellow. O I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—​What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—​whether it existed before or not—​for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.18

It would have been neater to begin this quotation, as most citations of it do, at ‘I am certain of nothing’. Like the poet’s account of ‘Negative Capability’ (the capacity of ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’),19 the statement that follows suggests Keats’s sense of the vital importance of imaginative experience in a world where words such as ‘certainty’ are being wrestled away by reason and science. To give the longer, parallel structure of what Keats is saying to Bailey, however, is to show that Keats is not quite thinking in such grand, abstract terms. His famous claim about ‘the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination’ is an afterthought, a reaching out for stability within the tense, untameable dynamics of human interaction. He is trying to reassure a friend. If we edit out this social instinct in order for the ‘aesthetics’ to stand out more boldly, then we lose something important about the way Keats understands the possibilities of his art. On the other hand, Keats is sensitive to the limitations of epistolary exchange as a forum for the analysis of literary experience: ‘I am running my head into a Subject’, he

18  The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 184. 19  To George and Tom Keats, 21,?27 Dec. 1817, Letters of Keats, i. 193.

272   Anthony Howe goes on to confess, ‘which I am certain I could not do justice to under five years s[t]‌udy and 3 vols octavo’. The obvious place to discuss his ideas would be the extended philosophical treatise or manifesto, not the personal letter. Yet Keats also has his doubts about the ‘3 vols octavo’ approach. The problem is not simply that as a letter-​writer he lacks the space required for a full philosophical treatment of the subject, but that such works, he suspects, can in any case only produce a narrowed version of truth: ‘I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning—​ and yet it must be—​Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections [?]’.20 However great the philosopher and however comprehensive his treatment of the subject, there will always be something missing. The multi-​volume treatise might be more extensive than the axiom-​laden letter, but it remains a fragment all the same. When Keats refers to ‘this (unsaid) Letter’, he is thus doing more than playing on the legal jargon in which Bailey was being trained at Oxford; he is alluding, also, to the Romantic thinker’s preoccupation with the ineffable and the unapprehended as critical outcomes. If, through writers such as Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Hunt, the Romantic period was a crucial one in the development of modern, professional prose criticism, it was also remarkable for its diverse staging of literary argument and debate. As well as the various hybrid forms produced by—​among others—​Gifford and Hunt, and the extensive epistolary record graced by Keats, the period boasts a rich culture of prefatory discourse. Prefaces are used widely by poets, novelists, and dramatists to comment upon contemporary literary, philosophical, and political issues, notable instances including the ‘Introductory Discourse’ to Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions (1798) and the prefatory framing of Scott’s Tales of my Landlord (1816–​32) by the fictional alter ego Jedidiah Cleishbotham, a device crucial to the novels’ evocation and discussion of history. Many of the period’s notable poetic achievements are also fronted by discursive prose, including Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Lyrical Ballads. In the latter, Wordsworth, like Hunt in The Feast of the Poets, greatly increased the prose component of his (and Coleridge’s) poetry collection after an initial edition with a short prose Advertisement. However, where the majority of Hunt’s prose trails individual couplets or passages in the form of literary-​journalistic gobbets or splurges, Wordsworth’s Preface is (by definition) up front, far more philosophically ambitious and more focused in its polemical aims. The implication of this formal organization—​that poetry needs to be spoken up for by theoretical prose—​was not universally welcomed. Byron, as already noted, thought that the authors of Lyrical Ballads had been misled by philosophy, quipping that Wordsworth was ‘the great Metaquizzical poet’, guilty of propagating a ‘new system to perplex the sages’.21 Similarly, Coleridge, whom Byron admired selectively, is ‘a hawk encumber’d

20 

Letters of Keats, i. 184. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​94), viii. 66; Don Juan, ‘Dedication’, stanza 4. 21 

Poetic Defences and Manifestos    273 with a hood’, a poet bogged down in ‘Explaining metaphysics to the nation—​I wish he would’, Byron rounds off his couplet, ‘explain his Explanation’.22 We may not, of course, think Byron the most balanced judge here, and not only because, like most of his contemporaries, he had read only a portion of the poetry for which Wordsworth is now chiefly remembered. In pointing to the philosophical framing of the Preface, however, Byron does put his finger on something crucially at stake within the tense dynamics of Wordsworth’s theoretical project. If, as I  have suggested, we misrepresent—​in part at least—​the prose poetry of Shelley’s Defence by paraphrasing it as a philosophical argument, then this seems less clearly the case with Wordsworth’s Preface. Where for Shelley the possibility of a clear, rational poetics is always under pressure (productively so), Wordsworth seems to want to get as close to the terms of the laboratory as possible and to stick with them. As with his original Advertisement to the 1798 edition, the Preface begins by drawing attention to the experimental nature of the poetry, the ‘experiment’ being to ‘ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart’.23 This is a poet motivated by rational, utilitarian principles, one determined to maximize the ‘quantity’ of his meliorative product. Similarly, Wordsworth’s Rousseauian and democratically suggestive claim that the ‘feelings’ that concern true poetry will be discovered most readily among the scenes of rural life is set out in pragmatic and pseudo-​scientific terms. The emotional material it is the poet’s role to discover and transmit will be found in the fields and villages of Cumberland ‘in a state of greater simplicity’ than in cities and ‘consequently’, Wordsworth concludes, ‘may be more accurately contemplated’ (743). The poet’s turn to the ‘real language of men’ may be provocative and politically freighted, but it is also associated with a straightforward concern to locate the cleanest possible experimental data. Although often quoted for its definition of ‘good poetry’ as the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (744), the Preface’s own rhetorical and critical structures are, on the whole, far from spontaneous or overflowing. Unlike Shelley, who passionately invokes Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton as the Gods of a breathless poetic continuity, Wordsworth tacks his prose to a rather chillier tradition, one that runs, roughly, from Aristotle through to more contemporary thinkers such as Godwin and Hartley. While determined to advertise his experimental agenda, Wordsworth is also decidedly cagey about his theoretical ambitions. He had been ‘advised’ by ‘Friends’, he tells us, to ‘prefix a systematic defence of the theory, upon which the poems were written’. ‘But I was unwilling’, he explains, ‘to undertake the task, because I knew that . . . the Reader would look coldly upon my arguments, since I might be suspected of having

22 

Don Juan, ‘Dedication’, stanza 2. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–​1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 741. All Wordsworth quotations are from this edition; subsequent page references are given in the text. 23 

274   Anthony Howe been principally influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of reasoning him into an approbation of these particular Poems’ (742). If we are under the impression that we are reading a full systematic, theoretical account of poetry then we should think again. This is merely a ‘few words of introduction’ (742) which, in retrospect, he felt necessary given the unusual nature of the writing that he was bringing before the public. It is usually taken for granted that Wordsworth is underplaying his hand here, especially by those who admire the Preface as a revolutionary manifesto and a determined attempt to change public attitudes about the importance and nature of literary writing. Yet the fact remains that Wordsworth was keen to guide his reader away from certain conclusions about the extent of his philosophical ambitions. There may be a political dimension to this. Given that the kinds of thinking categorized as system and theory were held in deep suspicion by a political establishment that associated them strongly with the French Revolution—​that mighty totem of British governmental fear—​it is possible that in playing down the Preface Wordsworth was trying to minimize its provocativeness.24 There was also Keats’s problem of space. In order ‘adequately to display my opinions and fully to enforce my arguments’, Wordsworth tells us, he would ‘require a space wholly disproportionate to the nature of a preface’ (742). Anything more than a ‘few words of introduction’ would risk compromising the work’s fundamental identity while inviting the kind of swamping prose sprawl to which Hunt was prone but which would not have suited the austere Wordsworth at all. Yet where Keats moves from his initial ironic unsaying to a further moment of scepticism in which the ‘3 vols octavo’ type of theorizing is called into question, Wordsworth does not appear to think that writing a ‘systematic defence’ would be beyond him, nor that such an enterprise would be fundamentally problematic. He seems to take it for granted, rather, that the project would be entirely possible, and even specifies what would be required to bring it to fruition—​namely, ‘a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country’ and a study of the ‘manner language and the human mind act and react on each other’ (742). Where for Keats recognizing the fragmentary nature of a critical manifesto leads to a more general reflection upon the limits of theory in the face of imaginative plenitude, Wordsworth appears to see things in more pragmatic terms. Among his major contemporaries, Wordsworth is unusual in the extent to which he desired to claim a ‘place for poetry as the collaborator of science’ (742), something we see particularly in his revisions to the Preface for the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Yet he is never comfortable with the attempted accommodation, a fact we sense in the rhetorical overreaching of his prose. Wordsworth’s claims upon the language of science, in other words, want to suggest an attained collaboration that is not substantially backed up by the Preface’s philosophical achievement. For all his willingness to propose the idea of a rationally accounted poetry, Wordsworth was too thoughtful a poet to miss the intractable problems of category thrown up at the meeting point of scientific and poetic

24 

See David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 43.

Poetic Defences and Manifestos    275 thought. It was science, after all, from which Wordsworth distinguished poetry after refusing to distinguish it—​in any fundamental sense—​from prose. He recognized that there would be something ‘foolish’ in any attempt at ‘reasoning’ his reader into an ‘approbation’ of his poems. What happens when we read an argument is essentially different in character to what happens when we read poetry. However clear and convincing our reasoning about poetry may be, and however much sociological and psychological context we provide, we cannot convey to a reader the unique experiential contours of the poem itself. These problems may (Coleridge suggested as much) help to explain Wordsworth’s decision, in later editions of his poetry, to relegate the Preface from its original prominence to a marginal position where the reader encounters it more as an optional extra than as a predetermining manifesto.25 The question of how comprehensively the Preface represents the poems it introduces became an important one for Coleridge, the ‘Friend’ usually credited with suggesting the Preface, which he called a ‘half a child of my own Brain’.26 His Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (1817) is in part a critical response to Lyrical Ballads, the poetic-​theoretical project in which Coleridge had been so heavily involved two decades before. By this stage, Coleridge had come to disagree with the main strands of Wordsworth’s argument, and he dismisses the case for ‘Low and rustic life’ as poetically pre-​eminent on the grounds of the poems’ lack of social realism and Wordsworth’s failure to apprehend the true sources of linguistic renewal and innovation. ‘The best parts of language the product of philosophers, not clowns or shepherds’, as he puts it rather uncompromisingly in the summary headnote to ­chapter 17.27 Wordsworth’s argument that there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and prose is likewise rejected because, in Coleridge’s view, it fails to understand how metre fundamentally alters the conditions and expectations of linguistic expression. Wordsworth’s mistake is to think of metre simply as something that can be added to or subtracted from language with predictable effects rather than as a force which interacts with the substrate so as to create something vitally new.28 Underlying these specific disagreements is a broader sense of Wordsworth’s failure as a theorist, his misapprehension of the relation between philosophy and literary experience. Coleridge was suspicious of Wordsworth’s assumption that fully worked-​out philosophical systems such as Hartley’s can frame our understanding of poetry and it is no coincidence in this respect that he devotes a full chapter of the Biographia, itself a self-​consciously fragmentary text, to undermining those theories of Hartley from which 25  On the other hand, Wordsworth did add a further essay ‘Supplementary to the Preface’. On the complexities of Wordsworth framing and reframing of Lyrical Ballads, see Brian R. Bates, Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). 26  To Robert Southey, 29 July 1802, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–​7 1), ii. 449. 27  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 333. Subsequent page references given parenthetically in text. 28  See Stephen Maxfield Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 15–​24.

276   Anthony Howe Wordsworth draws. At the same time as calling the methodology of the Preface into question, however, Coleridge also champions Wordsworth as an important poet, as the creator of the very thing the Preface fails to comprehend. Coleridge manages this by driving a wedge between Wordsworth’s prose and the poems it purports to elucidate, declaring that it is the former that must bear the bulk of responsibility for the ‘unexampled opposition’ that Lyrical Ballads has been ‘doomed to encounter’ (195). This is because, he implies, it is easier to disagree with a structured argument than it is to establish the value (or otherwise) of a poem. There is an unpredictable force at work in the uptake of poetry that is absent when we read a work of poetics such as the Preface, something Coleridge attempts to prove by citing his friends’ apparently surprising estimates of individual poems from the collection. By writing the Preface in the way he did, therefore, Wordsworth played into the hands of mal-​intentioned reviewers who can more easily compile their odium around the definite structures of theory than they can the evanescent forms of poetry. A true critic such as Coleridge, however, is led, by contrast, to celebrate Wordsworth’s prose as a productive misadventure that enables him to ‘reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius’ (346–​7). As well as calling Wordsworth’s mode of theorizing into question explicitly, Coleridge also diverges from his friend in the manner of his own critical practice. In reading Wordsworth’s poetry Coleridge had been struck by the peculiar ‘excellence’ which ‘constitutes the character of his [fellow poet’s] mind’. This was something Coleridge ‘no sooner felt’ than he ‘sought to understand’ (203). Theory thus begins in the non-​rational event of poetry itself. Where Wordsworth’s ‘systematic defence’ is conceived of as two pieces of theory, the first being the one ‘upon which the poems were written’ and the second being a reflexive exercise designed to elucidate the first, Coleridge begins with a fundamental difference—​that between feeling and understanding. For Wordsworth, theory can attain a quasi-​scientific status because it can rely upon a continuity of object and means of investigation. For Coleridge, however, there is no underlying theory, only the emotional and aesthetic experience of the poem. The philosophical apprehension of a poem, he suggests, cannot rely upon an assured translation between what are radically divergent species of knowledge; it must work through the extrapolation rather than the cancellation of difference. Coleridge’s awareness of these problems shapes the unsystematic, almost Shandean, forms of c­ hapter 13, the apparently central discussion of ‘the imagination, or esemplastic power’ (307). In terms of direct argument or statement, Coleridge’s promised theory is pent up in two (not especially long) paragraphs that suddenly emerge from the fragmentary and indirect textual assemblage that constitutes the bulk of the chapter. The chapter begins with an extended quotation from Paradise Lost followed by an extract, in Latin, from the philosophy of Leibniz. This prefatory mixture of poetry and prose proposes, in the broadest terms, an anti-​materialist and mystical context for Coleridge’s discussion of imagination, although the latter is not immediately forthcoming. What follows, instead, is an abstruse consideration of Kantian method and the relation between mathematical science and metaphysical speculation. This Kantian excursus itself becomes a fragment

Poetic Defences and Manifestos    277 as it is interrupted, mid-​sentence, by a letter, written by Coleridge but presented as if from a friend privy to Coleridge’s (so far absent) argument. The letter is written in a very different, far more literary style to the technical—​if bewildering—​analysis of Kant, and foregrounds Coleridge’s fluency with metaphor more than his philosophical interests. ‘The effect on my feelings’, the letter-​writer remarks, ‘I cannot better represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed, and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of autumn’ (311). The introduction of this Gothic, mystical register, as well as recalling the poet’s original task as contributor to Lyrical Ballads, brings with it allusions both to Coleridge’s own ‘Christabel’ and, as a form of parody, the Gothic church metaphor deployed rather leadenly by Wordsworth in his Preface to The Excursion.29 By destabilizing the textual experience, this juxtaposition of discourses becomes a meta-​critical act that suggests a model of reception for the reader of literary theory. If the quest to understand—​and theorize—​poetry begins, as Coleridge’s does as a reader of Wordsworth, in a moment of powerful feeling, then this originary experience, Coleridge implies, should remain implicated in the critical process. Rather than separating out theoretical from literary practice (the convention Lyrical Ballads tends to follow), Coleridge discovers new critical ironies and telling resistances in his mixing of modes. Wordsworth’s role in the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge recalls, had been to awaken ‘the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom’ and to direct it to ‘the wonders of the world before us’ which had become lost behind a ‘film of familiarity’ (314). This idea was taken up by Shelley into the poetic weave of his Defence, where it is given fresh philosophical impetus. Poetry, Shelley writes, ‘makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.’30 Where the authors of Lyrical Ballads proposed poetry as a means of reawakening the reader to the majesties of nature, Shelley raises the stakes to invest poetry with a quasi-​divine creative agency. The poet’s calling, for Shelley, is to reverse our fallen state: to discover fresh reciprocities of thought in language and, in so doing, counter the diminishing effects of familiarization. The responsibility of the literary critic, it follows, is not merely to evaluate poetry by the rhetorical conventions and expectations of his time; this would be to reassert the familiar and uncreative in the very places they have been dismissed by the poet. The achievement of the Defence is to articulate the higher purpose of criticism and the permanent values on which it should be based, and to do this through an intensely literary criticism whose artistic performance is as important as its theoretical argument. In an age of brilliant literary polemic, Shelley’s Defence both reflects and transcends its occasion, showing how the manifesto, as a way of thinking about literature, was problematized and reconceived.

29 

See Bates, Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, 101–​2.

30 Shelley, Major Works, 698.

278   Anthony Howe

Further Reading Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). Bennett, Andrew, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries:  English Literature and its Background 1760–​1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Duff, David, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Halmi, Nicholas, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007). Hamilton, Paul, Metaromanticism:  Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003). Howe, Anthony, Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). Jarvis, Simon, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Newlyn, Lucy, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). O’Neill, Michael, Romanticism and the Self-​Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Park, Roy, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Rajan, Tilottama, and Julia M. Wright (eds), Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-​forming Literature 1789–​1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Simpson, David, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Chapter 18

Crit ical Ju d g e me nt a nd the Reviewing Profe s si on William Christie

‘I weep for Adonais—​he is dead’, mourned Percy Bysshe Shelley in the rhapsodic pastoral elegy he wrote for John Keats, which was also an historical elegy for poetry itself and a eulogy for fellow poets, real and imagined. Perhaps the only thing all writers of the Romantic period had in common was a certain anxiety about their audience—​about how they were received by their contemporaries, in the first instance, then how (or whether) they would be read by future readers. It related to a more generalized anxiety about the status and function of poetry in what the satirist Thomas Love Peacock, in his Four Ages of Poetry (1820), called an ‘iron age’, when ‘intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better channels’.1 Poetry, in Peacock’s provocative and only partly comic characterization, is historically redundant, a hangover from when society thought as a child. The technologico-​scientific future glimpsed in the early signs of an industrial revolution, the claims of common sense and logic, and the increasing prevalence of market forces would have no place for it. This ‘anxiety of reception’ (to use Lucy Newlyn’s term) explains why so much Romantic and post-​Romantic poetry is written about poetry itself, beset by doubts about its own visionary and interpretative powers while yearning to establish a unique epistemology and authority.2 The tense relationship between poet and audience in the early nineteenth century is manifest in one of the most resilient of the Romantic myths, of which Adonais is an exalted expression, the myth of the vulnerable poetic sensibility damaged or destroyed by an indifferent, if not openly hostile, world. From 1802, at the centre of this hostile world and representative of the reading public, we find the figure of the critical reviewer, 1  Thomas Love Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry, in David Bromwich (ed.), Romantic Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 199, 211. 2  Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

280   William Christie the actual provocation for Shelley’s poem and the emotional focus of his mythologizing. Shelley’s hypersensitive Keats has been destroyed by the brutal forces of the critical establishment (‘snuffed out by an Article’, as Byron more flippantly put it in Don Juan3): The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated these unworthy verses, was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and where cankerworms abound, what wonder if its young flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-​vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly afflicted.4

As so often, the story turns out to be a myth in both senses of the word:  a fabrication, no less than a powerful story expressing a collective insight or anxiety. Far from being naturally ethereal and retiring, before contracting tuberculosis Keats was athletic, edgy, and prone to belligerence, but the attack on him in the periodicals was real enough. Before being taken over by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review, the attack had been launched in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine by the Scottish critic and cultural commentator John Gibson Lockhart, in a series of articles against what he called the ‘Cockney School’, which included Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt along with Keats. Blackwood’s—​familiarly known as ‘Maga’—​was one of the most energetic and entertaining, and certainly the most scurrilous, of the nineteenth-​century magazines. ‘It is with such sorrow that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John Keats’, wrote Lockhart, sarcastically: ‘The frenzy of the Poems was bad enough in its way, but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion.’5 Politically and socially inspired, Lockhart’s and, later, Croker’s attacks focused on what they saw as Keats’s lower-​middle-​class vulgarity and cultural illiteracy, and on the sheer presumption of his authorship. If many of the reviewers’ critical judgements strike the modern reader as cruel, irrelevant, and critically inept—​as they inevitably must—​still it was typical of innumerable ‘slashing’ reviews throughout the early nineteenth century. ‘Attacking persons as much as principles, the reviewers and critics of Romantic Britain positioned one another as often according to their social habitus as to their critical postures’, writes Jon Klancher: ‘Class and gender associations became means of crediting or discrediting a bewilderingly various array of critical positions.’6 Lockhart and Croker were imitating, 3 

Don Juan, Canto 11, stanza 60, in Jerome J. McGann (ed.), Byron: The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 4  Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 390–​1. 5  Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3, no. 17 (Aug. 1818), 519. 6  Jon Klancher, ‘The Vocation of Criticism and the Crisis of the Republic of Letters’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 314.

Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession    281 and often exaggerating, a style of literary criticism developed in 1802 by the first—​and first among equals—​of the big Romantic periodical Reviews, the Edinburgh Review, a style best exemplified by the Edinburgh’s editor, Francis Jeffrey, in his reviews of William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie, John Thelwall, Thomas Moore, and many others. ‘The Edinburgh reviewers’, as Louis Simond wrote in his 1811 Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, echoing Jeffrey’s own characterization of the ‘new sect of poets’ he would go on to call the Lake poets, ‘must be allowed the merit of having founded a new school, destined to be the model for the critics of the nineteenth century’.7 The advent of the Edinburgh saw the advent of what Kim Wheatley has identified as the ‘recurring themes’ of ‘nineteenth-​century comments on the periodical press’: ‘their relentless politicization of discourse, their reliance on (and abuse of) anonymity, their indulgence in so-​called “personality” or personal attacks and, last but not least, their sway over public opinion’.8 The cultural ‘sway’ presumed and enforced by the big Reviews—​by the Edinburgh (1802), the Quarterly Review (1809), and the Westminster Review (1824), primarily, but also on occasion by the British Critic (1793), the Anti-​Jacobin Review (1798), the Eclectic Review (1805), and the British Review (1811), as well as by the critical reviewing of magazines like Blackwood’s (1817) and the London Magazine (1820), and by Leigh Hunt’s weekly Examiner (1808)—​confirmed not only the extent to which Britain had become a culture of print, but also the extent to which that print culture had become a social and political battle field. With the Napoleonic Wars raging throughout Europe, the imagery of war and combat dominated and informed the obsessive self-​characterization of early nineteenth-​century culture, a war (to quote Mark Schoenfield) ‘fought over economics and information, over political and aesthetic norms, over the control of public opinion and the boundary between public and private’.9 The dominance of the Reviews is not surprising if we think of the publishing revolution that had taken place during the eighteenth century, when booksellers had been obliged for various commercial and copyright reasons to advertise and promote their books more actively. The widely distributed and successful Gentleman’s Magazine (1731) had included from the start accurate and comprehensive lists of recent books, though notices (what they called ‘intelligence’) had not been enough. To make more informed choices, readers confronted with an expanding number of titles looked to the selections and recommendations of book reviews; the Monthly Review was established by Ralph Griffiths in 1749, to be followed not long after in 1756 by the Critical Review, edited and managed by the novelist Tobias Smollett, and many more were to follow. But however exigent the commercial pressures behind the establishment and development of Reviews, their centrality and influence could never be limited to promoting 7 

Louis Simond, Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, During the Years 1810 and 1811, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1817), ii. 39. 8  Kim Wheatley (ed.), Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 3. 9  Mark Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ‘Literary Lower Empire’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.

282   William Christie specific books as commercial objects. From the beginning, they were also engaged in the culture of ideas and ideologies, reflecting and fuelling political and cultural antagonisms that would become more open and divisive after the French Revolution. It was to realize the intellectual and political potential of book reviewing that the Edinburgh Review; or, Critical Journal was launched in October 1802. Largely maintained by ‘a distinct and marked set’ of energetic and talented, but politically disfranchised, young Scottish Whig lawyers—​Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, John Archibald Murray, Henry Brougham, Thomas Thomson—​the Review was instigated by Sydney Smith, the one member of the group of friends who was neither a Scot nor a lawyer.10 Thanks to some clever, scathing, but well-​informed and well-​argued reviews, the Edinburgh erupted into the intellectual life of early nineteenth-​century Britain. Before the end of its first year, Francis Jeffrey had been installed as editor by its enterprising publisher, Archibald Constable, and the Review was in the way of becoming both a successful commercial publishing venture and a cultural phenomenon. Over the first seven years of its publication, however, it also became more recognizably oppositional in its politics—​for defensive Tories, even, at times, ‘Jacobinical’. To this we owe the origin of the Edinburgh’s main rival, the pro-​ministerial Quarterly Review. The Quarterly was the brainchild of a handful of Tory writers and intellectuals, including poet and novelist Walter Scott, who, after reviewing for the Edinburgh and feeling compromised by its politics and insulted by its treatment of his own poems, withdrew to throw some of his considerable energy into the creation of an alternative. Co-​ conspirators included the second-​generation Scot who would become the Quarterly’s publisher, John Murray, and the leader of the liberal conservative faction of the Tory party, George Canning. With the presumption of ministerial support and privileged insight, and under the editorship of a close literary associate of Canning’s, William Gifford (Canning and Gifford had collaborated on the Anti-​Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner in 1797–​8), the Quarterly began its comparably wide-​ranging, more politically conservative survey of contemporary literary production with the prolific assistance of Robert Southey, John Barrow, and John Wilson Croker.11 The Edinburgh and the Quarterly, then, dominate our period—​not just its book reviewing, but also its thinking. It was the changes to reviewing practice introduced by the Edinburgh and adopted by the Quarterly that enabled the two Reviews to become such discursive forces throughout the whole, but especially the first half of the nineteenth century. There was, for one thing, their selectivity. The earlier Monthly and Critical had tried to discuss or at least ‘to register all the new Things in general, without exception to any’, with the result that they were bound to remain in service to the book trade.12 The Edinburgh, on the other hand, determined ‘to be distinguished, rather for 10 

Henry Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, with a Selection of His Correspondence, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1852), i. 142. 11  For a full account, see Jonathan Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–​1825 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). 12  Monthly Review 1 (1749), 238.

Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession    283 the selection, than for the number of its articles’, declined ‘any attempt at exhibiting a complete view of modern literature’.13 The cause and concomitant of this change was its decision to appear quarterly rather than monthly (a refinement publicized in the title of the rival Quarterly). It allowed the big Reviews to escape the restless accumulation of notices into which the Monthly and the Critical occasionally degenerated and become more discriminating and (paradoxically) representative by becoming more exclusive, choosing to notice some books and writers but not others. And the Edinburgh paid well, a fact that very soon became public knowledge. Again at Sydney Smith’s instigation, Archibald Constable offered in the first instance ten guineas a sheet (16 printed pages), raising it five years later to fifteen and, in 1812, to twenty-​ five. As editor, moreover, Jeffrey had the freedom to boost payment to individual contributors, and in 1809 managed to negotiate with Constable and Longman to secure a percentage of the profits for its original contributors, more than doubling their income. This was astonishingly high payment compared with the ‘two or three guineas’ being offered in the eighteenth century14—​and astonishingly high payment compared with the income of most contemporary authors, it should be said, who were likely to earn less for their work than the reviewer earned for reviewing it. Jeffrey was able to pay Henry Brougham about the same for his forty-​page contribution to the Edinburgh Review of April 1809, for example, as Thomas Egerton would pay Jane Austen for the copyright of Pride and Prejudice three years later.15 Matched by the Quarterly (it was one of the original conditions spelled out to Murray by Scott), this bounty became part of the aura of periodical reviewing in the Romantic age and integral to the reception of the big Reviews. ‘Constable’, writes Ian Duncan, was able to reclaim the tradition of a professional rather than merely commercial class of men of letters by paying unprecedentedly high fees to his editor and contributors: an investment that saved their status as gentlemen and, conversely, cast the publisher himself as an enlightened person rather than a tradesman.16

The Edinburgh’s payment was not only generous, it was also compulsory, enforcing an equality of status upon all reviewers and making professional men of letters out of its contributors whether they liked it or not. ‘Even Czar Peter working in the trenches must accept the pay of a common soldier’, wrote Walter Scott to William Gifford, recommending the same policy for the new Quarterly.17 With the comparative independence and dramatic increase in financial remuneration came a ‘dramatic transformation 13 

Edinburgh Review 1 (Oct. 1802), [p. iii]. Derek Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh 1788–​1802 (London: Methuen, 1978), 39. 15  Jeffrey paid Brougham £106, Austen received £110. See Jeffrey to Brougham, 10 Sept. 1809, University College (London) Library, Brougham MS 22,127; and Pride and Prejudice, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xxviii. 16  Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 25. 17 Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review, 192. 14 

284   William Christie in the status of the reviewer’.18 ‘Gentility itself ’, to quote James Secord, ‘was to be redefined around notions of intellectual leadership. The major quarterlies, especially the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, played a crucial part in defining this new role for the author’.19 Book reviews, moreover, gradually expanded in length. Beginning in its first number in 1802 with twenty-​nine reviews, the Edinburgh was publishing only nine reviews in the same number of pages by the time of the last issue under Jeffrey’s editorship twenty-​ seven years later. What in 1802 might have occupied two or three, at most ten pages, was soon running to twenty or thirty, even as much as fifty and sixty pages. Not only did reviews become longer, but the priorities of book reviewing also changed. The reviewer and his ideas on the topic in question took increasing precedence over the publication under review, which often became merely the occasion for a reflective article or essay—​a sustained, argumentative account of an idea or event considered to be of cultural significance. It was not just that the big Reviews had barely concealed political priorities—​that their ‘Right leg is politics’, as Jeffrey famously insisted—​though this was certainly true.20 From Jeffrey’s opening article on the causes of the French Revolution, in spite of radical differences in the length and form taken by different reviews, the book review was striving to become a distinct and independent cultural form. Already by 1816, with the Edinburgh and the Quarterly both well established, Francis Horner was looking back nostalgically to a lost state of innocence: ‘I wish reviews were brought back to their proper business, that of giving us an account of the contents of new books, and sometimes helping the public to form a right judgement of their merits’.21 By 1816, however, it was too late. When not directly concerned with patrolling the borders of the republic of letters, the review article saw its responsibility as one of offering an intellectual and historical context for the work under review. Discussion of specific topics or the text under review has to await generalizations that, when not openly argumentative, are often unapologetically didactic, as the reviewer, affecting a kind of omniscience, assumes greater authority than both author and reader: ‘he establishes his own claims in an elaborate inaugural dissertation de omni scibile et quibusdam aliis’, wrote Hazlitt, ‘before he deigns to bring forward the pretentions of the original candidate for praise, who is only the second figure in the piece’.22 Drawing on its heritage in the Scottish Enlightenment, the Edinburgh popularized an integrated cultural commentary in which history and politics were primary concerns. Indeed, there are few generalizations about the early nineteenth century offered 18  Neil Berry, ‘The Reviewer Triumphant’, London Magazine new series 33, nos 11 and 12 (Feb./​Mar. 1994), 34–​49 (p. 39). 19  ‘Introduction’, Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, ed. James Secord (London: Penguin, 1997), xii. 20  Francis Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846), i, p. xvii. 21  The Horner Papers: Selections from the Correspondence and Miscellaneous Writings of Francis Horner, MP, ed. Kenneth Bourne and William B. Taylor (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 905. 22  ‘On Criticism’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), viii. 214.

Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession    285 by modern cultural historians that have not been anticipated by the big Reviews. ‘Public written representations of society and social relations’, as Judith Newton has written, ‘offered a sense of control over time and change while extending to those who could interpret the flux a superior cultural authority’.23 Like Newton, Jon Klancher identifies a new kind of cultural semiotic competence in the generalizing, interpretative method of the Romantic periodical, from whom its ‘audience learns to operate those interpretive strategies through which it can read a social world, a symbolic universe, a textual field, and to discover its own purpose within them’.24 The high status of the Reviews was bound up with their self-​elected cultural function as the observers and interpreters of historical signs. ‘To represent an historical state of affairs’, moreover, as James Chandler has observed, ‘is to begin to transform it, to make “history” is to begin to “make history” ’: ‘to state the case of the nation—​and to do so in such a way as to alter its case’.25 Another innovation attributable to the Edinburgh and adopted by reviewing generally was the critical severity with which we began this chapter, a severity threatened in the Edinburgh’s motto Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur: ‘the judge stands condemned when the guilty are acquitted’. A legacy of the legal background shared by so many of the Edinburgh’s reviewers, the motto literalizes the idea of ‘the review as a judicial hearing’ (to quote Philip Flynn),26 highlighting the ethical and social accountability of the work under review: Putting ourselves thus upon our country, we certainly look for a verdict against this publication; and have little doubt indeed of the result, upon a fair consideration of the evidence contained in these volumes.27

‘Against the background of a burgeoning reading public’, remarks Neil Berry, ‘reviewers in the early nineteenth century discovered a new power to terrorise authors’.28 Pre-​emptive appeals to reviewers for clemency and complaints about their malevolence were certainly not new. Smollett had opened his Critical Review with threats against literary mediocrity that were as aggressive as anything offered by the Edinburgh or the Quarterly: The CRITICAL REVIEWERS, secure from personal abuse, will persevere in the execution of their plan, without paying the least regard to the undistinguishing clamour and impotent threats of bad writers, or their employers. Nor can they be fairly taxed

23  Judith Newton, ‘Sex and Political Economy in the Edinburgh Review’, in her Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 97. 24  Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 51–​2. 25  James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 93, 6. 26  Philip Flynn, Francis Jeffrey (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), 40. 27  Edinburgh Review 11 (Oct. 1807), 216. 28  Berry, ‘The Reviewer Triumphant’, 35.

286   William Christie with injustice, or inhumanity. Every author who writes without talents is a grievance, if not an impostor, who defrauds the public; and every critic has a right to detect the imposition.29

Moreover, the potential for misrepresentation even in the most self-​effacing reviewing, is immense, with the simplest act of quotation and paraphrase amounting to an exercise of power over both writer and reader. At the same time as a review alerts the reading public to the existence of a work and helps to bring it to cultural birth, it offers them a version of that work that can only ever be a radical abridgement, shaped by the reviewer’s implicit priorities and evaluations. And this before the reviewer embarks upon explicit judgement. Misrepresentation is inevitable to reviewing, in other words, and critical severity had been around long before 1802, but with the Edinburgh misrepresentation and severity become especially wilful and especially skillful, politically calculated and sometimes vicious and inexcusable. Henry Cockburn’s reflections on the ‘not altogether groundless’ charge of critical severity levelled at the Romantic reviewer remain apposite: the critic, unless he be of a singularly considerate temperament, and on a very cool subject, naturally imbibes feelings of conscious superiority, not favourable to the exercise of candid judgment. Confidence in his own opinions, and thoughtlessness as to the sensations of authors . . . are nearly inseparable from his position; and this tendency is immensely increased by the number of occasions on which severity, and even scorn, are absolute duties. Then, it does so happen that all human censors do prefer the discovery of faults.30

John Thelwall received a celebrated measure of Jeffrey’s patrician scorn, which drove Thelwall publicly to defend himself in an acute analysis of the deflationary rhetoric initiated by the Edinburgh Review.31 Jeffrey’s review of Thomas Moore’s Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806) provoked an equally celebrated mock-​heroic duel between the two men, and Henry Brougham’s savaging of Byron’s Hours of Idleness (1807) led at first to despair and then to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which Byron manages to inhabit both of the antithetical worlds conjured by his title: the spontaneous, creative world of English poetry, and the cold, analytical world of Scottish criticism.32 Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, also became the butt of Jeffrey’s mockery, as did Joanna Baillie and Walter Scott, and the Shakespeare scholar Francis Douce seems never to have 29 

Critical Review 1 (1756), 257.

30 Cockburn, Life of Jeffrey, i. 287–​8. 31 

Mr. Thelwall’s Letter, to Francis Jeffray, Esq (London: J. Turnbull, [1803]). Other clever retorts to the reviewers include John Ring, The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, alias the Stinkpot of Literature (London: H. Symonds and J. Hatchard, 1807); and Edward Coplestone, Advice to a Young Reviewer, with a Specimen of the Art (Oxford: J. Parker and J. Cook, 1807). 32  See ‘Running with the English Hares and Hunting with the Scotch Bloodhounds: Byron and Jeffrey’, in my The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), ch. 6.

Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession    287 recovered from the treatment he received. Most notorious of all, Jeffrey began a twenty-​ year vendetta against William Wordsworth in the first issue, a vendetta that even in its own time and across the political spectrum became a paradigm of critical partiality and insensitivity. In spite of a resolution to avoid similar excesses, moreover, the conduct of the Quarterly only confirmed critical severity as a cultural habit, and it was not long before, along with Keats, the Shelleys, Hunt, and Hazlitt, writers such as Walter Savage Landor and Sydney Morgan were also falling foul of a comparably ‘paranoid politics’.33 And these are only some of the better-​known, more lurid cases to be found in the history and mythology of the big Reviews. The final change introduced by the Edinburgh that ensured the financial success and cultural influence of the enterprise was its policy of editorial ‘fineering’. The word is Scott’s, from a letter to Gifford in which he offers advice on the execution of the Quarterly: One very successful expedient of the Edinr. Editor and on which his popularity has in some measure risen is the art of giving life and interest even to the duller articles of his Review. He receives for example a criticism upon a work of deep research from a person who has studied the book and understands the subject and if it happens to be written which may often be the case in a tone of stupefying mediocrity he renders it palatable by a few lively paragraphs or entertaining illustrations of his own or perhaps by generalising and systematising the knowledge which it contains. By this sort of fineering he converts without loss of time or hindrance of business an unmarketable commodity into one which from its general effect and spirit is not likely to disgrace those among which it is placed.34

Not only did editors often more or less subtly let contributors know what approach and summary judgement they had in mind when commissioning a review, but most reviews were modified editorially after their composition. Some of these modifications were slight; others were more extensive, altering the reviewer’s perspective or conclusions: ‘Any thing to preserve the form and appearance of power’, wrote Hazlitt, ‘to make the work their own by mental stratagem, to stamp it by some fiction of criticism with their personal identity, to enable them to run away with the credit, and to look upon themselves as the master-​spirits of the work and of the age!’35 All these changes—​the selectivity of the Reviews and enrichment of the reviewers, the Olympian historicity, the critical severity and editorial ‘fineering’—​encouraged the rhetorical attitude of ‘superior cultural authority’ mentioned by Judith Newton, an attitude that had an impact on writers no longer enjoying formal patronage and dependent for their livelihood on the sale of their works, and thus an impact on Romantic writing itself. The uneasy relationship already subsisting between reviewer and commercial 33  See Kim Wheatley, ‘Paranoid Politics: The Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews’, Prose Studies 15.3 (1992), 319–​43. 34 Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review, 193. 35  ‘On Editors’, Complete Works of Hazlitt, xvii. 362.

288   William Christie author in the late eighteenth century, dating back to when they had been born and raised together by the needs of a rapidly enlarging book trade, reached a state of sustained critical tension. With reviewers often identifying with their readers as consumers and conspiring with them against the pretensions of an author, it is hardly surprising to find a tendency amongst Romantic writers ‘to dismiss audiences as either mindlessly passive or voraciously appetitive’, to quote Lucy Newlyn, and ‘to demonize reviewers as an army of talentless upstarts, concealing their various envies behind the shield of collective anonymity’.36 Jeffrey’s reviews of Wordsworth and Croker’s of Keats affected them financially and retarded their reputations as poets. The often antagonistic attitude taken by the nineteenth-​century Reviews thus played a crucial role in reinforcing the self-​consciousness of authorship in the Romantic period and helping to precipitate some resilient Romantic myths, such as that of the vulnerability of genius celebrated in Shelley’s elegy for Keats. ‘Jeffrey, Croker and Hazlitt may not have slain with a review’, writes Marilyn Butler, ‘but it is not surprising that contemporaries thought them capable of it’.37 Indeed, as Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) makes abundantly clear, it was the rapid development of competitive, commercial publishing and the proliferation of commercially viable publications like the periodical that helped to precipitate the Romantic redefinition and valorization of ‘literature’ as a uniquely imaginative form.38 Coleridge’s privileging of imaginative literature is a reminder that an adequate understanding of the criticism of the Romantic Reviews requires the context of the whole enterprise. What we call ‘literature’—​poetry, fiction, drama—​while respected as one of society’s significant endeavours, was for the big Reviews only one endeavour among many (and, no less than other social endeavours, was susceptible to historical scrutiny and a degree of demystification). The word ‘literature’ in the Romantic period still meant letters in general—​writing—​and did not privilege creative works in the way our language and culture would go on to do. Whole issues of the Edinburgh would appear without any reviews of creative literature. The Quarterly made a point of covering more than its predecessor, but still poetry, fiction, and drama had to take their place among many other forms of writing. From the beginning of the periodical revolution in the eighteenth century, as I suggested earlier, magazines such as the Gentleman’s and Reviews such as the Monthly and the Critical had been engaged in the culture of information and ideas—​in the culture of knowledge broadly conceived, in other words, the social and economic currency of the expanding public sphere of the eighteenth century. ‘The distinctive character of the Edinburgh Review, as an intellectual enterprise’, writes Biancamaria Fontana, ‘was exactly that of a popular encyclopaedia of both natural and moral sciences, a principled digest of philosophical and scientific opinions for the consumption of the educated 36 Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism, 4.

37  Marilyn Butler, Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 273. 38  See Christie, The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain, 101–​22.

Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession    289 middle classes’.39 It was all part of what Marilyn Butler has called ‘the period’s massive investment in knowledge’.40 Accordingly, the Reviews conceived of themselves as ‘among the legitimate means by which the English public both instructs and expresses itself ’,41 mapping and modifying, often in ideologically inflected and provocative ways, traditional disciplines such as philosophy and classical literature, along with various emerging knowledges: the ‘sciences’ (as they would soon be called), historiography, anthropology, sociology, foreign policy, political economy, education. Any one issue of the Edinburgh or the Quarterly will be found to engage critically with a large number of diverse disciplines or bodies of knowledge, aspiring to authority across as broad a range of disciplines as possible and seeking (like George Eliot’s auctioneer, Mr Borthrop Trumbull) to bring ‘the universe under [their] hammer’—​or, more accurately, under their gavel.42 We may recognize that universe as ideologically circumscribed and selective, but the aspiration to comprehensiveness and coherence was genuine and affects the way we read—​or, at least, should read—​individual contributions: What is lost reading individual contributions outside the orbit of the periodical is not simply an immediate context for the work but a mode of emergence which radically affects the meaning of a particular essay, review, poem, or novel. A writer’s intentions are only part of the meaning of the work in a periodical: a work in such a setting enters a variety of relations with other articles and ongoing institutional concerns that give subtle inflection to its meaning.43

The age of the Review marked a late moment before the educated public would cede the custodianship of knowledge to specialists both inside and outside the academy, ‘under the new cognitive and social regime of specialisation and professionalisation of the nineteenth century’.44 This breadth of reference was not true of all reviewers, it should be said. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly numbered amongst their contributors a host of original writers whom we would think of as specialist practitioners in their respective fields, and this was part of the success of the Reviews. Walter Scott reviewed literature for both the big Reviews, for example, as did Thomas Moore, Hazlitt, and Carlyle for the Edinburgh and Southey for the Quarterly. The Quarterly had Canning and (occasionally) the Duke of Wellington for politics, the Edinburgh James Mackintosh and

39 

Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review 1802–​ 1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 94–​5. 40  Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 130. 41  Edinburgh Review 23 (Apr. 1814), 39. 42  George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 604. 43  Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3. 44  Charles W. J. Withers and Paul Wood (eds), Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), introd., 9.

290   William Christie (occasionally) Lord Grey. Henry Hallam and Thomas Babington Macaulay reviewed history for the Edinburgh, while Peter Elmsley and Charles J. Blomfield contributed articles on the classics, and Thomas Malthus articles on political economics, to both. For mathematics and science, the Edinburgh could boast John Playfair, John Leslie, and Gregory Watt, the Quarterly Thomas Young. This specialization had been true of reviewing from the beginning. In order to prove that the qualifications of many of the eighteenth-​century reviewers were every bit as impressive as those of their nineteenth-​ century counterparts, Derek Roper lists contributors to the Monthly and the Critical who were expert practitioners in the areas in which they reviewed: Charles Burney in music, for example; Thomas Holcroft and William Taylor of Norwich in literature; Thomas Beddoes in the sciences; and so on.45 Along with this specialization, however, went generalization. Many of the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviewers—​and certainly the ones that helped distinguish and lend coherence to their respective periodicals—​were not expert practitioners so much as expert critics. The rise in remuneration and status of nineteenth-​century reviewing created the phenomenon of the professional critic, and certain reviewers stand out as especially polygraphic. Between them, Jeffrey and Henry Brougham (and to a lesser extent Sydney Smith) accounted for well over 40 per cent of the Edinburgh in its early years; Southey and Barrow and Croker, along with editor Gifford, performed a similar service for the Quarterly. As well as the articles on Scott, Swift, Burns, Wordsworth, Baillie, Southey, Byron, Crabbe, Edgeworth, Moore, and Hemans for which he is known to literary scholars, for example, Jeffrey writes on the influence of the philosophes on the French Revolution, associationist aesthetics, geological vulcanism versus neptunism, the economic and political state of the British nation, China and Chinese penal laws, the impotence of metaphysical speculation, travels in Egypt and Africa and Russia and South America, slavery, Quakerism, slavery and Quakerism, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, changes in literary culture since the Elizabethan period—​and so on, and so on: 230 review articles in about 5,000 pages. Southey’s writing for the Quarterly was no less various: from the literary history and literary criticism we would expect, through Baptist missionary activity and evangelical preaching, the monitorial system of education, contemporary and historical diaries and memoirs, travels to most known places (though John Barrow’s travel reviewing for the Quarterly far and away outstripped that of any other contemporary reviewer), with a special interest in Spain and Portugal and its literature, to the social issues close to his heart, such as pauperism and the rise and progress of popular disaffection. The sheer extent and variety of the intellectual interests and professional commitments of all these men militated against an expertise in any one area. Their reviews attest to their argumentative competence in an impressive range of pursuits, and it is precisely this, and not an expertise in any specific area, that represents their critical strength.

45 Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh, 21–​2.

Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession    291 No practice highlights this distinction better than that of literary criticism. Jeffrey was known to his period as its greatest literary critic and made a point of reviewing the bulk of the poetry and fiction in the Edinburgh himself, especially after Scott’s departure in 1809. His experience as a poet amounted to little more than a short-​lived determination to write poetry in the early 1790s, one he abandoned with regret after a number of false starts.46 When Jeffrey reviewed creative literature for the Edinburgh, he wrote solely as a critic and consumer. Jeffrey’s pretensions—​and the pretensions of other literary reviewers, even those who happened to be creative writers themselves—​were not to literary, but to critical expertise. Jeffrey’s practical experience as a literary critic was immense. He was extremely widely read in English, as well as in French and Classical literature, and he had written what amounted to thousands of pages of criticism in his late teens and twenties, using the act of writing down his own considered response to everything he read as a personal discipline.47 And the same wide reading is characteristic of all of the professional reviewers. The line from the professional literary reviewer to the modern literary critic working in a university English department is, in this one sense at least, a direct one. Neither needs to be a creative artist in order to assume critical authority. Beyond this, however, the analogy will not hold. For one thing, reviewers were fond of reminding their readers and authors that they themselves lived, uncloistered and unspecialized, in the real world—​that they were not academic in the pejorative sense. What the reviewers were, they also reminded their readers, was civic minded, often justifying the harshness of their criticism by the threat posed to society by bad taste and anti-​social thinking. The rhetorical strategy, in characteristically ‘slashing’ reviews of the writers of whom they disapproved, was an affected or exaggerated lack of sympathy. This was particularly true of the critical attitude towards the new Romantic poetics. The refusal even to try and understand, manifest as indignation or outrage, is a technique characteristic not of objective criticism, but of theatrical oratory and of satire: the review as satirico-​forensic exercise. Time and again, a poet will be criticized for failing to satisfy the essentially conservative demands of the satirist, deliberately reinforcing what were taken to be ‘the agreed standards of the age’, in the words of James Sutherland, ‘by pointing at the eccentric, the anti-​social, the freethinker, the profligate, the antinomian’.48 Significantly, Jeffrey called upon the reviewer to exercise what he called ‘the wholesome discipline of derision’ in attacking follies that can be identified as the traditional target of the literary satirist, at least since Aristophanes:  affectation, exaggeration, mystification, coterie allusion, enthusiasm, and gratuitous innovation.49 Indeed, the more wholesomely derisive, iconoclastic, and aggressive reviewing—​Lockhart or Croker on Keats, for example, or Jeffrey on Wordsworth—​strictly belongs here, in the genre of satire. ‘Much of the writing in the reviews’, as Steven E. Jones has observed, 46 Cockburn, Life of Jeffrey, ii. 4.

47 Cockburn, Life of Jeffrey, i. 18–​46, 64–​8.

48  James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 40. 49  Edinburgh Review 9 (Oct. 1806), 147.

292   William Christie ‘especially in the two great rivals affiliated with political parties, the Whig Edinburgh and the Tory Quarterly, but also in other reviews, such as the ubiquitous Anti-​Jacobin—​was satirical’.50 If anonymous critical reviewing lacked satire’s sense of personal outrage (with some sensational exceptions), there was no shortage of representative moral outrage, just as there was no shortage of overt or covert political animus. It is no coincidence that the Quarterly’s first editor, William Gifford—​who features prominently in Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as the only possible saviour of a degenerate literary culture, and whom Byron would call his ‘literary father’—​not only collaborated with Canning on the notorious Anti-​Jacobin in the late 1790s, but was also the author of the literary satires The Baviad and The Maeviad.51 John Gibson Lockhart, his successor at the helm of the Quarterly after the brief interregnum of John Taylor Coleridge, graduated to the Quarterly after an apprenticeship as mainstay (with John Wilson) of the frequently satirical Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and contributor to its Menippean Noctes Ambrosianae. If critical reviewing is frequently satirical, however, it is not just a form of satire—​ any more than it is just a form of book reviewing, in service to the publishing industry. Instead, as we have seen, it has its own cultural and political and (arguably) aesthetic work to do. Whatever we might think of the critical judgement of the reviewing profession, we need to look on the review article or essay as Hazlitt did, as an end in itself: we will content ourselves with announcing a truism on the subject, which, like many other truisms, is pregnant with deep thought, —​viz. That periodical criticism is favourable—​to periodical criticism. It contributes to its own improvement—​and its cultivation proves not only that it suits the spirit of the times, but advances it. It certainly never flourished more than at present. It never stuck its roots so deep, nor spread its branches so widely and luxuriantly.52

Further Reading Butler, Marilyn, ‘Culture’s Medium:  The Role of the Review’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1993). Christensen, Jerome, ‘The Dark Romanticism of the Edinburgh Review’, in his Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Christie, William, The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009).

50 

Steven E. Jones, ‘Satire’, in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 394. 51  Byron to Douglas Kinnaird, 21 [?22] Feb. 1824, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–​94), xi. 117. 52  Edinburgh Review 38 (May 1823), 349–​50.

Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession    293 Clive, John, Scotch Reviewers:  The Edinburgh Review, 1802–​1815 (London:  Faber and Faber, 1957). Cutmore, Jonathan, Contributors to the Quarterly Review:  A History, 1809–​1825 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). Cutmore, Jonathan (ed.), Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). Demata, Massimiliano, and Duncan Wu (eds), British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Eagleton, Terry, The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-​Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984). Hull, Simon (ed.), The British Periodical Text, 1797–​1835 (Tirril: Humanities E-​Books, 2008). Klancher, Jon, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Klancher, Jon, ‘The Vocation of Criticism and the Crisis of the Republic of Letters’, in Marshall Brown (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5:  Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Morrison, Robert, and Daniel S. Roberts (eds), Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Parker, Mark, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Roper, Derek, Reviewing before the Edinburgh 1788–​1802 (London: Methuen, 1978). Stewart, David, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Wheatley, Kim, ‘Paranoid Politics: The Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews’, Prose Studies 15.3 (1992), 319–​43. Wheatley, Kim (ed.), Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture (London: Frank Cass, 2003).

Chapter 19

Trial Lite rat u re Victoria Myers

The Romantic era saw growing interest in the courtroom trial. At the same time that real-​ life legal process underwent revolutionary change, the expanding print medium gave the general reader more detailed understanding of trials than ever before. Newspaper reports, transcripts, and personal accounts secured attention for trials by exploiting their potential for narrative and drama. Conversely, literary writers made trials central to dramatic and narrative plots, capturing such speech acts as accusation, interrogation, confession, and judicial declaration, and exploring the thematic resonance of characters’ subjection to trials. This interchange between law and literature occurred at the same time that specialization and the rise of disciplines promoted the separation of discourses. Guyora Binder has observed that ‘until the nineteenth century’ legal and literary writings were ‘simply different genres of “letters” ’. While separation occurred gradually as ‘a conceptual distinction’ between ‘scientific’ and ‘expressive discourse’ became more prominent, law (with literature) participated in ‘the construction of characters, personas, sensibilities, identities, myths, and traditions that compose our social world’.1 Alexander Welsh’s seminal study, Strong Representations:  Narrative and Circum­ stantial Evidence in England (1992), exhibits the common ground shared by law and literature, showing how both discourses experienced a similar cultural change, namely the rise of a new type of narrative involving ‘carefully managed circumstantial evidence’. According to Welsh, this was ‘the single most prominent form of narrative in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, and it ‘flourished nearly everywhere—​not only in literature but in criminal jurisprudence, natural science, natural religion, and history writing itself ’. In this narrative form, ‘strong representations’ make ‘things not seen’ appear present; and facts are constructed into arguments geared toward producing a ‘conclusion’ whose importance for real life is validated by this narrative detail. Like other human institutions, the ‘way of making representations’ changes over time. 1 

Guyora Binder, ‘The Law-​as-​Literature Trope’, in Michael Freeman and Andrew D. E. Lewis (eds), Law and Literature: Current Legal Issues 1999, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 63, 65, 68.

Trial Literature   295 In the eighteenth century, as Welsh shows, that ‘way’ was determined by the rise of probabilistic thinking.2 In law, this thinking was early articulated by Geoffrey Gilbert’s The Law of Evidence (published posthumously in 1754). Responding to residual fears of epistemological scepticism—​doubts about human ability to know a thing with certainty—​ Gilbert argued that legal decisions do not require the absolute certainty available only in deduction, but only the best proof that the nature of the case admits; this proof is humanly possible through reasonable probability.3 As Welsh shows, Henry Fielding captures this probabilistic structuring of proof in the gradual narrative revelations in Tom Jones (1749).4 Romantic-​era writers raised a sceptical problem somewhat different from the epistemological one. They were deeply concerned with institutional scepticism, or radical doubt about the ability or even willingness of legal institutions to achieve justice. Lawyers and local justices had long been satiric targets, but criticism in the Romantic era increasingly encompassed the entire system. William Blackstone, in his widely influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1764–​9), attempted to forestall ‘contempt’ for English law by attributing to it a rational structure and downplaying the confusion of precedents and practices.5 Jeremy Bentham, however, sharply criticized Blackstone’s imposition of natural law and social contract megafictions on the real incoherencies of English common law.6 An age of debate about judicial reform, the Romantic era was also an age of agitation for parliamentary reform because, as reform societies claimed, the people could not expect laws to address their problems when the majority was not represented in the law-​making body. Government fears that criticism would reach beyond ‘contempt’ and eventuate in a French-​style revolution spawned a ministerial backlash that used the law courts in Scotland, Ireland, and England to silence reform leaders. From writings about the sedition and treason trials of the 1790s, the reading populace learnt that politically motivated judges and advocates could make ‘imaginative’ interpretations of the statute law, endangering civil liberty.7 Ironically, government repression raised citizens’ doubts about their legal and legislative systems further, even begetting a surrogate epistemological scepticism. Wordsworth recounts in Book 10 of The Prelude (1805) how the French Terror with its ‘unjust tribunals’ subverted his confidence in his mental powers, while Britain’s subsequent attempt to ‘make the guardian crook of law | A tool of murder’ against its citizens

2  Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ix, 9–​10, 14. 3  Geoffrey Gilbert, The Law of Evidence, Considerably Enlarged by Capel Lofft, 4 vols (London, 1791-​6), i. 1–​5. 4 Welsh, Strong Representations, 48–​76. 5  William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England, facs. repr. of 1st edn [1765–​9], 4 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), i. 8–​9. 6  A Fragment on Government (1776), in Jeremy Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ch. 1. 7  See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–​1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

296   Victoria Myers shook confidence in the distinguishing virtues of English courts (lines 374–​80, 645–​7).8 In his play The Borderers (written in 1796–​7), he had already dramatized this mental crisis by emplacing the real-​life rhetoric of Louis XVI’s trial, the 1794 London treason trials, and the court martial of the Bounty mutineers in 1792 on his protagonist’s struggle to maintain vigilante justice during the thirteenth-​century Border Wars. Without the aid of reliable legal institutions and under the influence of the unscrupulous Rivers, Mortimer falls back on the primitive ordeal to judge a man, the father of his betrothed, falsely accused of selling her into prostitution. In the process Mortimer finds that his ability to trust his own perceptions, to divide them from prejudice and calumny, is crippled, and even his trust in sentimental attachments is destroyed.9 This conversion of institutional into epistemological scepticism, with consequent injury to the capacity to feel, also appears in Coleridge’s play Osorio (1797), where individuals, both those aligned with church–​state power and those opposing it, manipulate belief in the information of the senses. Several changes in the conduct of real-​life courtroom trials emerged during the eighteenth century: lawyers speaking for the accused, increasing reliance on circumstantial evidence, and shifted configuration of power in the courtroom.10 The issue of lawyers’ participation is alluded to in radical fiction in various ways. In Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796), the protagonist apologetically but skillfully argues his own case; in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria (1798), the eponymous heroine takes over the defence of her lover in a criminal conversation case; and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the lawyer mounts an inept defence for the compliant Justine. Similar variation occurs in these novels’ representation of circumstantial evidence and judicial power, showing how such changes contribute (in different degrees) to forming the characters’ social and judicial realities.11 These novels, whose authors were personally linked with William Godwin as follower, wife, or daughter, engaged in different ways with his trial-​centred novel Caleb Williams (1794). An extended look at a trial scene from the novel illustrates how each of the legal changes mentioned could be represented in an atmosphere of

8 

Quotations are from William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). 9  William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 1796–​7 version. For an extension of this argument, see Victoria Myers, ‘Justice and Indeterminacy: Wordsworth’s The Borderers and the Trials of the 1790s’, Studies in Romanticism 40.3 (2001), 427–​57. 10  For changes affecting trial process in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, consult David J. A. Cairns, Advocacy and the Making of the Adversarial Criminal Trial 1800–​1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Thomas Andrew Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury 1200–​1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 11  See Adam Komisaruk, ‘The Privatization of Pleasure: “Crim. Con.” in Wollstonecraft’s Maria’, Law and Literature 16.1 (2004), 33–​63; Bridget M. Marshall, ‘Questioning the Evidence of Bodies and Texts in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, in The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790–​1860 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), ch. 2; and Jonathan H. Grossman, ‘Mary Shelley’s Legal Frankenstein’, in The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), ch. 3.

Trial Literature   297 institutional scepticism in which the accused person’s self-​understanding and the possibility of justice in Britain are at stake.12 Defence lawyers’ increasing participation in felony trials deeply affected the representation of the accused in court. While prosecutors’ lawyers had long possessed the right to full participation, it was traditionally assumed that defendants would be represented by the judge, who would advise defendants and cross-​examine on their behalf, while acting simultaneously as impartial referee over the trial. To offset prosecutors’ pre-​trial advantages and combat perjury by crown witnesses, judges began to allow defence lawyers to cross-​examine witnesses;13 through developments in the law of criminal evidence, their lawyers could at least prevent the accused from incautious speaking and inept handling of uncorroborated evidence. As John Langbein argues, however, the lawyers’ participation gradually appropriated defendants’ speech and eliminated an important source of factual information.14 In the pre-​trial hearing in Caleb Williams, Godwin attempts to capture a sense of defendants’ disadvantage. Accused of theft by his employer Mr Falkland, Caleb lacks legal counsel and depends on the good will of the judge, Mr Forester. Although half-​brother to the accuser, Forester considers himself impartial: ‘It is a wise principle [he says] that requires the judge to come into court uninformed of the merits of the cause he is to try; and to that principle I am determined to conform as an individual.’15 He succeeds, until Falkland (having tricked Caleb into revealing the hiding place of his boxes) uncovers the missing goods planted there. When Caleb asserts that Falkland knows his innocence, the implied aspersion on Falkland’s character encounters the judge’s class prejudices, which trigger his acerbic advice against ‘such insolent and intolerable insinuations’ (253). Caleb, harbouring residual deference to the same prejudices, declines to give any information regarding Falkland’s motives. Godwin’s narrative thus presents grist for the reformist argument that defendants need advocates, while further suggesting that if the lawyer-​centred trial suppresses truth, the lawyer-​less trial does so too, because the defendant often colludes in his own condemnation. Godwin’s criticism is aimed at an entire socio-​political system of which the trial is a synecdochic sign. A second significant change in the felony trial occurred with the prosecutor’s increasing reliance upon circumstantial evidence. Less emphasis was placed on eliciting direct testimony to the criminal act, more on constructing a chain of circumstances that made the defendant’s guilt convincing ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. In the eighteenth-​century common-​law trial, the prosecutor presented a ‘plausible narrative’ that ‘pieced together’ the facts into a ‘ “train of circumstances” that would satisfy a jury 12 

In her chapter on Caleb Williams, Marshall demonstrates that ‘Nearly every element of the novel traces back to a legal predicament or proceeding, and in each judicial encounter, Godwin portrays the inability of legal institutions to achieve justice’ (Transatlantic Gothic, 29). 13 Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, chs 3 and 4. 14 Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, ch. 5. Also see Cairns, Advocacy, ch. 1 and appendix 1.1. 15  William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 245. Subsequent page references are given in parenthesis in the text.

298   Victoria Myers of the prisoner’s guilt’. Such a prosecution would succeed through its narrative qualities of ‘connectedness’ and ‘completeness’, while witnesses alone often proved unreliable and biased.16 Yet Welsh indicates that the narrative was not exempt from fiction, in the conflated sense of ideology and untruth, as in the trial of Mary Blandy, in which the prosecutors imposed a providential theme, while her post-​trial confession countered with a story structured like a romance.17 In Caleb Williams, Godwin acknowledges the narrative structure of a prosecutor’s circumstantial-​evidence case, but also exposes its potential for devolving into fiction. Forester quite explicitly conceives of the hearing (and subsequent trial) as requiring Caleb to ‘Make the best story you can for yourself—​ true, if truth, as I hope, will serve your purpose; but, if not, the most plausible and ingenious you can invent’ (246). Falkland has constructed his own narrative, coherent yet false, and relying on traditional bias favouring masters over servants. His only supporting witness is his valet, who testifies merely to Caleb’s confusion after the episode with the chest and to Falkland’s showing him the chest already broken open—​weak circumstantial evidence augmented by Caleb’s strange behaviour in running away from his master. All this is inconclusive until Caleb’s boxes are searched, whereupon Forester rejects Caleb’s ‘appeal to probabilities and conjecture, in the face of incontestable facts’ (252). Godwin thus exposes the problem at the heart of circumstantial narrative: facts render plausible the accuser’s narrative by completing the chain of circumstances he recounts, but are supported in turn by that narrative. Caleb’s ‘tale’ is ineffective because, as Forester tells him, he has not ‘render[ed] it consistent and complete’ (254). Yet to effect that completeness requires a mental revolution in Caleb, which he cannot achieve until imprisonment, ostracism, and despair have turned him into a person he cannot admire. A third change affected the status of the jury. The judge interpreted the law, and in certain kinds of cases (such as sedition) could insist that the jury’s task was simply to decide whether the accused was guilty of the fact, regardless of actual intention. Fox’s Libel Act of 1792 gained for the jury (in sedition cases) the right to determine whether the law, as explained by the judge, did in fact apply to the act of the accused on which intention had important bearing.18 Through this measured empowerment, the jury of citizens became a centre of concern equal to or greater than the judge. As in William Hone’s trial (to be discussed later), the defence in political trials concentrated on urging the jury to exercise its independence, to save the (innocent) identity of the accused. Although Caleb’s hearing is not a formal trial before a jury, it takes place in the presence of Caleb’s fellow servants (his peers), and he notices their reactions and confidently appeals to their candour: ‘I will never believe that a man, conscious of innocence, cannot make other men perceive that he has that thought.’ (255) Caleb’s speech conveys Godwin’s faith in the omnipotence of truth earlier espoused in Political Justice. Yet Godwin allows his views to be undercut by echoing them in Forester’s warning that 16 Welsh, Strong Representations, 25, 30. 17 Welsh, Strong Representations, 18–​31.

18 Green, Verdict According to Conscience, 330. See ch. 8 generally.

Trial Literature   299 Caleb’s ‘dexterity, however powerful it may be in certain cases, will avail little against the stubbornness of truth’ (256). Caleb consequently withdraws his hopes from his peers, recognizing that belief in truth’s omnipotence is naïve: ‘You have just affirmed that it is not in the power of ingenuity to subvert the distinctions of right and wrong, and in that very instant I find them subverted’ (257). The wider effect of this reversal appears in the cry of a fellow servant against Caleb’s evident perfidy: ‘For your sake, lad, I will never take any body’s word, nor trust to appearances, thof it should be of an angel’ (260). Severely testing Godwin’s belief in the omnipotence of truth, this epistemological scepticism, like the radical doubt of Wordsworth’s protagonist in The Borderers, shows how the manipulation of the justice system destroys confidence in ability to discern truth, subjects the observer to authoritarian imposition, and even threatens the reformer’s credo.19 Legal and literary writings converge on a recurrent concern in this period: the formation of the person as a juridical subject and its effect on the subject’s extra-​legal social/​personal identity. This concern was situated in arguments over the defendant’s ‘intention’, how it could be known or proven, but also who had the authority to declare it. Both the draft conclusion to Caleb Williams (with Caleb’s insanity) and the published version (with his unalterable despair) suggest that the protagonist’s confidence in his intentions and his identity can be destabilized. Godwin’s savvy about this outcome arose from his personally attending the treason trial of his close friend Thomas Holcroft and, in Cursory Strictures (1794), his closely analysing the Chief Justice’s charge to the grand jury. Several pieces associated with the 1794 London treason trials reassert their writers’ identities against the legal concept of intention. Jeremiah Joyce’s An Account of the Author’s Arrest for Treasonable Practices (1795), John Thelwall’s Poems Written in Close Confinement (1795), and Thomas Hardy’s Memoir (1832) all record a degree of generic tension between aesthetic self-​expression and narrative truth. Holcroft, complaining, like his fellow defendants, of ‘the calumnious epithets and far-​strained innuendoes’ imposed on him, attempts to recover his social identity in A Narrative of Facts, Relating to a Prosecution for High Treason (1795), where he explicitly and even flamboyantly employs literary techniques to discredit the court’s fictionalizing. The Narrative of Facts employs a variety of genres, including comic drama. Holcroft relates that, when he heard a warrant had been issued for his arrest, he remained in town so that it might be delivered. The prosecution, however, was not willing to arrest him just yet and, eager to defend himself, Holcroft made his way to the court to confront his accusers and obtain his ‘full, fair, and public examination’. The Chief Justice, clearly embarrassed by his arriving without being formally called, attempts to discourage him by insinuating that his presenting himself is admission that he is the person indicted and

19  Regarding the omnipotence of truth, see Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 3: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, with Austin Gee (London: Pickering, 1993), 472. As Grossman notes (Art of Alibi, 49–​53), Godwin himself is unable to escape the structuring influence of narrative institutions, since he builds his novel ‘around the storytelling forum of trials’.

300   Victoria Myers requires his being committed to custody. Holcroft exposes the little dance of equivocation offered by the Chief Justice: Chief Justice.  ‘. . . I do not know whether you are, or are not Thomas Holcroft. I do not know you, and therefore it is impossible for me to know whether you are the person stated in the indictment.’ Mr. Holcroft.  ‘It is equally impossible for me, my lord.’ Chief Justice.  ‘Why then, sir, I think you had better sit still.’20

The comical episode pinpoints a serious issue. Holcroft is very aware that being called into court describes him as a juridical subject and that this description imposes on him an invidious identity. Holcroft also employs the resources of the epistolary novel, including a letter to his family that clearly indicates consciousness of government listening in: ‘Shall I own to you that, though I could not wish to be falsely accused, yet, being so accused, I now feel an anxious desire to be heard? Let my principles and actions be inquired into, and published’.21 To those familiar with Holcroft’s fictional work, the epistolary strategy would have brought to mind his novel Anna St. Ives (1792), where he pursued an agenda for discrediting coercion and punishment similar to his planned message to the court. Part of Holcroft’s strategy in the novel is to subject the violence-​prone antagonist to unremitting talk about his potential for virtue and to exhibitions of the heroes’ inexhaustible impartiality and forgiveness. In the Narrative of Facts, Holcroft constructs the government as a kind of Coke Clifton, addicted to self-​delusion and mendacity, using threats and persecution to intimidate its opponents, relying on persons of questionable morality—​ spies and agents provocateurs—​rather than well-​intentioned benevolent reformers, and, in short, attempting to provoke the rebellious behaviour it means to punish. Conversely, Holcroft rebuilds his identity as a virtuous man by constructing himself along the lines of Frank Henley and Anna. In the letter to his family he claims, ‘For my own part, I feel no enmity against those who endeavour thus to injure me, being persuaded that, in this as in all other instances, it is but the guilt of ignorance.’22 Like the treason trial defendants, Hone in his trials for blasphemous libel (1817) complains about being characterized as ‘an impious and wickedly disposed person  . . .  intending to excite impiety and irreligion’.23 He certainly understood, as 20  Thomas Holcroft, A Narrative of Facts, Relating to a Prosecution for High Treason (London: printed for H. D. Symonds, 1795), 32. Holcroft was one of twelve men accused of high treason, ‘compassing and imagining the king’s death’, under the statute of 25 Edward 3. Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall were actually tried and acquitted; Holcroft and the others were acquitted without trial. 21 Holcroft, Narrative of Facts, 24. 22 Holcroft, Narrative of Facts, 23. 23  William Hone, The First Trial of William Hone, on an Ex-​Officio Information, 8th edn (London: printed for William Hone, 1817), 11. Also see John Thelwall’s intended defence in his trial for treason, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons (London: printed for John Thelwall, 1795), 2; and Holcroft, Narrative of Facts, 52–​3. Facsimile reprints of Thelwall’s and Holcroft’s pamphlets can be found in John Barrell and Jon Mee (eds), Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–​1794, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006–​7).

Trial Literature   301 William Wickwar explains, that when the charge asserted ‘malicious intention’, the prosecution only meant to convince the jury of ‘the possible ill consequences of a publication’:  malice, in other words, was ‘the [legal] fiction of “constructive malice” ’.24 Nonetheless, he also perceived that the public read the accusation in the common way, as describing his real motives and character, and that government was conducting a politically motivated case against his parodies of the Catechism, the Litany, and the Athanasian Creed. As his published transcript shows, Hone carried the art of the literary scholar and parodist into the trial itself, recovering control of his character by dramatizing the court’s departures from common logic. The Attorney General tells the jury that ‘the Christian religion is parcel of the Common Law of England’, a guarantee for oaths of office and for testimony, the ground for the performative validity of legal acts and declarations, thus fundamental to the stability of the state and the judicial process. Parody, he asserts, operates insidiously, ‘like an infecting pestilence’, even against a person’s will, no matter what his level of understanding or education. He brings the usual evidence for criminal intention in such cases: merely reading excerpts from the piece and enlisting testimony that the accused published it, then simply assuming the probable effect. Hone’s transcript (giving the impression of a play) records the audience’s adventitious smiles and outright laughter at the reading, while the Attorney General asserts that these reactions are ‘the fullest proof of the baneful effect [the parody] has had’; even if not intended, the parody was obviously ‘calculated’ to induce contempt for the Christian religion. Hone, taking the charge at its word, argues that his parodies were meant to ridicule the current ministry, not the Christian religion—​thus revealing and satirizing the ministry’s subterfuge.25 Besides impugning the court’s logic, Hone built his defence in the three trials around the reading of many parodies. He exhibited an entire tradition of parody and demonstrated that one could bring the target into contempt without harming the textual object or vehicle, thereby enabling the jury to discern that his parodies were not in fact illegal. To demonstrate the court’s unjust practices and shift the judge’s performative authority to the jury, Hone emphasized that the court’s declarations needed the support not only of due process but also of traditions outside the court itself. For example, Hone reprehends Judge Abbott’s departure from due process in the first trial in ‘call[ing] this publication a libel . . . he would say, with all due deference, that his Lordship was mistaken. That only could be called a libel, which twelve men, sworn well and truly to try the cause, declared to be one.’26 To maintain the relevance of extra-​legal traditions to judicial judgement, Hone resists the judges’ frequent attempts to silence his reading of parodies—​as a result, his transcript contains some furious (and amusing) dialogue. In the second and 24  William H. Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press 1819–​1832 (London: Allen, 1928), 19–​20. 25 Hone, First Trial, 4, 45, 6; William Hone, The Second Trial of William Hone, on an Ex-​Officio Information, 2nd edn (London: printed for William Hone, 1818), 7. 26 Hone, First Trial, 38. See Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–​1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), ch. 5; and Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–​1822 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 3.

302   Victoria Myers third trials, Hone comes up against the redoubtable Lord Ellenborough, who declares peremptorily against the reading, ‘I shall not receive it . . . you may use your discretion, whether you shall dwell further upon a matter of evidence which I declare, judicially, to be inadmissible.’ Hone retorts, ‘I would ask your Lordship, if you really mean to send me to prison without a fair trial?’ As he waits for Ellenborough’s response, it becomes clear that he has silenced the judge rather than the judge silencing him.27 Gradually Hone appropriates the trial process and forces the court and the prosecution to reveal their own invidious parody of the law.28 While Holcroft and Hone consciously incorporate literature (as technique and tradition) in their defences, the issue of intention was often produced in trial-​related writings in a less deliberately fiction-​like way. One example is The Declaration and Confession of Robert Watt, written prior to his execution in Edinburgh in October 1794 for high treason. Watt’s confession exhibits the tensions inherent in a genre that was often double-​voiced in a way that escaped complete domination by legal institutions. Even while admitting guilt or submitting to the religion-​and state-​imposed conventions of the gallows confession, as Hal Gladfelder shows, the condemned could introduce material into the account to try to gain sympathy for their plight, or admiration for their intrepidity and resourcefulness.29 Watt’s confession inscribes his sense of his character within the conventional submission, yet goes beyond the tradition by explicitly affirming his belief in his fundamental innocence against the legal concept of intention. The tensions in the confession genre, however, dovetail with Watt’s own intense self-​ conflict. Detailing his childhood obsession with Calvinism, Watt confesses that pride and ambition were his two besetting sins and that however he tried to cleanse himself of these motives, he repeatedly discovered them even in his most beneficent actions. This self-​conflict interprets the ambiguity in his subsequent confession, where he claims he selflessly intended good to the nation yet hoped for the nation’s gratitude. In keeping with the confession convention, Watt asks forgiveness from the state, yet all along he insinuates the state is to blame for misleading him. He reports that he first voluntarily served as a government spy at reform society meetings, but there he became convinced that the reformers’ principles and practices were benevolent and their persecution by the government reprehensible.30 Now (he says) the state wants to impose on him its fictional (but, he concedes, legal) concept of intention. Since the law asserts that intention is ascertainable from the criminal act and its likely consequences, not from what the person says (and believes) his intention to be, Watt admits he may have been mistaken 27 Hone, Second Trial, 13. 28 

For extended discussion of Hone’s parodic strategy in his defence, see Victoria Myers, ‘Blasphemy Trials and The Cenci: Parody as Performative’, in Alexander Dick and Angela Esterhammer (eds), Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 106–​13. 29  Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-​Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 77. 30  Robert Watt, By Authority. The Declaration and Confession of Robert Watt . . . the Evening before his Execution, for High Treason, at Edinburgh, October 15. 1794 (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1794).

Trial Literature   303 about those consequences. But he cannot conceal that he considers his plan for simultaneously (and peacefully!) overturning the governments in Edinburgh, London, and Dublin a sign of his benevolence and resourcefulness. As John Barrell suggests, his confession reveals a mind more caught up in fantasy than in conspiracy.31 Towards the close, Watt conveys his dismay that the sort of moral creature he believes he is does not coincide with what law judges him to be, nor with what God has permitted him to be.32 The confession narrative, replete with tensions between fact and fiction (the prosecution’s, his own), thus becomes a poignantly ambiguous record of reformist aspiration. In the struggle for control over ‘intention’, many writings not only deplore, but also try to avert institutional scepticism. The crime, reiterated in so much of Romantic-​era trial literature, of trying to reform legislative and judicial institutions, may be seen precisely as an effort to save them from total destruction in revolution. Shelley’s The Cenci (1819), for example, for all its anti-​patriarchal violence, is linked to an argument against revolution. As Michael Kohler argues, Shelley does not treat his Count Cenci as simply a symbol of monolithic patriarchal power, but combines in him a critique of both reaction and revolution. If Cenci appears allied to papal power and adopts the religious sanction for his behaviour (claiming that God favours his desires, however cruel), he also undermines the religious establishment, which his wealth has contributed to rendering hypocritical. Shelley’s paternal efforts to recover his children after the death of his first wife were blocked by the Chancery court, but that Court’s responsibility for equity and morality was being spread throughout the emerging liberal state.33 In negotiating his private feelings and public agenda, Shelley achieves a more subtle and thorough mixture of legal and literary writing than his father-​in-​law Godwin did. Like Wordsworth’s Borderers, Shelley’s play also incorporates the rhetoric and issues of real-​life political trials, in this instance the blasphemy trials of Daniel Isaac Eaton and William Hone. Shelley, like Hone, is not a radical sceptic, but a believer in inevitable (preferably gradual) change through enlightenment, preserving what has proved beneficial and integrating it in institutions geared to an improved human nature.34 Like the Attorney General in Hone’s trial, Cenci uses the blasphemy accusation to silence his critics. He reappropriates the state-​fictional power of the father to authoritatively declare the identity of his children, but his confrontation with Beatrice also shows that his declarations are subject to the listener’s uptake.35 This is the point of entry for reform, as Hone’s trial showed. However, Beatrice, though able to refuse uptake of Cenci’s views, is unable to stimulate uptake of her own views during the quasi-​trial before the assembled aristocratic elders. Because they fear Cenci’s unscrupulous and secret revenge, 31 Watt, Declaration and Confession, 19–​26. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 258. 32 Watt, Declaration and Confession, 26.

33  Michael Kohler, ‘Shelley in Chancery: The Reimagination of the Paternalist State in The Cenci’, Studies in Romanticism 17.4 (1998), 545–​89 (pp. 566–​7). 34  See ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ (written 1819), in Shelley’s Prose: or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark, pref. Harold Bloom (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988), 260. 35  On uptake and its relation to law, see Angela Esterhammer, The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 43–​7.

304   Victoria Myers they pretend to accept his story that she is insane. His fear of Beatrice, who temporarily succeeds in intimidating him with a parody of his power, triggers his plan to rape her because by polluting her body he hopes to drive her into blaspheming despair and destroy her power to weaken his will. Shelley’s avoidance of revolution emerges in his subsequent treatment of Beatrice. Instructed by her failure with the aristocrats, she avoids bringing Cenci to actual trial for the rape and instead has him assassinated. Yet the irony Shelley insists on is that, while she is pursuing her private revenge, the pope is sending his legates to arrest Cenci, having lost patience with his too frequent and too flagrant violations of law. The further irony is that Beatrice’s act, now an imitation of Cenci’s secret methods, has begun to ‘contaminat[e]‌’ her with the corrupted identity Cenci decreed (III. i. 17).36 In the lead-​ up to the assassination she appropriates the religious sanction for her acts, and in the final trial scene uses her personal and rhetorical power as a kind of torture against the assassin to deflect accusation from herself. Beatrice, Shelley shows, is caught by her historical moment in the revolutionist’s recapitulation of tyranny. Stimulated by Hone’s experience, Shelley saw the potential in using trials, where the accused is called and thereby empowered to speak, as a venue and an instrument for publicizing institutional injustice, thus not only educating, instigating, and empowering the people to demand reform, but also shifting the operations of the institution itself.37 The power of historical perspective to deal with institutional scepticism, as recognized by Shelley, forms the main theme of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818). While Shelley absorbs the language and issues of real-​life blasphemy trials into the actions of his play, Scott places the language and issues of the real-​life Porteous riot case alongside the wholly fictional case of Effie Dean for infanticide. In the novel Scott gives a full (though selective) history of the Porteous case, beginning with the contraband trade in 1736, aimed at circumventing recent heavy imposts. Law conflicts with custom, threatening legitimate government and equivocating the meaning of justice. Scott conveys this equivocation through the trial of Wilson, one of the contraband traders, presenting the opinions on the case through the populace’s debate on the justice of the sentence. Scott presents popular opinion as a faulty tribunal, but he also conveys judicially relevant arguments justifying the public’s stand. Through the Porteous trial, Scott shows how the issue of local custom versus law reflects on the national rivalry between England and Scotland after the Union of 1707. In the wake of Porteous’ conviction for firing on the crowd assembled at Wilson’s execution, the Queen in England grants Porteous a reprieve. The populace views this act as ‘defraud[ing] the public justice’.38 By conveying the lawyers’ defence of Porteous and the equivocalness of the Queen’s

36 

Quoted from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002). 37  See Shelley, ‘Philosophical View of Reform’, 258–​9. For an extended argument concerning The Cenci, see Myers, ‘Blasphemy Trials’, 113–​23. 38  Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 41.

Trial Literature   305 motives through popular consciousness, Scott’s narrative imparts a stern judgement of present law under the Union with England.39 The tension between popular and formal justice, against the background of national rivalry, receives significant modification by its juxtaposition with the fictional case against Effie Deans. She appears a victim of a recent parliamentary statute meant to combat the rising number of infanticides. The statute asserts that failure of the mother to reveal her pregnancy to any person before the birth of the child would be construed as presumptive (or circumstantial) evidence of her guilt in the child’s death. Though George Staunton, the father of Effie’s illegitimate child, urges her sister to testify that Effie told her about her pregnancy, Jeanie refuses to promise anything that is not ‘lawful for a Christian’. She holds to the letter of the law, recognizing that the efficacy of the legal process depends on her consistently following her conscience: ‘I shall be man-​sworn in the very thing in which my testimony is wanted.’ Contrary to defendants in the political trials of Scotland and England in the previous three decades, which saw the threat to their identity coming from government, Jeanie maintains her principles, the seat of her identity, against the oppressive and usurping will of an individual. Jeanie holds by human law, which in this respect coincides with God’s law: ‘ “I may not do evil, even that good may come out of it.” ’40 In short, the trial of Effie Deans presents to the Porteous case a countervailing view of Scottish law as an institution continually progressing while maintaining a connection to its (not wholly reprehensible) past. Although Scott frequently calls English institutions more civilized, he also dwells on traditional practices, such as the solemn oath which both grounds Jeanie’s refusal to perjure herself and is efficacious in keeping the witness true to herself. The fictional and the real-​life cases are not kept completely separate, but rather provide opportunities for Scott (a practising lawyer) to reassert the reliability of law. Politically conservative, as seen in his severe criticism of radicals such as Watt (whose trial he witnessed in 1794),41 Scott opposed institutional scepticism with largely sympathetic portrayal of magistrates and lawyers, while recognizing that law’s willingness to instantiate the public’s sense of justice is frequently limited (as is the public’s sense of justice). In one instance, the narrator calls the ‘cross-​examination’ of Reuben Butler, a friend of Jeanie Deans and an unwilling participant in the vigilante execution of Porteous, a ‘painful task even for the most candid witness to undergo, since a story, especially if connected with agitating and alarming incidents, can scarce be so clearly and distinctly told, but that some ambiguity and doubt may be thrown upon it by a string of successive and minute interrogatories’.42 This is an instance of Scott’s frequently thinking of law and storytelling in similar terms; truth often appears vulnerable to scepticism, yet the magistrate’s sceptical techniques, like Scott’s storytelling, are seen as proper to the job of ascertaining 39 

See Marie Hockenhull Smith, ‘ “How Can Ye Criticise What’s Plain Law, Man?”: The Lawyer, the Novelist, and the Discourse of Authority’, in Freeman and Lewis (eds), Law and Literature. 40 Scott, Heart of Midlothian, 155, 153, 156. 41  The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932–​7), i. 34–​5. 42 Scott, Heart of Midlothian, 139.

306   Victoria Myers the truth. Mary Hockenhull Smith rightly points out that Scott also includes the officials’ questionable leniency to the recidivist Radcliffe, accepting his offer to exchange his imprisonment for a steady job in crime detection. Yet Radcliffe often appears a usefully discerning judge of character. Scott’s judgement of Scottish law is therefore modulated and complex. Although he discloses the law’s susceptibility to epistemological doubt in its everyday workings, he shows it can in practice become perceptive beyond the usual limitations of formal indictments and interrogations. We can recapitulate some of the key themes in Romantic-​era trial literature, and note significant departures, by turning briefly to the example of Joanna Baillie, who directly addressed the threat of institutional scepticism in her ‘Introductory Discourse’ to her Plays on the Passions (1798). Her concept of ‘sympathetick curiosity’ premises that human beings possess the ability to discern and understand each other’s motives and intentions. She believed that drama could obviate both epistemological and institutional scepticism by training judges and other persons to perceive the sources and development of excessive passions, thus rendering their judgements more perceptive and sympathetic. At the same time that she recommended familiar surveillance in everyday life, she also revealed the darker side of social control in the sometimes cruel withholding of approbation. Her Gothic drama De Monfort, for example, dramatizes the protagonist’s hatred for an upstart rival, his growing resentment as Rezenvelt garners the admiration of De Monfort’s social equals, and his fear that confessing his irrational hatred to his sister will deprive him of her approbation. In this state of mind, De Monfort loses self-​ control when a suppliant’s casual lie leads him to believe Rezenvelt has stolen his sister’s favour. Although the play is conducted without explicitly representing either a fictional or a known real-​life trial, it attends to a key element of the insanity excuse in murder trials—​the constraints operating on the defendant’s reason and will that might mitigate judgement of his responsibility. In this way, involving the viewer in the very processes of discernment and judgement required by judge and juror, Baillie used her knowledge of scientific discourse to unite the strategies of legal and literary writing to serve a public purpose.43 The increasing visibility of trials in the press, while changes in trial procedures and dispute over political reform occupied national attention, stimulated Romantic-​era writers to give trials a prominent place in fictional works. Meanwhile, the need for defence against law’s invidious fictions, especially regarding defendants’ intentions, encouraged the incorporation of fictional strategies into trial writings, and into legal proceedings themselves. An institutional scepticism, sometimes allied with crisis in epistemological trust, encouraged Godwin to explore the ambiguity of circumstantial narration while Holcroft, Hone, and Watt used fictional techniques to recover control over representation of their intentions. But Romantic-​era writers did not only promote institutional scepticism: Shelley, Scott, and Baillie also attempted to avert revolutionary

43 

See Victoria Myers, ‘Joanna Baillie and the Emergence of Medico-​Legal Discourse’, European Romantic Review 18.3 (2007), 339–​59.

Trial Literature   307 crisis by making trials the focus for accommodating existing institutions as well as grounding future amelioration.

Further Reading Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England 1660–​1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Brooks, Peter, and Paul Gewirtz (eds), Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Bugg, John, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Johnson, Nancy E., ‘Fashioning the Legal Subject: Narratives from the London Treason Trials of 1794’, Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 21.3 (2009), 413–​43. O’Quinn, Daniel, Staging Governance:  Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–​ 1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Pfau, Thomas, ‘Paranoia Historicized:  Legal Fantasy, Social Change, and Satiric Meta-​ Commentary in the 1794 Treason Trials’, in Stephen C. Behrendt (ed.), Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997). Posner, Richard, Law and Literature:  A Misunderstood Relation (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1988). Shapiro, Barbara J., ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’ and ‘Probable Cause’: Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-​American Law of Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). Ward, Ian, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Ward, Ian, ‘The Jurisprudential Heart of Midlothian’, Scottish Literary Journal 24.1 (1997), 25–​39. Weisberg, Richard, Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). White, James Boyd, Heracles’ Bow:  Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

Pa rt  V

C O G N I T ION

Chapter 20

The Subjecti v e  T u rn Thomas Keymer

Central to Charles Taylor’s account of secular modernity, in which divinely guaranteed truth gives way to the personal and human, is what he calls ‘the massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths’.1 Jean-​Jacques Rousseau is in Taylor’s account the first great exponent of this turn—​not so much as originator as for his capacity to articulate, and prominently instantiate, a shift in the culture at large. The shift is no less apparent in sentimental novels by Rousseau’s contemporaries, and in this regard Taylor cites Laurence Sterne’s celebration of felt sympathy as ethical imperative in A Sentimental Journey (1768): ‘eternal fountain of our feelings! . . . this is thy divinity which stirs within me’.2 More obviously, the subjective turn is central to Romantic aesthetics, with its tendency to look to inner experience for the meaning of exterior phenomena. In The Prelude, narration of ‘What passed within me’—​as Wordsworth puts it in a celebrated apostrophe to Coleridge—​displaces ‘outward things’ as the poem’s focus (Book 3, line 174).3 It is no coincidence that when the term ‘subjectivity’ (from German Subjectivität) entered English after 1800, it did so most conspicuously in Coleridge’s prose: in the current OED entry, Coleridge supplies three of the earliest usages of a word that was becoming necessary to register a more dynamic sense of consciousness in action than was conveyed by older alternatives such as ‘soul’ or ‘self ’. That is not to say that subjectivity was unproblematic, or unexplored, before Rousseau. In England, furious controversy was unleashed by John Locke’s casual—​or seemingly so—​acknowledgement in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that there might conceivably be such a thing as thinking matter: an acknowledgement

1 

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 26. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and others, 8 vols (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1978–​2008), vi. 155 (hereafter FE); see Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 302. 3  1805 version, in William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin, 1995). 2 

312   Thomas Keymer that threatened the age-​old distinction between material bodies and immaterial (hence unchanging, immortal) souls. The Boyle Lectures, founded in 1692 to combat deism and atheism, and still going strong when Wordsworth’s nephew Christopher lectured in 1854, provided a prominent forum for rejoinders by philosopher-​theologians such as Samuel Clarke. In the inaugural lecture, Richard Bentley’s scathing account of fashionable materialist opinion set the tone, ridiculing the notion ‘that all [men’s] thoughts, and the whole of what they call soul, are only various action and repercussion of small particles of matter . . . which finally must cease and perish by death’.4 No less enduringly controversial, in the second edition of the Essay (1694), was Locke’s account of personal identity in terms of consciousness—​as opposed to a pre-​existent, unifying soul—​and specifically the constitutive role of consciousness in uniting thoughts and actions. Now sameness of self depended not on an immaterial spiritual substance but on the connection, through memory, between present conscious experience and conscious experiences in the past. Locke was still coming under immaterialist fire in the later eighteenth century, and when Sterne’s Tristram Shandy endorses the Essay as ‘a history-​book . . . of what passes in a man’s own mind’ (FE, i. 98), his point was more controversial than is often supposed. The verb shared by Sterne and Wordsworth—​to pass—​harks back to Locke’s definition of consciousness as ‘the perception of what passes in a Man’s own mind’; it indicates a dynamism, perhaps also a transience, inherent in this new account of identity as the outcome of consciousness over time.5 Consciousness and its passage look less serene in David Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739–​40) not only rejects the traditional Cartesian view of personal identity as stabilized by an unchanging immaterial soul, but also fails to detect coherent selfhood in the evidence of inward experience. Hume recognizes the human need to believe in an essential self, but finds no invariable impression to underwrite such an idea. On inspection there is only radical instability, ‘a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux’.6 Here ‘bundle’ understates the mobile, disorganized condition Hume has in mind, and in the more studied metaphor that follows, invoked for its connotations of unreality and dislocation, Hume characterizes the mind as ‘a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-​pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’ (253). In a later generation, Hume might have invoked the exotic illusions of an eidophusikon, or the flickering projections of phantasmagoria; continuous selfhood is no more now than an enabling fiction cobbled together from fugitive shards of perception. The crucial faculty for maintaining this fiction is memory, which overcomes its inevitable patchiness—​‘Who can tell me . . . his thoughts

4  Richard Bentley, The Folly of Atheism (1692), quoted by Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 61. 5  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 115. 6  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-​Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 252.

The Subjective Turn   313 and actions on the first of January 1715, the 11th of March 1719, and the 3d of August 1733?’ (262)—​by training us to recognize, and imaginatively extend, a chain of causation between present and past perceptions. In this way, memory becomes the source of personal identity, stitching countless fugitive selves into a diachronic whole. Yet Hume was never content with his account of identity as fictitious in the Treatise, and he restricts the implications of his discussion to personal identity with regard to thought or imagination, as opposed to the passions. He worries, in an appendix to Book 1, that his analysis fails, even so, to pin down the relations between memory, causation, and identity, and expresses his famous determination, philosophical scepticism notwithstanding, ‘to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life’ (269). When his friend Lord Kames rather feebly posited, in opposition to this scepticism, ‘a feeling of identity, which accompanies me through all my changes’, Hume genially congratulated Kames on a ‘Method of explaining personal Identity . . . more satisfactory than any thing that had ever occur’d to me’.7 It is hard to take this seriously as a retraction of ‘bundle’ theory, but in Book 2, which shifts from the understanding to the passions, Hume makes several appeals to consciousness of self as an unproblematic idea, indeed one ‘always intimately present with us’ (317). When in his last illness he sought to defend his reputation in the brief memoir known as ‘My Own Life’ (posthumously published in 1777), the result was not the Shandean fragmentation we might expect, but a limpid, seamless account of more or less fixed identity, couched in traditional terminology of ‘natural temper’ and ‘ruling passion’. When Hume opens by confessing it ‘difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity’, the notion of futility as well as self-​regard is momentarily in play, but he comes no closer than this to signalling the fictionality of the exercise.8 Novelists undertook more extended and adventurous representations of self:  representations, moreover, that in some ways foreshadow postmodern approaches to subjectivity not as a free-​standing psychological entity, but as one constituted by and within discourse. It was in Richardson’s novels of the 1740s that the capacity of epistolary narration for exploring the ebbs and flows of consciousness was most fully realized. Richardson’s fictional voices were many, and as what we might call a method writer—​‘I am all the while absorbed in the character’—​he sometimes speculated on the relationship between the multiple narrative identities he assumed and his staid quotidian self. ‘It is not fair to say—​I, identically I, an any-​where, while I keep within the character’, he told one correspondent.9 The technique enabled subtly individualized explorations of psychological interiority that led contemporaries to praise his fiction in tropes of

7 

Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (Edinburgh, 1751), 233–​4; Hume to Kames, 24 Jul. 1746; both quoted by Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-​ Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 423. 8  David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), xxxiii, xxv, xxxi. 9  Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 286 (14 Feb. 1754).

314   Thomas Keymer geological revelation: the inmost recesses of the mind, or in Diderot’s words ‘le flambeau au fond de la caverne’ (the torch to the depths of the cavern).10 Yet Richardson also constantly stresses the dimness of the torch. He does so with special emphasis when in Clarissa (1747–​8) his most self-​critical narrator finally despairs of the mismatch between fluid consciousness and linear prose, ‘so I can write nothing at all’.11 Letters had long been prized as receptacles of authentic interiority, validated as such by their assumed spontaneity of composition and intimacy of address, and this assumption continued to underlie the confessional epistolarity of Romantic-​period works such as Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris (1823). Yet the breakthrough character of Richardson’s inward turn is best seen by contrast with an alternative tradition of letter-​writing, focused on displays of wit and outward-​looking satire, and a related tradition of novel-​writing hostile to epistolary disclosure. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose own letters (posthumously published in 1763) self-​consciously perform multiple, artificial identities to entertain different addressees, was fascinated by Richardson’s heroines, but recoiled with disdain from their self-​revelations: ‘Fig leaves are as necessary for our Minds as our Bodies.’12 Her bon mot was probably inspired by her cousin Henry Fielding, who used Shamela (1741) to unpick the equation between epistolary outpour and authentic consciousness, and continued to poke fun at Richardsonian interiority thereafter. As he notes of the hypocrite Blifil in Tom Jones (1749), ‘it would be an ill Office in us to pay a Visit to the inmost Recesses of his Mind’.13 Nor would it make aesthetic sense to do so, for Fielding’s fiction displays with unusual clarity what the subjective turn is from: a view of universal human nature still marked by humoral theory, in which cratylic names (Allworthy, Supple) denote the broad types into which humanity subdivides, with little need for further individuation, and no sense at all that inwardness might yield worthwhile gains. Richardson’s influence in the Romantic period reached well beyond the novel genre. As Gabrielle Starr has shown, the constructions of subjectivity achieved in his writing, with what Hazlitt called his ‘certain ideal forms of passion and imagination’, were to enter Romantic verse as a constituent feature unavailable in earlier lyric forms.14 That said, the consequences for fiction lie nearer the surface. Jane Austen abandoned her early experiments with epistolarity long before starting to publish, but in novels such as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816) the trace of letters remains strong, alongside probing representations of consciousness in free indirect discourse (a technique pioneered in Richardson’s last novel). The ardent personal correspondence adapted by Mary Hays for 10  Denis Diderot, ‘L’éloge de Richardson’, Journal étranger (Jan. 1762), in Œuvres complètes de Diderot, ed. J. Assézat, 20 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1875-​7), v. 225. 11  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 890. 12  The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–​7), iii. 97 (20 Oct. 1755). 13  Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. Martin Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 159. 14  Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 163.

The Subjective Turn   315 inclusion in her Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) produced a novel approaching the modern category of ‘autobiografiction’, in which authorial experience, fictional narrative, and the essay form intertwine.15 In its evocation of a specifically Scottish, Calvinist subjectivity, James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) draws with alarming irony on spiritual autobiography and Covenanter testimonies, but there is also a Richardsonian dimension to the clash of opposing, self-​justifying viewpoints engineered by Hogg’s double narrative structure. Even so, the most significant novel for the subjective turn in Romanticism is Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–​67), not only for the persistence with which it explores consciousness in all its waywardness, but also for its anticipation of the condition—​that ‘feeling of indissoluble antagonism . . . between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication’—​that Friedrich Schlegel would theorize as Romantic irony.16 The extent of Sterne’s philosophical seriousness is debatable, and Tristram Shandy’s explicit references to Locke on identity, language and other topics had much to do with intermediary sources such as Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (first published in 1728).We know that his fiction caught Hume’s attention, but Hume’s celebrated judgement of 1773—​‘the best book . . . writ by any Englishman these thirty years (for Dr Franklyn is an American) is Tristram Shandy, bad as it is’—​scarcely counts as full endorsement.17 And though the fragmentary, opaque nature of personal identity also preoccupies Sterne in his sermons, where individuals are ‘strange compounds of contradictory qualities’ and ‘there is no character . . . in every point consistent with itself ’ (FE, iv. 300; iv. 103), passages like this occur within a time-​honoured framework of Pauline Christianity, not modern philosophy of mind. Nor does it seem that the illusion of continuous selfhood was any harder for Sterne to establish in actual practice than it was for Hume. His ‘Memoirs’, posthumously published just two years before Hume’s, are ontologically untroubled; in a characteristic moment of self-​assertion, Sterne’s childhood self climbs a ladder to the freshly whitewashed schoolroom ceiling and ‘wrote with a brush in large capital letters, LAU. STERNE’.18 Yet it is hard not to find in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey a creative exploration, profound as well as playful, of questions about consciousness and identity that were still being debated by philosophers as Sterne wrote. ‘There is not a more

15   On this term, coined in 1906, see Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-​Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 171. For Hays, see Tilottama Rajan, Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 82–​116. 16  Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 13. See Paul Hamilton’s case for Tristram Shandy as a common source for Romantic irony in both German thought and English verse: ‘Romantic Irony and English Literary History’, in Karsten Engelberg (ed.), The Romantic Heritage (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press, 1983). 17  Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), ii. 269 (30 Jan. 1773). 18  Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 4.

316   Thomas Keymer perplexing affair in life to me, than to set about telling any one who I am’, his narrator Yorick famously declares in A Sentimental Journey. At one level, the line registers the embarrassing incongruity of Yorick’s Shakespearean name, which in the episode that follows he handles by indicating the gravediggers’ scene in a copy of Hamlet with all the logocentrism of the schoolboy Sterne: ‘Me, Voici! said I’ (FE, vi. 112). But the signified is less stable than the signifier here, and at another level Yorick’s words recognize the sheer intractability of consciousness in language, and the resistance of subjectivity, in all its fluidity, to the simplifications of linear prose. The same recognition is embodied in the novel’s disruption of narrative continuity, and its presentation instead as an intense but discontinuous sequence of perceptions and feelings, focused on subjective response, not objective reality. When Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘no writing seems to flow more exactly into the very folds and creases of the individual mind, to express its changing moods’, she found in A Sentimental Journey an anticipation of modernist narration.19 Yet the work’s experimental inwardness was also a response to existing debates about the nature of consciousness and its role over time in creating the experience of selfhood from shifting perceptions. Sterne indicates this context through Yorick’s anxiety about materialist arguments—​from Locke’s ‘thinking matter’ aside to La Mettrie’s alarming L’Homme machine (1748)—​that would reduce his subjectivity to mere particles in motion. In this context, Yorick’s location of personal identity in flashes of remembered consciousness, and in the affinities that stitch them into coherent selfhood, is a defensive action, one that finally leaves him (though ironies undercut his assurance) ‘positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me of the contrary’ (FE, vi. 151). Tristram Shandy voices the same perplexity with a lighter touch. The exemplary moment comes in the seventh volume of Sterne’s open-​ended (but eventually nine-​volume) work, when aimless throat-​clearing tips suddenly into existential doubt: —​My good friend, quoth I—​as sure as I am I—​and you are you—​ —​And who are you? said he.—​Don’t puzzle me; said I. (FE, ii. 633)

The puzzlement is everywhere. Published in parts over seven years, Tristram Shandy presents itself as the attempt of an ailing memoirist—​a memoirist free of Humean scruples about the vanity of life-​writing, though increasingly desperate for success as his project unfolds—​to fix his identity in print before death intervenes. But the enterprise soon jumps off the rails of linear narrative, pulled digressively here and there—​ pulled, especially, backwards in time—​by the vagaries of consciousness and memory. Like Hume in the Treatise, though with none of the same clarity of recognition, Sterne’s hapless narrator fails to articulate the simple, continuous selfhood he seeks, and finds

19 

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, Second Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 79.

The Subjective Turn   317 himself caught instead in a potentially endless riot of transitory perceptions. At one level, Tristram Shandy farcically dramatizes the unavailability, when put to the narrative test, of the substantial, persisting self of commonsense belief. At another, the work beautifully represents the restlessness of Humean mental theatre, and the constitution of identity through a succession of impressions and ideas and the chain-​forging efforts of memory. It is not necessary to find an allusion to Hume’s ‘different perceptions . . . in a perpetual flux’ in the famous marbled page of Tristram Shandy, a fluid swarm of colour that Tristram offers as an emblem of his work. Nor is it necessary to see an allusion to Hume’s questions about discontinuous memory in Tristram’s obsessive dating of his thoughts, ‘struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759’ or again ‘this day (August the 10th, 1761)’ (FE, i. 71; i. 449). A third passage finds him ‘sitting, this 12th day of August, 1766, in a purple jerkin and yellow pair of slippers’, so fulfilling his father’s prediction ‘That I should neither think, nor act like any other man’s child’ (FE, ii. 737): exactly the reverse of Hume’s pragmatic determination to ‘to live, and talk, and act like other people.’20 We know from a gleeful 1764 letter that Sterne once preached a sermon before Hume, and sparred with him afterwards; whether or not he also read Hume does not alter the affinity of the Treatise and Tristram Shandy as similarly disruptive, though generically divergent, responses to the Lockean paradigm of subjectivity. The philosophical context is in play again as Tristram struggles to narrate the scene of his birth. ‘O! never let it be forgotten upon what small particles your eloquence and your fame depend’ (FE, i. 116), he exclaims in words that connect the slipperiness of language and meaning with the materiality, or otherwise, of personal identity and its external corollary, reputation. The exclamation is usually explained in terms of Sterne’s games elsewhere with Lockean linguistics, notably his clever, creative send-​ups of the Essay’s chapters ‘Of Particles’ and ‘Of the Imperfection of Words’. Also in play, however, is Locke’s response to the materialist view of mental activity as no more than matter in motion. As early as 1683, Locke had insisted that personal identity ‘lies not in haveing the same numericall [i.e. identical] body made up of the same particles . . . but in the memory & knowledg of ones past self & actions continued on under the consciousness of being the same person’.21 In his wake, theologians as well as philosophers continued to worry about materialist explanations of consciousness and memory. Among them was Archbishop Tillotson, a heavily used authority in Sterne’s sermons, for whom materialism ruled out the continuity essential to selfhood: For if that which we call the Soul, were nothing else but . . . a company of small round Particles of Matter in perpetual motion, it being a fluid thing, it would be liable to a continual dissipation of its parts, and the new parts that come, would be altogether strangers to the Impressions made upon the old.22

20 Hume, Treatise, 269. 21 

MS note, quoted by Thiel, Early Modern Subject, 99. The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, 2 vols (1712), ii. 129 (Sermon 121: ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul, as discover’d by Nature, and by Revelation’). 22 

318   Thomas Keymer Only the more limited concept of corporeal identity—​Locke’s identity of man as opposed to person—​could be explained in material terms. But even here complications arose from the mutability of matter, and for Locke this identity could reside ‘in nothing but a participation of the same continued Life, by constantly fleeting Particles of Matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized Body.’23 Absent this condition of unique biological organization (as opposed to a soul that might conceivably transmigrate), one cannot establish, strictly speaking, that different men from different ages are not in fact the same man. Playfully, Locke lists Augustine and Cesare Borgia among his candidates for sameness. Beyond the text of Tristram Shandy, one might find in Sterne’s manipulation of his public image a witty performance of this problem. In its full modern sense, literary celebrity is normally seen as a phenomenon arising after 1800, dependent on effects of industrialization—​technologies of production, infrastructures of distribution, a socially diverse mass audience—​that existed for Byron but not for Sterne. Yet Sterne was quick to sense an interest in authors as personalities that was already beginning to emerge, and this interest was as much in private minds as public deeds. By the mid-​eighteenth century there was an eager market, alongside the novel, for the vein of autobiographical candour promised in memoirs such as An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), by one of Wordsworth’s less illustrious predecessors as Poet Laureate. The difference is that Sterne, whose epigrammatic declaration of his own candidacy for celebrity, ‘I wrote not [to] be fed, but to be famous’, self-​consciously reverses Cibber’s ‘I wrote to be Fed, not to be Famous’,24 offered his readers not Richardsonian inwardness but an array of fictional masks. Instead of suggesting the unitary and continuous (though in practice somewhat rambling) subjectivity of Cibber’s Apology, Sterne strategically confused his authorial identity with his fictional personae, and mischievously performed a range of selves. His sermons appeared as those of Parson Yorick, and he was lionized in Paris as the Chevalier Shandy. Boswell celebrated Sterne’s multiple identities in his ‘Poetical Epistle to Doctor Sterne, Parson Yorick, and Tristram Shandy’; ‘Philalethes’ deplored them in the Public Ledger (4 March 1761), citing Sterne’s own sermon on self-​knowledge to criticize the mobile selfhood of ‘this same Yorick, or Stern, or Tristram Shandy, or &c.’ As Peter Briggs puts it, with a crucial qualification, Sterne ‘deliberately became a “personality,” or rather several, for public consumption’.25 He was famous for being plural. Yet for all the artifice and theatricality with which Sterne and contemporaries such as Garrick fashioned their images, the relationship between emergent celebrity culture and the development of Romantic interiority, especially as expressed in autobiography, remains a real one. As Tom Mole writes, celebrity culture ‘is intricately connected to the history of the self, since it helps to shape the subjectivity of those it promotes, and, by promoting them, to change understandings of subjectivity

23 Locke, Essay, 332. 24 

FE, vii. 116 (30 Jan. 1760); see also 122 n. for Cibber and related passages in Tristram Shandy. Peter Briggs, ‘Laurence Sterne as Literary Celebrity’, in Thomas Keymer (ed.), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 87. 25 

The Subjective Turn   319 in general’.26 The process is clearest with Rousseau, whose posthumously published Confessions (1782–​9) presents itself as the most authentic documentation of selfhood ever achieved: ‘the only portrait of a man, painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth, which exists and will probably ever exist’.27 One consequence of this claim was Boswell’s no less extravagant counter-​claim, in the biographical case of his Life of Johnson (1791), to exhibit Johnson ‘more completely than any man who has ever yet lived’.28 But it was deep interiority that Rousseau had in view, not Boswell’s exhaustive documentation of social and professional life. The moi seul announced in the Confessions—​nothing but the self; the self as solitude—​takes its origin in the implicit model of Augustine’s Confessions, the fourth-​century work that for Taylor ‘introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought’.29 Readers were at no risk of mistaking Rousseau and Augustine for the same man, however. Where Augustinian inwardness is always a means to theological ends, Rousseau commits his project to a new science of man; his enterprise is rational and individualist, emanating from a sense of the self as fundamentally unlike any other, and analysing this self as a philosophical undertaking. As he later restates his ambitious goal, the Confessions will be ‘unique for a veracity for which there was no model, so that for once at least a man might be seen from the inside and exactly as he was’ (505). Yet Rousseau’s work was less disinterested than all this suggests. It is now a standard observation that the Confessions, ‘by dramatically bringing a secular and self-​exhibiting self into the literary limelight, also helped to initiate the culture of celebrity’.30 But the project was bound up with celebrity from the start, and celebrity of a controversial kind. As well as offering the autobiographical subject as an exhibit for scientific attention, the work vindicates Rousseau’s reputation in the face of the intense public interest—​indeed, notoriety—​that had dogged him since his iconoclastic publications of the 1750s; it becomes ‘the only sure monument to my character that has not been disfigured by my enemies’ (3). Rousseau never asks to what extent these goals might conflict, but others did, notably Hume, who sponsored the English sojourn of 1766–​7 when Rousseau wrote much of the Confessions. During the visit, which Rousseau spent protesting his love of solitude and anonymity while making flamboyant public appearances in his trademark Armenian cloak, Hume recorded a growing suspicion that his friend’s conspicuous oddity was ‘an art to gain celebrity’. After their widely publicized quarrel, he fretted that Rousseau’s rhetoric of self-​justification might operate at his own expense, and that the work in progress would ‘fall on me with some atrocious lie’.31 In both respects, the 26 

Tom Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 12. 27  Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar, ed. Patrick Coleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. 28  James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 22. 29 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 131. 30  Eugene Stelzig (ed.), Romantic Autobiography in England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 1. 31  Letters of Hume, ii. 15 (16 Feb. 1766); ii. 62 (15 Jul. 1766).

320   Thomas Keymer deep subjectivity of the Confessions was a calculated display: textual exhibitionism to match Rousseau’s social performances of self, and a rhetorically suspect public relations campaign. There is a further, more Shandean, sense in which Rousseau’s vaunted subjectivity fails to escape the condition of fictional selfhood. Words and deeds can be adequately recorded, but feelings resist description; heart and mind pull contrary ways, as though not the property of a unified self; the vagaries of memory disrupt diachronic sequence, throwing up data ‘too numerous, too muddled, and too disagreeable . . . to be narrated without confusion’ (608). Even as Sterne was expressing, via Tristram and Yorick, the perplexity of autobiography, Rousseau experienced it in practice. And though it may be an exaggeration to suggest, as Stephen Behrendt does, that little separates the Confessions as representation from ‘the brilliantly performative nature of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’,32 just this apprehension seems inherent in the new strain of celebrity autobiographies that followed in Rousseau’s wake. Like subjectivity, autobiography enters the language in these years (the earliest OED illustration dates from 1797), already with a sense of itself as generically problematic. As Julia Fawcett notes, sprawling theatre autobiographies such as An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy (1785) and Samuel William Ryley’s The Itinerant (1808–​17) explicitly present themselves as Shandean undertakings—​caught, writes Ryley, in a ‘Shandean mantle’—​and so identify their subjects as ‘remembered but never quite readable, at once well-​known and, ultimately, unknowable’.33 The most powerful autobiographies of the era—​if we include such generically complex cases as The Prelude (posthumously published in 1850) and Biographia Literaria (1817)—​are more robust in ambition. They emanate from a shared sense in Wordsworth and Coleridge, impatient with the passivity of consciousness in empiricist accounts and attracted to newer physiological theories of sensation, of subjectivity as constituted by the creative perceptual activity of imagination. It is this idea that animates lyrics such as ‘Tintern Abbey’, in which the senses not only ‘perceive’ but ‘half-​create’—​though Wordsworth borrows here from Young’s firmly Lockean Night Thoughts (1742–​5), in which the senses ‘half create the wondrous World they see’. The same inwardness marks ‘This Lime-​Tree Bower My Prison’, where the mental resources activated by Coleridge’s immobility allow him to recreate and express the poem’s landscape more vividly in absence than in presence. Recent scholarship has modified existing accounts of both poets’ early interest in associationist psychology (as developed by Hartley from Locke in the 1740s) by pointing to medical discourses which by the 1790s were stressing the physiological basis of consciousness, cognition, and subjectivity. For Noel Jackson, this new science was deeply informed by Hume’s emphasis on the fleeting temporality of perception, and Wordsworth’s debt to it lies ‘in the way in which its investigation into the nature of human sense perception provides a model for the formal arrangement of the 32  Stephen C. Behrendt, ‘ “I am not what I am”: Staged Presence in Romantic Autobiography’, in Stelzig (ed.), Romantic Autobiography, 148. 33  Julia H. Fawcett, ‘Creating Character in “Chiaro Oscuro”: Sterne’s Celebrity, Cibber’s Apology, and the Life of Tristram Shandy’, The Eighteenth Century 53.2 (2012), 141–​61 (p. 156).

The Subjective Turn   321 poet’s reflections on those very subjects’.34 In The Prelude’s endeavour to model how ‘the mind of man is fashioned and built up’, as Wordsworth puts it in the two-​part version of 1799 (Part 1, line 67), the poem gives an account of developing selfhood that stresses formative experiences in time, their preservation in ongoing memory, and the role of consciousness in forging continuities between them. In its full manuscript state of 1805, The Prelude becomes a strenuous attempt to discover and trace an integrated subjectivity and enshrine it in language. Finding in nature not only the formative experiences that constitute the poet’s ‘single self ’ or ‘true self ’ (Book 3, line 356; Book 10, line 915), but also the figures through which to record its seamless flow and growth, the poem calls on memory to bind its disparate materials into a seamless whole. Coleridge called the outcome ‘divine Self-​biography’, and predicted that the overarching poetic-​philosophical project inaugurated by The Prelude would constitute pure subjectivity on the page: ‘a Faithful Transcript of . . . his own habitual Feelings and Modes of seeing and hearing’.35 Yet for all these ambitions, an important part of Wordsworth’s self-​consciousness involves recognition of the obstacles impeding his project, and the risk, in particular, that subjectivity constructed in memory and committed in language may never transcend fictional selfhood. A Shandean subtext occasionally breaks the sublime surface of his poem—​and when Wordsworth earlier claimed to have read little modern English literature beyond ‘three volumes of Tristram Shandy’,36 he no doubt means the whole work, often published after Sterne’s death as a three-​volume set. As the poem proceeds, the Derwent-​like rush of its opening movement gives way to Shandean detours which, in their ‘broken windings’ (Book 2, line 289) and ‘motions retrograde’ (Book 9, line 8), threaten the linear coherence of self-​analysis. Even if the narrative holds its shape, it becomes unclear that adequate language exists to fulfil The Prelude’s introspective ambitions, so that the declaration quoted earlier in this chapter—​‘my theme has been what passed within me’—​brings with it anxiety that this theme ‘lies far hidden from the reach of words’ (Book 3, line 185). Though working hard to unite past and present selves in seamless organic development, the poem is repeatedly troubled by a sense of disjuncture—​‘often do I seem | Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself | And of some other Being’ (Book 2, lines 31-​3)—​and intimates that the earlier consciousness is only dimly recoverable beneath the projections of the later. ‘I cannot say what portion is in truth | The naked recollection of that time’, writes Wordsworth of one reconstructed memory, ‘And what may rather have been called to life | By after-​meditation’ (Book 3, lines 645–​8). Another passage worries that the analytic resources of the poem will never touch the fluidity they seek to define. ‘But who shall parcel out | His intellect, by 34 

Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 76; see also Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 39–​92. 35  Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 53 (4 Jan. 1804); Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956-​7 1), ii. 1034 (15 Jan. 1804). 36  Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–​1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993–​5), 132–​3.

322   Thomas Keymer geometric rules, | Split, like a province, into round and square?’ Wordsworth asks in an eloquent figure for the mismatch between rudimentary measurement—​an imperialist cartography is implied—​and immeasurable life (Book 2, lines 208–​10). Discussing this passage, Monique Morgan disputes an earlier critic’s account of it as evoking ‘the “Lockean epistemology and associationism run mad” of Tristram Shandy, and reads it as a simple rejection of causal narrative structure; Jackson explains it as critiquing ‘the “pre-​positivist” philosophers of the Enlightenment and their taxonomical ordering of sensations in time’.37 Yet Wordsworth’s lines are also unmistakably self-​implicating, not least when they recognize the danger of attributing truth to our own categorical fictions—​to our willingness to ‘create distinctions, then | Deem that our puny boundaries are things | Which we perceive, and not which we have made’ (Book 2, lines 221–​4). Here, as ever, Wordsworth strives towards a conviction that indeterminate selfhood will be surmounted by his own analytic rigour, or at least by his ‘best conjectures’ (Book 2, line 238). ‘Hard task to analyse a soul’, he writes (Book 2, line 232): hard, but not impossible—​nor vain. Yet the intricate textual history of The Prelude tells a different story, most pertinently in Wordsworth’s encounter with memories that complicate or jeopardize the patterns of continuous selfhood running through the poem. One passage, separately published as the fragment ‘Nutting’ in 1800, explicitly considers the difficulty of bridging two alien (narrated and narrating) consciousnesses, and the possible fictionality of memory as a faculty that, in doing so, may ‘now | Confound my present feelings with the past’.38 These lines, Wordsworth acknowledged decades later, were ‘struck out as not being wanted’ in The Prelude,39 and the textual instability of the project speaks for itself. Like Tristram, Wordsworth struggles to fix a subjectivity in constant motion as he composes the poem over time, and The Prelude’s evolution between its origins in 1798–​9 and its last major revision forty years later nicely illustrates Sterne’s claim elsewhere that each individual ‘may be as unlike . . . the man he was twenty or thirty years ago, as he ever was from any thing of his own species’ (FE, iv. 104). Disrupted in its early states by the potential gulf between the written subject of the past and the writing subject in the present, the poem was disrupted thereafter by the intrusion of the revising subject, ending in a fissured final version that makes the mobility of personal identity over time at once its explicit subject and its textual condition.40 Much commentary has focused on Wordsworth’s struggle to assimilate to his Tory Anglican maturity the radicalism and heterodoxy of his earlier self, but even in the 1850 Prelude the joins still show; for Macaulay (in a journal entry of 28 July 1850), the poem was ‘to the last degree Jacobinical . . . I understand perfectly why Wordsworth did not choose to publish it in his lifetime.’

37  Monique Morgan, Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-​Century British Long Poem (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 79; Jackson, Science and Sensation, 70–​1. 38  ‘Nutting’, lines 47–​8, in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (Harlow: Longman, 1992), 298. 39  Lyrical Ballads, 377 (authorial comment of 1843). 40  See Stephen Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 83–​154.

The Subjective Turn   323 For Coleridge, by contrast, autobiography was a strategic public intervention, an attempt to manage and modify celebrity of the embarrassing modern kind he describes at the start of the Biographia, in which, as Jason Goldsmith writes, ‘personality eclipsed accomplishment’.41 Yet Coleridge also gave this attempt an openly Shandean cast. At an early stage he spoke of writing ‘an Autobiographia literaria, or Sketches of my literary Life & opinions’, and the Shandean subtitle survives in the published text.42 Hazlitt picked up these terms to complain that ‘only two or three passages . . . relate to the details of the author’s life’, the work dissolving instead ‘in the multiplicity of his speculative opinions’,43 and the Biographia is indeed a kaleidoscope of disparate materials in which philosophy, religion, and criticism frequently predominate. Yet Hazlitt’s attack underestimates the extent to which the book was shaped—​or unshaped—​by Coleridge’s awareness of Tristram Shandy as the locus classicus of self-​expressive impasse, and as a creative antithesis to his own ideals of organic selfhood. In notes for a lecture of 1818, he praises Sterne as a digressive, self-​divided genius who ‘delight[s]‌to end in nothing, or a direct contradiction’,44 and in the Biographia Sterne unleashes comparable impulses of his own. Presented in plainly Shandean terms as the ‘immethodical . . . miscellany’ of an author for whom ‘metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby-​horse’,45 Coleridge’s work is replete with mock-​laments at the disruption of narrative by opaque words or invasive opinion, and with peremptory dialogues about structure and meaning with wrong-​headed inscribed readers. Like Tristram Shandy, it pointedly ends in nothing, or in contradiction. Coleridge closes the Biographia by acknowledging that it has in fact been no such thing, and promises a compensatory further attempt while at the same time undercutting his promise with Shandean phrasing. ‘For write it I assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me’, he affirms (ii. 237), ironically recalling Tristram’s vain hope of completing his own Life and Opinions ‘if it pleases the fountain of health to bless me so long with life’ (FE, i. 82). A further reason for the Shandean stance of the Biographia is that Coleridge was still responding, albeit with greater hostility, to the philosophical accounts of consciousness and identity on which Sterne had played. Long before undertaking the Biographia, Coleridge was expressing alarm about Hume’s account ‘of our whole being an aggregate of successive single sensations’, and in 1816 he denounced materialist accounts of consciousness as ‘the relation of unproductive particles to each other’; this was a ‘philosophy of death’.46 Much of the philosophical digression in Biographia Literaria 41 

Jason Goldsmith, ‘Celebrity and the Spectacle of Nation’, in Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 23. 42  Collected Letters of Coleridge, iv. 578–​9 (29 Jul. 1815). 43  J. R. de J. Jackson (ed.), Coleridge: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1970), 295 (in Edinburgh Review, Aug. 1817). 44  Alan B. Howes (ed.), Sterne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1974), 353. 45  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), i. 88; i. 85. 46  Coleridge’s Notebooks, 74 (23 Dec. 1804); Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 89.

324   Thomas Keymer develops an alternative account of identity and consciousness based on the vital imagination, as Coleridge takes issue with Hume and Hartley on association, and with materialist accounts of the mind, while also pondering the split between analysed and analysing subject: between ‘Ego contemplatus’ and ‘Ego contemplans’ (i. 72n.). Unlike Hazlitt, whose Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) gives a directly Humean account of personal identity as illusory, Coleridge posits an absolute, autonomous self, a Kantian subjectivity that knows and is known, and requires no ‘other predicate . . . but that of self-​consciousness’ (i. 276). Even so, the very presence of these avowedly hobby-​ horsical chapters—​digressive ‘opinions’, not progressive ‘life’—​simultaneously inhibits the capacity of the work to establish coherent selfhood as a narrative act. More mundane factors may have reinforced Coleridge’s determination to renege in practice on the expectations of autobiography that he first fosters. Like Wordsworth in The Prelude, he warily skirts his conspicuous discontinuity of political identity, and firmly excludes the areas of interest suggested by his opening reference to his own unwarranted celebrity: the broken marriage, the opium addiction. De Quincey was the sharpest observer of these evasions, and when writing his own autobiography soon afterwards he made the condition hidden by Coleridge central to his text. Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater (1821) does not need to name the ‘celebrated man of the present day’ who has indulged, but not recorded, an addiction yet more excessive than De Quincey’s own, and implicitly presents itself as the Biographia’s concealed subtext, punctuated as it by what Frederick Burwick aptly calls ‘Coleridgean moments’.47 Other models include Rousseau, whose title De Quincey revives, and Wordsworth, whose Prelude, which De Quincey read in manuscript in 1810, haunts the Confessions not only in its structure of narrative recollection—​a Prelude-​like sequence of formative ‘spots of time’—​but also in its open, provisional condition, revised, extended, and reinterpreted through six distinct phases until arriving at its final state of 1856. For all the rootedness of the Confessions in unique experience, the work repeatedly casts its subject in moulds created for others—​a recognition with which De Quincey flirts in a notable passage about ‘counterfeiting my own self ’ (25). On one hand, he finds in opium a way through the impasse of imitative subjectivity, a way that removes the ‘veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind’ (69); on the other, opium embroils him in horrors he despairs ‘of either recalling, or constructing into a regular narrative’ (62). Inevitably, the work presents its severest crises of introspection and expression in words echoing Sterne. ‘No’, De Quincey exclaims, ‘paint me, if at all, according to your own fancy’ (61), recalling the page left blank in Tristram Shandy as an emblem of inexpressibility (FE, ii. 566).

47  Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2; Frederick Burwick, ‘De Quincey as Autobiographer’, in Stelzig (ed.), Romantic Autobiography, 122. See also Nigel Leask, ‘ “Murdering One’s Double”: De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater and S. T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, in Peter J. Kitson and Thomas N. Corns (eds), Coleridge and the Armoury of the Human Mind: Essays on his Prose Writings (London: Routledge, 1991), 78–​98.

The Subjective Turn   325 If the subjective turn is necessarily a subjective bind, we may look to Byron, if not for a solution, than at least for flamboyant recognition of fictitious selfhood. Byron did not, like Coleridge or Hazlitt, write serious essays about philosophy of mind, and it would be rash to find a materialist theory of personal identity in his famous lines about book reviews and Keats’s death: ‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery Particle, | Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article’.48 Subjectivity for Byron was a matter of performance, one that would foster the celebrity cult of Byromania by seeming to offer authentic inwardness, self-​identical over time but constantly re-​articulated, or, as a reviewer of his unfinished Don Juan (1819–​24) put it, ‘a mirror in which are reflected the movements of his soul’.49 Yet on inspection the poems also disrupt, or allow to multiply in Shandean style, this mesmerizing public image. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–​18) identity, though relentlessly explored, is not only discontinuous—​‘I am not now | That which I have been’, the poet-​narrator finally declares—​but also ineffable, for ‘what we have of feeling most intense | Outstrips our faint expression’ (Canto 4, stanzas 185, 158). Byron was dismayed when the Edinburgh Review found Childe Harold Rousseauvian, and in Don Juan he placed greater emphasis on this sense of selfhood as sublime, calling the work a ‘poetical T Shandy’.50 In the dizzying created world of Don Juan, where both hero and narrator are mobile in shape, uncertainty about identity is so endemic that even Byron’s most brilliant efforts at self-​definition bring no more stability than ‘a versified Aurora Borealis, | Which flashes o’er a waste and icy clime’ (Canto 7, stanzas 11–​12). Meanings will never truly fix, so the poem seeks no closure. Just as an infinity of subjective experience makes Tristram start to imagine his work as a forty-​year project, so Byron’s narrator first extends his twelve-​book epic to twenty-​four books, and then envisages a hundred. Only through perpetual writing can his agile subjectivity continue to unfold, and as an ongoing process, not a stable product. There is no end to the subjective turn, or, as Tristram says with beautiful economy, ‘the more I write, the more I shall have to write’ (FE, i. 342).

Further Reading Bewell, Alan, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Bromwich, David, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Clej, Alina, A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

48  Don Juan, Canto 12, stanza 60, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​91), v. 15. All Byron quotations are from this edition. 49  Edinburgh Monthly Review (Oct. 1819), quoted by Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 26. 50  Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973-​94), x. 150 (14 Apr. 1823).

326   Thomas Keymer Fairer, David, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–​1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Gill, Stephen, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Henderson, Andrea K., Romantic Identities:  Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–​ 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Hess, Scott, Authoring the Self: Self-​Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (New York: Routledge, 2005). Jackson, Noel, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Jacobus, Mary, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Jones, Ewan James, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014). Kearns, Sheila M., Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Romantic Autobiography (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995). Nichols, Ashton, The Revolutionary ‘I’:  Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-​Presentation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). Perry, Seamus, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Richardson, Alan, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Smyth, Adam (ed.), A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Treadwell, James, Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783–​1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Chapter 21

Literatu re a nd the Sen se s Noel Jackson

The British Romantic period has long been recognized as an era uniquely preoccupied with the senses and sensation. No literary period before or since has been so closely identified with the representation and evocation of powerful sensory experiences or with the dynamics of human perception. Though many statements from the period might be put forward as illustrative of this aspect of Romanticism, the most familiar is that of Keats: ‘O for a Life of a Sensations rather than of Thoughts!’1 For modernist critics such as T. E. Hulme and Irving Babbitt, Keats’s famous utterance was a call to irrationality, evidence of the primitivism and puerility of Romantic literature, with its embarrassing indulgences and self-​absorption. Babbitt equated Romanticism with a movement toward ‘a hypertrophy of sensation and an atrophy of ideas, toward a constantly expanding sensorium and a diminishing intellect’.2 This hostile view of Romanticism was encapsulated in endlessly repeated anecdotes, such as Benjamin Robert Haydon’s testimony that Keats once coated his tongue with cayenne pepper in order to intensify his enjoyment of claret.3 Recent scholarship, however, has recognized Keats’s statement as something more profound and compelling: an appeal for a more embodied way of knowing—​a claim that thinking based in physical sensation could potentially engender a higher form of knowledge than that obtained through what Keats calls in the same letter ‘consequitive reasoning’.4

1 

To Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 185. 2  Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 131. 3  The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), ii. 317. 4  Letters of Keats, i. 185. For an extended discussion, see Shahidha K. Bari, Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations (London: Routledge, 2012).

328   Noel Jackson The story of how imaginative literature (and the exercise of imagination more broadly) came to be bound up with the senses is one that involves philosophers and physicians no less than poets and novelists. Aristotle’s axiom that ‘nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses’ (Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu) travelled widely throughout the empiricist philosophy of the long eighteenth century, chiefly in English and French.5 Under the pervasive influence of empiricism, writers of all philosophical stripes acknowledged the central role of the senses and sensation in giving content to the mind and its creations. Associated with figures such as Bacon, Locke, and Joseph Priestley in England, and in France with philosophers and physiologists such as La Mettrie, Condillac, Holbach, Helvétius, and Cabanis, empiricism attracted controversy where it appeared to verge onto a materialist account of mind and the universe. Yet even those authors who, like Wordsworth, were most resistant to the materialist reduction of mind to body consistently defined the poet as drawing inspiration from the bodily senses. Of the poet, Wordsworth wrote: ‘though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings’.6 That Romantic writers made the senses so consistently central to their literary practice is due in part to the currency of what George Rousseau calls the ‘neural paradigm’, a model of the relationship between mind and body that dates from the discovery of the nervous system in the late seventeenth century.7 It was the physician and natural philosopher Thomas Willis who, in the 1660s, first established that the brain depended on the nerves and the nervous system. Just as William Harvey had transformed the science of anatomy by discovering the circulation of the blood, so Willis helped to discover the role of the nerves, and to found the branch of medicine now known as neurology. Willis claimed that the nerves alone were responsible for sensory impressions, and that nerves were conduits from the sense organs—​the nose, ear, and eye—​to the brain, which he described as a ‘sensorium’, the terminus and connection zone for the nerves. Willis’s discovery transformed understanding of the brain and its functions, and made possible new accounts of cognition, consciousness, and language as vitally embodied. Over the following century and a half, theorists and practitioners of medicine, moral philosophers, novelists, and others elaborated a comprehensive description of the

5   Paul F. Cranefield, ‘On the Origin of the Phrase Nihil Est In Intellectu’, Journal of the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciences 25 (1970), 77–​80. 6  ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, in William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–​1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 753. All subsequent references to Lyrical Ballads are to this edition. 7  George S. Rousseau, ‘Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England’ (1969), in his Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 98. See also Rousseau’s seminal essay ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’ (1975), reprinted in the same collection; and Harry Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith, and Stanley Finger (eds), Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-​Century Neuroscience (New York: Springer, 2007). For the cultural ramifications of this new psychoperceptual system, see G. J. Barker-​Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Literature and the Senses    329 human organism in which sensibility, or acuteness of nervous response, was the principal feature. Rousseau’s pioneering work on the history of the neural paradigm revealed the close proximity of science and literature in the long eighteenth century, and showed that ‘the organic sciences generally and medicine particularly’ had a significant influence ‘on the formation of the temperament in art we now call “romantic” ’.8 Scholars have more recently extended this narrative into the Romantic period itself, charting the continued influence of theories of sensibility and the literary impact of further discoveries in neurology and brain science.9 The influences came from several different quarters and represented various philosophical orientations. One source of inspiration was the work of figures such as Robert Whytt, William Cullen, and others affiliated with the prestigious Edinburgh medical school (see Catherine Jones, Chapter 23 in this volume). Inspiration also came from prominent opponents of the Scottish medical orthodoxy, such as Cullen’s pupil John Brown, the theorist of ‘excitation’; the poet-​physician Erasmus Darwin, a leading figure in the Midlands Enlightenment; and Darwin’s friend Thomas Beddoes, whose ‘Medical Pneumatic Institution’ at Hotwells in Bristol became a centre of both medical research and literary experiment (see Sharon Ruston, Chapter 22 in this volume). The productive interchange between literature and medicine was equally apparent among the second-​generation Romantics. Keats, for example, had exposure to the ideas of the celebrated anatomist Charles Bell through Astley Cooper, his tutor at Guy’s Hospital in London; though Keats subsequently abandoned his medical career, this apprenticeship profoundly influenced his writing. Mary Shelley drew inspiration from the materialist theories of life and matter published by another prominent doctor, William Lawrence, giving fictional expression to these ideas in the ghastly experiment of Victor Frankenstein. Romantic writers, though, were not simply witnesses to contemporary developments in physiology and the science of mind; they helped to popularize and, in some cases, actively contributed to them. Coleridge, who befriended and corresponded with a number of leading scientific figures, was at the same time a participant in pressing scientific debates of the day.10 He took a particular interest in psychology, helping to give currency to the new word ‘psychological’ and coining his own adjective: ‘psycho-​somatic’.11 As this

8

  Rousseau, ‘Science and the Discovery of the Imagination’, 98. See, for instance, Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Alan Richardson, Neural Romanticism: Cognitive Theories and Romanic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 10  Some of these contributions are discussed by Neil Vickers, Coleridge and the Doctors, 1795–​1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 11  Coleridge refers playfully to his ‘Psycho-​somatic Ology’ in his unpublished essay ‘On the Passions’ (1828), in Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), ii. 1444. The Oxford English Dictionary (at: www.oed.com) cites this as first use but misdates it to 1834. 9 

330   Noel Jackson coinage suggests, Coleridge was deeply committed to investigating the channels of mutual influence between the body and the mind, despite being a lifelong critic of materialism. His investigations were not only of a theoretical kind: in a letter of 1801, he reports having sustained permanent physiological damage from ‘a multitude of little experiments on my own sensations, & on my senses’ performed in the course of his research.12 His poetry, too, he regarded as a form of sensory self-​experiment, and in his literary lectures and critical writings he frequently quoted Milton’s description of poetry as ‘simple, sensuous, passionate’, explaining his own revival of the word ‘sensuous’—​coined by Milton—​to encompass that which pertains to perception by the senses without the pejorative associations attached to the word ‘sensual’.13 The many references by other writers to artistic works as ‘experiments’ confirm the shared discursive ground between imaginative literature and the sciences of sensation. Wordsworth opens the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) by defining the collection as ‘an experiment’ in ‘fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men’ in order to explore the workings of the human mind and to give artistic pleasure.14 Wordsworth’s poems are ‘experiments’ in a strikingly literal sense, and the new sensations and insights they are designed to impart are more than coincidentally related to the ‘perceptions perfectly novel’ that Humphry Davy recorded having produced in his contemporary experiments with nitrous oxide.15 Robert Southey, an early volunteer in Davy’s experiments, exclaimed: ‘Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name’.16 His allusion to Xerxes, the Persian king who promised to reward any of his subjects who could invent a new pleasure for him, is fanciful but not altogether uncharacteristic of how both scientific and literary experiments were viewed in this period. The physiological experiment, or literary work of art conceived as a physiological experiment, had a purpose similar to that which Coleridge ascribes to the work of genius generally: to produce ‘freshness of sensation’.17

12 

To Thomas Poole, 17 May 1801, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–​7 1), ii. 731. 13  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819 On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), i. 139, 515; Biographia Literaria, ed. W. Jackson Bate and James Engell, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), i. 171–​2. Milton’s phrase is from his tract Of Education (1644). For poetry as self-​experiment, see Noel Jackson, ‘Critical Conditions: Coleridge, “Common Sense”, and the Literature of Self-​Experiment’, English Literary History 70.1 (2003), 117–​49. 14 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 741. See Rowan Boyson, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 3. 15  Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide (London: J. Johnson, 1800), 487. For parallels between Wordsworth and Davy, see Sharon Ruston, Chapter 22 in this volume 16  To Thomas Southey, 12 July 1799, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part 2: 1798–​1803, ed. Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt, Romantic Circles Electronic Edition (Aug. 2011), at: www.rc.umd.edu/​editions. For another description of Davy’s discovery which makes explicit the allusion to Xerxes, see Southey’s letter to William Taylor, 27 Oct. 1799. 17 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 81.

Literature and the Senses    331 Poets and philosophers in this period shared with physicians, anatomists, and physiologists an inclination to regard bodily ‘feeling’ as constituting a significant form of cognition in its own right. One touchstone for this conception was David Hume’s argument that reason, belief, and opinion are alike functions of the sensitive rather than cogitative faculty of humankind. ‘All probable reason is nothing but a species of sensation’, Hume had argued; ‘’Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy.’18 For Hume, the degree to which a person believes in an idea or is prepared to affirm it as true depends wholly on the ‘vivacity’ with which he or she conceives that idea—​that is, the strength or intensity of feeling that is associated with it. In fact, Hume backs away from the furthest consequences of this idea, denying that poetry or fiction may excite anything like ‘actual’ belief in the reality of unreal and imagined things. However, his supposition that fictions could be put on the same foundation as truths if only they were vivid enough makes a mere degree of perceptual vivacity the dividing-​line between truth and lies or fictions. While this argument severely limits the scope of human rationality and so ultimately calls into question the legitimacy of philosophy itself, it also opens all of sentient life to ‘philosophical’ apprehension, raising to philosophical complexity some of the most ordinary and embodied human responses. Though probably only Coleridge and Shelley among the major Romantics were directly acquainted with Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–​40), the ideas to which he gave expression were in wide circulation among Romantic-​period authors, many of whom shared the inclination to regard intense feeling as constituting a kind of reason in its own right. ‘[W]‌e reason deeply when we forcibly feel’, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote.19 This statement reflects the pervasiveness of views we might call ‘Humean’, even if it sits somewhat uneasily with Wollstonecraft’s own scepticism—​expressed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and elsewhere—​toward those led by education and custom to lead lives of ‘mere’ sensation. Informed by developments in medicine and the philosophy of mind, the emergent science of aesthetics taught writers and readers that the forms of thought characteristic of imaginative literature are in an indeterminate but durable way connected to movements of bodily feeling. As the study of sensuous cognition, aesthetics (a term, coined in the eighteenth century, which derives from the Greek for ‘sense-​perception’) conceived of the categories of art experience—​such as the beautiful, the novel, the sublime, the pathetic—​as so many modes of sensory affection, ways of being moved. In a prose note he appended to his poem ‘The Thorn’ in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that ‘Poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings’.20 This is ‘a Janus-​faced phrase,’ Kevis Goodman notes, in which ‘feelings’ are ambiguously both

18 

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-​Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 103. 19  Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), in A Wollstonecraft Anthology, ed. Janet M. Todd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 168. 20 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 351.

332   Noel Jackson the ‘agent’/​modality and the ‘focus’/​object of scientific inquiry.21 At one and the same time, poetry embodies the language of impassioned feeling and serves as a vehicle for purposeful reflection on feelings. The notion that literature has as one of its highest functions the communication of sensation or ‘feeling’ is an idea with a venerable pedigree. It constitutes part of a long-​ standing rhetorical tradition which in England might be traced to Sidney’s assertion in An Apology for Poetry (1595) that ‘moving is of a higher degree than teaching’.22 Quintilian and other ancient Roman rhetoricians had used the term enargeia (‘vividness’) to describe how speech brought visibility to recollected or imaginary images. Quintilian defines enargeia as an illustrative property of language that ‘makes us seem to be not so much talking about something as exhibiting it’ (ostendere).23 The Scottish judge and influential philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames called this technique of imaginative literary representation ‘ideal presence’. In his Elements of Criticism (1762), Kames writes: The power of language to raise emotions, depends entirely on the raising such lively and distinct images  . . .  the reader’s passions are never sensibly moved, till he be thrown into a kind of reverie; in which state, forgetting that he is reading, he conceives every incident as passing in his presence, precisely as if he were an eye-​witness.24

To read is to bring imagined or recollected images before the senses (particularly the sense of sight), and thus to encourage the sense that one is not reading at all, but is a live witness to the proceedings. Arguments such as Kames’s underpin Romantic accounts of the reading process—​ what Celeste Langan calls its ‘audio-​visual aspect’—​and of other forms of sensory transmission. The heightened awareness of Romantic authors to the status of printed literature as a medium is attributable in part to their recognition of  ‘the power of print to evoke a variety of sensory experiences’.25 Romantic writers were fascinated by how sensations are conveyed from one person to another, how atmospheres are detected, how meaning changes in the shift from one medium to the next. One example may suffice. In an early scene from Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda (1801), the physician Dr X—​ discusses with the children by what sense, whether by hearing or touch or ‘feeling’, the 21  Kevis Goodman, ‘Romantic Poetry and the Science of Nostalgia’, in James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (eds), The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 197. 22  Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella, ed. Peter C. Herman (Glen Allen: College Publishing, 2001), 82. 23 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 6.2.32. 24  Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (6th edn, 1785), ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), i. 69. 25  Celeste Langan, ‘Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, Studies in Romanticism 40.1 (2001), 49–​70 (p. 68).

Literature and the Senses    333 fish receives indication of a tap on the tank.26 More than a passing lesson in natural history, Edgeworth presents an artful meditation on mediation: the issue here is how and through what means or faculties radically different beings may communicate with and be understood by one another, as humans to fish through a tank.27 Yet despite Romanticism’s strong investment in the life of the senses, to identify Romantic literature solely with the intensities of bodily sensation would surely be an error. As Orrin Wang has lately reminded us, Romantic literature is just as significantly marked by its commitment to the figure of sobriety.28 For many authors of the period, the senses are to be transcended, moved beyond, or transformed, whether through the agency of the visionary imagination (as in Blake’s work), a programme of education, or the simple passage of time. To Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, for instance, the attainment of a sober and balanced intellect was the first and necessary step toward sexual equality. Wollstonecraft observed how women’s ‘uncultivated understandings make them entirely dependent on their senses for employment and amusement’. By ensuring that the education of women was overseen with equal care as that of men, Wollstonecraft argued, one could look forward to the time when ‘sensation will give place to reason’.29 Though his defence of sobriety is less explicitly aligned to an emancipatory political programme than in Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth frequently records how the ‘coarser pleasures’ of youth are set aside in preference for those blessed moments when ‘we are laid asleep | In body, and become a living soul’. Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, from where these words are taken (lines l74, 46–​7), is along with The Prelude the paradigmatic text describing self-​development as a movement from rudimentary, ‘vulgar’ sensations to ideas of greater abstraction and seeming disembodiment. One source for these conceptions was David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), whose modified account of the Lockean association of ideas has long been recognized as a text of central importance to the first-​generation Romantic poets (in particular Coleridge, who named his first child after the philosopher). Both Wordsworth and Coleridge refer to the eye as a ‘despotic’ organ, capable of claiming ‘absolute dominion’ over the mind and imagination. The caution applied to that ‘most despotic of our senses’ (1805 Prelude: Book 11, line 173)  30 applies to all senses in their status as mere passive inlets of reception which if unchecked or indulged would overwhelm the mind. On the same basis, Wordsworth and Coleridge conceive as a threat to imaginative 26 

Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 99. See James K. Chandler, ‘Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies 45.1 (2011), 87–​104 (pp. 96–​7). 28  Orrin N. C. Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 29  Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 112, 108. 30  Quoted from William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-​Book Prelude, ed. Mark Reed, 2 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Subsequent references are to this edition. Coleridge refers to the ‘despotism of the eye’ in Biographia Literaria, i. 107. 27 

334   Noel Jackson autonomy the popular literary entertainments that cater most obviously to the bodily senses—​‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’.31 Wordsworth’s account of poetry as both the expression of powerful feelings and a sophisticated reflection on them is in this respect expressive of his powerful ambivalence toward the senses. His famous formula for poetry as originating in ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ can be regarded, likewise, as a measure to preserve the force of powerful feeling while blunting its tendency to a potentially uncontrollable and dangerous excess. Such insistence on the union of sensation and thought is ultimately more characteristic of the period than is suggested by modernist accounts of Romanticism’s ‘hypertrophy of sensation’. Though Keats in 1817 fantasizes about a life of sensations rather than of thoughts, and allegorizes the rending of sensation and thought in a late poem such as ‘Lamia’, for the most part this poet and former student of medicine insists on their union: The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this—​in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all [the] horror of a bare shoulderd Creature—​in the former case, our shoulders are fledge, and we go thro’ the same air and space without fear.32

The notion that authors should write to the senses of their audience variously inflects the literature produced in this period. On the one hand, it led authors—​notably in the genre of Gothic—​to seek extremes of readerly response by cultivating sensations of greater and greater intensity. States of pleasure and pain are vividly rendered and elicited in the Gothic, where, as one scholar notes, ‘The dangers of credulity have been overtaken by the primary goal of provoking sensation.’33 As elsewhere in Romantic literature, however, the Gothic’s investment in the production of powerful embodied response goes hand in hand with frequent cautions against the pathology of susceptibility. In Ann Radcliffe’s most popular and critically acclaimed novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the father of the heroine Emily St Aubert repeatedly advises her against excessive sensibility; the novel counsels stoicism as frequently and as vigorously as it seeks to work on the nerves of its readers: ‘Those, who really possess sensibility, ought early to be taught, that it is a dangerous quality, which is continually extracting the excess of misery, or delight, from every surrounding circumstance.’34 In Radcliffe as in Wordsworth, the aim of literature to represent and evoke powerful sensations must negotiate the risk that such stimulation can easily be carried too far.

31 

Wordsworth, ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, 747. To J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818, Letters of Keats, i. 277. 33  E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5. 34  Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 79–​80. 32 

Literature and the Senses    335 Where authors did not have the machinery of plot to rely on for the production of thrilling effects, they might, as did the physician-​poet Erasmus Darwin, produce vivid effects at the level of literary description. Darwin’s two-​part poem The Botanic Garden, which enjoyed a brief but considerable popularity in the 1790s, presents a series of ‘emblematic exhibitions’ of various botanical specimens, in rhymed heroic couplets appropriately flowery in style, along with extensive scientific notes. ‘I am only a flower-​ painter’, Darwin wrote; and he defended the practice of poetic ‘exhibition’ in a prose interlude from the second part of the poem, The Loves of the Plants: as our ideas derived from visible objects are more distinct than those derived from the objects of our other senses, the words expressive of these ideas belonging to vision make up the principal part of poetic language. That is, the Poet writes principally to the eye, the Prose-​writer uses more abstracted terms.35

For Darwin, the poet is most importantly charged with reproducing the visible world by means of language. Accordingly, Darwin’s verse presents an extravagance of descriptive detail in bringing various specimens of the goddess Flora to view. His conception of poetry as a kind of painting to the eye did not please everyone (‘I absolutely nauseate Darwin’s poem’, wrote Coleridge, registering intense bodily feeling of another kind36). Darwin’s friend, fellow poet, and sometime collaborator Anna Seward offered a judicious criticism in her posthumous biography, distinguishing between ‘vivid poetry which does not excite sensation, and vivid poetry which does excite it’. Seward concludes that ‘Dr. Darwin’s poetry, while it delights the imagination, leaves the nerves at rest.’37 Seward’s critical judgement raises the question—​a timely one in this period—​of whether and how words can give adequate expression to feeling, and thus how literature manages (or not) to reach a nervous system that remains hidden beneath the skin. Romantic literature is unusually preoccupied with the unfathomable depths of inner life that lie, in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘far hidden from the reach of words’ (1805 Prelude, Book 3, line 185). These ‘incommunicable powers’ (line 188)—​or what he elsewhere calls ‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’38—​point most obviously to the limitations of language as an expressive or communicative medium. ‘[E]‌very man must know,’ Wordsworth wrote in the note to ‘The Thorn’, ‘that an attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language’.39 ‘Do you understand this feeling?’ Robert Walton asks in a letter to his sister Margaret Saville at the 35 

Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden: A Poem, facs. reprint, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1978), i. 48, 49–​50. 36  To John Thelwall, 13 May 1796, Collected Letters of Coleridge, i. 216. 37  Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin, Chiefly During His Residence in Lichfield (London: J. Johnson, 1804), 171, 174. 38  ‘Ode [Intimations of Immortality]’, line 206, in William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–​1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 39 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 351.

336   Noel Jackson outset of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.40 Mary Favret and George Haggerty read Walton’s question as a self-​reflexive invitation that the novelist extends to readers—​an attempt, as Haggerty puts it, to ‘engage the reader in the sensations of the speaker’.41 These are preoccupations that persist in the novel, as deeply concerned as it is with the formative effects of reading and with narratives whose purpose is to move their listener to sympathy and moral action. But Shelley’s invitation to understand recognizes that full comprehension of one’s feelings is impossible. Walton continues in a subsequent letter: ‘I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.’42 That imagination might partly overleap the barriers dividing individuals was as much a topic of philosophical concern in this period as it was a preoccupation of literary writers. In a text of signal importance to the culture of sensibility, Adam Smith had given a detailed account of imaginative sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations . . . By the imagination we place ourselves into his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations.43

As a non-​sensuous medium charged with the work of conjuring the probable sensations of others, imagination is for Smith the primary ingredient of ethical cognition. By means of the sympathetic imagination, we overcome (if only temporarily) the limitations of our own embodiment and put ourselves in the place of another. William Hazlitt similarly claims imagination for ethics in his first published book, An Essay Concerning the Principles of Human Action (1805). Hazlitt’s first and only extended foray into moral philosophy asserts a crucially temporal component to imaginative disinterest. Whereas the individual’s sensations are uppermost with reference to present and past experience, this cannot be the case with regard to the future, in which sensations have only an imagined existence and belong no more to one person than to another. With reference to the future, Hazlitt argues, the ‘I’, properly speaking, does not exist. Securing this capacity for sympathetic communion, both in the Romantic period and in the literature of sensibility that precedes it, is a quality of responsiveness shared by the

40 

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5. 41  George E. Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/​Gothic Form (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 46. See also Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 186, 196. 42  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 8. 43  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 9.

Literature and the Senses    337 poet and ‘genius’ alike. Humphry Davy thus described a refined sensibility as the quality uniting the scientist and the aesthete: ‘Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful.’44 Wordsworth characterized the poet as an individual ‘possessed of more than usual organic sensibility’,45 and Shelley in the Defence of Poetry similarly describes the poet as ‘more delicately organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them’.46 The culture of sensibility taught that ‘The well-​taught philosophic mind | To all compassion gives; | Casts round the world an equal eye, | And feels for all that lives.’47 These lines from Anna Barbauld’s poem ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ (1773) share with Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ the message that one should cultivate sensitivity for all sentient creatures—​‘man and bird and beast’ (line 607). The haunted anti-​hero of Coleridge’s poem and the caged mouse whose plaint Barbauld dramatizes have this in common: both have been rendered subject to forces much greater than themselves (Wordsworth later identified as one of the ‘defects’ of  ‘The Rime’ this trait of the Mariner, that ‘he does not act, but is continually acted upon.’48) Romantic authors develop a perceptual language for rendering in literature the weight of circumstance and context, the force that the historical world exerts on the mortal human body. In the language of sensation, Romantic writers account for how human beings bear the stamp of history. There are many variations on this theme, of which the best known is Shelley’s exclamation in the ‘Ode to the West Wind’: ‘I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’ (line 54). Another example is in Shelley’s ‘Julian and Maddalo’, where the figure of the Maniac describes himself as ‘a nerve o’er which do creep | The else unfelt oppressions of the earth’ (lines 449–​50). The poet or author was that nerve—​throbbing, quivering, tensing, or slackening, and registering the impress of the historical circumstance with acute sensitivity. A scientifically informed language of the senses structures the categories of aesthetic reception and of historical awareness alike. If Romanticism’s perceptual language renders with special clarity forms of historical agency and experience, it is just as often employed to invoke modes of affective and historical experience not immediately reducible to the categories of individual personhood. When Shelley refers to the ‘unseen Power’ whose shadow ‘Floats though unseen amongst us’ (‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, lines 1–​2) or to the ‘unseen presence’ of the West Wind (‘Ode’, line 2), he is touching both on poetry’s ‘divine and unapprehended’ 44  Humphry Davy, Collected Works, ed. John Davy, 9 vols (1839–​40), viii. 308, quoted in Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 276. 45  Wordsworth, ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, 744. 46  Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 516. Subsequent Shelley quotations are from this edition. 47  ‘The Mouse’s Petition’, lines 25–​8, in The Poems of Anna Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). 48  Wordsworth’s note (1800) to ‘The Ancient Mariner’, in Lyrical Ballads, 791.

338   Noel Jackson mode of action (Defence, 534) and more generally on modes of feeling, singular but issued from no determinate subject position, that elude conscious apprehension. Recent scholars have emphasized Romantic literature’s attunement to the affective charge of historical atmospheres, and thus to forms of historical experience at which intimations are given at the level of (not quite or not yet aesthetic) feeling. Kevis Goodman has examined how poetry in a georgic mode makes ‘history’ felt in forms of perceptual interference, somatic or cognitive displeasure, invoking feelings that resist conceptualization. In the literary tradition that Goodman brings to light, poetry thus operates as a distinctive medium for rendering a ‘circumambient, historical presentness’.49 In a similar vein, Mary Favret has examined how in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) and other Romantic texts the tedium and predictable routines of everyday life are measured against the certain consciousness and traumatic though distant circumstances of a world at war.50 In pursuit of a supple language to evoke complicated states of feeling, Romantic authors describe feelings in excess of the individual, affectively charged environments and the site of feelings that exceed conceptual or narrative containment. Though a frequent medium for introspection and self-​examination, then, Roman­ ticism’s perceptual language is not reducible to egotism. Keats’s ‘camelion Poet’51 who merges his identity with any object of contemplation is a figure more obviously of delight than of goodness. But in contrast to Hazlitt, whose Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) was nevertheless of profound importance to the young poet, Keats held to a disinterestedness that was born of the senses rather than of their cancellation. Of Keats, his friend Richard Woodhouse attested: ‘He has affirmed that he can conceive of a billiard Ball that it may have a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness volubility of its motion.’52 Keats’s empathetic identification with the insensate billiard ball exemplifies a property of aesthetic excellence that Hazlitt named ‘gusto’. Gusto connotes the artist’s ability to endow the most inanimate things with the semblance of life and feeling, and just as prominently involves the proprioceptive sensitivity of the body to its own motion and activity. Thus Hazlitt, in discussing Titian’s fleshly forms as a singular instance of painterly gusto, describes ‘that tingling sensation to the eye which the body feels within itself ’.53 This quality of self-​reflexive attention to sensation as an apparent end in itself led Arthur Henry Hallam in 1831 to designate Shelley and Keats (along with Hallam’s friend, the young poet Alfred Tennyson) ‘poets of sensation’, in contrast to the ‘poets of reflection’ Wordsworth and Coleridge. With these later poets, Hallam argues, is born a lavish 49  Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108. 50  Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 51  To Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct. 1818, Letters of Keats, i. 386–​7. 52  Hyder E. Rollins (ed.), The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1818–​1878, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), i. 59. 53  ‘On Gusto’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), iv. 77.

Literature and the Senses    339 and finely wrought poetry whose primary aim is not to convince but rather to enrapture and enchant. For Hallam, the renunciation of literature’s claim to immediate social or political relevance is accompanied by a corresponding intensification of ‘sensuousness’. The value of this poetry is for Hallam measured not mainly by the ideas that it manages to get across, much less by the opinions that it promotes, as by the sensations it manages to represent and evoke.54 Hallam’s account of the poetry of sensation looks forward to a later tendency of authors to conceive a perceptual language unconnected to the positing of moral or symbolic meaning. The possibility that Wordsworth raises but rejects—​of a ‘peculiar language’ reserved to poets and others similarly privileged by genius—​is anticipated by Romanticism but more properly belongs to the legacy of late-​nineteenth-​ century aestheticism, understood as the cultivation of an idiom restricted to the artist and art experience.55 Romanticism’s poetry of sensation is perhaps nowhere more notable than in its production of synaesthetic imagery—​epitomized by Coleridge’s description of ‘A light in sound, a sound-​like power in light’ in ‘The Eolian Harp’ (line 28)56—​where, as Hazlitt says, ‘the impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of another’.57 A topic of long-​standing interest to Romantic critics, synaesthetic imagery is now attracting fresh attention from researchers in ‘cognitive cultural studies’, such as Gabrielle Starr, who has shown it to be a property both of the most highly wrought poetic language and of everyday speech.58 Exponents of this new interdisciplinary field have explored connections between Romantic literature and modern cognitive linguistics and poetics, which share an interest in the way literary images and forms embed structures of perception and cognition. Marking in some respects a return to the ‘neural paradigm’ from which Romanticism historically emerged, these scholars have presented a ‘neural Romanticism’ (in Alan Richardson’s phrase59) both imaginatively supple and bearing strong relationship to past and present scientific accounts of how the mind works. The ‘cognitive turn’ in literary studies reminds us that, while long celebrated for rendering extraordinary and elevated configurations of experience, Romantic literature captures with equal sensitivity the most common, everyday acts of perception and cognition. On both grounds, Romanticism’s ‘history or science of feelings’ presents some of literature’s richest and most fully imagined accounts of what it is to feel and make feel.

54   ‘On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Poetry of Alfred Tennyson’ (1831), in The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York: Modern Language Association, 1943), 182–​98. 55  Wordsworth refers to the poet’s ‘peculiar language, when expressing his feelings for his own gratification, or that of men like himself ’, in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, 754. 56  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text), ed. J. C. C. Mays, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), i. 233. 57  ‘On Gusto’, Complete Works of Hazlitt, iv. 77–​8. 58  G. Gabrielle Starr, ‘Multisensory Imagery’, in Lisa Zunshine (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 59  Alan Richardson, Neural Romanticism: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

340   Noel Jackson

Further Reading Bate, W. Jackson, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-​Century England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946). Boyson, Rowan, ‘The Senses in Literature:  Pleasures of Imagining in Poetry and Prose’, in Anne C. Vila (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Bruhn, Mark J., and Donald R. Wehrs (eds), Cognition, Literature and History (New  York: Routledge, 2014). Caruth, Cathy, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions:  Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Chandler, James, ‘The Politics of Sentiment:  Notes Toward a New Account’, Studies in Romanticism 49.4 (2010), 553–​75. Davies, Jeremy, Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature (New York: Routledge, 2014). Gigante, Denise, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Goodman, Kevis, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism:  Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Jackson, Noel, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). McGann, Jerome, The Poetics of Sensibility:  A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996). Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability:  The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Richardson, Alan, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Rousseau, George S., Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). Sha, Richard C., ‘Toward a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination’, Configurations 17.3 (2009), 197–​226. Starr, G. Gabrielle, ‘Multisensory Imagery’, in Lisa Zunshine (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Wang, Orrin N.  C., Romantic Sobriety:  Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

Chapter 22

‘High’ Rom a nt i c i sm: L iteratu re and  Dru g s Sharon Ruston

Some of the most famous poems of this period may have been written under the influence of opium, such as Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’; others, such as Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, refer explicitly to the wondrous powers of opiates. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater (1821) made clear what these poems only suggested or implied: that opium could be used to enhance literary creativity. This link between drugs and creativity is something for which the Romantics are remembered. Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book detailing his experiences with mescaline was named Doors of Perception, alluding to a passage in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-​3): ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.’1 Thus, the ‘high’ Romanticism in the title of this Chapter has a number of references, including the act of expanding, elevating, and extending one’s vision beyond the quotidian to reach a higher truth. In this, opium use takes its place alongside other attempts to intensify perception and transcend ordinary consciousness, such as the sublime. My approach to this topic will place the most explicit account of opium use and addiction by a Romantic-​era writer within the larger context of scientific experimentation with mind-​altering substances, specifically Humphry Davy’s nitrous oxide experiments. Such substances were thought to hold the key to happiness, and thereby to offer the whole of mankind the means by which, in Davy’s words, we could ‘destroy our pains and increase our pleasures’.2 Opium use, whether medicinal or recreational, could also be undertaken in the spirit of research; De Quincey, for example, was intrigued by the effects of opium upon his body and mind. He experimented with its use and recorded 1 

William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 154. Humphry Davy, Collected Works, ed. John Davy, 9 vols (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1839), ii. 85–​6. 2 

342   Sharon Ruston its effects. These drugs were taken either in company or alone, in situations arranged and planned for maximum effect, and seemed to offer writers new insights into subjectivity and the relationship between the body and mind. The visions, waking dreams, and revelations that often accompanied the use of opium and nitrous oxide appeared to present new worlds of perception. Addiction, withdrawal, and their symptoms, however, revealed the polar opposites of pleasure and pain: the joy and dejection that opium, in particular, could cause. Coleridge’s poem ‘The Pains of Sleep’ (published with ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’ in 1816) records nightmares that may well have been brought on by opium use, even though Coleridge said he took opium to ward against such nightmares.3 Unlike De Quincey, however, Coleridge was not explicit in public about his opium use. For example, he claimed to have written ‘Kubla Khan’ during a sleep brought on by the prescription of an ‘anodyne’, widely accepted to have been opium but not identified as such.4 This poem has contributed greatly to the Romantic myth, explored in M. H. Abrams’s book The Milk of Paradise (1934), of an association between drug-​taking and creativity or heightened states of consciousness.5 According to Abrams, poets ‘utilized the imagery’ from their opium dreams in their ‘literary creations, and sometimes, under the direct inspiration of opium, achieved [their] best writing’; even Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’, subtitled ‘A Poet’s Reverie’ in its 1800 version, has its ‘source and development in Coleridge’s opium hallucinations’.6 The degree to which opium affected and enabled poetry of the period is still debated, however. Elisabeth Schneider’s Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (1953) disputed Abrams’s claims, arguing that Coleridge’s poem was not inspired by opium but by a complex set of cultural and psychological influences.7 Nicholas Roe has shown how in the 1790s literature, politics, and medicine were spheres of activity that were ‘intellectually compatible, each overlapping with and reinforcing each other’, and suggests that for Keats, medical training was an understandable choice of career given his family background, politics, and schooling.8 By the time he was doing his medical training, however, after the new regulations of the 1815 Anatomy Act came into force, the situation had changed and ‘the physician-​poet John Keats was obliged to quit his medical studies in order to dedicate himself fully to his calling as a poet-​physician’.9 The drowsiness and numbness that we find associated with the opium poppy’s effect in his ‘Ode on Indolence’ can be linked easily to Keats’s desire to act as a ‘poet-​physician’, where the poetry itself is charged with the soporific, sensual 3 

Neil Vickers, Coleridge and the Doctors, 1795–​1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 99. S. T. Coleridge, Christabel &c., 3rd edn (London: John Murray, 1816), 52. 5  M. H. Abrams, The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). 6 Abrams, Milk of Paradise, ix, 36. 7  Elisabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 17. 8  Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 180, 172. 9 Roe, Keats and the Culture of Dissent, 181. For Keats as poet-​physician, see also Catherine Jones, Chapter 23 in this volume. 4 

‘High’ Romanticism: Literature and Drugs    343 character of the drug. In his recent biography of Keats, Roe claims that Keats’s personal laudanum use was in fact a ‘habit’, and that his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ‘deserves a place alongside “Kubla Khan” or De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater as one of the greatest re-​creations of a drug-​inspired dream-​vision in English literature’.10 Drugs had been known and used for centuries before the Romantic period. The word ‘drug’ originally meant ‘any substance, of animal, vegetable, or mineral origin, used as an ingredient in pharmacy, chemistry, dyeing, or various manufacturing processes’, and only later came to refer to ‘a natural or synthetic substance used in the prevention or treatment of disease’.11 This medicinal meaning, involving a physiological effect on the body, shared currency during the Romantic period, as it does today, with the other meaning of ‘a substance with intoxicating, stimulant, or narcotic effects used for cultural, recreational, or other non-​medicinal purposes’.12 Indeed, Thomas Green, writing in 1753, already links the effects of drugs to the imagination when he writes of ‘The strange effects of drugs and opiates, and even of the imagination.’13 Drugs, therefore, can be both medicinal and recreational, affecting both body and mind. Opium, which was prepared from the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, had been used to treat a variety of problems since medicine was first practised, but in the sixteenth century, Paracelsus (the alchemist whom Victor Frankenstein reads so avidly) developed laudanum, the form in which opium was most commonly taken in the Romantic period.14 Laudanum was a tincture of opium, made up of about one-​twelfth opium dissolved in alcohol.15 By the eighteenth century, opium use was common and had no kind of stigma attached to it, as we can see from its frequent appearance in William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769), the much-​reprinted handbook that remained the most popular guide to health throughout the Romantic period. Opium is recommended in Domestic Medicine as a treatment for a ‘nervous cough’, whooping cough, inflammation of the intestines, toothache, dropsy, and the hiccups.16 Laudanum is recommended (either alone or in combination with other things) in cases of fever, sleeplessness (due to opthalmia), a tickly cough, bilious colic, inflammation of the bladder, cholera morbus, diarrhoea, headache, wind, piles, and many other illnesses.17 It has been said that in the early nineteenth century everyone ‘took laudanum occasionally’; this may be no

10 

Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 324.   ‘Drug’, definition 1a, Oxford English Dictionary (at: www.oed.com). 12  ‘Drug’, definition 1b, Oxford English Dictionary (at: www.oed.com). 13  Thomas Green, A Dissertation Concerning Enthusiasm (London, 1753), xvi, cited in Oxford English Dictionary (1b). 14  Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 21–​2. 15  Grevel Lindop, The Opium-​Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 122. 16  William Buchan, Domestic Medicine: or, A Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicines, 11th edn (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1790), 285, 287 n., 294, 359, 377, 437. On popular medicine in this period, see Roy Porter, Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–​1860, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 17 Buchan, Domestic Medicine, 149, 262, 281 n., 298, 303, 311, 313, 356, 444, 685. 11

344   Sharon Ruston exaggeration given that laudanum was used to treat so many different ailments and that it was commonly used for children as well as adults.18 Buchan notes the drug’s soothing qualities as well as its efficacy as a painkiller. In the section devoted to opium itself he agrees that ‘It is indeed a valuable medicine when taken in proper quantity’ but warns that ‘an overdose proves a strong poison.’19 Addiction was not understood until late in the nineteenth century, and many writers were lifelong, regular users, including Elizabeth Barrett-​Browning, Byron, Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, George Crabbe, Charles Dickens, Keats, P. B. Shelley, Walter Scott, Tom Wedgwood, and William Wilberforce. Robert Clive, Commander-​in-​Chief of British India and the Pre-​Raphaelite model Lizzie Siddal died from overdoses of opium.20 Before the 1868 Pharmacy Act, opium could be bought easily from ‘barbers, confectioners, ironmongers, stationers, tobacconists, wine merchants’ and other suppliers.21 In order to understand how opium use was conceived at this time, it is instructive to look at a newly synthesized drug that seemed to offer everything that opium promised, and more: nitrous oxide. In 1799, the radical chemist Thomas Beddoes set up the Medical Pneumatic Institution at Clifton in Bristol to test the efficacy of a number of new gases that Joseph Priestley had discovered on a variety of diseases, but most particularly on consumption. He employed the dazzling young Humphry Davy to become an assistant at the Institution. Beddoes subscribed to John Brown’s system of sthenic and asthenic treatments (he had published Brown’s Elements of Medicine in 1795) and the Institution was run along these lines. In this system, all diseases were classified as resulting either from too much excitability (sthenic) or too little excitability (asthenic). If the former was diagnosed, a sedative was administered, and if the latter, a stimulant (usually opium or alcohol) was given to restore the balance of the nervous system. The Institution began treating patients in early 1799, and in March of that year Davy returned to experiments he had begun nearly a year earlier with nitrous oxide, a gas that an American chemist, Samuel Mitchell, had claimed would be fatal if inhaled.22 The apparent recklessness of Davy’s self-​experimentation with the gas is difficult to understand today; in those early years Davy used himself to test various gases that were extremely dangerous, often with alarming results, including a near-​death experience after inhaling a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The nitrous oxide experiments of Clifton 1799–​1800 show the optimism with which drugs were invested. It is clear from the notebooks that Davy kept at this time that he believed life was the result of chemical changes in the body, and thus could be affected by the introduction of new 18 Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination, 30. 19 Buchan, Domestic Medicine, 318, 85, 476.

20  Barry Milligan, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater, ed. Milligan (London: Penguin, 2003), xxxiii. See also Mike Jay, Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century, rev. edn (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2011). 21 Jay, Emperors of Dreams, 61. 22  Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide (London: J. Johnson, 1800), 453–​4; hereafter Researches.

‘High’ Romanticism: Literature and Drugs    345 chemicals.23 The Clifton project, as the following discussion will show, sheds light on both the social and the solitary aspects of drug use in the period; at its centre was the tantalizing claim that nitrous oxide, unlike opium, could offer a powerfully pleasurable experience without any negative after-​effects. On 9 April 1799, Davy wrote to a friend announcing his discovery that nitrous oxide could be safely respired. The letter reveals his delight at the effect of the gas: I made a discovery yesterday which proves how necessary it is to repeat experiments. The gaseous oxide of azote is perfectly respirable when pure. It is never deleterious but when it contains nitrous gas. I  have found a mode of obtaining it pure, and I breathed to-​day, in the presence of Dr. Beddoes and some others, sixteen quarts of it for near seven minutes. It appears to support life longer than even oxygen gas, and absolutely intoxicated me. Pure oxygen gas produced no alternation in my pulse, nor any other material effect; whereas this gas raised my pulse upwards of twenty strokes, made me dance about the laboratory as a madman, and has kept my spirits in a glow ever since.24

As we can see here, nitrous oxide, subsequently known as ‘laughing gas’,25 could have the most delightful results. Davy compares it favourably with oxygen, noting that it excited and enthused him, and that the effect continued long after he had stopped breathing the gas. This is the first of many accounts, by Davy and others, that seem to promise a drug that can make people happier, even energize them and increase their activity, without any subsequent depletion of spirits. Following this successful trial, Davy’s experiments were repeated, extended, and developed, and some of the most famous writers of the age tried the gas. The day after his successful trial, Davy wrote to William Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy with a hesitant but hopeful statement: ‘the effects produced by it were very peculiar: should they be confirmed by future experiments, it will probably prove a valuable medicine’.26 Nitrous oxide did indeed prove to be a valuable medicine in the form of an anaesthetic, but this was not how Davy imagined its usefulness. His single sentence on this aspect of the drug in his published account of the experiments was not at this time explored further: ‘As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place.’27 When Davy wrote this, pain was 23 

This was only one of a number of competing theories concerning life or vitality; for others, see Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), ch. 1. 24  To Davies Giddy, quoted in John Ayrton Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, 2 vols (London: Henry Coburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), i. 55–​6. The collected letters of Davy are in the process of being transcribed and annotated for a print edition, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Work in progress available at: www.davy-​letters.org.uk. 25 The Oxford English Dictionary cites first use of the phrase ‘laughing gas’ as 1819. 26  Davy to William Nicholson, 11 Apr. 1799, published in Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts 3 (1800), 55–​6 (p. 55). 27 Davy, Researches, 556.

346   Sharon Ruston thought to be a crucial aspect of surgery and so serious investigation was not made into dulling the sensations. It took many decades before the anaesthetic property of nitrous oxide was properly understood.28 Davy’s experiments—​on himself and others—​are detailed in his book Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, published in 1800, but there also exist unpublished letters and manuscript diary entries from this period. As one would expect, the published account differs considerably from these, for example in adopting a more objective ‘scientific’ tone. Taking nitrous oxide quickly moved beyond being solely of scientific interest to become a pleasurable pastime for the collection of like-​minded men gathered around Beddoes and Davy in Bristol. Indeed, Davy speaks of taking his silk bag of gas along with him on a moonlight walk in an attempt to enhance by artificial means his experience of the sublime: ‘On May 5th, at night, after walking for an hour amidst the scenery of the Avon, at this period rendered exquisitely beautiful by bright moonshine; my mind being in a state of agreeable feeling, I respired six quarts of newly prepared nitrous oxide’ (Researches, 491–​2). The experience lasts beyond the length of his walk, and he experiences that night an ‘intermediate state between sleeping and waking’ of ‘vivid and agreeable dreams’ (Researches, 492). This trance-​like state between dream and vision is one that we hear of in a number of Romantic poems, from Shelley’s ‘Triumph of Life’ to Keats’s ‘The Fall of Hyperion’; it is a state that De Quincey and Coleridge describe as opium-​induced, and clearly nitrous oxide can have the same effect. When Davy visits the Wye valley to see Tintern Abbey by moonlight later in 1800, he experiences a kind of ‘reverie’, and we might speculate that nitrous oxide was involved on this occasion too.29 Davy clearly thinks the drug offers access to the sublime, and after breathing it on 26 December 1799 records in a notebook that taking it makes him feel like he has become a ‘sublime being’ himself.30 In another notebook he records these sublime experiences in a poem titled ‘On breathing the Nitrous Oxide’: ‘Yet are my limbs with inward transports thrill’d | And clad with new born mightiness round.’31 The identification of the experience as a ‘reverie’ alerts us to its potential as a counterpart of the Romantic poet’s experience. In ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ for example, Wordsworth describes how in that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 28 

Stephanie Snow, Operations Without Pain: The Practice and Science of Anaesthesia in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 23. 29  Davy to Davies Giddy, 20 Oct. [1800]; unpublished letter now in private hands. For details of the ‘reverie’, see Davy, Collected Works, i. 64–​6 (p. 64). 30  RI MS HD 20b, 133. The Humphry Davy manuscripts are quoted here by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. 31  RI MS HD 13c, 5–​6 (p. 6).

‘High’ Romanticism: Literature and Drugs    347 In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. (lines 41–​9)32

When the breath and the circulation of the blood are almost ‘suspended’, when our bodies are ‘asleep’, we enter into a new kind of consciousness and thus can see more deeply ‘into the life of things’. Wordsworth is here describing the new vision brought on by a trance that is not chemically induced but is the result of harmony and joy, a ‘serene and blessed mood’. Davy was asked by Coleridge and Wordsworth to proofread the second volume of the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800); while this volume did not contain ‘Tintern Abbey’, he would surely have known the poem.33 Davy parodied Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad form in a notebook poem, ‘As I was walking up the street’, which mentions Wordsworth by name.34 He may even have gone to see Tintern Abbey because of Wordsworth’s poem.35 For Davy, though, viewing the abbey and its surrounding scenery may not have been enough: nitrous oxide offered an enhancement of the sublime experience, and seemed, at times, even capable of creating the sublime. One issue to be resolved was what these experiments proved for the theory of excitability, which was particularly associated with Brown and Erasmus Darwin. Privately, Davy told a friend early in 1799 in a letter that remains unpublished: ‘Both Browns and Darwins Theories seem to be daily loosing [sic] ground. I have had a number of conversations with Dr Beddoes on this subject. Dr Beddoes himself seems to give up altogether Browns Theory.’36 This suspicion does not make its way into the published accounts of the experiments, though eventually both Wordsworth and Coleridge would also come to reject Brown’s ideas.37 Despite this, the language of excitability can be clearly seen in their writing, notably in Wordsworth’s famous criticism of modern lifestyles which encourage a ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’, 38 and in Biographia Literaria

32 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008), 144. 33  See Roger Sharrock, ‘The Chemist and the Poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 17.1 (1962), 57–​76. 34   RI MS HD 20c, 44, 46, 52. This notebook is marked ‘Clifton 1800 From August to Novr’ in the front cover. 35  RI MS HD 20c, 64. See also Alice Jenkins, ‘Humphry Davy: Poetry, Science and the Love of Light’, in Richard Cronin (ed.), 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads (Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press, 1998), 133–​51 (p. 144). 36  Davy to Henry Penneck, 26 Jan. 1799; unpublished letter held at the American Philosophical Society. 37  See Neil Vickers, ‘Coleridge, Thomas Beddoes and Brunonian Medicine’, European Romantic Review 8.1 (1997), 47–​94 (pp. 81–​3). 38  William Wordsworth, Prose Works, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), i. 150. See Gavin Budge, ‘Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of William Wordsworth: “Excitement without the Application of Gross and Violent Stimulants” ’, British Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies 30.2 (2007), 279–​308.

348   Sharon Ruston (1817), where Coleridge accuses Charles Maturin’s Bertram of leaving the reader ‘craving alone the grossest and most outrageous stimulants’.39 In his published account, Davy declares of his nitrous oxide experiments: ‘I was unable to determine [at this early stage] whether the operation was stimulant or depressing’ (Researches, 457). If it is a stimulant, he would expect to find the usual weakness and feebleness that comes after such treatment. The experiment he divines to decide the case involves him drinking a bottle of wine (a known stimulant) in eight minutes: he experiences all the usual symptoms of extreme drunkenness—​unsteadiness, slurring his words—​and eventually sinks into ‘a state of insensibility’ from which he awakes a few hours later with a headache (482). After the third breath of some pure nitrous oxide, he forgets about his headache and experiences ‘the usual pleasurable thrilling’, but when that is gone, he feels nausea, and the headache, ‘langour and depression’ return, though he sleeps well and wakes up hungry (483). He concludes that ‘debility from intoxication was not increased by excitement from nitrous oxide’ (484). This experiment might be the same as that recorded in his notebook in a rather less scientific and objective manner: ‘On december 23. I breathed after a terrible drunken fit a larger quantity of gas 2 bags and 2 bags of oxygen it made me sick.’40 These experiments show that Davy was attempting to find a drug that would excite and energize the body without any attendant suffering. In this, nitrous oxide seemed to be better than other stimulants, such as opium and alcohol. In another notebook also kept around this time, Davy writes that it is probable ‘that the phænomena of life are capable of chemical solution’; his nitrous oxide experiments must have seemed to prove this since it seemed as though the gas was nothing less than a distilled form of happiness.41 His experiments appeared to indicate that pleasure could be administered and controlled. Davy referred to the gas in a letter as the ‘pleasure-​ producing air’.42 The language in which Beddoes publicly announced the discovery of a ‘new pleasure’ is that of the Romantic masculine sublime: ‘Man may, some time, come to rule over the causes of pain and pleasure, with a dominion as absolute as that which at present he exercises over domestic animals and the other instruments of his convenience.’43 Certainly, nitrous oxide helped Davy feel an increased sense of self-​confidence. After a particularly enjoyable session with the gas in April, his notebook records ‘I cried out said to myself I was born to benefit the world by my great talents &c’.44 This exalted self-​confidence is reflected in another notebook entry he made on 27 August, possibly after inhaling seven quarts of nitrous oxide mingled with atmospheric air. He writes 39  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), ii. 229. 40  RI MS HD 20b, 95. 41  RI MS HD 13h, 17. 42  Davy to John Tonkin, 12 Jan. 1801, in Davy, Collected Works, i. 81. 43  Thomas Beddoes, Notice of Some Observations Made at the Medical Pneumatic Institution (Bristol: Biggs and Cottle, 1799), 27. For the Romantic masculine sublime, see Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 85. 44  RI MS HD 20b, 153.

‘High’ Romanticism: Literature and Drugs    349 simply ‘Davy & Newton’, comparing himself directly to the great mathematician and scientist—​and putting his own name first.45 The gas invited the subject into new realms of transcendent and sublime wonder.46 Just as Davy’s supposedly scientific experiments can be seen in the light of recreational drug-​taking, so De Quincey’s accounts of his opium experiences in Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater demand to be seen as contributing to contemporary medical knowledge. Many of the same ideas and motivations that were seen in the nitrous oxide experiments appear again in De Quincey’s account, and it is highly likely, given their mutual friend Coleridge, that De Quincey knew of Davy’s experiments.47 Indeed, it is possible that De Quincey is invoking Davy specifically when he describes how in his own endeavours, ‘I . . . have conducted my experiments upon this interesting subject with a sort of galvanic battery.’48 This instrument is best known as the tool by which Davy isolated a number of chemical elements, including chlorine, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. By this allusion, De Quincey is both comparing his experiments to those of the scientific world, and implying that opium can deliver similarly spectacular results. In other words, both opium and the galvanic battery can be used to discover truths that could not be otherwise attained. De Quincey represents himself as a willing subject undertaking medical research for the greater good, telling his reader that he has ‘for the general benefit of the world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the poison of 8000 drops of laudanum per day’ and thereby comparing himself to surgeons who give themselves diseases in order to test treatments (65). Here is an image of the medical man as romantic explorer, very much in the Davy mould, experimenting upon himself in a courageous attempt to benefit the lives of others. When Jan Golinski describes Davy’s self-​experimentation as ‘a profound enquiry into—​and moulding of—​his own subjectivity’, he might equally be describing De Quincey’s opium experiences.49 De Quincey’s Confessions offer an explicit challenge to the medical profession. He declares that medical accounts to date, written by ‘professors of medicine’ from positions of apparent authority and expertise, are quite simply ‘Lies! lies! lies!’ (44). He uses technical, medical language in this text that shows he clearly thinks he can inform these doctors despite, disingenuously, near the end of Confessions, describing himself ‘a man so ignorant of medicine as myself ’ (87). De Quincey’s knowledge is on display throughout, not least in the huge array of literary allusions and quotations from ancient Greek to contemporary poetry. Interspersed with the medical language he adopts, there are 45 

RI MS HD 20b, 182. For Davy and the sublime, see Sharon Ruston, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), ch. 4. 47  De Quincey writes that he had some communication with the ‘late Sir Humphrey Davy’; see his recollection of S. T. Coleridge, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (Nov. 1834), in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, gen. ed. Grevel Lindop, 21 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), x. 325 48  De Quincey, Confessions, ed. Milligan, 65. All quotations below are from this edition, cited parenthetically by page number. 49  Jan Golinski, ‘Humphry Davy: The Experimental Self ’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies 45.1 (2011), 15–​28 (p. 25). 46 

350   Sharon Ruston strategically placed quotations from his literary hero, Wordsworth, and the text in general knowingly displays both De Quincey’s stylistic virtuosity and his intertextual range. William Buchan comes in for particular ridicule in the Confessions; he is mentioned three times, which attests to the importance of his Domestic Medicine at this time. De Quincey mentions seeing a ‘pirated edition’ of this text ‘in the hands of a farmer’s wife’ which had a serious misprint, warning readers not to take more than twenty-​five ounces of laudanum when this should have read twenty-​five drops (45 n.). He refers to the misprint twice more, at one point assuring the reader in a tone of ironic superiority that he never forgot Buchan’s advice of taking no more than twenty-​five ounces in one go. The playful sarcasm in his remark that ‘it is far better to consult Dr. Buchan’ on medical advice than other sources is evident too in his later note: ‘The reader sees how much I kept within Dr Buchan’s indulgent allowance’ (58, 61). De Quincey’s point is that medical men are not to be trusted on the matter of how much opium can be taken or what the short-​and long-​term effects are, and that he himself is the sole authority on such matters. As he puts it in one of many references to religion in the text: ‘This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium: of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member’ (47). He asks doctors to ‘stand aside’ while he delivers his own ‘lecture’ on the subject (45). De Quincey concedes very few points to standard medical accounts of opium—​only three facts, namely: that it is ‘a dusky brown in colour’; that it is ‘rather dear’ to buy; and that if you take too much you will die, though this last point is in contention because he claims to ‘have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded’ (45, 4). The italics are there to signal that there is one other person who may well have indulged more than De Quincey, but that his experiences are not on record. He refers, of course, to Coleridge, whose struggles with opium were well known but not explicitly admitted in print. Again, taking the position of a martyr to a cause, De Quincey claims that he has published his Confessions as a ‘service’ to ‘the whole class of opium-​eaters’, which he claims is a far larger class than the reader was probably aware (5). He compiles his evidence in a scientific manner, listing two facts that persuaded him that this was the case: first, evidence from druggists in London; and second, evidence from ‘several cotton-​manufacturers’ in Manchester concerning ‘their work-​people’ (5–​6). He grudgingly acknowledges one medical source, John Awsiter’s An Essay on the Effects of Opium Considered as a Poison (1763), which is alive to what De Quincey calls the ‘fascinating powers of opium’ and the likelihood that once these were known, English people would become habituated to its use.50 De Quincey is keen to distinguish between two uses of opium: he uses the drug for the ‘bare relief of pain’, and this is how he first knowingly encountered the drug as an adult, but he also uses it for ‘the excitement of positive pleasure’ (5). His account of his early illnesses shows that his medical knowledge is steeped in Brown’s theory of excitability. 50  John Awsiter, An Essay on the Effects of Opium Considered as a Poison (London, 1763). Awsiter may have introduced the idea of ‘habit’ to the discussion of drug-​taking; certainly his usage predates the OED’s account of the word.

‘High’ Romanticism: Literature and Drugs    351 When he faints with hunger on the steps of a house in Soho Square in London, his friend Ann treats him with ‘a glass of port wine and spices’ (26). This is the ‘powerful and reviving stimulus’ that his body needs and it provides ‘an instantaneous power of restoration’ (26). Taking on the question, as Davy had for nitrous oxide, of whether opium is a stimulant or a depressant, De Quincey declares: ‘Certainly, opium is classed under the head of narcotics; and some such effect it may produce in the end: but the primary effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system’ (49). Another ‘leading error’ among those who discuss opium is the idea that ‘the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression’ (49). Instead, De Quincey portrays himself during what he calls, in a further religious reference, his ‘noviciate’ –​that honeymoon period when he claims to have experienced only pleasure from opium –​as a serious student pursuing ‘severe studies’ at university in Oxford that required attention and activity (49, 50). He is also forceful in his condemnation of the idea that opium intoxicates. Laudanum has the potential to intoxicate, he admits, but only if enough of it is drunk, and only because of the alcohol in which the opium is dissolved. He clearly wishes to make clear that the English opium-​eater is not to be thought of as lying in a drunk-​like torpor; his vision of himself as a philosopher is quite different from this image. It is important to him (as it was to Davy again) to prove that the experience of taking opium is quite different to that of drinking wine: the difference is not in degree ‘but even in kind’; it is a completely different kind of experience (45). Comparing the feeling one gets after drinking wine to that of taking opium, De Quincey borrows ‘a technical distinction from medicine’: one pleasure is acute and the other is chronic (46). Both terms are more usually applied to pain than to pleasure, and they point to another of De Quincey’s central messages—​that there is equal and opposite pain to match the pleasure of opium-​eating. The extended comparison between the effects of opium and wine demonstrates how important it is to De Quincey to deny similarities of experience. Where wine ‘robs a man of his self-​possession . . . opium greatly invigorates it’ (46). We see this in both Davy’s and De Quincey’s accounts, both of which involve moments of self-​confidence and egotism. Wine ‘unsettles and clouds the judgment’, whereas opium ‘communicates serenity and equipoise’; both wine and opium give ‘an expansion to the heart’, but wine tends to make ‘benevolent affections’ have a ‘maudlin character’, which opium does not (46). While wine may initially ‘steady the intellect’, it eventually ‘leads man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance’, and, beyond this, to ‘disperse the intellectual energies’ (47).51 Opium, on the other hand, ‘seems to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted’ (47). His final comparison is telling: alcohol reminds us

51  Compare Lamb’s uncompromising account of the effects of alcohol in his ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’, first published in the London Magazine in 1813 and republished in August 1822 in order, Jonathan Bate claims, to ‘remind the literary world that De Quincey’s stunning pathological self-​analysis was not totally original’ (‘Introduction’, in Charles Lamb, Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, ed. Jonathan Bate [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], xvii). Lamb’s essay is also an important precedent in English use of the autobiographical ‘Confessions’ genre.

352   Sharon Ruston that we are ‘merely human’, even ‘brutal’ or animal-​like, whereas opium gives an indication of the ‘diviner part of [man’s] nature’ (47). The opium-​eater, at least the English one (and De Quincey repeatedly distinguishes between him and foreign others), is bathed in the ‘great light of a majestic intellect’ (47). In this respect, if not others, Confessions could be accused of glamourizing the drug. It is amusing that De Quincey feels the need to point out that he has ‘never been a great wine-​drinker’ (46), just as Davy, in a footnote to his wine and nitrous oxide experiments, writes: ‘I ought to observe that my usual drink is water, that I had been little accustomed to take wine or spirits, and had never been completely intoxicated but once before in the course of my life’ (Researches, 482 n.). Whatever the truth of this in Davy’s case, if De Quincey consumed opium in the manner and quantity he claimed, then he simultaneously drank a great deal of alcohol. Robert Morrison calculates that even ‘at the lower percentage of 45 per cent proof spirits, and even when he had his habit under some kind of control, his weekly consumption of alcohol was considerable, while during the periods of his worst excesses he drank the equivalent of between one and two pints of whisky per day’.52 Morrison speculates that the withdrawal symptoms described in the Confessions, which do not quite fit usual accounts of opium withdrawal, may be the result of alcoholism rather than opium addiction.53 For practical reasons, since laudanum is largely made up of alcohol, De Quincey keeps his in a ‘wine decanter’ on a table next to him (68). Despite this, and without seeing the irony, De Quincey accuses the reader of having indulged just as unhealthily an amount of ‘claret, port, or “particular Madeira” ’ as De Quincey had opium (57). Like Davy’s nitrous oxide account, De Quincey finds that opium can give pleasure in both solitary and sociable occasions. It can be enjoyed in ‘solitude and silence’ and lead to ‘those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature’ (54). At other times, and on occasions premeditated, De Quincey takes opium and goes to the opera or walks among people of the labouring classes, listening to and joining in with their conversations (52–​3). This is a further example of the ways in which artistic perception can be expanded by the use of drugs: De Quincey speaks of his ‘Opera pleasures’ being greatly enhanced by opium (52). He portrays himself as an explorer—​‘the first discover of some of these terræ incognitæ’—​literally and figuratively, courageously exploring new territory (53). These pleasures are personal to him, though, or at least to men of his race and class. Other men, men whose only ‘talk is of oxen’, will ‘if he is not too dull to dream at all . . . dream about oxen’ (7). De Quincey’s experiences (and dreams) are superior to such men because he is superior himself; styling himself a philosopher, the reader can expect to hear about suitably philosophic dreams. Looking for the reason for his attraction to opium, De Quincey declares: ‘I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that I am too much of an Eudæmonist: I hanker too 52  Robert Morrison, The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2009), 165. 53 Morrison, The English Opium Eater, 164.

‘High’ Romanticism: Literature and Drugs    353 much after a state of happiness, both for myself and for others’ (59). Again, we see a conviction that happiness is obtainable by chemical means. The first time De Quincey takes opium, he thinks he has discovered the ‘secret of happiness’ and a panacea for all human woes (44). Later he describes himself as having ‘taken happiness, both in solid and liquid shape’ (64). He feels that in offering these reports of opium experiences, he is engaged in a ‘science of happiness’ (65). Looked at in the light of Davy’s nitrous oxide experiments, De Quincey’s opium use seems less pleasure-​seeking for its own sake and more in keeping with contemporary medical research, or at least this is what he would like us to think. Confessions is in many ways a challenge to the reader—​to reflect upon his or her own bad habits before they judge his. Unfortunately, while opium might seem to offer happiness, its long-​term use was often accompanied by dependency and by the horrendous symptoms, including nightmares, which resulted when the user tried to reduce the amount taken or withdraw from the drug altogether. De Quincey uses quotations from Milton’s Paradise Lost and from Shelley’s recently published The Revolt of Islam (1818) to describe the ‘pains of opium’: the vivid and pleasurable dreams that accompanied initial opium use are now replaced by nightmares of ‘dreadful faces throng’d and fiery arms’ (88, quoting Paradise Lost, Book 12, line 644). Dreams fascinated Romantic writers, and opium use and withdrawal offered even stranger and more fascinating dreams. Jennifer Ford notes that De Quincey claimed Confessions was written more to ‘reveal the mysteries and potential grandeur of dreams than to outline the dangers and pleasures of opium.54 Details from episodes of intense creativity described in early accounts come back to haunt him in his nightmares, and the qualities for which he had exalted opium later fail him. He is unable to pursue his intellectual work, or even to read poetry; he is incapable of finishing writing projects, describing himself as experiencing ‘intellectual torpor’, being in a ‘dormant state’ except for the pain and misery he feels, and having a ‘sense of incapacity and feebleness’ (74). The end of the Confessions is the reverse of its beginning: after harrowing accounts of his nightmares, we hear that ‘opium had long ceased to found its empire on spells of pleasure; it was now solely by the tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it, that it kept its hold’ (84). Here De Quincey’s and Davy’s experiences differ. For all its dangers, we do not hear of Davy falling out of love with nitrous oxide; in 1811 he writes in a love letter to his wife-​to-​be Jane comparing his feelings for her with the ‘exhilarating gas’.55 Davy did, however, stop speaking about it in public. Like so many other Romantic experiments of the 1790s, laughing gas became firmly tied in satirical cartoons and periodicals to Jacobin politics, associated as it was with the radical circles of Joseph Priestley and Beddoes.56 As his career moved on and he entered into the metropolitan elite, Davy drew a discreet veil over his youthful nitrous oxide 54 

Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–​4. Davy to Jane Apreece, 9 Sept. [1811]: unpublished letter held in the Royal Institution, HD/​25/​3a. 56  [Richard Polwhele],‘The Pneumatic Revellers: An Eclogue’, Anti-​Jacobin Review 23 (May 1800), 109–​ 18. For other satires, see A. J. Wright, ‘ “I fill three quarters of immensity!”: Satires of Early Nitrous Oxide Research’, Bulletin of Anesthesia History 14.1 (1996), 15–​18. 55 

354   Sharon Ruston experiments; De Quincey, on the other hand, spent the rest of his career exploiting his notoriety as the ‘English Opium-​Eater’.

Further Reading Abrams, M. H., The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). Berridge, Victoria, and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opium Use in Nineteenth-​ Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Boon, Marcus, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Burwick, Frederick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Fullmer, June, The Young Humphry Davy:  The Making of an Experimental Chemist (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000). Golinski, Jan, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–​1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Hayter, Alethea, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1968). Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Press, 2008). Jay, Mike, The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and his Sons of Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Jay, Mike, Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century, rev. edn (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2011). Lindop, Grevel, The Opium-​Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Milligan, Barry, Pleasures and Pains:  Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-​Century British Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995). Morrison, Robert, The English Opium Eater:  A Biography of Thomas De Quincey (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2009). Ruston, Sharon, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Science, Literature and Medicine of the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Smith, W. D.  A., Under the Influence:  A History of Nitrous Oxide and Oxygen Anaesthesia (London: Macmillan, 1982).

Chapter 23

W riter-​P hysi c ia ns Catherine Jones

In his Observations on the Duties and Offices of a Physician (1770), the Scottish physician and philosopher John Gregory elaborated upon the character of the ideal physician and the different kinds of knowledge he needed to acquire. First published anonymously, from a student’s notes, the Observations were versions of university lectures that Gregory, as Professor of the Practice of Physic, had given at Edinburgh from the mid-​ 1760s. According to Gregory, in order to excel in ‘physick’ or ‘the art of preserving health, of prolonging life, and of curing diseases’, it is necessary to acquire a ‘greater compass of knowledge’ than in any other art: A knowledge of the mathematicks, . . . of natural history, and natural philosophy, are essentially connected with it; as well as the sciences of anatomy, botany, and chemistry, which are deemed its immediate branches. There are likewise some pieces of knowledge, which, though not absolutely necessary to the successful practice of medicine, are yet such ornamental acquisitions, as no physician who has had a regulation education is found without; such are, an acquaintance with the Latin, Greek, and French languages. If you add to this, that knowledge of the world, of men, and of manners, so useful to a physician, . . . I think it will evidently appear, that no profession requires a greater variety of liberal accomplishments than that of physick: and this sufficiently establishes the dignity of the science.1

Gregory’s description of the polymathic quality of the practising physician, and his conception of medicine as a synthesis of different forms of knowledge, reflects the cosmopolitan values of the Edinburgh Medical School, a key institution of the Scottish Enlightenment which attracted students from across Europe and North America as well as Britain and Ireland. Like his distinguished contemporary William Cullen, author of an influential nosology (classification of diseases) and other standard textbooks,

1 

[John Gregory], Observations on the Duties and Offices of a Physician; and on the Method of Prosecuting Enquiries in Philosophy (London, 1770), 1, 5–​6.

356   Catherine Jones Gregory sought to found medical identities upon principles of politeness and gentility and on liberal learning, so as to produce physicians who were ‘ornate’ as well as ‘skilful’.2 Their success in promoting this ideal and imparting it to generations of students helps to account for the high esteem in which the medical profession was held in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The syncretic character of medical knowledge, the sociability of the profession, and the philosophical and literary education which accompanied a university training in physic created a fluid boundary between different intellectual fields and ensured that medical concepts and language were widely distributed in the general culture. This effect was reinforced at other levels of the professional hierarchy. The fact that the vocational training and apprenticeship for surgeons and apothecaries did not require attendance at university meant that these branches of the profession were open to various social groups and connected with other trades and disciplines, including, for apothecaries, the thriving field of medical botany. Medical publishing, which, like other areas of the book trade, expanded greatly in this period, reflects these various trends, the proliferation of specialist textbooks coinciding with the growth of popular medical manuals and many other forms of writing and publication which laid claim to medical knowledge.3 It is in this context that the relationship between literature and medicine in the period can be examined. The cross-​fertilization of these domains has been intensively studied in recent years, and scholars such as Hermione de Almeida, Alan Richardson, and Michelle Faubert have shown how important to Romantic literary culture was medical science (including brain science, or ‘science of mind’, an area that saw significant advances in this period) and how frequently medical ideas found expression in literary form.4 Much of this work, however, has focused on a few canonical writers and a small number of texts, thereby obscuring the huge diversity of medical writing in the age of Enlightenment and Romanticism. Not only writer-​physicians but writers of all kinds sought to claim therapeutic or diagnostic powers for literature; and medical writing, broadly defined, embraced a wide range of genres. In this chapter, I will illustrate this diversity by examining five writers who represent different points of intersection between medical and literary culture: John Aikin, Benjamin Rush, Joanna Baillie (sister of the physician Matthew Baillie), Erasmus Darwin, and John Keats. Though they constitute only a small fraction of the numerous Romantic-​era writers who studied or practised

2  John Thomson, An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen, M.D., 2 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1832), i. 504. See also Jane Rendall, ‘The Reputation of William Cullen (1710–​ 1790): Family, Politics, and the Biography of an “Ornate Physician” ’, Scottish Historical Review 93.2 (2014), 262–​85. 3  For an overview of medical publication in this period, see The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 5: 1695–​1830, ed. Michael S. Suarez, S. J. and Michael L. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chs 46 and 47. 4  Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Michelle Faubert, Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-​Era Psychologists (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009).

Writer-Physicians   357 some form of medicine, or were otherwise connected with the medical world, these case studies demonstrate some of the many ways in which literature and medicine could be combined across the course of a career. They also exemplify the emergence of new, or transformed, genres of medical writing, or of literary genres that became newly medicalized in this period, a process of generic innovation that will be traced here in part through consideration of the reception history of the texts in question. Medical writing was fashionable but contentious in the Romantic period; it intersected with the broader literary and intellectual controversies of the age. The career of the English doctor and writer John Aikin typifies the porous boundary between literature and medicine and the diasporic influence of Scottish medical education. As a medical student at Edinburgh University from 1764 to 1766, Aikin was committed to acquiring the wide-​ranging ‘compass of knowledge’ advocated by Gregory and Cullen. He had previously attended Warrington Academy, the well-​known school for the children of dissenters at which his father, John Aikin, was the classics tutor. He had also undertaken, from 1761, an apprenticeship to a surgeon and apothecary in Uppingham. In a letter written from Edinburgh to his sister Anna Barbauld, he expressed his particular delight in anatomy, a difficult but ‘noble and entertaining’ field, and also affirmed the importance of cultivating a taste for polite literature as ‘an excellent guard against running into vicious pleasures, and against being unfitted by hard study and low spirits for social life’.5 His own books of amusement at this time were ‘the Latin poets’, and his favourite ‘the elegant and tender Tibullus’. On leaving Edinburgh in 1766 without taking a degree, Aikin undertook further studies to prepare him for a career in surgery in Manchester and in London. After an initial start in Chester, he moved his surgical practice to Warrington in 1771; from 1774, he also lectured part-​time at the Warrington Academy (on anatomy, physiology, and chemistry). As a surgeon, he began publishing widely on medical and scientific topics; he also established a reputation as a literary figure, his Essays on Song-​Writing appearing in 1772 and An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry in 1777. When Warrington Academy closed in 1783, Aikin applied for a doctorate in medicine at the University of Leiden; he successfully defended his thesis at the university in the summer of 1784. On returning to England he established a medical practice at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, before finally settling in London, in 1792, near the thriving Dissenting intellectual community in Hackney. However, according to his elder son, Arthur Aikin, he did not succeed in obtaining much professional employment, ‘being little fitted by temper or habit to engage in the incessant struggle necessary to success; he therefore the more willingly followed the bent of his disposition, and occupied himself chiefly in literary pursuits’.6 In 1796, a stroke of paralysis effectively ended his medical career: he gave up his house and practice to his younger son, Charles Aikin, and retired to Stoke Newington in 1798. From there, he continued to publish many literary works; among

5 

6 

Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, M.D., 2 vols (London, 1823), 8. A[rthur] A[ikin], ‘Dr. John Aikin’, Gentleman’s Magazine 93 (Jan. 1823), 83–​9 (p. 87).

358   Catherine Jones his most original productions was a collection of stories for children, Evenings at Home, or The Juvenile Budget Opened (1792–​6), written with his sister (see Susan Manly, Chapter 14 in this volume). He was also significantly involved in Romantic periodical culture as an editor and reviewer (he held the editorship of both the Monthly Magazine [1796–​1806] and the Athenaeum [1807–​9]). At Warrington, Aikin published his single volume of Biographical Memoirs of Medicine in Great Britain from the Revival of Literature to the Time of Harvey (1780), which intertwined biography with history to create a national narrative of the developing medical profession. In the period of Enlightenment and Romanticism, most published ‘lives of physicians’ originated as spoken eulogies and conformed to ‘an established formula covering “pedigree” and “preferments” before concluding with a description of personal character and physical appearance with only the briefest of commentary on publications, theories or practice’.7 Dissenters practised the genre with particular fervour: biography was ‘the ideal medium for extolling the benefits of an education at Edinburgh, rather than Oxford and Cambridge, and for singing the praises of such exemplary characters as . . . Cullen’.8 Aikin expanded both the form and the content of medical biography by using collective biography for historiographical purposes. Aikin set out his plan in A Specimen of the Medical Biography of Great Britain; with an Address to the Public (1775). ‘No lover of letters’, he declared, ‘can want respect to the character of an ENGLISH PHYSICIAN, nor can fail to discern the connection a medical biography will have with the literary history of the country’.9 As examples of the intended work, he presented sketches of three individuals of varying cast of character: John Clement (a president of the London College of Physicians and a protégé of Sir Thomas More); William Butler (a physician to James VI and I); and John Woodall (a surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and a contemporary of Harvey). The publication of the Specimen led to useful suggestions and offers of assistance. However, on finding the problems attending the investigation of ‘the earlier and darker periods of medical history’ to be insurmountable, Aikin decided to limit the scope of his project to the period from the Renaissance to the age of Harvey.10 Although Aikin assured the public that every attention would be afforded ‘to render the work a history of the art, as well as of its professors’, he was subsequently obliged to defend himself against some ‘esteemed medical correspondents’ who suggested that he should ‘confine his researches to the progress of the art, without troubling himself with

7 

David Shuttleton, ‘John Thomson’s “Account . . . of Dr William Cullen”: The Making of a Medical Biography’, in Megan J. Coyer and David E. Shuttleton (eds), Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726–​1832 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 246. 8  Lisbeth Haakonssen, Medicine and Morals in the Enlightenment: John Gregory, Thomas Percival and Benjamin Rush (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 107. 9  John Aikin, A Specimen of the Medical Biography of Great Britain; with an Address to the Public (London, 1775), 2. 10  Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, i. 24.

Writer-Physicians   359 the biography of its professors’.11 Aikin acknowledged that analysis of the historical development of medical knowledge ‘is indeed the most useful and essential part of his undertaking’. Yet he reflected that ‘he could not persuade himself to forego the opportunities which offered of adding somewhat to the stock of British Biography; and of throwing due lustre on the characters of men, not less estimable for liberal manners and literary endowments, than for skill in their proper profession’.12 Aikin sought to commemorate the activities not only of those ‘most noted of the empirical class [of the profession], who have introduced any important innovations into medicine’, but also those who ‘became eminent from their proficiency in another part of science, or from any remarkable circumstance in their lives’.13 While he celebrated the contributions of physicians to a variety of fields, those to literature, as Kathryn Ready notes, inspired particular pride: Of the physician-​poet Jon Phreas, he writes that a ‘circumstance perhaps more to his credit than any other, is that he was requested by a noble Italian to write an epitaph for the tomb of Petrarch, to supply the place of a barbarous one before inscribed upon it.’ He includes admiring notice of Thomas Linacre’s contributions to Latin grammar and composition and praises John Kaye or Key, alias Caius, for succeeding ‘Linacre in uniting the first honours of literature with those of medicine’.14

Aiken’s novel approach to medical biography was welcomed by the Monthly Review, which stated in its November 1780 issue: ‘We think [the author] entitled to praise for the industry he has shewn in collecting his materials, as well as for the manner in which he has employed them.’15 However, according to his daughter Lucy Aikin, the work did not find favour either with the medical profession or with the general public, and he was compelled finally to abandon the project, ‘as one which promised no adequate remuneration either in fame or emolument’.16 Like Aikin, the Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush studied at Edinburgh University (between 1766 and 1768), where his teachers included Gregory and Cullen. In the growing quarrel between Britain and her American colonies, Rush associated with such leaders as Thomas Paine, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, it was Rush who suggested to Paine that he write his famous pamphlet and later discussed its title with the author. ‘Mr. Paine’, he recalled in a

11 Aikin, Specimen, 3; John Aikin, Biographical Memoirs of Medicine in Great Britain from the Revival of

Literature to the Time of Harvey (London, 1780), vii. 12 Aikin, Biographical Memoirs, vi–​vii. 13 Aikin, Specimen, 3–​4. 14  Kathryn Ready, ‘ “And make thine own Apollo doubly thine”: John Aikin as Literary Physician and the Intersection of Medicine, Morality and Politics’, in Felicity James and Ian Inkster (eds), Religious Dissent and the Aikin-​Barbauld Circle, 1740–​1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 73–​4. See also Aikin, Biographical Memoirs, 26, 103. 15  Monthly Review 63 (Nov. 1780), 379–​84 (p. 384). 16  Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, i. 25.

360   Catherine Jones letter to James Cheetham of 17 July 1809, ‘proposed to call it “Plain Truth.” I objected to it and suggested the title of “Common Sense.” ’17 Rush’s Scottish education allowed him to make this link for Paine and to give a political application to an epistemological (and physiological) term. After the Revolution, Rush warned his students against too great regard for medical figures of the past. ‘To believe in great men’, he proclaimed in his Eulogium on Cullen, delivered before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia on 9 July 1790, ‘is often as great an obstacle to the progress of knowledge, as to believe in witches and conjurers’.18 Rush engaged in heated debate throughout the 1790s about the cause, nature, and contagiousness of yellow fever, and its most effective remedies. During the epidemics in Philadelphia of 1793 and 1797, he vigorously defended his view of the necessity of bleeding in the disease in lengthy conversations and private letters, as well as in communications to the press; he also published An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever, as It Appeared in Philadelphia in the Year, 1793 (1794), which includes exhaustive and revealing analysis of his motives in drawing blood. Rush’s Account recalls Daniel Defoe’s fictional reconstruction of the effects of the Great Plague on London of 1665 in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a copy of which Rush had acquired by 1790.19 Describing the desolation on Water Street, Philadelphia, Rush observed in a letter to his wife Julia Stockton Rush on 25 August 1790: ‘This morning I witnessed a scene there which reminded me of the histories I had read of the plague.’20 In Defoe’s Journal, the facts of the plague submerge the narrator, H. F., in his community from the start; indeed, ‘plague flattens out the basic ingredient of the emerging novel form, the autonomous self, and in defence of a piety with which all readers can thereby identify’.21 Like H. F., Rush is concerned to establish the facts of the yellow fever. Yet he also attends to subjective states in a personal final chapter, in which he describes ‘the state of [his] body and mind, during [his] intercourse with the sick in [the city’s] late epidemic’. ‘My perception of the lapse of time’, he comments, ‘was new to me. It was uncommonly slow. The ordinary business and pursuits of men appeared to me in a light that was equally new. The hearse and the grave mingled themselves with every view I took of human affairs.’22 By including this personal memoir in his Account, Rush transformed the language and style of ‘Medical Inquiries and Observations’; he also created the new genre of physician autobiography.23 17 

Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press for American Philosophical Society, 1951), ii. 1008. 18  Benjamin Rush, An Eulogium in Honor of the Late Dr. William Cullen (Philadelphia, 1790), 27–​8. 19  Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47. 20  Letters of Benjamin Rush, ii. 640. 21  David Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xxii. 22  Benjamin Rush, An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever, as it Appeared in the City of Philadelphia, in the Year 1793, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1794), 339, 358. This edition forms the third volume of the 1798 multi-​volume set of Medical Inquiries and Observations. 23  Catherine Jones, ‘Benjamin Rush, Edinburgh Medicine and the Rise of Physician Autobiography’, in Coyer and Shuttleton (eds), Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture. See also Stephen Carl Arch, The

Writer-Physicians   361 The English journalist, politician, and agriculturalist William Cobbett, who had arrived in America in 1792, pilloried Rush as a Sangrado, meaning a physician who resembles the fictional Dr Sangrado of Valladolid from Alan-​René Le Sage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas (1715–​35). In Le sage’s literary rendering of a physician, Dr Sangrado’s sole remedies are bleeding and the drinking of hot water. On 16 October 1797 Cobbett printed in his newspaper Porcupine’s Gazette a passage from Gil Blas, in which Dr Sangrado is quoted as saying (after drawing six porringers of blood from a patient and ordering six more to be drawn in three hours), ‘It is a gross error to suppose that blood is necessary to the conservation of life.’24 Cobbett’s attacks increased in trenchancy after Rush issued a notice that he was suing Cobbett for libel. Rush secured an overwhelming victory in his libel suit, decided in December 1799, but the feud between the two men ended only with Cobbett’s departure for England on 1 June 1800. In the summer of 1800, Rush began composing a document entitled ‘Travels through Life:  or, An Account of Sundry Incidents and Events in the Life of Benjamin Rush’. The controversy over bloodletting and the quarrel with Cobbett feature prominently. However, ‘Travels through Life’ is not only about public quarrels. The narrative’s self-​ justifying tone may be as much a product of Rush’s repudiation of his Edinburgh teacher, Cullen, as of his feud with Cobbett. Rush pays tribute in ‘Travels through Life’ to his Edinburgh teachers: ‘The two years I spent in Edinburgh’, he declared, ‘I consider as the most important in their influence upon my character and conduct of any period of my life.’25 But he gives far more space to the process by which he abandoned Cullen’s system. Rush portrays his repudiation of Cullen as an intuitive experience or flash or insight that comes like a moment of conversion: ‘The leading principle of my System was obtruded upon me suddenly while I was walking the floor of my study. It was like a ferment introduced into my mind. It produced in it a constant endless succession of decompositions and new arrangements of facts and ideas upon medical subjects.’26 Such instances in the narrative align ‘Travels through Life’ with the genre of spiritual autobiography established by St Augustine, developed in Anglophone transatlantic communities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and modified by Jean-​Jacques Rousseau. Elsewhere, in the sections of the narrative devoted to the controversy over bloodletting, Rush’s language and style become closer to the sermon or the jeremiad, Rush exploiting the language of the Presbyterian pulpit to warn against criminal ignorance amongst medical practitioners and others, and to defend his own theory and practice.

Emergence of Autobiography in Post-​Revolutionary America 1730–​1830 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001). 24  William Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works, 12 vols (London, 1801), vii. 234, cited by L. H. Butterfield, ‘The Cobbett-​Rush Feud’, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, ii. 1215. 25  Benjamin Rush, ‘Travels through Life’, in The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His ‘Travels Through Life’ Together with His Commonplace Book for 1789–​1813, ed. George W. Corner (1948; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970), 43. 26  Rush, ‘Travels through Life’, 87–​8.

362   Catherine Jones ‘Travels through Life’ remained unpublished until the mid-​twentieth century, but it circulated in manuscript amongst Rush’s family and others. Rush’s son, James Rush, continued his father’s quarrel with medical professionals in Philadelphia in Hamlet, a Dramatic Prelude (1834), ‘a covert satire, of a professional drift’, in the words of the Knickerbocker, or New-​York Monthly Magazine, which ‘has doubtless hit where it was intended—​for we learn that the edition has decreased with no common rapidity’.27 George Bancroft used the manuscript for the ninth volume of his History of the United States, which appeared in 1866. Responding in part to Rush’s heroic self-​presentation in his An Account of the . . . Yellow Fever, the Quaker physician J. C. Lettsom, in 1815, compared his friend’s courage during the epidemic to Hippocrates during the plague in Athens.28 Many, however, thought Rush almost a fanatic on the advantages of phlebotomy, and vigorously opposed his methods in letters and pamphlets. Charles Brockden Brown, in his novel Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799–​1800), sceptically explored some of the assumptions that had guaranteed Rush’s self-​assurance. In particular, the middle section of the narrative, which takes place in Philadelphia during the plague of 1793, explores the perils of conscientiousness.29 Where Brown turned to fiction to explore human passions and motives, the Scottish poet Joanna Baillie experimented in new kinds of character portraits for the stage. In her collection A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (1798), she brought the concerns of her brother, the physician-​anatomist Matthew Baillie, to dramatic composition. Joanna Baillie was immersed in the medical culture of her age. As well as being the sister of Matthew Baillie, she was the niece of the Hunter brothers: the celebrated physician-​surgeon, ‘man-​midwife’, and anatomist William Hunter; and the surgeon-​ anatomist John Hunter. A  former pupil of Cullen, William Hunter had founded an anatomy school at his home in Great Windmill Street, London, in 1769. On his death in 1783, he left Matthew Baillie control of the school and the eventual freehold of the premises. Here Joanna Baillie wrote and published her first volume of poetry (Poems . . . of Nature and Rustic Manners [1790]) and began experimenting in dramatic composition. As trustee custodian of William Hunter’s museum, Matthew Baillie had free access to a collection containing many pathological specimens, and as physician (from 1787) at St George’s Hospital he had frequent opportunities to examine diseased corpses. In 1793 he published his influential treatise, The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body, which aimed ‘to explain more minutely than has hitherto been done, the changes of structure arising from morbid actions in some of the most important parts of the human body’.30 The work was limited to the thoracic and 27 

The Knickerbocker, or The New-​York Monthly Magazine 5 (Jan. 1835), 81. J. C. Lettsom, Recollections of Rush (London, 1815), 12–​13. 29  William L. Hedges, ‘Benjamin Rush, Charles Brockden Brown, and the American Plague Year’, Early American Literature 7.3 (1973), 295–​311 (p. 304). 30  Matthew Baillie, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body, 2nd edn (London, 1797), i. 28 

Writer-Physicians   363 abdominal organs and the brain; significant additions were made to the second edition of 1797, especially notes on symptoms corresponding to pathological change. Although he focused his investigations on physiological causes, he acknowledged that no simple discrimination of mind and brain was possible: for example, having noted that the brain ‘has sometimes been found more firm and elastic than is natural in cases of mania’, he adds—​‘from the best authority’—​that this state of brain ‘is not common in maniacs; and that in them it is generally not more firm, nor more elastic, than in people whose minds have always been sound’.31 In the ‘Introductory Discourse’ to her 1798 volume, Joanna Baillie described her design as no less than a whole anatomy of ‘the varieties of the human mind’.32 ‘The passions’, as Dorothy McMillan comments, ‘must be fully embodied to be understood, the course of the disease followed and if possible cured. It is in drama that the fullest embodiment is possible.’33 The plays in the 1798 volume consist of Count Basil and The Tryal, respectively a tragedy and a comedy delineating the passion of love; and De Monfort, representing the passion of hate. Baillie chose to represent dramatic character ‘not in terms of traditional literary models, but rather in relation to the accounts of mental pathology in contemporary medical science’.34 Curiosity and sympathy are the driving impulses in Baillie’s theory of drama. At the end of Act 1, scene 2 of De Monfort, for example, the workings of the mind of the play’s eponymous hero are unveiled to Baillie’s reader or theatre audience through soliloquy. De Monfort confesses: Hell hath no greater torment for th’ accurs’d Than this man’s presence gives—​ Abhorred fiend! he hath a pleasure too, A damned pleasure in the pain he gives! Oh! the side glance of that detested eye! That conscious smile! that full insulting lip! It touches every nerve: it makes me mad. (I. ii. 193–​9)

In this instance, De Montfort is depicted reading the mind, through its effects on the body, of the object of his hatred, his childhood friend Rezenvelt. The audience is drawn into an exercise of sympathetic curiosity; by observing De Montfort, we gain insight into our own minds. De Monfort’s partner comedy on hate is The Election, included in the second volume of Plays on the Passions (as the series became popularly known), 31 

Matthew Baillie, Morbid Anatomy, 457. Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions, ed. Peter Duthie (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), 76. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent quotations are from this edition. 33  Dorothy Macmillan, ‘ “Dr” Baillie’, in Richard Cronin (ed.), 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 77. See also Alan Richardson, ‘A Neural Theatre: Joanna Baillie’s “Plays on the Passions” ’, in Thomas C. Crochunis (ed.), Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 2004). 34  Frederick Burwick, ‘Joanna Baillie, Matthew Baillie, and the Pathology of the Passions’, in Crochunis (ed.), Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist, 48. 32 

364   Catherine Jones published in 1802, and dedicated to Matthew Baillie. The plays reveal the passions as potentially but not essentially, nor incurably, morbid. Baillie stressed the superiority of native plays in an 1800 prologue to the stage version of De Monfort: O, shame!—​why borrow from a foreign store? As if the Rich should pilfer from the poor.—​ We who have forc’d th’astonish’d world to yield, Led by immortal Shakespeare to the Field.35

Baillie situated De Monfort in relation to a British dramatic lineage that included Shakespeare, Thomas Otway, and John Dryden. The prologue provides, along with the ‘Introductory Discourse’ to the 1798 volume and her brother’s work, a way to understand and interpret her experimental drama. Critical responses were mixed. Francis Jeffrey, reviewing the 1798 volume in the Edinburgh Review, was scornful of Baillie’s overall method: ‘To delineate a man’s character by tracing the progress of his ruling passion is like describing his person by the yearly admeasurement of his foot, or rather by a termly report of the increase of a wen, by which his health and his beauty are ultimately destroyed.’36 Similarly, while the Edinburgh Magazine recognized Baillie’s ‘bold innovation’, the reviewer (signed ‘X’) considered her plan ‘unfortunate’: It is true that, in some of our best tragedies, one passion is predominant, and its excess leads to the catastrophe, as the jealousy of Othello, and the ambition of Lady Macbeth; but no one, except our author, ever thought of giving, in the form of a drama, an anatomical analysis,—​a philosophical dissection of a passion.37

However, William Harness mounted a strong defence of Baillie’s theory and practice in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: The end to which . . . Baillie proposed to herself was to warn the mind against the access of passion . . . This is an object worthy of the exalted talents which were dedicated to its accomplishment, and, if the moral influence attributed to theatrical representations be as powerful as has been ascribed to them by every individual who has treated of the subject from the days of Aristotle to our own, the object was rationally pursued.38 35  Joanna Baillie, ‘Prologue’ to De Monfort, in Jeffrey N. Cox (ed.), Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–​1825 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 233. 36  Edinburgh Review 2 (July 1803), 269–​86 (p. 272). 37  ‘Female Authors of Scotland. No. I. Remarks on the Plays on the Passions, by Joanna Baillie’, Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany new series 2 (June 1818), 517–​9 (pp. 517–​8). 38  [William Harness], ‘Celebrated Female Writers. No. 1. Joanna Baillie’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 16 no. 91 (Aug. 1824), 162–​78 (p. 168).

Writer-Physicians   365 Where Baillie dramatized the mental nosology of her age, the English physician Erasmus Darwin, in his first didactic poem, The Loves of the Plants (1789), taught the classification system of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. Darwin conceived of The Loves of the Plants as a two-​part project, which he brought to completion with the publication, in 1791, of The Botanic Garden; A Poem, in Two Parts. Part I. Containing the Economy of Vegetation. Part II. The Loves of the Plants. With Philo­ sophical Notes. These works founded the genre of the botanic poem with philosophical notes. Darwin also produced his own nosology, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794–​6), in which he sought, as he stated in the ‘Preface’, ‘to reduce the facts belonging to ANIMAL LIFE into classes, orders, genera, and species; and by comparing them with each other, to unravel the theory of diseases’. His purpose was to help ‘the public’ (which had ‘become superstitiously fearful of diseases’) to avoid becoming ‘the daily prey of some crafty empyric’ by providing them with knowledge. 39 As a student in the early 1750s of classics and mathematics at St John’s College, Cambridge, Darwin had travelled to London to attend the anatomy lectures of William Hunter. He subsequently studied medicine at Edinburgh from 1753 to 1756, where he came under the influence of Cullen; he took his MB degree from Cambridge in 1755. As a practising physician in the Midlands, Darwin founded several provincial scientific societies, notably the Lunar Society of Birmingham; he was also part of a wider network of Enlightenment thinkers that included such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin. In a letter to Josiah Wade of 27 January 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge described Darwin, whom he had recently met, as possessing ‘perhaps a greater range of knowledge than any man in Europe’.40 Begun in Lichfield in 1779, the bulk of The Loves of the Plants was written concurrently with Darwin’s translation of Linnaeus’s catalogues.41 The poet Anna Seward (known to many as ‘The Swan of Lichfield’), who helped Darwin tend his botanic garden, encouraged Darwin by presenting him with a short poem on the nymphs and gnomes in his Lichfield garden. Darwin, she recalled, considered the Linnaeus’s classification system to be ‘unexplored poetic ground, and an happy subject for the muse. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed’.42 Written in the style of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712), The Loves of the Plants recalls the lost world of beaux and belles at the court of

39 

Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols (London, 1794), i. 1, 2. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols, reprint edn (1956; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), i. 177. 41  Janet Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and the Loves of the Plants’, Isis 80.4 (1989), 593–​621 (p. 601). 42  Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin: Chiefly During his Residence in Lichfield, with Anecdotes of His Friends, and Criticisms on His Writing (London, 1804), 130–​1. 40 

366   Catherine Jones Queen Anne, but in place of the earlier decorous battles of the sexes, Darwin presents Linnaeus’s world of thriving and ingenious vegetable sexuality: DESCEND, ye hovering Sylphs! aerial Quires, And sweep with little hands your silver lyres; With fairy footsteps print your grassy ring, Ye Gnomes! Accordant to the tinkling strings: While in soft notes I tune to oaten reed Gay hopes, and amorous sorrows of the mead.—​ From giant Oaks, that wave their branches dark, To the dwarf Moss that clings upon their bark, What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves, And woo and win their vegetable Loves.43

Darwin’s poem functions as a ‘Camera Obscura’ through which pictures of plants are presented to our view and ‘magnified into apparent life’ (I.  v) for our amusement.44 Following Linnaeus, Darwin’s understanding of plant morphology was analogically based on humans. The Loves of the Plants reflects contemporary botany’s analogues, and exploits their lyrical qualities by making them the subject of the poem. Darwin’s philosophical notes provided his readers with more in-​depth knowledge of the scientific and medical topics that he introduces in his verse. In a footnote to Canto 4 of The Economy of Vegetation, for example, he draws on eighteenth-​century contagion theory, and research on volcanoes, in order to gloss the phrase ‘on stagnant deeps’: All contagious miasmata originate either from animal bodies, as those of the small pox, or from putrid morasses; these latter produce agues in the colder climates, and malignant fevers in the warmer ones. The volcanic vapours which cause epidemic coughs are to be ranked amongst poisons, rather than amongst miasmata, which produce contagious diseases. (I. 168)45

Darwin goes on to allude in the verse narrative to ‘the PLAGUE, upborne on Belgian air’, and to how the ‘beauteous Ægle felt the venom’d dart’. The accompanying footnote links this poetic fancy to a medical case history related by the seventeenth-​century German poet, physician, and orator, Vincent Fabricius, concerning the plague of 1636 in Holland: ‘a young girl was seized with [the plague] had three carbuncles, and was removed to a garden, where her lover, who was betrothed to her, attended her as a nurse, and slept with her as his wife. He remained uninfected, and she recovered, and was married to him’ (I. 169). Formally, The Botanic Garden is both poem and prose, anticipating

43 

[Erasmus Darwin], The Botanic Garden; A Poem, in Two Parts: Part I. Containing The Economy of Vegetation. Part II. The Loves of the Plants (London, 1791), II. 2–​3. References are given by part and page number. 44 [Darwin], Botanic Garden, pt II, v. 45 [Darwin], Botanic Garden, pt I, 168.

Writer-Physicians   367 the genre-​mixing of later Romantic writing. Percy Bysshe Shelley imitated Darwin’s practice of copious annotation in Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. With Notes (1813). Darwin’s political radicalism made him an easy target for anti-​Jacobin attacks, and in 1798 he was lampooned in the Anti-​Jacobin with a work called the ‘Loves of the Triangles’ (a satire of The Loves of the Plants). Darwin’s poetry was also attacked on aesthetic grounds. Comparing Darwin’s poetry to a succession of landscapes or paintings, Coleridge observed in a notebook entry that it ‘arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the rapidity necessary to pathos—​it makes the great seem little’.46 Anna Seward also criticized Darwin’s poetics for its preference of ‘the picturesque’ over qualities pertaining ‘more to the mind, or heart, than to the eye’. But she drew attention to the ‘artful grace with which this Poet subdues the difficulty of rendering all sorts of science subservient to the purposes of high heroic verse’. 47 John Keats rejected the didacticism of Darwin (‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us’, he declared in a letter to J. H. Reynolds of 3 February 1818).48 Yet the many influences on Keats’s poetry extended to The Botanic Garden. Furthermore, as trained medical practitioners, both Darwin and Keats ‘offset their sharp doctorly awareness of life’, as Martin Priestman puts it, ‘as an alternation of physical enjoyment and painful decay with appeals to a classical world, in whose contemplation such processes can be understood at some more timeless level’.49 Keats’s medical background was used as a stick to beat him with in the Cockney School controversy. Writing as ‘Z’ in Blackwood’s, John Gibson Lockhart advised: ‘back to the shop Mr John, back to “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,” &c. But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry’.50 Lockhart’s review evokes the stereotype of the low-​status apothecary. This is misleading: Keats became a licensed apothecary at a time when medical education was undergoing significant reform. Lockhart significantly minimized Keats’s education and intellectual depth.51 Keats began his medical training in either mid-​1810 or early 1811, when he was apprenticed to the Edmonton surgeon-​apothecary Thomas Hammond. From 1815, he continued his formal training at Guy’s Hospital, London, where his teachers included celebrities such as Astley Cooper. After receiving his licence to practice as an apothecary on 25 July 1816, he spent several months more at Guy’s training as a surgeon and serving

46 

Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3.

47 Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin, 173–​4, 231–​2.

48  The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 224. 49  Martin Priestman, The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 244. For a comparison of Darwin with other psychologist-​poets, see Faubert, Rhyming Reason, ch. 1. 50  ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. 4’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3 (Aug. 1818), 519–​24 (p. 524). 51  See Alan Richardson, ‘Keats and Romantic Science’, in Susan J. Wolfson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

368   Catherine Jones as a surgeon’s dresser before finally leaving medical practice in March 1817, the same month his first volume of poetry was published. In the autumn of 1818, Keats began his ambitious experiment in epic, ‘Hyperion. A Fragment’, which takes as its subject matter the defeat of the Titans by the new race of Olympian gods. The poem’s style and imagery is strongly influenced by Keats’s study and annotation of Milton’s Paradise Lost from late 1817. The opening of the poem recalls Book 1 of Paradise Lost in both its poetic diction and its ‘stationing’ or ‘statuary’ (that is, its grouping of figures). Medicine also has a presence in the text. Thea, for example, attends to Saturn as a doctor would a patient: One hand she pressed upon that aching spot Where beats the human heart, as if just there, Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain; The other upon Saturn’s bended neck She laid, and to the level of his ear Leaning with parted lips some words she spake In solemn tenor and deep organ tone (Book 1, lines 42–​8).52

These lines establish one of the central motifs of the poem: ‘the intervention of one embodied figure to diagnose and perhaps alleviate the suffering of another’.53 Nicholas Roe has drawn attention to the close parallels between ‘Hyperion’ and Keats’s medical notebooks. While listening to Cooper lecture on the nerves, for example, Keats noted: ‘Injuries may happen so quickly that sensation has not time to be communicated. The pain is proportioned to the degree of quickness or slowness of Wounds being inflicted.’54 The idea that pain may be proportioned to time re-​emerges in ‘Hyperion’, where Keats writes of Hyperion’s prolonged anguish:  ‘horrors, portioned to a giant nerve, | Oft made Hyperion ache’ (Book 1, lines 175–​6). ‘Keats’s distinctive vision’, Roe concludes, ‘as unique as Wordsworth’s romance of childhood and nature in The Prelude, represents the world as a gigantic hospital, a global sickroom populated with “effigies of pain” ’.55 Keats’s generic innovation in ‘Hyperion’ is dependent upon combining a recollection of the precise words and context of Paradise Lost with his medical training and experiences.

52 

Quotations are from John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 53  James Robert Allard, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 100. 54  John Keats’s Anatomical and Physiological Note Book, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 56. 55  Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 192. See also Timothy Ziegenhagen, ‘Keats, Professional Medicine, and the Two Hyperions’, Literature and Medicine 21.2 (2002) 281–​305.

Writer-Physicians   369 The first ‘Hyperion’ breaks off with Apollo about to become a god. Apollo’s achievement of godhead depends upon his initiation into human suffering. Apollo looks into the face of Mnemosyne and seems to achieve knowledge: Mute thou remainest—​mute! yet I can read A wondrous lesson in thy silent face: Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me . . . (Book 3, lines 111–​18)

In this dialogue, Keats dramatizes concerns that he had previously articulated in a journal letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818: ‘Until we are sick, we understand not; . . . as Byron says, “Knowledge is Sorrow”; and I  go on to say that “Sorrow is Wisdom”.’ Throughout this letter Milton and Wordsworth are cited as representing a comprehensive human knowledge; yet Keats clarifies his own thinking with an image that refers back to his medical training: ‘axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses’.56 Keats would develop these ideas when he came to revise ‘Hyperion’, beginning a reconstruction of the poem in July 1819, ‘The Fall of Hyperion’. In ‘The Fall’, Keats applies the idea of Mnemosyne teaching how it is necessary to embrace suffering to the poet instead of the emergent god. Mnemosyne, now called Moneta, states that the poet cannot achieve vision until for him ‘the miseries of the world | Are misery’ and he ‘will not let them rest’ (Canto 1, lines 148–​9). The second unfinished version of ‘Hyperion’ was not published until 1857, long after Keats’s death. The first version was chosen for inclusion for the 1820 volume of Keats’s poems. It was highly praised by Leigh Hunt, Byron, and Shelley, and later by Matthew Arnold and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Hunt, writing in the Indicator on 2nd and 9th August 1820, compared the poetic deities of ‘Hyperion’ and Paradise Lost, and the style of Keats’s versification to that of Milton and of George Chapman. He concluded that Keats’s faculties, ‘though partaking of the unearthly aspirations and abstract yearnings of both these poets, are altogether his own . . . They are more social, and in the finer sense of the word, sensual, than either. They are more coloured by the modern philosophy of sympathy and natural justice’.57 Keats’s representation of titanic anguish in ‘Hyperion’, together with his affirmation of the law of progress, is a manifestation of this ‘colouring’. Sympathy or the capacity to feel for ‘the misfortunes of his fellow creatures’ was, according to Gregory, the chief motive for the performance of virtuous action and one of ‘the most natural and powerful incitements’ for a physician ‘to exert himself for the relief 56  57 

Letters of Keats, i. 279. John Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London: Routledge, 1971), 174–​5.

370   Catherine Jones of his patient’.58 Keats would invoke the concerns and the characteristics of the ideal physician, as articulated by Gregory, when he defined the role of the poet in the second ‘Hyperion’: ‘a poet is a sage, | A humanist, physician to all men’ (Canto 1, lines 189–​90). While the idea of the poet as healer reaches back to classical antiquity, Keats gave it new purchase, drawing on his experience as both doctor and patient.59 His knowledge of the theory, practice, and profession of medicine leaves its mark on his letters and poems as emphatically as his personal experience of illness. As well as being key works in the Romantic literary canon, the two ‘Hyperion’ poems are, like the other texts discussed in this chapter, part of a broader culture of medical, or medicalized, writing in the period, much of which still remains to be explored.

Further Reading Allard, James Robert, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Budge, Gavin, Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–​1852 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Connolly, Tristanne, and Steve Clark (eds), Liberating Medicine 1720–​1835 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). Coyer, Megan J., and David E. Shuttleton (eds), Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726–​ 1832 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014). De Almeida, Hermione, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1991). Doig, A., and others (eds), William Cullen and the Eighteenth Century Medical World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). Faubert, Michelle, Rhyming Reason:  The Poetry of Romantic-​Era Psychologists (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). Goellnicht, Donald C., The Poet-​Physician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984). Haakonssen, Lisbeth, Medicine and Morals in the Enlightenment: John Gregory, Thomas Percival and Benjamin Rush (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). Priestman, Martin, The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin:  Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Richardson, Alan, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Roberts, Marie Mulvey, and Roy Porter (eds), Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993). Roe, Nicholas (ed.), John Keats and the Medical Imagination (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

58 Gregory, Observations on the Duties and Offices of a Physician, 8. 59 

William Hale-​White, Keats as Doctor and Patient (1938; Folcroft: Folcroft Press, 1970).

Pa rt  V I

C OM P O SI T ION

Chapter 24

Oralit y a nd Im provis at i on Erik Simpson

Orality involves communication by speech rather than writing, often in a context where the technologies of literacy are not dominant. Poetic improvisation relates to orality because improvising involves the poet’s responses to an audience in real time, in a collaborative relationship made possible by the immediacy of oral communication. Literary representations of orality and improvisation call our attention to the limitations of print: writing can portray a singing minstrel, but it cannot conjure the song without a translation of medium. Building on Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use the term ‘remediation’ to describe such translations, which involve a ‘complex kind of borrowing in which one medium reworks other media into itself ’.1 Romantic writers took particular interest in the remediation of poetic inspiration and composition. When a novel depicts an act of improvisation—​a poem, say, composed spontaneously in response to a topic shouted from the audience, altered in progress by observers’ reactions—​it calls our attention to a creative method as well as a set of sounds that cannot be replicated in print. In the eighteenth century, Jean-​Jacques Rousseau emphasized the losses incurred by the movement from orality to writing; in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, published posthumously in 1781, he maintained that writing ‘substitutes precision for expressiveness’, and many British Romantic writers similarly presented oral performance as carrying an emotional power that writing cannot.2 Some modern critics seek to undermine Rousseau’s dichotomy between writing’s precision, derived from its material fixity, and orality’s expressiveness. Susan Stewart, for example, argues that transforming speech into writing does not necessarily produce fixity; indeed, we might see the 1  Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 45. 2  Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Language and Writings Related to Music, trans. John T. Scott, vol. 7 of The Collected Writings of Rousseau (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), 300.

374   Erik Simpson collaborative aspects of folkloric forms as giving them a kind of endurance that writing lacks.3 Whether resisted or embraced, however, these binary oppositions—​between the spoken and the written, spontaneity and stability, freedom and control—​place Romantic orality and improvisation in a line of philosophical investigation including Plato, Rousseau, and Derrida. This chapter will engage that tradition while attending to its transformations in the practices and scholarship of British Romanticism. Orality and improvisation, and literary representations thereof, took many forms in the Romantic period, including singing, improvised poetry and drama, public lectures (and published versions of lectures), speech acts represented in novels and other literary works, the conversations of coffee houses and salons, and the genre of ‘table talk’. Some of these are covered elsewhere in this Handbook (see Judith Thomson, Chapter 34; Kirsteen McCue, Chapter 41 in this volume). Here, I will discuss first, the theoretical assumptions informing current scholarly discussions of Romantic orality, and second, concrete examples of writers exploring the meeting point between represented orality and literary creativity: figures of the creative artist composing or performing for a live, responsive audience. Why, at a time of rapidly growing print culture, when the growth of periodical reviews dramatized the reception of literary works in print, did so many writers portray the process of creation and reception through singers, minstrels, improvisers, and the like? Why did the Romantic period see a flourishing of ‘pseudo-​songs’, as Terence Allen Hoagwood calls them4—​printed texts that paradoxically celebrate orality by shifting a musical mode to silent print? And why were many readers at the time eager to indulge the fantasy of orality by referring to authors by the names of the singers they wrote about: James Macpherson as ‘Ossian’, James Beattie as his minstrel Edwin, Thomas Moore as the Minstrel Boy, Sydney Owenson as Glorvina, Germaine de Staël as Corinne, Walter Scott as a more generic Border Minstrel, James Hogg as the Ettrick Shepherd or the Mountain Bard, Lord Byron as Childe Harold? As such questions imply, these representations of oral composition or performance involve a departure from straightforward realism. The widespread fascination with ancient bards and minstrels in Romantic writing acknowledges the poet-​singer as a figure from a past that cannot be recaptured and, contrarily, creates the pleasurable fantasy that such a past is reanimated in the written words and even the bodies of literary authors. Contemporary critics generally address such contradictory tendencies in orality by building on the theories of Jacques Derrida, especially those of his early work Of Grammatology (1967), where he argues that a set of thinkers including Plato, Rousseau, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Claude Lévi-​Strauss have valorized speech as providing an unadulterated means of transmitting meaning, whereas the marks of writing, which represent the symbols of speech, are further removed from the originating thought.5 3  Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 104. 4  Terence Allan Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-​Songs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 5  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

Orality and Improvisation    375 Derrida resists this ‘phonocentric’ placement of speech above writing by presenting evidence of the structures of writing in characterizations of the ostensibly older forms of speech. He thus disrupts the fantasy of recovering a natural, ancient bond between thought and the spoken word. Another theoretical touchstone in this field, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy:  The Technologizing of the Word (1982), offers a post-​Derridean account theory of the shift from oral to written culture, couched in terms of a theory of historical psychology and cultural anthropology. Ong contends that humans immersed in cultures of literacy take for granted the naturalness of many cultural practices that, in fact, derive from the technologies of writing and print. Ong moves beyond Saussure’s sense of writing as a complement to speech, proposing instead that writing is a ‘transformer of verbalization’, creating new kinds of thought and orality in literate peoples.6 Examining representations of orality in nineteenth-​century Scottish fiction, however, Penny Fielding has employed a method that reverses Ong’s, one that looks ‘not so much at how speech and writing determine the course of social history, but the other way round: a view in which speech and writing are less the agents of change and more its objects’.7 Fielding identifies the contradiction that undermines the powerful conception, inherited from Rousseau, that orality’s truths are self-​evident and resistant to analysis: on the one hand, the oral is communal, ‘something everyone knows’; on the other, it cannot be known because it dissolves ‘without record into the past’. The celebration of orality as a natural, authentic alternative to artifice and modernization depends on its placement in the past: ‘Orality, it seems, is something more valuable dead than alive’.8 The pertinence of Fielding’s formulation is revealed by the celebration of last bards and minstrels—​figures who bring to an end some long-​standing oral tradition—​ in Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’ (1757), Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), and other Romantic texts. Taken together, these works illustrate the process of simultaneously mythologizing and containing the forces and peoples associated with orality. For many Romantic writers, the remediation at the heart of literary representations of orality—​the representation of the unprintable in the medium of print—​called into use an array of paratextual conventions that attempt to manage and explain the process of remediation: editorial introductions, footnotes, headnotes, endnotes, and appendices. The authenticity of the recorded orality is thus buttressed by the editor’s immersion in the conventions of print. These editorial conventions arise from pre-​existing scholarly techniques; earlier works advertised as coming ‘with notes’ included translations (mostly from Greek and Latin), Bibles and other religious documents, collections of laws, and literary works by writers other than the annotator. In the early eighteenth century, the Augustan ‘Battle of the Books’ debate involved modern editors commenting on ancient texts, and that debate produced a series of satirically self-​annotated fictions,

6 

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), 5. Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture and Nineteenth-​Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 7. 8 Fielding, Writing and Orality, 4. 7 

376   Erik Simpson including Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) and culminating in the gently ironic notes of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–​67). Editorial annotation became important to Romantic orality in the practices of antiquarian author-​editors such as Thomas Percy, Joseph Ritson, and Walter Scott. Their work influenced other writers both by generating source material and by providing models of textual presentation. Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), for instance, was celebrated for revealing treasures of ballad and romance poetry to English readers and writers, and for providing inspiration to Romantic writers including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, and others.9 The antiquarians also blurred the boundary between creative and editorial writing, linking scholarly and creative works by using similar methods of annotation, and making scholarly authentication a visible feature of their literary texts. Other writers followed their lead, and the ‘bibliographic imagination’, as Andrew Piper calls it, became a powerful factor in Romantic creativity.10 James Beattie’s widely read poem The Minstrel (1771–​4) is a good example of this blending of editorial citation and the creative process. Beattie states in his Advertisement that ‘The first hint of this performance was suggested by Mr. Percy’s ingenious Essay on the English Minstrels, prefixed to his first volume of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.’11 His comment exemplifies a broader phenomenon in writing about minstrelsy: Beattie’s paratext engages directly with Percy’s paratext. Not only did authors use paratext to frame represented orality—​whether in the form of ostensibly collected materials such as Percy’s or that of an imaginative work such as Beattie’s—​but they also frequently cited other paratexts, creating a rhetorical community of editors. In part by referring to one another, these editors worked to interpret and contain the content, often violent or fantastical, of the ballad tradition. Percy also helped to pioneer a practice that would become important to many Romantic-​era writers: annotating one’s own imaginative works using the conventions of editorial paratext. In 1771, the same year that saw the publication of the first instalment of Beattie’s Minstrel, Percy brought out his own creative adaptation of material from the Reliques, a border tale called The Hermit of Warkworth which anticipated Scott’s border romances in content and method. Percy supplemented his poem with an antiquarian editorial apparatus, including the descriptions of modern landscape that later became characteristic of Scott’s editorial persona. By placing an avowedly original poem in this editorial frame, Percy introduced in The Hermit of Warkworth the split authorial voice that would characterize many of the Romantic period’s most widely read texts about minstrelsy.12 9 

See Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, 1964); and Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 10  Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also Paul Keen, Chapter 28 in this volume. 11  [James Beattie], The Minstrel, or, The Progress of Genius (London: Dilly, 1771), iv. 12  For a fuller version of this argument, see my introduction to Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–​1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Orality and Improvisation    377 A parallel case that complicates the relationship of paratext to writing about orality is that of the ‘poems of Ossian’, the ostensibly ancient bard at the centre of a series of works James Macpherson began publishing in 1760 with Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland. Macpherson had won support for his project by claiming special access to the oral traditions of the Scottish Highlands and to manuscript records of the poems. The authenticity of Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry quickly became the subject of heated debate, generating two rival visions of his editorial and authorial roles. For readers and writers who accepted the poems’ authenticity, Macpherson took his place in a long line of modern editors of ancient works; his editorial annotation performed the usual task of scholarly mediation, albeit inflected in his case by the oral transmission of the source material. For those who denied or doubted Macpherson’s claims, his Ossianic productions became something different and more striking, namely original works of poetry, fictitiously attributed to someone else and accompanied by annotation by the true author’s editorial persona. Interpreted this way, Macpherson’s essays and footnotes constitute the creation of another character in the fiction, an editor whose pronouncements sometimes come loaded with biting irony, as when the editor of Fingal argues that the poem should be read differently from modern productions simply because it has lasted: ‘Poetry, like virtue, receives its reward after death.’13 Fittingly, Malcolm Laing’s influential attack on the authenticity of Macpherson’s Ossian in 1805 took the form of another annotated edition, this time with hostile rather than authenticating notes. The problems of remediating orality into print thus spawned multiple layers of paratextual apparatuses, immersing the oral ever more deeply within the commentaries of print. This immersion became still deeper in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when an increasing number of writers began to produce self-​annotated imaginative works. For example, the Bristol-​based literary circle of Joseph Cottle used extensive footnotes in Cottle’s Alfred, An Epic Poem (1800) and Robert Southey’s Cottle-​published Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). Soon afterward, Southey’s Madoc (1805) and Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel replaced footnotes with extensive endnotes, and the endnoted format of these works became familiar to the many readers of Scott’s poetry in later editions. The phrase ‘with notes’ now appeared more frequently on title pages of creative works, advertising to the reader the dual pleasures of fiction and annotation, much as DVDs now try to entice buyers with bonus features including the commentary of screenwriters, directors, and actors. Romantic-​era editorial practice also underwent a shift in the content of citations that Maureen McLane describes: beginning in the late eighteenth century, ballad collectors increasingly moved from citing fellow antiquarians to documenting the oral tradition and instances of recitation. This documentation allowed them to accrue ‘vernacular cultural capital’ as they competed to demonstrate the singularity of their collections.14 For McLane, the movement from citing other collectors to identifying sources found in 13 

[James Macpherson], Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books (London: Becket, 1762), n. p. Maureen McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 62. 14 

378   Erik Simpson fieldwork constitutes an ‘ethnographic turn’ in which the collector’s living sources established ethnographic authority rather than functioning as a potentially discrediting sign of the collector’s ‘national prejudice’. In the ethnographic writing of Scott and others, McLane sees a denial of the coexistence of collectors and their sources, as the collectors portray contemporary sources as ‘living fossil[s]‌’ that transport the archaic into the modern.15 Scott drew on this tradition of ethnographic collecting as well as historical research in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, one of the most important successors to the landmark eighteenth-​century collections. The 1802 two-​volume first edition of the Minstrelsy contained historical ballads and a handful of modern imitations, mainly by Scott himself. The 1803 second edition added a third volume consisting entirely of modern works by Scott and other writers he invited to contribute. In 1805, Scott completed his shift from collecting minstrelsy to presenting himself as a modern minstrel with the stand-​ alone narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a sensational commercial success that brought him instant fame and began a series of verse romances and novels that frequently portray fictional minstrels and minstrel-​like editorial personae that draw on Scott’s life and authorial practices. Scott’s success raised the ideological stakes of literary minstrelsy. A Tory active in politics, Scott deployed minstrelsy in the service of a pragmatic Unionism that absorbed and redirected the energies of historical conflict. Scott’s project differed, therefore, from the bardic nationalism Katie Trumpener has described, in which cultural nationalists in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland sought to construct national literary histories under ‘the sign of the bard’, representing ‘the resistance of vernacular oral traditions to the historical pressures of English imperialism’.16 In bardic constructions of British history, minstrelsy often represents a later, compromised version of the bard’s prophetic resistance. This characterization understates the extent to which some writers grounded their versions of literary minstrelsy in resistance and dispossession:  Hogg, for example, a Scot who had worked as a shepherd and farmhand; and the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare. In Scott’s case, however, minstrelsy did serve to align his artistic productions with the interests of established political power. Marlon Ross argues that Scott posed as a minstrel ‘to claim his place as a representative of the old formation and to proclaim the values and socio-​political arrangements implied by that formation’.17 Orality takes a central place in this model because ‘writers like Scott and [William] Wordsworth look back nostalgically to a time before the written word had usurped the seemingly unmediated relation between the speaking bard or minstrel and his listening audience’. Ross points out that Scott’s narrators ask his readers to ‘listen’ in ways that figure the narrative’s audience as a small, close community 15 McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, 72, 40–​1.

16  Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 33. 17  Marlon B. Ross, ‘Scott’s Chivalric Pose: The Function of Metrical Romance in the Romantic Period’, Genre 19.3 (1986), 267–​97 (p. 278).

Orality and Improvisation    379 of gentlemen, in contrast to the huge popular readership that actually existed for Scott’s works. Scott used minstrelsy to downplay his ideological commitments and allegiances while his work functioned to tighten them.18 Ross finds a connection between Scott and Wordsworth in their uses of nostalgia, but Wordsworth also resisted Scott’s vision of minstrelsy. One paradigmatic moment arises in Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’ (1807), in which the poem’s speaker observes a ‘Highland Lass’ singing, presumably in Gaelic, and asks, Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-​off things, And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-​day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again! (lines 16–​24)19

In speculating on the song’s contents, the poem presents two possibilities: first, that the song is a romance of ‘battles long ago’; and, second, that it expresses ‘natural’ feeling whose universality connects the past and the future (‘has been, and may be again’). The poem evokes two uses of literary orality in the two possible songs, the first more like Scott’s minstrel mode, the second more conversational, more ‘humble’, and therefore, in the speaker’s view, more lasting. Either interpretation of the lass’s song requires multiple levels of translation or transfer: from the singer to the poet, from Gaelic to English, from orality to writing, from writing to the printed text the reader encounters. Wordsworth characterized his writing as aspiring to the effects of orality, as in his definition of a poet as ‘a man speaking to men’.20 James Chandler writes that for Wordsworth, ‘The middle and lower classes preserve the ethos of speech from an encroaching ethos of letters’, whereas Hazlitt and Blake defend the contrary position, valorizing the printing press as a mechanism of political freedom.21 Blake’s vision of a new Jerusalem requires the press, and Hazlitt’s defence of writing is explicitly political: in his Life of Napoleon (1828), he describes the French Revolution as ‘a remote but inevitable result of the invention of the art of printing’, and printing as the downfall of feudalism.22 Hazlitt’s arguments with

18 

Ross, ‘Scott’s Chivalric Pose’, 283, 289. William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–​1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 185. 20  ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), i. 138. 21  James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 144. 22  The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), xiii. 38. 19 

380   Erik Simpson Wordsworth, who had turned away from his early support of the Revolution, thus sounded the political overtones of debates over phonocentrism. For all the contention involved in these competing Romantic models of minstrelsy, however, there remains a remarkable consistency in the absorption of Romantic writers in minstrelsy, orality, and the importance of their remediation into print. Literary minstrelsy’s model of the living source transporting archaic materials to later times also had a gendered component. Ann Wierda Rowland explains that antiquarian discourse frequently constructs female singers—​particularly stock figures such as that of the Scottish nurse—​as having privileged access to memories that ‘become preserves of childhood and orality marooned in an adult mind and a textual world’.23 This oral/​aural state of childhood, preserved in the female singer, in turn provides access through ballads to a national childhood; the ballads ‘represent the poetry of a primitive nation’, and women’s minds, in this account, preserve that oral tradition precisely because they lack an urge to transform it with authorial purpose.24 Rowland therefore reads Scott’s paratextual apparatuses as a strategy for enfolding the content of the ballads in a larger narrative of national growth. The reliance of ballad collectors on the supposed naïveté of female singers relates to other ways in which Romantic representations of orality began as a masculine concern. In its efforts to recover or reimagine the bards and minstrels of the past, Romantic phonocentrism was first developed mostly by men, and it almost exclusively portrayed the singing of men. Joseph Cooper Walker in Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786) writes that although some women did cultivate music and poetry, he ‘cannot find that the Irish had female Bards, or Bardesses, properly so called’.25 Similarly, Percy, in his ‘Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels’ (1765), remarks in the context of a story about a woman cross-​dressing as a minstrel, ‘I do not find that any of the real Minstrels were of the female sex.’26 It is striking, therefore, that Romantic-​era women began to represent their creative process through the conventions of literary minstrelsy, transmuting the act of writing into one of reciting or singing. In many works by female writers, the creative woman becomes a Sappho (imagined as a speaker rather than a writer), an Italian performer of improvised poetry, or a traveller cross-​dressed as a male minstrel. Creative writing is figured as creative sound. This figuration, however, needed to be invented. One major shift from antiquarian-​ inspired representations of male minstrelsy to the proliferation of female minstrels happened in 1806 and 1807 with the publication of The Wild Irish Girl by the Irish novelist and poet Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan) and Corinne, or, Italy by the French-​ Swiss writer Germaine de Staël. These works set their action in the past, but it is the

23  Ann Wierda Rowland, ‘ “The Fause Nourice Sang”: Childhood, Child Murder, and the Formation of the Scottish Ballad Revival’, in Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (eds), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 230. 24  Rowland, ‘ “The Fause Nourice Sang”‘, 231. 25  Joseph Cooper Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (London: Payne, 1786), 19. 26  Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), i, p. xviii.

Orality and Improvisation    381 recent past: each novel takes place at the end of the eighteenth century. Owenson also domesticates her female minstrelsy by having her heroine, Glorvina, perform only for private gatherings. In setting Corinne’s improvisations mainly in the Rome of the 1790s, Staël provided a new model of women’s performance. Corinne depicts a social environment that unequivocally celebrates the improvisatory powers of the eponymous heroine, and the novel thus became central to nineteenth-​century representations of women’s creativity, improvisation, and orality. Staël moved female minstrelsy from the parlour to the public square. Owenson’s life and work have persistently frustrated efforts to categorize them, or produced contradictory efforts, since Owenson’s life and writings tend to support contrary readings. A commercially successful Anglo–​Irish writer, she expressed Irish nationalist sentiments at times, but she also accepted the patronage of British authorities. She set out to collect Irish songs on nationalist grounds, but published a collection of poems that, though it carried the title The Lay of an Irish Harp (1807), mentions Ireland only occasionally and evasively.27 Her most famous work, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), stages a romance between an English hero, Horatio, and an Irish heroine, Glorvina. The romance is fuelled by minstrelsy, but Owenson uses the conventions of literary minstrelsy to leave the implications of the novel ambiguous. The novel narrates how Horatio falls in love with Glorvina and reconsiders his prejudices about Ireland. He hears her sing and discusses Irish history with her, receiving a conversational version of scholarly annotations to the songs. The marriage of Horatio and Glorvina seems to place Glorvina’s minstrelsy in the service of Unionist allegory. The novel prompts the reader to resist that interpretation, however, both in specific ways, such as having Glorvina deliriously accuse Horatio or his family of murdering her father before she marries him, and more broadly, by setting the novel in the recent past. The action takes place in ‘17—​’, and the characters do not comment directly on the 1798 Irish Rebellion or the subsequent Act of Union, leaving the reader to wonder whether Glorvina’s idealized minstrelsy and relationship with Horatio are pointedly placed in the past. Like Gray’s ‘The Bard’, in other words, The Wild Irish Girl mobilizes both nationalist and Unionist sentiment. Whereas Gray’s poem contains Welsh nationalism in a developmental narrative leading to Union, however, Owenson’s novel does not subsume one into the other. This ambiguity arises from the characteristics of literary minstrelsy:  Owenson deploys multiple semi-​autobiographical personae, including the domestic minstrel Glorvina but also an editor, who annotates the novel with suggestive but fleeting references to the Rebellion and its consequences (see Jim Kelly, Chapter 9 in this volume). By dividing Owenson’s authority (in both senses) among these personae, the novel can produce the logic of economic Unionism and nationalist resistance simultaneously.

27 

See Hoagwood, From Song to Print, ch. 3.

382   Erik Simpson By having Glorvina attract Horatio with her minstrelsy and advocacy for Irish culture, Owenson also helped establish the literary conventions of female minstrelsy, and of representing women’s creativity more broadly. In these early works, however, she still portrayed women’s public performance as dangerously self-​indulgent and showy. In her 1805 novel The Novice of St. Dominick, the heroine Imogen improvises at a society function, and that scene signifies a failure of modesty from which she must work hard to recover. Owenson’s reluctance to celebrate even semi-​public women’s improvisation indicates the extent of the transformation that Staël would create when she glamorized the improvisations of the eponymous Corinne in 1807. Though not written by a Briton, Corinne featured a British hero—​Oswald, Lord Nelvil—​and dramatized the contrary roles of Scottish songs and Italian improvisation. The novel was translated twice from French into English in 1807 and attracted an enthusiastic British readership in both languages. Corinne’s improvisatory method involves an immediate responsiveness to a live audience’s reactions, so the processes of composition, reception, and revision are intertwined rather than standing alone as sequential stages. For example, to begin an improvisation at the Roman Capitol, Corinne is asked to improvise on the subject of the glory of Italy. In response, she begins to recall triumphs of the past, delighting her Italian audience. When she sees Oswald, Lord Nelvil in the crowd, however, she adapts her composition to his reaction: ‘[d]‌ivining the thoughts going through his mind, she was impelled to meet his need by talking of happiness with less certainty’.28 Her introduction of northern melancholy to the poem earns his applause. Staël’s deployment of oral composition in this scene engages the traditions of classical composition, imagined in Staël primarily through Sappho, in which a Muse or an audience complicates the sense of an author as a self-​contained creative subject. Corinne’s improvisation, in a manner enabled by the orality-​effects of the represented scene, has Oswald become both Muse and audience, with Corinne the passive and active creator of the changing poem. The novel constructs this interpretation of improvisatory practice against British models of minstrelsy. Corinne knows of Ossian and performs old Scottish songs, which she sings to win the heart of the more conservative Oswald, for whom these manifestations of British minstrelsy represent his attachment to his homeland. The association of Oswald with minstrelsy and balladeering, on the one hand, and Corinne with improvisation, on the other, calls the reader’s attention to the opposition between Staël and British writers such as Scott.29 In contrast to Scott’s evocation of male minstrels working within prominently patriarchal societies, Corinne offered women a matriarchal muse in the improvvisatrice, whose representation in remediated orality conjures a line of women’s performance stretching from Sappho to Staël and her successors. The successes of celebrity writers such as Owenson, Scott, and Staël set the stage for Byron, who would achieve even greater fame writing in a wide range of pseudo-​oral 28  Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Avriel Goldberger (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 30. 29  For further discussion of the novel’s thematization of nationhood and engagement with European aesthetics, see James Vigus, Chapter 44 in this volume.

Orality and Improvisation    383 forms, including adaptations of Scottish minstrelsy, ethnographic song-​collecting, and Italianate improvisation. In the opening canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Byron has his eponymous hero sing in a manner inspired directly by Scott; Byron acknowledges in his Preface that ‘The “Good Night,” in the beginning of the first canto, was suggested by “Lord Maxwell’s Good Night,” in the Border Minstrelsy, edited by Mr. Scott.’30 Harold sings that song, however, in the process of leaving Britain and engaging an oceanic world ranging far beyond Scott’s borderlands, with a destination to be improvised: it is not ‘fix’d as yet the goal | Where he shall rest him on his pilgrimage’ (Canto 1, stanza 28). Byron’s use of improvisation becomes explicit in Don Juan (1819–​24), whose narrator likens himself to an ‘Improvisatore’ (Canto 4, stanza 20)  and, in keeping with improvisation’s emphasis on process over teleology, holds that ‘the great end of travel . . . is driving’ (Canto 10, stanza 72). Byron also incorporates the remediation of orality into the joking of his narrator, who frequently asks the reader to help guide the poem, as if the reader is able, like Staël’s Oswald, to receive and respond to the poem during its composition. Near the beginning of the poem, Byron undermines the notion of predetermined design (in theology as well as poetics) with just such a joke: That is the usual method, but not mine—​ My way is to begin with the beginning; The regularity of my design Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning, And therefore I shall open with a line (Although it cost me half an hour in spinning), Narrating somewhat of Don Juan’s father, And also of his mother, if you’d rather. (Canto 1, stanza 7)

Towards the end of the canto, Byron’s narrator extends this joke by saying he will continue the poem only ‘if we should understand | Each other; and if not, I shall not try | Your patience further than by this short sample’ (Canto 1, stanza 221). This gesture of submission to the reader’s approval to continue an episodic poem had been part of many earlier works, including Beattie’s The Minstrel, but Byron’s version is transparently ironic: even in the first edition, the second canto of Don Juan was published alongside the first. Byron’s wandering heroes, who enact the conventions of minstrelsy and improvisation in a wide range of international settings, were one important part of a broader internationalization of literary minstrelsy in the early nineteenth century. British writers increasingly represented improvisation and minstrelsy comparatively, as the products 30  ‘Preface’ to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romaunt, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​93), ii. 4. All quotations from Byron are from this edition.

384   Erik Simpson of parallel traditions generated by many nations and peoples. Writing about improvisers involved a comparativist impulse from the beginning, and, as Angela Esterhammer has shown, the improviser became an important figure within many European Romantic traditions, spreading across Europe as what we might now call a meme: a cultural trait gaining power from its mobility. Esterhammer demonstrates that the spread of this improvisatory meme created not only parallel productions of represented improvisers in different nations and languages, but also a literary consciousness of these parallel developments, as in Alexander Pushkin’s improviser story ‘Egyptian Nights’, which arises out of ‘a proliferation of international influences’, including contemporary performances, travel accounts, Corinne (in Russian translation), and literary works by Heinrich Heine, Byron, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.31 Unlike improvisation, literary minstrelsy had roots in localism, but a growing strain of comparative minstrelsies became part of British Romantic writing in the 1810s and 1820s. Previously, the antiquarianism at the heart of the minstrel mode had determined the status of the agricultural folk ‘by their perceived differences from cosmopolitan peoples’, as Roger Abrahams has noted.32 This new internationalism, however, involved real or imagined travel to gather the songs of other peoples; the writer-​as-​minstrel took an anthropological turn. These two strands of literary minstrelsy correspond to the two kinds of storytellers described by Walter Benjamin, who sees the types persisting into nineteenth-​century literature: ‘one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman’.33 Thomas Moore, a Dubliner who eventually settled in England, participated in a kind of Irish cultural nationalism as well as the internationalist turn of later Romanticism. His early work, however, exhibits other kinds of internationalism:  Moore made his reputation largely as a translator of Anacreon, and after government work took him to Bermuda, he continued his travels to America and Canada, a trip that resulted in his Epistles, Odes and Other Poems (1806). This volume resembles later ethnographic works in its variety of national settings and voices, but instead of the bland comparativism of those later works (including Moore’s own), this volume expresses Moore’s disappointment in, even hostility to, the politics and culture of the places he visited. Having become a literal version of Benjamin’s sea voyager, Moore writes that his experience has ‘represse[d]‌every sanguine hope of the future energy and greatness of America’.34 Moore then became the Minstrel Boy, publishing (from 1808) successive instalments (or ‘numbers’) of his hugely successful Irish Melodies, a collection that capitalized on his cultivation of tunes from his native Ireland but joined them with original lyrics 31 

Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 216. 32  Roger D. Abrahams, ‘Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics’, Journal of American Folklore 106 (1993), 3–​37 (pp. 3, 4). 33  ‘The Storyteller’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1978), 84–​5. 34  Thomas Moore, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (London: Carpenter, 1806), x. See Jeffery Vail, ‘Thomas Moore in Ireland and America: The Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, Romanticism 10.1 (2004), 41–​62.

Orality and Improvisation    385 that became part of English-​language ‘Irish’ popular culture, in Ireland and abroad (the song ‘The Minstrel Boy’, for example, appeared in the fifth number in 1811, and the phrase quickly became associated with the author). He next turned to the presentation of Eastern minstrelsy in the full-​length tale Lalla Rookh (1817), and then to the collection of multinational minstrelsy in National Airs, whose publication began in 1818. These later works make comparative minstrelsy their organizing principle, without the first-​person authority that Moore claimed for his American and Irish pieces: the National Airs include songs based on French, Swiss, Venetian, Sicilian, Indian, Swedish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Mahratta, Highland, Russian, Neopolitan, Savoyard, Italian, Old English, Scotch, Languedocian, Cashmerian, Catalonian, German, Maltese, and Welsh tunes. Minstrelsy’s new internationalism included other single-​author collections of songs such as the ‘Lays of Many Lands’ series by Felicia Hemans (1825) and the contest poems of James Hogg (The Queen’s Wake [1813]) and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (The Troubadour [1825] and The Golden Violet [1827]), which allowed their authors to take on many national voices as they depicted the entrants to the poems’ imagined contests. Novels representing minstrels, including some by Owenson and Scott, also began to describe a wider range of geographical settings for minstrelsy. Oriental tales took on the existing conventions of minstrel tales, especially in the prominent examples of Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Byron’s The Giaour (1813), ostensibly the transcription of a Turkish coffee-​house minstrel’s performance. Some writers produced collections that merged religious musical traditions and the minstrel mode, including Moore’s Sacred Songs (starting in 1816) and Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (1815). These works further expanded the available representations of singers and improvisers working in oral modes. Some of these representations encouraged a positive construction of foreign societies that implied a critique of British conventions; others, using roughly the logic Edward Said would later describe in Orientalism, reinforce British expansionism by depicting foreign peoples as incapable of self-​ government.35 The imagination of foreign minstrelsy expanded from encompassing British regionalism to including American, Canadian, Asian, and European singers. The newly internationalized minstrelsy included classical lutes, Celtic harps, Spanish guitars, and eventually banjos, the instruments that would later dominate ‘Ethiopian’ or ‘negro’ minstrelsy. In theatrical culture, blackface had long been part of British theatrical practice,36 but the term ‘minstrelsy’ did not refer to blackface performance until the early 1840s. The shift occurred when Daniel Decatur Emmett’s American group took the name ‘Virginia Minstrels’ (rather than using other current terms such as ‘delineators’) to align his group with the Tyrolese Minstrels, German Minstrels, and others who had achieved popular success on respectable American stages in the

35 

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). See Julie A. Carlson, ‘New Lows in Eighteenth-​Century Theater: The Rise of Mungo’, European Romantic Review 18.2 (2007), 139–​47. 36 

386   Erik Simpson 1830s and early 1840s.37 The new usage spread quickly on both sides of the Atlantic.38 The terms ‘melodies’ and ‘melodist’ also became part of blackface minstrelsy, even before the term ‘minstrel’ itself, and they created another kind of two-​way movement between the conventions of print and performance. George Washington Dixon, who became one of the major early blackface performers in the character Zip Coon, billed himself as the ‘American Melodist’, and an 1834 reviewer refers to Dixon as part of a group of ‘Melodists’; Emmet also advertised himself as ‘the great Southern Banjo Melodist’.39 This language of melodies and melodists recalls works such as Moore’s Irish Melodies and Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, works by well-​known authors that combined printed text with that great technology of remediated sound, the musical score. The billing of a blackface singer as a ‘Melodist’ carried the promise of having works similar to these—​bolstered by association with Moore and Byron, two of the most commercially successful writers of the day on both sides of the Atlantic—​come to life in performance. Blackface shows, in turn, helped create the market for many new volumes of ‘melodies’, including one of the most important collections of blackface minstrel songs in print form: Stephen Foster’s Ethiopian Melodies (1849). Literary fantasies of minstrelsy and improvisation thus provide the Romantic period not only with ways of imagining print authorship as analogous to oral performance, but also with a developing set of representations of race, nationality, gender, and class that became foundational to musical performance, popular song, theories of inspiration, and constructions of European and American cultural history. In the space between the performer’s connection to a live audience and the printed representation of that connection, we see the incipient detachment of poetry from mass entertainment. At the same time, the Romantic roots of many later cultural modes—​from minstrel troops to world music, from jazz and hip-​hop improvisation to popular songbooks—​reveal a different, less commonly discussed genealogy that, for better and for worse, connects Romantic poetry and novels to the popular and mass entertainments of the following two centuries.

Further Reading Chandler, James, Wordsworth’s Second Nature:  A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1984). Esterhammer, Angela, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009). Fielding, Penny, Writing and Orality:  Nationality, Culture and Nineteenth-​Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 37 

Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 30. 38  For more information on the emergence of blackface ‘minstrelsy’ from the literary minstrelsies of the early nineteenth century, see my Literary Minstrelsy, ch. 6. 39  Quoted in Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 105 (illus.), 108, 150.

Orality and Improvisation    387 Groom, Nick, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Hoagwood, Terence Allan, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-​Songs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). McLane, Maureen, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982). Ross, Marlon B., ‘Scott’s Chivalric Pose: The Function of Metrical Romance in the Romantic Period’, Genre 19.3 (1986), 267–​97. Simpson, Erik, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–​1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Stewart, Susan, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Chapter 25

Revision a nd Self-​C itat i on Jane Stabler

The fallacy of what has recently been called ‘the romantic creed of antirevisionism’—​ a belief that there was ‘a romantic disdain for second thoughts’ or that ‘the romantics  . . .  shied away from revision’1—​can be demonstrated with the single sheet of paper that holds the revised autograph manuscript of Byron’s poem ‘Sun of the Sleepless!’: Sun of the Sleepless! —​melancholy Star! Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far—​ That show’st the darkness thou cans’t not dispel How like art Thou to Joy remembered well! So gleams the past—​the light of other days—​ That shines but warms not with its powerless rays, A Moon beam Night-​beam Sorrow watcheth to behold Distinct but distant—​clear—​but deathlike cold—​oh! how cold!

B Sep.tr 8.th 1814. —​2 The manuscript was unknown to Jerome McGann and so is not included in the Clarendon edition of Byron’s Complete Poetical Works. The date indicates that ‘Sun of the Sleepless!’ was written on the same day that Byron drafted the longer poem ‘Harmodia’,

1 

Hannah Sullivan, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 31–​2. Sullivan questions the alleged Romantic preference for spontaneity (25–​30), but then reinstates it for the purposes of making a sharp contrast with modernist poetics. 2  Byron’s manuscript was auctioned on 10 Apr. 2013: see The Roy Davids Collection. Part III: Poetical Manuscripts and Portraits of Poets (London: Bonhams, 2013), 95–​5.

Revision and Self-citation    389 which contains some of the same lines. McGann suggests that ‘Sun of the Sleepless!’ was ‘plundered’ from ‘Harmodia’ 8–​19 September 1814, but the rediscovery of this manuscript makes the order of the two compositions less certain.3 It reveals Byron’s art of self-​citation, otherwise known as ‘authorial intertextuality’, whereby a writer revisits his or her work immediately after the original drafting (as above) or at some later point, and re-​employs it in another piece of writing.4 Examination of the process of revision goes to the heart of Romantic creativity: although some poems might have arisen as unpremeditated song, vision, or waking dream, most result from what Shelley recognized as ‘a careful observation of the inspired moments’ that manifests itself in the practice of ‘toil’ and ‘delay’.5 Revision, in other words, is a vital part of composition even if you also believe, as Shelley did, that ‘when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline’.6 What happens in the last two lines of ‘Sun of the Sleepless!’ is an example of a process Byron was often reluctant to acknowledge: ‘I can’t furbish.—​I am like the tyger (in poesy) if I miss my first Spring—​I go growling back to my Jungle.—​There is no second.—​I can’t correct—​I can’t—​& I won’t.’7 However, like all poets, he could and he did. He adjusts the poem’s central image by revising ‘Moon beam’ to ‘Night-​beam’. By changing ‘deathlike cold’ to ‘oh! how cold!’, Byron creates a dramatic shiver of immediacy that heightens the encounter between the poet and his bright star. The sharp intake of breath or longer sigh of ‘oh! How cold!’ acquires retrospective tonal complexity from its biographical context (on 9 September 1814, Byron sent another marriage proposal to Annabella Milbanke), but the manuscript is immediately interesting for its graphic record of Byron crossing out his ‘first Spring’ and replacing it with a second thought, and then signing (owning) the sheet. The act of deletion is a signal that temporal proximity to the ‘lava of imagination’ or ‘spontaneous overflow’ or ‘fading coal’ does not necessarily yield the truest expression of the idea; there is a different way of ‘getting at it’ (Keats’s phrase) involving drudgery or even pain as well as inspiration: ‘verily I do not feel it at this moment’, Keats wrote after writing out his sonnet ‘On sitting down to King Lear once Again’, ‘I feel rather tired & my head rather swimming.’8 On 26 January 1802 Dorothy Wordsworth noted, ‘Wm. wrote out part of his poem, and endeavoured to alter it, and so made himself ill.’9

3 

Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​93), iii. 460, 471. 4  Paul Eggert, ‘Textual Product or Textual Process: Procedures and Assumptions of Critical Editing’, in Philip Cohen (ed.), Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 66. 5  A Defence of Poetry, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 697. 6 Shelley, Major Works, 697. 7  Leslie A. Marchand (ed.), Byron’s Letters and Journals, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​94), vii. 229. 8  The Letters of John Keats 1814–​21, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 214–​15. 9  Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1941), i. 102.

390   Jane Stabler Out of all the Romantic poets, Byron was the most keen to disavow the endeavour of the professional poet, and he did it so convincingly that even as astute a critic as Frank Kermode is taken in: Byron ‘did very little revision’, Kermode states, ‘being preternaturally fluent, lazy and aristocratically hostile to the bourgeois glamorizing of integral selfhood, the Romantic cult of organic wholeness, and pretentious claims for the sedentary trade of writing’.10 Byron cites laziness as a reason for not making the changes to Don Juan for which Murray was pleading in 1819, but an opposite tendency—​the linguistic diligence that led Byron to co-​write an Armenian grammar during his Venetian sojourn—​is also evident in Byron’s careful recording of second or third thoughts, which can be seen all over his manuscripts and are not quite the rare species that some critics want to believe. The myth that Byron did very little revision was spiked as early as 1828 when Leigh Hunt published facsimiles of the handwriting of Byron, Keats, and Shelley as the frontispiece to Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. Byron’s sample was a heavily deleted, blotted, and over-​written four lines from English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; the Keats autograph was a lightly amended six-​line section of Hyperion, and the Shelley fragment was a pristine draft of four lines from The Revolt of Islam. While encouraging his readers to regard Shelley as a spontaneous genius, Hunt was keen for them to know that Byron’s poetry involved laborious effort. Like the manuscripts of his contemporaries, however, Byron’s manuscripts mostly lie somewhere between carelessness and trouble. Despite the claim that he can’t ‘furbish’, Byron often offers amendments for a variety of reasons, and his capacity for revision makes him the paradigmatic example of this chapter—​not the counter-​example to Wordsworth that he usually becomes in discussions of Romantic creativity. Revisions can be instigated by internal or external agents; they can be the result of quiet reflection or heated debate; and in most cases we will never find out because then as now most conversational exchanges are lost histories. We know that all the major Romantic poets worked collaboratively: Catherine Blake helped to colour her husband’s designs;11 Coleridge rinsed the archaisms out of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ at the suggestion of William Wordsworth.12 Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth willingly lent journal observations and suggested lines to resolve William’s moments of creative impasse: on 18 April 1802, Dorothy’s journal records: ‘He met me with the conclusion of the poem of the Robin. I read it to him in bed. We left out some lines.’13 As Jack Stillinger points out, the myth of the solitary Romantic genius led Miriam Allott and H. B. Forman to credit Keats with alterations to The Eve of St Agnes that were

10 

Frank Kermode, ‘Floating Hair v. Blue Pencil’, London Review of Books 18.11 (6 June 1996), 15–​16. William Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 11. 12  The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, Part 2: Poems (Variorum Text), 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), i. 506. 13  Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, i. 135. 11 

Revision and Self-citation    391 actually the work of Richard Woodhouse.14 Charles Robinson’s edition of Frankenstein allows us to see the extent of Percy Shelley’s revisions to Mary Shelley’s 1818 text,15 and John Cam Hobhouse modestly writes himself into the fabric of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 4: When I rejoined Lord Byron at La Mira . . . I found him employed upon the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold . . . It was much shorter than it afterwards became, and it did not remark on several objects which appeared to me peculiarly worthy of notice. I made a list of these objects, and in conversation with him gave him reasons for the selection. The result was the poem as it now appears, and he then engaged me to write the notes.16

Revisions can be made by diverse hands and they can be implemented for a variety of reasons: at one end of the scale we witness the poet striving toward an elusive aesthetic perfection, and, at the other, we see the poet trimming to placate his or her publisher in the interests of potential sales. Keats accedes to Taylor’s request to tone down the erotic encounter between Porphyro and Madeline in The Eve of St Agnes before publication. As Byron makes the fair copy of Don Juan in September 1818—​well before he receives the representations from Murray’s advisers—​he anticipates Murray’s reluctance to publish the attack on Castlereagh in the Dedication. After the blistering stanzas on Southey’s ‘conversion’, Byron offers an alternative couplet ending to stanza 11 with an often-​overlooked note to his publisher in the margin: Mr John Murray—​As publisher to the Admiralty and of various Government works—​if the five Stanzas concerning Castlereagh should risk your ears or the Navy List you may omit them in the publication—​in that case the two last lines of stanza 10 [11] must end with the couplet inserted per margin.

He makes a similar marginal offer to Murray to exchange the word ‘bidét’ for ‘tea pot, tray’ in Canto 3, stanza 17 ‘in case the other piece of feminine furniture frightens you’, offering a revised text as a parallel version within the press copy of the poem.17 Revision can take place over different temporal spans: a draft can be subject to an ‘immediate period of dissatisfaction’, as Kathryn Sutherland describes the 16–​18 July

14 

Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 37. Stillinger, however, subtly reinstates a division between the kinds of labour undertaken by Keats and his friends when he refers to Woodhouse’s ‘fussing’ over rhymes (32). 15  Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley), The Original Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus: The Original Two-​Volume Novel of 1816–​1817 from the Bodleian Library Manuscripts, ed. Charles Robinson (New York: Vintage Books, 2008). For another account of the multiple ‘parenting’ of Frankenstein, see Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 167–​73. 16  E. H. Coleridge (ed.), The Works of Lord Byron, 7 vols (London: John Murray, 1898–​1904), ii. 315. 17  Marginal note on fair copy MS. Murray, quoted in McGann and Weller (eds), Complete Poetical Works, v. 698.

392   Jane Stabler revision of Persuasion which preceded a longer stage of rewriting up to the first week of August 1816 (according to Cassandra).18 The revision of Austen’s other posthumous publication, Northanger Abbey, took place over the best part of two decades as the work evolved from the novel titled Susan in 1799 that Crosby and Co. advertised but did not publish in 1803 to the novel that was finally published by John Murray in 1817 (with 1818 on the title page). Even when writers do not falsify the dates on their manuscripts (as McGann shows Byron did), we can never be sure that a change of ink means that the writer simply recharged his or her pen and carried on or whether he or she got up and left the manuscript for days, weeks, or longer. Nancy Goslee points out that the passages which look like ‘interruptions’ in Percy Shelley’s notebooks might be moments where ‘that “interrupting” passage from the second work was already on the page, so that he must skip over it’.19 In order to provide provisional dates for the different draft stages of many canonical Romantic poems, editors must assess the complex relationships between all the different witnesses, ambiguous references in correspondence, and accounts of the birth of a work in retrospective portraits of the artist by friends keen to appear as a confidantes, guides, or muses. When not instigated by another reader (which is never easy to prove), it is tempting to ascribe revision of published material to artistic or philosophical development or to religious or political conversion: Blake reframes Songs of Innocence (1789) in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), intensifying the moral dialectic of the original collection. David Fairer shows the linkage of Coleridge’s political and aesthetic shifts as he revises ‘Frost at Midnight’ to remove his earlier hospitality to ‘idle thought’, and then in the 1829 edition, makes further changes that draw his 1790s self into line with the poet for whom the synthesis of ideas was more important than the ‘mixed, varied, localised, and adaptive elements’ of his younger self.20 Although revision can indicate the radical denial of an earlier intellectual phase, it can yield a counter-​awareness of imaginative coherence and integrity. Poring over a poet’s manuscripts, we can begin to recognize the ways in which a particular mind works and reworks the same ground. This is an organic process (in Fairer’s sense) of continuing labour, tillage, or refurbishing. When Wordsworth added the ‘Action is transitory’ lines from The Borderers as an epigraph to The White Doe of Rylstone in his Poetical Works (1836), he signed it ‘M.S.’, signalling a continuity of concern between something unpublished and the poem itself. In the 1845 and 1850 editions of the Poetical Works, ‘M.S.’, was omitted, indicating not only that The Borderers had been published (in 1842), but also that these lines were now fully absorbed

18 

Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 148–​52. 19  Nancy Moore Goslee, ‘Shelley’s Draft Notebooks’, in Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, with Madeleine Callaghan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 226. 20  David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–​1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 312–​13.

Revision and Self-citation    393 into The White Doe.21 Elizabeth Barrett recognized them when The Borderers was published and saw them as that noblest of the noble which the poet employed before—​long ago—​as a motto—​ & which seemed then to belong to the great ‘didactic poem’ in the treasure-​ house . . . ‘Action is transitory . . . a step, a blow’. Altogether we surely ought to be grateful for it . . . call it tragedy . . . poem—​discrepancy . . . what you please.22

Here Barrett articulates a sense in which the lines ‘seemed . . . to belong’ to the earlier (but in fact later) poem. The idea of the ‘discrepancy’ suggests how the revisionary process can throw up fragments of an earlier life and so discompose a biographical narrative. The early deaths of Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats mean that we do not know if they would have turned into inveterate revisers like the authors of Lyrical Ballads, but the existence of the Mawman copy of Don Juan is evidence that when Byron picked up a printed edition of his work, he was unable to resist tinkering with lines that he felt could be improved. For a variety of reasons, the so-​called second generation of Romantic poets faced more pressure from their publishers before publication to amend lines, stanzas, or whole poems. An entire category of revision could be devoted to the demands of decency, such as Shelley’s blurring of the sexual union of sister and brother when Laon and Cythna (1817) was hastily withdrawn and reissued as The Revolt of Islam (1818). Such revisions are often classed as ‘censorship’; they are the changes that recent editors have been most keen to undo to reveal poems in their most contentious forms. It can improve things aesthetically, however, to make poetry less particular, pointed, or rawly autobiographical. When Coleridge revises ‘A Letter to—​4 April 1802’ into the less personal ‘Dejection. An Ode’, he amends the lines ‘O Sara! we receive but what we give | And in our Life alone does Nature live—​’ (lines 296–​7) to ‘O lady, we receive but what we give, | And in our Life alone does Nature live:’ (line 47).23 There is nothing wrong with the name ‘Sara’, of course, but ‘lady’ (with the stately connotations of Milton’s Comus) strengthens the line and the poem’s connections with the ‘poor, loveless, ever-​ anxious crowd’ by replacing the frustrated passion of the speaker for someone else’s sister-​in-​law with a more ineffable and timeless sense of yearning. A desire to startle the reader is more usually evident in early versions of Romantic poems, but Stillinger has warned against an automatic preference for first editions, which he labels ‘textual primitivism’.24 The authenticity or not of revision has been at the 21 

Stephen Gill interprets allusions to The Borderers in The Prelude as a private message to Coleridge: Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 100. For shifts in the positioning of the epigraph, see William Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone; or, The Fate of the Nortons, ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 77. 22  The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson, and Scott Lewis, 26 vols (Winfield: Wedgstone Press, 1984–​), v. 311. 23  Other variants for the line include ‘O Wordsworth!’, ‘O EDMUND!’ and ‘O William!’: Coleridge, Poems (Variorum Text), ed. Mays, ii. 873, 890. 24  Jack Stillinger, ‘Textual Primitivism and the Editing of Wordsworth’, Studies in Romanticism 28.1 (1989), 3–​28.

394   Jane Stabler centre of modern editorial policy debates. From the 1960s, the Greg-​Bowers principles of editing (also known as ‘New Bibliography’) stipulated that the author’s final intention should determine a definitive copy text. The Cornell edition of William Wordsworth’s poems took a different approach because the general editors believed that Wordsworth’s poetic powers declined with age. Their choice for reading texts, therefore, favoured earlier versions. ‘Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch’ appears in its 1798 form, ending with the old man’s direct speech about going to Falmouth to take a last leave of ‘my son who . . . is dying in an hospital’ (lines 15–​20), and not the indirect speech of the 1800 edition or the version Wordsworth published from 1815 onwards that ends simply, ‘the young behold | With envy, what the old man hardly feels’ (lines 13–​14).25 In 1996, Zachary Leader’s Revision and Romantic Authorship lambasted the editorial policies of Stephen Gill (Cornell and Oxford English Texts) and Stephen Parrish (Cornell) for ignoring Wordsworth’s later revisions. Leader argued that aesthetic preference for early Wordsworth was highly subjective and that to ignore the final wishes or last will and testament of an author was an ethical as well as an editorial transgression. To make his point, Leader tracked the subtle modifications of Parrish’s editorial principles in essays published as the Cornell edition progressed in order to pose the question of whether we should adopt ‘the early Parrish’ as ‘the best Parrish, the real Parrish’.26 It was cleverly done, and the controversy was rekindled with each review of Leader’s book, but the Cornell series carried on with what Wordsworth would have saluted as ‘calm oblivious tendencies’, and is now established as the standard reference for editorial variants, if not for reading texts. In the 1990s, the difficult issue of editorial choice was complicated still further by the growing technological advances of hypertext, which made it theoretically possible to archive and access all versions of a work from manuscript to revised editions. Leader pointed out that even with the advent of electronic pluralism, someone would still have to take responsibility for the choices involved in producing a single reading text for the laity and the student reader, but most of the enthusiasts for online variorum editions came from well-​funded university departments where it seemed possible that ‘very soon . . . these electronic tools will not only be far cheaper, they will also be commonplace’.27 In this revolutionary shift from paper-​based to electronic texts, all readers would have instant online access to everything; the task of making choices could be delegated to individual readers or deferred altogether by infinite browsing, clicking reading texts into existence for a few seconds and moving on to another version. Hurricanes in America and tsunami in Japan have shown how fragile the electricity supply of major industrial nations can be, and we are probably less confident than McGann in 1995 that online resources will always be on. The number of students who 25 

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–​1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 110. 26 Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship, 32. 27  Jerome McGann, ‘The Rationale of HyperText’, in Kathryn Sutherland (ed.), Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 40.

Revision and Self-citation    395 read from a screen in class rather than from a book is increasing year on year, but the electronic kit McGann mentions is still not universally available.28 Although the digitization of manuscripts has provided a wealth of material in sharper resolution than printed facsimiles, switching between layers of electronic text can be slow and hard on the eyes in a different way from manuscript and print. The greatest gain of the new technology has been in Blake studies, where the ability to view multiple versions of the illustrated books in sequence has revolutionized teaching and research.29 Despite McGann’s reservations about the difficulty of ‘scholarly codes’ (the dense manuscript abbreviations and symbols for insertion and deletions), printed scholarly editions such as McGann’s more conservative editorial work on the Clarendon Byron (based, somewhat inconsistently, on authorial intention), J. C. C. Mays’s Bollingen edition of Coleridge’s poems (which records all Coleridge’s poems in chronological sequence, with a comprehensive record of all variants to allow the construal of different reading texts), and Donald Reiman’s Garland facsimile series (with transcriptions) allow the reader to reconstruct the process of revision through printed variants that are arranged in sequence on one page and not subject to low battery power. Some questions about revision can only be resolved by consulting the original manuscripts, but thanks to ongoing editorial archaeology, much draft material is now accessible. Notwithstanding widespread acceptance of the multiple valency of authorship, we can still learn a great deal about poetic craftsmanship from the interplay of lines written, deleted, and inserted in the early stages of revision. Interest in the revisionary process for its own sake goes back at least as far as the 1770s when, describing the seminal stages of Paradise Lost, Samuel Johnson contemplated the fascination of tracing the ‘gradual growth and expansion’ of great works and how ‘they are sometimes suddenly advanced by accidental hints and sometimes slowly improved by steady meditation’.30 In the 1970s, French ‘genetic criticism’ developed analysis of text and avant-​texte, and its application to Romantic poetry has been pioneered by Sally Bushell’s work on The Excursion and other nineteenth-​century long poems.31 Genetic criticism has no interest in identifying a final reading text: freed from the responsibility of fixing a single version of the poem, this school of criticism explores poetic genesis for its own sake and treats the meaning that emerges from each draft page as a unique construct. In the second half of this chapter I shall discuss three brief sample moments of revision, combining a focus on the evolution of the manuscript with an awareness of historical context.

28  For an overview, see David S. Miall, ‘The Library versus the Internet: Literary Studies under Siege?’, Publications of the Modern Language Association 116.5 (2001), 1405–​14. 29  The key resource is The William Blake Archive, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, at: www.blakearchive.org. 30  Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, ed. John H. Middendorf, 3 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), i. 141–​2. 31  Sally Bushell, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2009). See also Louis Hay (ed.), Essais de critique génétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1979).

396   Jane Stabler Wordsworth’s revisions have received more attention than those of any of his contemporaries because he spent most of his life modifying and re-​ordering his work, comprehensively revising everything in 1845, but making further changes even as late as 1849–​50. Critics such as Stephen Gill, Stephen Parrish, and Duncan Wu have regarded it as ‘essential’, when editing his work for modern readers, to overturn those changes ‘against the stated wishes of the author’.32 More recently, however, Gill’s Wordsworth’s Revisitings (responding to Zachary Leader’s criticism) focuses on the significance of Wordsworth’s revisions and self-​quotations as a live engagement with the past ‘that reactivates it in conjunction with the present’.33 Gill suggests that this sort of study enables a reassessment of the artistic stature of the older Wordsworth. As Sally Bushell (editor of the Cornell Excursion) argues, we have much to gain from a study of the genesis of Wordsworth’s poems—​that is, from ignoring the ‘reading text’ sections of the Cornell series and instead immersing ourselves in transcriptions of the multiple drafts and annotated copies, or tracing the way that Wordsworth dismantles his early editions and reissues his works in different groupings. Neil Fraistat has pointed out that ‘poets . . . who alter the organization of their books, change the meaning of the contexture’.34 ‘Old Man Travelling’ changes not only when Wordsworth removes the last six lines, but also when the poem is collected with ‘Poems Referring to the Period of Old Age’ rather than Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth describes the art of poetry as ‘the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the imagination’.35 The proximity between creativity and revision in Wordsworth’s writing was first explored in detail by Hugh Sykes Davies when he analysed the way in which Wordsworth worked over clusters of repeated words in the ‘spots of time’, building an incantatory rhythm out of ‘cumulative tautologies’.36 For Davies, the finished poems lead the reader through a process of psychic revision, which he also calls ‘the process of involution’. This return of particular words under imaginative pressure is what lends the poems their haunting power. The centrifugal force of individual words is evident in Wordsworth’s drafts, but, as we will see, a similar orbiting also emerges from the examples of Keats and Shelley’s revisions. Jonathan Wordsworth claims that with Wordsworth, revision has a detrimental effect because it ‘usually took the form of elaboration’.37 In drafts of ‘The unremitting voice of nightly streams’, we can observe Wordsworth stripping away the local occasion that ties the ‘thought-​controlling sound’ to a particular scene and moving toward that featureless 32 

William Wordsworth, The Five Book Prelude, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 18.

33 Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings, 37. 34 

Neil Fraistat (ed.), Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 10. 35  ‘Preface’ to Poems (1815), in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936; repr. 1985), 754. 36  Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 87. 37  Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 56.

Revision and Self-citation    397 interior territory of brooding thought that typifies The Borderers. Wordsworth gradually whittles away references to folklore surrounding a hermit’s cell (where the poem overlaps with ‘The Somnambulist’), focusing instead on sounds that penetrate sleep. Jared Curtis’s transcriptions reveal how long the first lines took to settle. The earliest Dove Cottage Manuscript reads: The unsuspended Voce of mountain streams Where Nature seems to work with wasted powers 38

These lines are repeated in the next draft, and then replaced by: The unsuspended voice of mountain streams Tires not the day nor wastes on night its powers.

Later on, Wordsworth experiments with a participle, ‘The unsuspending Voice of mountain streams’, and writes in another possibility above it:  ‘In unremitting Voice of mountain streams.’ But he is still undecided about the second line: ‘Where Nature works with, we think, with wasted powers’ was also accompanied by the trial line ‘That morning, noon & night, we think, with wasted powers.’ ‘We think’ brings in a community of readers and conveys the poet’s hesitancy about his claims for Nature. In 1840–​ 2, when the draft appears under the heading ‘Introduction to the Somnambulist’, the opening becomes: The unremitting voice of mountain streams That wastes so oft, we think, its tuneful powers

but this is crossed out, and in another draft on the back of the next page Wordsworth supplies another version (which is also cancelled): The unremitting voice of mountain nightly streams That wastes so oft we think its soothing tuneful powers.

In aesthetic terms, most readers would agree that ‘unremitting’ improves on ‘unsuspended’ by summoning the sound of a ceaseless and almost relentless noise, whereas ‘nightly streams’ instead of ‘mountain streams’ is much less successful (streams don’t stop flowing in the day?). The distracting suggestion of nocturnal bodily rhythms is admitted by Wordsworth’s indecision between ‘notions’ and ‘motions’ of a dream, which later becomes ‘to regulate the motion of our dreams’. In the earliest version the hermit-​figure was ‘bound | To one deep solemn thought-​controuling sound’. ‘Thought-​ controuling’ moved from ‘hope-​controuling’ to ‘heart-​controlling’ but Wordsworth 38 

William Wordsworth, Last Poems 1821–​1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 669–​79.

398   Jane Stabler eventually cancels the whole couplet (in which ‘drowned’ also echoed), replacing it with the milder ‘tinkling knell . . . heart could tell’ rhyme. The knight in hermit’s clothing has now been replaced by ‘rudest’ or ‘simplest swains who dwell | Where torrents roar’ and the poem becomes general, not local as the healing influence of sound creeps into ‘the human heart breast . . . as in through every clime | Was felt near murmuring brooks from in earliest time’. The later version is a more ambitious but less striking poem. The revisionary process, however, provides a moving encounter with the hopes and anxieties of an old man whose faith in sound is bound up with poor eyesight and increasing physical frailty. Whereas ‘The unremitting voice’ is revised over decades, Keats’s holograph of ‘Hyperion’ (British Library Add. MS. 37000) is, according to his friends, the original and only draft of this poem. Some pages appear without any revision at all (the Romantic myth would say ‘free’ from any revision), but the first fourteen lines of the poem reveal pockets of revision around similes as Keats forces himself to ‘plunge into abstract images’ and cast his ideas in more remote, lapidary forms:39 Deep in the shady sadness of a Vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of Morn, Far from the fiery noon and evening Eve’s one star, Sat grey hair’d Saturn quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his Lair. Forest on forest hung above his head Like Clouds that whose bosoms thunderous bosoms Like Cloud on Cloud. No stir of air was there; Not so much Life as what an eagle’s wing a young vulture’s Would spread upon a field of green ear’d corn: But when the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Shading across it Spreading a shade: the Naiad amid her reeds Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.40

The cancelled image for ‘Not so much Life as’ is replaced by two later lines written cross-​ wise in the right hand margin: ‘Not so much life as on a summer’s day | Robs not at all the dandelion’s fleece.’ Keats’s working through ‘eagle’ to ‘young vulture’ to ‘dandelion’ suggests that he was trying to achieve an image of stillness without distracting attention from Saturn. With the eagle simile he appears to have been thinking of the soaring of the birds that cast only a shadow from above, but the silent passage of a predator is still too full of force and potential movement, especially when it becomes briefly a ‘young 39 

Letters of Keats, i. 369. Jack Stillinger (ed.), Facsimiles of the Hyperion Holograph and George Keats’s Notebook (New York: Garland, 1988), 3. 40 

Revision and Self-citation    399 vulture’ (‘hardly an improvement’, as de Selincourt remarked rather tartly).41 In a later stage of revision, Keats shifts from animal to vegetable and from something at the beginning of its life cycle to something at the end: hence the dandelion fleece. Miriam Allott perceptively cites Keats’s earlier appreciation of a metaphor in Troilus and Cressida: ‘the seeded pride | That hath to this maturity blown up’ (I. iii. 315–​16). In his marginal comments on Shakespeare’s play, Keats writes: ‘One’s very breath while leaning over these Pages is held for fear of blowing this line away—​as easily as the gentlest breeze—​Robs dandelions of their fleecy Crowns.’42 Bringing Keats’s reading notes on Shakespeare to bear on the poem, Allott reminds us that revision is part of the writer’s ongoing work of criticism. The sudden flurry of dandelion seeds is still too volatile an image, so lines 8–​9 eventually become: Not so much life as on a summer’s day Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass.

We can tell that the image of the eagle remained in Keats’s head, however, because at the end of his first sketch of Saturn, listening to the earth ‘for some comfort yet’, Keats frames the following metaphor: Thus the old Eagle drowsy with his grief great woes grief Sat moulting his weak Plumage never more To be restored or soar against the Sun, While his three Sons upon Olympus stood . . .

There is a recollection here of ‘a sick eagle looking at the sky’ in ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’, an image which Keats had repeatedly invoked in connection with poetic ambition. Eagles in particular might accompany Keats’s forecasts of imaginative triumph because gilt Regency mirrors were often crested by a carved gilt eagle, so when Keats saw his own reflection, he often would have been conscious of an eagle straining upwards or pluming its feathers just above him. As the son of an ostler, Keats would have been aware of the dilapidated appearance of fowl in the local stable yard, and he might also have been thinking of the eagle shedding his grey plumage and rising on new pinions out of the sea in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book I, canto 11, stanza 34), eighteenth-​ century editions of which often supplied a note on the belief that eagles moult every ten years. When preparing himself for new work in 1819, Keats tells Benjamin Robert Haydon and John Hamilton Reynolds that he has been ‘moulting’.43 In Miltonic terms, the image is too homely for a fallen Titan. Readers who (like Christopher Ricks) see in ‘bad Keats’ deliberate strategies to make the reader experience the disconcerting and the embarrassing might, however, read these lines as designedly low in register, recreating 41 

Ernest de Selincourt (ed.), The Poems of John Keats (London: Methuen, 1912), 495. Miriam Allott (ed.), The Poems of John Keats (Harlow: Longman, 1970), 397. 43  Letters of Keats, ii. 32, 128. 42 

400   Jane Stabler the sinking potency of Saturn from virile prince to decrepit old man. From this perspective, removing the image of the fallen monarch as a bedraggled bird of prey, past his prime, and deprived of powers of flight might be counted as a conservative retreat from a passage that bordered dangerously on the burlesque. The recurrence of a familiar image within and across poems is one of the most pervasive forms of self-​citation, especially when the image draws on and transforms another writer’s cadences. The recasting of self and other exemplifies at a local level and in a modified form Harold Bloom’s theory of revisionism, whereby a period of struggle with an influential precursor results in the eventual emergence of a new creative voice. Beginning with clinamen, where an author follows but then ‘swerves’ from the precursor, Bloom’s revisionary ratios are suggestive but too linear and antagonistic for the ruminative progress of manuscript revision in a poet such as Wordsworth or Keats, which takes its cues from multiple environmental influences (things and people) as well as a dialogue with the poetic tradition and earlier versions of the new work.44 Percy Shelley’s preoccupation with the motif of a ‘wrinkled’ reflection in water provides a final example of the poetic matrix of self-​citation and intertextuality. Shelley uses the idea of the wrinkle in a number of poems and prose works across his career about the experience of human history. In The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, A Defence of Poetry, and Hellas, the word is applied to legends, sands, and oceans. In 1819, when Shelley was thinking intensively about the possibility of revolution in England, he sees ‘old palaces and towers | Quivering within the wave’ (lines 33–​4), and another variation on the motif occurs in the lines labelled in Mary Shelley’s Copybook as fragment 37: Within the surface of the fleeting river The wrinkled image of the mountain lay Immoveably unquiet.45

This is a trial run or an offshoot of the poem drafted in the ‘Devils Notebook’ and eventually titled ‘Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa’ in Posthumous Poems (1824). If we follow the evolution of the poem simply recording deletions and insertions, the opening lines read as follows: The sun is set, the swallows are asleep The bats are flitting fast in the grey air The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep 44 

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 14. See also Alan Rawes, ‘Keats and his “Composite Precursor[s]” in The Fall of Hyperion’, in Alan Rawes and Jonathan Shears (eds), Reading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 45  Irving Massey (ed.), Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. d. 7 (New York: Garland, 1987), 55. The vision of ‘old palaces and towers’ in water might be a reworking of the description of Venice ‘with its islets, palaces and towers rising out of the sea’ in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 174.

Revision and Self-citation    401 The The The Silent And evening’s winds is moving breath is wandering here & there Over the glimmering bosom surface of the pool stream Wakes not its one ripple from its summer dream There are is are is no dews on the dry grass tonight There is no freshness in the sultry on the leaves Nor freshness in damp within the shadow of the leaves shadows trees The wind The overhan The wind is dry intermitting . . . dry & light And in the inconstant motion of the breeze The dust & straws are driven up & down And, whilred about, the pavement of the Town Over the Within the surface of the fleeting river The wrinkled image of the city lay Immoveably unquiet—​and forever It trembles but it never fades away Go to the Indies You, being changed will find it then as now.46

The draft conveys Shelley’s characteristic shifting in dream vision from the mass of a mountain to the mass of a city. The misspelling ‘whilred’ for ‘whirled’ is intriguing and perhaps provides a glimpse of the ghost of William Shelley or the dark hue of the dusty earth in Pisa, moving like the red leaves in ‘Ode to the West Wind’. In what feels like a late summer poem (its dating is unconfirmed, but the Longman editors incline to summer 1820), Shelley is still waiting for revolutionary change; the poem is full of what is not. The revisions reveal a shift away from silence to an infinitesimally small, but audible motion (although Mary Shelley uses ‘silent dream’ instead of ‘summer dream’ in her transcription and for the version printed in 1824). Like Keats in the draft of ‘Hyperion’, Percy discards the clichéd word ‘bosom’ for the surface of the water, but he then discards ‘surface’ as well. Mary reinstates ‘surface’ in 1824, inviting readers to dwell on the return of the same word in line 13. ‘Pool’ is cancelled because, presumably, it is not quite the right word for a river and, more pressingly, because of the oncoming rhyme with ‘dream’. The poet’s preternaturally heightened, raw-​nerved perception means that the plural ‘dews’ (as if each drop can be seen) hovers as the possibility for line 7 before Shelley settles on the simpler ‘There is no dew on the dry grass tonight.’ In a similar move, he decides not to have individual ‘leaves’ but just the ‘shadow of the trees’ in the next line. ‘No damp’ is preferred to ‘no freshness’, possibly because it helps the muffled alliterative pulse of ‘dew . . . dry . . . damp . . . dry’. The next line lifts from things on the ground to the movement of the wind, but we can see how the idea of the wind is first stirred by

46 

P. M. S. Dawson and Timothy Webb (eds), Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 9 (New York: Garland, 1993), 252–​3.

402   Jane Stabler the trees; Shelley cancels ‘The wind’ and starts the line again with a word that is hard to decipher, but which seems to be ‘The overhan’.47 Then there is a relatively free passage of composition in which a momentary hesitation after ‘intermitting’, marked by tiny ellipsis, is filled in by the unit ‘dry & light’, running into the fluid picture of dust and straws blowing ‘up & down’ as an image of inconstancy. The lines might recall Shakespeare’s King John, which Mary Shelley read in April 1819 and Percy read aloud in January 1820: Now hear me speak with a prophetic spirit; For even the breath of what I mean to speak, Shall blow each dust, each straw, each little rub Out of the path which shall directly lead Thy foot to England’s throne. (III. iv. 126–​30)

Many critics have been puzzled by the sudden change of tense in the next stanza, ‘The wrinkled image of the city lay.’ The revisions to this section suggest that Shelley is working over the motif of a reflection as palimpsest. The deletion ‘Over the Within the surface of the fleeting river’ gives depth to the surface, allowing it to hold past and present together. Shelley’s return to this idea draws attention to its function as a verbal/​visual nexus that can yield different effects when viewed from different angles. Poetic revision tries out these angles of vision. Previous Shelley editors have noticed the echo of Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ (1807): ‘thy Image still was there | It trembled but it never pass’d away’ (lines 7–​8). Shelley revises Wordsworth’s resigned acceptance of the failings of human history while revisiting a vision of reflection that has preoccupied him over a number of years. The ‘wrinkled image’ occurs with slight modification in the more politically engaged ‘Ode to Liberty’, which was drafted in another notebook at roughly the same time. In this case the image is of Athens: Within the surface of Time’s fleeting river Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay Immoveably unquiet, and forever It trembles, but it cannot pass away! (lines 76–​9)

In the ‘Ponte a Mare’ poem, the city reflected in the river is Pisa, but it is also a memory of Athens and a memory of and prophecy about London. The Longman editors suggest that the lines in the ‘Ponte a Mare’ fragment ‘seem to pre-​date the draft of the similar, though more elaborate lines that formed the basis of [Ode to Liberty]’, and argue that 47  The Garland facsimile suggests ‘overtian’ for this cancellation, but Shelley has not dotted an ‘i’ and Timothy Webb and Michael O’Neill (for whose advice I am grateful) both agree that ‘overhanging’ is more likely as a Shelleyan word.

Revision and Self-citation    403 the change of tense is because Shelley is ‘reproducing from memory the second line of Within the surface of the fleeting river’.48 P. M. S. Dawson and Timothy Webb note ‘there is a strong possibility that an uncompleted poem supplied material for another poem which did achieve closure, but it is also possible that the Pisan fragment borrowed from the “Ode” ’.49 The doubtful chronology of revision undoes any simple narrative of development and replaces it with a more inconstant fluctuation of ideas, images, and sonic fragments. Representing different Romantic generations, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley all work across and between their poems. Evidence of their laborious (to some extent, in all cases) self-​revision encourages us to question naïve concepts of poetic originality, making us more attentive to the fluid evolution of poems and their provisional emergence as finished forms. But it would be a mistake to attempt to demystify the birth of new poems entirely; we need to bear in mind Reiman’s warning that we can never ‘quite follow the trail of . . . mental processes’ that led [the poet] to make specific turns’.50 The patient toil and observation of editorial scholarship, however, allows us to see Romantic poets as painstaking editors too, and to discern a different form of creativity in that restless return to and rewriting of something that changes with every reading and every stroke of the pen.

Further Reading Brinkley, Robert, and Keith Hanley (eds), Romantic Revisions (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1992). Bushell, Sally, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2009). Cohen, Philip (ed.), Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). Fairer, David, Organising Poetry:  The Coleridge Circle, 1790–​98 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009). Fraistat, Neil, Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Gill, Stephen, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Greetham, D. C., Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Leader, Zachary, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Reiman, Donald, ‘The Four Ages of Editing and the English Romantics’, Text 1 (1984), 231–​56. Stillinger, Jack, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1991). Sullivan, Hannah, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

48 

Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, and Michael Rossington (eds), The Poems of Shelley, vol. 3 (Harlow: Longman, 2011), 423. 49  Dawson and Webb (eds), Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook, xxiv. 50  Donald H. Reiman, ‘Shelley’s Manuscripts and the Web of Circumstance’, in Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (eds), Romantic Revisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 238.

Chapter 26

Intertextua l Dia l o g u e Beth Lau

Intertextual dialogue in this period is shaped by conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, a number of key aesthetic concepts associated with Romanticism disparage the practice of alluding to other writers. Neoclassical theory had encouraged imitation of previous authors, especially Greek and Latin, in accordance with Pope’s dictum that ‘To copy Nature is to copy’ the ‘ancient rules’ derived from their writings.1 By the late eighteenth century, however, the ascendancy of originality as an artistic ideal had challenged this idea. The creative figure, according to theorists such as Edward Young, William Duff, and Alexander Gerard, was to be a unique ‘genius’ who surpassed his literary forebears and broke the rules derived from their works. Poetry was now defined as a natural effusion of the poet’s inner emotions rather than a skillfully constructed artefact derived from study of earlier models. In keeping with these shifts in outlook, the concept of plagiarism evolved, so that drawing on another writer became associated with criminal theft.2 Political currents further eroded the authority of ‘ancient rules’: in a period shaped by the upheaval of the French Revolution, many writers wished to participate in the revolutionary spirit and break free from past literary conventions. If many factors, though, contributed to valorizing autonomous originality and denigrating art that derived from other works of art, other developments undermined these ideals and encouraged writers’ engagement with other texts. The very worship of original geniuses such as Shakespeare and Milton resulted in intense study of these writers and desire to emulate them. This process was facilitated by the House of Lords’ decision in 1774 that ended the practice of perpetual copyright and released many older works into the public domain, with the result that inexpensive editions and anthologies of British poets, dramatists, and prose writers proliferated and made their work available

1  An Essay on Criticism, lines 139–​40, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 1, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 2  See Tilar Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Intertextual Dialogue   405 to readers to whom it was previously inaccessible.3 The wide dissemination of these texts coincided with and contributed to the emergence of a canon of English writers, many of whom (especially Shakespeare and Milton) were now considered equal or even superior to the Classics. Thus, aspiring writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had the concept of a national canon they could hope to join and the texts of that canon to absorb. Because the works of this canon were written in the language of their readers, the practice of literary allusion became more democratic. As Lucy Newlyn notes, previously allusion to other writers was ‘associated only with learned reference to the ancients’, but now people ‘of vastly different classes and educational backgrounds’ could cite Milton’s works or Shakespeare’s or any of the other new English classics.4 But the towering presence of Shakespeare, Milton, and other canonical figures could also be intimidating rather than inspiring and make modern writers feel, as Keats did at one point, that ‘there was now nothing original to be written in poetry . . . that its riches . . . were already exhausted,—​& all its beauties forestalled—​& That [he] should, consequently, write no more’.5 In The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970), Walter Jackson Bate explored the difficulty eighteenth-​and early ​nineteenth-​century poets experienced as successors to the ‘great creative achievement’ of the Renaissance, analysing the strategies they pursued to escape that ‘burden’. 6 From the example of the major male Romantic poets, Harold Bloom developed his theory of ‘the anxiety of influence’, according to which poets acquire their unique voices by misreading the works of imposing literary forefathers, especially Milton.7 Other critics have challenged Bloom’s theory of Oedipal strife between writers, however, and argued that Romantic poets found past writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton empowering rather than intimidating and accurately drew upon passages, themes, and motifs in their works rather than misreading them.8 Whether one believes the Romantics’ relationships with important past writers are characterized by conflict or harmony, however, one is still interpreting the Romantics in terms of their engagement with other texts. It is telling that prominent theories of literary influence such as W. J. Bate’s and Bloom’s have emerged from studies of the period most associated with originality, spontaneity, and the revolutionary overthrow of past 3  See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chs 3–​7. 4   Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 42. 5  The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 380. 6  W. J. Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 12. 7  Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). For a more recent account of the Romantic poets’ ‘misreading’ of Milton, see Jonathon Shears, The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: Reading Against the Grain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 8  See, for example, Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); and Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader.

406   Beth Lau conventions. This in fact was the special dilemma of Romantic writers: they lived in an age when the pressure to be original and natural coincided for the first time to a significant degree with the worship and canonization of previous British writers. All major writers of the period can be seen to negotiate the competing demands to acquire legitimacy by invoking other, recognized authors and to express their own unique vision and style. Moreover, these issues are not confined to poetry: similar issues arise in fiction, drama, and non-​fictional prose. In this chapter, I shall explore the complications of intertextual dialogue in five representative authors across a variety of genres: the essayist and critic William Hazlitt, the poet and writer of marginalia Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the novelist Jane Austen, and the poets John Clare and John Keats. The essays of Hazlitt, whether on literature, politics, or miscellaneous subjects, are chock-​full of quotations, especially from his favourite, Shakespeare. Jonathan Bate counts more than 2,400 quotations from Shakespeare in Howe’s edition of Hazlitt’s Complete Works, in addition to many others from the Bible and from such writers as Milton, Spenser, Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and a variety of eighteenth-​century poets.9 Some of his contemporaries found fault with Hazlitt’s extensive use of quotations. Thomas De Quincey accuses him of a lack of originality, claiming that ‘the whole [of Hazlitt’s work] is a series of mosaics, a tessellation made up from borrowed fragments’ in which ‘the nominal author has contributed nothing more . . . than a few passages of transition or brief clauses of connexion’. In De Quincey’s eyes, ‘to express one’s own thoughts by another man’s words’ is ‘at war with sincerity, the foundation of all good writing’.10 Thomas Noon Talfourd’s objection is that Hazlitt’s incessant quotations are distracting for the reader: ‘In some of his essays, when the reasoning is most cogent, every other sentence contains some exquisite passage from Shakespeare, or Fletcher, or Wordsworth, trailing after it a line of golden associations’ that interrupt the reader’s focus on the subject at hand. Hazlitt’s style demonstrates ‘the want of that imagination which brings all things into one . . . and rejects every ornament which does not heighten or prolong the feeling which is proper to the design’.11 These writers find Hazlitt’s essays deficient in the key Romantic qualities of originality, sincerity, and imagination. Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’ (1818) sheds light on his habit of weaving quotations from other writers into his prose. Like Coleridge and Keats, Hazlitt praises Shakespeare’s ability to enter into the identities of his creations ‘[b]‌y an art like that of the ventriloquist’. He contrasts Shakespeare in this respect to ‘modern’ poets like Wordsworth who ‘surround the meanest objects with the morbid feelings and devouring egotism of the writers’ own minds’.12 Hazlitt prefers Shakespeare’s ventriloquism to the

9 

Jonathan A. Bate, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, Prose Studies 7.1 (1984), 26–​37 (p. 26). North British Review (Nov. 1848), quoted by J. Bate, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, 28–​9. 11  Thomas Noon Talfourd, ‘Thoughts upon the Intellectual Character of the Late William Hazlitt’, in Literary Remains of the Late William Hazlitt, with a Notice of His Life, By His Son, 2 vols (New York, 1836), i, p. xxxviii. 12  ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), v. 50, 53. 10 

Intertextual Dialogue   407 personal self-​expression of contemporary poets, and he seems to follow a method of composition similar to Shakespeare’s by, as De Quincey says, ‘express[ing his] own thoughts by another man’s words’. What De Quincey regarded as a fault, however, Hazlitt considered a stylistic virtue: as Jonathan Bate observes, the ‘foundation of good writing’ for Hazlitt was not ‘sincerity and individuality but responsiveness to the geniuses of the past’.13 Paradoxically, though, for Hazlitt Shakespeare’s ‘genius consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing every object from the exact point of view in which others would see it’.14 He regards Shakespeare as an original genius for his unmatched ability to inhabit other identities. His characterization of Milton’s style even more strikingly involves a mixture of individuality and dependence on others: Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, and exhausted every source of imitation, sacred or profane; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer. He is a writer of centos, and yet in originality scarcely inferior to Homer. The power of his mind is stamped on every line. The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials. In reading his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect, that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them.15

This passage, according to Tom Paulin, also explains and exemplifies Hazlitt’s own critical practice: Hazlitt conceives of ‘the critic [as] a creative artist who assembles rapidly and intensely a prose argument which draws into its molten flux quotations, single allusions, and multiple or layered or intertextual allusions’. The concept of ‘the essay as cento, as a bricolage of quotations is part of the deep structure of Hazlitt’s imagination’.16 Romantic authors did not engage solely with literary works from the past. Second-​ generation Romantic poets such as Shelley and Keats were acutely aware of living in a period of great literary flowering and defined themselves in relation to older contemporaries such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.17 Third-​generation Romantics—​Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Thomas Hood, Letitia Landon, and others—​in turn defined themselves against the second and first generations (see Michael Bradshaw, Chapter 10 in this volume). The period is also notable for many literary friendships, coteries, and families that stimulated and shaped one another’s works. These include the Edgeworths (Richard Lovell and his daughter Maria); Anna Letitia Barbauld and her brother John Aikin;

13 

J. Bate, ‘Hazlitt’s Shakespearean Quotations’, 29. ‘The Same Subject [‘Genius and Common Sense’] Continued’, in Complete Works of Hazlitt, viii. 42. 15  ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’, Complete Works of Hazlitt, v. 58. 16  Tom Paulin, Day-​Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 94, 27. 17  See, e.g., G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988); Sally West, Coleridge and Shelley: Textual Engagement (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Beth Lau, Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). 14 

408   Beth Lau the ‘Lake School’ of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey; the Godwin-​Shelley family; the friendship of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron; and the ‘Cockney School’ composed of Leigh Hunt and his circle. Study of these networks has been a major feature of recent scholarship, comprehensively challenging the myth of the Romantic writer as a solitary, isolated genius.18 None of these circles has been as extensively studied as that of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the fascination here probably lies in the complex ways these figures both inspired and inhibited one another’s creativity.19 Especially in the early years of their friendship, all three writers collaborated and borrowed from one another to produce such seminal Romantic works as the Lyrical Ballads collection and Dorothy’s Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals. For Coleridge, however, Wordsworth’s example soon proved intimidating. As he told William Godwin on 25 March 1801, ‘by shewing to him what true Poetry was’, Wordsworth made him feel ‘that he himself was no Poet’. His ‘Dejection:  An Ode’, written in response to what became Wordsworth’s ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’ and ‘Resolution and Independence’, declares the death of his imagination.20 Similarly, ‘To William Wordsworth’, written in 1807 after Wordsworth read The Prelude aloud to him, contrasts Wordsworth’s triumphant achievement in that poem with Coleridge’s own unfulfilled promise. Significantly, however, Coleridge expresses his inadequacy in accomplished poems, indicating that a sense of inferiority to another writer can actually function as a productive form of inspiration. Indeed, Richard Holmes argues that Coleridge created an enabling identity of himself as a failed poet, which helpfully distinguished him from the successful Wordsworth and served to release his creative energies.21 It is true that Coleridge eventually all but ceased writing poetry, so one could say his sense of failure in relation to Wordsworth did contribute to the silencing of his creativity. On the other hand, Coleridge continued to produce numerous prose works including much astute and influential literary criticism, such as his extended commentary on Wordsworth’s

18  Relevant studies include Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Julie Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Scott Krawczyk, Romantic Literary Families (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 19  In addition to the works cited elsewhere, see also Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Lucy Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in each other’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Richard Matlak, The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge 1797–​1800 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). 20  Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-​1971), iv. 714. Gene Ruoff traces the poetic interchanges through successive drafts of these poems in Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics, 1802–​1804 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989). 21  Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (New York: Viking, 1990), 296, 300–​2. Newlyn makes a similar point about Coleridge in relation to Milton (Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, 228–​38).

Intertextual Dialogue   409 poetry in Biographia Literaria (1817) and his lectures on Shakespeare. Coleridge thus can be said to have simply shifted his medium of response to other writers from poetry to non-​fictional prose. Throughout his life Coleridge practised another form of intertextual dialogue that assumed the status of a literary genre during the Romantic age: marginalia, a term apparently first used in 1819.22 As Thomas McFarland remarks, ‘no form [of writing] so fully participates in the literal significance of the word intertextuality’ as marginalia,23 and Coleridge was the period’s most prolific exponent of the form, filling his (and other peoples’) books with copious notes that now make up six print volumes.24 Jerome Christensen argues that Coleridge habitually composed in the ‘marginal method’, a fact that explains the many instances of plagiarism that have been detected in both his prose and his poetry. According to Christensen, Coleridge needed another text to provoke his own writing, and his works therefore incorporate passages from other writers, whether acknowledged or not, which he can then respond to with commentary.25 Even ‘Kubla Khan’, which celebrates the inspired creative genius and, according to its 1816 Preface, resulted from a process of unconscious composition, begins by citing a passage from a book that Coleridge says he was reading when he fell asleep. In addition, numerous allusions to Paradise Lost and other texts have been identified in the poem; John Livingston Lowes wrote an entire book on literary sources for this poem and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, despite the fact that the latter was meant to resemble an oral folk ballad and was characterized by Coleridge as ‘a work of . . . pure Imagination’.26 Thus, even the poems that would seem to be the most spontaneous, subjective, and divorced from mainstream literary tradition are revealed to incorporate abundant references to other works and indeed to depend on these works for their composition. Parody is another form of intertextual dialogue that was common in the Romantic period, often used by poets as a weapon in the skirmishes between conservative and progressive literary factions.27 The most skilled parodist of the period, however, or at least the one whose training in parody was most instrumental to her artistic development, was a novelist: Jane Austen. Austen’s juvenile works, such as Love and Freindship [sic], Lesley Castle, and Catharine, or the Bower, hilariously and ‘[w]‌ith merciless disrespect’, in Mary Waldron’s words, burlesque what she regarded as the absurdities of 22 The Oxford English Dictionary (at: www.oed.com) credits Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine with first

use of this term, in an article of 1819 referring to Coleridge’s marginal annotations. 23  Thomas McFarland, ‘Synecdochic Structure in Blake’s Marginalia’, European Romantic Review 1.1 (1990), 75–​90 (p. 78). 24 Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 6 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980–​2001). A one-​volume selection was published by Jackson in 2003. 25  Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), ch. 3, esp. 98–​100, 104–​5. 26  J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927); Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), i. 149. 27  See the excerpts and commentary in David A. Kent and D. R. Ewen (eds), Romantic Parodies, 1797–​ 1831 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992).

410   Beth Lau eighteenth-​century fiction.28 As was the case with many women writers, Austen was long thought to have composed naturally and unconsciously, from direct observation of life, like a ‘brown thrush who tells his story from the garden bough’ in Henry James’s notorious characterization, 29 rather than as a serious artist working within a literary tradition. Yet the evidence shows that Austen’s writing career began as a commentary on other novels, and her mature works are also informed by this impulse. Waldron insists, in fact, that ‘Much of [Austen’s] fiction . . . is about fiction itself, its parameters and possibilities’. Kenneth Moler similarly claims that ‘The Austen novel consistently tends to define its vision of life in relation to literature; Jane Austen habitually expresses herself in terms of imitation, parody, correction of her predecessors and contemporaries.’30 Two of Austen’s earliest novels, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, most resemble her juvenilia in their close relationship to other literary works. Both satirize the novel of sensibility, with its highly emotional and impossibly virtuous heroines and heroes, dark villains, and melodramatic plots, exemplified in works such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–​8) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–​4) and Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, or The Orphan of the Castle (1788).31 Northanger Abbey is also a spoof on Gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which inspires Catherine Morland’s erroneous conjecture that General Tilney murdered his wife. In their exposure of the absurdities of sentimental and Gothic fiction, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility follow the tradition of Quixotic novels, which depict the dangers for young women of misguided reading that causes them to lose touch with reality. The most well-​known of these works, one with which Austen was familiar, is Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). Austen also read E.  S. Barrett’s The Heroine, or the Adventures of Cherubina (1813), a version of the Quixotic novel specifically directed at Gothic fiction. Another anti-​sentimental genre to which Sense and Sensibility is indebted is the novel of contrasting female characters, one of whom models herself on the heroine of sensibility and in consequence meets with a bad end, and the other of whom, clearly superior, is rational and self-​disciplined. Works in this genre which Austen probably knew include Maria Edgeworth’s Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795) and ‘Mademoiselle Panache’, Part I (1795), and Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story (1796).32

28 

Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 16. 29  Quoted in Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 219. 30 Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, 14; Kenneth L. Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 1. 31  For Richardson’s novels as a target of Austen’s satire in her juvenilia and in Sense and Sensibility, see Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, 48–​7 1, 222–​38. For Smith’s Emmeline in relation to Northanger Abbey, see Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, 26–​7, 29. 32  For Austen’s reading of Lennox and Barrett, see Deirdre Le Faye (ed.), Jane Austen’s Letters, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116, 256. For her familiarity with Edgeworth’s and West’s works, see Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion, 47–​58; Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, 50, 83; and Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, 63–​8.

Intertextual Dialogue   411 Yet the special distinction of both Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility is the complexity of their responses to texts and traditions they ostensibly satirize. As many critics have noted, Northanger Abbey actually conforms in some ways to Gothic conventions, as Catherine Morland becomes a heroine in distress persecuted and separated from the man she loves by his tyrannical father. Moreover, her Radcliffe-​inspired fantasy about General Tilney’s cruelty toward his wife turns out to be not far from the truth of their marriage—​or of many marriages in the patriarchal culture of the time. Similarly, the sentimental Marianne Dashwood is more complex and sympathetically portrayed than her counterparts in other Quixotic novels or novels of contrasting characters. Many readers have found Marianne more appealing than the sensible Elinor, who suffers from her own delusions and errors of judgement when she assumes a ring Edward Ferrars is wearing contains her own hair and when she downplays the seriousness of her sister’s illness. As Waldron remarks, Austen burlesques the burlesques as much as she does the Gothic and sentimental novels they target. Austen skewers any works that are too schematic and simplistic in their depiction of human nature and experience, and her own novels are indeterminate and ambivalent in their points of view.33 Austen’s four other novels are less obviously intertextual, but references to other works, both direct and indirect, persist. The fact that Mr Collins chooses ‘Fordyce’s Sermons’ to read aloud to the Bennet family, to the boredom of Lydia and Kitty, helps to define these characters. Elizabeth Inchbald’s drama Lovers’ Vows and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII play important roles in Mansfield Park, as do lines from Cowper’s The Task in Emma, and Byron’s and Scott’s poetry in Persuasion. One trend in Austen’s intertextuality is that whereas her earliest works refer chiefly to other novels, her later works engage with other genres such as drama and poetry. Jocelyn Harris, who finds Richardson’s novels, especially Sir Charles Grandison, to be the major source for Austen’s work from the juvenilia through Mansfield Park, claims that in her last two completed novels Austen ‘places herself more firmly in the main line of English literature’.34 Harris argues for significant parallels between Emma and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and between Persuasion and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. According to William Deresiewicz, Austen’s last three completed novels were significantly shaped by her reading of Romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth’s but also Coleridge’s, Byron’s, and Scott’s.35 Another writer who was marketed in his own day as an untutored natural genius but whose works are imbued with intertextual dialogue is the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare. Especially in his asylum years, Clare adopted the identities of and wrote poems in the 33 Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, 28. See also my ‘Madeline at Northanger

Abbey: Keats’s Anti-​Romances and Gothic Satire’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 84 (1985), 30–​50; Beth Lau, ‘Jane Austen and John Keats: Negative Capability, Romance and Reality’, Keats-​Shelley Journal 40 (2006), 81–​110 (pp. 100–​4); and Beth Lau (ed.), Sense and Sensibility (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 1–​21, 328–​34. 34 Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, 169. 35  William Deresiewicz, Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

412   Beth Lau style of Shakespeare, Burns, Cowper, and Coleridge, among others. He developed a particular fixation with Lord Byron and in 1841 composed poems he titled ‘Child Harold’ and ‘Don Juan’. ‘Child Harold’ does not closely resemble Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, as it is composed of miscellaneous verses, only some of which are written in Spenserian stanzas (usually without the final Alexandrine) and many others of which are ‘songs’ and ‘ballads’ in other verse forms. Nonetheless, many of the poem’s themes and motifs could be considered Byronic. Clare repeatedly laments the absence of the woman he calls his first wife, Mary (the name of his youthful sweetheart, whom he never married), and depicts himself as an alienated, solitary wanderer. ‘In this cold world without a home | Disconsolate I go’ commences one ‘Song’, which concludes ‘But now loves hopes are all bereft | A lonely man I roam | & abscent Mary long hath left | My heart without a home’ (lines 934–​5, 962–​5).36 Elsewhere in ‘Child Harold’ Clare mixes elements of Byron’s life and poetry with his own, as when he refers to himself as ‘the tennant of the hall & Cot | The princely palace too hath been his home’ and declares that ‘Oceans have rolled between’ himself and Mary (lines 625–​6, 306). Clare had never been abroad or lived in a ‘hall’, much less a ‘princely palace’, but he would have read of such travels and exotic habitations in Byron’s poetry. Anne Barton notes that another ‘Child Harold’ lyric, ‘Written in a Thunderstorm, July 15, 1841’, ‘connects the storm over Lake Leman in Byron’s Canto III with one [Clare] himself experienced at High Beech’.37 Clare’s ‘Don Juan’ more closely resembles Byron’s poem of that title, as it is written in ottava rima throughout and adopts many of the topics and stylistic features of its namesake. Clare’s narrator conveys a cynical, disillusioned attitude towards women, politics, and poetry. The latter he debunks, as Byron does, by calling attention to his decidedly uninspired creative process (‘& married dames with buggers would not mingle . . . & here I want a rhyme—​so write down “jingle” ’ [lines 60, 62]) and by emphasizing his mercenary motives for writing: ‘So reader now the money till unlock it | & buy the book & help to fill my pocket’ (lines 300–​1). Clare’s narrator in fact is even more deeply cynical than Byron’s, especially in his treatment of male–​female relationships. His comments on women, including the young Queen Victoria, are full of crude sexual innuendo and are starkly misogynistic:  ‘Wherever mischief is tis womans brewing | Created from manself—​to be mans ruin’; ‘A hell incarnate is a woman-​mate’ (lines 15–​16, 34). At times Clare directly refers to Byron’s poem, as when he states ‘Don Juan was Ambassador from russia’ and sought ‘To save one orphan’, presumably Leila (lines 215, 222). In one of the most curious passages near the end of the poem Clare writes ‘Now this day is the eleventh of July . . . Next tuesday used to be Lord Byrons birthday’, and goes on to say that Byron is ‘still in Allens madhouse caged & living’ (lines 255, 262, 270). The Tuesday Clare refers to, 13 July, was his own birthday, and he himself was ‘caged’ in ‘Allens madhouse’. 36  The Later Poems of John Clare 1837–​1864, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), i. 74–​5. All subsequent quotations from Clare’s poetry are from this edition and will be referenced by line numbers in the text. 37  Anne Barton, ‘John Clare Reads Lord Byron’, Romanticism 2.2 (1996), 127–​48 (p. 143).

Intertextual Dialogue   413 As John Goodridge notes, it would be easy to dismiss Clare’s conflation of Byron’s life with his own as an unfortunate symptom of his mental illness, but one can perceive methods in Clare’s ostensible madness similar to those employed by other writers of the period. One explanation Goodridge offers for Clare’s imitation of Byron is that it may function as ‘a personal statement about self-​esteem and identity—​a way of saying that he is just as important as Byron’,38 a point that is supported (though Goodridge does not cite this passage) by Clare’s assertion in ‘Don Juan’ that ‘Though laurel wreaths my brows did ne’er environ | I think myself as great a bard as Byron’ (lines 285–​6). Another impulse behind his identification with Byron could be the authority and power he felt he thereby acquired. As the above lines indicate, Clare never achieved Byron’s fame, but by taking on the noble poet’s persona he could share in his reputation and influence. With the sanction of Byron’s example, he could express his own sense of loss and alienation in ‘Child Harold’ and his own anger and disillusionment in ‘Don Juan’. Tim Fulford offers another theory for why Clare adopted the identities and wrote in the style of other writers during his asylum years, namely that he missed the literary community he had enjoyed for a brief period when John Taylor was publishing his work and when his verses regularly appeared in the London Magazine alongside those of other writers who welcomed him into their circle. Incorporating other writers’ voices into his own poems, Fulford claims, was a way for Clare to reconstruct the literary community he needed to sustain a sense of vocation and literary identity.39 His response to his isolation in the Northampton Lunatic Asylum particularly dispels the myth of the solitary genius, for it reveals how essential it was for him to feel himself part of a group. Although Clare’s particular circumstances were unusual, other writers of the time also felt rejected by the London literary establishment and ignored by the reading public, and Clare’s habit of speaking through the voices of others is similar to Coleridge’s ‘marginal method’ and to the ‘ventriloquis[m]‌’ Hazlitt celebrated in Shakespeare. My final example of a writer whose composition process was heavily dependent on intertextuality is Keats, whose earliest surviving poem is entitled ‘Imitation of Spenser’ and who looked to other writers for inspiration and guidance throughout his brief career. As he writes in his 1816 poem, ‘How many bards gild the lapses of time’, ‘when I sit me down to rhyme | These [bards] will in throngs before my mind intrude’ and furnish ‘the food | Of my delighted fancy’ or the sustenance for his creativity (lines 5–​6, 3–​4).40 The stages of Keats’s career can largely be charted according to the successive literary models he adopted: from Spenser to Hunt to Shakespeare to Wordsworth to Milton to Dante, with assorted others along the way. Keats eventually rebelled against most of his major influences as he struggled to assert his independence but, tellingly, rejecting one

38  John Goodridge, ‘Identity, Authenticity, Class: John Clare and the Mask of Chatterton’, Angelaki 1.2 (1993-​4), 131–​48 (pp. 145–​6). 39  Tim Fulford, ‘Personating Poets on the Page: John Clare in his Asylum Notebooks’, John Clare Society Journal 32 (2013), 27–​48 (pp. 29–​30). 40  All quotations are from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

414   Beth Lau role model usually involved adopting another in its place. Thus, in 1817 Keats abandoned George Felton Mathew’s literary coterie, taste, and style for Leigh Hunt’s; in early 1818 he rejected Hunt and Wordsworth (the latter of whom Keats had previously regarded with ‘Reverence’) for Shakespeare and Milton; and in September 1819 Keats declared his break from Milton (‘I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me’) by expressing his preference for Chatterton’s poetic language.41 Marjorie Levinson argues that Bloom’s anxiety of influence model does not apply to Keats but only to those poets who regard themselves as legitimate heirs of their national literary tradition. According to her, the middle-​class Keats, who felt ‘disinherited by the Tradition’, paradoxically had to establish his legitimacy by proving his derivativeness, and this fact accounts for the ‘fetishized exhibition of other men’s words’ in his poetry.42 Like Clare, Keats acquired authority by speaking through the voices of other, more prominent writers, but at times he did find the burden of influence oppressive, and he knew he could not earn a place ‘among the English Poets’43 unless he made an original contribution to literary history. When Joseph Severn praised the Miltonic style of ‘Hyperion’, Keats retorted that he did not want to write a poem ‘that might have been written by John Milton, but one that was unmistakeably by no other than John Keats’.44 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ illustrates the distinctive conflation of derivativeness and originality in Keats’s poetry. The poem is saturated with echoes of other literary works. Jonathan Bate states that the number of ‘Shakespearean analogues’ in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is ‘remarkable’; he counts about fifty examples.45 Cynthia Chase considers Milton to be the central literary predecessor with whom Keats’s ode engages.46 My own study found more allusions to Wordsworth in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ than in any other of Keats’s poems.47 To cite just a few of these various parallels: Keats’s desire to drink wine and ‘fade away’ with the nightingale, forgetting ‘The weariness, the fever and the fret’ of human life, and his invocation of death as a means of escaping the pain of existence (stanzas 2, 3, 6), have been linked to Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’ soliloquies (Hamlet, III. i. 55; I. ii. 129), and to Claudio’s ‘I will encounter darkness as a bride’ and ‘Ay but to die, and go we know not where’ speeches in Measure for Measure (III. i. 82–​3; III. i. 117). Keats’s opening lines—​‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains | My sense’—​also recall Hamlet’s reference to ‘The heart-​ache, and the thousand natural shocks | That flesh is heir to’ (Hamlet, III. i. 61–​2). Milton’s description of the nightingale as ‘the wakeful Bird | [That] Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid | Tunes her nocturnal Note’ (Paradise Lost, Book 3, lines 38–​40) seems to 41 Keats, Letters, i. 118, 223–​5; ii. 167, 212. 42 

Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 10, 57.

44 

Cited in W. J. Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 612.

43 Keats, Letters, i. 394.

45 J. Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, 192.

46  Cynthia Chase, ‘ “Viewless Wings”: Intertextual Interpretation of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” ’, in Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (eds), Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 212–​3. 47 Lau, Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets, 28.

Intertextual Dialogue   415 inform Keats’s description of the nightingale embowered in ‘some melodious plot | Of beechen green, and shadows numberless’ as well as the line ‘Darkling I listen’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, lines 8–​9, 51). The maiden in the field in Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary Reaper’ has been connected to the figure of Ruth in the seventh stanza of Keats’s ode, and a number of other parallels have been noted between these two poems: ‘Breaking the silence of the seas | Among the farthest Hebrides’ (‘Solitary Reaper’, lines 15–​16) and ‘the foam | Of perilous seas’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, lines 69–​70); ‘Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow’ (‘Solitary Reaper’, line 18) and ‘thy plaintive anthem fades’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, line 76); ‘as I mounted up the hill, | The music in my heart I bore’ (‘Solitary Reaper’, lines 30–​ 1) and ‘Up the hill-​side’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, line 77). Wordsworth’s ‘While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays’ from The Excursion (Book 4, line 760) also is echoed, both in meaning and rhythm, in Keats’s ‘Where youth grows pale, and spectre-​thin, and dies’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, lines 25–​6).48 Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth are not the only writers alluded to in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Traces of many others have been detected in the ode, including Coleridge, Hazlitt, Charlotte Smith, Horace, and Drayton.49 As with ‘Kubla Khan’, a fundamental irony pervades this poem: it proposes the nightingale’s spontaneous natural song as its model of creativity, but it is composed almost solely from literary sources.50 Moreover, one could characterize ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in the same way Hazlitt did Milton’s verse: it is virtually a ‘cento’ made up of scraps of other writers’ phrases, images, sonic patterns, and ideas, and yet ‘The power of [Keats’s] mind is stamped on every line.’ As Hazlitt says of Milton (and Paulin says of Hazlitt), Keats’s ‘imagination melts down . . . as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials’ and recasts them in his own distinctive mould. Keats could also be said to conform to Hazlitt’s description of Shakespeare as an artist whose originality derives from his uncanny ability to assume the voices of others, ‘with an art like that of a ventriloquist’.51 At their particular moment in history, with the pressure to be original, spontaneous, and revolutionary coinciding with the adulation of artistic geniuses enshrined in a newly established British canon, Romantic writers struggled to adopt strategies that would allow them both to fit into existing literary tradition and to stand out as unique. Such strategies include Hazlitt’s model of the essay as a bricolage of quotations, Coleridge’s marginal method of composition and assumption of the failed poet persona, and Clare’s and Keats’s ventriloquism of other writers, with Keats eventually constructing his voice 48 J. Bate, Shakespeare and the Romantic Imagination, 192–​7; Chase, ‘ “Viewless Wings,” 213, 215–​6; Lau,

Keats’s Reading, 46, 55. 49  Allusions noted in Miriam Allott (ed.), Keats: The Complete Poems, 3rd impression with corrections (London: Longman, 1975), 523–​32. 50  See James O’Rourke, ‘Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds: Intertextuality and Agency in the “Ode to a Nightingale” ’, in his Keats’s Odes and Contemporary Criticism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). 51  Complete Works of Hazlitt, v. 218, 211. For Keats’s ventriloquism of other writers, see my ‘Protest, “Nativism,” and Impersonation in the Work of Chatterton and Keats’, Studies in Romanticism 42.4 (2003), 519–​39 (pp. 532–​9).

416   Beth Lau from the amalgamated voices of virtually the entire English poetic tradition. Among the writers examined in this chapter, Austen seems to have experienced the least anxiety about following but distinguishing herself from her literary forebears. This may be because an intimidating canon of great British novelists did not yet exist, or because the novelistic tradition was well enough established to provide a sufficient number of texts with which to engage in dialogue, but not so many as to discourage new contributions. If, as Mikhail Bahktin has argued, all human utterance is social and responds to other utterances, then literary texts inevitably engage in dialogue with other texts, and creativity can be hampered as much by a dearth as by an overabundance of models and predecessors.52 The burden of the past is thus also a storehouse for the future, and a study of intertextuality in the Romantic period can shed light on the manifold ways literature evolves in response to other literary works, imitating and diverging, carrying on a tradition and leading it in new directions.

Further Reading Fulford, Tim, Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries:  The Dialect of the Tribe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Jackson, H. J., Romantic Readers:  The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2005). Jones, Steven E. (ed.), The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Krawczyk, Scott, Romantic Literary Families (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Lau, Beth (ed.), Fellow Romantics:  Male and Female British Writers, 1790–​1835 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Levy, Michelle, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Mazzeo, Tilar, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Murphy, Olivia, Jane Austen the Reader: The Artist as Critic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Ortiz, Joseph M. (ed.), Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Poole, Adrian (ed.), Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, vol. 4 of Great Shakespeareans (London: Continuum, 2010). Robinson, Charles E., Shelley and Byron: The Snake and the Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Russett, Margaret, ‘Clare Byron’, in her Fictions and Fakes: Romantic Authenticity, 1760–​1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

52 

M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293–​4. For Bakhtin’s theories and their relationship to the concept of intertextuality, see Graham Allen, Intertextuality, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2000), 14–​29.

Intertextual Dialogue   417 White, Adam, ‘Identity in Place: Lord Byron, John Clare and Lyric Poetry’, Byron Journal 40.2 (2012), 115–​27. Wittreich, Joseph Anthony (ed.), The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970). Wolfson, Susan, Romantic Interactions:  Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

Chapter 27

L et ters and J ou rna l s Pamela Clemit

On 14 May 1800, William Wordsworth and his brother John set off to walk from Grasmere, in the Lake District, to Yorkshire. Their sister Dorothy began a journal ‘of the time till W & J return . . . because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again’. She ended the first entry at nine o’clock that evening: ‘Oh! that I had a letter from William!’ Two days later she walked to Ambleside for the post: ‘No letters! . . . I had many of my saddest thoughts & I could not keep the tears within me.’ On 18 May, there were ‘letters from Coleridge & Cottle’; but on 20 May, again, ‘No letters!’ On 24 May, she ‘found a letter from Wm’ and wrote back after dinner. On the next day she found another letter from Coleridge. By Tuesday 27 May, she ‘expected a letter from Wm’, but it did not arrive until Friday. In the following week, the walking and waiting were resumed. She received a letter from Coleridge, and answered it, but there was ‘No letter, no William’. When William finally returned at the end of the week, ‘We were busy all day in writing letters to Coleridge, Montagu, Douglass, Richard.’1 Such emotional dependence on letters was not unusual in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Why did Dorothy Wordsworth value them so much? To answer this question, it is necessary first to establish what letters are, and to recapture the material culture of letter-​writing in an era without e-​mail or telephone. My focus here is on personal letters—​between friends, family, lovers, and strangers. (Business letters would require a separate study.) When people wished to talk to each other, and were far apart, they communicated by writing on a sheet of paper, which they sent through the post. The post, in Voltaire’s words, was ‘the consolation of life’: ‘those who are absent, by its means become present’.2 Interpersonal communication over distance had a scarcity value—​a value we have largely lost through the cheapening of communication—​and

1 

‘The Grasmere Journal’, in Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–​5, 7, 9. 2  Entry for ‘Post’, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, a Critique and Biography by John Morley, notes by Tobias Smollett, trans. William F. Fleming, 21 vols (New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901), vi, #375.

Letters and Journals    419 expectations were high. When Coleridge went to Germany in September 1798 (returning in July 1799), he planned to write alternately to his wife Sara Coleridge and to his friend Thomas Poole, twice each week, throughout his absence.3 When William Godwin visited Charlotte Smith in April 1805 (returning five days later), he wrote to his wife Mary Jane Godwin on the day he left: ‘The first thing I think of . . . is to write a letter to the sympathising & matured partner of my fire-​side, & to present to her a little journal of my impressions & sensations.’4 Letters stood in for a larger conversation. They allowed intimacy to be preserved at a distance, an intimacy sometimes more intense and with different qualities to that available face-​to-​face. Writing letters took an effort. Letters are compositions, however spontaneous they may appear: they are written according to specific conventions and designed for the particular reader the writer has in mind. Surviving manuscript letters represent texts at many different stages of composition, reflecting the labour that went into producing them. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, letters sent through the post were usually written on single sheets of paper folded in half to create four pages. The middle section of the fourth page was left blank to accommodate the address, so that the sheet could be folded with the flaps tucked in, and sealed. If the text required more space, the author would write across the top and bottom of the fourth page, or would cross-​write, adding vertical writing to pages of horizontal writing, creating a gridlike effect. Shorter letters were written on half-​ sheets, with the address on the other side; brief, informal notes might be written on scraps of paper. Sometimes salutations and signatures would be omitted to save space. Many letters are preserved in draft, representing texts in flux through the different stages of composition and revision. They show that the letter was a formal mode of communication, requiring a lot of work. It was not only intended for someone else to read, but was a mode of self-​presentation, conveying different levels of intimacy and formality—​for example, in decisions about whether to allow crossings-​out and additions, or whether to prepare a revised, flawless text. Sometimes this meant writing out the text several times before sending it. Sometimes it was also important to keep a record of what you had said. Many letters survive as copies, made either by the sender, for archival purposes, or by the recipient, to pass on to others to read. Sometimes there are multiple versions. What message do these documents convey? In each case, the writer has made an effort to gratify a particular individual. He or she has focused his attention on that individual for a substantial amount of time, perhaps several hours. The value which the letter conveys is the value of ‘regard’. Regard is an attitude of approbation. As Avner Offer has argued, it can take many forms: ‘acknowledgement, attention, acceptance, respect, reputation, status, power, intimacy, love, friendship, kinship,

3  Coleridge to Thomas Poole, [15 Sept. 1798], Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–​7 1), i. 415 (hereafter STC Letters). 4  Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 2 Apr. 1805, The Letters of William Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols in progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–​), ii. 343 (hereafter WG Letters).

420   Pamela Clemit sociability’.5 Offer points to the original formulation of the idea by Adam Smith. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith describes the purpose of economic activity as the acquisition of regard: ‘To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it.’6 The letter is a unilateral signal of approbation—​in other words, a gift. Regard is ‘at the very least . . . a grant of attention, and attention is a scarce resource’.7 The letter acquires objective value from the effort that goes into writing it. The effort of a letter-​writer goes beyond a grant of attention: he or she also seeks to communicate a signal which is crafted uniquely for the recipient. In the economy of regard, the purpose of communication is not to convey regard altruistically, but to secure it from our counterpart: sympathy is not separate from self-​interest.8 The best way to get another person’s approbation is to provide them with our own: the personalization of the gift signal confers an obligation to reciprocate. Letter-​writers were self-​conscious about this obligation and worked hard to fulfil it. Thus Keats began a correspondence with his younger sister Fanny by playfully drawing her into a compact of reciprocity: Let us now begin a regular question and answer—​a little pro and con; letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your favorite little wants and enjoyments, that I may meet them in a way befitting a brother. We have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on things that I  know not whether you prefer the History of King Pepin to Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress—​or Cinderella and her glass slipper to Moor’s Almanack. However in a few Letters I hope I shall be able to come at that and adapt my Scribblings to your Pleasure.9

Claire Clairmont, on the other hand, took her stepsister Mary Shelley to task because her letters were not sufficiently tuned to the recipient: ‘Your letters to me are very curious—​ they always seem written as if mine to you have never been received and you had not an idea of what was passing in my thoughts.’10 Claire Clairmont’s own letters are generally

5   Avner Offer, ‘Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard’, Economic History Review 50.3 (1997), 450–​76 (p. 451). 6  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 50. 7  Offer, ‘Between the Gift and the Market’, 452. 8  Avner Offer, ‘Self-​interest, Sympathy and the Invisible Hand: From Adam Smith to Market Liberalism’, Economic Thought: History, Philosophy, and Methodology 1.2 (2012), 1–14. 9  Keats to Fanny Keats, 10 Sept. 1817, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–​1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 153 (hereafter JK Letters). 10  Claire Clairmont to Mary Shelley, 6 Nov. 1835, The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), ii. 332 (hereafter CC Correspondence).

Letters and Journals    421 shaped to nurture a relationship with the reader: first she replies to her correspondent’s queries; then she gives an account of her present situation; and finally she includes questions and requests for the recipient, designed to elicit a further exchange. Letters need not convey information in order to be of value: regard is a good in itself.11 Samuel Johnson wrote in The Rambler, 152: ‘The purpose for which letters are written when no intelligence is communicated, or business transacted, is to preserve in the minds of the absent either love or esteem.’12 The intrinsic benefits of epistolary exchange were recognized by Keats. ‘Your letter gave me a great satisfaction’, he wrote to Richard Woodhouse in October 1818, ‘more on account of its friendliness, than any relish of that matter in it which is accounted so acceptable in the “genus irritabile” ’ (JK Letters, i. 386). To criticize Jane Austen’s letters for their limited subject matter is to miss the point.13 ‘Expect a most agreable Letter’, she wrote to her elder sister Cassandra in January 1801, ‘for not being overburdened with subject—​(having nothing at all to say)—​I shall have no check to my Genius from beginning to end.’14 The value of the sisters’ letters is in their shared performative irony (Jane to Cassandra: ‘You are indeed the finest comic writer of the present age’; JA Letters, 5). Repeated exchanges of ‘important nothings’ create an exclusive, self-​enforcing bond: ‘we, the formidables’ (JA Letters, 130, 260). The misery caused by the failure of the regard signal can be seen in Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters to Gilbert Imlay. ‘You have, by your tenderness and worth, twisted yourself more artfully round my heart, than I supposed possible’, she wrote to him.15 But Imlay (the recipient of 76 letters) did not respond to her ‘new language’ of feeling. His infrequent replies dwindled to notes (‘only half a dozen hasty lines, that have damped all the rising affection of my soul’; MW Letters, 279), and then silence. This led Wollstonecraft down a spiral of ‘continual inquietude’ (MW Letters, 275), culminating in two suicide attempts. In Godwin (to whom she wrote 146 letters over a briefer span) she found a man receptive to her epistolary trust. As she gained assurance that ‘the writer loved me’, she began to evolve new modes of communication, using dashes and broken words: ‘I am overflowing with the kindest sympathy—​I wish I may find you at home when I carry this letter, to drop it in the box,—​that I may drop a kiss with it into your heart, to be embalmed, till we meet, closer Don’t read the last word—​I charge you!’ (MW Letters, 371). Tuning the signal to the partner’s needs required constant vigilance. ‘Is that the right style for a letter?’, Godwin wrote the day after setting off to visit the Wedgwood family at Etruria in early June 1797 (WG Letters, i. 209). She, buoyed by his promptness, replied affirmatively, ‘I find you can write the kind of letter a friend ought to write’; but 11 

Offer, ‘Between the Gift and the Market’, 472. The Rambler 152 (31 Aug. 1751), Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 5, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 47. 13  [E. M. Forster], quoted in Vivien Jones, ‘Introduction’, Jane Austen, Selected Letters, ed. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), x. 14  Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 21 Jan. 1801, Jane Austen’s Letters, 4th edn, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 78 (hereafter JA Letters). 15  Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, [14 Jan. 1794], The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 245 (hereafter MW Letters). 12 

422   Pamela Clemit by the middle of the month she felt he was slipping: ‘Your latter letters might have been address [sic] to any body’ (MW Letters, 417, 421). Letters were part of a reciprocal exchange, but this exchange rarely had the metronomic regularity envisaged by, say, Cowper, when he wrote to William Unwin in August 1781: ‘Letter for Letter is the law of all correspondence whatsoever.’16 Perfect reciprocity tended to occur when the function was transparent (for example, letters requesting money or patronage). Even in courtship exchanges (which perhaps have the greatest incentive to regularity), delayed reciprocity was often the norm. There were several reasons for this. To begin with, patterns of letter-​writing were shaped by contemporary postal practices. Before the introduction of the envelope and the adhesive postage stamp in 1840, there were three distinct postage systems: the Penny Post (or Twopenny Post after 1801), the Inland Mail, and the Foreign Letter Office.17 All three came under the jurisdiction of the General Post Office, which, by 1800, had become ‘a national institution with agents throughout the land’.18 Its expansion during the second half of the eighteenth century was largely due to the reforms of two individuals. Ralph Allen created a nationwide network of mail roads, and John Palmer changed the way that mail was delivered by replacing post boys on horseback with high-​speed mail coaches which obtained freedom of the road by blasting a horn.19 (The baby Fanny Imlay ‘was so pleased with the noise of the mail-​horn’, reported Mary Wollstonecraft to Imlay from Hull, ‘she has been continually imitating it’; MW Letters, 296.) Improvements in service brought high postal costs. In 1797, it cost 3d. to send a single sheet fifteen miles; 4d. for thirty miles; up to 7d. for 150 miles; and 8d. from London to Edinburgh (or vice versa). In 1801, the rates were raised further; and in 1805, charges rose again (1s. 1d. to send a single sheet from London to Edinburgh).20 Postage within Great Britain was usually paid by the recipient, but letters going abroad were charged to both the sender and the recipient. Given the expense of postage, many letters were handled by private messenger, usually a personal servant. Reciprocity was thus constrained by time and cost. At Etruria, Godwin explained to Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘the messenger who brings the letters from Newcastle under Line [sic], 2 miles, carries away the letters you have already written. In case of emergency however, you can answer letters by return of post, & send them an hour after the messenger, time enough for the mail’ (WG Letters, i. 215). He was reassuring her that any lapses in correspondence were due to the household’s postal practices, not his own inconstancy. (Despite these limitations, he wrote three long letters over six days.) When the recipient bore the cost, it was only courteous to fill a whole sheet of paper. This 16 

Quoted in Sarah Haggarty, ‘ “The Ceremonial of Letter for Letter”: William Cowper and the Tempo of Epistolary Exchange’, Eighteenth-​Century Life 35.1 (2011), 149–​67 (p. 158). 17  Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 195–​206. 18  Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter-​Writers 1660–​1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47. 19 Robinson, The British Post Office, 99–​112, 126–​40, 132–​3. 20 Robinson, The British Post Office, 154–​5, 156.

Letters and Journals    423 explains why Keats, in a hurried letter to his brothers George and Tom, apologized for not cross-​writing the pages already written: ‘I have not time to chequer work this Letter for I should like to be sure of the 4 o Clock Post’ (JK Letters, i. 237–​8). Letter-​ writing is often thought of as a binary exchange, but the reading or writing of letters was often shared by family and friends. ‘Papa has given to me this space of paper to fill & seal’, began Fanny Imlay’s portion of a letter from Godwin to Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley in Geneva in May 1816 (CC Correspondence, i. 48). The sharing of paper was a way of avoiding a double sheet (which cost twice as much as a single), though it also restricted how much could be said: ‘I have been obliged to write in great haste’ (CC Correspondence, i. 49). The widespread practice of franking (sending letters free of charge by using an MP’s signature) generated further postal traffic.21 When Godwin was away in Norfolk in 1808, his wife procured franks for each of the children to write a separate letter,22 initiating the next generation in the reciprocal practices of adult society. Even without the need to adapt to the rhythms of the postal system, reciprocity was often disrupted. Letters are littered with apologies for delays, whether due to human frailty (‘I have been abominably id[l]‌e since you left’, wrote Keats to his brothers in 1818) or less explicable factors (‘I have lying by my side six huge Letters, with your name on each of them’, wrote Coleridge to Josiah Wedgwood II in 1799: they were never sent) (JK Letters, i. 235; STC Letters, i. 517). Even so, the absence of letters, when expected, was always a matter of concern. ‘ “No letters from England!” ’, Coleridge wrote to his wife Sara from Germany in November 1798: ‘Through the whole remaining day I am incapable of every thing but anxious imaginations, of sore and fretful feelings’ (STC Letters, i. 445–​6). He was right to be worried. The letters from England, when they came, communicated news of the illness and death of his baby son Berkeley. The news was made worse because Poole and Sara withheld it: Berkeley died in February 1799 but Coleridge did not receive the news until April of that year.23 In delaying their letters, Poole and Sara had broken the unstated compact of trust between letter-​writers. Letters were signs of life, and disruptions in reciprocity could mean the worst. Such contingencies could even shape individual letters. On 15 September 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft’s old friend, the United Irishman Archibald Hamilton Rowan, who was living in exile in America, wrote to congratulate her on her marriage to Godwin (‘I rejoice most sincerely that you have such a companion protector & friend . . .’). On 17 November he added a further paragraph: ‘This has been lying by me and the last papers announce a melancholy event—​and have you so shortly enjoyed the calm repose I hoped you were in possession of. I hope the report is false: if true, let this convey my condolance to Mr G.’24 Wollstonecraft had died on 10 September, shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley). 21 Robinson, The British Post Office, 113–​15, 153; Whyman, The Pen and the People, 65. 22 

Charles Clairmont to Godwin, 6 May 1808, CC Correspondence, i. 2 and n. 1. Coleridge to Poole, 6 Apr. 1799, STC Letters, i. 478 and n. 2. 24  Archibald Hamilton Rowan to Mary Wollstonecraft, 15 Sept.–​17 Nov. 1797, Bod. MS Abinger c. 41, fos. 7r, 8r. 23 

424   Pamela Clemit Such breaks in the chain of reciprocity bring us back to the multiple functions of letter-​writing. Anthropologists have argued that reciprocal exchange fosters a stable social order.25 Letters were not only a vehicle for exchange of information or opinions, but played an important role in upholding and reaffirming a set of relations. (‘How comes it that I hear from none of you?’ wrote Coleridge to Poole in November 1798: ‘Am I not a Friend, a Husband, a Father?’; STC Letters, i. 441.) Letters are primary documents of family and social history, spanning modern disciplinary categories. They were written to meet psychological, social, and cultural needs—​sometimes all three within the same text. They brought people together, strengthened family relationships, and helped to build social networks on which everyone depended. A review of scholarly editions of Romantic-​period letters may suggest that the dominant model for correspondence groupings is that of hub and spoke, with a ‘master-​ correspondent’ as a focal point, surrounded by acolytes (Coleridge, Godwin, Shelley). But in many cases the wheel also had a rim. While Coleridge corresponded with both Thomas Poole and Sara Coleridge, they also wrote separately to each other. Godwin corresponded with Amelia Alderson (later, Opie) and Mary Hays, each of whom corresponded separately with Mary Wollstonecraft, who also corresponded directly with him. Shelley corresponded with Thomas Love Peacock and Mary Shelley, who also corresponded separately with each other. When two ‘master-​correspondents’ wrote to each other, correspondence groups became linked in a larger network. For example, Coleridge and Godwin wrote to each other, were discussed by each other in letters to other members of the group, and corresponded with figures in each other’s circle (Charles Lamb, John Thelwall, Thomas Wedgwood). The same may be said of Godwin and Shelley (who were additionally linked by kinship ties). These letters between men rarely have the intensity or duration of binary exchanges between women in the period, notably Mary Shelley’s correspondence with her mother’s friend Maria Gisborne, and, later, with Claire Clairmont. What made these correspondents keep on writing? Letters create or maintain shared interests over distance and (often) over time. In the era of the French Revolution, many of those interests were political.26 In 1791, the London shoemaker Thomas Hardy sought to capitalize on the bonding mechanisms inherent in letter-​writing by forming a society ‘to correspond with individuals and societies of men’ on the subject of parliamentary reform. He proposed a low subscription of a penny per week and a policy of ‘members unlimited’.27 The aim was to recruit unenfranchised groups, journeymen, tradesmen, and mechanics of the metropolis, together with middle-​class radicals who had the education and accomplishments to provide political leadership. The London Corresponding

25  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (1950; London: Routledge, 1990). 26  Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 24–​33. 27  Quoted in Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 190–​1.

Letters and Journals    425 Society spread its net wide: it exchanged letters and papers on political reform not only with literary and philosophical societies in the English provinces, but also with French revolutionary assemblies and clubs. Many members of the radical intelligentsia were wary of political organizations. They used correspondence in a different way, writing private letters of introduction in the hope of establishing solidarity with like-​minded individuals. When Godwin read Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–​2), he attempted to initiate a reciprocal interaction by writing to the author: ‘I believe that a cordial & unreserved intercourse between men employed in the same great purposes, is of the utmost service to their own minds & to their cause’ (WG Letters, i. 65). The letter resulted in a meeting at the publisher Joseph Johnson’s, but this did not satisfy Godwin. A  subsequent invitation to dinner at the philosopher’s home was even less successful: Paine did not reply. Coleridge had better luck with Thelwall, to whom he wrote in the spring of 1796 with a copy of his newly published Poems on Various Subjects. He was encouraged by Thelwall’s response: ‘You have given me “the affection of a Brother”: and I repay you in kind. Your letters demand my friendship & deserve my esteem’ (STC Letters, i. 212). The grooming progressed through exchange of books and opinions, personal disclosure, and the sending of affectionate regards to Thelwall’s wife and children. By December of that year the two men were sufficiently intimate for Coleridge to write: ‘I would to God we could sit by a fireside & joke vivâ voce, face ​to ​face—​Stella & Sara, Jack Thelwall, & I!’ (STC Letters, i. 295). In the summer of 1797, Thelwall visited Coleridge at Nether Stowey in the West Country, where he met William and Dorothy Wordsworth and was sufficiently impressed by the group’s idyll of literary retirement to seek to emulate it on the banks of the River Wye. The letters were less frequent after this visit, however, suggesting that the correspondence had achieved its aim. A generation later, Shelley wrote to Godwin seeking to establish a more conventional dynamic between master and student. In a letter of introduction of January 1812, he reconstructed his aristocratic upbringing in terms of Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). A childhood of ‘passive obedience’, in which ‘coercion obviated its own intention’, had given way to adolescent withdrawal from the world, fuelled by ‘extravagant romances’ and ‘ancient books of Chemistry and Magic’.28 However, these youthful fantasies had now been overtaken by a sense of duty to humanity—​and the catalyst for this transformation, Shelley flatteringly declared, was a reading of Godwin’s ‘inestimable book on “Political Justice” ’: ‘till then I had existed in an ideal world; now I found that in this universe of ours there was enough to excite the interest of the heart, enough to employ the discussions of Reason’ (PBS Letters, i. 227–​8). Godwin took him on. The pair became locked into a repetitive bond: ‘I take up the pen again immediately on the receipt of yours.’29 Shelley bombarded Godwin with pamphlets on Irish reform, 28  Shelley to Godwin, 10 Jan. 1812, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), i. 227 (hereafter PBS Letters). 29  Godwin to Shelley, 14 Mar. 1812, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), i. 73 (hereafter WG Novels).

426   Pamela Clemit and Godwin persuaded him to abandon a scheme for creating political associations of working men in Dublin. Shelley’s letters echo the language of debates among 1790s radicals (including Godwin) on the best means of effecting political reform. Godwin’s cautious replies are charged with his lived experience of the 1790s, and his memories of the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The exchange was played out before an audience, as an exercise in collective political education: ‘You cannot imagine how much all the females of my family, Mrs. G. and three daughters, are interested in your letters and your history’ (WG Novels, i. 76). Letters had a special role to play in the lives of those at odds with contemporary norms. Traditionally there were strong epistolary networks among dissenters, who were excluded from participation in civic life by the legal requirement that all who held offices under the Crown should receive the sacrament according to Anglican rites.30 Their minority position heightened their need to stick together. The Pattisson family of Witham, Essex, a family of Independents, formed a tightly-​knit letter-​writing circle over several generations. Surviving materials include the correspondence of three young men in the 1790s:  William Pattison, who was sympathetic to democratic principles; Thomas Amyot, an Anglican who made ‘Politics a very small part of [his] study’;31 and Henry Crabb Robinson, a Unitarian and ardent supporter of Godwin (and, later, one of the foremost diarists of the first half of the nineteenth century). In 1794–​5, all three were articled clerks in training as attorneys: Pattisson at Diss (in Norfolk), Amyot in Norwich, and Robinson at Colchester. Their three-​way correspondence aimed at self-​ education: they discussed not only the law, but also politics, literature, religion, and political philosophy. They went to some trouble to establish a genuine exchange of views (‘It will certainly be much better to write at stated times than to send & receive a Letter on the same Day’), and their writing style could be blunt: ‘You are an Ass’, wrote Amyot to Robinson in February 1796, ‘for filling so much of your last Letter with the praises of Godwin’s Pamphlet . . . He is still in a dream of Theory, but he does not snore loud enough to disturb the peace of his neighbours’ (Youth, 62, 135). The pamphlet in question was Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bill (1796), which led to a quarrel between Godwin and Thelwall. Amyot reported to Robinson the two men’s reconciliation at Norwich later that year: ‘I have since seen them walking together round our Castle Hill . . . Like Gog & Magog or the two Kings of Brentford they will now go hand in hand in their glorious schemes’ (Youth, 140–​1). By 1798 the three-​way interchange had lost its impetus, with Pattisson resolving ‘to avoid politicks & be merely a private Character’ (Youth, 158); but the three men remained friends. Their correspondence provides evidence of the absorption and rejection of advanced ideas among the rank and file of the radical intelligentsia, and a counterpart to the dominant voices of Coleridge and Wordsworth. 30 Whyman, The Pen and the People, 117–​18, 154–​5.

31  Thomas Amyot to William Pattisson, 13 May 1794, in Penelope J. Corfield and Chris Evans (eds), Youth and Revolution in the 1790s: Letters of William Pattisson, Thomas Amyot and Henry Crabb Robinson (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1996), 56 (hereafter Youth).

Letters and Journals    427 The reliance on letters for self-​improvement was especially common among women dissenters, who were excluded from institutions of higher education. In the 1780s, Mary Hays, who worshipped with her family at a Baptist Chapel in Southwark, established a correspondence with the rational dissenter Robert Robinson. He educated his daughters as he did his sons and rejected her supplication to him as an acolyte: ‘No, you are not my pupil, but my friend.’32 She went on to establish epistolary relations with other prominent dissenters, such as George Dyer and William Frend. By November 1792 she was in correspondence with Wollstonecraft, who warned her, ‘your male friends will still treat you like a woman’ (MW Letters, 210); but when Hays began to correspond with Godwin in 1794, she found another man willing to treat her as an intellectual equal—​for which she was not entirely prepared. Like many of Godwin’s correspondents, Hays wrote to him not only for intellectual stimulation but also to work out the problems of living. In her letters she began to intersperse discussion of Political Justice with the story of her unreciprocated love for William Frend. How could she combat the excessive feelings that threatened to overwhelm her? Godwin told her that it was ‘weak & criminal’ to have made her peace of mind depend on someone else: ‘The principle by which alone man can become what man is capable of being, is Independence’ (WG Letters, i. 154). Hays wrote back indignantly: ‘Why call woman, miserable, oppress’d & impotent, woman, crushed & then insulted—​why call her to an “independence” which not nature, but the accursed & barbarous laws of society have denied her?’ (WG Letters, i. 156, n. 10). She may have been dismayed by Godwin’s advice to act like a man, but she addressed him with the same outspoken frankness with which he had written to her. Godwin’s commitment to unreserved social communication, in both speech and writing, encouraged women to present themselves as the discursive equals of men. Letters also had a special importance in maintaining friendships between women. ‘The party of free women is augmenting considerably’, wrote Claire Clairmont to Mary Shelley in September 1834: ‘Why do not they form a club and make a society of their own’ (CC Correspondence, i. 314). In reality, the party of free women (by which Claire Clairmont meant the separated, widowed, or single) was dispersed across Europe and kept together by writing letters. Deep ties were forged between the associates and heirs of Mary Wollstonecraft in the early nineteenth century. When the Shelleys left England in the spring of 1818, Mary Shelley carried a letter of introduction from Godwin to Maria Gisborne, whom (as Maria Reveley) he had courted in 1799, and who had since remarried and moved to Italy. Godwin recalled Maria Gisborne’s early care of his and Wollstonecraft’s newborn daughter: ‘You perhaps recollect an unfortunate female infant, of which I was the father, that you took into your house, & were kind enough to protect for a week, a very few days after its birth. That child proposes to herself the pleasure of putting these lines into your hands’.33 Mary Shelley noted in her journal on 9 May 32 

Robert Robinson to Mary Hays, 11 Jan. 1783, quoted in Gina Luria Walker, Mary Hays (1759–​ 1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 38. 33  Godwin to Maria Gisborne, 10 Mar. 1818, in Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman, and Doucet Devin Fisher (eds), Shelley and his Circle, 1773–​1822, 12 vols in progress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–​), v. 512.

428   Pamela Clemit 1818: ‘Mrs Gisborne calls in the evening with her husband—​she is reserved yet with easy manners.’34 The next day, Maria Gisborne called alone, and Mary Shelley recorded ‘a long conversation with her about My father & Mother’ (MWS Journals, 209). When the Shelleys moved on to Bagni di Lucca a month later, the two women began a correspondence which lasted until the end of Maria Gisborne’s life. (Shelley corresponded separately with Maria Gisborne—​to whom he sent a verse epistle, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, in 1820—​and her husband John.) Socially isolated (‘we know no one’) and constantly on the move,35 Mary Shelley established a bond of intimacy with her mother’s friend. Her side of the exchange gives a detailed picture of her life with Shelley, their work in progress (separately and together), their travels and lodgings, and the illnesses, deaths, and births of children (‘The little boy [Percy Florence] . . . takes after me’; MWS Letters, i. 112). Like all letters, they should be read for their omissions as well as for what they include. It was to Maria Gisborne that Mary Shelley confided a long, harrowing account of the last days and drowning of Shelley and Edward Williams, written on the day of their cremation on 15 August 1822: ‘Today—​this day—​the sun shining in the sky—​they are gone to the desolate sea coast to perform the last offices to their earthly remains. Hunt, LB. & Trelawny’ (MWS Letters, i. 249). Letters like this were not written just to keep in touch, but to share the physical and emotional challenges that women experienced in common. They cover everything from domestic minutiae to major life events. In communicating these experiences, authors constructed narratives of their lives. Their letters are not the background to creative work, but are creative work in themselves. ‘I have not the art of letter writing’, wrote Mary Shelley to Claire Clairmont in 1845: ‘You have to an eminent degree’ (MWS Letters, iii. 271). Trelawny, writing in 1837, begged for one of her ‘long flighty fanciful beautiful letters’.36 Among the qualities which Claire Clairmont’s correspondents admired was her skill in creating a narrative of her life experiences with directness, immediacy, and a sense of dramatic timing. In April 1825, for instance, she wrote to Jane Williams from Moscow (where she spent five years as an English teacher): One’s intimate friend here is sure to live nine versts off, and such as have many acquaintances, or go to many parties, pass whole days and nights in their equipages—​ Neatness in a Russian Woman’s dress can never be expected; for the paving is so bad, the ruts, holes and mud so numerous and excessive, that before one arrives at the end of one’s journey, one’s whole dress is in disorder; every pin in it has jumped out; every curl has been jolted out of its place, and to finish the list of grievances, of which I have only spoken of the hundredth part, tho’ last not least, come the troops of black-​ beetles, bugs and ear-​wigs, which swarm in every Russian house—​I have foresworn 34  The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–​1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-​Kilvert (1987; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 209 (hereafter MWS Journals). 35  Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, 17 Aug. 1818, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–​8), i. 77 (hereafter MWS Letters). 36  Trelawny to Claire Clairmont, 10 [Feb.] 1837, Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1910), 205.

Letters and Journals    429 sleep in Russia—​never any where did I sleep so little. I see nothing but these horrid animals crawling about all day, and my imagination is so affected, that it seems to me always as if my bed were covered by a troop of black insects—​Enough of the horrid subject! my letter blackens to my eyes, even as I write—(CC Correspondence, i. 222)

The sense of alienation, low spirits, and physical discomfort which Claire Clairmont experienced in Moscow are converted through the structured energy of her writing into a bitter comic art. Such letters have an intimacy that modern readers may associate with journal writing rather than reciprocal exchange. The boundaries between the two genres were fluid in the Romantic era. Mary Shelley described her letters as a ‘journal kind of writing’ (MWS Letters, i. 399). Coleridge and Keats peeled off into journal letters when they went travelling, or when their loved ones travelled: Keats gave an account of his tour of Scotland to be shared by family and friends, and wrote journal letters to his brother and sister-​in-​law when they emigrated to America; Coleridge envisaged the publication of his letters from Germany. The impetus for journal writing was often reciprocal exchange. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal, quoted at the start of this chapter was a gift lovingly prepared for her brother (‘I shall give Wm Pleasure by it’). Both the Alfoxden and the Grasmere journals ‘preserve more than herself ’:37 they contain experiences to be shared, images to be reshaped, and ideas to be explored collectively among an intimate group of friends. When Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley eloped to the Continent in 1814, they began a collaborative journal (‘Shelley and Mary’s journal book’; MWS Journals, 5) in which they documented their travels, parts of which they published in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817). In the background was Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), based on her letters to Imlay. They also recorded their daily writing, reading, and social contacts, just as Godwin did. Godwin began his diary in 1788, the year in which he lost his faith in Christianity, and kept it to the very end of his life. It is a factual record intended solely for his own use, in which he listed his daily activities in the belief that he was answerable for how he used every moment of time. Events carrying private or emotional significance are recorded obliquely, often by reference to time or place (‘20 minutes before 8’, on 10 September 1797, followed by three strokes of the pen across the page, denoting the death of Mary Wollstonecraft; ‘Swansea’, on 9 October 1816, denoting the suicide of Fanny Imlay).38 Narrative and autobiographical reflection are mainly found in his letters, where the creation of personal identity is shaped by awareness of the recipient for whom the letter was written. Literary writers composed letters with an eye to posterity. Few looked into futurity as unblinkingly as Keats, who urged his sister Fanny: ‘You will preserve all my Letters 37  Pamela Woof, ‘The Uses of Notebooks: From Journal to Album, from Commonplace to Keepsake’, The Coleridge Bulletin new series 31 (Summer 2008), 1–​18 (p. 10). 38  The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010), at: http://​godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

430   Pamela Clemit and I will secure yours—​and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good Bundle—​which, hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and god knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on times past’ (JK Letters, i. 156). Nonetheless, the value of all the letters under discussion was recognized by the numerous acts of preservation which have made them available to us. Godwin kept copies of his outgoing letters and preserved many incoming ones—​notably Wollstonecraft’s. Mary Shelley’s and Claire Clairmont’s letters to the Gisbornes were valued so highly that John Gisborne made copies of them in his notebooks. Byron wrote to John Murray in September 1821 with a list of people who would have his letters in their possession—​which Thomas Moore later used as a guide when collecting materials for his Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830).39 (Byron’s memoirs, on the other hand, were deemed too controversial to keep: shortly after his death they were burned at the instigation of his executor John Cam Hobhouse.) Many different agents, interests, and motives contribute to the preservation (or destruction) of letters. The story of the survival of letters is also a story of the transformation of value. For family members, letters are not the inscriptions of a random person: they are portions of a known or remembered individual, which can be preserved. A member of the family, by virtue of kinship, has an enhanced value. When that member is a significant literary figure, the value is enhanced many times. The aura of the celebrated author is absorbed and reflected by other family members, and their self worth and social worth are enhanced by the association. One example must suffice. When Godwin died in 1836, his daughter Mary Shelley was left in control of several distinct but related archives: her mother’s, her father’s, her husband’s, and her own.40 Since 1823 Mary Shelley had been engaged in the preparation of editions in which she aimed to fix the value of her husband’s writings (including his letters). When Godwin died, she embarked on a further project, a two-​volume edition of his memoirs and correspondence, which she abandoned less than halfway through. Her preparatory work, making copies of fragile originals, ensured the preservation of many letters. When Mary Shelley died in 1851, the entire archive passed to her son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, and his wife Jane, Lady Shelley, who eventually gave the portion relating to Shelley and Mary Shelley (including their correspondence) to the Bodleian Library. The rest of the papers were handed down through the family until they were bequeathed to James Richard Scarlett (8th Baron Abinger). James recognized the importance of making the papers available to scholars. He allowed them to be microfilmed, and between 1974 and 1993 deposited the originals at the Bodleian Library (but did not cede ownership). When he died in 2002, the Bodleian Library purchased the Abinger papers from his son. Other letters were preserved by intervention of a different type:  the obsessive activity of collectors. They became the agents of preservation of non-​family letters which were sold on the open market. One such collector was Carl H. Pforzheimer, a self-​made 39  Byron to [John Murray], 28 Sept. 1821, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​94), viii. 226–​8 and n. 1. 40  This paragraph is based on Pamela Clemit, ‘Introduction’, WG Letters, vol. i, pp. xxiv–​xxix.

Letters and Journals    431 New York financier.41 From the 1920s, Pforzheimer was driven by a passion for collecting books and manuscripts for his private library. His principal interest was in Shelley, but he set out to build a collection that would document the lives of the entire Godwin/​ Shelley family, and of their associates. Along with literary manuscripts, he bought deeds, wills, bills, and, above all, correspondence. Pforzheimer’s addiction to correspondence suggests that the items he collected were worth more to him than their market value: he appreciated their uniqueness as parts of an interpersonal exchange. He valued them not only as trophies, but as a way of being intimate with the past. When Carl Pforzheimer died in 1957, his collection became an asset in the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation. It was moved from his home and established as an independent research facility. In 1986, the Pforzheimer Foundation gave the collection to the New York Public Library, and it became known as the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. Acceptance into public library collections exemplifies yet another transformation in the value of Romantic-​period correspondence. The willingness of libraries to receive such letters indicates that earlier preservation efforts had been successful. It signals both their intrinsic value and their universal cultural appeal. A further stage in the signalling of universal cultural value is the preparation of scholarly editions. Fixing correspondence in printed form helps to guarantee its survival. It exposes the materials to larger numbers of people, and diffuses its physical manifestation in many locations. Carl Pforzheimer saw the value of such an undertaking in relation to his own collection. He employed Kenneth Neill Cameron to undertake a trophy catalogue, entitled Shelley and his Circle, 1773–​1822. It is a bibliographical hybrid: part catalogue, part collective biography, part social history, and part scholarly edition. Each item included—​it is highly selective—​is transcribed in full and accompanied by a scholarly commentary. Shelley and his Circle, lavish though it is, reduces the cost of access to the original items. Scholarly editions affirm and consolidate the canonical status of authors. The letters of almost every major literary figure in the British Romantic era are now available in scholarly format, together with those of many lesser-​known authors who have come to prominence in recent years. Such projects present what may be definitive packaging efforts, and make available documents which were sometimes hidden from contemporaries. Large-​scale editions of letters (and journals) have provided the foundations for much of the rehistoricizing and contextualization of authors that have distinguished recent critical and interpretative study of the period. The reader who opens a scholarly edition of letters, now or in 100 years time, has the chance to experience something of the raw power of the original interpersonal communication. In recent years, new technology has made it possible to take the democratization of letters (and journals) a step further. Digital editions which are available to the general public include William Godwin’s Diary, in the Oxford Digital Library series, and The

41 

Stephen Wagner and Doucet Devin Fisher, The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle: A History, A Biography, and A Guide (New York: The New York Public Library, 1996), 8–​13.

432   Pamela Clemit Collected Letters of Robert Southey, a Romantic Circles edition.42 Some libraries have made facsimile images of original letters and searchable transcripts freely available online, notably Harvard University Library (Keats’s letters) and the University of Iowa (Leigh Hunt’s correspondence).43 In 2012 the New York Public Library released a free app, which makes it possible to download an image of a Godwin letter to an iPad.44 Each of these letters began its existence as a blank sheet of paper on the author’s desk. Over two centuries, the intrinsic value of what the author wrote propelled it through several bottlenecks: the personal archive, the marketplace, the private collection, the public edition. In its latest incarnation, as a stream of electrons, the original letter can once again be contemplated by a single person at a private desk.

Further Reading Bannet, Eve Tavor, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–​ 1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Bland, Caroline, and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-​Writing, 1750–​ 2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Brant, Clare, Eighteenth-​Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Earle, Rebecca (ed.), Epistolary Selves:  Letters and Letter-​Writers, 1600–​1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). Ellis, Jonathan (ed.), Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Favret, Mary A., Romantic Correspondence:  Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Goodman, Dena, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Haggarty, Sarah, ‘ “The Ceremonial of Letter for Letter”: William Cowper and the Tempo of Epistolary Exchange’, Eighteenth-​Century Life 35.1 (2011), 149–​67. Jones, Vivien, ‘Introduction’, in Jane Austen, Selected Letters (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004). Matthews-Schlinzig, Marie Isabel, and Caroline Socha (eds), Was ist ein Brief? Aufsätze zu epistolarer Theorie und Kultur/What is a Letter? Essays on Epistolary Theory and Culture (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2018). Offer, Avner, ‘Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard’, Economic History Review 50.3 (1997), 450–​76. Offer, Avner, ‘Self-​interest, Sympathy and the Invisible Hand: From Adam Smith to Market Liberalism’, Economic Thought: History, Philosophy, and Methodology 1.2 (2012), 1–14. Simons, Judy, Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). 42 At: http://​godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk; www.rc.umd.edu/​editions/​southey.letters.

43 At: hcl.harvard.edu/​libraries/​houghton/​collections/​modern/​keats.cfm; www.lib.uiowa.edu/​sc/​ leighhunt/​collection. 44 At: http://​exhibitions.nypl.org/​biblion/​outsiders/​outsiders/​essay/​essayclemit.

Letters and Journals    433 Webb, Timothy, ‘Scratching at the Door of Absence: Writing and Reading “Letter to Maria Gisborne” ’, in Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (eds), The Unfamiliar Shelley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Whyman, Susan E., The Pen and the People: English Letter-​Writers 1660–​1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Woof, Pamela, ‘The Uses of Notebooks:  From Journal to Album, from Commonplace to Keepsake’, Coleridge Bulletin new series 31 (Summer 2008), 1–​18.

Pa rt  V I I

P U B L IC AT ION

Chapter 28

B o ok-​M a ki ng Paul Keen

The political struggles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were about a lot more than books, but questions about books were rarely far from the surface. If, as Alfred Cobban has suggested, the pressures unleashed by the French Revolution generated ‘perhaps the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in this country’, the cultural dimension of these struggles meant that these years were also the occasion of an equally fundamental debate about the nature and role of printed texts.1 William Godwin’s insistence that ‘few engines can be more powerful, and at the same time more salutary in their tendency, than literature’, which he defined as ‘the diffusion of knowledge through the medium of discussion, whether written or oral’, found its conservative echo in T. J. Mathias’s warning that ‘LITERATURE, well or ill conducted, IS THE GREAT ENGINE by which, I am fully persuaded, ALL CIVILIZED STATES must ultimately be supported or overthrown.’2 Whether they embraced this vision of literature as an engine of reform or denounced it as a source of disruption, participants on both sides of the debate agreed about its extraordinary power, and, as a direct result of this, on the need to think more carefully and explicitly about what Mathias called ‘the nature, variety and extent of the word, Literature’ (238). Mathias’s subsequent comment that ‘all learning has an index, and every science it’s abridgement’ highlighted the connections between these issues about literature, however broadly defined, and the material realities of books. But his related observation that ‘we are no longer in an age of ignorance, and information is not partially distributed according to the ranks, and orders, and functions, and dignities of social life’ (238) also underscored critics’ nervous awareness of the sociological dimension of these questions. Cobban may well have been right about the absence of any fundamental political debate in Britain since the Romantic period, but the technological changes of our digital 1 

Alfred Cobban (ed.), The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789–​1800 (London: Black, 1950), 1. Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), iii. 14; T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, or What You Will: A Satirical Poem in Dialogue, 7th edn (London, 1797), 161–​2. 2 

438   Paul Keen age have fostered a renewed interest in the history and nature of books. We are once again preoccupied with the challenge of considering ‘the nature, variety and extent of the word, Literature’, and every bit as committed to thinking this through in terms of the technologies of writing which mediate these issues. Nor has this been limited to debates about the impact of digital media. The radical nature of the technological changes in our own day has inspired a corresponding historical awareness of the physical reality of books’ production and distribution, ‘the workaday shufflings and shiftings of meaning brought about by typesetting, reviewing, anthologising, popularising, compiling encyclopedias, composing textbooks, etc’.3 This focus on the daily workings of the print shop has been an important corrective to earlier critical approaches which bypassed them in favour of loftier aesthetic concerns. As Richard Sher has argued, the rise of the history of books as an area of academic interest has underscored the importance of taking books seriously in every possible mode in which they appear—​as homes for texts written by authors and read by readers, as physical artifacts crafted by skilled and unskilled workers using particular technologies, as commodities bought and sold in the marketplace, as instruments for the transmission of knowledge and values, as fodder for great libraries and popular amusements, as objects of government regulation and censorship, as cultural symbols, and much more.4

The real lesson of this turn towards book history has been the inseparability of these various levels of activity—​the workaday world of the print shop; the social, legal, and economic infrastructure which enabled books’ distribution and consumption; and the discursive landscape which helped to shape people’s impressions about why books mattered so much. Romantic-​era publishing was, by most accounts, a daunting cultural landscape. John Brewer’s description of eighteenth-​century publishing as ‘an expanding maze or labyrinth [which] offered the potential author many entrances and numerous routes to eventual publication, each full of hazards, pitfalls, and dead-​ends’ remained true, but these complexities would be magnified by a network of mutually reinforcing changes in the decades that followed.5 As John Feather points out in his history of British publishing, book-​making was in a state of rapid change during the Romantic period, partly as a result of a series of technological advances.6 In 1800, the Earl of Stanhope introduced a cast-​iron press that simultaneously doubled the output of older presses and greatly

3 

Nick Jardine, ‘Books, Texts, and the Making of Knowledge’, in Marina Frasca-​Spada and Nick Jardine (eds), Books and the Sciences in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 400. 4  Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-​ Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5. 5  John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1997), 140. 6  John Feather, A History of British Publishing, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 6.

Book-Making   439 reduced the amount of force that was required to operate them. In 1814, The Times made history by switching to steam-​powered printing.7 Stereotype plates (permanent plates made using a plaster mould) appeared soon after. Shortages in the supply of good paper (which was still produced from rags, many of them collected from the battlefields of Europe) were partly eased when, in 1806, Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier patented the first paper-​making machine that could produce rolls of paper of any size, and with real speed.8 These technological breakthroughs were reinforced by several commercial improvements that were rooted in what Paul Fritz and David Williams have described as ‘the triumph of culture’ in the eighteenth century, an era when, in J. H. Plumb’s words, ‘the combination of leisure and culture became an important industry’.9 As Brewer notes, the development of a range of relatively accessible cultural venues and activities, from theatre and opera to pleasure gardens and window shopping, was accompanied by the rise of the marketing of culture as an industry in its own right.10 This new emphasis on marketing was true for all of these cultural enterprises, but it was especially important in the world of publishing, where a rising demand for books in the provinces generated a corresponding need to develop new ways to alert these distant readers about the books they might wish to order. This challenge fuelled the rapidly evolving business of advertising.11 Advertising took many forms in this period, including pre-​publication prospectuses, publishers’ and booksellers’ catalogues, prefatory and end-​page advertisements listing recent and forthcoming titles, in-​text product placements, and, above all, newspaper advertisements.12 Newspaper advertising was already a lucrative and highly successful economic field by the end of the eighteenth century; the first page of leading newspapers such as the Morning Post and Morning Chronicle was covered almost entirely with advertisements for everything from theatre and circuses to schools, scientific lectures, and shows of every kind. Notices for new books took their place amongst this visual cacophony of products and events. The most dramatic change of all, however, came as a result of the 1774 Donaldson versus Beckett decision which abolished perpetual copyright in favour of a fourteen-​year term, renewable as long as the author was alive. This decision restructured the entire industry by shattering the hold of a small oligarchy of powerful London publishers, freeing up older titles for general use and, in 7 

James Moran, Printing Presses: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 49–​57. 8  Richard L. Hills, Papermaking in Britain 1488–​1988: A Short History (London: Athlone, 1988). 9  Paul Fritz and David Williams (eds), The Triumph of Culture: 18th Century Perspectives (Toronto: Hakkert, 1972); J. H. Plumb, The Commercialisation of Leisure in Eighteenth-​Century England (Reading: University of Reading Press, 1973), 38. 10  John Brewer, ‘ “The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious”: Attitudes Towards Culture as a Commodity, 1660–​1800’, in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds), The Consumption of Culture 1600–​ 1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995), 346. 11  John Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2008). 12  James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–​1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 257–​93.

440   Paul Keen doing so, simultaneously aiding new entrants into the publishing world. More than anything else, this change in copyright, which marked the beginning of the end of a firmly entrenched monopoly of London publishers, would lay the groundwork for a new, more modern world of book production (see Michael Gamer, Chapter 29 in this volume). As important as commercial and technological changes in book production and distribution, however, was the production of new ideas about books: about their benefits and dangers, their appropriate (and inappropriate) audiences, and their commercial and aesthetic value. As Adrian Johns has noted, the qualities that would come to be associated with printed books—​their reliability, fixity, and standardization, in comparison with the vagaries of the manuscript culture they displaced—​were neither intrinsic nor guaranteed; they ‘had to be made’, to be forged ‘by virtue of hard work, over generations and across nations’.13 So effective was this process of naturalization that these assumptions about books could be forgotten altogether; they had been so profoundly internalized that they could be taken for granted. The effort to produce not just new and more efficient ways of making and circulating books, but new ideas about why they mattered, manifested itself in the intensely bookish nature of the age. Taking its cue from Wolfgang Menzel’s comment that ‘if a citizen of the next century were to look back at the current moment in German history, he would say that we had slept and dreamt in books’, Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (2009) pursues these various issues by focusing on ‘the process of how we became bookish at the turn of the nineteenth century’.14 Grounding his study within an equally nuanced sense of the formative cultural influence of technological developments in our own day, Piper’s work follows the lead of book historians by ‘help[ing] us to see how the printed book was a far more richly imagined and far more diversely used media object than we have traditionally assumed’ (5). If falling asleep in books suggests the thoroughness with which we have internalized these assumptions about literature, Piper’s book is in large part an effort ‘to reverse that process of naturalization’ (9). In the Romantic period, these ideas were forged through controversy as much as consensus. Critics’ sense that they were living through a print revolution—​a technological shift that was no longer new but whose implications had not yet been fully assimilated—​ combined with the spectre of political revolution to underline both the complexity and the high stakes of debates about books. Then as now, the questions turned on what Roger Chartier has described as the constitutive force of a triad of relations between books (as physical objects), texts (the expressive power of the writing they contained), and the readers who consumed them.15 And then as now, these relations were mediated

13  Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 60. 14  Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3. 15  Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 2–​3.

Book-Making   441 by a dense network of social, economic, technological, legal, and political issues. As Jon Klancher has pointed out, the issues were all the more important because of unprecedented changes in the third of these factors: the fact that ‘the English Romantics were the first to become radically uncertain of their readers’.16 Confronted by the spectre of a mass reading public—​the consequence of what Coleridge would call ‘the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity’17—​Romantic authors experienced ‘a confusing, unsettled world of reading and writing’. This may have forced them ‘to shape the interpretive and ideological frameworks of audiences they would speak to’, but it also had an impact on debates about books themselves. 18 Ironically, however, the fact that by the end of the century literature had become ‘a major fashion business’, in which publishers’ struggle to win customers in a highly competitive market frequently involved an emphasis on the physical appearance of books and an unprecedented commitment to marketing, meant that these debates about the relations between books, texts, and readers played themselves out in two very different ways.19 On the one hand, prosecutors’ insistence, in the period’s many seditious libel trials, that a cheap price and an accessible format were as much a sign of a text’s criminality as the message it contained, exposed the limits of Enlightenment assumptions about the diffusion of knowledge. On the other hand, as Coleridge’s allusion to ‘luxuriant misgrowth’ suggests, critics frequently complained that this Enlightenment ideal was equally threatened by too fashionable an emphasis on books’ materiality as an end in itself. The straightforwardly political nature of the first of these issues, at a time when the security of the government itself seemed to be in jeopardy, endowed it with high public visibility. The innovative strategies of radical authors offered a jarring reminder that printed books were playing a greater range of social roles than critics had traditionally acknowledged, a versatility which, in turn, forced the entire legal establishment to become theoretically sophisticated book historians in response. The Attorney General, Archibald Macdonald, spelled out the importance of the triad of connections mapped by out Chartier with admirable clarity in his prosecution of Thomas Paine (in absentia) in the high-​profile 1792 seditious libel trial for Rights of Man, Part the Second. Archibald was eager to make the point that it was not authorities such as himself who posed a threat to England’s cherished freedom of the press, but incendiaries such as Paine and his radical cohorts who abused the very idea of free speech by attempting to foment violence under the pretence of exchanging ideas. The proof of this, Macdonald explained to the specially selected jury, was his tolerance for the first part of Rights of Man: 16 

Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 3. 17  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 36. 18 Klancher, Making of English Reading Audiences, 3. See also Anthony John Harding, ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Book Business’, Wordsworth Circle 44.1 (2013), 13–​19. 19  James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–​ 1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 63.

442   Paul Keen Reprehensible as that book was, extremely so, in my opinion, yet it was ushered into the world under circumstances that led me to conceive that it should be confined to the judicious reader, and when confined to the judicious reader, it appeared to me that such a man would refute as he went along.20

What he meant was that the first part had been published in a relatively expensive format; it sold for three shillings, the same price as Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Released in an expensive enough format, books neutralized the ‘reprehensible’ content they sometimes contained by confining themselves to a select audience—​an audience that was wealthy enough and, presumably, well-​enough educated, that it could be exposed to radical ideas without being compelled to act in destructive ways. These readers could ‘refute’ as they ‘went along’. The problem was that Paine and the radical societies who promoted his work had deliberately skewed this relationship between books, texts, and readers by altering the nature of the books themselves. As Macdonald put it: when I found that another publication was ushered into the world still more reprehensible than the former; that in all shapes, in all sizes, with an industry incredible, it was either totally or partially thrust into the hands of all persons in this country, of subjects of every description; when I found that even children’s sweetmeats were wrapped up with parts of this, and delivered into their hands, in the hope that they would read it; when all industry was used, such as I describe to you, in order to obtrude and force this upon that part of the public whose minds cannot be supposed to be conversant with subjects of this sort, and who cannot therefore correct as they go along, I thought it behoved me upon the earliest occasion, which was the first day of the term succeeding this publication, to put a charge upon record against its author.21

The wickedness of Paine’s message had been deliberately compounded by the industriousness with which Paine and his cohorts had disseminated his writing, releasing Rights of Man, Part the Second in a cheap sixpenny pamphlet form and strategizing to promote its circulation amongst an audience that lay far beyond the limits of the polite reading class. Mathias’s slightly poetic warning that ‘our peasantry now read the Rights of Man on mountains, and moors, and by the way side; and shepherds make the analogy between their occupation and that of their governors’ found its more anxious antecedent in Macdonald’s comment to the jury that the change in publishing format between Part One and Part Two implicitly changed the message itself by redirecting the text and addressing it ‘to the ignorant, to the credulous, to the desperate’.22 In doing so, it had crossed the line in a way that the content itself could never have done on its own. At the 20  Quoted in The Speeches of Thomas Erskine, ed. James Ridgway, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London, 1813), ii. 47–​8. 21  Speeches of Erskine, ii. 48. 22 Mathias, Pursuits of Literature, 238, quoted in Speeches of Thomas Erskine, ii. 47.

Book-Making   443 core of these debates was the striking fact that even prosecuting attorneys had become book historians before their time, exceptionally attuned to the broader cultural implications of books’ status as physical artefacts whose impact was defined by their location within a highly developed and often vexed network of technological, economic, social, and legal factors. To put this another way, if the political pressures of the Romantic age meant that it was an era of book-​making marked by unprecedented efforts (by both radicals and conservatives) to disseminate their views by manipulating the material reality of their texts and by fostering infrastructures to facilitate these books’ dissemination, it was also, on another level, an age of book-​making in the theoretical sense suggested by Chartier and Johns: a struggle to forge definitions of what this thing known as ‘the book’ was by insisting on the centrality of these multiple related factors as key elements in the larger symbolic codes that determined people’s understanding of why books mattered. Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that if ‘every literary field is the site of a struggle over the definition of the writer’, then ‘the boundary of the field is a stake of struggles’, was true not just of tensions between contending aesthetic ideologies, but also, more fundamentally, of these overtly political struggles over the nature of books.23 To diminish the material reality of a book too much by reducing its price and simplifying its format was to unsettle the delicate matrix of relations between books, texts, and readers which ensured the legitimacy of particular acts of writing. The participants in these debates were involved in struggles over the meaning and authority of books whose implications we continue to feel today. Critics’ fears about radicals’ efforts to reach a wider audience were amplified by a set of equally dire laments about the opposite problem: not only were cheaper books being used to reach plebeian readers, but needlessly expensive and physically elaborate books had become the rage with fashionable readers who were equally unaware of the real use of books. Questions about fashionable excesses in book production hardly amounted to the kinds of urgent political concerns that dominated debates about Jacobin writing, but, in their own way, these warnings often sounded just as extreme. In The Pursuits of Literature, Mathias had shifted his attention from his usual focus on a rogues gallery of Jacobin scoundrels to warn in equally vehement terms: I condemn the general and needlessly expensive manner of publishing most pamphlets and books at this time. If the present rage of printing on fine, creamy wire-​woven, vellum, hot-​pressed paper is not stopped, the injury done to the eye from reading, and the shameful expence of the books, will in no very long time annihilate the desire of readings, and the possibility of purchasing. No new work whatsoever should be published in this manner, or Literature will destroy itself.24

23  Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 42. 24 Mathias, Pursuits of Literature, 223.

444   Paul Keen Few of these sorts of comments were as apocalyptic as Mathias’s, but the issue of the dangers of material excess was a persistent theme. A letter published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1794 warned that among the many luxuries of the present day, none appears to me more hostile to the general welfare of society than that which begins so extensively to prevail in the useful art of printing, and the other branches of the bookselling business. Science now seldom makes her appearance without the expensive foppery of gilding, lettering, and unnecessary engravings, hot-​pressing, and an extent of margin as extravagant as a court-​lady’s train.25

The problem with this vogue for inflating the price of books by favouring ‘the mechanical embellishments of literature’ was precisely opposite to the one that dominated seditious libel trials: the concern here was not that books were being directed to too broad an audience, but that ‘the inferior orders of society can scarce get a sight of her’ (47). Book-​making, when it fell hostage to the tyranny of fashion, undermined the role of literature by distorting this same triad of relations between books, texts, and readers which defined the literary field, though in very different ways from the threats posed by political radicals. The Gentleman’s Magazine would have had little time for the reformist authors with whom the publisher Joseph Johnson was associated (Mary Wollstonecraft had met both Paine and her future husband, Godwin, at one of the weekly dinners Johnson hosted), but in its 1809 obituary for him, it lauded Johnson’s ‘true regard for the interests of Literature’, which had ‘rendered him an enemy to that typographical luxury which, joined to the necessary increase of expence in printing, has so much enhanced the price of new books as to be a material obstacle to the indulgence of a laudable and reasonable curiosity by the reading Publick’.26 The fact that ‘he usually consulted cheapness rather than appearance in his own publications’ would have been serious cause for concern in one of the age’s seditious libel trials, but knowing that Johnson had done so ‘on this principle’ of resisting the lure of ‘typographic luxury’, it became a virtuous rather than wicked form of book-​making, one guided by a laudable desire to restore a proper set of relations between books, texts, and readers. These concerns touched a nerve because of literature’s immersion within what, by the second half of the eighteenth century, had become a full-​blown consumer revolution. Books’ increasingly fashionable status exacerbated a set of deeply rooted anxieties about the corrosive effects of luxury, which, as a source of corruption and effeminacy, was just as toxic an influence as more straightforwardly political influences. In his Letters of Literature (1785), the Scottish historian and critic John Pinkerton warned that ‘fashion, after exerting her power upon most other subjects, has at last chosen literary reputation to display the utmost caprices of her sway’.27 An article in Joseph Johnson’s monthly periodical, the Analytical Review, agreed 25 

Gentleman’s Magazine 64 (1794), 47. Gentleman’s Magazine 89 (1819), 1167. 27  [John Pinkerton,] Letters of Literature. By Robert Heron (London, 1785), 15. 26 

Book-Making   445 that ‘it is much to be lamented, that fashion should extend its influence even to matters of literature’.28 It was one thing, remarked another commentator, for fashion to exert ‘her arbitrary powers in matters which tend not to the corruption of morals’, such as ‘the exact dimension of a buckle or a head-​dress’, but the problem was that fashion had strayed beyond her natural domain into more serious areas of cultural life.29 The gendered nature of these accounts (margins ‘as extravagant as a court-​lady’s train’) reflected deeply rooted misogynistic concerns about the feminization of commercial society, but persistent references to luxury also suggested the extent to which these debates were part of a broader form of class struggle:  not a levelling spirit of Jacobin revolution, but an attempt to establish fashionable life as the basis of new kinds of polite refinement. Books, critics warned, had become a new form of symbolic capital capable of ensuring deeply hierarchical forms of social distinction, but in all the wrong ways. A letter to the Gentleman’s in 1799 entitled ‘A modern Requisite towards the Character of a Gentleman’ warned, tongue only partly in cheek, that ‘when the feudal spirit had possession of the public mind, it was deemed essential to the character of a gentleman, either to fight a duel, or to rescue a princess:—​now, if he would appear with credit to the world, it is equally essential “to write a book” ’.30 Where it had once been the custom in ‘a celebrated hunt in the interior of the kingdom’ to judge newcomers by the number of horses they kept, ‘the same rule prevails, and with equal justice, in judging of an author,—​How many books has he written?’ The problem with this distortion in cultural priorities, which privileged quantity over quality and social prestige over intrinsic merit, manifested itself most jarringly in yet another distortion of the familiar triad of books, texts, and readers. Literary fashion, the letter warned, had converted what ought to have been a natural community of interests into a scene of contention: The authors in alliance with the booksellers, avail themselves of the exterior recommendations of advertisements,—​puffs,—​vignettes,—​title-​pages,—​superfine royal,—​superb engravings, &c. &c.—​while the readers, no less dexterous,—​call in the assistance of indices,—​extracts,—​heads of chapters,—​converzationis; and thus get the character of a book, and are enabled to quote from it, without the drudgery of perusal.31

Pitting authors (‘in alliance with the booksellers’) against readers, these sorts of ‘mechanical embellishments’ and ‘typographic luxuries’ corrupted literature’s natural role as a healthy source of genuine refinement by reducing it to so much ammunition in the scramble for fashionable distinction. But, like denunciations of seditious Jacobin literary practices, objections to the typographic excesses of modern book-​making also functioned as forms of book-​making on a more abstract level: backhanded efforts to assert

28 

Analytical Review 8 (1790), 543. Vicesimus Knox, Essays, Moral and Literary, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London, 1779), iii. 321–​2, ii. 17. 30  Gentleman’s Magazine 69 (1799), 740 31  Gentleman’s Magazine 69 (1799), 740. 29 

446   Paul Keen legitimate ideas about the nature and role of books. The 1794 letter to the Gentleman’s which complained of the destructive social effects of ‘the mechanical embellishments of literature’ cited this danger as part of a plea for ‘a few reading, public-​spirited men’ in each town to establish private subscription libraries—​using their monthly contributions to purchase the right sort of books: ‘A valuable collection like this, would, in the family of every subscriber, prove a general luminary to the human mind, and effectually exclude all the corruptive trash of our common circulating libraries.’32 Denunciations of the dangers of the wrong kinds of book-​making always functioned as ways of imagining more promising ideas about books, rethinking the boundaries that were defined by relations between books, texts, and readers in ways that consolidated more ‘legitimate’ definitions of the literary field. Complaints about both types of problems would only intensify in the early nineteenth century. Following William Cobbett’s lead, the authors and editors of the radical press cut their prices to evade the stamp tax, banding together in their production of cheap weekly magazines—​the infamous ‘two-​penny trash’, as they were collectively known—​and, in doing so, reconfigured the print landscape in extraordinary new ways. The stamp tax required publishers to use officially stamped paper, a law which the government manipulated to inflate the price of radical texts in order to limit their audience. But by publishing their periodicals in the form of a single broadsheet and by omitting news, Cobbett and the radical authors who copied his tactic managed to avoid paying the stamp tax.33 At the other extreme, the infamous Roxburghe auction of 1812, at which an unprecedented bidding war for the contents of the third duke of Roxburghe’s library reached its zenith with the purchase of the 1471 Decameron for a stunning £2,260, was followed up by the formation of the Roxburghe Club, a group of wealthy book-​lovers committed to the appreciation and production of expensive and visually alluring editions.34 Both of these developments intensified concerns about what was becoming widely referred to as ‘bibliomania’, as the debased opposite of a proper regard for books, but other critics were engaged in very different forms of book-​making that would be equally central to emerging notions of literary modernity that we remain deeply influenced by today. Nor were these groups mutually exclusive. However involved radical authors such as William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt may have been in the struggle to forge an extended reading public whose breadth reflected their democratic political visions, they were equally active in fostering the development of a relation to books that Deidre Lynch has provocatively explored as book-​love: an intense and deeply affective response to books as material objects.35 Books were loved for the texts they contained and for

32 

Gentleman’s Magazine 64 (1794), 47. See Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-​Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 34  Philip Connell, ‘Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain’, Representations 71 (2000), 24–​47 (p. 25). 35  Deidre Shauna Lynch, ‘ “Wedded to Books”: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists’, in Ina Ferris (ed.), Romantic Libraries, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (Feb. 2004), at: www.rc.umd.edu/​praxis/​libraries. 33 

Book-Making   447 the memories of previous readings they evoked, but also as physical objects in their own right. If this particular form of book-​making fetishized books as objects, typographic luxury was not the point. On the contrary, the more well-​worn and ordinary the books, the more they seemed to be capable of triggering this response. ‘I yield to none in my love of bookstall urbanities’, Leigh Hunt insisted in his essay ‘My Books’ (1823); ‘I have spent as many happy moments over the stalls (till the woman looked out) as any literary apprentice boy who ought to be moving onwards.’36 Few discussions of books offered a more conspicuous performance of book-​love than Hunt’s essay, or more clearly demonstrated how it helped to foster new ideas about why books mattered in ways that simultaneously embraced and transcended books’ physical presence. ‘When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally’, Hunt explained; ‘I like to lean my head against them’ (iii. 25). Hunt’s self-​portrait offered a vision of himself entrenched in a world of books in the most literal sense but, paradoxically, it was precisely the intensity and immediacy of this relation which enabled Hunt to transcend the mundane limitations of this materiality so completely: Sitting last winter among my books, and walled round with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me; to wit, a table of high-​piled books at my back, my writing-​desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet; I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books,—​how I loved them, too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them . . . (iii. 23).

This book-​love extended to the authors of these books themselves: ‘I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books’ (iii. 31). This sympathetic identification with the ‘bookishness’ of earlier authors extended itself to a kind of bibliographic sublime in which subjectivity and materiality were wholly fused: ‘how pleasant to reflect that all these lovers of books have themselves become books! What better metamorphosis could Pythagoras have desired!’ (iii. 33). Hunt’s concluding vision of his own future death—​‘I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my over-​beating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy’ (iii. 37)—​conjured up an almost parodic image of this relation to books as a confirmation of his own rich interiority. The more thoroughly books could be loved as objects, the more this relation could be positioned within a domain of pure affectivity. If Hunt’s vision of himself dying on books represented an extreme version of Menzel’s description of a generation dreaming in books, it also served as a uniquely evocative instance of Piper’s argument about the ways these earlier readers internalized ideas about books that we continue to be shaped by today. Lamentations for digital writings’ lack of physical presence (even though this is never actually true) 36 

‘My Books’, Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, gen. eds Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle-​Sinatra, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), iii. 28.

448   Paul Keen affirm the ongoing influence of this love of books as imaginative texts whose physicality confirms our relation to them as a uniquely powerful expression of the deep subjectivity that would become a hallmark of Romantic literary history as well as a cornerstone of modern publishing.

Further Reading Bermingham, Ann, and John Brewer (eds), The Consumption of Culture 1600–​1800:  Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995). Chartier, Roger, Forms and Meanings:  Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Darnton, Robert, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (Philadelphia: Public Affairs, 2009). Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, The Bibliomania; or, Book-​Madness; Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms and Cure of this Fatal Disease (London, 1809). Ferris, Ina, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Bibliographic Romance:  Bibliophilia and the Book-​Object’, Ina Ferris (ed.), in Romantic Libraries, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (Feb. 2004), at:  www.rc.umd.edu/​praxis/​libraries. Ferris, Ina and Paul Keen (eds), Bookish Histories: Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity, 1700–​1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Keen, Paul, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s:  Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Keen, Paul, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Keen, Paul (ed.), Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780–​1832 (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004). Klancher, Jon, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Lynch, Deidre Shauna, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2104). Piper, Andrew, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Raven, James, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–​1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004). Suarez, Michael F., and Michael L. Turner (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Chapter 29

Oeuvre-​M ak i ng a nd Canon-​F ormat i on Michael Gamer

Although neither term in the title of this chapter was coined during the Romantic period, our modern sense of each was profoundly shaped by developments during these years. Of the two, ‘canon’ has the longer and more heterogeneous history, existing well before the advent of Romanticism as a system of religious beatification codified by specific markers, which included the creation of pictorial representations of the individual as a saint, the celebration of masses and festivals, and official inscription into the catalogue of saints.1 One need only look to modern scholarly editions or bicentenary celebrations of books such as Waverley (1814) or Emma (1816) to understand the degree to which religious and literary canonization have more in common than just etymology. The two share common rituals and practices, both performative and bibliographic. Unlike the papacy’s official canon of saints, however, literary canons do not come from a single authority that pronounces inclusion or exclusion by decree. Multiple contenders claim the right to people Parnassus: not only critics, but also readers and publishers, who can choose to print or purchase some writers and not others. Among the most important of literary canon-​making’s monumentalizing gestures is, of course, the ‘oeuvre’, a term appearing in France at the turn of the seventeenth century and finding its way into English a few centuries later. Most commonly signifying an artist’s collected body of work, it finds ready synonyms in Latin and English, among them ‘opus’, ‘corpus’, and ‘works’.2 This work of oeuvre-​making, moreover, in no way requires an author’s death. Writers long have collected themselves—​at least since Petrarch 1 

Eric Waldram Kemp, Canonization and Authority in the Western Church (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 1–​2; and David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-​Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 3–​4. 2  The long histories of these associated terms confirm that, though ‘oeuvre’ did not find its way into English until the second half of the nineteenth century, the idea signified by the word had existed in English printing at least since William Thynne’s edition of the collected Workes of Geffray Chaucer, printed by Thomas Godfray in 1532.

450   Michael Gamer in Italy and Ben Jonson in England, both of whom provide paradigmatic examples of an author revising himself for posterity, attended by all the anxieties attending self-​ promotion. Certainly, oeuvre-​making brought with it the promise of financial benefit; Robert Southey estimated in 1813 that a subscription edition of his collected works would bring his family £3,200 after his death.3 Still, it more frequently served as a vehicle for other ambitions, the twin labours of collecting and republishing standing as implied testimonies of lasting, even permanent, value. Whether performed by living writers or literary executors, editors or publishers, oeuvre-​making and canon-​formation unquestionably feed off one another. In the literary marketplace, each activity looks to posterity with a mix of pretension and anxiety, producing commodities that resemble one another in their projected audience, look, structure, and tone. Oeuvre-​making brings with it an element of speculation and economic risk. Compiling the collected works of a writer, after all, presupposes those works to be worth not only reprinting, but also collecting and presenting as a corpus. Thus, in the hands of an enterprising bookseller, printed oeuvres and canons can easily overlap with one another, since an author’s works might be printed both as stand-​alone publications and as part of a larger collection of several writers. Among British publishers pioneering such practices, the earliest important example is London bookseller Jacob Tonson, whose premises on the Strand were marked by the authorizing head of Shakespeare and who, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, printed collected editions of Spenser, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Dryden, Prior, and others—​though these discrete publications were never advertised as parts of a uniformly printed collection or canon.4 As the century progressed, literary producers reprinted older authors with increasing ambition and energy, transforming the piecemeal approach of Tonson and others into something more systematic and ambitious. What made them do so were changes in copyright law and publisher practice—​triggered in part by the foundational Statute of Anne and in part by long-​term increases in the production and consumption of books.5 That these changes were neither consistent nor gradual is best shown through the fate of the Statute of Anne itself, which decreed copyright on new books to be limited to a once-​renewable term of fourteen years. Though originally passed in 1710, the law did not take effect until decades later—​and then unevenly across Great Britain—​because of court challenges. Scottish booksellers had reprinted titles, first surreptitiously and 3 

To Mary Barker, 29 Jan. 1810, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part 4: 1810–​1815, ed. Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt, Romantic Circles Electronic Edition (2013), at: www.rc.umd.edu/​editions. 4  See David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 26–​9; and D. F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve’, in his Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 228–​9. 5  On the Statute of Anne and legal controversies that attended it throughout the eighteenth century, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). On the effects of monopoly on rates of literacy, see William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 38–​42, 84–​9.

Oeuvre-Making and Canon-formation    451 then openly, since the mid-​1730s, resulting in a spate of lawsuits by London booksellers. When the last of these failed in February of 1751, the Statute of Anne became the uncontested law of the land in Scotland.6 In England, the question remained unsettled until Donaldson v. Becket (1774), which made the Statute of Anne law throughout Britain and ended years of disparity between Scottish and English reprinting practices. This meant that Scottish publishers were reprinting books well before the English, although on a fairly small scale. Aside from Alexander Donaldson, the Edinburgh publisher who forced the landmark case into the Lords, the most notable were Robert and Andrew Foulis of Glasgow and William Creech of Edinburgh. Both not only printed the works of select British poets, but also began to advertise these individual oeuvres as parts of larger collections. Beginning in 1765–​6 with a duodecimo edition of John Milton’s poetical works, the Foulis brothers released successive editions in the same size, font, and format, slowly growing them into a series of fifty uniformly printed volumes. What began as piecemeal publication of individual oeuvres became with time a self-​conscious exercise in canon-​building, the act of printing uniformly combining with other flourishes to give the collection the air of an authoritative canon. After 1768, for example, the title pages of Foulis poets typically bore the inscription ‘Printers to the University’, the insignia affirming the status of the featured author as a modern ‘classic’.7 Creech, meanwhile, conceived his British Poets from the first as a standard collection with canonical pretensions. His initial advertisements projected the series as extending to forty volumes and comprising ‘the Most Celebrated British Poets, from Milton to the Present Time’.8 That he never completed the series is a testimony to the effects of the Donaldson decision on British publishing as a whole. That case, though not quite revolutionizing the reprint market, nevertheless extended Scottish practices throughout the kingdom, opening English markets even as it subjected Scottish publishers to competition from London rivals, who appropriated their publishing models and brought out their own series of standard poetry and drama. In London, the most conspicuous of these venture publicists was John Bell, whose ‘British Library’ was located on the Strand not far from where Tonson’s bust of Shakespeare had stood half a century earlier. While Donaldson was being argued in the House of Lords, Bell began conceiving a series of reprinted collections of monumental scale. His signature format—​the affordable pocket-​sized volume, elegantly printed with a single frontispiece illustration—​proved popular both with lending libraries and with individuals. Beginning with his eleven-​volume edition of Shakespeare in 1774, over the next few years Bell launched collections that would become standards during the 6 

Warren McDougall, ‘Copyright Litigation in the Court of Session, 1738–​1749, and the Rise of the Scottish Book Trade’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 5.5 (1988), 2–​31; Ronan Deazley, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (1695–​1775) (Oxford: Hart, 2004), 110–​11, 115–​30. 7  For an authoritative account of the Foulis Brothers’ reprinting activities, see Thomas Frank Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–​1810 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 39–​96. 8  Edinburgh Evening Courant (24 May 1773), quoted in Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 73.

452   Michael Gamer Romantic period: his 21-​volume British Theatre (1776) and his 109-​volume Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (1777–​82). As with the earlier Scottish collections of Foulis and Creech, Bell’s could be purchased either complete or piecemeal, so that buyers if they wished could construct their own personal canons. Donaldson did more than make a host of works available for reprinting throughout the nation; it directed the attention of publishers to British authors and away from foreign ones who, repackaged in the form of new translations, had previously been a staple of new editions, anthologies, and collections. In this sense, Bell’s decision to name his circulating library, bookshop, and press the ‘British Library’ was hardly accidental. Publishing at a time when Britain was at war both with its North American colonies and with the French ships that aided them, he made his collections of poetry and drama central to a larger marketing campaign that linked excellence in printing with national pride. Groundbreaking in their typography and style,9 Bell’s advertisements typically wield the word ‘British’ at least twice, usually in italics or capital letters. The advertisements for his standard collections of drama and poetry go even further, presenting them as ‘national convenienc[ies] . . . worthy of general encouragement’10 and as canons in which ‘the BRITISH . . . merits of each respective Author be handed down to posterity with the utmost degree of reputation’.11 Bell, moreover, was hardly alone in his endeavours to transform Britishness, or Englishness, into a brand name and marketing tool. His competitors engaged in similar practices, titling their works and pitching their wares largely along the same lines. The front page of the 22 January 1780 Morning Chronicle, for example, features a Bell advertisement for Poets of Great Britain, an advertisement for A Select Collection of Poems simply carrying the headline ‘ENGLISH POETRY’ in large italics, and another for the sixty-​volume Works of the English Poets (1779–​81) highlighting its prefatory essays by Samuel Johnson and some words of praise from the Critical Review: ‘As the general character of every polished nation depends in a great measure on its poetical productions, too much care cannot be taken, in works of this nature, to impress on foreigners a proper idea of their merit.’12 What such advertisements make clear is that canon-​formation in the final decades of the eighteenth century was more than just big business; these large, uniformly printed collections functioned as vehicles for a literary nationalism facilitated by copyright reform and fuelled by imperial politics. As Jack Stillinger has noted, because large collections like Bell’s are so commonplace to readers today, we are inclined to forget how revolutionary—​or, in Thomas Bonnell’s words, ‘unprecedented’—​they were to readers in the last decades of the eighteenth century.13 Sometimes reaching more than a hundred volumes, they did more than combine

9 

See Stanley Morison, John Bell, 1745–​1831 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 10. The World (5 Jan. 1787), 1. 11 ‘Advertisement’, The British Theatre, 21 vols (London: John Bell, 1776–​8), i. 3. 12  Morning Chronicle (22 Jan. 1780), 1. 13  See Jack Stillinger, Reading The Eve of St Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 118; Thomas Frank Bonnell, ‘Speaking of Institutions and 10 

Oeuvre-Making and Canon-formation    453 the formal elements of the oeuvre and the anthology into a highly commodified form. Dominated by urbane and polished poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they differed markedly from the other poetry-​collecting vogue of these years, for early ballads and ancient poetic fragments. Exemplified in collections such as James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760), Evan Evans’s Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764), Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Joseph Ritson’s A Select Collection of English Songs (1783) and Scotish Songs (1794), and Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–​3), these collections marshalled the antiquarian’s zeal for poetic origins in the service of creating Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh poetical canons, reflecting the devolutionary trend that also found expression in national literary histories compiled in this period.14 The new canons—​one self-​consciously British and modern, the others regional and antiquarian—​were formative to the ambitions of the young writers who read them. Though operating under different conceptions of ‘nation’, the two types of canon were both professedly national in their scope and cultural aims, and both transformed how readers and writers in the Romantic period thought about canonicity. Commentators have long acknowledged the role collections such as Percy’s Reliques played in the poetry of Coleridge, Scott, and Wordsworth.15 The role played by publishers’ canons like those of Foulis and Bell, however, has been less well understood. As a publishing phenomenon first instituted by Scottish booksellers such as the Foulis brothers before being taken up after 1774 by London counterparts such as Bell, publishers’ canons were at once synthetic in their scope and self-​consciously British, grouping English, Scottish, and Welsh writers together into a single tradition. For poets coming of age in the final decades of the eighteenth century, they provided the first bibliographic representations of the full body of British national poetry, not to mention providing guides for how authors might tastefully collect themselves. Put another way, writers of the Romantic period constitute the first literary body able to purchase affordable models of what a poetic canon and a canonized poet looked like. Robert Burns owned Bell’s Poets of Great Britain. So did the younger Wordsworth, who also frequently had recourse to Robert Anderson’s Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (1792–​5), a collection also favoured by Coleridge.16 Wordsworth so admired Canonicity, Don’t Forget the Publishers’, Eighteenth-​Century Life 21.3 (1997), 97–​9 (p. 98); and Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 267. 14 

See Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 158–​ 62; and Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 76–​87. 15  See Kathryn Sutherland, ‘The Native Poet: The Influence of Percy’s Minstrel from Beattie to Wordsworth’, Review of English Studies 33 (1982), 414–​33; Groom, Making of Percy’s Reliques, 236–​8; and Erik Simpson, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–​1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 6–​11. 16  See Ralph J. Coffman, Coleridge’s Library: A Bibliography of Books Owned or Read by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), xl; and Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1800–​1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4–​5.

454   Michael Gamer Anderson’s edition, in fact, that in 1814 he wrote to Anderson to express his regard, making explicit suggestions concerning what additional poets might be included in the event of a second edition.17 Wordsworth’s recommendations arose out of conversations with Robert Southey, who, in panning Alexander Chalmers’s Works of the English Poets (1810) in the Quarterly Review as the work of a vulgar tradesman, praised the more genteel Anderson for helping to reform British poetic taste.18 This lure of cultural influence (not to mention handsome profits) led Walter Scott to plan his own collection of poets as early as 1805,19 and in these same years to review newly published collections with rigour.20 Byron’s departure for the Continent in 1816 forced to him to sell not only his edition of Anderson but also his prized set of Bagster’s Poets of Great Britain from the time of Chaucer to Sir William Jones (124 volumes, 1807), for which he originally had ordered a custom-​built carrying case. Later years found him purchasing Whittingham’s British Poets: Including Translations (100 volumes, 1822) to replace it.21 Still, the most suggestive statement regarding the power of these standard collections comes from John Keats, whose copy of Bell’s Spenser acted at once as an inspiring totem and as a concrete embodiment of his poetical ambition. In October of 1818, Keats pointedly annotated that volume, ‘I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death’, prophesying his own inclusion in collections like those of Bell, Anderson, and Chalmers, in spite of Endymion’s negative reviews.22 Given such testimonials, it should not surprise us that these early efforts at oeuvre-​ making and canon-​formation should have been in that most prestigious of literary genres, poetry. In an age uncertain (if not ambivalent) about the commodification of literary ‘classics’, publishers needed to walk a difficult line: elevating the authors they reprinted, while selling them in unprecedented numbers and at lower prices. As the most prestigious of the genres, poetry most easily allowed for this double game. For each of the 109 volumes of Poets of Great Britain from Chaucer to Churchill, John Bell printed 3,000 copies—​a huge number—​and priced them at just one shilling and six pence sewn. 17 

William Wordsworth to Robert Anderson, 17 Sept. 1814, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 3: The Middle Years, Part 2: 1812–​1820, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 151–​3. 18  [Robert Southey], review of The Works of the English Poets, Quarterly Review 11 (July 1814), 480–​504. Earlier in the decade, Southey had compiled his own national poetic anthology, Specimens of the Later English Poets, with Preliminary Notices, 3 vols (London, 1807). 19   The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932–​7), i. 267. The nearest Scott came to a fulfillment of this project was a modest two-​volume collection, The English Minstrelsy, Being a Selection of Fugitive Poetry from the Best English Authors (Edinburgh, 1810). 20  [Walter Scott], review of Specimens of the Early English Poets, Edinburgh Review 7 (Apr. 1804), 151–​63; review of Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances and Ancient English Metrical Romances, Edinburgh Review 14 (Jan. 1806), 387–​413; review of Old Ballads, Essay on Song Writing, and Vocal Poetry, or a Select Collection of English Songs, Quarterly Review (May 1810), 481–​92. 21 See A Catalogue of Books, the Property of a Nobleman, about to leave England on the tour to the Morea (London: W. Bulmer, 1813), item 193; A Catalogue of a Collection of Books, Late the Property of a Nobleman, about to Leave England on the Tour (London: W. Bulmer, 1816), items 23 and 250; and Catalogue of the Library of the Late Lord Byron (London: Evans, 1827), item 658 (reference amended). 22  See Stillinger, Reading The Eve of St Agnes, 120.

Oeuvre-Making and Canon-formation    455 At the same time, he also never failed to stress the quality and elegance of his printing, paper, and binding, offering a variety of bindings at increasingly higher prices. Unable to compete with Bell’s prices, the publishers of Works of the English Poets chose to sell their collection only as a complete set, to prevent buyers from purchasing only those volumes that contained Johnson’s prefatory Lives. Both sold well, with constant reprinting in the 1780s and 1790s, producing combined sales of more than half a million volumes.23 Add to these figures the 62,000 volumes that were printed of Anderson’s Poets of Great Britain and the 31,500 volumes of Chalmers’s Works of the English Poets (1810)—​not to mention the countless numbers of Cooke’s British Poets, published serially from 1794 onwards24—​and one begins to understand the ubiquity of these publishers’ canons and the sheer volume of poetry reprinted from the 1770s onwards. Writing about his first meeting with Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth in 1798, William Hazlitt, in ‘On My First Acquaintance with Poets’, recalls Coleridge discovering ‘a little worn-​out copy of the Seasons, lying in a window-​seat, on which Coleridge exclaimed, “That is true fame!” ’25 The handy size of the volume and its condition tell most of the story. Here is one of the many thousands of copies of Thomson’s poem reprinted during Coleridge’s youth; its worn condition suggests that, for Coleridge, ‘true fame’ consists in one’s works being reprinted and reread—​almost to tatters26—​not just in London but throughout the land. Yet, it is also important to understand how editors and publishers, through the format and packaging of their collections, sought to belie their own status as cheaper commodities. As an aesthetic expression of prestige, elegance mattered. Over time, English and Scottish publishers tried out various editorial strategies, though the majority followed the practice of combining a clean reading text, often small octavo or pocket-​sized, with a few paratextual enhancements. These usually included a frontispiece portrait and a ‘Life’ of the author, a prefatory essay, and spare editorial commentary usually in the form of notes. In arranging the contents, editors customarily sought to present them as a coherent body of work: at once an autonomous corpus and a logical product of the poet’s biography, whether chronologically or thematically arranged. This combination of fine printing, limited editorial apparatus, smaller format, and cheaper price made possible by economies of scale created a formidable and enduringly profitable literary commodity—​one so recognizable that during the Romantic period collections like

23 Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 104–​6, 139. 24 Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 242. 25 

William Hazlitt, ‘On My First Acquaintance with Poets’, The Liberal 3 (Apr. 1823), 43–​4. Charles Lamb singles out the same iconic volume in his essay ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’: ‘Thomson’s Seasons . . . looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and dog’s-​eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading’ (The Prose Works of Charles Lamb, 3 vols [London: Moxon, 1836], iii. 46). John Clare tells a similar story, recalling his purchase of his own copy as an epochal moment: see Felicity James, Chapter 31 in this volume. For the poem’s publication history, see Sandro Jung, James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730–​1842 (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2015). 26 

456   Michael Gamer Bell’s and Anderson’s effectively became genres in and of themselves, identifiable both by their characteristic format and by the claims they made to readers. That the dramatic collections published in these years did not resemble their poetic counterparts can teach us much about the relative status of drama and its cultural history. Two years before Bell and his London rivals published Poets of Great Britain and Works of the English Poets, respectively, each brought out a collection of plays: Bell’s British Theatre (1776–​8) and The English Theatre (1776–​7). Reprinted drama thus came before reprinted poetry; it came, however, in very different packaging that signalled with it a different system of canon-​formation for drama. Rather than organize their contents as an assemblage of oeuvres—​chronologically and by author—​The British Theatre and The English Theatre instead divided them by genre, alternating volumes of tragedy and comedy in succession. The collections, moreover, came without scholarly pretensions: no authoritative editorial apparatus, no commentaries, and no Lives of Authors. Instead, both featured texts derived from theatrical practice: their editions based on the Prompters’ copies of the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres; their goals variety and readability. Bell’s Advertisement for The British Theatre assures its buyers that for each play ‘the Variations of the Theatres are distinguished by inverted Commas . . . so that classical, theatrical, and general readers, may be equally gratified’.27 This level of editorial complexity—​effectively providing multiple versions of the same text to gratify multiple reading audiences—​testifies to Bell’s ambition to reach a range of readers, from scholars to those keen on home theatricals. It also points to the greater complexities attending the reprinting of dramatic canons. Where plays could be read as texts or experienced in theatres; where a given play through its performance history might exist in multiple versions; and where an actor might interpret a role so definitively as to make the play his or her own (as with David Garrick’s Richard III or Sarah Siddons’s Lady Macbeth): which version should be canonized as standard? Part of this greater complexity arises from the collective and transient nature of dramatic performance; part also derives from the long-​standing institutional practices of British theatres, which predated Donaldson and even the Statute of Anne. It is worth remembering that successful playwrights derived the bulk of their income throughout the eighteenth century not from print publication but from selling their works to playhouses, which either paid a flat fee or awarded dramatists the proceeds from specific evenings of performance. At national theatres such as Drury Lane and Covent Garden, authors of popular plays could net upwards of £600 or even £800 from these benefit nights, making them among the highest-​paid writers in Britain. This system of remuneration provides a useful counter-​narrative to histories of authorship that rely too exclusively on printed books and copyright. Among other things, it testifies to how writers such as John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Henry Fielding, and Matthew Lewis—​now taught primarily for their non-​dramatic works—​managed to achieve a kind of professional status outside of the realm of print. At the same time, it allows us to consider the

27 ‘Advertisement’, The British Theatre, 21 vols (London: John Bell, 1776–​8), i. 2.

Oeuvre-Making and Canon-formation    457 cumulative performance history of a playwright such as Susanna Centlivre or John Gay as constituting its own kind of collective oeuvre-​making, the efforts of British theatres combining over the years to constitute an evolving corpus of work. Thinking along these lines also allows us to consider the role that repertory—​that body of standard plays performed year in, year out—​performed in how Britons conceived of dramatic canons. Where plays are performed each year with some consistency across theatres, repertory can provide a powerful, even canonical, sense of tradition. This capacity increases when we remember the privileged place accorded to Britain’s national theatres during the Romantic period. Consisting of Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket, these were also called ‘patent’ theatres, ‘legitimate’ theatres, or ‘Theatre Royals’, because they were authorized by royal patent and granted monopoly status on spoken drama. Royally licensed and authorized by parliamentary act, these were not just playhouses but national institutions, possessing patents reaching back to the Restoration. They stood, moreover, at the centre of the theatrical universe: provincial theatres served as satellites to them, importing hit plays after their London runs had ended and serving as training grounds for actors and other artists. In this way, the patent theatres of London effectively institutionalized plays both new and old, defining ideas of dramatic legitimacy and giving them a specifically institutional existence, backed as they were by statutory law and the authority of royal favour. With such advantages, the standing repertories of Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket could not but take on the kind of enhanced authority and prestige customarily associated with canons. Collections such as Bell’s British Theatre and The English Theatre confirm many of these claims, particularly in light of the performance histories of the national theatres. Comparing their contents to the most performed plays at Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket shows collection and repertory standing as mirrors of one another. As Table 29.1 indicates,28 Bell’s British Theatre includes every one of the top twenty plays performed in the previous quarter-​century. The three plays missing from the contents of The English Theatre—​The Beggar’s Opera, Love in a Village, and The Maid of the Mill—​are likely excluded for generic reasons, being comic operas rather than traditional five-​act comedies. Given that both collections based their texts on prompters’ copies from the Theatre Royals, it is no surprise to find their contents consisting of the most popular plays of those theatres. Still, the strength of the correspondence is striking: a tribute to the cultural centrality of the patent theatres, and a testimony to the determination of publishers to reprint the repertory rather than building canons out of the oeuvres of individual authors. Print may have initially mimicked repertory, but this did not mean that repertory responded in kind over the next decades. If nothing else, the affordability of collections such as the British Theatre and English Theatre helped fuel a rage for home theatricals; 28  In compiling the data for the two tables in this chapter, I have drawn chiefly on The London Stage 1660–​1800: A Calendar of Plays: Part 4: 1749–​1775, ed. G. W. Stone, 3 vols, and Part 5: 1776–​1800, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan, 3 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). Where data are missing, I have had recourse to the Burney Collection of the British Library.

458   Michael Gamer Table 29.1 The 20 Most Performed Plays 1749–​74 and their inclusion in The British Theatre (1776–​8) and The English Theatre (1776–​7) No. of Performances 1749–​1774

Included in The British Theatre?

Included in The English Theatre?

1.  Beggar’s Opera (1728, comic opera)

306

Yes

No

2.  Romeo and Juliet (1594–​5, tragedy)

289

Yes

Yes

3.  Beaux Stratagem (1707, comedy)

221

Yes

Yes

4.  Richard III (1592, history/​tragedy)

180

Yes

Yes

5.  Love in a Village (1762, comic opera)

174

Yes

No

6.  Hamlet (1600–​1, tragedy)

171

Yes

Yes

7.  Provok’d Husband (1728, comedy)

158

Yes

Yes

8.  Every Man in His Humour (1598, comedy)

146

Yes

Yes

9.  Busy Body (1709, comedy)

137

Yes

Yes

10.  Conscious Lovers (1722, comedy)

137

Yes

Yes

11.  Suspicious Husband (1749, comedy)

136

Yes

Yes

12.  Cymbeline (1609, comedy)

133

Yes

Yes

13.  Jane Shore (1714, tragedy)

124

Yes

Yes

14.  King Lear (1606, tragedy)

116

Yes

Yes

15.  The Wonder (1714, comedy)

111

Yes

Yes

16.  Macbeth (1606, tragedy)

108

Yes

Yes

17.  Merchant of Venice (1596–​8, comedy)

108

Yes

Yes

18.  Orphan (1680, tragedy)

107

Yes

Yes

19.  Maid of the Mill (1765, comic opera)

102

Yes

No

20.  Othello (1604, tragedy)

101

Yes

Yes

Play (Year, Genre)

for the first time, the living canon of London’s theatres now could reside in the homes and on the bookshelves of private individuals. In addition, the repertory offerings of the Theatre Royals shifted once collections of standard plays began appearing in print. Whether audiences found established plays less enticing or London theatre managers felt less need to continue to stage them is uncertain. In the quarter-​century following the publication of The British Theatre and The English Theatre, however, we find increasingly diverse offerings, particularly with regard to genre, as Table 29.2 illustrates. The list shows the continued robustness of certain older plays and playwrights, particularly The Beggar’s Opera and Shakespeare. Beyond these proven mainstays of theatrical tradition, however, the dedication to older plays appears to be eroding, or at least yielding to generic innovation, particularly in the realm of comedy. The majority of new plays entering the top listings are not traditional comedies and tragedies, but rather

Oeuvre-Making and Canon-formation    459 Table 29.2 The 20 Most Performed Plays 1776–​1800 Play (Year, Genre)

No. of Performances 1776–​1800

1.  Beggar’s Opera (1728, comic opera)

223

2.  School for Scandal (1777, comedy)

214

3.  Duenna (1775, comic opera)

179

4.  Love in a Village (1762, comic opera)

165

5.  Hamlet (1600–​1, tragedy)

162

6.  Inkle and Yarico (1787, comic opera)

161

7.  Macbeth (1606, tragedy)

148

8.  Spanish Barber (1777, comedy/​opera)

141

9.  Haunted Tower (1781, comic opera)

121

10.  Belle’s Stratagem (1781, comedy)

113

11.  Suspicious Husband (1749, comedy)

136

12.  Cymbeline (1609, comedy)

133

13.  Jane Shore (1714, tragedy)

124

14.  King Lear (1606, tragedy)

116

15.  The Wonder (1714, comedy)

111

16.  Macbeth (1605, tragedy)

108

17.  Merchant of Venice (1596–​8, comedy)

108

18.  Orphan (1680, tragedy)

107

19.  Maid of the Mill (1765, comic opera)

102

20.  Othello (1604, tragedy)

101

comic operas, the managers of the Theatre Royals apparently striving to suit the singing tastes of the times. One might expect subsequent printed collections of plays to follow this lead. Looking to those published between 1780 and 1820, however, we find no uniform pattern of print following theatrical practice. The two most successful collections of the early nineteenth century take diametrically oppositional views to reprinting, the repertory, and canonicity. Elizabeth Inchbald’s popular British Theatre (1808) sticks with the established formula of accepting the repertory and the national drama as one, while its chief rival, The British Drama (1804, expanded 1811), takes an antiquarian approach, rejecting performed ‘theatre’ for closet ‘drama’ and reprinting primarily older plays, a significant portion of which had not been staged at the patent theatres in a century. Subsequent collections corroborate this growing divide, with some privileging earlier plays not performed in centuries and others duplicating the offerings of the major theatres. But what of newer genres, such as the novel? There, we find no standard collections resembling those of Bell or his rivals published in the immediate aftermath of Donaldson.

460   Michael Gamer The absence is telling, all the more when considered alongside publishers’ ambitious attempts at constructing what Joseph Ritson aptly called ‘national repositor[ies]’ in other genres.29 Forward-​looking only in its steady bowdlerization of its late seventeenth-​ and early eighteenth-​century contents,30 George Kearsly’s three-​volume Collection of Novels, Selected and Revised by Mrs. Griffith (1777) bears little resemblance to the larger collections of poetry and drama introduced through the Edinburgh and London reprint trade. Like the earlier Novelist; or Tea-​Table Miscellany, Containing Select tales of Dr. Croxall (1766), it ignores new developments in reprinting altogether, taking its format and the majority of its contents from Samuel Croxall’s Select Collection of Novels (1720–​2). Indeed, the need to present such a collection of fiction as chaperoned by a married woman of known respectability points to other, more obvious reasons for the absence of publishers’ canons of British fiction in these years. As the 1770s closed, the novel’s place in British literary culture was hardly secure.31 With the novel occupying a less prestigious position than other literary forms—​and with the longer length of novels making the prospect even of printing a single author’s oeuvre no small enterprise—​it is hardly surprising that publishers shied away from the financial risk of printing standard collections of British fiction, even one author at a time. The first publisher of fiction to exploit the trove of fiction made available by the new copyright regime did so via a very different route: serial publication. Appearing in weekly numbers priced at sixpence, James Harrison’s The Novelist’s Magazine (1779–​ 88) declared no pretensions for oeuvre-​making or canon-​building. Its Prospectus and opening pages provide no prefatory essay on the genre or its history; there is not even an attempt to organize its contents generically or chronologically. Instead, Harrison’s Prospectus promises only a ‘very capital and agreeable Publication’, modestly printed double-​columned large octavo format at one-​third of the price of his competitors.32 Harrison’s initial choice of titles to reprint, however, shows him following a fairly careful formula, combining popular genres with the most respected authors of his day. Opening with John Hawkesworth’s Almoran and Hamet, volume one then follows with Henry Fielding’s Adventures of Joseph Andrews and Amelia. Volumes two and three repeat this pattern of varying between exotic tale and home-​grown history, deftly alternating between Arabian tales, French and Spanish translations, and works of Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith.33 Harrison’s publishing formula was so successful that by 1783 his

29 

[Joseph Ritson, ed.], A Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1783), i, p. xiv. Mrs Griffith’s Collection of Novels contains, in order, Segrais’s Zayde and its Sequel, Behn’s Oroonoko, The Princess of Cleves, Haywood’s Fruitless Enquiry, Behn’s Agnes de Castro, and Aubin’s Noble Slaves. 31  See J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England (London: Constable, 1932); Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Michael Gamer, ‘A Select Collection: Barbauld, Scott, and the Rise of the (Reprinted) Novel’, in Jillian Heydt-​Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman (eds), Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Approaches to British Fiction, 1780–​1832 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2008), 165–​8. 32  [James Harrison], A Pleasing Publication (London: Harrison, 1779), 1. 33  Harrison’s second volume opens with Langhorne’s Solyman and Almená, an Oriental Tale, followed by Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, a Tale, Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random, Ashmore’s, 30 

Oeuvre-Making and Canon-formation    461 weekly circulation had surpassed 10,000, and sales continued to be robust until shortly before he ceased publication in 1788. Looking across the sixty titles that comprise its twenty-​three volumes, Richard C. Taylor finds The Novelist’s Magazine’s choice of texts to be essentially canonical, filled as they are with familiar works by Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Fielding.34 Such an assessment, however, undervalues both the strange drama of the collection’s unfolding and the central role that foreign romances and translations played in its lasting success (see Gary Kelly, Chapter 12 in this volume). Aiming to produce neither oeuvre nor canon, Harrison effectively produced both—​though he left it to subsequent critics to articulate a coherent account of British and world fiction. One of the ironies of late  ​eighteenth-​century canon-​formation, in fact, lies in the diminished role played by critics. Published a month after the Donaldson decision, Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774) was hailed as a landmark of literary criticism; it was influential enough that, forty years later, John Dunlop wrote his own History of Fiction (1814) on Warton’s model. Yet, the actual contents of poetry, drama, and fiction collections published during these same years point to the far greater influence of publishers, who chose to model new collections on commercially successful predecessors rather than on critical histories. Even that monument to literary biography and canonization, Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent Poets (1781), was originally commissioned for the sixty-​volume Works of the English Poets (1779–​81), a collection assembled by London publishers to break Bell’s dominance in the reprint market. Johnson’s essays, in other words, were originally published as a series of prefaces scattered across a collection over which he had little editorial authority, the publishers determining both its format and the choice of authors. This interweaving of critical essay and publisher control is emblematic, and helps to explain why Johnson bristled when Works of the English Poets began to be advertised as ‘Johnson’s Poets’, the rubric implying a level of ownership he did not possess.35 More generally, it exemplifies the inevitably social (and sometimes contentious) nature of literary production, particularly in large collaborative projects requiring considerable capital, such as Works of the English Poets. Where authors and editors find themselves among a myriad of other agents, from illustrators and translators to printers and publishers, canons necessarily become the products of negotiation and compromise.

Zadig; or, The Book of Fate; An Oriental History, and Le Sage’s Devil upon Two Sticks. The third volume contains Morell’s Tales of the Genii and Fielding’s History of Tom Jones. 34  Richard C. Taylor, ‘James Harrison, The Novelist’s Magazine, and the Early Canonizing of the English Novel’, Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900 33.3 (1993), 629–​43 (p. 637). See also Claudia Johnson, ‘ “Let Me Make the Novels of a Country”: Barbauld’s The British Novelists (1810/​1820)’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34.2 (2001), 163–​79. 35  See Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 138–​51; Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-​Queens, 1998), 282–​4; James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–​50), iv. 35; and The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992–​4), iii. 226.

462   Michael Gamer What such accounts make clear is not just that oeuvres and canons develop unevenly, but that their formation—​and the bibliographic forms that formation takes—​are themselves subject to generic convention, hierarchies, and rivalry. Printed to resemble the ancient classics, standard collections of British poetry began to find their way into the marketplace as early as the 1760s. Dramatic collections followed shortly thereafter, although their packaging aimed less at canonizing individual authors than at corroborating the authority of the Theatre Royals. The novel had to wait still longer; after the serial publication of The Novelist’s Magazine, no standard canon of British fiction appeared until the magisterial The British Novelists (1810), published in fifty volumes, for which Anna Barbauld supplied a lengthy introduction and prefatory essays on individual authors. Yet, even here we find Barbauld still acknowledging (though in more muted form) the inevitable limitations on editorial autonomy that come with any large-​ scale act of canon-​building. ‘Copyright also was not to be intruded on, and the number of volumes was determined by the booksellers’, she explains, and ‘some regard has been thought proper to pay to the taste and preference of the public, as was but reasonable in an undertaking in which their preference was to indemnify those who are at the expense and risk of the publication.’36 Her implication is clear: that literary production is necessarily collaborative, that legal and economic considerations matter as much as aesthetic ones, and that a utopian world free of legal and commercial constraints would bring with it critical autonomy and a larger and more diverse canon of writing. In coming to grips with the commoditization of her own work of canon-​formation, she exemplifies the ways Romantic writers were forced routinely to confront such issues, not to mention rethink their own relation to the market for books and to posterity.

Further Reading Benedict, Barbara, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Bonnell, Thomas Frank, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–​1810 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Deazley, Ronan, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (1695–​1775) (Oxford: Hart, 2004). Duff, David, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Gamer, Michael, ‘A Select Collection: Barbauld, Scott, and the Rise of the (Reprinted) Novel’, in Jillian Heydt-​Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman (eds), Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Approaches to British Fiction, 1780–​1832 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2008). Gamer, Michael, Romanticism, Self-​Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Groom, Nick, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

36 

Anna Barbauld, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing’, The British Novelists, ed. Barbauld, 50 vols (London: Rivington and others, 1810), i. 60–​1.

Oeuvre-Making and Canon-formation    463 Johnson, Claudia, ‘ “Let Me Make the Novels of a Country”: Barbauld’s The British Novelists (1810/​1820)’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34.2 (2001), 163–​79. McLane, Maureen N. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Price, Leah, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel:  From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Raven, James, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Ross, Trevor, The Making of the English Literary Canon:  From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-​Queens, 1998). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004). Suarez, Michael F., S.J. ‘Trafficking in the Muse: Dodsley’s Collection of Poems and the Question of Canon’, in Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (eds), Tradition in Transition:  Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-​Century Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Taylor, Richard C., ‘James Harrison, The Novelist’s Magazine, and the Early Canonizing of the English Novel’, Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900 33.3 (1993), 629–​43.

Chapter 30

Cel ebrit y and A nonymi t y Tom Mole

Benjamin Disraeli’s 1831 novel The Young Duke features a celebrated but anonymous opera singer: fascinating but mysterious, she is internationally famous, and yet, curiously unknown. When word reaches fashionable London that she is about to arrive in its midst, the town is set all abuzz with ‘feverish expectation’, not least because so little seems to be known about someone so widely celebrated: ‘An air of mystery environed the most celebrated creature in Europe.’1 She exercises a powerful fascination over her audiences, but what fascinates them most, apparently, is how little information is required to sustain their fascination. Onlookers speculate about her nationality, her parentage, and her marital status: ‘Even her name was a mystery; and she was known and worshipped throughout the whole civilized world by the mere title of “The Bird of Paradise!” ’ (140). An anonymous celebrity, Disraeli’s character blurs the boundaries between fame and obscurity, and reveals how thoroughly, in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, the two had become entwined. The Bird of Paradise has many of the attributes of a celebrity. She is personally fascinating to her audience, who speculate about her private life. Her body, as well as her art, is subjected to intense, eroticized attention: in Disraeli’s ironic description, this scrutiny itemizes her charms, moving from her hair (‘braided’), to her brow (‘like ivory’), to her cheeks (‘a deep pure pink’), to her nose (‘quite straight, with a nostril that would have made you crazy’), to her eyes (‘large and lustrous’), to her arms (‘that gleamed like moonbeams’), to her hands (‘that glittered like stars’), her costume (‘which was ravishing’) and her feet (which were too small to see at all) (141). She seems to offer her audience a way of relating to her personally through her art, so that even as they join together in their adoration of her, each one of them feels a special connection with her: the eponymous Duke observes that ‘ever and anon the siren shot a glance which seemed to tell him that he was marked out amid this brilliant multitude’ (142). Her celebrity rubs off on those around her, raising the public profile of the products, venues, and people 1 

The Bradenham Edition of the Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli, 12 vols (London: Peter Davies, 1926–​7), ii. 140.

Celebrity and Anonymity    465 associated with her: the Young Duke discovers that patronizing her ‘extend[s]‌his celebrity in a manner which he had not anticipated’ and makes him ‘in the comprehensive sense of the phrase, a Public Character’ (142–​3). She gains celebrity not only through the medium in which she performs (music), but also through secondary media that circulate her image and raise her profile: when she becomes the Duke’s mistress, ‘[a] Sunday journal [is] immediately established’ to publish groundless reports about them (143). She finds herself locked into a strained yet symbiotic relationship with these secondary media: newspaper proprietors boost sales by connecting their products with the Bird of Paradise, however limited their knowledge of her; she boosts her fame by appearing in their pages, however vexatious the reports. But despite being a celebrity, she does not have a name. Disraeli only ever refers to her by her pseudonym. The apparatus of celebrity operates in the absence of a proper name, creating a branded identity that is ‘strange, mysterious, celebrated’ (142). This pseudonymous presence in Disraeli’s novel suggests that, by 1831, the categories of celebrity, anonymity, and pseudonymity were far from mutually exclusive. Their sometimes surprising overlaps, synergies, and tensions are the result of significant changes in the cultural function of both celebrity and attribution over the previous decades. In this chapter, I will explore the shifting status of these categories and examine the relationships between them, showing how an understanding of those relationships can shed new light on the construction of authorship in Romantic literary culture. Disraeli was writing at the end of a period that witnessed radical and widespread changes in how fame was constructed, experienced, and understood. They occurred when changes in cultural production and reception combined with shifting understandings of authorship and subjectivity to make some individuals personally fascinating to large, anonymous, socially diverse, and geographically distributed audiences. As the total amount of printed matter in circulation increased rapidly at the end of the eighteenth century, leaving cultural consumers feeling swamped by new publications and alienated from their authors, celebrity emerged to palliate the new condition of information overload and alienation. Celebrity, as I have argued elsewhere, is a cultural apparatus with both material and discursive elements, which emerged almost simultaneously in several fields, from literature to music, theatre, politics, and sports.2 It functions by branding the identity of an individual to raise his or her mediated profile, allowing the celebrity to rise above the sea of other aspirants to public notice and gain widespread attention, both positive and negative. It constructs what I call a ‘hermeneutic of intimacy’, which makes consuming the products of the celebrity apparatus feel like entering into an asymmetrical but powerfully affective relationship with the celebrity. A number of studies of the celebrity culture of the Romantic period have appeared in recent years, making this a vibrant new area of enquiry. These studies build on historical overviews such as Leo Braudy’s The Frenzy of Renown, and draw on theoretical 2  Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Tom Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

466   Tom Mole treatments such as those of P. David Marshall.3 Claire Brock, Ann Hawkins, and Maura Ives have examined celebrity culture’s gendered dimensions and its relationship to material culture.4 Eric Eisner, Ghislaine McDayter, and Janine Barchas have considered the engagements of canonical writers with celebrity culture, while Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody have engaged with the history of theatrical celebrity.5 Frank Donoghue and David Higgins have explored the place of celebrity in the periodical press, while Martin Postle has examined the role of Joshua Reynolds’s portraits in the creation of celebrity culture.6 These books and essays, among others, have revealed the long history of our current obsession with celebrities, offering new ways to understand the construction and circulation of authorial personality in the Romantic period, as well as new insights into the functioning of reading communities and the public sphere, and challenges to assumptions about gender and authorship. The process of branding on which the celebrity apparatus relies is not simply under the control of any one individual—​neither the celebrity him-​or herself nor a Svengali behind the scenes—​but is an emergent function of many distributed, mediated references to the celebrity. It identifies the celebrity with certain memorable and marketable traits and, by reiterating those connections across time and via several media, creates a stable and recognizable public identity. Mary Robinson, for example, developed a branded identity that evolved over time, but was supported by both her own productions (her theatrical performances, her poetry volumes, her novels, her non-​fictional prose, her work as literary editor of the Morning Post) and a field of media taking her as its subject (her appearance in newspaper reports about her clothes, carriages, and liaisons; reviews of her work; portraits of her by Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Romney; and explicit, derogatory caricatures).7 These mediated appearances differed considerably among themselves, but they all combined to create her branded identity. 3 

Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York: Vintage Books, 1997); P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); P. David Marshall (ed.), The Celebrity Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2006). 4  Claire Brock, The Feminisation of Fame, 1750–​1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); Ann Hawkins and Maura Ives, Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 5  Eric Eisner, Nineteenth-​Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Ghislaine McDayter, Byromania: Byron and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2008); Janine Barchas, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (eds), Theatre and Celebrity in Britain: 1660–​2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 6  Frank Donoghue, The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Careers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London: Routledge, 2005); Martin Postle (ed.), Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (London: Tate Gallery, 2005). 7  On Robinson’s celebrity, see Tom Mole, ‘Mary Robinson’s Conflicted Celebrity’, in Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture; Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), esp. 163–​83; and Daniel Robinson, The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). On Robinson’s visual celebrity, see Anne K. Mellor, ‘Making an Exhibition of Her Self: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and Nineteenth-​Century Scripts of Female Sexuality,’ Nineteenth-​Century Contexts 22.3 (2000), 271–​304.

Celebrity and Anonymity    467 The hermeneutic of intimacy encouraged cultural consumers to treat the products of the celebrity apparatus as conduits through which to relate to celebrated individuals. In doing so, they entered a largely new kind of asymmetrical, mediated relationship which helped to palliate the sense of alienation between cultural producers and consumers that set in with an increasingly differentiated, industrialized marketplace for culture. The hermeneutic of intimacy allowed readers to imagine that they were relating to a remarkable individual, rather than consuming the products of a profit-​driven industry. It was fostered by the works of celebrities themselves, sustained by the secondary media that circulated their branded identities, and reiterated by the consumers who made affective investments in them. Those proto-​fans gained a mark of cultural distinction—​a sense that they understood the celebrity in a way that ordinary consumers did not—​and they sometimes attempted to transform the mediated relationship into a physical one.8 Lady Caroline Lamb and Annabella Milbanke were both fans of Byron’s poems before they became lovers of Byron the man, just as, in Disraeli’s novel, the Young Duke is a fan of the Bird of Paradise before he becomes her lover. As the cultural apparatus of celebrity began to emerge, the nature of anonymity and pseudonymity was also shifting. I am not primarily concerned here with anonymity as an existential condition, as Jacques Khalip treats it, but with anonymity and pseudonymity as practices within print culture and paratexts in printed books.9 Likewise, I am concerned with naming not as a recurrent concern of literary texts and an artistic resource deployed within them, as Alastair Fowler considers it, but as a practice of labelling texts and oeuvres in print culture, which Gérard Genette calls ‘onymity’.10 Anonymity and pseudonymity have been studied in early modern culture by Marcy North, and transhistorically by Robert Griffin, and are the focus of a special issue of New Literary History edited by Herbert Tucker; Donald Foster has explored the motives for anonymity and the scholarly practice of attributing anonymous and pseudonymous texts.11 The attribution of some texts to Romantic authors by modern scholars 8 

For case studies in the history of fandom, see Cheryl Wanko, ‘Patron or Patronized?: “Fans” and the Eighteenth-​Century English Stage’, in Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture; Eric Eisner (ed.), Romantic Fandom, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2011) at: www.rc.umd.edu/​praxis/​fandom; and Corin Throsby, ‘Flirting with Fame: Byron’s Anonymous Fan Letters’, Byron Journal 32.2 (2004), 115–​23. For cultural-​studies approaches to fandom, see Lisa A. Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (London: Routledge, 1992); Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); and Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002). 9  Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 37–​54. 10  Alastair Fowler, Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Genette, Paratexts, 39–​42. 11  Marcy L. North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-​Stuart England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Robert J. Griffin (ed.), The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); Herbert F. Tucker (ed.), New Literary History 33.2 (2002), Special Issue: Anonymity; Donald W. Foster, Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).

468   Tom Mole remains controversial, most recently in cases involving Robert Burns and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.12 But questions about the place of anonymity and pseudonymity in Romantic print culture have not been much examined, with the exception of some notable case studies.13 At the beginning of the Romantic period, most novels and poetry volumes were initially published anonymously. Joseph Addison, in 1712, had represented anonymity as the default position for published writers, observing that ‘scarce One Part in Ten of the Valuable Books which are published are with the Author’s names’.14 As far as Addison was concerned, this was a desirable state of affairs, which guaranteed the disinterested intellectual integrity of the public sphere. ‘[T]‌here are many important Truths which are absolutely necessary to be told’, he wrote, ‘and yet who would undertake to tell them if he must expose himself to the Malice and Fury of a Party?’15 Addison’s claim that anonymity was the norm is borne out by the bibliographical record. In the 1770s, around 60 per cent of new poetry volumes and 80 per cent of new novels were published anonymously, making affixing one’s proper name to a book the exception rather than the rule. The percentage of poetry volumes published anonymously peaked at 70 per cent in 1778, while all the novels recorded for 1781 in the standard bibliography were published anonymously.16 But during the Romantic period, the percentage of new publications appearing anonymously fell steadily. The percentage of new poetry volumes published anonymously 12  A prominent edition controversially ascribed to Burns eleven anonymous radical poems from the 1790s: The Canongate Burns, ed. Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001). The attribution of a translation of Goethe’s Faust to Coleridge also remains controversial: Faustus, from the German of Goethe, trans. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 13  See, for example, Paula Feldman, ‘Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era’, New Literary History 33.2 (2002): 279–​89; Susan Rosenbaum, ‘ “A Thing Unknown, without a Name”: Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Illegible Signature’, Studies in Romanticism 40.3 (2001), 369–​99; Ralph Schoolcraft, ‘For Whom the Beyle Toils: Stendhal and Pseudonymous Authorship’, Publications of the Modern Language Association 119.2 (2004), 247–​64; and Geraldine Friedman, ‘Pseudonymity, Passing, and Queer Biography: The Case of Mary Diana Dods’, Romanticism On the Net 23 (Aug. 2001) at:  www.erudit.org/​revue/​ron/​2001/​v/​n23. 14  [Joseph Addison,] The Thoughts of a Tory Author, Concerning the Press (London: A. Baldwin, 1712), 28. 15  Thoughts of a Tory Author, 26. 16   In 1770, 61.6 per cent of poetry volumes and 82.5 per cent of novels appeared anonymously. Statistics for poetry are compiled from J. R. de J. Jackson, Annals of English Verse, 1770–​1835: A Preliminary Survey of the Volumes Published (New York: Garland, 1985) and J. R. de J. Jackson, Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770–​1835 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); for the novel, from Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. i. 46–​7 and ii. 73. I also draw on information from Lee Erickson, ‘ “Unboastful Bard”: Originally Anonymous English Romantic Poetry Book Publication, 1770–​1835’, New Literary History 33.2 (2002), 247–​78; and James Raven, ‘The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–​1830’, in Robert J. Griffin (ed.), The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave, 2003). For further discussion of these figures, see Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 10–​13.

Celebrity and Anonymity    469 fell to 24 per cent in 1815 and 17 per cent in 1834.17 The causes of this decline in anonymous publication were various, and reducing the bibliographical record to a binary distinction between named and anonymous publication does not adequately represent the variety of attribution styles available in the period, which are discussed in more detail below.18 But the overall effect of the drop in anonymous publication was to change the way people thought about anonymity. Where anonymity had previously been the default position, unworthy of comment and even invisible as a distinctive, motivated artistic choice, in the second half of the Romantic period anonymity became newly noticeable, available as an artistic strategy, and even potentially scandalous. Anonymity was now a mask to penetrate and a stimulus to readerly ingenuity. While Addison would have considered it strange, or even immoral, to seek out an anonymous writer, in 1814, just after Waverley was published anonymously, Walter Scott wrote in a letter that ‘the good people of Edinburgh [were] busied in tracing the author’.19 The high level of curiosity generated by the anonymous publication of Waverley, as well as the specific form that curiosity took—​trying to identify the proper name of the author—​ reflect how the cultural significance of anonymity had shifted in the previous generation. Scott either did not understand this shift, or was disingenuous about it, when he tried to justify his anonymity by invoking authors from the previous century. ‘I think an author may use his discretion in giving or withholding his name’, he wrote; ‘Harry McKenzie never put his name in a title page till the last edition of his works and Swift only owned one out of his thousand and one publications.’20 While Henry McKenzie and Jonathan Swift wrote in a culture where anonymity was the norm, Scott wrote in a culture where anonymity was the exception. And, precisely because it was exceptional, it became newly interesting. As a result, while the percentage of poetry volumes published anonymously continued to drop throughout the Romantic period, the percentage of novels published anonymously, having dropped steadily from 90 per cent in 1772 to 40 per cent in 1805, rose again to 80 per cent in 1828, reflecting a ‘Waverley effect’: a renewal of interest in anonymous publication and a transformation in the meanings of anonymity.21 As High Romanticism theorized poetry as inseparable from the writing subject (‘What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer

17   As Erickson notes (‘ “Unboastful Bard” ’, 248–​9), these figures do not take into account the differences between editions; he shows that poetry volumes initially published anonymously were much more likely to appear with the author’s name if they were sufficiently popular to warrant a second and third edition. 18  Erickson’s path-​breaking work in this area accepts J. R. de J. Jackson’s definition: ‘that any proper name, any pseudonym, or any initials create a signed work, but any generic label, such as “a Lady” or “a Gentleman” (no matter how limiting), makes a work anonymous’ (‘ “Unboastful Bard” ’, 275). 19  To John B. S. Morritt, 9 Jul. 1814, Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, Centenary Edition, 10 vols (London: Constable, 1932), iii. 457. 20  Letters of Scott, ii. 437. 21  Figures from Raven, Garside, and Schöwerling, The English Novel 1770–​1829: A Bibliographical Survey, i. 46–​7 and ii. 73.

470   Tom Mole to the one is involved in the solution of the other’, Coleridge asserted in Biographia Literaria),22 and as the book trade increasingly turned away from anonymous publication, anonymity emerged as a new topic of discussion. As the new discourse surrounding anonymity gained currency, a new vocabulary was required, including the word ‘anonymity’ itself.23 ‘Anonymous’, meaning ‘of unknown or unavowed authorship’, was already in use at the end of the seventeenth century: OED’s first citation is from 1676. But ‘anonymity’ did not appear until the condition of anonymity had been reconceived as an omission requiring investigation: OED’s first citation is from 1820. In the meantime, Romantic authors had to employ neologisms when discussing the shifting cultural categories of attribution. Robert Southey used the word ‘anonymousness’ in 1802, and Lord Byron referred to authors’ ‘anonymes’ in 1812.24 ‘Pseudonym’ is also a Romantic coinage, first cited by OED in an 1817 text (although, as with ‘anonymous’, the adjective ‘pseudonymous’ is older, dating from 1706). ‘Pseudonymity’ first appeared in 1877. As a new discourse surrounding anonymity and pseudonymity emerged, people soon began to demand reliable reference books cataloguing and deciphering pseudonyms and attributing anonymous works. In 1785, ‘T. S.’ wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine to ask ‘whether there is any work that gives an account of the authors of anonymous and pseudonymous books in English’. In the next issue, ‘S. E.’ replied that ‘a few anonymous and pseudonymous English authors’ were mentioned in a Latin reference book from 1708, but he agreed that ‘a work of this kind . . . is much wanted in our language’.25 By the end of the Romantic period, Samuel Halkett and John Laing were compiling a comprehensive dictionary of anonymous and pseudonymous publications, which remains a standard work of reference.26 Halkett announced the projected dictionary in Notes and Queries in 1856, and it appeared in several volumes between 1882 and 1888.27 In the interim, Ralph Thomas (writing under the pseudonym Olphar Hamst) published his Handbook of Fictitious Names in 1868, describing it as ‘the first of its kind, so far as we know, that has ever been attempted in the English language’.28 By the twentieth century, dictionaries of pseudonyms and anonymous publications were sufficiently widespread to require their own bibliography, compiled by Archer Taylor and Fredric J. Mosher, in 22 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), ii. 15. 23  See Anne Ferry, ‘Anonymity: The Literary History of a Word’, New Literary History 33.2 (2002), 193–​214. 24  Southey to William Taylor, 21 Nov. 1802, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part 2, 1798–​1803, ed. Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt, Romantic Circles Electronic Edition (2011), at: www.rc.umd.edu/​editions; Byron to Lord Holland, 10 Sept. 1812, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​94), ii. 191. 25  ‘T. S.’ letter to Gentleman’s Magazine 55 (Sept. 1785), 689; ‘S. E.’ letter to Gentleman’s Magazine 55 (Oct. 1785), 781. 26  Samuel Halkett and John Laing (eds), A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain, 4 vols (Edinburgh: W. Paterson, 1882–​8). 27  Samuel Halkett, ‘Dictionary of Anonymous Writers,’ Notes and Queries 2nd ser., 1 (1856), 129–​30. 28  Olphar Hamst [pseudonym of Ralph Thomas], Handbook of Fictitious Names (London: John Russell Smith, 1868; repr. Chicheley: Paul P. B. Minet, 1971), ix.

Celebrity and Anonymity    471 1951.29 Together, these reference books assisted readers wishing to identify the authors of particular works, and promoted the idea that the proper names of all authors should be known. As that idea took hold, anonymous publication came increasingly to be seen as dubious, evasive, or underhand. In 1835, in a scrupulously signed article on ‘Anonymous Publications’ in Fraser’s Magazine, John Galt proposed that anonymity should be illegal, at least for authors of controversial articles in periodicals: What we would propose is, to let the law stand as it is with respect to printers and publishers, but to require that the authors shall give their name and address to every work, small or great, in which others are concerned; we should then know what degree of credit was due to statements that are now anonymous.30

Where a century before Addison had viewed anonymity as a natural state of affairs, and seen in anonymity a guarantee of the effective functioning of the public sphere, Galt saw anonymity as an abuse that undermined the integrity of public debate. Influenced by Romantic thinkers such as Coleridge, who located a writer’s authority in his personality, Galt thought readers were entitled to know the proper names of authors and promoted the idea that every published text should be tethered to its author’s proper name. Although the law Galt proposed was never enacted, his conception of anonymity as a departure from the norm, an eccentricity demanding investigation, became naturalized by the middle of the nineteenth century.31 In order to understand the relationship between this specifically Romantic conception of anonymity and the apparatus of celebrity, we need to grasp the variety of attribution styles that were available to authors in the period. Foucault famously argued that we should speak of an ‘author function’, which characterizes certain kinds of discourse and which became increasingly important as a classificatory principle around 1800.32 In the publishing world of British Romanticism, however, the author function did not require a proper name, or even a pseudonym. There were a number of other styles of attribution—​including, I suggest, some kinds of ‘anonymity’—​that could serve the same classificatory function, gathering texts together and attributing them to a common source. So long as those other styles of attribution could fulfil the author function, they could become the branded identities of the celebrity apparatus, even without the presence of an individual’s proper name on the title page. 29  Archer Taylor and Fredric J. Mosher, The Bibliographical History of Anonyma and Pseudonyma (Chicago: published for the Newberry Library by the University of Chicago Press, 1951). 30  John Galt, ‘Anonymous Publications’, Fraser’s Magazine 11 (1835), 549–​51. 31  Robert J. Griffin points out that English law has only required author’s names to be affixed to publications during two short periods, in the mid-​sixteenth and mid-​seventeenth centuries (The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert J. Griffin [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003], introd., 5). 32  ‘What is an Author?’ (1969 version, trans. Josué V. Harari), in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, ii: Aesthetics: Method and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 205–​22.

472   Tom Mole Books published in the Romantic period appeared with what now seems to us a bewildering variety of attributions. These have received only limited scholarly attention, but Donald Foster is right in claiming that ‘a literary attribution, whether accurate, or disputed, or phoney, or omitted altogether, is no less essential to the work of criticism than is true of other parts of the literary text’.33 While some books appeared with the author’s name (that is, with some version of the name by which the author was known to acquaintances), and others appeared with no name whatsoever, a range of other attribution options was available. One was the formula ‘by the author of ’. This formula could be used alongside a proper name, for example in Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (1802) ‘by Robert Bloomfield, author of The Farmer’s Boy’.34 Or it could appear on its own, whether unchangingly, as in ‘by the author of Waverley’, or shifting as the author’s oeuvre grew. Jane Austen and her publishers employed this approach. Sense and Sensibility, whose first edition (1811) was ‘By a Lady’, was ‘by the author of “Pride and Prejudice” ’ in the second edition (1813). Pride and Prejudice (1813) was attributed to ‘the author of “Sense and Sensibility” ’. Mansfield Park (1814) was ‘by the author of “Sense and Sensibility,” and “Pride and Prejudice” ’ in the first edition. Emma (1816) was ‘by the author of Pride and Prejudice &c. &c.’ and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818) ‘by the author of “Pride and Prejudice”; “Mansfield Park,” &c.’35 These attributions reflected (and exploited) Austen’s increasingly established identity in the marketplace, without revealing her name. The phrase ‘by the author of ’ was sufficiently widespread by 1823 to be satirized in Rhymes without Reason, with Reasons for Rhyming ‘by the Author of No Other Publication!!!’36 Attributions, with or without the proper name, could signal class allegiance (as when Percy Shelley published St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian [1811] ‘by A Gentleman of the University of Oxford’), age (as in Hours of Idleness [1807] ‘by George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor’), nationality (for example, A Hint to the Inhabitants of Ireland [1800] ‘by a Native’), professional status (‘by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple’), or gender identity (‘by a Lady’). Attributions could also function as genre labels—​for example in Della Cruscan poetry, a literary subculture whose badge of membership was a special kind of pseudonym. Charlotte Dacre displayed the self-​consciousness of Della Cruscan attributions when she published Hours of Solitude (1805), ‘by Charlotte Dacre, better known by the name of Rosa Matilda’. Another common attribution style in the period was to use initials. Letitia Landon initially published simply as ‘L.’, but soon altered her moniker to L. E. L., an attribution 33  Donald W. Foster, ‘Commentary: In the Name of the Author’, New Literary History 33.2 Special Issue: Anonymity (2002), 375–​96 (p. 394). 34  Robert Bloomfield, Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (London: Vernor and Hood; Longman and Rees, 1802). 35  Pride and Prejudice (London: T. Egerton, 1813); Sense and Sensibility, 2nd edn (London: Printed for the Author and Published by T. Egerton, 1813); Mansfield Park (London: T. Egerton, 1814); Emma (London: John Murray, 1816); Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (London: John Murray, 1818). 36  [Ellen Garraway], Rhymes without Reason, with Reasons for Rhyming: To Which are Added, Two Prose Essays (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1823).

Celebrity and Anonymity    473 that was distinctive enough to become a branded identity, and which remained consistent for poems published in the Literary Gazette, poetry volumes, and novels.37 Laman Blanchard notes in his Life and Literary Remains of L.  E. L. that her initials ‘speedily became a signature of magical interest and curiosity’.38 Her novel Romance and Reality (1831) was attributed to ‘L. E. L., Author of “The Improvisatrice”, “The Venetian Bracelet” &c. &c. &c.’39 Combining her initials with the ‘author of ’ formulation, this attribution eased Landon’s transition from poetry to prose by reminding her first novel’s purchasers of two of her highly successful poetry volumes, and gesturing, in that repeated ‘&c.’, to her prolific output. In other cases, initials were not sufficient to create the branded identity of celebrity culture. When Felicia Hemans published poems in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, she signed them with the initials F. D. H. or F. H.40 But she quickly discovered that her initials did not guarantee that her verses would be recognized as her own, or that they could be distinguished from poems penned by others. In some confusion she wrote to William Blackwood: Some One, for whose perpetrations I am not at all desirous to be answerable, has adopted the signature of F. H., and I am rather perplexed as to the best means of proving my own Identity. —​Even if I lay aside the use of the initials altogether, I fear I should not quite free myself from the imputations of Mr F. H.’s poetry, which really is ‘so middling, bad were better.’41

Hemans found her initials in a perplexing state of flux between owners, between degrees of aesthetic value, and (she assumed) between genders. Initials, then, could serve the author function in some cases, but were not reliably effective at gathering works into an oeuvre, and, even in cases where the initials became a branded identity such as L. E. L., a separate label such as ‘the author of ’ was sometimes required. By the end of the Romantic period, as John Galt’s 1835 essay suggests, this range of attribution styles was narrowing, until only the author’s proper name (or a version of

37 

On the switch from L. to L. E. L., see Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Daniel Riess (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997), 12. On the relation between Landon and ‘L. E. L.’, see Glennis Stephenson, Letitia Landon: The Woman Behind L. E. L. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 1–​20. 38  Laman Blanchard, The Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L., 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), i. 30. 39  [Letitia Elizabeth Landon], Romance and Reality, 3 vols (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831). 40  Hemans’s first poem in Blackwood’s was ‘On the Death of Princess Charlotte’, which appeared under the signature ‘F. D. H.’ in April 1818. She went on to contribute another seventy-​four poems to the magazine between 1819 and 1835. She had previously used her maiden name, Felicia Dorothea Browne, for her volume of juvenilia, Poems (1808). See Nanora Sweet’s bibliography of Herman’s work at: www.umsl.edu/​~sweetn/​swetbib.htm. 41  Undated letter in the Blackwood archive, National Library of Scotland, MS 4027, ff. 172–​6, cited by Feldman, ‘Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era’, 283–​4.

474   Tom Mole it) was considered acceptable on the title page of a published volume. This may explain why those authors who chose to adopt pseudonyms later in the nineteenth century often chose ‘realistic’ names, such as Mark Twain, George Eliot, or Michael Field. In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, by contrast, a variety of attribution styles could fulfil the author function, and many Romantic authors experimented fancifully with what Adrian Room calls ‘invented names’ such as Jedediah Cleishbotham, Chrystal Croftangry, and Malachi Malagrowther (all Walter Scott), Horace Hornem and Quevedo Redivivus (both Lord Byron), or Miching Mallecho (Percy Shelley).42 A proper name on the title page, then, was not necessary in the Romantic period for the construction of a branded identity in the nascent culture of celebrity. Many who published works under their own names failed to become celebrities, and some who published works without their own names succeeded in becoming celebrities.43 Other forms of attribution besides an author’s proper name could serve as the label for the branded identity of celebrity culture. Anonymity and pseudonymity, as Disraeli understood in The Young Duke, offered alternative routes to celebrity. Letitia Landon’s anonymity became a form of celebrity. Edward Bulwer-​Lytton joined his undergraduate friends in reading her weekly contributions to the Literary Gazette: ‘all of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed at the author. We soon learned it was a female, and our admiration was doubled, and our conjectures tripled. Was she young? Was she pretty?’44 The fact that Bulwer-​Lytton didn’t know who Landon was did not prevent the hermeneutic of intimacy from functioning, as he treated her works as a stimulus to learn more about her, or know her more fully. The branded identity of L. E. L. allowed Landon to function as a celebrity in the public sphere, while still maintaining some distance between her personal life and her public image. Anonymity or pseudonymity could, in fact, produce an especially intense version of the hermeneutic of intimacy, because the uncertainty surrounding the author’s identity set up—​either in reality or in imagination—​an ‘in group’ of readers who could penetrate the mask and know the true identity of the author. As Matt Hills argues in his study of fandom, fan identities are constructed around membership of fan communities with internal hierarchies based on knowledge of or connections with the celebrity (or other object of fan fascination).45 Anonymous or pseudonymous celebrities such as L. E. L. provide one obvious way to structure such hierarchies, by implying the existence of a restricted group who are privy to information about the celebrity’s identity. How large the group of those in the know really is—​or even whether such a group exists at all beyond the celebrity’s immediate circle—​is beside the point. The point is that readers aspire to a greater degree of intimacy with the author, and engage with his or her works as

42 

Adrian Room, Dictionary of Pseudonyms, 3rd edn (Jefferson: McFarland, 1998), 43. For a case study of an individual from the Romantic period who employed a number of attribution styles in her failed pursuit of celebrity, see Judith Pascoe, ‘Ann Hatton’s Celebrity Pursuits’, in Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture. 44  Repr. in Landon, Selected Writings, ed. McGann and Reiss, 331. 45 Hills, Fan Culture, 46–​64. 43 

Celebrity and Anonymity    475 a substitute for that intimacy, a simulacrum of it, or a means to produce it. Asking who knew the identity of L. E. L. or ‘the Author of Waverley’, and when, is less important than asking what was the effect on Landon’s or Scott’s readers of the perception that some people knew and some did not. Walter Scott was unusual in having two branded identities functioning simultaneously in the literary marketplace. As ‘Walter Scott’ he was a well-​known poet and antiquary. As ‘the Author of Waverley’ he was the period’s best-​selling novelist. The two branded identities functioned as classificatory categories, as guarantors of certain literary qualities, as genre labels, as focal points for reading communities, and as shorthands for (admittedly overlapping) constellations of political and cultural connotations. But neither of Scott’s branded identities, named or unnamed, was simply identical with the biographical individual who penned both their works. Not only is the branded identity of the celebrity not identical with the person who produces the works that sustain that identity, but there is not necessarily a one-​to-​one relationship between the two. One person can have two branded identities, like Walter Scott, and in some cases two or more people can share one branded identity, like the several contributors to Blackwood’s Magazine who shared the signature ‘Z’.46 The distance between the public branded identity of the celebrity and the private individual behind it meant that—​strange as it may sound—​celebrity could also be a form of anonymity. This is not to claim that there is no relationship between the public image and the private self, or that the celebrity’s branded identity does not feed back, in various ways, into the celebrity’s understanding of him-​or herself. But it is to acknowledge the extent to which, once they were established in the public imagination, celebrity brands operated independently of the individual whose name and image were circulated. Not only was ‘Lord Byron’ the cultural phenomenon not identical with Lord Byron the man, but once his celebrity was established, ‘Lord Byron’ became a mask for Lord Byron to hide behind, just as certainly as ‘the Author of Waverley’ became a mask for Walter Scott, or ‘L. E. L.’ became a mask for Letitia Landon. Captain Forester experienced this distance between the celebrated persona and the individual that ostensibly inhabited it when he visited Byron in 1824 and found ‘a being bearing as little resemblance to the pretended fac-​simile, as I do to Apollo’.47 By 1824, Byron’s celebrity identity had taken on a life of its own, and was circulated by the celebrity industry with little reference to the ideas or desires of Lord Byron, or even, as Forester discovered, to his physical appearance, which had changed significantly since his widely circulated portraits of a decade before.48 As Byron’s personal life and his branded identity drifted apart, he retreated to

46  The fullest exploration of the authorship of articles signed ‘Z’ remains Alan Lang Strout, A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine (Lubbock: Texas Technological College, 1959). 47  Cited in Richard Walker, Regency Portraits, 2 vols (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1985), i. 82. 48  For a discussion of the circulation of Byron’s image that traces a visual discourse of Byronic celebrity, see Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 78–​97. Further details of the circulation of Byron’s portraits in his lifetime are provided by Annette Peach, ‘Portraits of Byron’, Walpole Society 62 (2000), 1–​144.

476   Tom Mole a position of anonymity, concealed from the public eye not only by his distance from England but also by his dissimilarity from his own celebrity persona. Similarly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that the distance between himself and his public image was so great that he could not recognize himself in the press. In the opening sentences of Biographia Literaria he made a pre-​emptive strike against the charge of egotism, claiming that: It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation, and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world.49

John Wilson was quick to puncture Coleridge’s modest pose in his Blackwood’s review, insisting that Coleridge was an enthusiastic participant in the period’s celebrity culture. ‘The truth is’, he claimed, ‘that Mr Coleridge has lived, as much as any man of his time, in literary and political society, and that he has sought every opportunity of keeping himself in the eye of the public, as restlessly as any charlatan who ever exhibited on the stage.’50 Having cultivated their celebrity identities, Coleridge and Byron both found themselves estranged from them. They shared a sense that the celebrity identity attached to their proper names was uncoupled from their own experiences and ideas. In Romantic print culture, then, the terms ‘Lord Byron’, ‘S. T. Coleridge’, ‘L. E. L.’, and ‘The Author of Waverley’ all performed very similar functions. Each served to identify an authorial brand, an oeuvre, a source of fascination, a focal point organizing a readership, a marketing device, and a constellation of connotations. The apparatus of celebrity operated to brand authorial identities whether the author function was labelled by a proper name, a set of initials, a pseudonym, a phrase such as ‘the author of ’, or a combination of these. The brand identities created by the apparatus were distinct from the identities of the individuals branded, and they often seemed to take on a life of their own in the literary marketplace. As a result, anonymity could become a form of celebrity, and celebrity could become a form of anonymity. The figure of the anonymous celebrity was familiar enough by the 1830s to be personified in Disraeli’s Bird of Paradise, but as anonymous publication decreased in popularity, it became the norm for celebrated individuals to appear under their own names. During the Romantic period, celebrity, anonymity and pseudonymity were not mutually exclusive categories, but overlapping approaches to the construction of branded identities in the media ecology, in which the revelation of authorial identity and its concealment were entwined.

49 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 5.

50  [John Wilson], ‘Some Observations on the Biographia Literaria of S. T. Coleridge’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 (Oct. 1817), 3–​18, repr. in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–​1825: Selections from Maga’s Infancy, gen ed. Nicholas Mason, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), v. 27–​51 (p. 37).

Celebrity and Anonymity    477

Further Reading Braudy, Leo, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). Eisner, Eric, Nineteenth-​ Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Eisner, Eric (ed.), Romantic Fandom, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2011), at: www.rc.umd.edu/​praxis/​fandom. Erickson, Lee, ‘ “Unboastful Bard”:  Originally Anonymous English Romantic Poetry Book Publication, 1770–​1835’, New Literary History 33.2 (2002), 247–​78. Fawcett, Julia H., Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). Feldman, Paula, ‘Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era’, New Literary History 33.2 (2002), 279–​89. Ferry, Anne, ‘Anonymity: The Literary History of a Word’, New Literary History 33.2 (2002), 193–​214. Griffin, Robert J. (ed.), The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave, 2003). Hawkins, Ann and Maura Ives, Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Marshall, P. David (ed.), The Celebrity Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2006). McDayter, Ghislaine, Byromania: Byron and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008). McPherson, Heather, Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). Mole, Tom, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Mole, Tom (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009). Mullan, John, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). Raven, James, ‘The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–​1830’, in Robert J. Griffin (ed.), The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave, 2003). Tuite, Clara, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Chapter 31

Rom antic Re a de rs Felicity James

Nothing captures more clearly the double bind of Romantic reading attitudes—​ at once dependent on and resistant to the book—​than the two poems from Lyrical Ballads (1798) which dramatize alternative responses to the act of reading. In the first, ‘Expostulation and Reply’, the poet is taken to task by his interlocutor Matthew for his dreamy self-​absorption: Where are your books? that light bequeath’d To beings else forlorn and blind! Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath’d From dead men to their kind. (lines 5–​8)1

Yet this invigorating defence of reading—​‘Up! Up!’—​is weighed down by the evocation of those ‘dead men’, whose breath sends an unsettling chill through this stanza. The poet, however, self-​consciously refuses to engage with them, focusing instead on his own ‘sweet’ life beside Esthwaite Lake, and on the way ‘our bodies feel’: sitting, dreaming, schooling the mind into a ‘wise passiveness’. His ‘reply’, which runs over into the following poem, ‘The Tables Turned’, is one of the most famous Romantic repudiations of reading: Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks, Why all this toil and trouble? Up! up! my friend, and quit your books, Or surely you’ll grow double. (lines 1–​4)

1 

William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008), 188. All quotations are from this edition.

Romantic Readers   479 A key Romantic dispute seems to be playing out here, between the ‘Spontaneous wisdom’ of nature and the ‘dull and endless strife’ of books (lines 19, 9). But the solution proposed at the close of ‘The Tables Turned’ is hardly workable: ‘Close up these barren leaves’, we are urged, in favour of learning from the ‘vernal wood’ (lines 30, 21). If we do that, how are we to discover the poems which follow? Which sort of ‘leaves’, then, are best for us: the ones on trees, or the ones in books? This confusion embodies some of the paradoxes associated with books in the period, as authors use their writing to explore the nature and purpose of reading. The example also makes the point that neither Romantic writing nor Romantic reading happens in solitude. The debate which Wordsworth is staging in these poems, supposedly between the dreaming poet and his friend Matthew, is in reality a three-​way one: with himself, with the young William Hazlitt (who visited Nether Stowey while Lyrical Ballads was being composed), and with the reader. Lyrical Ballads reveals an alertness—​which at times verges on paranoia—​to the ways in which the reading audience had evolved in the period. For this was ‘an age of books!’, Maria Jane Jewsbury exclaimed in 1825: ‘of book making! book reading! book reviewing! and book forgetting!’2 Thanks to increased literacy, heightened competition in the book trade, and technological advances in printing, eighteenth-​century Britain had transformed itself into ‘a nation of readers’, as Samuel Johnson observed in his Lives of the English Poets (1779–​81).3 Coleridge, looking to Europe and America, went further and saw a ‘World of Readers’ opening up.4 James Lackington commented in 1792 that ‘all ranks and degrees now READ’—​a development which had benefited the autodidact bookseller himself both socially and financially.5 But Lackington’s excitement was not universally shared: witness the ominous close to Jewsbury’s exclamations, ‘book forgetting!’ Such authorial anxieties—​as well as more widespread fears and uncertainties about reading in the period—​are vividly expressed in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth’s defensive rhetoric attempts to negotiate new reading relations in the period, as he strives to establish the responsibilities of both author and reader. On the one hand, he is eager to point out his consciousness of readerly expectations, ‘the promise which by the act of writing in verse an Author in the present day makes to his Reader’; on the other, he reminds his reader that this must be a reciprocal contract: ‘the Reader ought never to forget that he is himself exposed to the same errors as the Poet’, and that his judgement may err, causing him to make decisions ‘lightly and carelessly’.6 Wordsworth is also aware 2  Maria Jane Jewsbury, ‘The Age of Books’, Phantasmagoria; or, Sketches of Life and Literature, 2 vols (London, 1825), i. 3. 3  Samuel Johnson, ‘Swift’, The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. Roger Lonsdale, selected with intro. John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 326. 4  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819 On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), i. 186. 5  James Lackington, Memoirs of the First Forty-​Five Years of the Life of James Lackington, new edn (London, 1792), 387. 6  Lyrical Ballads, 173, 184.

480   Felicity James of the contemporary pressures facing his work, the ‘multitude of causes unknown to former times’ effecting revolutionary change both in wider society and in print culture.7 The stimulating power of ‘great national events’, of urban life and newspapers was, Wordsworth felt, heightened by the wrong sort of reading, of ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’.8 More people might be reading, but were they reading the proper books in the proper ways? Wordsworth was by no means alone in his fears: the spectacle of increasing working-​class literacy was regarded as a serious threat by many, with a corresponding sense that ‘in order to facilitate social control’, as Alan Richardson puts it, ‘literacy, and the distribution of literature, must be carefully managed by those in power’.9 Wordsworth’s Preface, bristling with instructions to the reader, might be placed alongside other attempts to control reading in the period:  the systematization of education, for example, or the provision of suitable popular reading material, such as Hannah More’s pamphlets for the poor. In More’s words, ‘To teach the poor to read without providing them with safe books, has always appeared to me an improper measure.’10 More and Wordsworth offer clear examples of Romantic writers troubled by developments in reading practice, but Romantic readers had their own anxieties. Despite the fact that print had, by now, been around for several hundred years, readers were still coming to terms with the slow shift away from the habits engendered by oral and manuscript culture, towards what Walter Ong calls ‘solo reading’: private, silent, individual reading.11 The move had powerful advantages. Writing of the Romantic period is filled with images of such solo reading, often linked to sensuously imagined spaces. John Clare, for example, is fascinated by the ways in which birds’ nests might be snugly lined—​‘blackbirds lining them with grass | And thrushes theirs with dung’ (‘Childhood’, lines 57–​8)—​and in ‘A Poets Wish’ he leaves us in no doubt what he wants his own nest, ‘a little garret warm & high’, to be lined with: With all my Friends encircl’d round In golden letters richly bound (lines 29–​30).12

7 

Lyrical Ballads, 177. Lyrical Ballads, 177. 9  Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–​1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 119–​20. 10  Quoted in Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 120. 11  Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), 131. See also Lucy Newlyn’s discussion of Romantic reading practices in Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 333–​7 1. 12  John Clare, Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 115; The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804–​1822, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), ii. 490. 8 

Romantic Readers   481 When Thomas De Quincey asks us to partake in his opium visions, he entices the reader into a ‘room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than seven and a-​half feet high’ which is ‘populous with books’: a beautifully imagined womb-​like space of warmth and comfort.13 ‘You are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader!’, declares Charles Lamb as Elia in ‘The Two Races of Men’, as he similarly extends an invitation to look over his shelves.14 Solo readers ourselves, we are invited to share this private reading moment. But this Romantic ideal can also become an oppressive nightmare. There may be another reason why Clare describes his books as ‘Friends’ and why De Quincey and Lamb invite the reader to join them in their libraries: solitary reading is often associated with danger. A dramatic example is offered by the tailor and political activist Francis Place, whose personal library at the back of his shop in Charing Cross numbered more than a thousand volumes. Despite his pride in his books, he relates fears that his reading might be viewed as ‘an abominable offence in a tailor’, losing him custom and attracting opprobrium. These pressures manifest themselves in a terrifying nightmare in which he dreamt of going into his library and finding it disarranged: ‘stooping down to pick up a book, I could not rise again, something pressed me down and kept my face near the floor. I soon ascertained that it was an immense hand which covered the back of my head and shoulders, the fingers spread over me’.15 Place’s giant hand is a powerful image of anxieties associated with working-​class reading—​anxieties which Clare shared to some extent, since, despite his voracious reading habits, he was always ‘mindful that seeming to be unlettered was part of his appeal’.16 Yet the classically educated De Quincey was also subject to nightmares associated with private reading. His snug book-​room could, once refracted through a quart of ruby-​coloured laudanum, become an endless Piranesi sequence of ‘gothic Halls’ and tormenting staircases, symbols of the difficult interpretative maze facing the Romantic reader. And the same issue of the London Magazine which opens with ‘Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater’ includes, a few pages on, Lamb’s essay ‘Witches and other Night Fears’, which portrays the terror of the child Elia alone in his room, a prey to despair after looking at a picture in Stackhouse’s History of the Bible: ‘The feeling about for a friendly arm—​the hoping for a familiar voice—​when they wake screaming—​and find none to soothe them’.17 Elia claims that such childhood fears would have arisen whether or not he had seen Stackhouse, but the motif of frightening solitary reading recurs in Mary Lamb’s children’s story ‘The Young Mahometan’, where a young reader is terrified by the thought of eternal damnation. De Quincey, similarly, recalls a nightmarish vision of childish

13 

Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-​Eater, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 60. 14  The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 6 vols (London: Methuen, 1912), ii. 29. 15  The Autobiography of Francis Place 1771–​1854, ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 223, 276. 16  Mina Gorji, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 32. 17  [Charles Lamb], ‘Witches, and other Night-​fears’, London Magazine 4 (1821), 384–​8 (p. 386).

482   Felicity James reading appetites running wild. Fearing that he may accidentally have ordered thousands upon thousands of books, he imagines himself unable to stop the flow, as a procession of booksellers’ carts and wagons inexorably advance: each in turn would present its rear, deliver its cargo of volumes, by shooting them, like a load of coals, on the lawn . . . Then the impossibility of even asking the servants to cover with sheets, or counterpanes, or table-​cloths, such a mountainous, such a ‘star-​y-​pointing’ record of my past offences, lying in so conspicuous a situation!18

Here, the sensual indulgence of private reading has become publically, embarrassingly exposed. The ‘mountainous’, ‘conspicuous’ offences which are the natural consequence of his bibliomaniac greed cannot be concealed. Moreover, these scatological heaps are ‘star-​y-​pointing’, an incongruous use of Milton’s words on Shakespeare.19 De Quincey is at once laying claim to the words of Wordsworth’s ‘dead men’, and feeling a certain amount of guilt about so doing, physically oppressed, like Francis Place in his library, by the weight of his own reading. There is also a hint of authorial consciousness here about the eventual end to which outmoded books might be put in the period, co-​opted for the ‘culinary or post-​culinary conveniences’ of their owners, as Coleridge puts it, ruefully thinking about the fate of The Friend, and imagining that it might first have been used to wrap food or clean dishes, and then as toilet paper.20 This was no exaggeration: book historians confirm that unwanted books in this period were also routinely sent off ‘to be shredded and spread on the fields along with the “night soil” of the cities’.21 Romantic readers, then, might be beset by as many anxieties as Romantic writers in negotiating print culture. Yet the examples above also highlight some problems we ourselves might face when studying Romantic reading practice. The compelling images put forwards by canonical authors such as Wordsworth can often distort our perspective on the period; we need to look beyond what the Romantics themselves tell us about reading in order to situate their anxieties. What was actually being read in the ‘age of books’? Who was reading, and how were the books produced and sold? Rather than focusing on the solitary author, Romantic scholarship now encompasses the broader landscape of book-​making and book-​buying. ‘One of the favourite “facts” of literary history’, Kathryn Sutherland comments, records that the democratization of literature is signalled in the year 1800 with the publication of the revolutionary ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads. But the popular imagination of the age, as recorded in its radical journalism, tells a different story: that the 18 

De Quincey, Confessions, 134–​5. ‘On Shakespeare’, line 4, in John Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson, 2007), 126. 20  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 176. 21  William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 241. 19 

Romantic Readers   483 year 1800 signals the democratization of literature because it saw the building of the first hand-​operated iron-​frame printing-​press.22

Sutherland’s remark is characteristic of recent critical approaches which emphasize the material contexts of print and the book trade (see Paul Keen, Chapter 28 in this volume). Scholars have also sought to gather and analyse data about book circulation, individual and collective reading, and practices associated with reading, such as marginalia. ‘How can we recapture the mental processes by which readers appropriated texts?’ asks Robert Darnton; recent research such as Heather Jackson’s survey of Romantic-​era annotations sets out to answer this question.23 Jackson’s patient analysis of thousands of scribbles, notes, underlining and cross-​referencing helps to build up a picture of readerly involvement with books:  reference, conversation, debate with texts and with other readers. Similarly, Stephen Colclough’s examination of a diary kept by fifteen-​year-​old Sheffield apprentice Joseph Hunter in 1797–​8 gives a vivid portrait of ‘mental processes’ shaped by reading: Hunter’s ‘account of the books which I read’ affords an insight into both his literary development and his growing ‘jacobinical’ consciousness.24 The experiences of an individual such as Hunter as he visits circulating libraries and book societies, bargains with ‘Book John’ in the marketplace, and borrows and comments on novels, poetry, handbills, and political texts, shed valuable light on the reading practice of the ‘middle and lower classes of society’ of whom Wordsworth spoke, and allow us to understand the wider reading scene around ‘Expostulation and Reply’.25 One immediately noticeable element of Hunter’s journal is the scarcity of his new book purchases. In the first six months of 1798, for instance, despite extensive reading from different sources, he bought only two new titles, after careful negotiation with his guardian. Like many readers of the period, Hunter simply ‘did not have the freedom to purchase new books with his own money’.26 Book prices, as this reminds us, were a key factor in the demography of readership, highlighted in Richard Altick’s pioneering study and in more recent work such as that of Colclough, Erickson, and St Clair.27 Despite widespread comments about the new mania for reading, books remained beyond the purchasing power of many people; essentially, they were a luxury item. In the Monthly 22  Kathryn Sutherland, ‘ “Events . . . have made us a world of readers”: Reader Relations 1780–​1830’, in David Pirie (ed.), The Penguin History of Literature, vol. 5: The Romantic Period (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 1. 23  Robert Darnton, ‘Seven Bad Reasons Not to Study Manuscripts’, Harvard Library Bulletin 4 (1993), 37–​42; quoted in H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), xi. 24  Stephen M. Colclough, ‘Procuring Books and Consuming Texts: The Reading Experience of a Sheffield Apprentice, 1798’, Book History 3 (2000), 21–​44 (pp. 22, 33). 25  ‘Advertisement’ (1798), Lyrical Ballads, 47. 26  Colclough, ‘Procuring Books and Consuming Texts’, 25. 27  Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–​1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). See also Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and St Clair, The Reading Nation.

484   Felicity James Magazine for October 1798, for example, Lyrical Ballads was advertised alongside a large range of ‘New Publications’ in the same month—​art and antiquarian titles; medical, theological, and political texts; works on geography, law, and history; as well as poetry, plays, and novels. This testifies to the varied interests of the intellectual audience of the Monthly Magazine, but also shows that they would have needed to be well-​off to have purchased copies of most books advertised. Lyrical Ballads cost five shillings on publication, at a time when a labourer’s day rates in the winter of 1798 have been estimated at seventeen pence.28 It is listed alongside Mary Pilkington’s four-​volume Gothic romance, The Subterranean Cavern, costing fourteen shillings, and Coombe Ellen, a poem, written in Radnorshire, September 1798, by William Bowles, a mere two shillings, but amounting to only twenty-​seven pages. Illustrated or luxury editions could be considerably more expensive, rising to over a guinea; moreover, a book, usually published in paper wrappers or in cardboard, would need to be bound at additional expense. Wordsworth complained in 1802 that quartos and octavos were the province of gentlemen readers, ‘persons of fortune, professional men, ladies persons who can afford to buy or can easily procure books of half a guinea price, hot-​pressed, and printed on superfine paper’.29 Yet Wordsworth himself would enter the luxury goods market in 1814 with the publication of The Excursion, costing £2 2s, or £2 5s bound; as William St Clair comments, ‘he did not number many leech gatherers among his readers’.30 Meanwhile, against the harsh economic backdrop of the early 1800s, the cost of all new books rose. The average price of the novels listed in the Monthly for October 1798 was around eight shillings, but by October 1815 it was around seventeen shillings. Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) cost eighteen shillings; Emma (1816) twenty-​one shillings. Little surprise, then, that Austen could comment on a proposed second edition of Mansfield Park that ‘People are more ready to borrow & praise, than to buy—​which I cannot wonder at.’31 Given these large costs, how could readers get access to literature? Borrowing was one option, from book clubs, book societies, or different types of library; there was also a brisk trade in second-​hand and remaindered books in the period. The change in copyright law in 1774 meant that more cheap reprints became available, and periodicals reprinted extracts and original literature.32 However, despite this new availability, there were still significant difficulties and tensions involved in procuring books, which might be heightened depending on the social class and gender of the reader, and the type of book. A good illustration of this is the contrast between subscription and circulating libraries. Although similar in some respects, these two types of lending institution were

28 

Gregory Clark, ‘Farm Wages and Living Standards in the Industrial Revolution: England, 1670–​ 1869’, Economic History Review 54.3 (2001), 477–​505 (p. 503). 29  The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 1: The Early Years 1787–​1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 355. 30  St Clair, Reading Nation, 202. 31  Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 299. 32  For the impact of periodicals, see Jon P. Klancher, The Making of Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 18–​46.

Romantic Readers   485 perceived to have different social functions and serve different clienteles, differences which can shed important light on approaches to reading in the Romantic period. Subscription libraries were often associated with the elite, or would-​be elite, and could attract titled subscribers as well as landowners and clergymen and, in urban centres, merchants and manufacturers. Among the 456 subscribers to the Public Library in Norwich in 1792, for example, there were fifty-​six clergy, two peers, and six baronets. The Liverpool Library, by contrast, attracted large numbers of professional and commercial subscribers, its social pretensions signalled by the imposing neoclassical building it constructed for itself in 1800, ‘The Lyceum’, by which time it had become so popular that it was forced to cap its membership at 893.33 The physical appearance of the Lyceum, with its grand, pillared portico, underlines the idea that subscribing to a library could be, in David Allan’s words, a marker ‘of one’s elevated position, one’s respectability, and, in some contexts, one’s enlightened credentials’.34 More humble subscription libraries, such as the Wanlockhead Miners’ Library, founded in 1756 to provide reading matter for the lead-​miners in this remote outpost in the Lowther Hills, also served a distinct social purpose. Although ostensibly an example of intellectual aspiration among the working classes, the library originated as a paternalistic reform backed by the mine-​owners, who sought to promote morality and civic values among a community which had previously had a reputation for violent behaviour, and who tried to exert strict control over its administration.35 Wanlockhead was an early forerunner of several such working-​class institutions in the nineteenth century. Alongside the Liverpool Lyceum, for example, the Liverpool Mechanics’ and Apprentices’ Library was established in July 1823, open daily during the ‘dinner hours of the working classes’. Like Wanlockhead, it emphasized the wider benefits of the ‘intellectual improvement’ it offered its readers.36 Both working-​ class subscription libraries and their wealthier counterparts promised an increase in social, as well as intellectual, capital. Circulating libraries had a different reputation, and it is harder to reconstruct their audiences, which varied greatly across place and time. In prosperous spa towns such as Bath and Cheltenham, large circulating libraries might attract visiting dignitaries and naval or military officers, but smaller commercial enterprises in places such as Nottingham or Knaresborough which charged less—​an annual rate sometimes as low as eight shillings—​would have been accessible to artisans and some working people. The radical poet and lecturer John Thelwall—​a guest of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the summer of 1797, and a shadowy, unacknowledged presence in Lyrical Ballads—​ remembered educating himself as a young shop assistant through ‘such books as the neighbouring circulating library could furnish’. He hastily points out that this did not

33  See David Allan, A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (London: British Library, 2008), 62–​70. 34 Allan, Nation of Readers, 70. 35  See John C. Crawford and Stuart James, The Society for Purchasing Books in Wanlockhead 1756–​1979 (Glasgow: Scottish Library Association, 1981), 1–​2. 36 Allan, Nation of Readers, 199.

486   Felicity James

Fig. 31.1  Card issued by Hookham’s Circulating Library (c.1800). Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection: Circulating Libraries 1 (71c).

include novels, but plays, poetry, and history, ‘moral philosophy, metaphysics, and even divinity’.37 Circulating libraries could therefore have a strong educational function, contributing to social mobility. They might also enable other forms of sociability. John Trusler’s The London Adviser and Guide, in its 1790 edition, highlights the accessibility of circulating libraries owned by Hookham, Bell, Vernon, and Boozey as part of a discussion of how a ‘man may live like a gentleman in London at a very easy rate’.38 Hookham’s collection of ‘foreign books’ appears side by side with recommendations for other forms of gentlemanly entertainment, including concerts, debating societies, and a fish dinner at the Gun Tavern, Billingsgate. The labels used by Hookham’s confirm that the borrowing of books might run alongside the purchase of ‘tickets for the opera, theatres, concerts etc’. (Fig. 31.1).

37  John Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, With Memoirs of the Life of the Author, 2nd edn (London, 1801), vii. 38  John Trusler, The London Adviser and Guide, 2nd edn (London, 1790), 131–​4. For more information on Hookham’s, a family business across several generations which incorporated bookselling and stationery, and went on to publish Shelley and Peacock, see Hilda M. Hamlyn, ‘Eighteenth-​century Circulating Libraries in England’, The Library 1 (1946), 197–​222.

Romantic Readers   487 The social and cultural function of circulating libraries is also sharply observed by Jane Austen. The subscription list of Mrs Whitby’s library in the unfinished novel Sanditon (1817), for instance, gives a valuable, if disappointing, insight into the society the resort has managed to attract. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Lydia is alert to the flirtatious possibilities of Clarke’s library in Meryton, where Colonel Foster and Captain Carter are often to be seen. Lydia’s adventures find a parallel in the erotic potential which the Halifax circulating library afforded Anne Lister, who not only used it as a serious resource for her reading, but also as a rendezvous for meetings with love interests such as Maria Browne. If they were reading, rather than flirting, what were the clientele of such libraries borrowing? Book societies and subscription libraries often prided themselves on the educational and cultural irreproachability of their holdings. In 1783, for example, the Wanlockhead Miners’ Library contained 116 books, including 35 religious texts and 25 history books, as well as fiction, periodicals, literature, and biography—​it would later acquire works on geography, science and technology, and politics. By 1814, the catalogue for the Liverpool Library at the Lyceum included thousands of volumes, on topics as far-​ ranging as history and natural history, biography, religion, astronomy, law, education, language, poetry, and classics.39 Circulating libraries were widely perceived as having a different focus. The stereotypical contrast between the two is nicely illustrated by a letter to the Monthly Magazine in May 1799 which draws attention to the commercial pressures of a circulating library in which ‘poison . . . lurks almost invariably’. By contrast, a subscription library such as Wanlockhead, reports the correspondent, has ensured the miners ‘sources of rational and manly entertainment, and distinguished them by their general knowledge; skill in their particular occupation; urbanity, public spirit and sobriety’.40 Against this idealized image of sober manly rationality, we might set Austen’s satirical portrait of a typical circulating library consumer: Isabella Thorpe with her breathless list of ‘horrid’ novels in Northanger Abbey (1818): ‘Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries.’41 Isabella’s list reminds us why circulating libraries, in particular, could arouse controversy: they were closely tied to anxieties surrounding the novel, particularly its seductive attraction for female readers. Arguments about the novel and its ill effects had been rumbling throughout the eighteenth century, but found new directions in the Romantic period as the genre evolved into what some believed ever more dubious forms, hence Wordsworth’s fulmination against the fashion for ‘frantic novels’ in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.42 Austen’s passionate defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey, first drafted in the 1790s, participates in the same topical debate. Mocking the ‘affected indifference, or momentary shame’ of the female reader caught out with a novel, Austen parodies 39 

Catalogue of the Liverpool Library: At the Lyceum, Bold-​street (Liverpool, 1814). Monthly Magazine 46 (May 1799), 448–​9. 41  Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25. 42  Lyrical Ballads, 177. 40 

488   Felicity James contemporary responses to the genre:  ‘I am no novel-​reader—​I seldom look into novels—​Do not imagine that I often read novels.’43 This is almost a direct echo of a letter in the Monthly Magazine for November 1797 which also mocks the ‘sagacious antipathy’ of those prejudiced against the genre, who ‘repeat, with self-​complacent emphasis, “I never read novels.—​I dare say the book may have a vast deal of merit; but it’s a novel, and I make it a rule never to read novels.” ’44 Both Austen and the Monthly Magazine correspondent are satirizing the contemporary vogue for attacking the genre together with female library subscribers, ladies who (as the Gentleman’s Magazine put it) were ‘not engaged in more useful, or capable of more rational, employment’ and might be misled by the ‘ridiculous chimeras’ offered by circulating libraries.45 Thomas Gisborne, in his Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), had no doubt that the baneful effects of ‘a passion for reading novels’ was linked to the ways in which ‘the produce of the book-​ club, and the contents of the circulating library are devoured with indiscriminate and insatiable avidity’.46 If women had to be protected from this corrupt genre, so too did the lower classes. The Liverpool Mechanics’ and Apprentices’ Library took care to distance itself from the ‘deadly opiates’ of novels, ‘in the classes of mechanics and apprentices more fatal than the deadly nightshade’.47 To some extent, this association between the circulating library and the novel was justified. The Use of Circulating Libraries Considered, a practical guide published in London in 1797, gives detailed instructions for setting up a circulating library of 1,500 volumes, to include 1,050 novels and 130 romances, against 60 volumes of history and 60 of biography. Subscription libraries, despite their rhetoric of usefulness and education, often also quietly supplied their members with a range of novels. Even the Wanlockhead Miners’ Library contained almost 20 per cent fiction (21 out of 116 titles) in 1783. The Liverpool Lyceum Library also offered plenty of choice, including Minerva Press titles such as Mysterious Wife and Roche’s Trecothick Bower (1814) and a full range of Radcliffe novels—​as well as Sense and Sensibility (1811). Meanwhile, Austen herself, as one might expect from her own experience, is even-​handed in her treatment of library use. Whereas Isabella’s shallow Gothic dabblings are gently mocked, Fanny Price’s subscription to a Portsmouth circulating library allows her not to indulge in thrilling novels, but to educate her sister in biography and poetry. Fanny’s delight in becoming a subscriber—​‘amazed at being anything in propria persona . . . to be a renter, a chuser of books!’—​reminds us that circulating libraries might represent a rare occasion for women to act autonomously, for pleasure or for intellectual improvement, and explains why they were seen as particularly attractive to female customers.48 Jacqueline Pearson points out that the library was ‘one of the few quasi-​public places’ respectable women 43 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 23–​4. 44 

Monthly Magazine 24 (Nov. 1797), 347–​8. ‘On Reading Novels’, Gentleman’s Magazine 82 (Nov. 1797), 911–​12. 46  Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London, 1797), 217. 47  Henry Smithers, Liverpool, its Commerce, Statistics, and Institutions (Liverpool, 1825), 309. 48  Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley and Jane Stabler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 313. 45 

Romantic Readers   489

Fig. 31.2  Interior of the premises of Messrs Lackington, Allen & Co, ‘The Temple of the Muses’, Finsbury Square. From Ackermann’s Repository of Arts 4 (1809), plate 17. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection: London Booktrade L.

could frequent; furthermore, circulating libraries offered an important source of income for female novelists, who in turn portrayed libraries in intriguing ways.49 Mary Robinson, for example, shows women supporting one another through and within the circulating library in The Natural Daughter (1799). While certainly not exclusively a feminine domain, the circulating library was deeply important both for women readers and women writers in the period. If a reader could not afford a library subscription, cheap second-​hand books were also readily available: as the testimonies of writers as various as John Clare and James Lackington show, these could be an important source of literature and self-​education for working-​class readers. Lackington was one of the period’s most successful booksellers, his ‘Temple of the Muses’ (Fig. 31.2) was a vast book emporium on Finsbury Square, complete with lounging rooms and a large glass dome. It was piled high with remaindered and second-​hand books—​Lackington pioneered the remainder technique—​and his cash-​only policy and aggressive marketing ensured a rapid turnover.50 The young John Keats came here to browse, and Nicholas Roe detects an echo 49 

Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–​1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161, 162–​9. 50  See Sophie Bankes, ‘James Lackington (1746–​1815): Reading and Personal Development’, in Katie Halsey and W. R. Owens (eds), The History of Reading, vol. 2: Evidence from the British Isles, 1750–​1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). For the remainder trade and Lackington’s place in it, see also

490   Felicity James of his childhood fascination with its ‘radiant dome’ in Moneta’s ‘domed monument’ in the ‘The Fall of Hyperion’.51 It was here, too, that the young shop-​assistants John Taylor and James Augustus Hessey met. Taylor and Hessey would go on to found one of the period’s leading publishing houses; they were responsible for the London Magazine, and supported and encouraged Keats and Clare, among many others. Spurred by his conversion to Methodism as an apprentice, Lackington educated himself firstly through devotional literature, a reflection of John Wesley’s emphasis on reading and writing as central to religious practice (Dissent, especially Methodism, encouraged such working-​class auto-​didacticism). Lackington then began to acquire more second-​hand books, including Homer and Epictetus, and finally branched out into free-​thinking and Deist texts, shaking his original faith—​to which he did, nevertheless, eventually return. While his capacious, gossipy memoirs can scarcely be taken as an accurate account of reading practice, they offer a fascinating example of reading used retrospectively to structure a life narrative, as Lackington narrates his emotional development through different phases in his book-​buying habits, eager to present himself primarily as a book-​lover rather than a bookseller. We might doubt his claims to have spent his Christmas dinner money on a second-​hand copy of Edward Young—​ ‘should we live fifty years longer, we shall have the Night Thoughts to feast upon’, he tells his wife, whose response is not recorded—​but his presentation of reading as a social and educational tool is clear.52 Books have made both Lackington’s fortune and his identity. Lackington’s memoirs at times overlap with John Clare’s more modest presentation of reading as having shaped his ‘Self-​Identity’.53 Clare’s autobiographical reminiscences are similarly structured by encounters with books: hearing an old shepherd reading aloud from a tattered family Bible; his father reciting ‘Love Triumphant Over Reason’ from John Pomfret’s Poems; getting snowed in with a classmate’s copy of Robinson Crusoe; hiding ‘in woods and dingles of thorns in the fields on Sundays’ to read sixpenny pamphlets and chapbooks, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Giant Killer; revelling in ‘cock robin babes in the wood mother hubbard & her cat &c &c’, which he saw as ‘real poetry in all its native simplicity’.54 Sometimes other poetry could filter down to him in unusual ways, as when his mother bought him a ‘fairing’ from Deeping May Fair, ‘a picturd pocket hankerchief . . . on which was a picture of Chatterton and his Verses on Resignation’.55 A weaver—​whose own preference was for the hymns of Wesley—​showed him a ragged Thomson’s Seasons, which ‘made my heart

James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, ‘Reassessing the Reputation of Thomas Tegg, London Publisher, 1776-​1846’, Book History 3 (2000), 45–​60. 51 

Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 346, 168.

52 Lackington, Memoirs, 215–​6. 53 

The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 239. John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 33, 13, 5, 13, 57. 55  Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, 83. 54 

Romantic Readers   491 twitter with joy’ and sent Clare off to buy his own copy. In his memoirs he presents his return from the Stamford booksellers as an epochal moment, when so as not to let any body see me reading on the road of a working day I clumb over the wall into Burghly Park and nestled in a lawn at the wall side . . . what with reading the book and beholding the beautys of artful nature in the park I got into a strain of descriptive ryhming on my journey home this was ‘the morning walk’ the first thing I committed to paper.56

While we need to be aware of the self-​fashioning at work in Clare’s account, as well as its subsequent shaping by editors from John Taylor onwards, the ways in which he encounters literature—​from oral culture to the old stories sold by pedlars and even handkerchiefs—​give a vivid sense of the varied reading culture of the working classes, both in terms of what he himself read and the glimpses of others around him reading. As Stephen Colclough notes, Clare reveals ‘a diversity of different reading communities and the overlapping of different competencies, or types of literacy’.57 He also bears witness to larger movements in book history, specifically copyright laws. Clare’s joyful experience with his shilling text of Thomson in Burghley Park directly reflects the revolutionary change in book distribution and marketing brought about by the lifting of perpetual copyright restrictions in 1774, a shift analysed in detail by Michael Gamer in Chapter 29 in this volume (Thomson’s Seasons looms large in his account). This brought about an immediate surge in cheap reprints, as older texts entered the public domain: poets such as Thomson and Young, and eighteenth-​century novelists such as Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. This is the background against which Lackington notes, in 1792, that country people and farmers no longer beguiled winter evenings by telling ghost stories but instead by reading aloud:  ‘you may see Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and other entertaining books stuck up on their bacon racks’.58 However, this change was short-​ lived, and it imposed its own limitations on Romantic reading practices. In 1808, the statutory copyright period was extended from fourteen to twenty-​eight years, and in 1842 a new Copyright Act decreed that copyright should last either for the author’s lifetime and seven years thereafter, or for forty-​two years after publication, whichever was longer. Indeed, Wordsworth himself campaigned ferociously for the extension of copyright, ideally for sixty years or longer, struggling to reconcile literary immortality and economic imperatives with a ‘desperation more nearly eschatological than financial’.59 Copyright restrictions, while they helped to ensure authorial incomes, meant that an ‘old canon’ of eighteenth-​century authors, in St Clair’s words, dominated the Romantic market: Clare, a potentially ideal ‘rustic’ reader 56 

Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, 9. Stephen Colclough, Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–​1870 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 155. 58 Lackington, Memoirs, 386–​7. 59  Susan Eilenberg, ‘Mortal Pages: Wordsworth and the Reform of Copyright’, English Literary History 56.2 (1989), 351–​74 (p. 354). 57 

492   Felicity James for Lyrical Ballads, was instead reading Thomson in his rural boyhood, before his entry into the literary marketplace enabled him to read more widely. With the exception of editions pirated by radical publishers of works such as Shelley’s Queen Mab and Byron’s Don Juan, many Romantic writers remained inaccessible for large numbers of poorer readers. Robert Story, for example, an early ​nineteenth-​century Northumberland shepherd-​poet, recalled in his memoirs lamenting the lack of contemporary poets just at the time when ‘Wordsworth had produced his “Lyrical Ballads” . . . the gales of Britain were alive with harmony, but the sound was turned aside by the mountains that sheltered my cottage’—​and by the rules which governed the book trade.60 Both Jonathan Rose and William St Clair have traced the effects of copyright legislation on readerly practice through the nineteenth century. Despite anthologization of individual poems, and publication in periodicals, it was not until the later Victorian and Edwardian periods that key Romantic volumes became widely accessible.61 Rose records the eventual impact on new generations of poorer readers, such as the early twentieth-​century servant-​girl Dorothy Burnham who recalled turning Keats’s poem into ‘La Belly Dame Sans Murky’ in her ‘back street urchin accents’, but who was nevertheless entranced by its escapist power.62 Yet the fact that they eventually did reach such audiences demonstrates the way in which the Romantic desire to control or restrict reading existed alongside a recognition of the possibilities afforded by new reading practices. For all the emphasis in its Preface on the way in which the reader might be directed, Lyrical Ballads is alert to the fluidities of multiple interpretations. The examples with which I began, ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’, nicely illustrate Wordsworth’s anxieties as he hovers between instructing and trusting the reader, remaining in control, or allowing the reader free rein. The changing position of the poems in the collection shows Wordsworth’s desire to shape and direct the reader’s response, even if it meant denigrating his co-​author’s work: in the 1800 edition, ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ is banished from the leading position it had occupied in 1798 to the end of the first volume, where it is accompanied by Wordsworth’s notorious explanation of the poem’s ‘great defects’. Yet the poems themselves encourage interpretative ambiguity, offering both a challenge and a form of complicity with the reader, who must negotiate between the types of leaves mentioned—​natural and literary—​and take a decision about whether to read on. This is characteristic of the ways in which the poems which follow pose deliberate puzzles to the reader, sometimes through their indeterminacy, sometimes through their depictions of misconception or over-​interpretation. The sequence known as the ‘Lucy poems’, for instance, gain their haunting power from their refusal to explain their ‘Strange fits of passion’, while the obtuse narrators of ‘We are Seven’ or ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ are 60 

Robert Story, Love and Literature; Being the Reminiscences, Literary Opinions, and Fugitive Pieces of a Poet in Humble Life (London, 1842), 132. See also Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 118. 61  St Clair, Reading Nation, 122–​39. 62 Rose, Intellectual Life of Working Classes, 24.

Romantic Readers   493 mocked for their insistence on imposing particular meanings onto the words of children. The overall effect is to prompt the reader into thinking about the responsibilities and challenges of interpretation. The success of Wordsworth’s strategy can be gauged by the responses of readers such as Charles Lamb or Hazlitt, who was the original inspiration for ‘Expostulation and Reply’. Lamb, receiving his copy of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in January 1801, sent a letter to Wordsworth which provides an excellent example of the Romantic reader answering back. Moved by the poems, Lamb nevertheless criticizes Wordsworth’s tendency towards instruction: An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think upon this subject . . . There is implied an unwritten compact between Author and reader; I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it.63

Wordsworth’s Preface he saw as a ‘prose apology’ which associated a ‘diminishing idea with the Poems which follow’. Yet he demonstrates his appreciation of the poems themselves by going on to present his own imaginative response in the conclusion of the letter, a Wordsworthian reading of his ‘intense local attachments’ to London: ‘the crowds, the very dirt & mud, the Sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old Book stalls, parsons cheap’ning books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself, a pantomime and a masquerade’.64 The seeds of the Elia essays lie in this passionate defence of local attachment: the response of a reader who is at once frustrated and inspired. Similarly, Hazlitt’s readings of Lyrical Ballads resonate through his essays, despite his quarrels with its authors. ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ is both a repudiation of Wordsworth and Coleridge and a statement of profound sympathy with their early aims. Above all, it is a memoir of reading: of the pleasure of sitting up all night with ‘Paul and Virginia’ in a Tewkesbury inn, of finding ‘a little worn-​out copy of the Seasons, lying in a window-​seat’, and of reading Lyrical Ballads in manuscript, dipping into them in a room in Alfoxden with ‘great satisfaction, and with the faith of a novice’.65 Hazlitt’s faith in Wordsworth and Coleridge would fade, but he retains the sharp excitement of that first ‘sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry’, and his faith in reading itself remains undimmed. Both Lamb and Hazlitt, as they transmute rural poetry into urban prose, offer us an image of the Romantic reader in action:  resisting, challenging, imaginatively responding. They remind us that the reader—​whether borrowing from circulating libraries, browsing in second-​hand bookshops, reading poems from handkerchiefs, or sitting beside Esthwaite Lake with a closed volume—​is as valuable and complex a subject of enquiry as the Romantic text itself, a mutual dependence which contemporary scholarship has come finally to recognize. 63  The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin Marrs, Jr, 3 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975–​8), i. 265–​6. 64  Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, i. 267. 65  The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), xvii. 120, 116.

494   Felicity James

Further Reading Allan, David, A Nation of Readers. The Lending Library in Georgian England (London: British Library, 2008). Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–​1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). Colclough, Stephen, Consuming Texts:  Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–​ 1870 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Deegan, Marilyn, and Kathryn Sutherland, Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). De Ritter, Richard, Imagining Women Readers, 1789–​1820: Well-​Regulated Minds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Jackson, H. J., Romantic Readers:  The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2005). Klancher, Jon P., The Making of Reading Audiences, 1790–​1832 (Wisconsin:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Newlyn, Lucy, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Pearson, Jacqueline, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–​ 1835:  A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Raven, James, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–​1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Raven, James, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Richardson, Alan, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–​ 1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004). Sutherland, Kathryn, ‘ “Events . . . have made us a world of readers”: Reader Relations 1780–​ 1830’, in David Pirie (ed.), The Penguin History of Literature, vol. 5: The Romantic Period (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).

Chapter 32

Non-​P ubli c at i on Lynda Pratt

On 1 September 1798, the Anti-​Jacobin Review and Magazine published James Gillray’s A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism, a cartoon depicting the goddess ‘Truth’ destroying the monstrous productions of ‘Jacobinism’ in the form of pamphlets labelled ‘Libels’, ‘Defamation’, ‘Sedition’, ‘Ignorance’, ‘Anarchy’, ‘Atheism’, and ‘Abuse’ (Fig. 32.1). Though intended as political satire, Gillray’s vision of a society in which the products of the printing press were disturbingly ubiquitous finds many echoes in modern literary scholarship, which portrays the Romantic period as dominated and at times overwhelmed by a massive growth in the publishing of books, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines, made possible in part by technological advances in printing and paper-​making and by the continued expansion of the reading public. One consequence of this emphasis on print culture is that other equally dynamic aspects of the period’s literary production have often been overlooked. Only recently have critics begun to question the supremacy of print and investigate the roles played by manuscripts and manuscript culture. D. F. McKenzie, for example, has drawn attention to those writers for whom ‘printing was too impersonal, too public, too fixed’,1 and Michelle Levy has exposed as false the ‘assumption that the late-​eighteenth century print avalanche destroyed and supplanted earlier forms of literary dissemination’. Not only, Levy argues, did manuscript culture ‘flourish even in an age of intensified print production’, it also exerted a ‘vital influence’ on Romantic literary culture as whole.2 Yet manuscripts themselves are only one aspect of what might be termed the avoidance—​short-​or long-​term—​of print. This chapter will argue that the presence, and persistence, of manuscript culture is part of a much wider tendency in Romantic period culture: that of non-​publication.

1 

D. F. McKenzie, ‘Speech—​Manuscript—​Print’, in his Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S. J. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 247. 2  Michelle Levy, ‘Austen’s Manuscripts and the Publicity of Print’, English Literary History 77.4 (2010), 1015–​40 (pp. 1015–​16).

496   Lynda Pratt

Fig. 32.1  James Gillray, A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism. Frontispiece to Anti-​Jacobin Review and Magazine (1 Sept. 1798). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Though often disregarded, the prevalence of manuscript in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a statistical fact. Many more manuscripts were written than books were published. As William St Clair notes, print culture was the tip of a very large iceberg composed mainly of the non-​printed: most ‘manuscripts were turned down’ by publishers, with John Murray rejecting 700 poetry manuscripts per year by 1817.3 Even within the select domains of print, however, manuscripts—​or at least the idea of manuscripts—​retained a formidable presence. Influential collections such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–​3) drew extensively on manuscript sources. Editors and publishers capitalized on the value of previously unpublished writings by eminent contemporaries, incorporating them into marketing strategies for new works. The title page of Joanna Baillie’s edited anthology A Collection of Poems (1823) advertised its contents as ‘Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors’ and included new poems by Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth, amongst others. Writers themselves remained alert to the potential value 3 

William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 159.

Non-Publication   497 and interest of manuscripts. Ann Yearsley’s version of the legend of the man in the iron mask, The Royal Captives: A Fragment of Secret History (1795), proclaimed it was ‘Copied from an Old Manuscript’. In turn, debates over the authenticity (or lack of authenticity) of Ossian and Rowley’s works and of the ‘Shakespearian’ manuscripts ‘discovered’ by William Henry Ireland were focused on the status of the ‘original’ manuscripts from which they purported to derive. The cultural authority ascribed by Romantic authors and readers to handwritten pages that had at least the appearance of antiquity was encapsulated by Edward Williams, the radical poet and document-​forger also known as Iolo Morganwg: ‘If a manuscript has a little of the mould of age on it, we admit blindly more of what it says as truth than becomes a wise man.’4 Manuscripts did not just have to be old. They were not just restricted to antiquarian researches and did not just function as means of connecting the present with the past. Contemporary manuscripts also had their usefulness and power. Romantic-​period books, newspapers, and magazines published accounts of recent events at home and abroad derived from what they claimed to be original manuscript sources, including journals and letters written by first-​ hand witnesses. For example, readers interested in the fate of the French royal family had access to volumes such as The Trial of Marie Antoinette . . . Compiled from a Manuscript sent from Paris (1794) and A Journal of Occurrences at the Temple during the Confinement of Louis XVI, King of France, by M. Cléry, the King’s Valet-​de-​Chambre. Translated from the Original Manuscript (1798). Those interested in more local events could read pamphlets such as an Extraordinary Case of Suicide (1797), which contained ‘an exact COPY OF THE MANUSCRIPT’ which an unidentified man had written on the walls of his Bristol lodgings before killing himself. Manuscripts could cater to extra-​European tastes as well. When writing his accounts of contemporary events in South America for the Edinburgh Annual Register, Robert Southey made use of his privileged access to a manuscript journal kept by the merchant Thomas Kinder, who had witnessed at first hand the revolution in Buenos Ayres in 1808–​10.5 However, whilst manuscripts were a means of circulating information, a politically turbulent age saw them as far from neutral. For British loyalists, they were objects of suspicion, their ‘private’ nature potentially subversive of both the public sphere and the public good. In 1798, David Rivers noted how dissenting communities had made and ‘industriously distributed’ copies of the prepublication manuscript of Paine’s Rights of Man ‘so that had it never appeared in print, it would have had a rapid circulation in a clandestine and private manner’.6 This was, Rivers made clear, not to be approved of, as the reproduction and distribution of manuscripts had the potential to

4 

Edward Williams, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 2 vols (London: J. Nichols for the author, 1794), ii. 221. See Mary-​Ann Constantine, The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). 5  For Southey’s account, drawn in part from Kinder’s unpublished journal, see Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1811 4.1 (1813), 395–​421. 6  David Rivers, Observations on the Political Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters (London: T. Burton, [1798?]), 35–​6, quoted in Anti-​Jacobin Review and Magazine 1 (July–​Dec. 1798), 632.

498   Lynda Pratt subvert government regulation of printed matter and thus to imperil the well-​being of the nation at a time of political crisis. Manuscripts also had a more intrinsic value. Writers themselves unsurprisingly placed great importance upon their own manuscripts. With an eye on posterity, they preserved, copied, and bound them, and weeded out those they felt to be unsuitable, consigning them to the flames. Fanny Burney, for example, burnt the manuscripts of her juvenile writings.7 On occasion, writers gifted their manuscripts to friends who, in turn, ascribed specific, even semi-​religious, value and significance to them. Southey wryly observed that Joseph Cottle, when presented with the manuscript of his epic Joan of Arc, which Cottle had published, valued it ‘as much as a Monk does the parings of his tutelary Saints great toe nail’.8 As the example of Cottle shows, manuscripts played important roles in enforcing and reinforcing familial, social, and cultural networks and ties. Manuscripts of unpublished writings (as well as of those never intended for publication) were often passed around or otherwise made available to carefully chosen audiences. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden journal was read by her brother William and by Coleridge, and the accounts she kept of tours in Scotland and on the Continent were circulated to her close friends. In the late 1790s the unpublished draft of Southey’s Welsh–​American epic Madoc was left in the shop of his publisher, Cottle, where it was read by, amongst others, the lawyer and author James Losh. Many poems central to formulations of canonical Romanticism, including Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’, circulated in manuscript for years before their publication. Wordsworth’s Prelude, too, had a select prepublication audience, which included Coleridge and De Quincey. Coleridge, the addressee of The Prelude, responded to the unpublished thirteen-​book version by writing a poem. Published in 1817 under the title ‘To a Gentleman. Composed on the night after his recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind’, this poem had the odd distinction of appearing before the wider reading public some thirty-​three years before the work that had occasioned it.9 What might be described as ‘the network effect’ applied also to the actual process of manuscript production.10 Manuscripts could be the work of more than one person and did not just bear the marks of the author of a literary work. Percy Shelley made substantial additions and revisions to the manuscript draft of Frankenstein,11 and Wordsworth

7 

Levy, ‘Austen’s Manuscripts’, 1021. To Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 24 Feb.–​2 Mar. 1796, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part 1: 1791–​97, ed. Lynda Pratt, Romantic Circles Electronic Edition (2009), available at:  www.rc.umd.edu/​editions. 9  Written in Jan. 1807, published in S. T. Coleridge, Sibylline Leaves: A Collection of Poems (London: Rest Fenner, 1817). 10  For other examples, see Michelle Levy, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 11  For an appraisal of the evidence, see Charles E. Robinson, ‘Introduction’, Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley), The Original Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus: The Original Two-​Volume Novel of 1816–​ 1817 from the Bodleian Library Manuscripts, ed. Robinson (New York: Vintage Books, 2008). 8 

Non-Publication   499 regularly called on family members, including his wife and sister, to act as amanuenses. Albums kept by women of the Wordsworth and Southey families bear further witness to this. They contain numerous autograph contributions by the two poets and by members of their circle. Transcribing verse or prose onto a fresh page or into an album was, as Samantha Matthews has shown, a way of writing yourself into a literary and social network.12 It could be a fraught process. Wordsworth and Southey may have contributed regularly to albums owned by their family and friends, but they also complained repeatedly about the time and energy invested in such an activity. Manuscripts could reveal hierarchies and tensions, as much as synergies and common causes, within a group. Coleridge, for example, was in the 1790s an avid participant in manuscript exchange, making copies of his own and his friends’ verses and embedding them or enclosing them in letters to members of his social network. Yet, as David Fairer has observed, to be ‘a friend of Coleridge was to enter a powerful force field of someone for whom friendship was “an idea in process, changing with differing relationships” ’.13 What, then, appears on the surface to be a highly sociable act was laden with complexity. Coleridge frequently amended—​perhaps he considered it improved—​verses by others when transcribing in his own hand. In December 1794 he copied out a recent sonnet by Southey, which he sent to the latter ‘not so much to give you my corrections as for the pleasure it gives me’.14 This was not always well received. In 1796, Charles Lamb objected fiercely to Coleridge’s alterations to his sonnets. The first-​person possessive pronouns of Lamb’s response reassert his rights to his writing: ‘I love my sonnets because they are the reflected images of my own feelings at different times . . . I charge you, Col. spare my ewe lambs.’15 On other occasions, Coleridge amended the writings of earlier poets in order to make a point. For example, in a letter to Southey of 13 November 1795, written at a time when the collapse of the Pantisocracy project had severely strained their relationship, he rewrote lines from the fourth book of Paradise Lost, changing Milton’s whom I seduc’d With other promises and other vaunts Than to submit, boasting I could subdue Th’ Omnipotent.

12  Samantha Matthews, ‘Importunate Applications and Old Affections: Robert Southey’s Album Verses’, Romanticism 17.1 (2011), 77–​93. 13  David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–​1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 211; the citation is from Gurion Taussig, Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1789–​1804 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 18. 14  Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–​ 71), i. 146. 15  Charles Lamb to S. T. Coleridge, 8–​10 June 1796, The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, 1796–​1817, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr, 3 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975–​8), i. 20. See also Felicity James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

500   Lynda Pratt to: whom you seduc’d With other promises & other vaunts Than to repent, boasting you could subdue Temptation!16

The change of pronouns from the Miltonic ‘I’ to ‘you’ was directed at Southey, a swipe at what Coleridge saw as his chilling assertions of rectitude and false ideas of friendship. Even gifts to others of Coleridge’s own poems were framed by shifting interpersonal and literary relationships. In summer 1797 he copied out into two letters the recently composed ‘This Lime-​tree Bower My Prison’, which overtly—​lavishly, even—​celebrates his friendships with Charles Lamb and William and Dorothy Wordsworth. He sent it to Southey, with whom he had reconciled, and Charles Lloyd, whose relationship with Coleridge was fraught with tension and ambiguity. Coleridge was not unique, and was later to have the tables turned and suffer the emendation of his own writings by a member of his social network. Indeed, the poet-​publisher Joseph Cottle turned copying and altering his friends’ manuscripts, particularly their correspondence, into an activity bordering on obsession. This climaxed in one of the most controversial Romantic period biographies, Early Recollections, Chiefly Relating to the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1837), notorious for its cavalier treatment of the texts of letters sent by Coleridge and others to Cottle.17 Romantic period letters, journals, poems, novels, and albums are important indicators of an exuberant, if complex, manuscript culture. Yet they are more than this. They offer a route into a much wider, though neglected, aspect of Romanticism: the culture of non-​publication. It is a striking—​but odd—​fact that many writings since seen as manifestos or key products of British Romanticism were not published at the time they were written and therefore were not widely, if at all, accessible to Romantic-​period readers. The list is an impressive one. It includes, amongst others, Blake’s ‘Public Address’, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, Keats’s ‘Ode on Indolence’ and ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, and the countless statements on writing and the role of the writer found in letters and notebooks kept by individuals now seen as central to the period. This has important implications. We may not agree with The Athenaeum’s observation on the belated publication in 1839 of Shelley’s satirical drama Oedipus Tyrannus, or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, written nearly two decades earlier, that ‘Time has taken all the sting out of it’,18 but there is without doubt 16 Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book 4, lines 83–​6; Collected Letters of Coleridge, i. 170. 17 

Lynda Pratt, ‘ “Let Not Bristol Be Ashamed?”: Coleridge’s Afterlife in the Early Recollections of Joseph Cottle’, in James Vigus and Jane Wright (eds), Coleridge’s Afterlives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 18  Athenaeum 633 (14 Dec. 1839), 939. In fact, Oedipus Tyrannus had been published anonymously in 1820 at the time of the Queen Caroline crisis which it satirizes, but the publisher, James Johnston, threatened with prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, withdrew it after the sale of only seven copies.

Non-Publication   501 a major disjunction between our sense of literary history, and of what and who was significant, and that of late ​eighteenth-​and early ​nineteenth-​century audiences. Key to this disjunction is a culture of delayed, belated, or even non-​publication which ensured that Romantic-​period literary production looked very different to, and was experienced differently by, those who were alive at the  time. Non-​publication took many forms, including the suppression of completed writings, bibliophobia (an aversion to publication and to print culture), and non-​execution. The period witnessed numerous attempts, of varying success, to use legislation to control the trades of authorship, publishing, and bookselling (see David Worrall, Chapter 15 in this volume). Official, public attempts at censorship inevitably impacted on the broader culture of print (and non-​print) and led to more closeted, private acts of suppression. Some Romantic-​period writings were not published at the time due to the direct intervention of others, particularly publishers, who were fearful of both what they might lead to and the responses they might elicit. On 23 September 1819, Shelley sent from Italy a copy of a topical new poem—​‘The Mask of Anarchy’—​to Leigh Hunt, for publication in The Examiner. Hunt, afraid of prosecution, did not print it. Instead, he held it back until 1832, when it appeared as The Masque of Anarchy. A Poem. Shelley’s response to Peterloo was thus unpublished until the year of the passing of the Great Reform Bill. It was not a special case. As Michael Scrivener has noted, none of Shelley’s ‘interventionist poetry’ of 1819–​20 ‘did much intervening at the time it was written’, as very little of it was published then.19 The casualties included what Shelley refers to as ‘a little volume of popular songs wholly political, & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers’; its contents remain a matter for conjecture.20 Shelley was far from unique. In 1812 Walter Savage Landor dedicated an attack on the Tory ministry to James Madison, the President of the United States, at a time when the country was about to go to war with the United Kingdom. Although it was printed, the volume’s prospective publisher John Murray got cold feet and decided against publication. It was Murray, too, who helped deter Byron from publishing the dedication to Don Juan, and who ensured neither Byron’s name nor his own appeared on the title page of Cantos 1 and 2 of the poem. Murray’s cautiousness and the culture of suppression and non-​publication it embodied encompassed personal morality too. On 17 May 1824, his London office was the venue for the destruction of the manuscript of Byron’s unpublished memoirs on the grounds of their scandalous, highly personal content. Yet, whether motivated by politics, morality, or a combination of the two, these multiple acts of suppression are significant both for our understanding of what print culture actually

19  Michael Scrivener, ‘Introduction’, Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry, 1819-​1820, ed. Scrivener, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001), at: www.rc.umd.edu/​praxis. 20  To Leigh Hunt, 1 May 1820, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), ii. 191. See Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Popular Songs and Ballads: Writing the “Unwritten Story” in 1819’, in Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, with Madeleine Callaghan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

502   Lynda Pratt made available and for our awareness of the impact—​or lack of impact—​of Romantic-​ period writers and their writings on the public sphere. On occasion, authors themselves exercised self-​censorship, deliberately holding back work from publication. A case in point is Wordsworth, whose career of non-​publication began early. In the 1790s, his direct contemporaries Coleridge and Southey issued poetry and prose that established them as key players in what was dubbed a radical ‘NEW SCHOOL’, centred in Bristol and pre-​dating the so-​called ‘Lake School’.21 In contrast, the young Wordsworth wrote much but published little. Works composed but unpublished at this time included poems (Salibsury Plain and Adventures on Salisbury Plain), prose (A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff), and drama (The Borderers). Wordsworth’s reticence did not just encompass his radically charged early writings. The Prelude did not appear until after his death in 1850 on the grounds that, as he put it eleven years earlier, ‘publication has been prevented merely by the personal character of the subject’.22 For a writer acutely attentive to his own image and posterity, there was, perhaps, more to the ‘merely’ than met the eye, particularly because, as the Eclectic Review noted, the existence of The Prelude had long been an open secret: ‘For well nigh thirty-​four years the public curiosity has been excited by the knowledge that there existed in MS . . . [a]‌ poem, of very high pretensions, and extraordinary magnitude’.23 There is, however, no doubt that Wordsworth’s non-​publishing habits meant that his contemporaries’ sense of his writing life was radically different from our own. Our access to multiple manuscript versions of The Prelude means that we have, as Nicola Trott notes, ‘stolen a march on . . . [Wordsworth’s] contemporaries’ in terms of seeing how the poem fits into his personal literary history.24 Yet it also means that we need to be careful not to use this privileged knowledge to falsify our sense of how those same Romantic-​period contemporaries perceived and engaged with Wordsworth. The anxiety about print culture and consequent resort to the tactics of delayed publication and non-​publication displayed by Wordsworth are well known.25 Less familiar is how such bibliophobia was shared by and impacted on his contemporaries, particularly at a time when legislative measures against writers, publishers, and booksellers coincided with an aggressive review culture. The Nottingham-​born poet Henry Kirke White drew attention to the potential impact of a savage notice on an ambitious young writer, observing that the Monthly Review’s assessment of his first volume, Clifton Grove, had ‘cut deeper than you could have thought; not in a literary point of view, but as it affects my respectability’. For the evangelical White, the offending article assumed a 21 

The Anti-​Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner 1 (20 Nov. 1797), 7. William Wordsworth to Thomas Noon Talfourd, [c.10 Apr. 1839], The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 6: The Later Years, part 3: 1835–​1839, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 680. Talfourd had earlier seen ‘a small part’ of the poem in manuscript. 23  Eclectic Review 28 (Nov. 1850), 550. 24  Nicola Trott, ‘Wordsworth: The Shape of the Poetic Career’, in Stephen Gill (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 9. 25  See Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 91–​135. 22 

Non-Publication   503 spectral, even demonic presence: ‘this review goes before me wherever I turn my steps; it haunts me incessantly, and I am persuaded it is an instrument in the hands of Satan to drive me to distraction’.26 Contemporaries echoed his concerns. Coleridge lamented an age in which books had been ‘degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-​elected . . . judge’ (for the judicial tone of contemporary reviewing, see William Christie, Chapter 18 in this volume).27 Southey eschewed the language of the courtroom, invoking in its stead a piratical culture. He advised young writers to opt for the safer option of publishing first in periodicals rather than book format because the former were ‘fishing boats, which the Buccaneers of Literature do not condescend to sink, burn, and destroy’.28 Keats, another victim of ferocious reviews, stated his ‘wish to avoid publishing—​I admire Human Nature but I do not like Men—​I should like to compose things honourable to Man—​but not fingerable over by Men’.29 In the Preface to Adonais, Shelley confirmed just how destructive such ‘fingering’ could be, asserting that the ‘savage criticism’ of Keats’s Endymion in the Quarterly Review had ‘produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind’ and ‘ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs’, precipitating his death. The fear of printed, vicious reviews articulated by writers echoes a wider concern in the period about the degeneration of the published word, a belief that books themselves had now become things of ‘horror and alarm’, as fear-​inducing and potentially deadly as the cholera pandemics of the 1820s and 1830s.30 Yet bibliophobia and a sense of the perils of publication ran alongside an acute awareness of the importance of print in establishing a writer’s place in literary history. The ambiguity is seen at work in what those same bibliophobic individuals chose to publish. Even Wordsworth managed to put aside his fear of print in order to publish enough poetry and prose to fill several volumes. It is found too in Romantic writers’ editorship of their contemporaries or near-​contemporaries in order to establish or perpetuate their reputations—​for example, in the posthumous editions of Shelley and Coleridge produced by members of their families. Even the hostile review culture could, on occasion, be turned to benefit. Henry Kirke White’s editor, Robert Southey, recalled how the harsh notice in the Monthly Review that had driven White to near despair had resulted in a longer-​term good. It roused Southey, who had himself been on the receiving end of similar attacks, to ‘indignation . . . [at] a criticism at once so cruel and so stupid’. He wrote to White, established a relationship with him, and after his death agreed to edit White’s literary remains. Without the review, then, White’s ‘papers would probably have 26 

Robert Southey, The Remains of Henry Kirke White, of Nottingham, Late of St John’s College, Cambridge; with an Account of His Life, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Vernon, Hood, and Sharpe; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1808), i. 27. 27  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), i. 57. 28 Southey, Remains, i. 14. 29  To B. R. Haydon, 22 Dec. 1818, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–​1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 415. 30  T. F. Dibdin, Bibliophobia: Remarks on the Present Languid and Depressed State of Literature and the Book Trade (London: H. Bohn, 1832), 6.

504   Lynda Pratt remained in oblivion, and his name in a few years have been forgotten’.31 Eternal oblivion was, presumably, something that most writers did not care to contemplate. Just how easily that state could be achieved is shown in an editorial commission rejected by Southey who, after having a minor success with White’s Remains, was routinely solicited to do the same for others. In 1815–16 he considered but eventually refused a request to edit the poems of James Dusautoy who, like White, had died whilst a Cambridge undergraduate. The result was that the poems never made it into print and any chance Dusautoy had for posthumous fame was lost.32 Suppression and bibliophobia play key roles in the literary history of Romantic non-​publication, but they usually involved works already written, in part at least. Co-​ existing with them was something rather different:  a culture of non-​execution and non-​realization that ran alongside Romantic print culture and offers an alternative and compelling literary history of the period—​a narrative of paths not taken. In April 1797, Coleridge described how he would go about writing an epic: I should not think of devoting less than 20  years to an Epic Poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I  would be a tolerable Mathematician, I  would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine—​then the mind of man—​then the minds of men—​in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. So I would spend ten years—​the next five to the composition of the poem—​and the five last to the correction of it. So I  would write haply not unhearing of that divine and rightly-​whispering Voice, which speaks to mighty minds of predestinated Garlands, starry and unwithering . . . 33

Coleridge here presents the literary equivalent of a wish-​list:  the proposed epic was never written. It was, however, in good company. Coleridge spawned ‘plans like a herring’.34 His projected works are correspondingly numerous. They include a translation of Boccaccio’s prose; a study of Jakob Boehme; ‘The Brook’, a poem that gave ‘freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reflections on men, nature, and society’; an essay on ‘the uses of the Supernatural in poetry and the principles that regulate its introduction’;35 a blank verse translation of Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra; a satire that included swipes at ‘Canning & the Anti-​Jacobins’; an essay on ‘my system of balanced opposites’; an ‘Essay in defence of Punning’; and a ‘Greek and English Lexicon’

31 Southey, Remains, i. 27. For the class dynamics of Southey’s literary relationship with White, see

Brian Goldberg, Chapter 11 in this volume. 32  The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849–​50), iv. 23–​4. 33  Collected Letters of Coleridge, i. 320–​1. 34  To S. T. Coleridge, 4 Aug. 1802, Collected Letters of Southey, Part 2: 1798–​1803, ed. Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt (2011). 35 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 196; 306.

Non-Publication   505 ‘on philosophical Principles’.36 His was a far from unique case. Projecting and planning were endemic amongst Romantic period writers. The ranks of what Keats described as ‘Poem[s]‌that . . . [are] to be—​’ 37 and Southey as ‘unborn Works’ are well-​populated.38 They include Byron’s proposed epic on Bosworth Field, the unwritten cantos and stanzas of Don Juan, and ‘The Highland Harp’, a collection of his translations from Erse; the unwritten sections of Wordsworth’s ‘The Recluse’ and Shelley’s ‘Triumph of Life’; Shelley’s poem on the Roman emperor Otho, of which just a few lines survive; and Keats’s plan to fulfil his ‘greatest ambition’ by writing ‘a few fine Plays’, including one on the history of the Earl of Leicester.39 Some of these proposed works were merely ideas mentioned in letters, some never got beyond a few stanzas or pages, whilst others were started but never finished and survive only as fragments. So, what is the point of considering works that had little, if any, physical existence apart from occasional mentions in letters or commonplace books or as unfinished manuscript drafts? Why does this matter? In terms of our understanding of the careers of individual Romantic writers it matters because it shows the range of their interests and the scope of their literary ambitions. Unachieved projects can indicate a writer’s investment in different subjects and genres and also the plethora of writing opportunities available to an author in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They show that in the Romantic period there were many different ways of having a literary career. Considering what writers did not do—​what they did not write—​also reveals the contingencies that govern literary history and offers a salutary corrective to the linkage of non-​execution with failure. It reminds us that often one thing gets written simply because something else does not. The chances and accidents of a life lived might intervene and reshape a career. Death too might—​ as the examples of Austen, Scott, Shelley, and Wollstonecraft show—​leave incomplete writings that might, or might not, have been finished. Richard Holmes has observed that biographers always write knowing the end point of their work, the death of their subject, and that they thus run the risk of giving their subject’s career a shape and a coherence that are artificial.40 The same is true of looking at a writer in terms of what they did do rather than what they thought about doing but did not do, of taking into account actual literary history but ignoring the possibility of an equally compelling and potentially realizable counterfactual history. Thinking only of what was written, finished, even published, rather than reflecting as well on what was not produced, gives an artificial sense of unity to a career that might, in fact, have been random, accidental, and chaotic. In other words, what a writer chooses not to do can be as significant and interesting as what they choose to do. The unachieved can be as important as the achieved. Imagine, for

36 

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vols 1–​3, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–​73), i. 61, 567; iii. 3400, 3762, 4210; Collected Letters of Coleridge, ii. 999. 37  To John Taylor, 17 Nov. 1819, Letters of Keats, ii. 235. 38  To John Murray, 31 Jan. 1812, Collected Letters of Southey, Part 4: 1810–​1815, ed. Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt (2013). 39  To John Taylor, 17 Nov. 1819, Letters of Keats, ii. 234. 40  Richard Holmes, ‘Death and Destiny’, The Guardian (24 Jan. 2004).

506   Lynda Pratt example, how different Wordsworth’s writing life might have looked if he had eschewed autobiographical blank verse in favour of the poetic routes taken by some of his contemporaries. How would we have viewed him had he completed the list of potential projects advanced in the opening book of The Prelude: Sometimes . . . I settle on some British theme, some old Romantic tale by Milton left unsung; More often resting at some gentle place Within the groves of chivalry I pipe Among the shepherds, with reposing knights Sit by a fountain-​side and hear their tales. Sometimes, more sternly moved, I would relate How vanquished Mithridates northward passed And, hidden in the cloud of years, became That Odin . . . Or I would record How in tyrannic times, some unknown man, Unheard of in the chronicles of kings, Suffered in silence for the love of truth . . .41

Although generic elements of the pastoral, romantic, and heroic are taken up and transformed in The Prelude itself, none of the individual works projected here came to fruition.42 Wordsworth thus rejected the route he rehearsed for himself, and the rest, we might say with the benefit of hindsight, is literary history. Non-​execution does not just have to include literary works. In one spectacular and surprising example it shaped a major public role. The case in question was Southey’s Poet Laureateship. Southey might seem, at first, an odd figure to mention in the context of non-​publication and non-​execution. He is famed, even notorious, as one of the most prolific authors of his day, producing nearly two hundred volumes.43 Yet the conventional image of a writer churning out publication after publication masks a more complex situation, one with the potential to unsettle any certainty about the ability of Romantic writers to impact on and shape the public sphere. Central here is what Southey did and did not do as Poet Laureate from taking the post in late 1813 to his death in 1843. In the early nineteenth century the Laureateship was held in low regard and the holder was potentially subject to ridicule and accusations of selling out to the establishment that paid his salary. When he accepted the job after the death of

41  1805 version: Book 1, lines 177, 179–​88, 201–​4, in William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). 42  For ‘generic transformation’ in The Prelude, see Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1989), esp. 359–​66. 43  For Southey as a projector and planner, see Lynda Pratt, ‘What Robert Southey Did Not Write Next’, Romanticism 17.1 (2011), 1–​9.

Non-Publication   507 the poet-​politician Henry James Pye, Southey was determined to do something with it. He desired to make it relevant, to ensure that its incumbent was an influential voice in public debate and, with an eye on posterity, to make it ‘an honour’, rather than a dishonour, for ‘him who shall be thought worthy to wear it after me’.44 Initially he set to the task with characteristic vigour. Between 1814 and 1822 he issued five official volumes of poetry. The New Year’s Ode Carmen Triumphale was published on 1 January 1814, and was followed by Congratulatory Odes (1814), two occasional longer pieces, The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816) and The Lay of the Laureate (1816), and A Vision of Judgement (1821). Southey’s appointment to the Laureateship in 1813 had caused some bemusement and a great deal of controversy. William Hazlitt was not alone in pointing out the ‘inconsistency between some of Mr. Southey’s former [radical] writings, and his becoming the hired panegyrist of the court’.45 The volumes Southey published in his official capacity ensured that his profile remained high and that the debates continued. The Examiner described Carmen Triumphale as a ‘vulgar mistake’, and parodied Southey as a poetry-​writing court-​hireling, prepared to sing ‘Glory to Kings’ for the payment of a hundred pounds, a swipe at the Laureate’s annual stipend.46 The Lay of the Laureate was described by the Monthly Review as evidence of Southey as the ‘“Versifier Ego” of the day’. The Edinburgh Review, commenting on the same poem, dismissed Southey’s ‘resolution’ ‘to claim a real power and prerogative in the world of letters, in virtue of his title and appointment’ as self-​serving and silly, cautioning the ‘King’s house-​poet’ to ‘keep the nature of his office out of sight’ as much as possible.47 Contemporary critical antagonism climaxed with Byron’s The Vision of Judgment (1822). The partial allusion to the title of Southey’s A Vision of Judgement, published in the previous year, signalled Byron’s revisionary intentions. His Vision damned the Laureate as one who had ‘turn’d his coat—​ and would have turn’d his skin’ and whose corruption was bodied forth in works ‘buoy’d’ not by their cultural power but ‘By their own rottenness’.48 Controversial it certainly was, but Southey’s Laureateship was characterized by non-​ practice as well as practice. Non-​publication played a central role in this. Southey’s non-​publishing Laureateship took two main forms. First, he, unlike his immediate predecessors, did not publish all of his Laureate poems at their time of composition. Thus, his New Year’s Ode for 1819 on the death of Queen Charlotte did not appear in print until 1829, when it was published in the fashionable annual Friendship’s Offering.49 Even then its origins as an official Laureate production were not indicated, perhaps to save Southey any embarrassment that might arise from his recycling of an official poem for commercial gain. His departure from customary practice could be connected to 44 

To Charles Danvers, 21 Sept. 1813, Collected Letters of Southey, Part 4. Morning Chronicle (20 Sept. 1813). 46  Examiner 316 (16 Jan. 1814), 41–​2. 47  Monthly Review 82 (Jan. 1817), 91; Edinburgh Review, 26 (June 1816), 442. 48  Byron, ‘The Vision of Judgment’, lines 776, 835–​6, in Jerome J. McGann (ed.), The Oxford Authors: Byron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 49  Robert Southey, Later Poetical Works, gen. eds Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), iii. 135–​42. 45 

508   Lynda Pratt the unusual, and unprecedented, situation when Southey took up the post. The incapacity of George III had caused the Laureate’s usual duties of writing annual odes for the New Year and the monarch’s birthday to be suspended since late 1810. Second, after December 1822 Southey retreated from the public duties of the Laureateship, possibly stung by the reaction to the Vision of Judgement and his failure to effect the transformation of the office he had intended. His final Laureate composition was a New Year’s Ode for 1823.50 For the remaining twenty ​years of his Laureateship he produced no new official poems. He thus did not commemorate key events such as the death of George IV, the coronation and death of William IV, and the coronation of Victoria. The man who had embarked on the Laureateship determined to reinvigorate it fell silent. On one level this seems to be a failure. It is also, of course, a discomforting revelation of the inability in practice of poets and poetry to influence and shape the public sphere. However, Southey’s refusal to fulfil the terms of his appointment, to write poems to order, can also be read as a kind of strange success. Southey was not upbraided by his Courtly paymasters for his silence and was not called upon by them to write anything. He continued to draw his annual salary and thus was paid for doing nothing for the last two decades of his tenure. Southey had therefore managed to change the customary practices of the Laureateship and obtained, in an extremely roundabout way, the terms and conditions he had requested when he took up the post. It became the norm during his Laureateship for the Laureate not to be enslaved by the demands of composing annual New Year and Birthday odes, and this custom of minimum obligation is still observed today. In the Romantic period, then, the Poet Laureateship, the most public of poetic posts, became defined by non-​practice and non-​publication—​by what its holder did not do—​rather than by practice and publication. This set an important precedent. When Wordsworth accepted the Laureateship in 1843 he did so on the terms that he would not be compelled to write anything. By so doing, he was following the practice—​or, rather, non-​ practice—​of Southey. Our understanding of the Romantic period and our constructions of Romanticism have long been dominated and shaped by a belief in the supremacy of print. We have assumed, too readily perhaps, the centrality of writing and publishing in inscribing and defining an age. The examples given in this chapter remind us of a cultural phenomenon that coexisted with and ran counter to this familiar narrative. They reveal the persistence of a vital manuscript culture in an age saturated with the printed word. They demonstrate, too, the importance of acts of avoiding or delaying publication, of projecting but not executing, and even, in extreme circumstances, of refusing to write. The culture of non-​publication thus played a powerful role in shaping both the Romantic period itself and our own sense of literary history.

50 Southey, Later Poetical Works, iii. 201–​15.

Non-Publication   509

Further Reading Feather, John, A History of British Publishing, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2006). Levy, Michelle, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). McKenzie, D. F., ‘Speech—​Manuscript—​Print’, in McKenzie, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S. J. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). Newlyn, Lucy, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Pratt, Lynda, ‘What Robert Southey Did Not Write Next’, Romanticism 17.1 (2011), 1–​9. Russell, Gillian, and Clara Tuite (eds), Romantic Sociability:  Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Russett, Margaret, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–​1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Pa rt  V I I I

L A N G UAG E

Chapter 33

L iterary U ses of Dia l e c t Jane Hodson

British authors since Chaucer have made creative use of dialect in their writings. Up until the eighteenth century, the range of dialects represented was limited, the representations depended on a narrow range of stereotyped features, and the function of such representations was chiefly comic. From the late eighteenth century onwards, a much wider range of dialects began to appear in literature, to be represented in greater detail, and to take on a greater range of functions. Norman Blake, in his 1981 survey Non-​ Standard Language in English Literature, places the most significant shift during the Victorian period, arguing that during the Romantic period ‘regional varieties of English were gaining acceptability’, but that ‘only the Scots and Irish varieties found acceptance’.1 In this chapter I argue that, even if the most significant changes did not occur until later, the foundations for those changes were laid during the Romantic period itself. The period saw the publication of a number of landmark texts that used dialect in new and innovative ways or which offered a reconceptualization of the literary value of different varieties of English. These include the poetry of Robert Burns and John Clare; the novels of Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, and John Galt; and William Wordsworth’s influential statement about ‘the real language of men’ in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The primary question that arises when addressing any incident of dialect representation is: why has the author chosen to use non-​standard forms here? Recent work by dialectologists has demonstrated that, above all, what written representations of dialect do for readers is construct a sense of voice. Through experimental work which asked informants to read out and respond to written dialect representations, Jaffe and Walton established that readers ‘took for granted that orthography could authentically represent social voices and identities’.2 This suggests one reason why Romantic-​period literature began to embrace dialect: it enabled writers to invoke local and specific voices. This effect is not uniform, however, and dialect functions differently when it is the voice of a 1 

N. F. Blake, Non-​Standard Language in English Literature (London: Deutsch, 1981), 146. Alexandra Jaffe and Shana Walton, ‘The Voices People Read: Orthography and the Representation of Non-​Standard Speech’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.4 (2000), 561–​87 (p. 582). 2 

514   Jane Hodson first-​person speaker in lyric poetry, that of the homodiegetic narrator of a novel, that of a minor character in a novel written in Standard English, and that of a character in a play who will be brought to life by an actor on the stage. Two contrasting uses are exemplified in the following extracts: Let other Poets raise a fracas ’Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ druken Bacchus, An’ crabbed names an’ stories wrack us, An’ grate our lug, I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us, In glass or jug.3 “You have a noble stock of linen, cousin,” said Mrs Mason. “Few farmers houses in England could produce the like; but I think this rather too fine for common use.” “For common use!” cried Mrs MacClarty; “na, na, we’re no sic fools as put our napery to use! I have a dizen tableclaiths in that press, therty years old, that were never laid upon a table. They are a’ o’ my mother’s spinning. I have nine o’ my ain makin’ forby, that never saw the sun but at the bookin washing. Ye needna be telling us o’ England!”4

In the first extract, from Burns, it is the first-​person voice of the speaker of the poem who adopts non-​standard forms, mingling high-​register Italian-​derived vocabulary (‘fracas’) and classical references (‘Bacchus’) with Scots vocabulary (‘lug’, ‘druken’), respellings to indicate pronunciation (‘mak’, ‘bear’), and apostrophes to indicate the elision of sounds (‘an’’ and ‘o’’). The poem is a pastoral, a highly sophisticated and conventionalized genre which celebrates rural life but in a self-​consciously literary way. As such, the yoking together of Scots lexis with classical references is more conventional than it might initially appear, performing a confident and playful poetic persona who praises ‘Scotch bear’ (barley) whilst also demonstrating cultural knowledge that ‘vines an’ wines’ are more commonly associated with pastoral writing. Burns’s experiments with code-​switching, though, go beyond the occasional mixing of vocabularies typical of pastoral. As Alex Broadhead argues, he not only makes extensive use of the language varieties of his country of birth, but is actively engaged with remaking those varieties: ‘Burns’s response to contemporary understandings of language is characterized by a consistent desire to transform and reinvent its functions, boundaries and taxonomies.’5 The second extract, from Elizabeth Hamilton’s novel The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), is primarily written in a third-​person narrative voice in Standard English. The

3  ‘Scotch Drink’, lines 1–​6, in Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786), 22. 4  Elizabeth Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie: A Tale for the Farmer’s Ingle-​nook, 3rd edn (Edinburgh, 1808), 143. 5  Alex Broadhead, The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology and Identity (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 1.

Literary Uses of Dialect    515 direct speech of one of the characters, Mrs Mason, is represented as Standard English, but the direct speech of the other, Mrs MacClarty, is represented as Scots through dialectal vocabulary (‘bookin washing’), respelling (‘dizen’, ‘claiths’, ‘therty’), negatives (‘needna’), and apostrophes to indicate elision of sounds (‘o’’). In both what she says and how she says it, Mrs MacClarty’s speech characterizes her negatively as a woman incapable of making good choices—​one who has more than twenty fine tablecloths stored away in her ‘press’ but none suitable to put on her table. Even her name reinforces an association between her language, her place of origin, and her failings as a housekeeper: ‘clarty’ is a Scots or Northern dialect word meaning ‘dirty’.6 Dialect is here clearly separated from Standard English and used to mark out the speech of one character in opposition to another. In both extracts the writer is using dialect in highly performative ways, but in the extract from Burns the focus is on the linguistic agility of the poetic persona, while in the second the focus is on the personal qualities of a fictional character. In what follows I explore the use of dialect in Romantic-​era fiction and poetry, a new field of research which complements other work on regional and national aspects of Romanticism, and which intersects too with current work on Romantic literature and class (see Brian Goldberg, Chapter 11 in this volume). The role of dialect in eighteenth-​ and early ​nineteenth-​century theatre is another important topic, with a long scholarly history, but is excluded here for reasons of space.7 I focus on three key challenges that arise when attempting to understand the literary uses of dialect in the Romantic era. The first is the one inherent in using concepts such as ‘dialect’ to talk about a period before a modern understanding of language variation had emerged. The second is that of accounting for the overall development of dialect representation while also respecting the different trajectories of specific dialects. The third is that of understanding the ideological implications of dialect: what does it mean for a literary text to ‘make use’ of dialect? In addressing these questions, I draw on historical perspectives from both literary and linguistic scholars. An initial step is to ascertain how contemporary readers would have responded to literary texts that represent dialect. While Jaffe and Walton’s findings provide insights into how dialect representation functions for modern readers, this is not necessarily generalizable to readers two hundred years ago who were operating within a different linguistic landscape. The founding principle of modern linguistics is that all language varieties are equal and that it is only socio-​political accident that elevates one variety to the prestige of ‘the language’ while demoting other varieties to the status of ‘dialects’. Historians of the English language recognize that English has followed the same

6 

Oxford English Dictionary (at: www.oed.com). Older articles on stage dialect include J. O. Bartley and D. L. Sims, ‘Pre-​Nineteenth Century Stage Irish and Welsh Pronunciation’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93.5 (1949), 439–​47; and Richard Walser, ‘Negro Dialect in Eighteenth-​Century American Drama’, American Speech 30.4 (1955), 269–​76. See also Blake, Non-​Standard Language in English Literature, 130–​4; and Arden Hegele’s database of stage dialects in eighteenth-​century comedy at: http://​projects.chass.utoronto.ca/​prescrip/​ 18thcComedy/​home.html. 7 

516   Jane Hodson set of processes that have occurred in other languages where a standard variety has emerged: first the variety to be standardized is selected from among all other varieties, typically on account of its association with social and economic centres of power; then it takes on an increasing number of functions relating to law, writing, publishing, and education; its developing circle of activity means that it becomes more prestigious; concerns grow about its correct use, resulting in increased prescription about which variants are to be preferred; and finally the ‘the language’ is codified in grammars and dictionaries. Concurrently with this process of standardization for one variety, other varieties of English, which may have been associated with centres of power and had their own emergent literary traditions in earlier periods, become destandardized as mere dialects. From this perspective it is apparent that the Romantic period coincided with the latter part of the codification process of English, after the publication of some of the key works such as Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), but while there was still a rising tide of new grammars, dictionaries, and pronouncing guides.8 In particular, the codification of pronunciation was under way. Lynda Mugglestone has demonstrated that while issues of accent and pronunciation were not given much attention in the first half of the eighteenth century, thereafter they were in greater focus. She notes that ‘[f]‌ive times as many works on elocution appeared between the years 1760 and 1800 than had done so in the years before 1760’, and suggests that the purpose of these texts was ‘to codify a non-​localized, supra-​regional “standard,” and thus explicitly to displace the linguistic diversities of accent which currently pertained throughout the nation’.9 Writing in the 1980s, Olivia Smith identified a specifically political aspect to this codification process, arguing that ‘late eighteenth-​century theories of language were centrally and explicitly concerned with class division’,10 and that the writings of Hugh Blair, Lindley Murray, and Johnson ‘established grounds for dismissing any writings addressed to or originating from the vulgar audience, while making a language considered adequate for public discourse more difficult to learn’.11 Recent research in the field of Later Modern English, however, has challenged the narrative which sees eighteenth-​century grammarians as deliberately pursuing a repressive agenda. Ingrid Tieken, for example, has explored the work of Robert Lowth and found him to be a careful investigator of English, not the dogmatic prescriptivist of later

8 

See Ian Michael, The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Joan C. Beal, English in Modern Times: 1700–​1945 (London: Arnold, 2004); and Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, ‘English at the Onset of the Normative Tradition’, in Lynda Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 9  Lynda Mugglestone, ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3, 15. 10  Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–​1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), viii. 11 Smith, Politics of Language, 29.

Literary Uses of Dialect    517 caricature.12 In my own work on Joseph Priestley, an eighteenth-​century grammarian who has sometimes been identified as a forerunner of twentieth-​century linguistics, I have argued that modern accounts of eighteenth-​century language study tend to be highly coloured by the claims that the linguists writing them want to make about their own discipline.13 Alex Broadhead has proposed more generally that what is needed is a more sympathetic perspective on how writers on language perceived their own efforts, arguing that the eighteenth century should be understood not simply as an era of arid prescriptivism, but as ‘the age of the language makers’.14 Above all, these language-​makers placed emphasis on finding the permanent and universal in language. A  good example is the Aberdeen philosopher and theologian George Campbell, author of The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). As linguistic historians have noted, Campbell appears at times to entertain a descriptivist view of language, making statements such as: ‘It is not the business of grammar . . . to give law to the fashions which regulate our speech. On the contrary, from its conformity to these, and from that alone, it derives all its authority and value.’15 Despite this apparently favourable view of everyday speech, however, in the same chapter Campbell insists that proper use of English depends upon identifying ‘reputable’, ‘national’, and ‘present’ use. He distinguishes ‘national’ use against ‘provincial’ use as follows: In every province there are peculiarities of dialect, which affect not only the pronunciation and the accent, but even the inflection and the combination of words, whereby their idiom is distinguished both from that of the nation, and from that of every other province. The narrowness of the circle to which the currency of the words and phrases of such dialects is confined, sufficiently discriminates them from that which is properly styled the language, and which commands a circulation incomparably wider.16

Campbell is concerned to identify what speakers have in common across the nation, not what distinguishes them from one another. Campbell’s own position as an English speaker is significant: like other key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was part of an academic institution proudly rooted in a distinctive Scottish intellectual tradition, but he wrote in standard English and was careful to eradicate Scotticisms from his speech. His ‘philosophy of rhetoric’ promotes a standard form of English—​ grammatical, lexical, and phonological—​which involves an active suppression of any

12  Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 13  Jane Hodson, ‘The Problem of Joseph Priestley’s (1733–​1804) Descriptivism’, Historiographia Linguistica 33.1–​2 (2006), 57–​84. 14 Broadhead, Language of Robert Burns, 4. 15  George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2 vols (London, 1776), i. 340. For descriptive and prescriptive tendencies in his work, see Sterling Andrus Leonard, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage, 1700–​1800 (1929; New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 148–​62. 16 Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, i. 353.

518   Jane Hodson ‘dialect’ features of his native tongue. The linguistic assumptions are made explicit in expurgatory guides such as that of another prominent Aberdeen academic (and poet): James Beattie’s Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing (1787).17 Yet alongside attempts to identify the national and the permanent in English, dialect was on the rise as a serious object for scholarly investigation. The volume of work that had accrued in this burgeoning field by the early nineteenth century is evidenced by John Russell Smith’s A Bibliographical List of the Works that have been Published, towards Illustrating the Provincial Dialects of England (1839). Smith does not describe his methodology, and it must be borne in mind both that the quantity of print was increasing overall, and that recent works would have been easier to identify. Still, it is striking that Smith records just 10 works before 1700, 38 between 1700 and 1799, and 104 between 1800 and the publication of the bibliography in 1839. Although a few of the earlier works focus specifically on dialect, many are either collections of vocabulary (e.g. A Collection of English Words [1674]), or only incidentally contain dialect (e.g. History and Antiquities of the Isle of Tenet [1736]). By contrast, most of the later works listed by Smith address the topic of dialect specifically, such as A Cornish-​English Vocabulary (1808) and An Essay on the Peculiarities of Pronunciation, and the Dialect of Sheffield and its Neighbourhood (1825), and many titles attest to a growing interest in both collecting and writing texts in dialect, including The Northumberland Garland, or Newcastle Nightingale: A Matchless Collection of Famous Songs (1793) and Ballads in the Cumberland Dialect (1808).18 It is tempting to interpret the increased interest in dialect as a reaction against the ongoing codification of a single variety as ‘the’ language. While this may have been true in some cases, there are at least three objections to adopting this interpretation too readily. First, to a great extent it is the codification of Standard English that makes literary uses of dialect possible. It is because authors were well schooled in the use of ‘good’ English that they were able to play off against it, knowing that their readers were increasingly adept at interpreting the social signs of literary dialect. Second, it is a mistake to assume that an investment in codification was incompatible with an interest in dialect. In the case of Scotland, for example, poets including Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and Robert Burns rediscovered and took inspiration from older Scots poets such as William Dunbar in a movement described as the Vernacular Revival. Liam McIlvanney has argued that while the Vernacular Revival may initially appear directly opposed to the Scotticism-​eradicating tendencies of the Scottish Enlightenment, in practice there is ‘little warrant for viewing eighteenth-​century Scottish culture as bifurcated between two monolithic and antagonistic movements’ and that the two movements ‘interacted with

17 

See Richard W. Bailey ‘Scots and Scotticisms: Language and Ideology’, Studies in Scottish Literature 26.1 (1991), 65–​77; and Marina Dossena, Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary: ‘Like Runes Upon a Standin’ Stane’? (Edinburgh: Donald, 2005). 18  John Russell Smith, A Bibliographical List of the Works That Have Been Published, Towards Illustrating the Provincial Dialects of England (London, 1839).

Literary Uses of Dialect    519 one another and intersected in the lives of individual Scots’.19 Third, there is the fact that the emergent interest in dialect itself can be read as a form of codification in its attempts to identify and record the purest form of the dialect. When Broadhead speaks of the age of ‘language makers’ he is not only referring to efforts to codify what we would now term Standard English, but also attempts to ‘make’ other varieties, most notably Scots. All of this renders problematic the apparently harmless term ‘dialect’. A  typical modern definition of ‘dialect’ states that dialect is ‘a variety of language associated with subsets of users: in a geographical area . . . or with a social group’.20 At first glance, eighteenth-​century definitions of dialect do not appear strikingly different. Johnson in 1755 defines dialect as ‘The subdivision of a language; as the Attic, Doric, Ionic, Æolic dialects.’21 John Collier’s (pseud. Tim Bobbins) early and enormously successful dialect work was titled A View of the Lancashire Dialect (1746), and Burns’s first collection was titled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). Yet a closer view suggests some important differences between eighteenth-​and twenty-​first-​century understandings of the term. The modern definition is deliberately vague as to the ‘subset of users’, ‘geographical area’, or ‘social group’ in question; as Penny Eckert has noted, dialectologists are just as happy to turn to ‘the street kid in the inner city’ or ‘the burned-​out burnout in midwestern high school’ as to ‘the traditional peasant in an isolated community’.22 By contrast, Johnson immediately cites the major Greek literary dialects as examples of dialects, while Collier’s title speaks of ‘the Lancashire dialect’ and Burns of ‘the Scottish dialect’. In each case there is an assumption that there is a single dialect which holds across a wide geographical area. This points towards the second challenge I have identified, which is that while an overview of the literary uses of dialect in the Romantic period is desirable, the dialects under consideration are multiple and various, with individual histories and trajectories. Dialects that could claim historical depth were felt to be inherently of more value than those of a more recent vintage, and writings on dialect frequently laid claim to the notion of dialects as particularly historic. John Russell Smith’s bibliography is prefaced with a quotation from Joseph Bosworth’s Elements of Anglo-​Saxon Grammar (1823), which reinforces the importance of dialects for preserving older forms of the language: Much of the peculiarity of dialect prevalent in Anglo-​Saxon times, is preserved even to the present day in the provincial dialects of the same districts. In these local dialects, then, remnants of the Anglo Saxon tongue may be found in its least altered, most uncorrupt, and therefore in its purest state. Having a strong and expressive language of their own, they had little desire and few opportunities to adopt foreign idioms or pronunciation, and thus to corrupt the purity of their ancient language. 19  Liam McIlvanney, ‘Hugh Blair, Robert Burns, and the Invention of Scottish Literature’, Eighteenth-​ Century Life 29.2 (2005), 25–​46 (p. 28). 20  Katie Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics (London: Longman, 1997), 119–​20. 21  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London, 1755), i, n. p. 22  Penelope Eckert, ‘Sociolinguistics and Authenticity: An Elephant in the Room’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 7.3 (2003), 392–​7 (p. 392).

520   Jane Hodson Our present polished phrase and fashionable pronunciation are often new, and, as deviating from primitive usage, faulty and corrupt. We are, therefore, much indebted to those zealous and patriotic individuals who have referred to the archaisms of our nervous language, by publishing provincial glossaries, and giving specimens of their dialects.23

What we see here is a reversal of the terms of the debate, so that it is the ‘polished and fashionable’ modern English which is faulty and corrupt, and the provincial dialects which are ‘strong’, ‘expressive’, and ‘nervous’. The deconstructive turn of twentieth-​ century linguistic thought—​which understands the values placed on different language varieties as being social constructs rather than qualities inherent in the dialects themselves—​is not in evidence. Each language variety thus has a different trajectory during the Romantic period, resulting both from its own literary history and from its position in a series of complex and sometimes conflicting hierarchies which privileged not only ‘good English’ over ‘dialect’, but also ‘national’ over ‘local’ and ‘ancient language’ over ‘polished phrase’.24 Above all it is Scottish Literature—​exemplified by Ramsay, Burns, Scott, Galt, and Hogg, among others—​which led the way in dialect representation. Blake notes that the pre-​ existing tradition of writing in Scots meant both that writers had to hand a ready means for representation that simply did not exist for other varieties, and that readers were primed to read serious literature written in Scots.25 As many scholars have pointed out, however, Scots is properly not a dialect of English at all, but a parallel Anglo-​Saxon variety with its own literary standard. Scots started on the path towards standardization, but then became destandardized at a political level by the Union with England, even though a literary tradition was—​albeit somewhat spasmodically—​maintained. This effectively meant that from 1707 onwards it had two existences: one as a standard language within Scotland, and another as a dialect within the British Isles. It was, moreover, not a single uniform variety but a range of varieties on a cline from Standard Scottish English through Scots to Braid Scots, further complicated by regional variations within Scotland, as well as by the influence of Scots Gaelic. From a cultural position North of the border, writing in Scots must be treated as a literary tradition in its own right. And yet Scots is the literary dialect of the Romantic period par excellence, and many of the key innovations originated in Scotland.26 Burns had an enormous influence on 23  Joseph Bosworth, Preface to Anglo-​Saxon Dictionary, xxvii, cited on frontispiece of Smith, Bibliographical List. 24  In his chapter on ‘Bad Englishes’, Elfenbein takes Black English and Jewish English as his two exemplar dialects, but in many ways these are atypical of the dialects of the Romantic period because of the additional racial and foreign dimension that they bring. Andrew Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), ch. 3. 25 Blake, Non-​Standard Language in English Literature, 137. 26  A recent survey found that from a quantitative perspective it is novels featuring Scots which led the way in the rise of dialect representation in this period. See Jane Hodson and Alex Broadhead, ‘Developments in Literary Dialect Representation in British Fiction 1800–​1836’, Language and Literature 22 (2013), 315–​32; and our analytical database, Dialect in British Fiction 1800–​1836, at: www.dialectfiction.org.

Literary Uses of Dialect    521 later poets, including Wordsworth and Clare, for example. Within the history of the novel, Maria Edgeworth may have written the first homodiegetic novel narrated by a dialect-​speaking character as an Irishman with Castle Rackrent (1800), but much of the innovation in the novel form that followed was undertaken by writers using Scots, as evidenced across the novels of Walter Scott as well as experimental works such as James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).27 Even little-​ remembered novels such as Robert Mudie’s Glenfergus (1820) demonstrate a nuanced attention to the social dimensions of dialect that are far in advance of the crude stereotyping found in novels set in England during the same period. It is, in short, difficult to imagine how the English literary tradition of dialect representation would have developed in the absence of Scots. One result of the very different histories of Scots as opposed to regional varieties of English is that poems which make use of regional Englishes often look very different on the page to their Scots counterparts. It is striking, for example, to consider Clare’s use of dialect: The fields all clear’d, the labouring mice To sheltering hedge and wood patrole, Where hips and haws for food suffice, That chumbled lie about their hole. The squirrel, bobbing from the eye, Is busy now about his hoard, And in old nest of crow or pye His winter-​store is oft explor’d.28

Clare describes the landscape around him using words that are likely to have been familiar to rural speakers, being both specific and everyday (e.g. ‘hips and haws’, ‘crow or pye’). Clare also makes use of higher-​register Latinate words (‘suffice’ and ‘explored’). There is only one word that is distinctly regional: ‘chumbled’, which the Oxford English Dictionary first attests in this poem. While this is not the most dialectal of Clare’s poems—​a poem such as ‘Dolly’s Mistake’, written in the first-​person voice of a hapless milkmaid, is more non-​standard—​none of Clare’s poems shows the density of respelling, dialect vocabulary, and grammatical features to be found in Burns’s ‘Scotch Drink’. The fact that what Clare does here is nevertheless highly significant is attested by the reception of his poetry. In 1821 the Monthly Review offered the following review

27 

For Irish, Scottish, and Welsh influences on the development of the novel in this period, see Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 28  ‘Autumn’, lines 137–​44, in John Clare, The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems, 2 vols (London, 1821), i. 94–​5.

522   Jane Hodson of The Village Minstrel, comparing Clare’s use of dialect unfavourably to that of Scots writers: We leave it to the sober judgment of our readers, to decide, whether these, though indisputable, are desirable additions to our language. We may perhaps be told, that a Glossary is annexed to the book; but this does not alter our view of the subject. If the example of Burns, Ramsay, Ferguson, or other Scottish poets be pleaded, we answer, that they employed a dialect in general use through an entire country, and not the mere patois of a small district. If the peculiar phraseology of the Northamptonshire rustics is to be licensed in poetry, we see no reason why that of Lancashire, Somersetshire, and other countries should not be allowed an equal currency; and thus our language would be surprisingly enriched, by the legitimization of all the varieties of speech in use among the canaille throughout the kingdom.29

Clare’s use of dialect terms may appear light when contrasted with Burns, but they were evidently highly salient. For this reviewer any use of ‘the peculiar phraseology of the Northamptonshire rustics’ is sufficient to categorize his poetry as ‘dialect’, or, worse, ‘the mere patois of a small district’. Clare’s poetry raises questions relating to intentionality in dialect writing. James McKusick has made the case for valuing the skill with which he uses dialect: ‘Clare is not simply a dialect poet, but a poet who employs dialect for deliberate effect. Clare adopts a nonstandard lexicon only when it suits his poetic purpose, and he is fully capable of producing an “educated” sociolect when treating abstract or elevated topics.’30 This argument is similar to the one Broadhead makes about Burns, attesting to the importance of the shifting registers these poets employ and interpreting their use of dialect as a deliberate strategy. In the case of Clare, however, the vexed issue of the editing of his poetry makes questions of authorial intent problematic.31 In one of his letters, for example, Clare responds negatively to his editor’s attempts to ‘correct’ his language: ‘I may alter but I cannot mend grammer in learning is like Tyranny in government—​confound the bitch Ill never be her slave & have a vast good mind not to alter the verse in question’.32 This reads like a refusal to conform to codifying tendencies of the age, although the fact that he then explains that the passage in question was ‘written in ridicule of [Wordsworth’s] affectations of simplicity’ complicates matters. It is simply not possible to determine exactly which features of his non-​standard language Clare intended to achieve a ‘deliberate effect’, although from a reader’s perspective the perception of

29 

Monthly Magazine 52 (Nov. 1821), in Mark Storey (ed.), John Clare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 154. 30  James C. McKusick, ‘John Clare and the Tyranny of Grammar’, Studies in Romanticism 33.2 (1994), 255–​77 (p. 262). 31  For a discussion of the editorial issues, see Hugh Haughton, ‘Revision and Romantic Authorship: The Case of Clare’, John Clare Society Journal 17 (1998), 65–​73. 32  To John Taylor, 21 Feb. 1822, The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 231.

Literary Uses of Dialect    523 intentionality can matter a great deal. There is also a tendency to read elements of non-​ standard dialect differently: the use of regional lexical items is often associated with the positive performance of local identity, but non-​standard grammar and punctuation are more likely to be read as indexing a lack of education and literacy. If the idea that ‘the patois of a small district’ could have value was problematic for reviewers, varieties which could lay no claim to being ‘rustic’ were beyond the pale. In Amelia Beauclerc’s novel Disorder and Order (1820), for example, the speech of the maid Patty is markedly non-​standard. Given that the novel is set in Oxfordshire and Patty lives locally, it can be assumed that this is intended to be an Oxfordshire dialect: She saw them smiling significantly every now and then; and, stopping suddenly she said, in an angry tone—​‘None of your flams or your jeers! Your betters ha’ come a courting to me; so go along! True loviers are to be add, as well as sweetarts! Fine times, indeed, when young gals can’t walk the streets for you! I desires you wont keep me company, if you means nothen but fun.’ William Burrows, the other youth, was surfeited by her ignorance:  he liked a frolic of all things, but Patty was too vulgar for his taste; he therefore accepted her dismissal.33

Patty’s speech mixes some features associated with London speech (h-​deletion in ‘add’ and ‘sweetarts’, slang terms ‘flams’ and ‘gals’) with some features of rural speech (a-​ prefixing in ‘a courting’, respelling ‘loviers’). Even more salient are features which would have been perceived as grammatical errors:  non-​standard concordance in ‘I desires you’ and ‘if you means’. What is signalled here through Patty’s speech is not a specific geographical location but a generic non-​standardness, associated with her semi-​urban background and loose morals. The novel endorses the brutal judgement of William Burrows that Patty is ‘too vulgar’ to be concerned with, and she quickly comes to a bad end, seduced and abandoned by the other young man. The third and final challenge in the study of Romantic dialectology is that of understanding the broader implications of representing non-​standard English. From a linguistic perspective there has been a tendency to evaluate literary dialects for the potential information that they provide about real-​world historical dialects.34 The assumption underlying such approaches is that literary representations only have value in so far as they align with the real dialect which is ‘out there’ in the mouths of authentic speakers. Mary Bucholtz has noted that dialectology’s obsession with ‘the authentic speaker’ is ‘in part a residue of Romanticism’, and that ‘efforts to document the speech of the Volk . . . can in part be traced to philology and folklore, both central to Romanticism as a nationalist and intellectual project’.35 While twentieth-​century sociolinguists expanded 33 

Amelia Beauclerc, Disorder and Order, 3 vols (London, 1820), i. 97. See, for example, James P. Sullivan, ‘The Validity of Literary Dialect: Evidence from the Theatrical Portrayal of Hiberno-​English Forms’, Language in Society 9.2 (1980), 195–​219. 35  Mary Bucholtz, ‘Sociolinguistic Nostalgia and the Authentication of Identity’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 7.3 (2003), 398–​416 (p. 399). 34 

524   Jane Hodson their remit far beyond the remote peasant, the emphasis on the ‘authentic’ part remained, and it is apparent that modern dialectology owes a direct line of descent from the kinds of arguments used by Bosworth to justify attention to rural speech. Within the last decade dialectologists have begun to interrogate the idea of ‘the authentic speaker’ much more critically, and greater attention has been paid to the role of speaker agency and social creativity. This opens up new opportunities for cross-​fertilization between literary and linguistic perspectives. For example, drawing on earlier work by Asif Agha, Barbara Johnstone and colleagues develop a framework to explore the historical process by which speakers become conscious of dialectal differences, with particular reference to the variety of English spoken in the North American city of Pittsburgh.36 It is not my intention to rehearse the whole model here, but it is notable that in the final stage (third-​order indexicality) a subset of the linguistic features becomes widely recognized as marking that particular dialect, to the point where it becomes possible for speakers to perform the dialect simply by using a few features in isolation. At this point, both the dialect in question and the specific features associated with it are said to have become ‘enregistered’. What is of particular interest to the literary scholar in this model is that it affords a particular role to print and sees representations of dialects in literature as having a constructive role in the development of perceptions of dialect. In acknowledging the role that literature plays in constructing popular perceptions of dialect, consideration must also be given to the ideological implications of this process. As I explained earlier, dialects that were held to be particularly rustic and unspoiled were valued highly in linguistic terms; as a result, poetry written in those dialects was almost always pastoral in genre, as in the case of the poems by Burns and Clare already discussed. Writing about the Scottish context, Nigel Leask notes that ‘Despite its popularity, pastoral ranked low in the Augustan hierarchy of poetical genres, which meant that poetry written in the Scots “Doric” idiom was conventionally limited to pastoral eclogues and elegies . . . epistles, songs and ballads, and the “peasant brawl” genre of the Christ’s Kirk tradition.’37 ‘Doric’ was the variety of ancient Greek spoken in Doria and was associated with rural life, standing in opposition to the urban ‘Attic’ of Athens. The term was used early in the eighteenth century by Allan Ramsay to defend his use of Scots, and was later applied to Burns. The use of the Greek term confers classical connotations on poetry written in Scots, but at the same time it places constraints on subject matter and genre. Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads calls for a new kind of literary language which embraces the language of the lower orders. At the same time, however, it relentlessly associates the lives of those lower orders with the simple, the elementary, and the natural:

36 

Asif Agha, ‘The Social Life of Cultural Value’, Language and Communication 23.3–​4 (2003), 231–​ 73; Barbara Johnstone, Jennifer Andrus, and Andrew E. Danielson, ‘Mobility, Indexicality, and the Enregisterment of “Pittsburghese” ’, Journal of English Linguistics 32.4 (2006), 77–​104. 37  Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-​Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 57.

Literary Uses of Dialect    525 Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of these men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.38

From one perspective this is a powerful statement in support of regional language varieties, but from another it is evidence of how dialect was often confined to the marginal and remote. Certainly, in Wordsworth’s own poetic practice in Lyrical Ballads there is little evidence of dialect features, and those do appear are carefully hedged about. For example: Beneath that large old Oak, which near their door Stood, and from it’s enormous breadth of shade Chosen for the Shearer’s covert from the sun, Thence in our rustic dialect was call’d The Clipping Tree, a name which yet it bears.39

In using the phrase ‘our rustic dialect’ Wordsworth acknowledges ‘clipping tree’ to be a term that he himself shared in the past, and yet by glossing it in this way and footnoting its meaning he creates distance between the ‘rustic dialect’ and the national language shared by poet and reader.40 There is thus an inherent contradiction in the arguments that brought dialect into poetry during the Romantic period: these arguments both validated the use of the language of ordinary people in literature, and yet also invalidated such language as rural and marginal. Within fiction, there is a parallel tendency for dialect to be used to signal the speech of lower-​class characters, as in the case above with Mrs McClarty and Patsy. Even in dealing with a variety as well established as Scots, writers had to balance a desire to extend the literary range of Scots against the fact that they were participating in a literary culture which revolved around London as well as Edinburgh, and that they were writing for English as well as Scottish audiences. An example of how this might play out in practice can be seen in the novel Edith of Glammis (1836). In this historical novel, King James VI of Scotland makes regular appearances, often initially in disguise. Throughout, he speaks in Scots:

38 

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 2 vols (London, 1800), i, p. xi. Subsequent quotations are from this edition. 39  ‘Michael, A Pastoral’, lines 175–​9. 40  See Alex Broadhead, ‘Framing Dialect in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth, Regionalisms and Footnotes’, Language and Literature 19.3 (2010), 249–​63.

526   Jane Hodson ‘God’s grace, man!’ exclaimed the king, ‘we shall ne’er extend it to you—​to you, wha, under Providence, hae been the instrument o’ communicating the foul conspiracy to our gracious self. Na, na, man; that were but sma’ thanks to return for the affection ye have shewn to our maist royal person, and the meikle mischief ye hae prevented by the timely disclosure o’ the diabolical and maist unholy league.’ The latter parts of this sentence were spoken in a tone which, though veiled by natural urbanity and politeness, implied, to the most attentive hearer, the existence of a deep and bitter feeling of sarcasm and contempt.41

It is notable here that Scots is explicitly associated with ‘urbanity and politeness’, and that the king is presented as highly linguistically competent, mixing Scots ‘meikle’ and ‘maist’ alongside Latinate ‘conspiracy’, ‘gracious’, ‘affection’, and ‘diabolical’. Scots is presented as a language fit for a king, but the narrator is also careful to comment on the fact that James is a very unusual monarch who stands in distinction from his (Standard English–​speaking) courtiers: James had been called to the throne at a very tender age, and his education had consequently been much neglected. His acquirements in general might therefore be looked upon more as those of a natural, than of an artificial kind. Yet nevertheless, no prince ever existed who was so completely versed in the laws and customs of his kingdom, or who could apply those laws in a more correct and expeditious manner.42

While this passage does not explicitly refer to his language, it is difficult not to read the explanation of his ‘natural’ acquirements as referring at least in part to his use of language. The novel is thus caught between celebrating the linguistic dexterity of a king who ruled both Scotland and England and conforming to the expectations of an audience trained to identify Scotticisms as a defect in polite speech. Dialect in literature thus began to offer the possibility of representing the voices of characters who had not previously been heard in literature, or had not been taken seriously. At the same time, however, to represent such voices was to place them socially and to pass implicit judgement upon the intellectual abilities of their speakers. The fact that concerns about the way in which dialect constructed social status could and did occur to authors is confirmed by William Godwin’s novel St. Leon (1799), in the passage where the eponymous hero reports on his first conversation with Hector: I was surprised at the propriety of his answers. I am unable at this distance of time to recal the defects of his language; and I disdain the mimic toil of inventing a jargon for him suitable to the lowness of his condition: the sense of what he said I faithfully report. I had before been struck with a certain correctness of thinking in him; but I now examined his countenance more attentively than I had ever before done, and

41  Alexander Hamilton, Edith of Glammis, by Cuthbert Clutterbuck of Kennaquhair, 3 vols (London, 1836), ii, 186–​7. 42 Hamilton, Edith, ii. 179–​80.

Literary Uses of Dialect    527 thought I could distinctly trace in it the indications of a sound understanding and an excellent heart.43

Hector is ‘a negro, a servant of the prison’,44 and novelistic conventions of the period require that he is represented as speaking an appropriately ‘broken’ English. In part, St Leon’s decision not to represent the ‘defects’ of Hector’s speech is represented as a matter of practicality: he does not remember them sufficiently. There is, however, also a moral dimension to his argument: he recognizes that to attempt to construct a literary version of Hector’s speech would be ‘inventing a jargon’, and he feels able to capture Hector’s ‘correctness of thinking’ in Standard English. A  similar point is made by one of the characters in Thomas Henry Lister’s novel Arlington (1832) who criticizes writers who ‘profess to exhibit the feelings, habits, and language of the poor, upon the strength of a few cruises of mere curiosity’, arguing that, far from capturing real life, ‘they have got nothing but a mouthful of slang’.45 Through their characters, both Godwin and Lister articulate the tension between the laudable aim of representing the voices of marginalized social groups and the reductive assumption that, through a few stock linguistic features, unmediated access to the lives of those groups is granted. In doing so, they testify to the fact that literary uses of dialect in the Romantic period occur at the intersection of a number of socially and ideologically contested categories: national versus regional, rural versus urban, gentry versus servant, educated versus uneducated, articulate versus inarticulate, moral versus immoral.

Further Reading Adamson, Sylvia, ‘Literary Language’, in Suzanne Romaine (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 4: 1776–​1997 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Beal, Joan C., English in Modern Times: 1700–​1945 (London: Arnold, 2004). Blake, Norman Francis, Non-​Standard Language in English Literature (London: Deutsch, 1981). Broadhead, Alex, The Language of Robert Burns:  Style, Ideology and Identity (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013). Coupland, Nikolas, Style: Language Variation and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Elfenbein, Andrew, Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2008). Hodson, Jane, Dialect in Film and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Hodson, Jane, ‘Talking Like a Servant: What Nineteenth Century Novels Can Tell Us About the Social History of the Language’, Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 2.1 (2016), 27–​46. Hodson, Jane, and Alex Broadhead, ‘Developments in Literary Dialect Representation in British Fiction 1800–​1836’, Language and Literature 22 (2013), 315–​32.

43 

William Godwin, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, 4 vols (London, 1799), ii. 298–​9.

45 

Thomas Lister, Arlington, 3 vols (London, 1832), iii. 240.

44 Godwin, St. Leon, ii. 295.

528   Jane Hodson Hollingworth, Brian, Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). Jaffe, Alexandra, and Shana Walton, ‘The Voices People Read:  Orthography and the Representation of Non-​Standard Speech’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.4 (2000), 561–​87. McKusick, James C., ‘John Clare and the Tyranny of Grammar’, Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994), 255–​77. Mugglestone, Lynda, ‘Talking Proper’:  The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003). Sorensen, Janet, ‘ “Strange Orthography and Singular Diction”: Scott’s Use of Scots in The Heart of Midlothian’, in Ton Hoenselaars and Marius Buning (eds), English Literature and the Other Languages (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). Sorensen, Janet, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-​Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Tulloch, Graham, The Language of Walter Scott: A Study of His Scottish and Period Language (London: Deutsch, 1980).

Chapter 34

Rom antic Oratory Judith Thompson

The Orator hath yoked The hours, like young Aurora, to his Car . . . Marvellous! The enchantment spreads and rises; all are rapt Astonished . . . Words follow words, sense seems to follow sense; What memory and what logic! till the Strain Transcendent, superhuman as it is, Grows tedious even in a young man’s ear.1

Wordsworth’s doubled-​edged tribute to ‘tongue-​favor’d men’ in Book 7 of The Prelude marks the limit of most people’s knowledge of Romantic oratory. His satiric survey of sites and forms of public speech in London, as well as the belated encomium on ‘the genius of Burke’ that interrupts it in the 1850 version of the poem (but is conspicuously missing in the 1805 text), are symptomatic of a deep ambivalence about ‘the crook of eloquence’, an attitude that came to characterize the age and obscures the importance, variety, and influence of oratory within it. Indeed, the value judgement implicit in Wordsworth’s bathetic shift from transcendence to tedium is mirrored in the influential criticism of Coleridge and Hazlitt, who effectively bit the hand that fed them when they used public lectures to promote the inferiority of public speaking to private reading and writing, thereby helping to ensure that we study the ‘spirit of the age’ through the printed rather than the spoken word. Even as that age idealized folk orality through print bardolatry, it muzzled and mocked the louder voices of solidarity, resistance, and aspiration being raised in city squares, fields, taverns, and debating clubs. Posterity has thus forgotten that the Romantic era was also a golden age of spoken eloquence in which revolutionary debate provided a forum for some of the most powerful orators England had

1 

The Prelude (1805), Book 7, lines 532–​43, in William Wordsworth: The Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

530   Judith Thompson ever produced, in which thousands were inspired by popular pulpit and platform performers, and in which a rage for recitation swept the land such that not only the poet but the reader, too, was ‘a man speaking to men’ (or possibly even a woman to women). Of course, any study of the spoken word must confront its inherent impermanence. It may be the most vital and dynamic form of language, but it shares the mortality of the bodies that deliver it in particular times, places, and circumstances, and can never be completely reproduced. It is therefore not surprising that Romantic oratory has been overshadowed by more permanent forms of verbal media. Nevertheless, one of the chief reasons for its neglect is, like so much else in the period, political. It was precisely the democratic range, power, and immediacy of the spoken word, its capacity to unite and move, educate and empower the body politic, that posed a threat in a revolutionary era. The spectre of mob violence raised by radical demagogues, and memories of the ‘dangerous enthusiasms’ of England’s own revolution in the rantings of itinerant preachers and millenarian prophets, led first to the outright suppression of public speech (in the infamous ‘Gagging Acts’ of 1795), and then to its careful regulation. This was most effective when it was self-​imposed, as in the case of Coleridge, whose strategic sidestep  in 1797 from podium to poetry heralded an ideological about-​face also evident in Wordsworth’s adoption in the later Prelude of Burke as champion of the very freedoms he had betrayed fifty years before. But even as he celebrates Burke’s ‘most eloquent tongue’, it is the ‘genius’ of the Author rather than the histrionic delivery of the Orator that the later Wordsworth, like his contemporaries, retrospectively values. The Prelude thus registers the shift in Britain from an oratorical to a literary culture in which public speech was coded by class into two categories: one more artful and polite, suitable for translation into and commemoration in print, the other more activist and popular, targeted by satire in its own time, and long hidden from history. The separation of author from orator, the elite art from the lowly act of public speech, is reflected in terminology employed at the time and in the subsequent critical heritage. Oratory must first be distinguished from the related terms orality and rhetoric, both of which have received greater critical attention. The orality so influentially theorized for our own age by Walter Ong is, to use Friedrich Schiller’s terms, a ‘naïve’ form of spoken language, associated with preliterate cultures at one with nature; by contrast, oratory is one of Schiller’s ‘sentimental’ or self-​conscious forms, characterized by the artful cultivation of the voice; it is ‘the natural faculty of speech improved by art’, as defined by Joseph Priestley in his Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777).2 As such, it has stood at the heart of rhetoric—​the ‘art of speaking’—​for thousands of years, and it formed the foundation of a classical education through the Romantic period and beyond. While rhetoric and oratory were originally virtually synonymous, during the eighteenth century oratory came increasingly to be identified with only the fifth element of classical rhetoric, actio or pronunciatio, the more practical and physical Demosthenean art of delivery or elocution (including pronunciation, gesture, tone, and other performative

2 

Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London, 1777), 1.

Romantic Oratory   531 elements of language) as distinct from the more elegant, Ciceronian art of rhetorical figures and arrangement, which translated more easily to print. Demosthenean arts and acts of delivery lie at the heart of the elocutionary movement that dominated rhetorical theory and practice throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its considerable influence upon Romanticism has not been fully appreciated, however, due to the persistence of class prejudices—​as reflected, for example, in Howell’s disparagement of elocutionists as ignorant of classical tradition and too often mere ‘poseurs and charlatans’ who ‘brought rhetoric into the deepest disrepute that it had ever known’.3 Oratory all but disappeared as an object of serious academic study in the twentieth century, and by the end of the century, ‘the rhetoric of Romanticism’ was understood to refer to the entirely textual poststructuralism of Paul de Man’s 1984 landmark4 rather than the varieties of spoken and written rhetorical idiom studied by earlier scholars. Disciplinary boundaries hardened during the same period, so that the artful study of rhetoric-​as-​textuality in departments of literature and philosophy was sundered from the active delivery of speech-​as-​performance in departments of education and theatre. This oratorical apartheid has begun to break down in the twenty-​first century with the rise of interdisciplinary fields such as sociolinguistics, speech act theory, and performance studies, but the research remains fragmented. We need a more inclusive conception of Romantic oratory that embraces the range and interrelation of elocutionary and literary theory and practice in the period, and recuperates the reputations of popular, working-​class speakers whose rise is one of its most significant developments. To this end, my working definition incorporates two contemporary critical terms: oracy, adapted from speech pedagogy by Patsy Rodenburg to define competence in public speaking and defend the spoken word as a pragmatic instrument of the body politic;5 and orature, adapted from postcolonial linguistics by Ngugi wa Thiongo to denote an art of spoken utterance that celebrates interconnectedness and is used to resist the cultural imperialism of ‘literature’.6 These concepts inform the broadly elocutionary approach that I take in this chapter by focusing on the art of speaking as a political act and a form of cross-​generic and countercultural interaction. My inclusive approach to oratory in this chapter is anticipated in the theory and practice of the most important Romantic-​era elocutionist, the radical lecturer and pedagogue John Thelwall. In his Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary Science (1805), Thelwall distinguishes the ‘more general notion of Eloquence’, which he defines as ‘the Art of expressing our thoughts and feelings . . . whether oral or written’, from the ‘more complex idea’ of Oratory, which is ‘Oral Eloquence; or the Art of

3  Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-​Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 243. 4  Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 5  Patsy Rodenburg, The Need for Words: Voice and the Text (New York: Routledge, 2001), 3–​26, 66–​68. 6  Ngugi wa Thiongo, ‘Notes towards a Performance Theory of Orature’, Performance Research 12.3 (2007), 4–​7.

532   Judith Thompson Communicating’. As such, Oratory ‘includes . . . the practical part of Elocution’, which he defines most comprehensively of all as at once a Science, an Art, and an Act of delivery, intended not only to ‘convey’ thoughts and feelings but to ‘excite and impress’ them in and upon others: it ‘embraces the whole Theory and Practice of the exterior demonstration of the inward workings of the mind’.7 Thelwall stood within a rich tradition of elocutionary theory and practical pedagogy whose founding father was the Irish actor and educator Thomas Sheridan. In pioneering works such as British Education (1756) and A Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762), Sheridan had championed spoken language as the language of God, Nature, Passion, and Imagination, which was living, even as written language was man-​made and dead. Sheridan saw oratory as the cornerstone of civic virtue, the armour of religion, and the perfection of poetry, and he was committed to strengthening, stabilizing, and improving the English language and nation through elocutionary education. His ‘natural’ school of elocution, based primarily upon voice (articulation, tone, accent, emphasis, pauses and pacing), was rivalled by the ‘mechanical’ school of elocution developed by James Burgh, John Walker, Gilbert Austin, and others, which put more emphasis upon gesture and ‘the speaking body’, drawing on the physiognomic theories of Le Brun and Lavater to regulate and systematize expression.8 Thelwall combined natural and mechanical approaches to develop his own idiosyncratic system of notation, prosody, and pronunciation, and opened an Institution of Eloquence much like the one Sheridan had envisioned. Alone among his contemporaries, however, he based his theories upon scientific laws and understood the anatomical basis for the production of speech, experimenting and applying his theories to the treatment of organic, moral, and mental impediments, and thereby laying the foundation for modern speech therapy.9 More importantly, Thelwall stands out because of his range as a thinker and an activist who united polite and popular oratory, ‘straddling the world of Wordsworth and of Coleridge, and the world of the Spitalfields weavers’.10 In a varied career that spanned the entire Romantic period, Thelwall produced a prolific body of work unified by his commitment to both freedom of speech, and its improvement. He regarded oratory as central to the formation of a democratic citizen, to language understood as a medium of exchange, and to literature used as an instrument not only of social aspiration but also of political empowerment. Thelwall’s activist and interactive conception of oratory stands in striking contrast to more dominant Romantic notions of public speech exemplified by his better-​known 7 

John Thelwall, Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary Science (Pontefract, 1805), 2–​3, 11. 8 Howell, Eighteenth-​Century, 1–​54, 244–​56. See also W. Benzie, The Dublin Orator: Thomas Sheridan’s Influence on Eighteenth-​Century Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1972). 9  The broad educational and medical remit of Thelwall’s school is highlighted by an 1808 advertisement which refers to it as an ‘Institution for the cure of impediments of speech, instruction of foreigners, cultivation of oratory, English composition and polite literature, and the preparation of youth for the more liberal departments of active life.’ 10  E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 172.

Romantic Oratory   533 contemporaries and one-​time friends, William Godwin and William Hazlitt. Whereas Thelwall used his political and elocutionary lectures to promote ‘practical fluency’ among listeners of all social classes, Godwin denied that oratory could coexist with the intellectual independence and disinterested reflection necessary for true political justice. He disparaged oratory as mindless, overheated, and driven by mob feeling and political expediency, a matter of ‘harangues and declamation’, ‘pompous nothings’, and ‘meretricious ornament’ which ‘lead to passion and not to knowledge’.11 Similar attitudes are seen in Hazlitt’s essay on ‘On the Difference between Writing and Speaking’ (1826), which derides the ‘dashing orator’ (probably Thelwall himself) as a mere ‘theatrical declaimer’ whose volcanic delivery conceals his intellectual nakedness; utterly dependent upon the passion of the moment and an equally fickle audience, his fire turns ‘tame and trite and tedious’ in print.12 Hazlitt was more appreciative of parliamentary orators, to whom he devoted numerous essays and a two-​volume anthology, The Eloquence of the British Senate (1807), but he makes categorical distinctions between poetry and eloquence. Poetry enriches and delights the imagination; oratory motivates and impels the will. Poetry lulls and soothes; oratory awakens. Poetry dwells in an ideal world; oratory is confined to particular facts. A great orator may move ‘as a giant among common men’, but ‘he does not create, only imitate or echo back the public sentiment’. Only a poet can originate, and only print can preserve his creation.13 In diametrical opposition to Hazlitt, Thelwall and other elocutionists saw oratory as the origin and complement of poetry. According to Thomas Sheridan, ‘the study and practice of oratory alone could bring language to perfection. It was to the orators therefore that the poets of all denominations were obliged for the use and improvement of an instrument perfectly adapted to all their several purposes’.14 This process was assisted by hundreds of lectures, treatises, essays, handbooks, and anthologies of or about oratory and elocution, the most influential of which, William Enfield’s best-​selling The Speaker, was consistently in print, in Britain and America, from its publication in 1774 until the middle of the nineteenth century. In these works, oratory was generally classified according to classical precedent into the same three categories that appear (albeit more dismissively) in Wordsworth’s Prelude: senate, pulpit, and bar. The anthologies were subdivided further according to rhetorical genre or form (narrative, didactic, argumentative, descriptive, pathetic readings in prose, verse, and drama). Many of the lectures and readings also focused on representative hero-​orators, ancient (Cicero, Livy, Tacitus), modern (Walpole, Burke, Chatham), and literary (Milton’s Satan, Shakespeare’s Antony). Another, less hierarchical principle of organization, not represented in the handbooks, structures Wordsworth’s passage. It is notable that apart from

11  An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), iii. 144. 12  ‘On the Difference between Writing and Speaking’, The Plain Speaker (1826), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), xii. 264–​5. 13  Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (1819), in Complete Works of Hazlitt, vii. 299–​300. 14  Thomas Sheridan, British Education (Dublin, 1756), 303–​4.

534   Judith Thompson the belated tribute to Burke, none of the speakers and performers in Book 7 is named; instead, the book is organized geographically, according to sites of speech, in a composite London streetscape in which high and low forms of spoken and written language, material and visual culture are confused in a ‘thickening hubbub’ (line 227) of voice, image, and performance. Wordsworth’s method of organizing oratory corresponds to techniques used by Romantic-​era caricaturists, and anticipates the methods followed by modern cultural historians. The Romantic period was a time of transition in parliamentary oratory. As revolutions in America and France, and imperial corruption in India, heightened awareness of the speech acts by which society is bound together, and raised fundamental questions about who had the right to speak and act for the people,15 a once-​closed Parliament became increasingly open to a public eager to follow these debates in the press. Even before the official history of parliamentary reporting began with the sale of William Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates (founded in 1802) to the Hansard family in 1812, writers such as Coleridge and Hazlitt were honing their prose style by covering parliamentary affairs for papers like the Morning Chronicle.16 The art and practice of political oratory in the period also included the ‘platform culture’ of election campaigns (like the battle of Brougham and Lowther in Westmorland in 1818, in which Wordsworth and De Quincey participated) and political dinners, where ‘even a toast could carry far-​reaching consequences’.17 More importantly, politics was transformed by popular oratory in the halls, squares, and fields where lecturers such as ‘Citizen’ Thelwall and ‘Orator’ Hunt addressed the masses, demanding parliamentary reform, conversing directly with the vox populi, and planting the seeds for more representative politics and citizenship in the later nineteenth century. Among parliamentary orators, the name of Edmund Burke still shines as the most brilliant and influential of the age, acclaimed by allies and adversaries alike for his metaphorical sublimity and metaphysical penetration. However, the qualities that assured his reputation as a thinker and stylist, especially after his death, did little to hold an immediate audience; his erratic, heavily accented delivery and rambling rhapsodies so often emptied the House that he was nicknamed ‘Dinner Bell’.18 Nevertheless, according to Hazlitt, Burke’s contradictions were the key to his greatness; his ‘rich, impetuous, high wrought imagination’ both epitomized and transformed the spirit of the age, bespeaking a profoundly romantic sensibility that transcended the ‘ticketed and labeled eloquence’ and ‘bastard sophistry’ of his contemporaries.19 Educated at Trinity College Dublin 15  Angela Esterhammer, The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 16  Nikki Hessell, Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 97–​101. 17  Matthew Bevis, ‘Volumes of Noise’, Victorian Literature and Culture 31.2 (2003), 577–​91 (p. 579). 18  Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–​2, 5. 19  ‘The Character of Mr. Pitt’, vii. 325; ‘Mr. Brougham—​Sir F. Burdett’, The Spirit of the Age, xi. 137; The Eloquence of the British Senate, i. 147 (vol. and page refs. are to the Complete Works of Hazlitt).

Romantic Oratory   535 (where the debating club he founded continues to this day), he rapidly rose to prominence as an ‘Irish Cicero’ and Whig reformer during the American Revolution and the trial of Warren Hastings. But he left his greatest mark upon the age by turning his back on reform at the end of his career, when his reactionary Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) set off a pamphlet war which engaged the attention of the whole country and transformed the political culture. Its oratorical complement was the famous ‘dagger scene’ when, during a debate in the House of Commons in 1792, Burke drew a concealed knife from his pocket and threw it to the floor to bring home the threat of revolutionary violence, an act that epitomized the histrionic excess not only of Burke’s character, but of Romantic-​era politics and oratory in general.20 When Burke exposed his dagger, his fellow Whig and one-​time friend Richard Brinsley Sheridan is reputed to have cried out ‘but where is the fork?’ Such sharp repartee was characteristic of Sheridan, an orator as (or perhaps more) skilled than Burke, but one whose reputation has since been eclipsed by his Irish contemporary.21 A notable actor and celebrated playwright, son of Thomas Sheridan the elocutionist, he knew from experience that the power of voice is inseparable from its immediate circumstances and audience. Suave and self-​controlled, Richard Brinsley Sheridan brought to his oratory a theatrical poise, flexibility, and wit, taking on different roles, attitudes, and positions as circumstances demanded. His greatest moment came during the Hastings trial, when his ‘Begum speech’ held the house rapt for a full five hours, caused a public sensation, and was later acclaimed by many (including Moore and Byron) as the best single oration ever delivered.22 In their consummate professionalism, Sheridan’s spoken performances contrasted with those not only of Burke, but also of Charles James Fox, another of Burke’s one-​time friends and oratorical rivals. Fox’s style was, like his body, at the opposite extreme from that of both Burke and Sheridan: fat, swarthy, literally and rhetorically unbuttoned, he was by turns genial and pugnacious, an extemporizer extraordinaire with a penchant for simple, abrupt turns of phrase, hammering repetition, and a talent for seizing on his opponent’s weak points, reversing and improvising upon them.23 Fox’s most iconic oratorical moment was, ironically, a failure of oratory: the unprecedented emotional and rhetorical breakdown that occurred during a debate in 1791 when, overwhelmed by the betrayal of friendship represented by the Burke’s desertion of the reform cause, Fox burst into tears and struggled to speak. At once genuine and self-​consciously theatrical, these tears,

20  Gillian Russell, ‘Burke’s Dagger: Theatricality, Politics and Print Culture in the 1790s’, British Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies 20 (1997), 1–​16. 21  Frans de Bruyn, ‘Burke and the Uses of Eloquence: Political Prose in the 1770s and 1780s’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature 1660–​1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 583–4. 22  See Arthur Woehl, ‘Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Parliamentarian’, in Donald Bryant (ed.), The Rhetorical Idiom: Essays in Rhetoric, Oratory, Language and Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), 249. 23  William Mathews, Oratory and Orators (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1878), 244–​50.

536   Judith Thompson like Burke’s dagger, epitomize the physicality of Romantic oratory, and capture the paradox at its heart: it is most sincere and natural where it is most sentimental and performative. 24 Burke’s break with Fox and Sheridan was a defining moment for Romanticism in more ways than one, for at that point the drama of oratory passed from parliamentary to counter-​parliamentary spaces and speakers. As the Revolution debate spilled out of Parliament onto the fields, platforms, and debating halls of the London Corresponding Society and other plebian associations, polite oratory itself was challenged, subverted, and reanimated by being extended to a true (and truly reciprocal) public audience. While there had been popular leaders before this time, the Romantic period was unprecedented for the sheer number and seriousness of counter-​parliamentary spokesmen whose oratorical skill and sophistication matched (and mocked) those of the parliamentarians. Self-​educated, pragmatic, and articulate, they answered the frustrations and expressed the aspirations of an increasingly active, ambitious, and literate middle and artisanal class excluded from education and parliamentary representation. Often dismissed as mere demagogues, these men were not given the honour of posthumous recognition as political thinkers or ‘senatorial’ orators; as Belchem points out, even among sympathetic modern historians of the working class, ‘the demagogue has yet to be de-​stigmatized’.25 But they gained a different kind of posterity in the print caricatures of the period, many of which, like Wordsworth’s Book Seven, focus on sites of speech rather than names, as exemplified by James Gillray’s Copenhagen House (1795) or Isaac Cruikshank’s Debating Society (1795). Often scurrilously satiric, such images require careful interpretation, but they capture several key features of popular oratory, including its dynamic physiognomy, its varied and responsive audience, and even its raucous voices (in the speech balloons which appear in many prints, a technique pioneered by Gillray). Gillray’s Copenhagen House (Fig. 34.1) represents three of the speakers who mounted platforms to address upwards of 100,000 people at all-​day meetings in Copenhagen Fields in London in November 1795. Two of the figures are too small for certain identification, but the most conspicuous and individualized is John Thelwall, without doubt the most prominent popular orator of the 1790s. He appears in the right foreground in his characteristic pose, leaning forward, fist raised, exuding the vociferous charisma that physiognomically distinguishes him from the prosaic and grotesque figures who surround him, and in some measure ennobles him in spite of satiric intent.26 These 24  Daniel O’Quinn, ‘Fox’s Tears: The Staging of Liquid Politics’, in Alexander Dick and Angela Esterhammer (eds), Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 25  John Belchem, ‘Orator Hunt’: Henry Hunt and English Working-​Class Radicalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 59. 26  For the first part of this paragraph, and for my methodology throughout this section, I am indebted to Steve Poole, ‘Gillray, Cruikshank and Thelwall: Visual Satire, Physiognomy and the Jacobin Body’, in Yasmin Solomonescu (ed.), John Thelwall: Critical Reassessments, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2011), at: www.rc.umd.edu/​praxis/​thelwall.

Romantic Oratory   537

Fig. 34.1  James Gillray, Copenhagen House. Hannah Humphrey, 16 Nov. 1795. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

marks of distinction reinforce Thelwall’s own self-​fashioning after classical republican models, a strategy by which he claimed equality with parliamentary orators of his day, especially Burke, whose ideas and techniques are a frequent point of reference in his lectures. When addressing the public, Thelwall alternately imitated and refuted senatorial oratory, attacking, improvising upon and parodying its styles and arguments. Unlike Burke, however, Thelwall was able to hold an audience of tens of thousands. Whereas parliamentary orators met in exclusive, hierarchical interiors, representing the elite 10 per cent of the population that Burke considered as ‘the British public’, Thelwall and his fellows spoke in crowded, open spaces, addressing the hugely heterogeneous 90 per cent excluded from political representation. Their oratory was equally open and heterogeneous, sharing the mobility of what Thelwall called ‘seditious allegory’, a mode of expression that embraces and exploits the ephemerality and ambiguity of the spoken word in order to protect the speaker from prosecution.27 Thelwall’s oratory was characterized by constant shifts in voice, mode, register, meaning, and tone, moving between passion and reason, populism and authority, provocation and restraint, extravagant metaphor and plain facts. Freed from polite decorum, he used vulgar, physical humour. Thelwall 27  Michael Scrivener, Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001). See also Judith Thompson, John Thelwall: Selected Poetry and Poetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

538   Judith Thompson did not simply indulge and entertain the crowd, however; he also inspired and educated them, using oratory to inform, awaken, and impel, urging them to enquire, to question authority (including his own), and to speak for themselves. Unlike the stereotypical demagogue, Thelwall did not inflame passions but offered to working-​class auditors a course in rhetoric like the ones he later developed in his elocutionary lectures. Thelwall’s Romantic oratory was, above all, interactive: eliciting response, it forged a bond between speaker and audience to create a true corresponding society. The three African urchins pictured in the lower left corner of Gillray’s Copenhagen House draw attention to another popular oratorical tradition. Though none appeared on the platforms at Copenhagen Fields, black activists and orators were a conspicuous presence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the most prominent were William Davidson, one of the Cato Street conspirators, and Robert Wedderburn, who preached a fiery mix of Methodism and Spencean radicalism.28 Both were mixed-​ race Creoles, the ‘natural’ sons of powerful white planters (Davidson’s father was the Attorney-​General of Jamaica; Wedderburn’s mother a rebellious house-​slave) whose activism highlights the transnational, multi-​ethnic nature of nineteenth-​century associational and oratorical worlds. Wedderburn combined the traditions of Enlightenment oratory (inherited from his Scottish father) and African ‘orature’ (he was raised by a grandmother named ‘Talkee Amy’, known for both eloquence and magical arts)29 in ferociously extempore delivery which attracted crowds to his ‘temple of blasphemy and sedition’. Here, serious political arguments drawn from his readings in Paine and Volney were conveyed in the language of prophetic divination, violent colloquialism, and entertaining buffoonery. All these elements are captured in George Cruikshank’s 1819 cartoon The New Union-​Club (Fig. 34.2), where a figure who is probably Wedderburn stands below an image of St Paul, alongside a fiddler (possibly Wedderburn’s sidekick, the dwarf Samuel Waddington). Known for his theatrical role-​playing, Wedderburn exploited prejudice for his own protection during his blasphemy trial, when he pretended to be mute and illiterate, turning the proceedings into a farce.30 In this he resembled Thelwall, and this too is reflected in the physiognomy of the Cruikshank image, which mirrors Gillray’s Copenhagen House in the way the orator rises above viciously satirical class and racial stereotypes, standing slender, vibrant, and attractive at the centre, elevated above a drunken, animalistic crowd. A similar suppleness of oratorical physiognomy marks the caricatures of Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, who was to the Regency what Thelwall was to the 1790s. He appears in numerous prints published in the wake of the Romantic era’s climactic event of open-​ air oratory, the peaceful public meeting at St Peter’s Field in Manchester that became

28 Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, 146–​66. For Wedderburn, see Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 50–​72. 29  Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-​Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 287–​326. 30 Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, 158–​64.

Romantic Oratory   539

Fig. 34.2  George Cruikshank, The New Union-​Club. George Humphrey, 19 July 1819. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

known as ‘Peterloo’ after dragoons trampled and cut down hundreds of the 60,000 people who had come to hear Hunt and others speak. In one of the best known of these images, To Henry Hunt, Esqr., Hunt stands in the centre of the raised platform, in the standard oratorical pose, leaning forward and outward, one arm raised, the other holding his hallmark white top hat (Fig. 34.3). A focal point of the composition, crossed with a gleaming sabre blade, the hat captures the paradox of Hunt’s oratorical delivery and persona:  it mirrors the white liberty caps topping the banners that wave above him, resounding his message of ‘universal suffrage’, and uniting him with the people as their champion against tyranny; but it is also a mark of his vanity (Hunt was a wealthy gentleman farmer), a fitting symbol of the cult of personality that grew up around radical orators in the later Romantic period when, according to E. P. Thompson, self-​dramatizing ego replaced the earlier rhetoric of égalité. Skilled in the forms and language of high politics, Hunt could belabour his political opponents in their own tongue, but he also had the common touch, playing to the crowds who, in turn, treated him like royalty. Tall and handsome, he was a master of emotive rhetoric who identified his body with those of his auditors by struggling to speak (gasping, flushing, beating his breast).31 Hunt has gone down in history as a demagogue and vainglorious loudmouth, but according

31 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 681–​5.

540   Judith Thompson

Fig. 34.3 Anonymous, To Henry Hunt, Esqr. as Chairman of the Meeting assembled on St. Peter’s Field, Manchester on the 16th of August, 1819. Richard Carlile, 1 Oct. 1819. . © The Trustees of the British Museum

to his biographer, his speeches reveal ‘far more purpose and principle’ than he is given credit for, and as a linchpin joining Jacobin and Chartist oratory, his influence and contribution to political history are undeniable.32 While parliamentary and popular politics fed the Romantic cult of personality with a stream of charismatic orator-​heroes, the most pervasive and influential, though less glamorous, site of oratory was the church, in its various denominations and forms of worship, belief, and dissent. In an era in which a large percentage of the population was still illiterate, and religious observance was obligatory, the word of God came directly, with great regularity, through the mouth of the preacher into the ear of the congregant. While hundreds of sermons were published and read in the Romantic period, thousands more were heard. Ideally, religion was the great national unifier and stabilizer, binding together eye and ear, upper and lower classes, in the village church. The reality, however, was very different. Despite the cultural and political hegemony of the established

32 Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt, 59.

Romantic Oratory   541 (Anglican) church, which denied opportunities for education and social advancement to those who would not subscribe to its thirty-​nine articles, this was a period of religious sectarianism, when increasing numbers were attracted to dissenting denominations (Baptists, Unitarians, Quakers, Methodists, and even fringe millenarian sects). In these groups, as seen in the case of Wedderburn, the line between religious and political opposition was blurred; and it was above all this threat, and especially the growth of Methodism, that defined oratory in the period. As Daniel White has pointed out, religious differences manifested themselves in attitudes toward extempore oratory. In general, the established church frowned on spontaneous, unstructured preaching, which it associated with the vulgar zealotry and violent sectarianism of the English Revolution. Instead, licensed, well-​educated clergymen were trained first to write their sermons according to established rhetorical rules, and then deliver them in a seemly and serious manner, in order to give them the intellectual weight of both scriptural and institutional authority. This often sent the congregation to sleep. Written sermons also prevailed among rational dissenters, such as Baptists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians, whose devotional tastes, tending towards the philosophical, led them to share the widespread disdain of extempore enthusiasm as ‘a kind of monster’.33 That monster was Methodism, of which extempore open-​air preaching had become the habit and hallmark since it was pioneered by George Whitefield in 1739; this was the reason for its spectacular growth among the lower classes during the eighteenth century. Itinerant preachers offered direct access to the living Word of God to thousands of poor, illiterate citizens, both urban and rural, prompting conversions and convulsions in an enthusiastic contagion of prayer, confession, and testimonial in which distinctions between speaker and audience, authority and laity, soul and body were lowered.34 In the early nineteenth century new waves of ‘primitive’ Methodism took this even further, with camp meetings and love feasts led by uneducated working-​class preachers such as Hugh Bourne, in which people fell into trances and spoke in tongues. Similar frenzies of rapturous and reciprocal communication with the Voice of God characterized the fringe movements that sprang up around the turn of the century, including the millenarian cults that surrounded prophets such as Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers, although most of their prophecies circulated in print.35 It was the proliferation of this kind of irrational, fanatical, and potentially violent behaviour that underlay the persistent and widespread anxieties about popular oratory—​indeed, all forms of spoken word—​in the period. Yet no one could deny its power, and the need to confront the threat it posed to established authority.

33  Daniel White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 44–​5. 34  George Williams, ‘The Word Came with Power’: Print, Oratory and Methodism in Eighteenth-​ Century Britain (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Maryland, 2002), 41–​2. 35  Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-​American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 77–​8.

542   Judith Thompson It is no exaggeration to say that the elocutionary movement arose as a direct response to the challenge of Methodism, out of recognition that an over-​reliance on the written word and neglect of delivery on the part of the established church were driving people into the arms of extremists, political and religious. All the elocutionists recognized the crucial importance of pulpit oratory; Thomas Sheridan declared that ‘the study, or neglect of this art . . . must either effectually support religion against all opposition, or be the principal means of its destruction’,36 and his Lectures on the Art of Reading moved through the divine service line by line, giving instructions for correct delivery.37 Priestley too recognized the importance of extempore oratory (‘the perfection of speaking’) to the popularity of ‘our modern sects, such as the Independants, Quakers, and Methodists’, but attempted to steer a middle way with ‘an eloquence more addressed to the reason, and less directly to the passions’.38 Even Thelwall, an avowed atheist, taught pulpit oratory in his elocutionary Institution, where he mocked the ‘Clerical Drawl’ and ‘Cathedral Chaunt’ while exhorting audiences to ‘a more rational and impressive mode of delivery’.39 The scope and influence of Romantic oratory went far beyond the three time-​honoured types—​senate, bar, and pulpit—​taught by elocutionary theorists and practitioners. Thelwall, for example, also lectured on martial, stage, and conversational elocution, as well as ‘the importance of elocutionary education’ to ‘awaken intellectual faculties’.40 Increasingly, that education filtered downward and outward, past the schools where elocution dominated instruction in reading, to the larger population. This included women in middle-​class parlours and book clubs, and even servants and artisans in workshops and ‘spouting’ clubs, where reading aloud was a shared activity and an aspiration, both a source of entertainment and a tool of upward mobility. Oracy went hand in hand with the spread of literacy in the Romantic period; reading and speaking were not mutually exclusive but interdependent. Indeed, more often than we realize, they were the same activity; the art of reading was the art of speaking, and vice versa. This equation lay at the heart of the elocutionary movement, its popularity and its revolutionary potential. If we accept Priestley’s definition, then oratory included reading aloud in public and private, from professional performances, solo or choral, in large halls full of paying customers, to companionable tête-​a-​têtes by the family hearth or in the artisan’s workroom—​wherever there was at least one person able to read, entertain, and educate him-​or herself and any number of (possibly illiterate) others. Although strict rules and warnings about decorum and virtue, and the steep price of admission,

36 Sheridan, British Education, 91–​2. 37 

Quoted in Patricia Howell Michaelson, Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 45. 38 Priestley, Lectures, 132–​4. 39  John Thelwall, Selections &c. for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution (York, 1802), n. p. 40  John Thelwall, Selections and Original Articles (Wakefield, 1802), n. p.

Romantic Oratory   543 attempted to control the spread of oracy, as of literacy, to the lower orders, those very strictures, along with satires such as James Cobb’s farce Public Readings (1787), which features a recitation contest between a shoemaker and mantua-​maker, are evidence of its unstoppable power, range, and popularity.41 The methods and aims of oratorical reading were modelled not only by the elocutionary handbooks, but also by the lectures that often accompanied them. Indeed, the lecture must be considered as a major genre of Romantic oratory in its own right. Lectures stood at the heart of British ‘lyceum culture’, hosted in scientific, literary, and philosophical institutions that spread through the country during the Romantic period. Hundreds of ‘Lit and Phil’ and ‘Athenaeum’ societies sprang up in every provincial centre between the 1780s and 1820s; Royal Institutions were founded in London in 1799 and Manchester in 1823; mechanics institutes followed from the 1820s to the 1840s; and in towns too small to have an independent organization, itinerant lecturers rented assembly rooms.42 Lectures were open to members and/​or the paying public, delivered by authorities and aficionados, itinerant or invited, of varying degrees of distinction and expertise, on topics that ranged from to astronomy to zoonomy, elocution to perspective, music to dentistry, history to architecture. These subjects reflected the breadth and interconnectedness of ‘science’, ‘literature’, and ‘philosophy’ in a period when all three words still signified general knowledge. While the lectures of natural and physical scientists such as Michael Faraday and Humphry Davy are now better known, there were numerous public lectures on literature (or ‘belles-​lettres’), among which Coleridge’s, though arguably the most influential, were by no means the only or even the first. As recent research by Sarah Zimmerman reveals,43 the Regency was a golden age of literary lecturing in London, as Coleridge, Hazlitt, Thelwall, and Thomas Campbell went head-​to-​head in neighbouring Institutes during the seasons of 1811–​12, developing their influential criticism in dialogue with one another, and with their mixed audiences, in theatres whose seating signalled the performative nature of the genre and reinforced social hierarchies, but also encouraged intimacy and a measure of reciprocity. Their styles offer as much variety and vigour as those of their parliamentary contemporaries. But they also show a characteristically Romantic ambivalence towards their medium and their public audiences. Thelwall and Coleridge were both famed for extempore oratory, but Thelwall’s extemporaneity, like his direct gaze and demonstrative delivery, reflected his materialist theories, his sympathy with his audience’s intellectual aspirations, and his commitment to public

41 Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, 112–​14, 125, 145–​64. 42 

Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–​1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 169–​74. 43  Sarah M. Zimmerman, The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). I am grateful to the author for sharing drafts of her work, on which I draw here. For London lecturing institutions, see also Jon Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

544   Judith Thompson education, while Coleridge’s, like his upturned eye and haphazard, unpredictable delivery, reflected his metaphysical theories, his transcendence of popular culture, and his dedication to print. Hazlitt and Campbell, by contrast, wrote out and structured their speeches, but for diametrically opposite reasons: nervous and awkward, Hazlitt relied on print to buttress his confidence and authority, and to defuse the threat of celebrity culture; charismatic and polished, Campbell used print to perfect and maintain the celebrity he had already won with his equally polished poems. Literary lecturers regularly recited passages from the poems and plays they were discussing, and sometimes used the lecture to showcase their own poetry. This too highlights the fundamental interdependence of oratorical performance and literature in this period. Thomas Sheridan, whose elocutionary theories grew out of his experience as an actor-​manager, began the tradition of public readings by performing excerpts to illustrate his lectures. This developed into separate ‘Attic Evenings’ featuring recitations, songs, and instrumental music, a format that remained a staple of public entertainment well into the twentieth century.44 Sheridan also trained actors, most notably Sarah Siddons, who after her retirement from the stage offered readings at court, in private parties, and in public halls to paying customers. The great lawyer Thomas Erskine said that her performance was ‘a school for orators’, and he studied her cadences and intonation as a model for his own. The tragic dignity, power, and poise of her delivery overcame age-​old stereotypes against the female voice. While she was careful to maintain decorum, in order to allay anxieties about female oratory as vulgar and dangerous, she facilitated the acceptance of reading aloud, at least in the private sphere, as one of the accomplishments of a genteel woman.45 Thelwall went further, actively promoting ‘the superiority of female elocution’ in his lectures, welcoming female students, including aspiring actresses, to his Institution, and including them in the public performances regularly presented there. Also featured in these concerts were groups of speech-​disabled students whose impediments he had considerable success in curing through reading aloud, according to his idiosyncratically scientific system. A key to the power and popularity of oratorical reading, especially for those marginalized by class, gender, or other impediments, was the technique of ‘personation’, whereby the reader becomes the author of and/​or the character in the text that he or she is reading, incorporating its ideas and passions, and more importantly, taking on its authority.46 As Thelwall put it, a mouth ‘is “parcel of the mind”, and of a mind that can identify itself with its author, or its subject, and modulate its tones and motions accordingly’.47 The transformative power of personation lay behind much of the anxiety about public reading among women and the lower classes, who might get ideas beyond their station by ‘practicing authority’ and enacting transgressive passions.48 But this was 44 Benzie, Dublin Orator, 55–​78.

45 Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, 111–​27. 46 Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, 186. 47 

John Thelwall, Introductory Essay on the Study of English Rhythmus (London, 1812), xvi.

48 Michaelson, Speaking Volumes, 200–​12.

Romantic Oratory   545 precisely the point of Thelwall’s programme: his Selections included speeches by characters (from St Paul to Othello) who freed themselves from oppression, alienation, or imprisonment by exercising their voices. By allowing those who had been muted and marginalized to take on these roles, Thelwall gave them the tools to overcome their own condition of verbal, intellectual, or social repression. As this chapter has shown, recognizing the power and range of oratory, including the active, critical, and participatory art of reading as performance, opens up new areas of study in Romantic literature. It also sheds new light on canonical texts, including the one I began with, which contains an irony that has often been overlooked. On the surface, the Bartholomew Fair passage in The Prelude is certainly a scathing satire on public speech and performance. Yet the perspective from which Wordsworth scans the scene is that of an orator: he begs ‘the Muse’s help’ to ‘lodge us’



Above the press and danger of the crowd—​ Upon some showman’s platform. (1805: Book 7, lines 656–​9)

Wordsworth’s poem is itself a performance, a tour-​de-​force of oratorical showmanship, in which his polite, retrospective horror at the hellish hubbub of eye and ear cannot completely conceal the subversive delight he took in speech and spectacle at the time, and their formative impact upon his work. His response to the city was evidently complex, but he was an eager participant in the loud and lively London soundscape of street and stage, platform and pulpit, and it left more traces upon his poetry than we realize. In order to read Romanticism aright, we must put Wordsworth back on the showman’s platform, and learn the art of reading there ourselves.

Further Reading Bullard, Paddy, ‘Rhetoric and Eloquence:  The Language of Persuasion’, in James A. Harris (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Bryant, Donald (ed.), The Rhetorical Idiom: Essays in Rhetoric, Oratory, Language and Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958). Dick, Alexander, and Angela Esterhammer (eds), Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). Esterhammer, Angela, The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Epstein, James, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England 1790–​1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Mee, Jon, Conversable Worlds:  Literature, Contention and Community 1762–​1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Michaelson, Patricia Howell, Speaking Volumes:  Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

546   Judith Thompson Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982). Reid, Christopher, Imprison’d Wranglers:  The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons 1760–​1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Rodenburg, Patsy, The Need for Words: Voice and the Text (New York: Routledge, 1993). Russell, Gillian, and Clara Tuite (eds), Romantic Sociability:  Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Vickers, Brian, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

Chapter 35

Creative Tra nsl at i on Michael Rossington

In a memorable passage from A Defence of Poetry (composed in 1821, published in 1840), Percy Bysshe Shelley asserts that translating a poem is impossible. He makes the claim in the course of an analysis of the ‘distinction between measured and unmeasured language’, and illustrates it through the image of a flower being melted in a vain attempt to discover ‘the formal principle of its colour and odour’. But this claim is held in tension with another view: that the very impracticability of translation can be a spur to creativity. The argument runs as follows: Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations, has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed or it will bear no flower—​and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.1

If sound is intrinsic to poetry, a translation undertaken with the intention of pouring a poem ‘from one language into another’ in order to reconstitute with any degree of exactness its ‘essence’ (a word used in the manuscript draft of the sentence in question2) is futile. The rejection of the possibility of such ‘transfusion’ pitches A Defence against one of the few book-​length expositions on translation in the Romantic period, Alexander 1  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 678. All quotations from A Defence of Poetry are from this edition. 2  Bodleian MS. Shelley d. 1, fol. 73r rev., repr. in E. B. Murray (ed.), A Facsimile of Bodleian MS. Shelley d. 1, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, vol. 4, 2 parts (New York: Garland, 1988), part 2, 146.

548   Michael Rossington Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), where a good translation is said to be ‘That, in which the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another language, as to be as distinctly apprehended, and as strongly felt, by a native of the country to which that language belongs, as it is by those who speak the language of the original work.’3 However, although Shelley resists Tytler’s idea of translation-​as-​transfusion, he ends by suggesting, through another metaphor, that translations can indeed work if and only if they constitute a new beginning—​a fresh creation from a ‘seed’ implanted in a different language. Taking Shelley as its point of departure, this chapter will address a variety of translation practices and motives for translation in the Romantic period, and explore the connection between enlightenment and originality in translations and writings about translation by a range of Romantic authors. The work of Sir William Jones will feature as an example of the role of translation in communicating enlightened values. His pioneering renditions of poetry from Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit became part of the repertoire of late ​eighteenth-​and early ​nineteenth-​century readers of literature because he tactfully mediated the verse, ensuring it could not appear alien or become marginalized. In the case of literature translated from European languages with which educated English readers were familiar, such as Italian, enlightenment was best served by a less accommodating approach. This will be illustrated here by Byron’s experiments with deliberately literal renderings of Dante’s terza rima, which he offered provocatively as alternatives to popular contemporary translations. As well as producing translations, and defending their methods as translators, poets of the period sometimes embraced the verse translations of others. ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, the poem by Keats with which Leigh Hunt introduced him to a metropolitan readership,4 will be cited as a famous example of the genre of poetry inspired by translation. This sonnet demonstrates that translation not only gives readers access to work composed in languages they cannot understand, it also can inspire a poet to discover his or her own voice. Translation’s capacity to broaden horizons thus works hand in hand, I will argue, with its potential to force the literary artist towards a concentrated act of ‘making’ (to recall the Greek root of the word ‘poetry’), resulting in new work. Translation acts as poetry’s double, enabling not simply the ‘carrying over’ of words from one language to another, but a dialogue with the original that generates originality. Shelley’s writings offer a richly ambivalent response to translation’s possibilities. Translation for him may be seen as a condition that he enjoyed inhabiting. Yet he often professes an anxiety that any attempt at it may be creatively inhibiting. Mere ‘vanity’, to cite A Defence, might appear to be the sum of his verdict. He certainly maintains a steady scepticism about translation’s value both for practitioner and user in his correspondence. The undated ‘fragment of a letter . . . to a woman’ (as Mary Shelley styles it) 3  [Alexander Fraser Tytler], Essay on the Principles of Translation, 2nd edn (London: T. Cadell, 1797), 14 (italics in original). 4  Leigh Hunt, ‘Young Poets’, The Examiner 466 (1 Dec. 1816), 761–​2. The text of the sonnet reproduced later in this chapter is that of Keats’s Poems (London, 1817).

Creative Translation   549 offers no alternative to learning the languages required for reading foreign writings in the original: What is a translation of Homer into English? A person who is ignorant of Greek, need only look at Paradise Lost or the tragedy of Lear translated into French, to obtain an analogical conception of its worthless and miserable inadequacy. Tacitus, or Livius, or Herodotus, are equally undelightful and uninstructive in translation. You require to know and to be intimate with those persons who have acted a distinguished part to benefit, to enlighten, or even to pervert and injure humankind. Before you can do this, four years are yet to be consumed in the discipline of the ancient languages, and those of modern Europe, which you only imperfectly know, and which conceal from your intimacy such names as Ariosto, Tasso, Petrarch, and Macchiavelli; or Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, &c.5

Shelley himself only resorts to translating, he claims, ‘for want of spirit to invent’.6 On learning that Leigh Hunt had begun an English version of Tasso’s Aminta, he rebukes him for failing ‘to exercise your fancy in the perpetual creation of new forms of gentleness & beauty’. Shelley tells Hunt, in effect, that translation is secondary work: ‘You are formed to be a living fountain & not a canal however clear.’ In enjoining Hunt to resist its allures Shelley nonetheless acknowledges them: With respect to translation—​even I will not be seduced by it although the greek plays & some of the ideal dramas of Calderon (with which I have lately, & with inexpressible wonder & delight become acquainted) are perpetually tempting me to throw over their perfect & glowing forms the grey veil of my own words.7

In fact, the record shows that Shelley had already succumbed to this ‘temptation’ when he wrote this letter to Hunt, since several of his fragmentary verse renditions from Calderón’s dramas almost certainly date from the preceding few months.8 Yet his references to smothering and veiling indicate a wariness towards any attempt to translate the literary works he most valued. Such reservation is evident in comments he included in his 1822 translation of the ‘Prolog im Himmel’ (‘Prologue in Heaven’) from Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (1808). Having provided an alternative, literal translation alongside his poetical rendition of the first thirty-​nine lines, he observes: ‘it is impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification; even the volatile strength & delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation, & the reader is surprised to 5 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed. Mary Shelley, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1840), ii. 248–​9 n. 6  To Maria Gisborne, 19 July 1820, in Frederick L. Jones (ed.), The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), ii. 218 (hereafter PBS Letters). 7  To Leigh Hunt, 16 Nov. 1819, in Donald H. Reiman (ed.), Shelley and his Circle 1773–​1822, vol. 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 1081. 8  See nos 232–​5 in The Poems of Shelley, ed. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, and Michael Rossington, vol. 3 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2011), 64–​7.

550   Michael Rossington find a caput mortuum [worthless residue]’.9 Developing from its use in A Defence, the crucible in this passage becomes an explicit metaphor for translation as an alchemical experiment where transmutation yields only a lifeless remainder. Notwithstanding these reservations about the possibility of translation, the final sentence of the paragraph cited above from A Defence—​‘The plant must spring again from its seed or it will bear no flower—​and this is the burden of the curse of Babel’—​ allows that the impasse may be overcome. Transfusion or transmutation may be impossible, but transplantation is not: the germination metaphor implies that a plant can spring again from its seed and bear fruit in other soil. Even the second half of the sentence, with its apparent regret at the extinction of a single language, combines melancholy resignation with an eye for opportunity. It is appropriate that the reference to the myth of Babel invokes Genesis 11:1 (‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech’), for it is just such an undifferentiated realm that Shelley argues to be the preserve of poetry: ‘A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one’ (A Defence, 677). The suggestion that translations, provided they are undertaken by those—​necessarily poets—​capable of developing the seeds of the originals, may coexist with those originals in an ideal sphere is confirmed later in the essay. Within its account of the moral reach of ‘poetry’—​in the extended sense in which that word is used in A Defence—​translation is given an equal place to original writing: ‘it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world, if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton had ever existed . . . if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated’ (695). Moreover, the overarching argument of A Defence is, as David Simpson puts it, that ‘Poetry must ultimately reflect “the similitudes of things” and not the differences between them’.10 In this way, A Defence looks forward to Walter Benjamin’s idea that the translator’s goal is to make ‘both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language’.11 According to Shelley, by dint of being themselves creators, poets are able to remake the creations of one language in another such that they, too, may be identified as poetry and become part of ‘the one’. It was in such terms that in October 1822 Hunt introduced ‘May-​Day Night’, his edition of Shelley’s translation of the ‘Walpurgisnacht’ scene from Faust, hailing Shelley as ‘the true representative of his author’, and describing ‘May-​Day Night’ as ‘the very highest triumph both of poetry and translation’.12 Hunt’s judgement initiated a lasting consensus that Shelley’s translations into English—​from Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and German—​demonstrate the extraordinary potential of this supposedly impossible

9 

Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, fol. 128r, repr. in E. B. Murray (ed.), Miscellaneous Poetry, Prose and Translations from Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, etc., BSM, vol. 21 (New York: Garland, 1995), 82. 10  David Simpson, ‘Strange Words: The Call to Translation’, in his Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 161; quoting A Defence, 675. 11  Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 78. 12  Leigh Hunt, The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South 1, no. 1 (1822), 121.

Creative Translation   551 mode. A  ‘perfect translation’ of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-​Politicus and ‘part of ’ Plato’s Phaedo are lost.13 Discounting ‘Song. Translated from the German’ in Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire (1810), which belongs to the distinct genre of pseudo-​ translation, only three of his translations, conventionally understood, were published in his lifetime. Two were included in Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (1816). The first of these, ‘Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante. Dante Alighieri to Guido Cavalcanti’, a rendition of ‘Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io’, served as a counterpoint to the volume’s title-​poem by depicting a longing for a ‘strict community’ (line 8) bounded by friendship. The second, ‘Translated from the Greek of Moschus. Ταν ἁλα ταν γλαυκαν ὁταν ὡνεμος ατρεμα βαλλῃ, κ. τ. λ.’, was a sonnetized version of a thirteen-​ line poem or verse fragment attributed to this second-​century BC Bucolic poet. His third published translation was a nine-​line stanza beginning ‘My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few | Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning’, which was printed by itself on the page facing the opening lines of his anonymously published Epipsychidion (1821), having been introduced in this poem’s Advertisement thus: The stanza . . . is almost a literal translation from Dante’s famous Canzone Voi ch’ intendendo, il terzo ciel movete, & c. [‘O you who move the third heaven by intellection’] The presumptuous application of the concluding lines to his own composition will raise a smile at the expense of my unfortunate friend: be it a smile not of contempt, but pity.14

The ‘unfortunate friend’ provides the translation of the congedo (concluding stanza) from the first Canzone of Il Convivio (‘The Banquet’) as a caution against facile readings of what follows. It reinforces the warning, made earlier in the Advertisement with reference to the Vita Nuova (‘New Life’), against interpretations of Epipsychidion that would assume it to be reducible to autobiography in a vulgar sense: ‘The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-​of-​fact history of the circumstances to which it relates’. Thus, the congedo and its strategic positioning in the volume emphasize the role of translation in pressing for a deep reading of poetry of the kind offered in Dante’s two works where the writer’s true beloved turns out not to be Beatrice but Philosophy. In the context of philosophical literary criticism, ‘famous’ in the above quotation may take in an allusion to Biographia Literaria where Coleridge notes that the congedo’s first three lines (which he cites in the original and in translation) would serve well as a preface to Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality

13  Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, 20 Sept. 1822, in Betty T. Bennett (ed.), The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 3 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–​8), i. 262; P. B. Shelley to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, 22 Oct. 1821, PBS Letters, ii. 360. 14  The Poems of Shelley, ed. Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan, and Kelvin Everest, vol. 4 (London: Routledge, 2014), 129–​30. The translation is from K. Foster and P. Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 100.

552   Michael Rossington Ode’, a poem of profound importance to Shelley and one that, like Epipsychidion, treats autobiography philosophically.15 Yet Shelley, like other enlightened writers of the period, also considered translation as necessary to disseminate challenging ideas to the widest possible audience and to enhance an author’s reputation in the process. A case in point is his offer to translate Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice into French that he made in 1816 to a Genevan publisher who had brought out a French translation of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population seven years previously.16 Of the posthumously published translations that Shelley had either contemplated publishing (amongst them an early rendition of the Marseillaise), or clearly intended to publish, the reasons for non-​appearance are often instructive. The view he expressed in ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks relative to the subject of Love’ that ‘there are many to whom the Greek language is inaccessible’ is fundamental to the rationale for his translation of Plato’s Symposium which follows.17 On finishing it, he did not discount the possibility that it might appear, along with its preface, even as he denied to his Greek-​scholar friend Thomas Love Peacock, ‘any serious thought of publishing either . . . at least till I return to England, when we may discuss the propriety of it’.18 He remained ambivalent, both expressing ‘no intention’ to publish and, just before his death, perhaps entertaining the possibility of its inclusion in The Liberal.19 This periodical, a joint venture with Byron and Hunt to be edited in Italy and published in London, was also the intended destination for his renderings of three ‘scenes’ from Calderón’s El mágico prodigioso and the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ and ‘May-​Day Night’ scenes from Faust (ultimately ‘May-​Day Night’ was the only translation of Shelley’s to appear in The Liberal, although verse translations featured prominently in that journal).20 His choice of writings to translate from Goethe and Plato (whom he considered ‘essentially a poet’ [A Defence, 679]) demonstrate Shelley to have been motivated not only by what had not been attempted before, but by a desire to address issues—​in the cases of Symposium and Faust, sexuality and religion—​that tested the limits of what he knew to be publishable in his time.21 Shelley’s relatively unusual interest amongst his contemporaries in translating verse from English into Italian may have been motivated by a wish to be freed from the constraints of linguistic aptitudes that had the potential to inhibit him. In a reversal of 15 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), ii. 147. 16  To J. J. Paschoud, 9 Nov. 1816, PBS Letters, i. 512. 17  Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 11, p. 31, repr. in Steven E. Jones (ed.), The Julian and Maddalo Draft Notebook, BSM, vol. 15 (New York: Garland, 1990), 32. 18  To Thomas Love Peacock, 16 Aug. 1818, PBS Letters, ii. 29. 19  To Thomas Jefferson Hogg, 22 Oct. 1821, PBS Letters, ii. 360; Timothy Webb, ‘Naming “I-​t”: Incest and Outrage in Shelley’, in James Hogg (ed.), Shelley 1792–​1992 (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1993), 194. 20  See Shelley’s letter to John Gisborne, 10 Apr. 1822, PBS Letters, ii. 407. 21  Shelley’s translations of the scenes from Faust and of the Symposium appeared in their fullest textual form to date in, respectively, The Poems of Shelley, ed. C. D. Locock, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1911), ii. 375–​93; and The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols (London: Ernest Benn, 1926–​30), vii. 165–​220.

Creative Translation   553 the usual direction of translation where a native speaker brings the words of a foreign language into his own, translation becomes for Shelley a route to occupying imaginatively perspectives that are artistically liberating. The beginning of the intimacy with Teresa Viviani in late 1820 lies behind several compositions of verse in Italian during this period, original as well as translations. Some of his self-​translated lyrics (which were probably done for her to sing)—​including those from Prometheus Unbound (1820)—​ followed the original fairly closely, while others were looser variations. However, different motives seem to have governed the composition of ‘Ode alla Libertà’, a rendition of his ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1820) that in some of its lines has been argued to improve upon the original.22 The poem’s manuscript state—​parts survive in fair copy, as well as the whole in draft—​suggest it was intended to be published in an Italian periodical by way of supporting the Neapolitan constitutional government in the face of the threat of the Austrian army in the early months of 1821. Felicia Hemans, who had offered renditions of poems from the Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, German, and French in Translations from Camoens, and Other Poets, with Original Poetry (1818), promoted awareness of the political crisis in Italy amongst the British reading public at this time through translations in the Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany of scenes from tragedies by Alfieri, Manzoni, and Monti and a mini-​anthology of ‘Patriotic Effusions of the Italian Poets’.23 Hemans’s translations domesticate this selection of Italian poetry in an effort to accommodate the needs of her intended audience. In ‘Ode alla Libertà’ Shelley strives for a similar effect but from an entirely different angle. He addresses his projected audience as if he were a native Italian (translates himself, so to speak) as a means of bringing home, or authenticating, his commitment to the cause of Italian freedom, using a species of ventriloquism also found in his Italian composition, ‘Dal spiro della tua mente, [è] istinta’, a verse fragment whose narrative framework calls to mind the sophistication of Epipsychidion’s Advertisement.24 While Trelawny’s recollection that ‘Epipsychidion was printed in Italy, in a version of Italian poetry written by Shelley himself for Emilia (Viviani)’ may seem far-​fetched, manuscript evidence indicates this poem’s opening four lines may have been composed originally in Italian, then translated into English.25 Composing in Italian, or translating into Italian, thus allowed Shelley to adopt a bilingual persona. It also enabled him to reconnect English verse with its continental relations. His rough, incomplete Italian translation of lines 1035–​7 of Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale (‘That Emelye, that fairer was to sene | Than is the lylie upon his stalke grene, | And fressher than the May with floures newe—​’) is apparently addressed to Teresa (who, it has been established, was known as ‘Emilia’ before they met): ‘Che Emilia, ch’era più bella

22 

See Jean de Palacio, ‘Shelley traducteur de soi-​même’, Revue des sciences humaines 40, no. 158 (1975), 223–​44 (p. 237). 23  Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany (Dec. 1820), 512–​16; (Feb. 1821), 122–​32; (June 1821), 513–​19. 24  The Poems of Shelley, vol. 4, 195–​200. 25  Odette Bornand (ed.), The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–​1873 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 169; The Poems of Shelley, vol. 4, 187–​8.

554   Michael Rossington [a vedere] | Che il giglio bianco sul suo verde stelo | E più fresca che la Maia quando’.26 Moreover, the translation moves both Viviani and The Knight’s Tale towards Boccaccio’s Il Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (‘The Story of Theseus concerning the nuptials of Emily’), one of Chaucer’s sources. Translation for Shelley in the winter of 1820–​1, then, was both a consequence of his reading in Italian and other languages (including Greek), as well as English, and a factor in his experimentation with new creative practices. There are strong reasons to believe that an impetus behind his interest in English-​to-​Italian translation, including self-​translation, and composition in Italian, was his first-​hand experience of the dramatic mode of improvisation. The rapid writing of Epipsychidion coincided with the initial drafting of A Defence, both works indebted in form and argument to performances by the improvisatore Tommaso Sgricci that Shelley had witnessed in Pisa in December and January. Richard Holmes’s claim that Epipsychidion is ‘a conscious piece of rhetorical improvisation partly influenced by the performances of Sgricci’27 may be broadened to take in a range of Shelley’s compositions in early 1821, which include a review of Sgricci’s performance of La morte d’Ettore (‘The Death of Hector’) that licensed him to write of Italian liberty in Italian in the first person, as well as what was perhaps an experiment in improvisation, the poem ‘Orpheus’ (though whether this last was his work alone is open to question).28 Jeffrey Robinson has remarked that one may ‘posit “translation” for [Shelley], as the essential visionary act of poetry itself and perhaps a definition of [his] Romantic poetics’.29 Understood in such an extended sense, translation helps us to understand the futility of trying to source with any degree of precision the influence of, say, the Convivio and Vita Nuova on Epipsychidion. Instead, Dante’s works may be seen as taken over in Shelley’s through an act of textual impersonation, developed from what he saw at Sgricci’s accademie (performances) and extended through his interest in Plato’s Ion, a work about the nature of rhetorical performance that he had begun to translate in December 1819, and to which he returned, appropriately, early in 1821 when Epipsychidion and A Defence were being conceived.30 Thus, Shelley moves beyond a normative spectrum with literal translation at one end and free rendition at the other, occupying a position at yet a further remove that may be identified as ‘dramatic’, translating sometimes out of, rather than in to, his native language, and often inspired in such a way that his productions (in terms of their fragmentary and oral qualities) push against the limits of what is representable in writing.

26 See The Poems of Shelley, vol. 4, 52–​3. 27 

Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974), 631. On Shelley and Sgricci, see Nora Crook (ed.), The Charles the First Draft Notebook, BSM, vol. 12 (New York: Garland, 1991), xlii, 28–​49; Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 6; and The Poems of Shelley, vol. 4, Appendix B. 29  Jeffrey C. Robinson, ‘The Translator’, in Timothy Morton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 108. 30  See Neil Fraistat (ed.), The Prometheus Unbound Notebooks, BSM, vol. 9 (New York: Garland, 1991), xliv. 28 

Creative Translation   555 The cultural associations of this improvisatory mode were specifically Italian and best known at the time through Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne; ou l’Italie (‘Corinne; or Italy’) (1807). But, in Shelley’s case, in a characteristically original move, improvisation may have been inflected with oriental elements too. ‘From the Arabic—​imitation’, a lyric he composed in this same period (late 1820 or early 1821), seems to show Shelley’s Italian interests and practices converging with a renewed interest in poetic forms from outside Europe. Thomas Medwin suggested this poem was ‘almost a translation from a translation’ in Terrick Hamilton’s Antar: A Bedoueen Romance (1819–​20).31 Those who have searched that work for its basis have concluded that Medwin’s phrasing, while tantalizing, probably misses the point in seeking to associate Shelley’s poem with a specific source. Moreover, though Shelley had recently begun to learn Arabic, it is unclear whether he was sufficiently fluent or widely read at the time of composition to be able to produce an imitation of an original in that language. But, like many of his contemporaries, he was familiar with the verse translations of the poetry of Eastern languages by Sir William Jones. Jones’s ‘A Persian Song’ (1771), the first verse rendition of a Persian poem to be published in English, supplements literal and metrical translations with a brief explanation of principles. Jones holds in balance, on the one hand, respect for the distinctiveness of the tradition out of which he translates and the illumination that for the reader follows from their first encounter with such ‘difference’, and, on the other, reassurance—​for a reader familiar with European traditions of poetry and music—​that Persian poetry will, at some level, be recognizable: ‘I have, as nearly as possible, imitated the cadence and accent of the Persian measure; from which every reader, who understands musick, will perceive that the Asiatick numbers are capable of as regular a melody as any air in Metastasio.’32 Jones continued to press his audience to consider Eastern poetry as aligned with, rather than alien to, European (more specifically, Italian) traditions in his Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (1772). There he included his translation of one of Petrarch’s odes in order that the reader might compare the manner of the Asiatick poets with that of the Italians, many of whom have written in the true spirit of the Easterns: some of the Persian songs have a striking resemblance to the sonnets of Petrarch; and even the form of those little amatory poems was, I believe, brought into Europe by the Arabians.33

31 

Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 351. 32  William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London: W. and J. Richardson, 1771), 137. For a selection of Jones’s translations, see Sir William Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael J. Franklin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). For further discussion of his influence in this period, see James Watt, Chapter 43 in this volume. 33  William Jones, Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1772), iv–​v.

556   Michael Rossington Jones’s later translation from the Sanskrit of Kalidasa’s drama Sacontalá, or The Fatal Ring (1789) informs Shelley’s ‘Fragments of an Unfinished Drama’, and may, along with the Italian models sketched above, have contributed to his interest in 1822 in composing original dramas as well as translating dramatic works from other languages. Jones, then, offered Shelley and his contemporaries a precedent for formally and linguistically brilliant renditions of aesthetically compelling poetry that had not been translated into verse before. As important, Jones’s endeavours encouraged comparatism—​the identification of common features in European and oriental poetry—​an approach to literary art that looks forward to Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur (‘world literature’). Although there is no evidence that Shelley knew Friedrich Schleiermacher’s work, the metaphor of transplantation found in A Defence had, as Susan Bassnett notes,34 been used by Schleiermacher in his lecture, ‘Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens’ (‘On the Different Methods of Translation’), delivered in Berlin in 1813. Schleiermacher prefers a translator who ‘moves the reader towards [the author]’ to one who ‘moves the author towards [the reader]’, and thereby encourages, in the idiom of modern translation studies, ‘foreignizing’: Just as our soil itself has no doubt become richer and more fertile and our climate milder and more pleasant only after much transplantation of foreign flora, just so we sense that our language, because we exercise it less owing to our Nordic sluggishness, can thrive in all its freshness and completely develop its own power only through the most many-​sided contacts with what is foreign.35

Schleiermacher’s lecture is a reminder that the most sustained and urgent advocacy of translation in the early nineteenth century takes place outside Britain and in languages other than English. Staël’s ‘De l’Esprit des traductions’ (‘The Spirit of Translation’), translated from the original French into Italian by Pietro Giordani under the title ‘Sulla maniera e la utilità delle traduzioni’, appeared in the Milanese periodical Biblioteca italiana in 1816. Its essence is captured in the opening sentence: ‘The greatest service we can render literature is to transport the masterpieces of the human intellect from one language to another.’ Staël promotes the value of the aesthetic, and calls to literary arms Italian intellectuals who have a duty to translate foreign writers: ‘Some nations are military, others are political. The Italians need to assert their prominence through literature and fine arts.’36 If Staël’s essay is addressed to a particular people in danger of finding themselves culturally isolated in Restoration Europe, Goethe sees broader, more intangible benefits

34 

Susan Bassnett, Translation (London: Routledge, 2014), 47. Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, in André Lefevere (ed. and trans.), Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977), 74, 88. 36  Germaine de Staël, ‘The Spirit of Translation’, trans. Joseph Luzzi, Romanic Review 97.3/​4 (2006), 279–​84 (pp. 279, 284). 35 

Creative Translation   557 both for those who practice this mode of exchange—​including, to their advantage, the Germans—​and for humanity as a whole: The surest way to truly universal tolerance is to accept the particular characteristics of individuals and whole peoples, yet at the same time to adhere to the conviction that the truly valuable is characterized by its being part of all mankind. For some time now the Germans have been contributing to such mediation and mutual acceptance. He who studies German finds himself in the marketplace where all nations offer their wares. He plays the role of interpreter while enriching himself. And that is how we should see the translator, as one who strives to be a mediator in this universal, intellectual trade, and makes it his business to promote exchange. For whatever one may say about the shortcomings of translations, they are and will remain most important and worthy undertakings in world communication.37

Goethe’s use in this extract of the language of commerce—​ ‘marketplace’, ‘wares’, ‘trade’—​is a reminder that literary translation could be financially, as well as artistically, motivated. Claire Clairmont, an excellent linguist, is a striking example of the precarious position occupied by women translators who, as Susanne Stark has shown, played a crucial role in the business of nineteenth-​century English translation and, by means of it, achieved (or, in Clairmont’s case, were led to think they could achieve) a degree of financial independence.38 In March 1822, after Byron had expressed willingness to pay £100 for a translation of Goethe’s autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (‘From my Life: Poetry and Truth’) (1811–​22), Shelley encouraged Clairmont to undertake one on the understanding that she would benefit from its sale to a London publisher as well as be paid by Byron.39 Her diary for the period mid-​March to mid-​ April 1822 shows her measuring the progress of her labour by recording, every few days, the completion of a ‘sheet of Göthe’ to be sent to Shelley to read.40 A few months later, after Shelley’s death, she complained to Mary Shelley that ‘now he [Lord Byron] has mumbled & grumbled and demurred and does not know whether it is worth it and will only give forty crowns’.41 Clairmont’s justified annoyance and the following response of Mary Shelley show that some factors conditioning literary translation in the early nineteenth century were gender-​specific: ‘I would not go on with Goëthe except with a fixed price per sheet to be regularly paid—​& that price not less than five guineas—​Make this be understood fully through Hunt before you go. & then I will take care that you get the 37 

‘On Carlyle’s German Romance’ (1828), in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 207. 38  Susanne Stark, ‘Behind Inverted Commas’: Translation and Anglo-​German Cultural Relations in the Nineteenth Century (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999). 39  To Claire Clairmont, 24 March 1822, PBS Letters, ii. 401. 40  Marion Kingston Stocking (ed.), The Journals of Claire Clairmont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 278–​83. 41  To Mary Shelley, 11–​12 Sept. 1822, in Marion Kingston Stocking (ed.), The Clairmont Correspondence, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), i. 178.

558   Michael Rossington money—​but if you {do} not fix it, then I cannot manage so well.’42 Clairmont’s translation remained unfinished and another was published in London the following year. This episode inevitably qualifies Goethe’s belief that those who translate, as well as those who read translations, will be ‘enriched’ by them. ‘Foreignizing’—​ that is, techniques that defamiliarize, accentuating the reader’s awareness of the ways that a ‘source’ language resists accommodation to the expectations of the ‘target’ audience—​plays an important part in German theories of translation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Michael Forster has shown that Schleiermacher, and Herder before him, were ‘deeply imbued with, and motivated in their commitment to foreignizing translation by, a cosmopolitan concern for the Other’.43 Enlightened foreignizing is also evident—​though with attention to matters of form as much as language—​in three translations from the Italian composed by Byron in 1819–​20: Morgante Maggiore di Messer Luigi Pulci (the first canto of Pulci’s Il Morgante (1483)) and two versions of ‘Francesca of Rimini’ (part of the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno). Byron asked John Murray to publish Morgante and one of the ‘Francesca’ versions together with The Prophecy of Dante (composed in terza rima in the same period). But they eventually appeared separately: Prophecy in 1821, Morgante in The Liberal in 1823, and ‘Francesca’ in 1830 after Byron’s death. They are introduced, in each case, with scrupulous attention to issues of poetic form and a desire to educate a British audience. Byron’s letter to Murray from Ravenna introducing ‘Francesca of Rimini’ captures his excitement at the rewards of undertaking an acutely constrained metrical experiment and his impatience with consumers as well as producers of contemporary Englishings of the Divina commedia who are content with translation that simply domesticates: Enclosed you will find line for line in third rhyme (terza rima) of which your British Blackguard reader as yet understands nothing—​ Fanny of Rimini—​ you know that She was born here—​and married and slain from Cary, Boyd, and such people already.—​I have done it into cramp English line for line & rhyme for rhyme to try the possibility.—​44

Byron’s Preface to ‘Francesca of Rimini’ emphasizes an ambition for equivalence that he knows, at some level, will be unachievable as well as uncomfortable for his audience: The reader is requested to consider the following version as an attempt to render verse for verse the episode in the same metre. Where the same English word appears to be repeated too frequently, he will generally find the corresponding repetition in the Italian; I have sacrificed all ornament to fidelity.45 42 

To Claire Clairmont, 15 Sept. 1822, MWS Letters, i. 258. Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 394. 44  Leslie A. Marchand (ed.), Byron’s Letters and Journals, 13 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–​94), vii. 58. 45  Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​93), iv. 280. 43 

Creative Translation   559 The result of his method may be seen when his translation of Inferno v 127–​9 (given last below) is compared with the original, and that of Henry Cary: ‘Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse; soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.’ ‘One day For our delight we read of Lancelot, How him love thrall’d. Alone we were, and no Suspicion near us.’ ‘We read one day for pastime, seated nigh, Of Lancelot, how love enchain’d him too; We were alone, quite unsuspiciously.’46

Byron’s rendition, which includes a half rhyme at the end of the third line, foregrounds a tension amounting to resistance between translation and original that is arguably absent in Cary’s blank verse. In striving for a faithfulness he knows it is impossible to attain, one senses Byron’s effort, using enormous skill and ingenuity, to rebalance the relationship between ‘source’ and ‘target’ literary language such that the integrity of the source is emphasized. The attempt to balance competing demands, in the case of Morgante through an English rendition of its ottava rima stanzas, is expressed in that poem’s Advertisement: ‘the version is faithful to the best of the translator’s ability in combining his interpretation of the one language with the not very easy task of reducing it to the same versification in the other’.47 Through being ‘faithful’, Byron produces in his translations a necessary degree of estrangement. Instead of easy absorption by a ‘home’ audience, the original stands apart, and receives attention from a translator on terms that, if never its own, resist domestication. A judicious understanding of whether accommodation or estrangement is most appropriate in respect of language and form is one characteristic of the most engaging Romantic-​era translations. Another, also evident in poems inspired by translations, is the critical awareness they nurture in their readers as a consequence of inviting them to engage with historically distant moments or (as in the case of Jones’s works) cultures and religions that are geographically remote. Translation’s capacity to foster such self-​ awareness may be considered by returning to ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Influenced by Keats’s reading of William Robertson’s History of America (1777), this sonnet describes the effect of translation in terms of a journey from an author’s somewhat exhausted literary ‘realms’ in the opening line, through his revelatory encounter 46  Dante Alighieri, Inferno, ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 54; Henry Cary, The Vision of Dante, ed. Ralph Pite (London: Everyman, 1994), 20; Byron, Complete Poetical Works, iv. 282. 47 Byron, Complete Poetical Works, iv. 248.

560   Michael Rossington with a translation in lines 7–​8, to his rebirth as an explorer excited at a newly discovered prospect in the last line: Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-​brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—​and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—​ Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

It is the early modern period, encompassing Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean in 1513 and the publication of Chapman’s translations of Homer (1611–​16), not the classical world, that is at the centre of this poem. The sonnet’s attention to the epoch in which the mediation was produced and, in its title and eighth line, to the mediator, recalls Goethe’s insistence that at the heart of ‘this universal, intellectual trade’ of translation is the translator. The after-​effects of Keats’s encounter with another mediated classic are evident in his later sonnet, ‘A Dream, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca’.48 Its title tells that the poem is a fantastical reworking of the fifth canto of the Inferno, while its language shows the ‘reading’ to which the title refers to have been of Cary’s blank-​verse translation. Thus, Keats’s ‘But to that second circle of sad Hell, | Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw | Of rain and hailstones’ (‘A Dream’, lines 9–​11), for example, shows the influence, amongst several lines of Cary’s, of: ‘The stormy blast of hell | With restless fury drives the spirits on | Whirl’d round and dash’d amain with sore annoy’ (Inferno v, lines 32–​4). Byron’s ‘Francesca of Rimini’ poems, as noted above, seek to get as close as possible to the original through an attempted literal rendering of its form and language. Keats’s poem, on the other hand, constitutes an oblique translation. While it openly allows the diction of Cary’s translation to surface, it turns away from his blank verse. Moreover, its concluding lines, while ostensibly moving away from the original in their focus on pleasure, remind us that in Inferno v Francesca in her pain recollects happiness: ‘Pale were the sweet lips I saw, | Pale were the lips I kiss’d,—​and fair the form | I floated with about that melancholy storm’ (lines 12–​14). Keats’s sonnet, then, is an imaginative translation inspired by a ‘real’ translation, and one that in terms of Keats’s 48 

The poem was first published in Hunt’s The Indicator (28 June 1820). Quotations are from the text published in the London Magazine 4, no. 23 (Nov. 1821), 526.

Creative Translation   561 poetics, honours the original episode by refashioning it as dream. Indeed, Keats’s poem invites parallels with Shelley’s improvisatory writings in Italian. In both cases translation in an extended sense appears to be enabled by a suspension of consciousness. Keats’s two sonnets show that the translations of others, whether contemporary or from an earlier period, may be as potent a source of inspiration as the originals. Shelley’s view that poetry cannot be translated on one level turns out to be a truism. His writings and others of his era show translation to be an infinitely creative art and, as Goethe saw, one of the ‘most important and worthy undertakings in world communication’.

Further Reading Bassnett, Susan, ‘Byron and Translation’, Byron Journal 14 (1986), 22–​32. Burwick, Frederick, ‘Romantic Theories of Translation’, Wordsworth Circle 39.3 (2008), 68–​74. Constantine, David, ‘Translation is Good for You’, in his A Living Language (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2004). France, Peter, and Kenneth Haynes (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 4: 1790–​1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Gillespie, Stuart, English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2011). Nelson, Stephanie, ‘Shelley and Plato’s Symposium: The Poet’s Revenge’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 14.1/​2 (2007), 100–​29. Reynolds, Matthew, The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Robinson, Jeffrey C., ‘The Translator’, in Timothy Morton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Simpson, David, ‘Strange Words: The Call to Translation’, in his Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Stark, Susanne, ‘Behind Inverted Commas’: Translation and Anglo-​German Cultural Relations in the Nineteenth Century (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999). Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Talbot, John, ‘ “The Principle of the Daguerreotype”: Translation from the Classics’, in Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (eds), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 4: 1790–​1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Webb, Timothy, The Violet in the Crucible:  Shelley and Translation (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1976). Zuccato, Edoardo, ‘ “Englishing” Petrarch: The Translators’ Role’, in his Petrarch in Romantic England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Chapter 36

The Ineffa bl e Stephen C. Behrendt

This chapter explores three figurative modes—​allegory, symbol, and myth—​which Romantic-​era authors deployed in trying to overcome the inherent limitations of language and capture what they knew was infinitely elusive or ineffable. Announcing the aim of his visionary programme at the beginning of c­ hapter 4 of Jerusalem, Blake put it this way: I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall.1

Blake’s figure recalls the ball of glowing golden string with which Ariadne furnished Theseus to help him escape the labyrinth that her father, King Minos, had constructed on the island of Crete. But Blake reverses the image’s polarities; his golden string leads not out but in: our ‘labyrinth’ is the fallible mortal world of appearance and limitation, while the destination is Jerusalem’s new-​edenic visionary paradise. Blake directs his readers towards something that lies beyond language and ordinary signification, something transformative that alters both what is perceived and its perceiver, for ‘the Eye altering alters all’.2 Romantic-​era artists and thinkers regularly interrogated the phenomenal universe’s finite limits, seeking that greater, visionary ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ to which language—​figurative language in particular—​furnished a troublingly obstructed gateway. Immanuel Kant had argued in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that the phenomenal forms of time and space (including the natural universe) constitute spatio-​temporal ‘spectacles’ through which we view our world and which we can never remove.3 Kant’s contemporaries regarded language itself as one of these ‘spectacles’ that 1  Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 716. All Blake quotations are from this edition. 2  Blake, ‘The Mental Traveller’, line 62. 3  Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1946; London: Routledge, 2004), 642.

The Ineffable   563 we must both wear and ‘see’ through. Thus Shelley, concluding his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, urged the paradoxically invisible Power which the poem addresses to provide ‘whate’er these words cannot express’ (line 72).4 In this rhetorical gesture the young Shelley employs language’s inadequacy to convey his certainty about the existence of all that defies mere language’s capacity to represent it. Shelley’s difficulty is a familiar one; everyone knows the feeling that words and phrases sometimes hover just out of reach, just beyond utterance. ‘Words escape me’: the familiar phrase encapsulates the problem. The words are escaping: one is being abandoned by words apparently once possessed but over which control has now ceased. Escaping, the words shed their semantic enslavement to any individual author’s cognitive purposes and return to a freedom and indeterminacy inherently resistant to the rational structures (and strictures) of both objective language and empirical thought. In short, the notion that authors control their words proves largely illusory; meaning exists only in an interactive transaction involving those readers or auditors who share with the author relatively the same set of denotations and rhetorical conventions. Because the individual circumstances and experiences of readers are infinitely varied, figurative language offers an imaginative bridging mechanism that attempts to inscribe meaningful communication and cognition (or ‘meaning’) through largely indirect methods. In his Defence of Poetry (written in 1821) Shelley traced figurative language back to the origin of ‘Man in society’ and to humans’ early perception that language is ‘at once the representation and the medium’.5 For Shelley, poets possess superlative power to animate a ‘mimetic representation’ of the finite world; ‘Their language is intensely metaphorical’, capturing the otherwise ‘unapprehended relations of things’ in what become ‘signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts’ (512). Shelley explicitly separates this metaphorical quality from formal or generic features of poetry like the affected poetic diction that Wordsworth denounced in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads while apparently agreeing with him about the inspirational power of the ‘manly’ metrical arrangement of the ‘language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings’.6 In a period when what one published was routinely subjected to partisan misrepresentation, the Romantics wrestled with language’s ineffability, while linguists and lexicographers alike struggled to codify the elusive figures of allegory, symbol, and myth. Angus Fletcher claimed, with disarming clarity, that because ‘in the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another’, it inevitably ‘destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words “mean what they say” ’. Fletcher therefore insists that allegory is not just a ‘figure of speech’, but that it ‘is properly considered a mode: it is a fundamental process of encoding our speech’ (emphases added).7 Allegory 4  Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 95. Unless otherwise indicated, all Shelley quotations are from this edition. 5  Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 511. 6  ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 609, 597. All Wordsworth quotations are from this edition. 7  Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 2–​3.

564   Stephen C. Behrendt is, like symbol and myth, a mode of representation. As ‘modes’, they involve not just figures of speech, and thus semantics, but also processes of perception and cognition. Few British Romantics gave more thought to these modes of representation than Coleridge, who was steeped in the thinking of German contemporaries such as Goethe, Kant, Schelling, the Schlegels, and Herder. Coleridge expressed it this way in The Statesman’s Manual (1816):  allegory is ‘a translation of abstract notions into a picture-​language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses’.8 It is the sort of one-​to-​one relationship that Kames had described: ‘it consists in chusing [sic] a subject having properties or circumstances resembling those of the principal subject; and the former is described in such a manner as to represent the latter: the subject is kept out of view; we are left to discover it by reflection’.9 But the relationship is inherently unstable, because any allegory represents an ultimately unsuccessful (because impossible) attempt to represent some abstract thing or quality in tactile or otherwise empirically perceptible terms. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), for instance, advertises its allegorical nature in character names such as Christian and Mr Worldly Wiseman and in place names such as the Slough of Despond. While the signifying portion in such allegories is both linguistically and intellectually determinate, the other portion necessarily remains abstract and barely quantifiable; the resulting figure is more shadow than substance, more imminent than immanent. Blake sometimes considered allegory fatally flawed by its dependence upon real-​ world parameters: ‘Allegories are things that Relate to Moral Virtues. Moral Virtues do not Exist; they are Allegories & dissimulations’, he writes in A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810). Emphasizing the temporality of allegory and the allegorical mode, Blake argues that ‘Fable or Allegory are a totally distinct & inferior kind of Poetry . . . Fable or Allegory is Form’d by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of Inspiration.’10 Allegory relies upon a system of ‘remembered’ conventional and publicly accepted signs and referents; it is therefore bound to tactile, mortal finitude. What Imagination could produce is signalled in Blake’s 1803 letter to Thomas Butts describing a ‘Sublime Allegory’ he had completed and which he considered ‘the Grandest Poem that this World Contains’ and ‘a Memento in time to come, & to speak to future generations’.11 ‘Allegory address’d to the Intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding, is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry’, he explains. The poem, which was probably Milton (though it might have been the never-​completed The Four Zoas, which he abandoned around 1807) bears out his claim that ‘Vision or 8  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 30. See also John A. Hodgson, ‘Transcendental Tropes: Coleridge’s Rhetoric of Allegory and Symbol’, in Morton W. Bloomfield (ed.), Allegory, Myth, and Symbol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 9  Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762), new edn, 3 vols (Basel, 1795), iii. 52. 10  Blake: Complete Writings, 614, 604. Blake names Pilgrim’s Progress as an example of an allegorical work that is nevertheless ‘full of ’ vision, despite the imaginative limitations he associates with allegory (604). 11  Letter to Thomas Butts, 6 July 1807, Blake: Complete Writings, 825.

The Ineffable   565 Imagination is a Representation of what Eternally Exists, Really & Unchangeably’, and that ‘this world of Imagination is . . . Infinite & Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite & Temporal’.12 Blake’s notion of ‘Sublime Allegory’ is interestingly indebted to Edmund Burke’s description of the Sublime, the experience of which may transport us to an altogether different, elevated state of mind and spirit, and the sources of which include not only grandness but also obscurity.13 Chastising the Revd Dr John Trusler in 1799 for having ‘fall’n out with the Spiritual World’ (Trusler had criticized Blake’s visual work), Blake observed that ‘What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients consider’d what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act.’ What distinguishes the works of Homer, Virgil, and Milton, as well the Bible, Blake claims, is that ‘they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason’.14 Other Romantic-​era poets were not averse to allegory as a genre, however; Shelley’s Laon and Cythna (1817) and The Mask of Anarchy (1819, published in 1832) may likewise be assessed in terms of allegory. Shelley had already described his poem Alastor (1816) as explicitly ‘allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind’ and therefore filled with ‘instruction to actual men’.15 Romantic writers’ treatment of allegory typically reflects their expectations about the reading habits and capacities of their intended audiences. Thus, poems such as Shelley’s Mask, which was intended for a popular audience and to mobilize anti-​government feelings following the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819, employ starker, more obviously formulaic allegorical techniques than do more esoteric poems such as Prometheus Unbound (1820). Allegory informs tropes and figures with which Romantic-​era writers (and visual artists) and their audiences were familiar. Visual art commemorating Horatio Nelson’s life and death, for instance, is filled with anchors, denoting hope, firmness, solidity, tranquility, and faithfulness—​and Britain’s naval supremacy.16 Britannia, the traditional female personification of Britain and post-​Renaissance emblem of British imperial power, appears everywhere throughout the period, including atop Nelson’s monument in Trafalgar Square, furnished (in words or in images) with shield (usually bearing the Union Jack), trident, helmet (occasionally resembling a liberty cap), classical draperies (often coloured red, white, and blue) and accompanied by the emblematic lion. Poems employ comparable allegorical objects, terms, and characters, from Commerce, Crime, and Fraud in Anna Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) to Anarchy, 12 

Blake: Complete Writings, 604–​5. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757), part 2, esp. sects. 3–​4. The term ‘Sublime Allegory’ was used by Henry Fuseli in a Royal Academy Lecture on ‘Invention’, reprinted in The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, ed. John Knowles, 3 vols (London, 1833), ii. 196. 14  Letter to Dr Trusler, 23 Aug. 1799, Blake: Complete Writings, 793–​4. 15  ‘Preface’ to Alastor, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 72–​3. 16  See Marianne Czisnik, Admiral Nelson: Image and Icon, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2003. See esp. sects. 11–​16. 13 

566   Stephen C. Behrendt Hope, and Love in Shelley’s Mask. The fundamentally moral purpose informing such allegorical figurations made them attractive to social, political, and spiritual polemicists since, as, Fletcher observes, ‘allegories are the natural mirrors of ideology’;17 they simultaneously construct and reinforce culturally formulated patterns of representation. Fletcher’s point is as relevant to the highest and most esoteric productions as to the lowest and most exoteric.18 As Coleridge appreciated, though, the interchange (or dialogue) implicit in the two components of any allegory—​sign and referent—​increasingly illustrates both without ever fully realizing either, whether in the text or in its perceiver’s mind. The effectiveness of any allegory is therefore dependent upon its perceiver’s capacity for engaging and interpreting it. While Shelley’s handling of allegory in exoteric poems such as The Mask of Anarchy, for instance, is relatively straightforward, allegorical figures in esoteric ones such as Prometheus Unbound are, as Theresa Kelley observes, ‘more subtle and more subject to instabilities that demand readerly intervention, whether performed by the readers themselves or by characters within these works that investigate the meaning of events and characters’.19 Modern post-​ Enlightenment hostility towards allegory emerged early in the Romantic era as writers increasingly privileged symbol above allegory, branding the latter as a ‘lower’ form. In The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (2007), the fullest account of how Coleridge’s complex concept of the symbol’s nature and force relates to the ideas of post-​Enlightenment and Romantic German philosophers and linguists, Nicholas Halmi notes that it was not to allegory itself that the Romantics were hostile, but rather to ‘allegory as defined and practised in the Enlightenment’, which they saw as reductivist, artificial, and arbitrary.20 In fact, as Kelley demonstrates, Romantic thinking about allegory was decidedly ambivalent:  authors continued to explore and adapt the mode even as they ostensibly denigrated it. As happened with myth (see below), Romantic-​era artists across all media radically reconfigured allegory, disassembling its traditional forms and figures and recombining them in new ways, effectively reconstituting allegory by rendering its abstract elements in increasingly material fashion while simultaneously increasing its reliance upon pathos in linking human feelings with strong figurations.21 17 Fletcher, Allegory, 368. 18 

‘Exoteric’ is the term Shelley applied in 1819 to those poems he intended specifically for a more popular readership that employ plain and emphatic language, familiar poetic forms (like the ballad), allegorical figures, and sensational effects calculated to resonate with less sophisticated readers (and listeners): The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), ii. 152. 19  Theresa M. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 143. Kelley claims that Shelley is ‘the only one who insists that allegory can be an imaginative and moral agent’ (144), a linkage that Shelley develops further in A Defence of Poetry. 20  Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13. 21 Kelley, Reinventing Allegory, 5. For the alternative view that allegory largely vanishes in the modern era, see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977); Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); and Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

The Ineffable   567 Before proceeding to symbol and myth, an analogy from visual art may help to illustrate the interrelated nature and function of allegory, symbol, and myth for the Romantics. Admiral Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 prompted many formal paintings, the best known being Benjamin West’s Death of Nelson (1806) and Arthur William Devis’s Death of Nelson in the Cockpit of HMS Victory (1807),22 grand-​ style history paintings that are visual analogues to the literary epic. These dramatically ‘staged’ scenes assemble grieving observers, including some who were not actually present, in the manner of West’s Death of General Wolfe (1770), which itself echoes innumerable depictions of the dead Jesus lowered from the Cross (the Deposition). While West arranges his dozens of (mostly unsoiled) figures on the Victory’s open quarterdeck, Devis’s scene lies below the main deck in a dark, cramped space lighted almost exclusively by a single hanging lamp that shines down on the dying Nelson’s white-​draped figure, behind whose head a white pillow forms an impromptu glory. Neither the paintings nor their partners aim at documentary realism, but rather at contemporary mythmaking: visually associating the fallen Nelson with the dead self-​ sacrificing Redeemer invests him with the attributes of the greatest Christian hero. Factual accuracy of visual details is subordinate to depicting the greater reality that transcends any local concern with mere historical facts. Devis and West portray not simply Horatio Nelson’s last moments, but rather his ‘good death’ in an act of consummate self-​sacrifice for the good of others that points towards a greater victory—​in this case, the eventual triumph of Britain and her allies, which was still in doubt when West and Devis completed their paintings. West’s more ambitious Immortality of Nelson (1807) is a heavily classicized apotheosis scene showing the dead Nelson, wrapped in white and supported by cherubs, handed up by Neptune to the emblematic figure of Britannia.23 Here the historical record is wholly subsumed into the mythic as West fuses classical (i.e., pre-​Christian) and Christian iconography and myth with a constellation of nationalistic and distinctively British visual associations. The complex referentialty that informs The Immortality of Nelson confidently advertises British military, cultural, and moral exceptionalism in service to the nation’s imperial designs. Other memorials to Nelson included paintings and prints, sculpture, metalwork, textiles, chinaware—​and much poetry and prose. In even the most homely and unassuming tributes (like the semi-​literate James Chambers’s remarkable poem ‘On the Death of Lord Nelson’, published in 182024), historical facts are adorned or overlaid with iconographic and other allusions such as those discussed above. These artefacts strive to elevate a finite historical event (and person) to grander dimensions and significance, 22 West’s Death of Nelson is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Devis’s Death of Nelson in the Cockpit

of HMS Victory is at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. 23  At the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. In a related variant, The Apotheosis of Nelson (c.1818), the French painter Pierre Nicholas Legrand depicted the uniformed Nelson conducted up to Mount Olympus by the figures of Neptune and Fame, while Mars awaits him at the mountaintop and Britannia bids him farewell from a stylized naval vessel. This painting is at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 24  The Poetical Works of James Chambers, Itinerant Poet, with the Life of the Author (Ipswich, 1820).

568   Stephen C. Behrendt converting both into myth; the temporal event ‘opens into’ a more abstract and universalized event in which time, space, and character (or personage) coalesce in a single representation that combines and epitomizes both their distinct individual characteristics and significations and their accumulated cultural associations. When Blake described his visionary paintings of The Spiritual Form of Nelson guiding Leviathan and its companion piece, The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth, in the advertisement and catalogue for his 1809 exhibition, he called them ‘grand Apotheoses of Nelson and Pitt’. They were ‘compositions of a mythological cast’ conceived as public art and executed ‘on a scale that is suitable to the grandeur of the nation, who is the parent of his heroes’.25 Blake’s extraordinary naked heroic figures transport their viewer beyond the largely formulaic mechanisms of allegorical art and the orchestrated referentiality of the symbolic to the protean multivalence of the wholly symbolic. They are related to what medieval theologians called anagogy—​the fourth and most profound level of art’s meaning, which for Dante signifies ‘some portion of the supernal things of eternal glory’26 and culminates the ascending hierarchy of interpretive levels that also include the literal/​historical, allegorical, and tropological (moral). Blake celebrated his own ‘fourfold vision’, which, like Dante’s, culminated in the ‘supreme delight’ that its visionary capacity as ‘allegory addressed to the intellectual powers’ provided. Such operations of recombining (or reconfiguring) and pointing-​beyond in visual art closely approximate the sort of imaginative operations (and the mechanisms that drive them) associated with figurative language—​and especially the symbol—​during the Romantic period. At the same time, they suggest broader aspects of cultural community-​building that are the special province of myth. For the Romantics, the symbol is ‘inherently and inexhaustibly meaningful’; it exists ‘in diverse ontological and temporal realms’ and functions as an indicator of ‘an ideal of meaningfulness’.27 If allegory posits a fairly straightforward one-​to-​one correspondence between subject and object (even if one is more abstract and elusive than the other), symbol involves a more complex relationship between the sign and an array of actual or virtual referents to which the perceiver is directed. Nelson’s death presents an allegory of heroic death in service to one’s country, but it also constitutes a more complicated symbol. Still a figure for heroic death, it may denote resoluteness (including nationalistic steadfastness), British supremacy (as naval power, nation, and an ostensibly united and virtuous Christian citizenry), and—​more abstract still—​those moral and civic values which the culture attaches to its most exemplary luminaries. Coleridge considered the relationship between subject and object in the symbol not arbitrary and forced, but rather inherent and natural, an organic relationship between thing and thought (or idea). Contrasting symbol to allegory in The Statesman’s Manual, he observed that the former ‘always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, 25 

Blake: Complete Writings, 560, 564–​6. Both paintings are in the Tate Britain, London.

26 Dante, Convivio, II, i, quoted in Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947;

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 121. 27 Halmi, Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, 18–​19.

The Ineffable   569 abides itself as a living part of that Unity, of which it is the representative’.28 In other words, according to Coleridge’s organic view, the symbol is already a portion of any absolute or abstract whole that is employed to suggest the entirety of that whole. Coleridge identifies as the symbol’s most characteristic feature ‘a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General’ (30). For Coleridge, all symbolic representation is characterized by a bidirectional, transactional relationship in which the symbol itself, like a two-​way lens, reveals its ‘larger’ significations even as those larger significations return, wave-​like, to reinform and consequently to expand the determinate signifier that is the symbol itself. One famous Romantic-​era symbol is the Aeolean harp, or Aeolean lyre:  placed in a wind strong enough to vibrate its taut strings, it produces musical tones without any human touch. In addition to its widespread popularity as an actual instrument, the Aeolean harp became a favourite symbol for both the imagination and the poet (or poetic consciousness), swept by an intellectual breeze (in-​spired, or ‘blown into’) to yield artefacts that are only partially products of the mediating artist and that originate in the eternal and infinite imaginative state that Blake terms ‘Vision’.29 The work of art—​whether verse, prose, visual or plastic art, or music—​functions in Romantic thinking as the Aeolean intermediary that communicates to its audience (transmits by means of perceptible forms—​but also interconnects, as in adjacent or ‘communicating’ rooms that share a door) through the artist’s manipulation of the materials of her or his medium. According to Blake’s radical Christian terms, what the work of art communicates is the eternal vision whose author is God and whose messenger is the Holy Spirit and whose agent (at least for Blake) is Jesus, ‘the Human Imagination, | Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus’ (Milton, plate 3, lines 3–​4). Even when the artists’ objectives were more immediately personal and temporal, the aegis of the Aeolean harp was no less meaningful, as is evident from Amelia Opie’s ‘Stanzas written under Aeolus’ Harp’, drafted in 1795: ‘Thy softest call the inmost soul can hear, | Thy faintest breath can Fancy’s pinions ply’ (lines 39–​40).30 Those Romantics who examined the symbol most extensively largely agreed that not just Scripture but also history and nature constituted the living speech of God as it revealed itself to the limited mortal mind. This was Coleridge’s point in The Statesman’s Manual (subtitled ‘The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight’), where he characterized the symbol’s nature as a sort of hinge, or window, in and through which every particular is indissolubly linked with the universal ‘whole’ towards which that particular points; the Coleridgean symbol reflects an organic universal perspective that 28 Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 30. 29 

M. H. Abrams, ‘The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor’, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: Norton, 1986). For a contemporary anthology on this theme, with an accompanying treatise on manufacting Aeolean harps, see Robert Bloomfield (ed.), Nature’s Music: Consisting of Extracts from Several Authors with Practical Observations and Poetical Testimonies in Honour of the Harp of Aeolus (London, 1808). Bloomfield, author of The Farmer’s Boy (1800), made Aeolean harps himself. 30  Poems by Mrs. Opie (London, 1802), 131–​4.

570   Stephen C. Behrendt contrasts with the mechanistic view of empiricists such as Newton. It is also the process of intellectual (or visionary) expansion towards which Coleridge tends (and from which he retreats—​publicly at least—​at the behest of his disapproving wife Sara) in ‘The Eolian Harp’, composed in the same year as the poem by Amelia Opie cited earlier. There, the increasingly imaginative associations stimulated by the harp’s sounds culminate in his extraordinary speculation about the nature of the entire phenomenal universe: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual Breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (lines 36–​40)31

Indeed, in The Statesman’s Manual and elsewhere, Coleridge associates the symbol with humanity’s moral and spiritual (if not specifically and dogmatically ‘Christian’) life, likening the symbol’s function to that spiritual mechanism by which the individual gains partial or even entire access to the divine, which Coleridge usually calls, expansively, ‘God’. Writing about the Bible’s largely unrealized capacity to lead humans to divine vision, Coleridge opines that even a single passage has the potential to dawn upon us in the pure and untroubled brightness of an Idea, that most glorious birth of the God-​like within us, which even as the Light, its material symbol, reflects itself from a thousand surfaces, and flies homeward to its Parent Mind enriched with a thousand forms, itself above form and still remaining in its own simplicity and identity! . . . Transparence without Vacuum, and Plenitude without Opacity.32

Here Coleridge expresses his conviction that the symbol bridges the finite or determinate and the infinite or immanent, a function which he considers ‘mere’ allegory to be wholly incapable of performing. Just as the mental processes Coleridge examines here represent a sort of ‘higher’ thinking, so too, for him and many of his contemporaries, does symbol represent a ‘higher’ figuration than allegory. For the Romantics, Thomas McFarland writes, the symbol ‘signified the coincidence and fusion of the expressed and the inexpressible’. Despite its inevitable obscurity (which the Romantics cherished), the symbol—​and symbolic figuration—​is never about obfuscation or mystification. Rather, it aims to move cognitive consciousness towards ‘the apprehension of a great

31  Poems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, Late of Jesus College, Cambridge (London, 1796), 98–​9. In this first printed version, the poem’s title was ‘Effusion xxxv, Composed August 20th, 1795, at Clevedon, Somersetshire’. 32 Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 50.

The Ineffable   571 and incomprehensible whole’.33 This is precisely how Shelley arms the symbolic function of Mont Blanc in his 1816 poem on that subject. We can, of course, go beyond the primary figuration of the Aeolean harp and consider not just the instrument but also the inspiring wind that blows across or into it. One path leads us to the windstorms that sweep the Alpine heights of Byron’s Manfred (1816) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or the Simplon Pass passages in Wordsworth’s Prelude, in each of which some phenomenon of the natural world stands for imaginative, emotional, and psychic states or activities, like the great storm at the centre of King Lear. Down another path we encounter Shelley’s West Wind and the ode in which the poet and the wind end up, in the final lines, enacting a perpetual interchanging of places, roles, and functions, each simultaneously both inspiring (blowing into) and becoming the other. This figural chiasmus replicates at the level of language, rhetoric, and image the intellectual and imaginative interchange at the level of consciousness and vision that the ode explores. As James Chandler explains, the complicated and seemingly contradictory imagery and tropes that fill Shelley’s poem, right from the start, are in reality not contradictory after all: ‘the metaphors cooperate, corroborate, and cohere’, initiating a pattern of alternating clarity and obscurity that suggests a parallel figuration of destruction and preservation, or what Chandler calls ‘second-​order tropes, tropes of tropes’. ‘The wind’, he concludes, ‘then becomes that trope which constitutes the conjunction of these two, apparently incompatible, second-​order tropes’.34 All these examples demonstrate the exponentially expanding range of referentiality that attaches to symbols and symbolic representation. That range incorporates both creative recombinations of the symbol’s past manifestations and entirely new formulations that reflect the altered (and altering) historical and cultural contexts in which the symbol is used. This infinitely flexible condition renders the symbol less subject to narrowly determinate interpretation than what we typically think of as the allegory, whose parameters appear to be more fixed. Fire furnishes yet another example of a symbol with multivalent referentiality: there is the fire that Prometheus steals for mankind’s benefit, but also the biblical fires that both incinerate Sodom and Gomorrah and purify the universe at time’s end in the Book of Revelation. There is the fire of nature, the destroyer and preserver that reduces forests, fields, and prairies to ashes but provides in those ashes the nutrients to restore and regenerate them. And there is the fire that Roman Catholic art (in particular) associates with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which in turn differs from the tongues of fire, gifts of the Holy Spirit, that appear above the heads of the evangelists at Pentecost. Each of these functions as symbol, like the wind; like the wind as symbol, too, each points towards a range of only partially overlapping significations that underscore how different and context-​dependent is the function of each of them as they occur 33 

Thomas McFarland, ‘Involute and Symbol in the Romantic Imagination’, in J. Robert Barth, S. J., and John L. Mahoney (eds), Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 57, 50. 34  James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 532–​4, 540–​1.

572   Stephen C. Behrendt in culture. In deploying such symbols, Romantic writing seeks to harness this semantic multiplicity, while dramatizing the cognitive processes that produce this confrontation with the limits of language. For similar reasons, the Romantics also cultivated a new and revisionist notion of the nature and function of myth. Myth can be defined as a narrative or group of narratives that recount the activities of a culture’s gods and heroes and that ‘are the product of communal and (often) sacred impulses to sanction and reflect the cultural order existing at the time of their creation’.35 The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer suggested that myth is not just product but also process: an ‘original’ and undifferentiated human way of observing and interacting with the world.36 Myth embodies the intuitive human impulse to discover and shape the nature of spiritual reality, although neither myth nor its manifestations within artefacts (such as poems or paintings) is an objectively accurate record of history, even when each affects to be so. ‘Mythology’ involves both the raw materials—​the narratives and cultural connotations and overcodings that constitute ‘myth’—​and an additional, overlaid texture of interpretation that imposes upon this shared cultural material an external and objective explication that often involves significant cultural differences, whether of time, place, or cultural and spiritual values. It is helpful—​albeit difficult—​to try to keep the two terms, and what we denote by them, separate even while we acknowledge their many intersections and overlaps. If symbol expands the range and type of referents towards which its subject points, myth expands the field of focus further still, invoking ‘stories’ that reflect both the temporally historical and the atemporally expansive:  the heroic exploits of Richard the Lionheart, for example, but also those of Hercules. The Romantic treatment of myth reflected artists’ attempts to dismantle and repurpose the great spiritual systems of belief that had underpinned European culture for many centuries. These attempts are prefigured in studies of comparative mythology such as Jacob Bryant’s New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–​6), Richard Payne Knight’s Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (1786), and Count Volney’s Ruins, or Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1791), and in popular reference works such as John Bell’s illustrated New Pantheon; or, Historical Dictionary (1790), which ranges widely over pre-​Christian European mythology as well as Hindu, Persian, and Nordic myths. The reworking of traditional myths offered a mechanism for imposing upon (or seeming to discover within) the emerging chaotic industrial and nationalist modernity a redeeming and therefore comforting continuity, repairing, however temporarily and tenuously, the rupture between where (and what) we are ‘now’ and where (and what) we have been. The myth critic and Romantic scholar Northrop Frye wrote that because ‘the informing structures of literature are myths, that is, fictions and metaphors that identify aspects of human personality with the natural environment’, myth plays an especially 35  John B. Vickery, ‘Myth’, in Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (eds), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 806. 36  Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, ed. Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).

The Ineffable   573 important part in ‘establishing a society’s views of its own origin’ and graphing a culturally encyclopaedic world-​view that encompasses ‘all aspects of a society’s vision of its situation and destiny’.37 But Byron’s famous opening of Don Juan—​‘I want a hero’—​ underscores the poet’s dilemma: despite the plethora of contemporary ‘heroes’, military, ministerial, religious, and criminal, none is the ‘true one’ whom the poet seeks.38 So in choosing ‘our ancient friend Don Juan’, Byron selects a protagonist whose sheer anti-​ heroism defines, almost in relief, the qualities of modern heroism that Byron anatomizes in his poem. Frye claimed that the Romantic period marks the great shift in the European mythological framework away from a universalizing organic creation myth that had prevailed since classical times, augmented and redirected by Christianity’s influence, towards an alternative mythic model centred upon and in the individual self. For the Romantic author, Frye writes, ‘the real event is no longer even the universal or typical historical event, but the psychological or mental event, the event in his own consciousness of which the historical event is the outward sign or allegory’. The objective of this new mythic model, which Frye likens to a quest romance, is ‘the attaining of an expanded consciousness, the sense of identity with God and nature which is the total human heritage, so far as the limited perspective of the human situation can grasp it’.39 For the Romantics, myth was fundamental to structuring and situating the individual and collective social self. While myth (and mythology) may constitute a vast repository of real and ideal cultural patterns and behaviours, it may also serve, practically, to define and dignify the quotidian individual. Personal identity, we are reminded in works from Don Juan to Frankenstein, was becoming increasingly susceptible to the eroding effects of mass public behaviour and group thinking. If Byron’s Don Juan is essentially unremarkable, so too were most readers who followed his tale, for whom the drama of exclusion and isolation Mary Shelley traces in her Creature was an increasingly familiar aspect of the emerging nineteenth-​century class system. Myth enables its participants to elevate themselves by perceiving in their own circumstances the elements of enduring cultural myths. The myth of the dying hero, for instance, invests with both personal and national meaning the otherwise ordinary deaths of countless British warriors: falling in battle, they participated—​as had Wolfe at Ottawa and Nelson at Trafalgar—​in the mythic paradigm traceable back to classical and Christian precedents. Shelley’s observation in A Defence of Poetry that poetry ‘is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge’40 offers a useful figure for how Romantic-​era myth situates the individual consciousness simultaneously at the inner core and outer limit of what is ‘know-​able’ about being. That is, the human mind instinctively attempts to encompass and reconcile the seemingly contrary ideals of self-​centredness (the ‘concentered’ state Byron attributes to the eponymous hero of his poem ‘Prometheus’ in 1816) and the selflessness we 37 

Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968), 4. Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), Canto 1, stanza 1. 39 Frye, Study of English Romanticism, 36–​7. 40  Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 531. 38 

574   Stephen C. Behrendt associate with Keats’s ‘negative capability’. Myth affords one route to this ideal but fragile intellectual and imaginative equilibrium. Much of myth’s force lies in its bidirectionality: the mythic hero’s fortunes and exemplary nature dignify both him and the culture with which contemporary audiences identify him; and in adulating and emulating the mythic hero, the members of the culture elevate and empower themselves. The unanticipated death of Princess Charlotte Augusta after childbirth in November 1817 produced a public mythmaking that was eerily reprised following the death of Princess Diana in 1997.41 Like Diana, Charlotte had been invested in the popular consciousness with attributes of youth, beauty, motherhood, and domestic virtue heavy with mythic overtones, both classical and Christian. Myth’s bidirectionality made the same values and virtues for which she was celebrated accessible to countless ‘ordinary’ Englishwomen, death in childbirth being a purely human tragedy that disregarded class. While myth elevates us towards its ideal figures and archetypal patters of experience, it also brings its subjects nearer to the world inhabited by ‘ordinary’ citizens. That the Romantics appreciated this two-​way process is one reason why such interest developed in revising and reconfiguring myth and its paradigms: Romantic artists appropriated from inherited cultural myths what suited their needs, revamped and repackaged it, and discarded what was superfluous. For them, as Anthony Harding notes, ‘myth only exists and lives as it is transposed and translated’.42 Not surprisingly, Coleridge’s explanation of the secondary imagination as a recombinant power suggests how myth may be modified—​or repurposed—​in this way. The secondary imagination, he writes in Biographia Literaria, ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-​create’. Together with the primary imagination, which simultaneously creates what it perceives, the secondary imagination constitutes that power which Coleridge calls ‘esemplastic’, the word he coined to denote the capacity ‘to shape into one’, to discover the universe’s fundamental organic unity (which manifests God’s omnipresent spirit) or to create it when it cannot be found.43 Throughout the period, Romantic writers and artists invoke both mythical and historical precedents to ‘read into’ contemporary phenomena. They recognized that any contemporary understanding of myth is necessarily relative—​dependent upon its interpreter’s circumstances—​because myth is less about universal truths than about what Harding calls ‘patterns of relationships, sequences of actions, that may be read from widely different political or religious standpoints’.44 Perhaps because of that new consciousness of historicity about which Chandler writes in England in 1819, it was

41 

See Stephen C. Behrendt, Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 42  Anthony John Harding, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 15. 43  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), i. 304, 168. 44 Harding, Reception of Myth, 259.

The Ineffable   575 imperative to discover within an increasingly fragmented and materialistic European culture the underlying patterns and fundamental myths of human experience. The reason is apparent from the end of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘The world is too much with us’, written in 1802–​4. There, after lamenting the ‘Getting and spending’ that has laid waste his countrymen’s hearts and souls, the forlorn Wordsworth exclaims that he would rather be ‘A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn’ (line 10) than a modern Christian in contemporary bourgeois materialist society. Unlike his jaded contemporaries, Wordsworth suggests, a pagan might retain sufficient native imaginative vision to see in the phenomenal universe—​the natural world—​the mythic figures of Proteus and Triton. This capacity for an enlivening and restorative imagination—​for what Blake and Wordsworth call ‘vision’—​drives the Romantic-​era preoccupation with myth. Romantic myth differs from allegory and symbol in how it organizes and explains experience. Allegory and symbol customarily lead away from the temporal and determinate towards the abstract and universal. While it may initially seem to do something analogous, myth ultimately leads back to the world of temporal humanity. In the process, though, it reframes that temporal situation in more universal terms of human experience generally. This is why, like the epic, myth (and mythology) implicitly invite the contemporary audience to share in the idealized and ennobling nature of the mythic hero. This community-​building is a culturally complex exercise, for the audience must first recognize the analogy between their own circumstances and those of the mythic subject. This common ground established, the next step is to assess the differences, which most immediately involve issues of historical and cultural time, intellectual or spiritual environment, and changing cultural values. As Halmi observes about Shelley’s handling of myth in Prometheus Unbound, modern readers must, finally, acknowledge that ‘the ancients’ experience of the gods is irrecoverable’.45 Understanding, then, how Shelley’s hero is ‘progressively humanized’ in the drama involves for the reader bridging the gaps, reconciling the differences, and discovering that atemporal continuity that defines a culture of shared experience. This is why British citizens in 1805 could relate to visual representations of Nelson in terms of the various cultural and iconographic overcodings to which his painted (or sculpted) image was subjected. His heroic actions and death placed him in company with Wolfe and other heroic casualties from recent history, but also with Shakespeare’s dead warriors and those of Homer and Thucydides. It situated him, too, in the company of the Jesus of the Deposition, fallen in metaphorical or spiritual war (with sin, with evil, with Satan) for humanity’s salvation. But Nelson’s inescapably human constitution—​his mortality—​likewise put him among the company of innumerable fallen British warriors upon whose survivors these images of shared, self-​sacrificing humanity were psychologically instrumental and morally instructive. This is how—​and why—​myth enacts such complex referentiality during the Romantic period in serving the needs not just of

45 Halmi, Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, 162–​3.

576   Stephen C. Behrendt creative artists and thinkers but also of the audiences who interpreted and enacted the works of art within the context of their own lives and experiences.

Further Reading Barth, J. Robert, S. J., and John L. Mahoney (eds), Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990). Behrendt, Stephen C. (ed.), History and Myth:  Essays on English Romantic Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990). Curran, Stuart, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1986). Ferber, Michael, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Fletcher, Angus, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964). Fulford, Tim, Coleridge’s Figurative Language (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). Halmi, Nicholas, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007). Harding, Anthony John, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995). Hühn, Helmut, and James Vigus (eds), Symbol and Intuition: Comparative Studies in Kantian and Romantic-​Period Aesthetics (London: Legenda, 2013). Kelley, Theresa M., Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Regier, Alexander, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Pa rt  I X

A E ST H E T IC S

Chapter 37

The Romanti c L e x i c on Andrew Bennett

In order to explore the critical and theoretical reach and power of Romanticism’s poetics, this chapter will examine some of the words that its practitioners deploy to describe their own work. Seemingly straightforward, ordinary words such as ‘childhood’, ‘feeling’, ‘imagination’, ‘inspiration’, ‘language’, ‘nature’, ‘ordinary’, ‘passion’, ‘poet’, ‘power’, ‘romantic’, ‘sublime’, and ‘wild’ are used both in ordinary and in less familiar ways to develop new modes of writing and new conceptions of literature. Romanticism, it is true, also develops its own more specialized and, in some cases, more puzzling critical vocabulary, notably in words and phrases such as ‘esemplastic’, ‘genius’, ‘gusto’, ‘negative capability’, ‘organic’, ‘originality’, ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, and ‘unacknowledged legislator’. But more startling and notable is the way that Romanticism takes everyday, even banal words and phrases and makes them its own, inflecting and redirecting them. In so doing, Romanticism invents itself as a radically new, iconoclastic, even dissident literary movement. Paying attention to this evolving lexical cluster allows us to discern emerging patterns within and connections between ideas and practices in the major intellectual and literary developments of the late ​eighteenth and early ​nineteenth centuries—​developments that come to be known by the term ‘Romanticism’. As Jerome McGann has commented, the ‘centrality’ of keywords in Romanticism has ‘always been recognized’: it is their ‘historical importance’ and ‘ideological volatility’ that makes such words crucial to the Romantic project.1 One of the key characteristics of what we might understand as canonical Romanticism may be said to involve a certain lexical pressure, itself ideologically and historically determined or produced, that the movement places on the literary. It is in the production of a newly theorized aesthetic lexicon, in the very theorizing of this lexicon, that the definition or determination of what is called ‘Romanticism’ emerges. Romantic poetics, in other words, is the Romantic lexicon. It is notable that Romanticism takes often quite ordinary words—​like the word ‘ordinary’ itself, for example—​and pushes them towards new conceptual possibilities. 1 

Jerome McGann, ‘Poetry’, in Iain McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–​1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 273.

580   Andrew Bennett Together with its drive towards self-​definition and its reconceptualization of the nature of poetry and of the poet, this unleashing of lexical potential constitutes a core elem­ ent in the Romantic poetic revolution. The word ‘ordinary’, in fact, is a good place to start, linked conceptually as it is to so many other words that develop their own particular heft and significance in the Romantic period: ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’, ‘original’, ‘common’, ‘childhood’, ‘feeling’, as well as, by opposition or contrast, ‘imagination’, ‘sublime’, ‘Gothic’, ‘inspiration’, and indeed ‘romantic’ itself. Pressure is put on the word ‘ordinary’ most distinctively in Wordsworth’s influential and programmatic Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800). Here, Wordsworth insists on the importance of the ‘real’, the ‘common’, the ‘plain’, the ‘everyday’, the ‘elementary’, the ‘natural’, the ‘unelaborated’, the ‘general’: words that together form a crucial lexical cluster around, and that express the idea of, the ordinary. A lengthy sentence early on in Wordsworth’s groundbreaking manifesto strikingly emphasizes the centrality of ‘ordinary things’: The principal object then which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.2

‘Common life’, ‘a selection of language really used by men’, ‘primary laws’: everything points to the fundamental value of ‘ordinary things’. In this passage, Wordsworth carefully explains, and in doing so also carefully qualifies, his sense of the poetics of the ordinary. He explains that in writing the poems he has chosen what he calls ‘incidents and situations from common life’ and that he has attempted to describe them in ‘a selection of language really used by men’. In other words, his poems describe familiar or ‘ordinary’ incidents in familiar or ‘ordinary’ language. But he goes on to explain that, at the same time, he has attempted to ‘throw over’ the incidents ‘a certain colouring of imagination’, which will mean that ‘ordinary things’ that are the focus and organizing principle of his poems will be ‘presented to the mind in an unusual way’. The impulse is to present ‘ordinary things’, but in a way that will make them extraordinary. There is a politics of the ordinary that Wordsworth may be said to invoke here as well as an aesthetics, since the ordinary connotes or allies itself with a certain democratizing impulse and an affirmation of the values of the working or the emergent middle classes rather than those of the higher reaches of the class hierarchy. Since in the eighteenth century the total number of gentry and titled aristocracy amounted to less than 1

2  ‘Preface’ (1802 version), in William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–​1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 743. Further references to Lyrical Ballads are from this edition.

The Romantic Lexicon    581 per cent of the total population, with aristocrats themselves constituting only 0.02 per cent of the population according to one contemporary estimate,3 the wealthy and titled—​ the ruling classes—​were, just by virtue of their sheer rarity, extraordinary. Presenting ‘ordinary’ people and ‘ordinary’ events can in this sense be said to involve a recognition of the legitimacy and significance of the culture, the discourse and idiom, and indeed fundamentally the values of working people. Wordsworth is engaging in social and political commentary: taking his subject matter from what he calls ‘low and rustic life’, he makes explicit certain social and political allegiances with the dispossessed, with the economically disenfranchised, and with the typically hard-​grafting but under-​privileged classes. In his 1818 lecture ‘On the Living Poets’, Hazlitt recognized the democratizing, even revolutionary political impulse of this project, placing Wordsworth at the ‘head’ of the Lake school of poetry, which ‘had its origin in the French revolution’. The Lake poets, he observed, referring to Wordsworth in particular, claim ‘kindred’ only with the ‘commonest of the people’ and in so doing ‘level all distinctions of nature and society’.4 This celebration of the ordinary leads to a poetics of the simple and of simplicity that developed out of eighteenth-​century writing5 and is related to the second word in our Romantic lexicon: ‘childhood’. The value of children for Romanticism involves the way that childhood can be figured as constituting a condition that is more closely allied than adulthood with the primary, the primitive, the natural, and of course the ordinary. It is for this reason also that, as critics have recently begun to acknowledge, the non-​ human animal (whether nightingale, skylark, albatross, owl, cuckoo, swan, ass, dog, tiger, various kinds of deer—​hart, roe, doe—​badger, sheep, or other) is also crucial to Romantic poetic theory.6 When Wordsworth declares that ‘the child is the father of the man’,7 he prefigures Freud in some respects by foregrounding a logic or rationality that prioritizes the origin, a logic or rationality that, without being simply or reductively deterministic, seeks both value and explanation in an object’s or an individual’s beginnings and in its resistance to reason. For Wordsworth, the child—​like the peasant, the primitive, or the animal—​has a direct, unmediated experience of the world, an experience that, unlike the adult’s, is not compromised or complicated by education, by the intellect or rationality, or by the corrupting influence of cultural assumptions and ideas. The child is a ‘mighty prophet’, a ‘Seer blessed’, as he declares in the ‘Intimations Ode’ (line 3 

This estimate was made in 1759 by the political economist Joseph Massie, cited in Kirsten Olsen, Daily Life in Eighteenth-​Century England (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 14. 4  William Hazlitt, ‘On the Living Poets’, in Robert Woof (ed.), William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1: 1793–​1820 (London: Routledge, 2001), 892–​3. 5  See John E. Jordan’s discussion of how Wordsworth is ‘revaluing and reconstituting the current standard of simplicity’, in Why the ‘Lyrical Ballads’?: The Background, Writing, and Character of Wordsworth’s 1798 ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 102, and ch. 4. 6  See, for example, David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Christine Kenyon Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-​Period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 7  ‘My heart leaps up’, line 7, in William Wordsworth, ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–​1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Further references to Poems, in Two Volumes are from this edition.

582   Andrew Bennett 114): the child is able to transcend the natural, to see beyond it, just on account of his connection with it. Childhood, the ordinary, the primitive, the animalistic, are connected with an idea of ‘nature’, with a valuation of the natural that is not limited to Romantic poetics but that takes on a certain valency and a certain value at the end of the eighteenth century. When at the beginning of the century Alexander Pope appeals to the standards set by ‘Nature’ in his Essay on Criticism (1709), he is referring to a set of ‘rules’ or norms by which nature works and that ‘art’ should reflect: ‘Nature to all things fixed the limits fit’, Pope declares, ‘And wisely curbed proud man’s pretending wit’ (lines 52–​3).8 Nature determines what can and cannot exist, setting the limits to that which can in turn take the standard of nature as its model. Art, indeed, in Hamlet’s formulation, is no more, but also no less, than a ‘mirror’ held up to ‘nature’.9 Romantic nature, by contrast, or the Romantic conception of nature, seems to be almost diametrically opposed to this conception of nature as axiomatic. Rather than being rule-​bound, Romantic nature is wild; rather than limited, it is limitless; rather than fixed, it is mutable, mobile, uncontrolled. The Romantic poet replaces the tamed, contained ‘nature’ of the eighteenth-​century landscape garden (Pope was himself an accomplished landscape gardener) with an excessive, uncontainable wildness, with vastness and the sublime, with the inhuman majesty of the ocean, the wind, or the mountain. And Art does not so much mirror nature as produce it or exemplify it. Instead of nature being reflected or represented in Art, instead of nature being artistically arranged by human intervention, and instead of Art being directed or controlled by the ‘rules’ of nature, the wild, unruly otherness of nature somehow represents or reproduces something uncontainable and ultimately inexpressible in the individual, in the poet or artist himself. The ‘theme’ of poetry, as Wordsworth comments in The Prelude, is ‘What passed within me’.10 ‘Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part | Of me and of my soul, as I of them?’, speculates the impassioned speaker in an arch-​ Wordsworthian passage from Canto 3 of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816): ‘Is not the love of these deep in my heart | With a pure passion?’, he asks (stanza 75).11 Passion, the heart, more generally ‘feeling’, the poet’s own feelings, indeed, take centre stage in this new poetics. But the otherwise archly anti-​Wordsworthian Byron later distanced himself from these lines, claiming that at the time his friend Shelley had ‘dosed’ him with Wordsworth ‘even to nausea’.12 In his own ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Shelley expresses the idea that he is, 8 

Alexander Pope, The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

9 Shakespeare, Hamlet, III. ii. 22. For the classic statement of this development in poetics, see M.

H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). 10  1805 version: Book 3, line 174, in William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-​Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Unless otherwise stated, further references to The Prelude are to the 1805 text in this edition. 11  Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Further references to Byron are from this edition. 12  Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822 (London, 1824), 237.

The Romantic Lexicon    583 or is at one with, a wild, uncontainable nature, with the ‘wild West Wind’, with nature’s ‘Wild Spirit’ (line 13): ‘Be thou, Spirit fierce, | My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!’, he cries (lines 61–​2).13 Unruly and inhuman wildness, an uncanny and indeed distinctly strange, unfamiliar power and ‘impetuosity’, along with its quotidian qualities is precisely the contradictory appeal of nature for the Romantic poets. Such power and impetuosity are expressed in Shelley’s language, in his very syntax and punctuation: the emphatic repetition together with the melodrama of the exclamation marks in these lines give a sense of unpremeditated or—​to use the word that Wordsworth makes his own—​‘spontaneous’ expression.14 Poetry is a form of speech: it is emphatically, if paradoxically, not writing, because it is immediate, impetuous, impassioned, powerful, and indeed artless—​wild—​while writing is traditionally conceived of as requiring consideration, delay, care, rethinking and revision, and a certain mechanical artfulness. Poetry, by this reckoning is, like the bird’s song in Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-​Lark’, a form of ‘harmonious madness’ (line 103). The ideal poet is therefore one who, like Shelley’s skylark, ‘Pourest thy full heart | In profuse strains of unpremeditated art’ (lines 4–​5) in order to express what in ‘Mont Blanc’ Shelley calls ‘wild thoughts’ (line 41). Romanticism is wild, then: it contains an uncontainable, wild aesthetics or poetics—​ another form of resistance or challenge to what was seen as an increasingly commercialized, urbanized, mechanized world. This, perhaps, is the gist of Blake’s contemplation of the uncontainable wildness (a word not used but everywhere apparent) of the ‘Tyger’ in Songs of Experience (1794): ‘What immortal hand or eye’, the speaker asks, ‘could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ (lines 3–​4), hinting indeed at the god-​like powers required of the poet who would dare to ‘frame’ the ‘burning’ power of the tiger in the final stanza.15 The wild calls strongly to the Romantics, who use the word regularly. Alice Fell, the destitute orphan girl in Wordsworth’s 1807 poem of that name is ‘half wild’, for example, and there are many other individuals in Wordsworth’s poetry that are ‘wild’: Ruth, a ‘Child Three Years Old’, the six-​year-​old ‘H. C.’, the ‘Westmoreland Girl’, the ‘Mad Mother’, Joanna, a group of gipsies (‘wild outcasts of society’), Martha Ray and others, all earn the epithet for one reason or another. But in ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, first published as the closing poem in the first, 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth figures himself, or at least his younger self, as animalistically wild. He places himself in a ‘wild secluded scene’ and surveys the ‘wild green landscape’ and the ‘sportive woods run wild’ (lines 6, 15, 17), in order to contemplate the nature of his relationship with nature and with the wildness of his own youthful existence. The valley in which the speaker stands is largely uninhabited, uncultivated, or, when cultivated, ambiguously so:  orchards are mere ‘orchard tufts’ that ‘lose themselves’ in the ‘woods and copses’ and that

13  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Further references to Shelley’s poetry and prose are from this edition. 14  ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, 744 (‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’). 15  The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. edn (New York: Random House, 1988); for references to the tiger ‘burning’ or to its ‘fire’, see lines 1, 6, 8, 14, 21. All Blake quotations are from this edition.

584   Andrew Bennett fail to ‘disturb’ the ‘wild green landscape’; the hedgerows are ‘hardly hedgerows’ but instead ‘little lines | Of sportive wood run wild’; and there is only ‘uncertain notice’ of the ‘vagrant dwellers’ or hermits—​themselves wild kinds of humans—​that might inhabit the landscape (lines 11–​23). He thinks of his own younger self as a kind of wild animal, a roe deer (line 68), and twice mentions the ‘wild eyes’ of his younger sister (lines 120, 149)—​a kind of ‘other’ to his self, a living emblem of himself as a young man. And despite his more sombre, contained, controlled maturity, Wordsworth’s own effusive words as he stands now in the Wye valley are themselves figured as ‘wild ecstasies’ (line 139). Twenty years later, Keats seems to have picked up this phrase without necessarily alluding to it directly and partly domesticates, suburbanizes it, when he talks about the ‘wild ecstasy’ that he perceives to be depicted on a Grecian urn.16 For Keats, wildness is there, depicted on an art object, even as the viewer is distanced from such a state. And yet literature itself offers a kind of ersatz or substitute wildness: talking about the ‘wild surmise’ that the explorers experience on discovering the Pacific Ocean in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (line 13) is Keats’s way of talking about what it is like to read an epic poem for the first time. With ‘wild surmise’, Keats suggests, is how you might respond to the discovery of an ocean. And more domestically, less wildly, it is how you might feel on discovering a certain kind of book.17 ‘Wild’ appears at various moments in poems by Keats, but the word has a certain intensity of occurrence in the ballad-​like ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. In this poem, the speaker talks of meeting a ‘faery’s child’ whose ‘eyes were wild’ and who offers the speaker ‘honey wild’ (lines 16, 26). The fatal woman has ‘wild wild eyes’,18 eyes that are doubly or triply wild, that are wildly wild (this is wild language since we have already been told that her eyes are wild). He shuts her wild eyes with ‘kisses four’ (lines 31–​2), which is itself a somewhat wild, excessive number, while also a number that oddly contains the wildness of both erotic passion and imagination, that harnesses both by numbering the kisses and by limiting their number.19 If the poet is impelled to speak or sing or write poetry in a way that is wild, that is spontaneous, unpremeditated, artless, he may be said to have ‘Strange power of speech’, like Coleridge’s wild-​eyed Mariner in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.20 Indeed, ‘strange’, 16 

‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, line 10, in John Keats, The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Subsequent quotations from Keats’s poems and letters are from this edition. 17   The phrase ‘wild surmises’ occurs in another poem (‘On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt’, line 13) when Keats contemplates the ‘many glories’ for which he yearns but for which, as the clock ticks during a poetry-​writing competition, he finds himself inadequate. 18  ‘Wild wild eyes’ is from the manuscript version of the poem; the poem as it was published in 1820 was a little less wild, if perhaps no less strange: here, her eyes are ‘wild sad eyes’—​wild and sad, presumably, or wildly sad, or indeed sadly wild. 19  ‘Why four kisses, you will say?’ Keats comments playfully in a letter after writing out the poem: ‘Why four because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said “score” without hurting the rhyme, but we must temper the Imagination, as the Critics say, with Judgment’ (Major Works, 472). 20  Line 587 (1798 version), in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Further references to Coleridge are from this edition.

The Romantic Lexicon    585 ‘power’, and ‘speech’ are themselves precisely characteristic of the kind of person that the Romantics call a ‘poet’. But there is a darker side to such a figure, a side that is itself implied by his ‘strange power of speech’, and that involves the idea of Art, of poetry, as a kind of curse, as a punishment for an obscure crime or sin. ‘I look upon the peopled desart past, | As on a place of agony and strife’, Byron’s self-​torturing, wandering Childe Harold declares as he communes with nature, looking on the world as a place ‘Where, for some sin, to Sorrow I was cast’ (Canto 3, stanza 73). Coleridge’s Mariner, it is true, is being punished for shooting an albatross, but the reason why he did so and the reason why both he and the ship’s crew have to be punished for the act, remain obscure—​and all the more powerful for that obscurity. A kind of poet himself, the Mariner is doomed to travel the world accosting strangers in order both to rehearse his tale and, in so doing, to relieve himself of it: Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns. I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach. (lines 582–​90)

This kind of thing does not do the listener much good, of course: in Coleridge’s poem, the Mariner’s interlocutor, a wedding guest eager to get to the feast, ends up going home rather than to the marriage celebration, waking the morning after he has heard the tale a ‘sadder and a wiser man’ (line 624). The Mariner’s tale—​the hearing of it—​is a double-​ edged sword, in effect, since waking up wiser does not necessarily compensate for waking up sadder. The dissident, disturbed and disturbingly wild poet-​figure, the figure identified with nature itself (‘I pass, like night . . .’) is an individual against whom society has a duty to protect itself. Something similar is suggested about the subversive, anti-​ social power of the poet in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’—​a poem that ends by imagining what it would be like to meet such a person. ‘Beware! Beware!’ people would cry at the sight of a man whose ‘flashing eyes’ and ‘floating hair’ mark him out as somewhat wild, as someone who has ‘fed’ on ‘honey-​dew’ and who has drunk ‘the milk of Paradise’ (latter-​day versions of the Old Testament’s forbidden apple): ‘Weave a circle round him thrice, | And close your eyes with holy dread’, the speaker advises the community, in case one should encounter a man such as this, such as himself (lines 49–​54). We have moved a long way from the ordinary with which we began, from poetry and indeed the poet as ordinary, to qualities and effects that are in many ways extraordinary. But at its extreme the extraordinary begins to look like something that can also be

586   Andrew Bennett described as ‘ordinary’. It is perhaps for this reason that Wordsworth qualifies his famous description of the poet as ‘a man speaking to men’ by saying that such an individual has ‘a more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness’, that he has ‘greater knowledge’, and a ‘more comprehensive soul’ than others. Such a person speaks to men or women, then, as an ordinary man or woman might do, but at the same time he is seen as endowed with special powers, with the extraordinary powers of imagination, inspiration, and originality. The poet produces ‘original’ poetry through the faculty of the imagination since the imagination is that which produces or invents something that has not previously existed—​something therefore unavoidably new or original, something that is, by definition, out of the ordinary. The imagination, in Coleridge’s famous if somewhat opaque formulation in ­chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria (1817), is an ‘echo’ of the ‘eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’: it ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-​create’.21 But the imagination, in turn, can only properly be said to operate at the moment of inspiration. ‘Inspiration’, from the Latin inspirare, to blow or breathe into, describes a well-​ established conception of poetic making. Plato, for example, argued that the poet is ‘an airy thing, winged and holy’ who is ‘not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him’.22 But the Romantic poets and literary theorists renewed and revalorized inspiration in such a way as to make it central to the production of poetry. In a key passage from A Defence of Poetry (written in 1821, the year before he died), Shelley argued for the importance of inspiration, explaining that in this model poetry displaces the act of composition, decentres it, so that it is no longer tied to the individual poet’s consciousness or agency or intentionality. Writing poetry, for Shelley, is not an intentional act. The poet, at the moment of poetic production, is without agency: ‘A man cannot say “I will compose poetry” ’, Shelley contends, because at the moment of creation the poet is like a ‘fading coal’: the coal, a metaphor for the poet’s mind, is subject to ‘some invisible influence’ which, like ‘an inconstant wind’, may be said to ‘awaken’ that mind to what Shelley calls a ‘transitory brightness’. This notion of inspiration evacuates the individual of his or her own agency: ‘the conscious portions of our nature’, Shelley argues, are ‘unprophetic either of its approach or its departure’. For the highly idealizing Shelley, indeed, this moment of poetic inspiration is already only a dim reflection of or inadequate supplement to the original moment of creation: ‘when composition begins’, he argues, ‘inspiration is already on the decline’. For this reason, even the ‘most glorious poetry’ ever written is ‘probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet’.23 Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ is again exemplary: when he finally published the poem in 1816, Coleridge added a prose Preface in which he explained that the extant poem constitutes only a record of an ideal work that had never in fact been written down, that had only ever existed as a dream. The record itself, the poem that we see before us on the page, ‘Kubla Khan’, is but a pale and incomplete reflection of 21 Coleridge, Major Works, 313.

22 Plato, Ion 534 a–​b (italics added), in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977). 23 Shelley, Major Works, 696–​7.

The Romantic Lexicon    587 that original dream-​poem. Both in Shelley’s Defence and in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, the written poem, the poem as it is presented to the world, is conceived of as not the poem as it is at the moment of inspiration or conception—​a moment that involves transcendental, immaterial qualities but that is, for that reason, understood to be fatally compromised by the slow, artful, conscious, physico-​mechanical act known as ‘writing’. Comparing poets to priest-​like expounders of sacred mysteries or religious rites, Shelley declares in a resounding phrase at the end of the Defence that they are ‘hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration’.24 In this respect, poets are both at the centre of and themselves marginal to the act of creation. Indeed, the more they ‘apprehend’ what it is they are doing—​the more they consciously know it, understand it—​the less they may be said to be inspired, and the less truly poetic their work will be. The kind of creativity that is outlined in such a description of poetic inspiration involves a sense of the ‘sublime’—​another venerable term that is well established in the literary tradition and that comes to prominence through translations of Longinus’s ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime. In the English tradition, the sublime features most prominently in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), and takes on a new force and effectiveness during the Romantic period. The sublime is first of all an experience of something immense or overwhelmingly powerful—​an idea that denotes either an object or an experience that overpowers the consciousness and rationality of the perceiver. In his discussion of the sublime in Critique of Judgement (1790), Immanuel Kant argues that the experience of the sublime can be understood to involve the experience of being confronted with an object of such magnitude that the mind is unable to grasp it—​the ocean, for example, or the concept of infinity, or some other ‘wild’ natural phenomenon. For Kant, it is in that confrontation with an inhuman object or experience that the subject comes to an understanding of the limitations of his or her mind and therefore even with his or her humanity. What the mind is at least able to grasp in this confrontation is that it cannot grasp such immensity. It is the mind’s recognition of its own failure or its limitations that constitutes the experience of the sublime. The sublime is the experience of understanding that you do not understand, and in that sense it constitutes a human confrontation with the non-​human. For Kant, indeed, while the sublime might begin in sensory experience, it ultimately relies on the understanding, on reasoning, on the intimation of the ‘supersensible’, by comparison with which anything that can be experienced by the senses becomes ‘little’. This reasoning power is, according to Kant, a power that allows us to understand that which goes beyond the senses. It is even, in effect, a fundamental law of human nature, a ‘law’ that ‘goes to make us what we are’.25 It is precisely in the encounter with the non-​human sublime that one engages with this fundamental dimension of one’s humanity, that one is confronted with evidence for a state or condition beyond the empirical, the sensory, the material: it is just on account 24 Shelley, Major Works, 701. 25 

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 106 (Part I, §27).

588   Andrew Bennett of the disjunction between the intellectual and the perceptual faculties, between cognition or understanding and the material or sensory, that one becomes fully human, even as one is confronted at that moment by the limitations of the intellect, of cognition or understanding. It is a moment of encounter with an overwhelming power—​a moment of supreme powerlessness—​that also thereby empowers the subject. What is clear in this analysis is that the sublime shares with inspiration and imagination an anti-​or at least non-​empirical, a transcendental as well as a non-​human, dimension. The sublime, like the moment of inspiration, of inspired poetic composition, is beyond the experience of the senses—​beyond experience, indeed—​and also finally beyond cognition. At the same time, however, it is important to emphasize the centrality of the mind, of cognition, to the experience of the sublime: the mountains or ocean or stars that the poet invokes and evokes are also a supplement for or ‘emblem’ of the poet’s own consciousness. As Shelley gazes on Mont Blanc, in his poem of that name, he also ‘muses’ on his own ‘separate phantasy’: the poem is about the way that his own mind ‘holds’ an ‘unremitting interchange’ with what he calls the ‘clear universe of things around’ (lines 36–​40). In this respect, ‘Mont Blanc’ is both a mountain and a poem, the poem itself being a representation of what happens in the poet’s own ‘human mind’ during such an interchange. In the culminating representation of the sublime in Book 13 of The Prelude, Wordsworth also fuses mind and mountain in his recollection of his ascent of Mount Snowdon in Wales as a young man. He comments on the mountain as ‘an emblem of a Mind | That feeds upon infinity’ (lines 70–​1). The sublimity of ‘Nature’ as it is available to the senses is, Wordsworth continues, ‘the express | Resemblance of that glorious faculty | That higher minds bear with them as their own’ (lines 88–​90). The mountain, in this sense, is significant in as much as it is an ‘objective correlative’ (to use a quasi-​ Coleridgean phrase made popular by T. S. Eliot) of the poet’s own mind.26 But it is more than that, more than something that simply represents the mind: nature is both productive of and produced by the mind. In ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth declares himself to be a ‘lover’ of nature, a lover of ‘all the mighty world | Of eye, and ear’, before qualifying that empirical, perceptual notion in the next phrase: ‘both what they half create, | And what perceive’ (lines 105–​7). The sublime is self-​evidently connected to another series of words in the Romantic lexicon, a series that includes ‘power’, ‘passion’, and ‘feeling’, and that Hazlitt encapsulates in the term ‘gusto’—​the quality in art of expressing ‘power or passion’, as he puts it, the ‘living principle’ that expresses ‘muscular strength . . . moral grandeur, and . . . intellectual dignity’.27 Keats, the friend and admirer of Hazlitt, writes eloquently in a letter to

26 

See T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ (1919), in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 100. The phrase seems to have originated with the Coleridgean painter and poet Washington Allston in his Lectures on Art (c.1830, first published in 1840), as noted by John J. Duffy, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Objective Correlative: A New England Commonplace’, New England Quarterly 42.1 (1969), 108–​15 (pp. 108–​9). 27  ‘On Gusto’ (1816), in William Hazlitt, Selected Writings, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 266–​7.

The Romantic Lexicon    589 his brothers of December 1817 on this quality of the aesthetic, making explicit as he does so the (heterosexually) eroticized and masculinized subtext of Hazlitt’s position. Keats records his disappointment on seeing a well-​known painting by the artist Benjamin West, Death on a Pale Horse, at the Royal Academy: ‘there is nothing to be intense upon’, he complains to his brothers, ‘no woman one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality’, before going on to generalize about ‘excellence’ in art. Such excellence, Keats argues, inheres in its ‘intensity’, in its ability to make ‘all disagreeables evaporate’ in the face of ‘Beauty and Truth’.28 In another letter, Keats specifically uses Hazlitt’s word ‘gusto’ in a passage that has become famous for its invention of what he calls the ‘camelion poet’. In this letter, written to his friend Richard Woodhouse in October of 1818, Keats attempts to explain what he understands by the word ‘genius’ by speculating on the ‘poetical Character’. Speculating as much on himself as on anyone else, he argues that the Poet is ‘not itself ’: . . . it has no self—​it is everything and nothing—​It has no character—​it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—​It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.

‘The Poet’, Keats continues, ‘is the most unpoetical thing in existence because he has no identity’.29 Again, but this time very differently, Keats, like Kant, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others, is trying to articulate an experience or an identity that goes beyond the human, beyond the subject, and beyond cognition, understanding, rationality. In each case we are confronted with a thinking that strives both to encompass or articulate individual identity, consciousness, cognition, and at the same time to undermine the integrity of such a condition. For all its power, and for all its extraordinary challenge to the quotidian, however, the sublime is also, paradoxically, that which is most closely tied to the familiar, to the very sense of our own identity, of our own humanity. As I have tried to suggest, it is important to recognize the paradoxicality of the Romantic insistence—​Wordsworth’s insistence, in particular—​on the ordinary, as an aesthetic value in and as part of a radically new and developing poetic programme. There is an insistence in Wordsworth and other writers on what his Preface refers to as the ‘colouring’ that imagination lends to the ordinary. A much-​cited moment in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, his poem on ‘the growth of my own mind’, seems explicitly to dwell, from within the sublime, on a sense of the extraordinariness of the ordinary, its engagement with imaginative innovation, with a certain conceptual expansiveness. In a passage that was first drafted in 1799, Wordsworth talks about seeing an ‘ordinary sight’ (in fact a series of ‘sights’: a pool, a hill-​top beacon, and 28 Keats, Major Works, 370.

29 Keats, Major Works, 418–​19.

590   Andrew Bennett a girl who is carrying a pitcher on her head and whose clothes are blowing in the wind) and declares that despite the ordinariness of the sight he would need ‘Colours and words that are unknown to man’ to depict what he calls its ‘visionary dreariness’ (Book 11, lines 307–​15). The ‘vision’ is extraordinary and ordinary. But it is extraordinary not in spite of but precisely because of its ordinariness. It is the ordinariness that appeals, that baffles and compels the speaker at this point—​including the ordinariness of the language by which this extraordinary experience is registered and recalled. Wordsworth, that is, commemorates this extraordinary experience of the ordinary in quite ordinary words (there is nothing particularly unusual about any of the words in or the syntax of the phrase ‘Colours and words that are unknown to man’). Part of what is at work here involves Wordsworth’s insistence in the Preface on a poetics of ‘ordinary language’, on what he calls ‘the real language of men’, an idiom that he contrasts with what he sees as the false, artificial, hackneyed, and unduly sophisticated allure of late ​eighteenth-​ century ‘poetic diction’.30 But also at work is an important recognition of the way in which even the most ordinary, the most quotidian object, the humble, the everyday, can be seen, if one sees it aright, if one sees it, in Kant’s formulation, ‘as the poets do’,31 as extraordinary. To see in this way is, as Blake writes in the strangely ordinary words of a truly remarkable sequence of lines that make up his ‘Auguries of Innocence (1803)’, to see a World in a Grain of Sand And Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour . . . (lines 1–​4)

Further Reading Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp:  Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). Brown, Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5:  Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Burwick, Frederick, Romanticism: Keywords (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2015). Chandler, James (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Clark, Timothy, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-​Romantic Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Costelloe, Timothy M. (ed.), The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

30 

Lyrical Ballads, 854, 747.

31 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 122 (Part I, §4).

The Romantic Lexicon    591 De Bolla, Peter, and Andrew Ashfield (eds), The Sublime:  A Reader in British Eighteenth-​ Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Hamilton, Paul, Metaromanticism:  Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003). McCalman, Iain (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-​—​-1​ 832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). McGann, Jerome, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Regier, Alexander, and Stefan H. Uhlig (eds), Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory:  Knowledge, Language, Experience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Rowland, Ann Wierda, Romanticism and Childhood:  The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Shaw, Philip, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006).

Chapter 38

Literat u re and Phil o s oph y Tim Milnes

The relationship between literature and philosophy has formed an established part of the study of Romantic aesthetics since the work of René Wellek, Arthur O. Lovejoy, and M. H. Abrams in the early twentieth century.1 Subsequent waves of theory and historicism have confirmed the importance of the topic to our understanding of the culture and politics of Romanticism. Yet the issue can be a confusing one for modern scholarship, not least because our very notions of ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’ are, to a great extent, forged in the Romantic era itself. It is only during this period that the modern notion of ‘Literature’, with its aura of autonomy and profundity, comes to be distinguished from the more instrumental arts of rhetoric and belles lettres. In a related development, ‘philosophy’ begins to be divorced from ‘natural philosophy’, which in turn is reincarnated in the early nineteenth century as ‘science’. Prior to these developments, it had been possible to conceive of progressive knowledge as a kind of unified commonwealth, evidenced by the founding of institutions such as the Lunar Society of Birmingham and the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the image of a field of human knowledge bound together by a commanding intellect such as that of Isaac Newton came under pressure from the increasing diversity of scientific discoveries and a corresponding drive to divide philosophical labour.2 At the same time, thinkers such as Dugald Stewart cast doubt on the Aristotelian idea that poetry’s cognitive status rested upon its status as a medium that grants access to general truths about human nature. For

1  René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England 1793–​1838 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931); Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘Coleridge and Kant’s Two Worlds’ (1940), in his Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: George Braziller, 1955); M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). 2  Anthony Ashley Cooper [Third Earl of Shaftesbury], Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1737), 3 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), ii. 164.

Literature and Philosophy    593 Stewart, poetic creativity is bought at the price of epistemological substance: while it is the privilege of the poet rather than the scientist ‘to produce something which had no existence before’, the creations of the poetic imagination, he maintains, are ‘not for the purpose of information, but to convey pleasure to the mind’.3 This threat of epistemological disenfranchisement spurs Romantic writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth to re-​establish poetry’s cognitive pedigree, which in turn reignites an ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy. From its inception, this quarrel was politically inflected. Romantic-​period writers engage with philosophical ideas in the context of an antipathy in Britain towards philosophers that grows steadily from the mid-​1790s onwards. Such misgivings were not entirely new: even during the Enlightenment, philosophy and philosophers had borne the brunt of the scepticism of David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–​40), the satirical volleys of Voltaire in Candide (1759) and the Philosophical Dictionary (1764), Thomas Reid’s advocacy of common sense in An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), and, more recently, the linguistic materialism of John Horne Tooke’s Diversions of Purley (1786, 1805). The counter-​revolutionary rhetoric of Edmund Burke, however, created a politically urgent basis for British suspicions regarding philosophy. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke attacks not only the theory behind the French Revolution as a ‘barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings’, but also the very assumption that philosophical systems should be a basis for polity, adding, with regard to the latter, that ‘in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false’.4 He continues: What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics. The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.5

Interestingly, Burke’s appeal to ‘experimental science’ would be matched by his radical opponents, such as Thomas Paine, who also based their ideas upon the empiricist methods and principles of Locke. However, in distinguishing ‘metaphysics’ from ‘science’, Burke is attempting to draw a more fundamental distinction between philosophy and life in general. In opposition to what he perceives to be the cold abstractions of the philosophy of the ‘rights of man’, he promotes other spheres of value, which, he believes, are more solidly grounded in the traditions, emotional attachments, and even the prejudices of a people. Accordingly, Burke’s ideal constitution is affectionate, filial,

3  The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. William Hamilton, 11 vols (Edinburgh, 1854–​8), ii. 282, 448. 4  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), 115, 91. 5 Burke, Reflections, 89–​90.

594   Tim Milnes and partial, rather than enthusiastic, contractual, and rational. In this respect, literature boasts an advantage over philosophy, insofar as its privileged links with human affections mean that it is a ‘a better school of moral sentiments’. Unlike philosophers, he insists, poets, ‘who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart’, could never find the spectacle of the French Revolution a source of ‘exultation’.6 By appealing to the ‘moral constitution of the heart’, Burke attempts to wrest the language of poetic sensibility from the hands of the followers of Jean-​Jacques Rousseau and enlist it in his defence of feeling against abstraction. As passages such as these suggest, Burke’s style was as instrumental as his arguments in politicizing the discourse of philosophy during the Romantic period. The Reflections’ self-​consciously rococo rhetoric of chivalric honour forged a link between the high grounds of ‘elevated’ or poetic speech and anti-​Jacobin politics, leaving the lowlands of ordinary language or ‘plain speaking’ to republican philosophers such as Paine and William Cobbett. This realignment would later be adopted by a political opponent, the essayist and philosopher William Hazlitt, who contrasted the ‘aristocratic’ imagination, an ‘exaggerating and exclusive faculty’, with the ‘republican’ and ‘distributive’ understanding. ‘The principle of poetry’, Hazlitt concluded, ‘is a very anti-​levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast.’7 Thus, Hazlitt, whose own career had begun with the radical philosophical treatise An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), implies that, whereas ‘Poetry is right-​royal’, philosophy is radical-​republican. Before Hazlitt appropriated Burke’s dichotomy between Jacobin philosophical prose and anti-​Jacobin poetry, however, other writers had attempted to circumvent it. Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (particularly in its revised, 1802 version) attempts to radicalize Burke’s rhetoric of power by bridging the gap between partial and ‘exclusive’ homely feeling on one side and, on the other, republican common sense and plain speaking. By ‘fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’, Wordsworth and Coleridge conduct an experiment that is at once aesthetic, philosophical, and political.8 The attempt to marry the folk-​ authenticity of the ballad with the sincerity and spontaneity of the lyric is underpinned by the principle that poetry (rooted in ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’) is opposed not to prose, but to ‘Matter of Fact, or Science’.9 For Wordsworth, it follows from this that ‘a language arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings is a more permanent and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets’.10 By associating poetic affect with plebeian emotions, Wordsworth attempts to outmanoeuvre Burke’s division between a powerful but partial poetic imagination

6 Burke, Reflections, 120.

7 ‘Coriolanus’, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), iv. 214. 8  William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 595. All Wordsworth quotations are from this edition. 9 Wordsworth, Major Works, 611, 202. 10 Wordsworth, Major Works, 597.

Literature and Philosophy    595 and an egalitarian but abstract philosophical understanding. In this way, Lyrical Ballads redefines the epistemology and the politics of literary expression. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, true poetry is ‘philosophical’ precisely because it is not based in abstract rationality. Nonetheless, due partly to Burke’s efforts and partly to subsequent wars with France, ‘philosophy’, natural and metaphysical, becomes a disreputable business in the eyes of a class of British readers for whom the abstract universalism adumbrated by Rousseau and Godwin is increasingly associated with the unflinching application of revolutionary principle by Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. Following the Lyrical Ballads’ attempt to explore the philosophical possibilities of poetry through quotidian forms of expression, Wordsworth and Coleridge turn their attention towards other, less politically contentious reserves of authenticity. Like many writers of the period who were repelled by Burke’s politics but drawn to his ideas regarding the links between poetry, power, and the imagination, they were particularly attracted to the notion of a mind ‘purified by terror’.11 In Reflections, Burke had forged a connection between patriarchal norms and the aesthetics of the sublime, defending the irrational, affective bonds that bind families and societies as well as traditions inherited from ‘canonized forefathers’ through which freedom ‘is tempered with an awful gravity’ and ‘carries an imposing and majestic aspect’.12 Such arguments echo aspects of Burke’s earlier work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in which he argued that ‘authentic histories’ documenting the ruin of empires and state catastrophes could be sources of sublime emotion. Indeed, Our delight in cases of this kind, is very greatly heightened, if the sufferer be some excellent person who sinks under an unworthy fortune. . . . for terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close, and pity is a passion accompanied with pleasure, because it arises from love and social affection.13

For the later Burke, it follows that the terrifying spectacle of the French Revolution can become, in an Aristotelian sense, a source of cathartic edification: we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments . . . because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because . . . we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical order of things. We are alarmed into reflexion; our minds . . . are purified by terror and pity; our weak unthinking pride is humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom.14 11 Burke, Reflections, 120. 12 Burke, Reflections, 49.

13  Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1759), 73. 14 Burke, Reflections, 119–​20.

596   Tim Milnes For others, however, the figure of the sublime offered the potential for revolutionizing both poetry and philosophy based on the elevation of dynamic energy over rational persuasion, of ‘mysterious wisdom’ over scientific knowledge. Accordingly, just as Burke adapted the affective vocabulary of the radicals for conservative ends, so his own distinction between the philosophical knowledge of prosaic reason and the ‘mysterious wisdom’ of the poetic imagination was appropriated by a generation of writers sympathetic to revolution but disenchanted with rationalism. Nowhere is this enthusiasm expressed more forcibly than in Blake’s critique of pure reason, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–​3), which depicts humanity’s fallen intellect, ‘clos’d by . . . senses five’, as incarcerated by empirical rationality.15 Blake’s belief in the primacy of energy and his conviction that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ (34) challenges the materialist and empiricist philosophies of the Enlightenment by depicting humanity as supernatural, dynamic, and imaginative, rather than as natural, static, and intellectual. Reason itself (and, by extension, philosophy), Blake suggests, is merely ‘the bound or outward circumference of Energy’ (34). Accordingly, the narrator of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell evinces a suspicion of rationalists and philosophers who speak ‘with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning’, concluding in his dialogue with the Angel that ‘it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics’ (42). Blake associates the ‘bound’ of reason with more concrete forms of intellectual, political, and sexual repression: thus, in The First Book of Urizen (1794), the eponymous ‘abstracted | Brooding’ figure (70) who most obviously encapsulates these themes punningly links rationality (‘your reason’) with limitation (‘horizon’). The sorry consequences of Urizen’s fall into abstraction and solipsism reveal Blake’s concern that philosophy’s edifice of systematic knowledge is merely a symptom of modern man’s stagnation and alienation. For Blake, seeing the world as it really is requires an unbinding of imaginative energy that counters Urizenic limit-​horizons by pushing thought towards the sublime—​in other words (as the etymology of the term implies), up to (sub) and beyond the limit (līmen) of what is conceivable according to empirical philosophy. It is this revolutionary act that Blake’s illuminated books instigate: like the ‘corroding fires’ (35) in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake’s plates of acid-​rendered relief etchings attempt to cleanse the ‘doors of perception’ (39) by burning away the bounds of sense and empirical rationality. Apocalyptic ideas such as these suggest the potential of human vision to cross the boundary between the finite and the infinite, with the result that revelatory moments in Romantic literature are frequently figured as forms of transgression, characterized by an ineffable awareness of a power in humanity that surpasses nature. ‘Vision’ in Blake’s universe entails a subliming of experience that exceeds intellectualization, and which can often only be expressed indirectly through an image of terror, such as the Tyger.

15 

The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. edn (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 35. Subsequent references are to page numbers in this edition.

Literature and Philosophy    597 Similarly, in the long poem to Coleridge that would posthumously become The Prelude, Wordsworth deploys tropes of terror as a way of intimating a level of philosophical wisdom that transcends the merely intellectual. In a celebrated passage in Book 5, the poet recounts an epiphanic episode from his childhood when he witnessed the body of a drowned man being recovered from Esthwaite Lake: At length, the dead Man, ’mid that beauteous scene Of trees, and hills and water, bolt upright Rose with his ghastly face; a spectre shape Of terror even! and yet no vulgar fear, Young as I was, a Child not nine years old, Possessed me; for my inner eye had seen Such sights before among the shining streams Of Fairy Land, the Forests of Romance (1805: Book 5, lines 470–​7).

Here, by adding a caveat infused with the more tranquil and conventional language of romance, Wordsworth attempts to contain the more radical aspects of his poetic enthusiasm. Elsewhere, however, Wordsworth’s dynamic consciousness, like Blake’s dialectical imagination, aspires to an apocalyptic insight that drives philosophical thought beyond the realm of abstraction. In ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, natural perception takes second place to the ‘sublime’ gifts of nature, chief among which is ‘that blessed mood, | In which the burthen of the mystery . . . | Is lightened’, so that we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. (lines 38–​50)

For Blake and Wordsworth, seeing ‘into the life of things’ has less to do with knowledge as conceived by Enlightenment discourse, and more to do with ‘power’. Indeed, in the hands of some writers, Romantic poetry challenges one of the basic paradigms of Western philosophy since Descartes: the construction of the self upon the foundation of a knowing consciousness. Accordingly, poetry’s challenge to philosophy is not for the latter to demonstrate the validity of its truth-​claims, but for philosophy to prove itself capable of capturing the ‘spots of time’16 that escape rationalization. And yet, while the apocalyptic crux of Romantic vision, the notion of an experience that crosses the threshold of the infinite, defied the largely empirical grid of understanding inherited by Blake and Wordsworth, the epistemological issue at the heart of this ideal had been 16 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book 11, line 258.

598   Tim Milnes a heated topic of philosophical debate in Germany for decades. For Kant and his successors, the possibility of the visionary imagination was bound up with the specific problem of intellectual intuition. This brings us to Coleridge, who, more than any other British writer of this period, sees the relationship between literature and philosophy as central to the reorientation of aesthetics away from taste and receptivity and towards genius and productivity. As he declares in Biographia Literaria (1817), ‘in energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production’.17 The notion of truth domesticated into power implied a new model of poetry (indeed, of art in general) based upon ideas of aesthetic autonomy and of the irreducibility of ‘poetic truth’. Although this model had already been suggested by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge came to suspect that poetry’s independence from science could not be justified within the language of British empiricism, and that the inevitable tendency of the mechanical and empirical traditions of Newton and Locke was to reduce and marginalize the cultural significance of art, poetry, and the creative imagination. Moreover, in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Terror, many of whose adherents claimed to base their thinking upon the ideas of Locke, Coleridge became concerned that the materialist philosophies of his youth presupposed no Christian theology and were compatible with atheism. Despite championing the materialist associationism of David Hartley and the scientific theories of Humphry Davy in the 1790s as models of human development and social progress, he became convinced that a more fundamental reorientation in the philosophical culture in Britain was required. This conviction hardened when, following a walking tour of Germany taken with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, he encountered a new current of thought influenced by the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The impact that this new philosophy would have on his thinking is evident in a letter he wrote to his friend and patron Thomas Poole soon after returning from mainland Europe: The interval since my last Letter has been filled up by me in the most intense Study. If I do not greatly delude myself, I have not only completely extricated the notions of Time, and Space; but have overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels . . .18

Coleridge’s boasts scarcely suggest the extent of his debts to his German sources. Nor was he the only British writer in this period to encounter the works of Kant and his followers: Henry Crabb Robinson had studied them while living in Germany; Hazlitt often cited Kant in support of his claims that the mind alone is formative; and Thomas 17  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), i. 85. 18  To Thomas Poole, 16 Mar. 1801, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–​7 1), ii. 706.

Literature and Philosophy    599 De Quincey deployed German metaphysics in his Confessions of an English Opium-​ Eater (1821). In addition, many readers in Britain would have been acquainted with Kant through Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813) (see James Vigus, Chapter 44 in this volume). Nonetheless, Coleridge is the first British thinker to engage in a rigorous and searching way with the philosophical and cultural implications of German idealism. Consequently, the letter to Poole is as good a marker as any for the moment when the seeds of the new idealism are first firmly planted in an Anglophone culture.19 Like Burke, Coleridge reviled the perceived atheism of the Jacobins, but while this revulsion prompted the former to attack metaphysics as such, it emboldened Coleridge to reconstruct philosophy from its foundations. This reconstruction involved overturning the three main ‘isms’ that formed the backbone of the ‘irreligious metaphysics’ of modern thought: materialism (the ontological theory, defended by Hartley and Priestley, that all that exists is matter or energy); empiricism (the epistemological theory, defended by Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, that all knowledge is based upon experience); and associationism (the psychological theory, defended by Hartley and Hume, that human consciousness is determined by the connection of ideas according to contingent principles of association). As Coleridge discovered, basing a critique of associationism upon the principles of transcendental idealism meant rethinking the relationship between literature and philosophy. That this was the case was largely due to the peculiar role that aesthetics came to play within the philosophy of Kant and German idealism. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant departs from empiricism in two fundamental ways: first, by thinking about knowledge transcendentally rather than causally; second, by treating mediation as a precondition, rather than as an obstacle to valid experience. In the first of these innovations, Kant discards the inductive method of Locke and Hume, which attempted to establish Descartes’ sapient being or cogito in the data of sense perception. If Hume had shown the impotence of reason in living a human life, Kant concluded, then philosophy must take the form of a critique of reason’s limits. Rather than asking, what causes my experience, the transcendental method begins with the question: what are the conditions of the possibility of experience? Unlike the empiricist, Kant argues, the transcendental philosopher will find that there are necessary conditions to experience which can only be known a priori. In turn, Coleridge saw in Kant’s inauguration of a transcendental (rather than dogmatic) a priori the re-​establishment of a link between the human mind and a universal order that transcended the purely inductive, naturalistic, and ‘irreligious’ metaphysics of a generation of thinkers inspired by Locke, Hume, and Hartley. Transcendental method becomes crucial to Coleridge’s attempts to move beyond what both he and Kant see as the paradoxes of empiricism, materialism, and associationism. Accordingly, in Biographia Literaria, he asks: ‘How can we make bricks without straw? Or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by

19 

For further discussion, see Monika Class, Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–​1817 (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

600   Tim Milnes occasion of experience; but the very facts so learnt force us inward on the antecedents, that must be pre supposed in order to render experience itself possible.’20 Kant’s own pursuit of the transcendental method triggers his second departure from empiricism—​namely, idealism. By thinking about knowledge in terms of the conditions of experience, Kant argues, we come to see that the world as we experience it is fundamentally ordered by mental intuitions and concepts. It is a transcendental condition of experience, and consequently of knowledge, that the mind partly creates the world that it experiences. As Kant puts it, ‘we ourselves bring into the appearances that order and regularity in them that we call nature’.21 One important corollary of Kant’s position is the impossibility of knowing the world outside the mediation of these ideal forms of experience. Since ‘[s]‌ensibility and its field, namely that of appearances . . . do not pertain to things in themselves, but only to the way in which . . . things appear to us’, reality as it is in itself and to itself, unmediated by the forms of intuition and understanding, is inaccessible.22 For Kant, the loss of the Ding an sich (‘thing-​in-​itself ’) is the price of defeating a scepticism engendered by empiricism. This in turn means understanding that ideas such as ‘infinity’, ‘God’, even the ‘self ’ have no constitutive role to play within human knowledge. Such things, while they may be conceivable, lie outside our possible experience; they are what Kant terms ‘noumenal’, as distinct from the ‘phenomenal’ world of our perceptual experience. Although we may (indeed, in certain cases, must) think such ideas, we cannot have knowledge of their objects. To know the self, for instance, in an unmediated way would involve a very exotic kind of non-​spatial, non-​temporal intuition, or what Kant calls ‘intellectual intuition’, which ‘lies absolutely outside our faculty of cognition’.23 Kant’s conservatism regarding intellectual intuition foregrounds the mixed legacy of the critical philosophy for Coleridge, as the latter strove to develop a philosophical vocabulary that might vindicate the visionary imagination of Wordsworth. On the one hand, Kant’s depiction of the human mind as both receptive (empirical) and spontaneous (transcendental) in its operations provides Coleridge with grounds for defending the authenticity of poetic creativity against critics who shared Stewart’s conviction that such mental creations were, epistemologically speaking, foundationless. Furthermore, Kant’s articulation of aesthetic judgement as reflective (spontaneous) and therefore disinterested (i.e. directly adding neither to the knowledge nor to the pleasure of the subject) provided Coleridge with a justification of aesthetic experience as autonomous. On the other hand, Kant’s methods were for Coleridge merely an initial step towards a more fundamental rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and existence. As he declares in Biographia Literaria, ‘The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way 20 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 142.

21  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 241. 22 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 348. 23 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 361.

Literature and Philosophy    601 conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are—​ab initio, identical and co-​ inherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally each other’s Substrate.’24 In passages such as these, Coleridge draws heavily upon thinkers such as F. W. von Schelling and J. G. Fichte, both of whom attempt to bridge the Kantian chasm between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between subjective and objective reality. Accordingly, for Fichte and Schelling, philosophy’s most fundamental questions relate not so much to the possibility of experience as they do to the possibility of intellectual intuition. The two thinkers address this issue by expanding different components of Kant’s architectonic. Fichte sets out from Kant’s argument that in behaving morally we think practically rather than cognitively, acting in accordance with an ideal moral law of which we can have no knowledge, but which, nonetheless, regulates our dealings with other persons. Fichte takes this argument a step further by making selfhood itself dependent upon the activity of practical reason, arguing that we are never more ourselves than when we are exerting our wills in self-​reflection. As he puts it in his ‘Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre’ (1797–​8), the only way that ‘belief in the reality of this intellectual intuition . . . can be accomplished is by exhibiting the ethical law within us . . . It is in this way that the I becomes characterized as something absolutely active.’25 Fichte’s emphasis on the constitutive nature of will chimed with Coleridge’s Christian voluntarism, and reinforced the latter’s conviction that ‘as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of being altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative or merely practical, but both in one’.26 However, Fichte’s attempt to build a system of truth from within consciousness proved to be too ego-​centred for Coleridge. More attractive, at least during the period when he was writing Biographia Literaria, was the philosophy of F.  W. J.  Schelling. Where Fichte builds upon Kant’s critique of practical reason, Schelling’s departure point is Kant’s account of aesthetic freedom and the productivity of artistic genius. The chief merit of artistic genius for Kant is that, by exceeding the cognitive measures of understanding, it can ‘animate the mind by opening up for it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations’.27 Schelling develops Kant’s account of genius into a system of reality as self-​reflective productivity, or consciousness. In his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), he agrees with Kant that the act of intuiting oneself intellectually (i.e. to be at once subject and object for oneself) is impossible, but argues that it remains possible for the self to intuit itself aesthetically, for ‘the aesthetic intuition simply is the intellectual intuition become objective’.28 In this way, subject and object 24 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 142–​3. 25 

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (1797–​1800), ed. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 49. 26 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 252. 27  Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 193. 28  F. W. J. von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 228.

602   Tim Milnes can be united through artistic activity, and ‘[t]‌hat which the philosopher allows to be divided . . . comes, through the miracle of art, to be radiated back from the products thereof ’.29 Schelling’s conclusion that ‘art is at once the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy’ not only underpins Coleridge’s declaration that the poet ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity’, it also justifies Biographia’s own blending of philosophical reflection and literary productivity.30 Consequently, it is only in the context of Biographia’s total performance that Coleridge’s defence of Wordsworth as a ‘philosophical poet’ makes sense: namely, that the philosophical basis of Wordsworth’s poetry lies in the way in which his genius aesthetically completes the task of philosophy. Yet even Kant’s relatively conservative and quietist concerns with transcendental harmonies were viewed with mistrust in some quarters in Britain. Coleridge’s attempts in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere to leaven his German idealist sources with Neoplatonic and other, more arcane authorities did little to alleviate British readers’ suspicions of modern philosophers. Moreover, such misgivings were not confined to the anti-​Jacobin tendency, as is illustrated by Byron’s mocking depiction of Coleridge in the Dedication to Don Juan as a ‘hawk encumber’d with his hood, | Explaining metaphysics to the nation’ (stanza 2).31 The feeling among a younger generation of writers that transcendentalism was reactionary obscurantism is further evident in Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical portrait of Coleridge as ‘Mr Flosky’ in his novel Nightmare Abbey (1818). Recanting his youthful support for the French Revolution, Flosky ‘plunged into the central opacity of Kantian metaphysics, and lay perdu several years in transcendental darkness, till the common daylight of common sense became intolerable to his eyes’.32 Peacock’s antithesis of ‘transcendental darkness’ and ‘the common daylight of common sense’ highlights the fact that, despite Coleridge’s exertions, German idealism never quite grips the Romantic imagination in Britain. In alluding to the dominant philosophical trend at this time (the ‘common sense’ theory of Thomas Reid, James Beattie, and Dugald Stewart), it also reminds us of the considerable influence exerted by the Scottish Enlightenment over British Romantic culture. The mock-​debate that takes place between Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (1821) and Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry (1820), for example, extends an earlier dispute between the scepticism of Hume and the historiography of William Robertson. Thus, Shelley’s declaration that only poetry can free us from the illusions of objectivity by enabling us ‘to imagine that which we know’, offers a Humean-​sceptical rebuttal of Peacock’s Scottish-​Enlightenment narrative of the historical decline of imaginative poetry and the rise of empirical knowledge.33 Indeed, 29 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 230. 30 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 15–​16. 31 

Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​93), v. 3. 32  The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, vol. 3: Nightmare Abbey, ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 11. 33  Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2002), 530. For further discussion of the Peacock–​Shelley exchange in the context of British aesthetic debates, see Anthony Howe, Chapter 17 in this volume.

Literature and Philosophy    603 Shelley’s claim that poetry is socially progressive in turn highlights another Scottish legacy in the form of Hume’s utility-​based moral philosophy. Shelley’s poetic utilitarianism, however, like that of his early mentor Godwin, avoids the reductive hedonic calculus of Jeremy Bentham and his followers in favour of a more qualitative understanding of the well-​being that might be promoted by human actions. Furthermore, although they arrive at very different conclusions, both Shelley and Peacock deploy methods originally developed by thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. In particular, they incorporate elements of what Dugald Stewart termed ‘Theoretical or Conjectural History’, a method that combines narratives of social progress with imagined models of past, present, and future communities.34 Pioneered by Robertson, Rousseau, and Lord Kames as a way of bridging narratives of historical progress with (often sketchy) historical detail, ‘theoretical history’ becomes a literary genre in its own right in the novels of Scottish author John Galt, particularly Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Provost (1822), each of which is intended, in Galt’s words, to represent a ‘kind of treatise on the history of society’.35 In Galt’s work as well as in Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, one can see the emergence of a distinctly British-​Romantic form of historical epistemology, whereby the historical narrative displays a reflexive awareness of its own role in structuring past events. Once the boundaries between the cultures of Romanticism and the Scottish Enlightenment are seen to blur in these ways, the role played by ‘common sense’ within Romantic writing appears more complicated. On the one hand, the term was firmly linked to the earnest philosophizing of the Scots, to which Charles Lamb offers an ironic rebuttal in his essay ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ (1821) by celebrating an ‘essentially anti-​Caledonian’ order of ‘imperfect intellects’, the owners of which ‘have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive’.36 Though playfully exaggerated, Lamb’s resistance to ‘Caledonian’ styles of thought is unsurprising: a common-​sensism rooted in an Enlightenment discourse of sociability and intersubjectivity was unlikely to retain its appeal for early ​nineteenth-​century writers who increasingly venerated imagination, consciousness, and individuality. Thus, for Coleridge, common sense was merely a form of linguistic residue that passed for folk wisdom, as ‘what was born and christened in the schools passes by degrees into the world at large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-​table’.37 On the other hand, Reid’s original defence of common sense appears more ‘Romantic’ when considered as part of a broader, counter-​philosophical impulse running through the long eighteenth century. The Cartesian demand for a ‘first’ philosophy disappears, Reid argues, when we exchange the picture of a mind that uses ideas to represent reality

34  Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.’ (1793), in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. Wightman and J. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 293. 35  John Galt, The Literary Life, and Miscellanies, 3 vols (London, 1834), i. 155. 36  The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 5 vols (London: Methuen, 1903), ii. 59. 37 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 86–​7.

604   Tim Milnes for one in which sensation produces belief through ‘simple and original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind’.38 This fundamentally non-​intellectual, instinctive image of the mind at work is shared by Hazlitt’s otherwise very different conception of ‘common sense’ as synonymous with ‘natural feeling, which . . . lies between the two extremes of absolute proof and the grossest ignorance’.39 Admittedly, Hazlitt’s use of common sense to describe the active but inchoate realm of ‘urgent, but undefined impressions of things upon us’ engages more with Burke’s notion of prejudice than it does with Reid’s ideas. Nonetheless, it indicates how vital the vocabulary of empiricism remained to writers during this period, particularly those who found that the new aura of autonomy surrounding literary and other art works offered a form of engagement with the world which unburdened the modern self of knowingness. In some writers, such concerns produce an indifference to knowledge that rejects both empirical rationalism and the metaphysics of imagination. This perspective is most memorably expressed by Keats’s defence of ‘Negative Capability’ as the poetic capacity for existing ‘in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.40 In its elevation of emotional paradox, indeterminacy, and the unparaphrasable quickness of experience over cognition, Keats’s ‘negative capability’, like Lamb’s ‘imperfect’ sympathy, suggests a deeper suspicion of reflective thought, whether abstract, empirical, or transcendental. By contrast, transcendentalist aesthetics transforms the relationship between literature and philosophy by theoretical means. For idealists it seemed that, if literature (and by extension, art in general) could noncognitively approach a ‘Truth’ that philosophy could not grasp, it followed that Schelling’s ‘miracle of art’ signalled the end of literature’s subservience to philosophy. Indeed, it could be argued that one corollary of the new aesthetics is the inauguration of ‘Literature’ itself, distinguished from its lower-​ case forebear by virtue of its reflexive power to embody intellectual intuition and unify subject and object. Rather than seeing poetry as the dress of thought, the ornamentation of just representations of philosophical truths, post-​Kantian aesthetics postulates a ‘Literary Absolute’, through which art and literature alone can produce representations that accommodate the philosophical impossibility of mirroring an Absolute Truth that is itself constituted by those representations.41 In other words, through Romanticism, ‘Literature’ becomes not just a genre in itself, but also (since it escapes all attempts at formal classification and determination) the genre of Romantic writing. This inauguration and elevation of  ‘Literature’ instigates a paradigm shift whereby the neoclassical model of literature as exemplum whose meaning might be paraphrased into 38 

Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, 4th edn (London, 1785), 39. 39  ‘Paragraphs on Prejudice’, Complete Works of Hazlitt, xx. 327. 40  To George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 [?]‌Dec. 1817, The Letters of John Keats 1814–​1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 193. 41  See Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe and Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 11.

Literature and Philosophy    605 the language of reason and general truth is supplanted by one of literature as autotelism, in which the relationship between a work’s form and content are dictated by ideas of essence and growth rather than by convention. Aspiring to the condition of a symbol that, in the words of Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual (1816), ‘partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible’, 42 Romantic poems such as his ‘Kubla Khan’ self-​consciously embody the relationship between the creative imagination and an unattainable Absolute in the indeterminate form of the fragment. Accordingly, behind Coleridge’s and (to a lesser extent) Wordsworth’s literary ambitions to produce a ‘genuine philosophical poem’ at the turn of the century is less a desire to emulate the early eighteenth-​century theodicies of Alexander Pope, Mark Akenside, and James Thomson by testing ‘literary’ thoughts and emotions against general philosophical truths, and more a determination to write poetry that achieves the condition of being simultaneously philosophy as literature and literature as philosophy. There remains, however, an ambivalence within this Janus-​faced ideal. On the one hand, transcendental aesthetics can be seen as the culmination of Enlightenment system-​building, insofar it installs an organic universalism that attempts to accommodate the subtle interpenetration of part and whole, particle and absolute, that Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume had found so troublesome. Much of the work of Schelling and Coleridge, for example, reflects their concern with establishing a nonreductive but philosophical principle of unity. This preoccupation informs Coleridge’s development of a theory of organic literary form and his insistence that ‘all Method supposes a principle of unity with progression’ which ‘can never in the sciences of experiment or in those of observation be adequately supplied by a theory built on generalization’.43 For Friedrich Schlegel, on the other hand, philosophy’s representational limitations themselves become the precondition and organizing principle of a kind of poetry that transcends philosophy. Thus, while Schlegel’s ‘romantic’ poetry embodies the reflexivity of the dialectic of consciousness described by Fichte and Schelling, it remains ironic rather than apodictic in outlook. As Schlegel puts it in his ‘Critical Fragments’ (1797), irony contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licences, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary.44

42  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 29. 43  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), i. 476. 44  David Simpson (ed.), The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 183 (fragment 108).

606   Tim Milnes Human life is philosophically ironic for Schlegel because the self is perpetually caught between ‘the impossibility and necessity’ of self-​identification, of complete communication with itself. Romantic or ‘transcendental’ poetry, he argues, expresses this condition more effectively than philosophy because of its resistance to closure and determination and its self-​conscious engagement with the necessity and impossibility of arriving at Absolute Truth. Accordingly, in his ‘Athenäum Fragments’ (1798), Schlegel describes ‘romantic’ poetry (and by extension, poetry in general) not as a product, but as a process that is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal . . . The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.45

Schlegel’s manifesto joins Shelley’s claim that poets are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the World’ in setting a high-​water mark for the Romantic faith in the power of literature to restore a unity and purpose to consciousness that had been lost by Enlightenment philosophy.46 In Germany, philosophy would return in the shape of Hegel’s historical dialectic, subsuming Romantic aesthetics within ‘the prose of life’, while in Britain the explosion of print culture and the rise of the realist novel undermined Coleridge’s idea of the literary work as autotelism. As Romantic tropes and ideas became increasingly anthologized and commoditized, the challenge facing later nineteenth-​century writers attracted to such notions would be to defend Literature’s newly won autonomy in the absence of transcendental assurances.

Further Reading Budge, Gavin (ed.), Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense, 1780–​ 1830 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007). Cavell, Stanley, In Quest of the Ordinary:  Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Eldridge, Richard, The Persistence of Romanticism:  Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Engell, James, The Creative Imagination:  Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Fischer, Michael, ‘Accepting the Romantics as Philosophers’, Philosophy and Literature 12 (1988), 179–​89. Hamilton, Paul, Metaromanticism:  Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003).

45 

46 

Simpson (ed.), Origins of Modern Critical Thought, 193 (fragment 116). Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 535.

Literature and Philosophy    607 Kompridis, Nikolas (ed.), Philosophical Romanticism (New York: Routledge, 2006). Lacoue-​Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (New  York:  State University of New York Press, 1988). Laniel-​Musitelli, Sophie, and Thomas Constantinesco (eds), Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature (New York: Routledge, 2015). Lockridge, Laurence S., The Ethics of Romanticism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989). McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1969). Milnes, Tim, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Rajan, Tilottama, and Arkady Plotnitsky (eds), Idealism without Absolutes:  Philosophy and Romantic Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004). Simpson, David, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Swift, Simon, Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy:  Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Contemporary Theory (London: Continuum, 2006).

Chapter 39

Practical C ri t i c i sm Gregory Dart

Practical Criticism, as a distinctive theory and practice of literary criticism, was the product of a particular milieu and a particular moment. The milieu was the Lamb circle, that loose collection of Lake poets, former radicals, and Christ’s Hospital old boys who met regularly in Charles and Mary Lamb’s rooms in the Temple. The moment, broadly conceived, was the period between 1808 and 1814, a time of delightful all-​night conversations, as William Hazlitt later remembered it in his 1826 New Monthly Magazine essay ‘Of Persons One Would Wish To Have Seen’, when the English Romantic movement was still a round-​table discussion. ‘The same event, in truth, broke up our little Congress, that broke up the great one’, he wrote, referring to the Congress of Vienna and Napoleon’s short-​lived return to power, ‘but that was to meet again: our deliberations have never been resumed’.1 The key witness to this birth, however, was not Hazlitt but Henry Crabb Robinson, whose Diary contains a vivid portrait of the coterie’s activities at this time. After his return from Spain in 1809, Robinson reinserted himself into a milieu in which the Cockneys and Lakers were still productively engaged with one another’s work, despite the fact that, of their number, only Robert Southey could really be considered a success. By 1811 Wordsworth appeared to be going backwards in the eyes of public opinion, Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh review of the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes having declared it a falling-​off from Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge, who was writing little new poetry, had recently failed in his Lakeland-​based periodical The Friend, and had only one course of lectures (delivered in Bristol in 1808) to his credit. Lamb’s career as a creative writer appeared to have stalled for good, his one-​act farce Mr H–​having been hissed off the stage in 1807. Only his Dramatic Specimens (1808) and the Tales of Shakespeare (1807), co-​ written with his sister Mary and published as part of William Godwin’s Juvenile Library, could be cited in his favour. Last but not least there was Hazlitt, who by 1811 already had two failed careers behind him, first as a painter, then as a philosopher, his grand treatise

1 

The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), xvii. 134.

Practical Criticism   609 On the Principles of Human Action having fallen ‘still-​born from the press’ (as he put it) in 1805. Robinson did everything he could to further the interests of this coterie, reading its works to the Flaxman and Aikin–​Barbauld circles, delivering prospectuses for Coleridge’s first series of London lectures in November of 1811, and helping Hazlitt to his first newspaper job in the succeeding autumn.2 But he also saw it beginning to help itself. Crucially, the years 1811–​12 saw a rejuvenation of the English Romantic project, a rejuvenation achieved primarily through a new focus on literary criticism. Intense conversations at Lamb’s, especially when Wordsworth was in town, on poetry, painting, and the degradation of taste, were finally to bear fruit in a flurry of metropolitan interventions—​ primarily public lectures and essays—​that were to re-​energize Romantic aesthetics. The possibility of a new model of reading had been in the air for a while. After the publication of Poems in Two Volumes, Wordsworth’s main response to continuing public neglect had been to redouble his efforts to ‘create the taste by which he [was] to be relished’,3 reiterating the criticism of eighteenth-​century poetic norms that he had first mooted in the critical appendages to Lyrical Ballads. From the anecdotal evidence supplied by Robinson’s Diary, nobody resorted to the close analysis of particular passages of poetry with greater frequency or urgency than Wordsworth, and always, it seems, in order to demonstrate the superiority of his own poetry to that of his more popular contemporaries. When Robinson first met Wordsworth in London in 1808 he heard him ‘speak freely and praisingly of his own poems’, a habit which the lawyer found surprisingly becoming; he also learnt of the poet’s long-​held intention to write an essay on ‘Why bad poetry pleases.’4 Wordsworth’s focus in this period, as in the Lyrical Ballads Preface, remained on ‘poetic diction’, and in particular the contrast between ‘the real language of men’, which he thought was poetry’s proper idiom, and the artificial poetic argot of the eighteenth century. This is one of the recurring emphases of the three ‘Essays upon Epitaphs’ he sketched in 1809–​10, the first of which appeared in Coleridge’s Friend and then later as a note to The Excursion (1814). But alongside the emphasis on diction was an equally pressing interest in literary form and genre. Wordsworth considered the epitaph an instructive form to contemplate because it was the product of a simple idea—​the desire to offer the memory of the deceased up to the realm of immortality ‘in the light of love’.5 Simple, but also exacting, because the form was peculiarly resistant to the imposition of any additional mode of inquiry, moral or intellectual, that was not in keeping with the ‘genial warmth’ of this basic impulse. The epitaph was not an appropriate place, he 2 

Henry Crabb Robinson, On Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1938), i. 30, 50–​65, 110. 3  William Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807, Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Mary Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), part 1, 150. 4 Robinson, On Books and their Writers, i. 10. 5  ‘Essay upon Epitaphs, I’, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), ii. 57.

610   Gregory Dart reasoned, for weighing the merits and defects of the deceased ‘in the nice balance of the pure intellect’ (ii. 57). Rather, it was one in which the lost loved one should appear ‘as a tree through a tender haze or a luminous mist’, spiritualized and beautified in such a manner that ‘the parts which are not abstracted’ (that is, any specified personal attributes) ‘may impress and affect the more’ (ii. 58). The defect of many Augustan epitaphs, he thought, was that they were both too abstract and too particular. They generalized from the life of the deceased person to produce compliments that could be applied to anybody, but the very process by which these compliments had been produced was often overly analytical, reflecting more on the skill of the poet, and his ability to juggle and splice moral qualities, than on the actual life of the subject. Ideally, Wordsworth insisted, the general and the particular ‘should temper, restrain and exalt one another’ (ii. 57): this was his recipe for a good epitaph, but also, more broadly, for the kind of poem he was always wanting to write, and thought every poet should be writing, in which an organic relation was to be set up between unapologetically homespun particulars and a sublime—​and supremely meditative—​ideal. The epitaph was thus an acid test of poetic tact and integrity for Wordsworth, in which many of the characteristic social and satirical reflexes of Augustanism were exposed as meretricious and self-​serving. In the second of the Epitaph essays (unpublished until 1876), Wordsworth cites an epitaph by Pope on Mrs Corbet, noting that it had been praised by Dr Johnson in the Lives of the Poets as being refreshingly free of common-​place. Wordsworth writes: ‘No arts essayed, but not to be admired,’—​are words expressing that [Mrs Corbet] had recourse to artifices to conceal her amiable and admirable qualities; and the context implies that there was a merit in this; which surely no sane mind would allow. But the meaning of the Author, simply and honestly given, was nothing more than that she shunned admiration, probably with a more apprehensive modesty than was common . . . (ii. 78)

Here, as so often in Wordsworthian close reading, the translation of poetry back into prose is designed to reveal the speciousness of the original formulation, its distortion of a natural thought into a fair-​seeming but illogical confection. What Wordsworth does not mention, however, is the extent to which Dr Johnson, himself a sensitive reader of epitaphs, had already been alive to this issue: ‘I once heard a Lady of great beauty and elegance object to the fourth line’, he noted, ‘that it contained an unnatural and incredible panegyrick. Of this, let the ladies decide.’6 The apology that Wordsworth prefaced to this close reading of Pope is also revealing, and shows something of the predicament in which the Lake poet found himself: ‘Minute criticism’, he conceded, is in its nature irksome; and, as commonly practised in books and conversation, is both irksome and injurious. Yet every mind must occasionally be exercised in this 6 

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), iv. 7.

Practical Criticism   611 discipline, else it cannot learn the art of bringing words rigorously to the test of thoughts; and these again to a comparison with things.7

Here ‘Minute criticism’ is closely associated with the elucidatory and emendatory practices of eighteenth-​century editors such as Pope, Warburton, and Johnson. To Wordsworth, this predominantly editorial mode of reading was too instrumental in its attitude to poetic language and form to appreciate the higher flights of poetic genius, though its habit of common-​sense close analysis was still an invaluable tool for exposing the accumulated absurdities of ‘poetic diction’. As in his discussion of the poem on Mrs Corbet, so too in the rest of his literary criticism, Wordsworth could never resist taking issue with Dr Johnson, if the opportunity presented itself, and yet in truth the latter’s line-​by-​line treatment of Pope’s epitaphs in the Lives of the Poets was still the secret model behind his own steadfastly ‘matter-​of-​fact’ approach. Perhaps this was what irked him most about Johnson-​style couplet-​crunching—​the fact that, undeniably useful as it was for local, tactical purposes, it was also hopelessly bound up with an aesthetic he was otherwise seeking to transcend. The epitaph was doubly resonant for Wordsworth in this respect. It was a poetic form, of course, but it could also be construed as a critical one, in which each epitaph-​writer was placed in a special relationship of genial judgement with respect to the deceased. Viewed from this perspective, Wordsworth’s recommendation of a mode in which salient particulars were always to be viewed in a larger, spiritualized light might be seen to offer itself as a model of reading as well as of writing, a new way of construing the relation between the critic and his object. The truth of an epitaph, Wordsworth wrote, is ‘truth hallowed by love—​the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the affections of the living!’8 Coleridge was also to become interested in reading ‘in the light of love’ during this period. As he noted in the margin of Lamb’s copy of John Donne’s Poems early in 1811, alongside ‘The Canonisation’: One of my favourite poems. As late as 10 years ago, I used to seek and find out grand lines and fine stanzas: but my delight has been far greater, since it has consisted more in tracing the leading thought thro’out the whole. The former is too much like coveting your neighbour’s Goods: in the latter you merge yourself with the Author—​you become He.9

Coleridge, fresh from his encounter with German philosophy and aesthetics, had been aspiring to this ideal for a while, to the extent that even as early as 1804 we can find him

7 Wordsworth, Prose Works, ii. 77.

8 Wordsworth, Prose Works, ii. 58.

9  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley, 6 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980–​2001), ii. 220.

612   Gregory Dart promising to study Shakespeare in a similar spirit: ‘Each scene of each play I read’, he wrote, in a letter to George Beaumont, as if it were the whole of Shakespeare’s Works . . . and when I have gone thro’ the whole, I then shall collect my papers, & observe, how often such & such Expressions recur & thus shall not only know what the Characteristics of Shakespeare’s Plays are, but likewise what proportion they bear to each other.10

Shakespeare was always going to be the test case for any new theory of sympathetic reading. He was universally acknowledged as England’s greatest poet, but also one whom neoclassical criticism had continued to find ‘wild’ and ‘uneven’. In the 1760s the British Magazine published a series of essays on belles-​lettres, subsequently included in collections of Goldsmith, in which the author had taken issue with Shakespeare’s notorious mixing of metaphors.11 The only way to carry the argument against this universally popular writer, the anonymous critic reasoned, was to ‘descend to particulars’, and so he sought to prove his point by taking the reader through a close line-​by-​line analysis of the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy from Hamlet.12 The analysis itself cannot but look to modern eyes as an object lesson in close misreading. Failing to grasp the speech’s opening choice about ‘whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ or ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them’ as a stark opposition between opting to continue with life’s struggle, or to commit suicide, the critic (not surprisingly) finds the early part of the speech bewilderingly illogical. The sequence ‘To die—​to sleep—​no more’ similarly floors him, and then later, by assuming that the word ‘conscience’ in the line ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’ must refer to moral conscience, and not, as Shakespeare almost certainly intended, ‘consciousness’, he makes a similar mess of its coda. ‘[Hamlet’s] whole chain of reasoning . . . seems inconsistent and incongruous’, he writes; ‘the conclusion is by no means warranted by the premises.’13 As a piece of neoclassical criticism gone wrong this is extreme but exemplary, not least because, supremely self-​confident as it is, it is also staggeringly devoid of historical-​linguistic or psychological understanding, and seems genuinely troubled by Shakespeare’s characteristic speed and suppleness of mind. In preparation for lecturing on the national poet, first in Bristol in 1808, and then in London in 1811–​12, Coleridge often used the margins of the scholarly editions he was working from as a congenial space in which to hammer out a new reading practice. This practice was to be, at one and the same time, more scholarly than that of the great eighteenth-​century editors, because more deeply historical in its linguistic and

10  Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–​7 1), ii. 550. 11  See Caroline F. Tupper, ‘Some Essays Erroneously Attributed to Goldsmith’, Publications of the Modern Language Association 39.2 (1924), 325–​42. 12  Oliver Goldsmith, Essays and Criticisms, 3 vols (London, 1798), ii. 203. 13 Goldsmith, Essays and Criticisms, ii. 208.

Practical Criticism   613 cultural purchase, and also more sympathetic to the characteristic nature and movement of Shakespeare’s genius. In the marginal notes to his copy of Theobald’s edition of 1773, which date from 1810–​13, we find him repeatedly standing up for Shakespeare’s text against the critically foursquare or insufficiently scholarly interventions of past commentators. Reading Claudius’s statement in Act IV scene vii of Hamlet that ‘goodness growing to a pleurisy | Dies in his own too much’, Coleridge was minded to reject Warburton’s plausible proposal of ‘plethory’ instead of ‘plurisy’: ‘I rather think’, he wrote, ‘that Sh. Meant Pleurisy, but involving in it the thought of Plethora, as supposing Pleurisy to arise from too much Blood’. He then returned to the same margin soon after in order to congratulate himself on his judgement: ‘STC. I was right—​in the old Medical Dictionaries, Pleurisy is often called a Plethory.’14 On Othello’s reference to ‘one whose hand, | Like the base Indian, threw a Pearle away | Richer than all his tribe’, Theobald had followed Warburton in preferring the first Folio’s ‘Iudean’ to the first Quarto’s ‘Indian’,15 considering that ‘in his Judian, he is alluding to Herod; who in a fit of blind jealousy, threw away such a jewel of a wife as Mariamne was to him’.16 Coleridge’s response was incandescent: ‘Thus it is’, he noted at the bottom of the page, for no-​poets to comment on the greatest of Poets!—​To make Othello say, that he who had killed his wife was like Herod, who had killed his!—​O how many beauties in this one Line were impenetrable by the thought-​swarming ever idealess Warburton! Othello wishes to excuse himself on the score of ignorance; & yet not to excuse himself—​to excuse himself by accusing. The struggle of feeling is finely conveyed in the word ‘base’ which is applied to the rude Indian not in his own character, but as the momentary representative of Othello’s.17

What Goldsmith, Theobald, and Warburton always seemed to be assuming is that Shakespeare’s metaphors could and indeed should only be operating singly, and in series. What they neglected, in Coleridge’s opinion, was precisely that capacity of his figures to combine together to create new and complex effects. In the third of his Bristol lectures of 1808 Coleridge had already praised Shakespeare for possessing both ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’. ‘Fancy’, he said, was the faculty of ‘bringing together Images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of Likeness—​distinguished’.18 (This was the effect Theobald and Warburton had been favouring when they proposed ‘Judian’.) ‘Imagination’, however, was that essential power, the source of all true poetry, ‘by which

14 Coleridge, Marginalia, iv. 744–​5. 15 

Theobald erroneously attributed ‘Judian’, which he calls the ‘genuine and more eligible reading’, to the ‘elder quarto’—​that is, to the first quarto of 1622. But ‘Iudean’ is actually from the first Folio of 1623. Jackson and Whalley reproduce Theobald’s error in their edition of Coleridge’s Marginalia (iv. 747–​8). 16  The Works of Shakespeare, Collated with the Oldest Copies, 8 vols, ed. L. Theobald (London: 1773), viii. 369. 17 Coleridge, Marginalia, iv. 747–​8. 18 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819 On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), i. 67.

614   Gregory Dart one image or feeling is made to modify many others, & by a sort of fusion to force many into one’. Coleridge then quoted the following lines from Venus and Adonis by way of illustration: Look! how a bright star shooteth from the Sky, So glides he in the night from Venus’s eye.

‘How many Images and feelings are brought together without effort & without discord’, Coleridge said, ‘the beauty of Adonis—​the rapidity of his flight—​the yearning yet helplessness of his enamoured gazer—​and a shadowy ideal character thrown over the whole!’19 He was to quote the same passage again in his London lectures of 1811–​12, citing it as an example of ‘all that could be expected from the imagination’.20 Coleridge returned repeatedly to the fancy-​imagination distinction during this period, so much so that after hearing him deliver the lines cited above, Crabb Robinson began to fear that ‘Coleridge’s laziness [would] lead him to be content with dreaming on and playing over certain favourite ideas which he delights in, but which some of his hearers will be tired of ’.21 But what Robinson, as a convinced Kantian, should have known was that this distinction was no mere intellectual toy for Coleridge, but the keystone of the philosophical bridge he was trying to build between Religion and Science. For Coleridge, the Fancy/​Imagination opposition not only described two different kinds of poetic effect, but also two different modes of poetic thought. It was a distinction at once theoretical and practical, and represented a kind of acting out, at the level of poetic particulars, of the Kantian distinction between Reason and the Understanding. The fancy—​a necessary element in all poetry, albeit a subordinate one—​was that capacity to borrow from past literature or the world of nature. It was a common trade in particulars, in associated or causally linked ideas. It corresponded to the faculty which Kant had called the understanding, the fact-​gathering, cause-​hunting faculty that collected concrete knowledge. Some poets were mere poets of the fancy: Coleridge evidently considered his friend Southey as such when he referred to him, in Robinson’s hearing, as ‘a jewel setter’ who ‘wanted modifying power’.22 The poet of the Imagination occupied a higher level than this; in him there was a more synthetic and symphonic principle at work, in which disparate materials were combined to form ‘the Beautiful . . . that in which the many, still seen as many, becomes one’.23 Shakespeare was the pre-​eminent example of this. Never allowing himself to be trammelled by the old classical unities, he had made Imagination the structuring principle of his works. ‘The rules of the

19 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819, i. 81

20 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819, i. 252.

21 Robinson, Books and their Writers, i. 53.

22 Robinson, Books and their Writers, i. 26.

23  ‘Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism, Concerning the Fine Arts, especially those of Statuary and Painting—​–​Essay III’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de Jackson, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), i. 371.

Practical Criticism   615 Imagination’, as Coleridge said later in ­chapter 18 of the Biographia Literaria, ‘are themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only the external appearance and the fruit.’24 Three-​quarters of the way through his Lectures of 1811–​12 Coleridge had started reading A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, and was gratified to find many of his own exploratory ruminations on organic form echoed in the German’s work.25 This confirmed in him the conviction that the proper way to read Shakespeare’s plays was as a series of dramatic poems, each one representing the intricate working out, through many scenes and characters, of an overarching creative idea. There was a moral, and even a religious significance in this, for what poetic imagination and artistic unity demonstrated above all, for Coleridge, was the free exercise of the will—​the fact that art works were not accidental or circumstantial aggregations of material, but organized by a powerful, if also somewhat mysterious act of the creative intelligence. Philosophically, the free will was a key ally of idealists such as Coleridge in their long-​running campaign against necessitarian materialism. But it also had a religious aspect, for in standing up for human agency, it also held out the possibility of a connection between the human voluntary impulse—​which had been linked to an a priori striving towards moral unity by Kant—​and the divine will, of which it might be deemed to be a finite portion. Hence, for Coleridge critical evidence of truly imaginative activity in particular lines of poetry led naturally not only to a consideration of broader compositional unities in art, but also towards an appreciation of  art itself as a self-​ authenticating moral activity, a simulacrum of religious faith. As he wrote in some lecture notes for the eighth of his Bristol series of 1812–​13, ‘Such is the Life, such the form—​ Nature, the prime Genial Artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers is equally inexhaustible in forms . . . Shakespeare himself a Nature humanized, a genial Understanding directing self-​consciously a power & a[n]‌implicit wisdom deeper than Consciousness.’26 This new focus on the Imagination required a new kind of criticism. In 1814, Coleridge gave it a name. In his ‘Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism’, which were unobtrusively inserted into Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, the critic laid down what he considered to be the fundamentals of literary taste, ‘the specific object of the present attempt’ being, as he said, ‘to enable the spectator to judge in the same spirit in which the Artist produced, or ought to have produced’.27 The proper role of genial criticism was to sympathize with genius, with the secret, shaping spirit behind a particular poem or artefact, and not necessarily with the individual who produced it, or indeed the final work itself. Its interventions would not be judgemental, but redemptive, interested in bringing out a work’s ideal essence even if that had not been achieved.

24 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), ii. 84. 25 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819, i. 345–​69. 26 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819, i. 495. 27 Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, i. 360.

616   Gregory Dart There was no strict opposition between genial criticism and eighteenth-​century editorial practice, as Coleridge’s splendid marginalia from this period make clear; the one was a kind of brother or counterpart to the other. But there was one mode of reading to which Coleridge’s ‘genial’ model was genuinely antagonistic, and that was literary reviewing, especially the adversarial, judgemental kind popularized by reviews such as the Edinburgh and the Quarterly (see William Christie, Chapter 18 in this volume). Coleridge’s opposition to the burgeoning periodical culture of the day was made evident in the first of his London Shakespeare lectures of 1811. ‘Reviews were pernicious’, J. P. Collier recorded him as saying, ‘because the writers decided without any reference to fixed principles, because they were filled with personalities, and above all because they taught people rather to judge than to read’.28 By ‘personalities’ Coleridge meant personal attacks motivated by professional or political animus—the frequency and vehemence of which gave such a distinctive character to the reviews. In private he opined to Godwin in March 1811 that Southey’s harshness as a critic ‘originated wholly and solely in the effects, which the Trade of Reviewing never fails to produce at certain times on the best minds—​presumption, petulance, and callousness to personal feelings, and a disposition to treat the reputations of their Contemporaries as play-​things placed at their own disposal’.29 Setting himself in opposition to this, Coleridge presented himself in his lectures as one whose own life had been spent mostly in ‘reading & conversation’, and who had ‘never felt the desire to become an author’.30 Defending Shakespeare’s conceits and puns in the sixth lecture in the series, we find him offering something like a genial model to his audience: ‘To the young he would say, that it was always wrong to judge of anything by its defects: the first attempt should be to discover its excellencies . . . Always begin with the good’.31 Crabb Robinson, like others in the coterie, found Coleridge’s lectures intermittently dazzling, but not, on the whole, as good as his private conversation. The suspicion was that others, less brilliant and wide-​ranging in their interests, but more disciplined in their critical arguments, might have succeeded in furthering some of his key positions better. In April 1811 Robinson had read Wordsworth’s ‘exquisite dissertation’ on Epitaphs to the circle of John Flaxman the sculptor. Six months later he read Lamb’s ‘very fine’ Reflector essay on the genius of Hogarth to the same group. These, in company with Lamb’s essay on Shakespeare’s tragedies, were the coterie’s real calling-​cards in this period, a fact that Coleridge himself seems to have recognized when he praised Lamb’s Hogarth to Robinson in July, ‘and spoke of the wrongers of subjects as well as writers on them’.32 Lamb had also kept his distance from literary reviewing, but when Leigh Hunt had invited him to contribute to his new contemplative quarterly The Reflector, he seems 28 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​19, i. 189. 29 

To William Godwin, 29 Mar. 1811, Collected Letters of Coleridge, iii. 315.

30 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819, i. 188. 31 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819, i. 293. 32 

Quoted in Robinson, Books and their Writers, i. 42.

Practical Criticism   617 to have had little difficulty translating the stuff of innumerable midnight conversations into public form. Lamb only produced two critical essays during The Reflector’s short run, the one on Hogarth and the one on Shakespeare, but they are both seminal works—​ seminal not only because of the way in which they herald Lamb’s emergence as a prose writer, the future star of the London Magazine, but also because they are arguably the two most fully achieved examples of genial criticism in the Romantic canon. In socio-​cultural terms, Lamb’s Hogarth essay has clear affinities with the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, making a case for this most popular of painters as no vulgar humourist, but a serious moral artist, a real ‘man speaking to men’. But the essay also has broader ambitions, being explicitly and consistently concerned with Hogarth’s organic imagination—​that is, his ability to blend the most apparently unpromising and disparate of materials into a rich, satisfying whole. Comparing Hogarth’s Gin Lane with a picture by Poussin, he insists ‘There is more of imagination in it—​that power which draws all things to one,—​which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their accessaries, take one colour, and serve to one effect.’33 The example that Lamb gives, his clinching piece of close reading, is the three mourners that one can see through the gap in the wall of Hogarth’s engraving, almost out of the sphere of the composition (Fig. 39.1). ‘This extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject’, Lamb writes, ‘could only have been conceived by a great genius.’34 It is only too easy to see the roots of Lamb’s Hogarth essay in dialogues with Hazlitt and Coleridge in his diminutive print-​room in the Temple. But the essay he wrote on Shakespeare, is, if anything, even more resonant with coterie concerns. It chimes strongly with Coleridge’s Shakespeare lectures of 1811 in particular, and not just on the most obvious point, the leading idea of Lamb’s essay, which questions whether the plays were fit for dramatic representation. To both Coleridge and Lamb, the modern stage, with its constant appeal to broad, palpable visual effects, did not suit Shakespeare’s complex, inward genius. What was best in him, and what distinguished him from other, lesser dramatists, was only to be imbibed through private acts of reading, where his ideas could be communicated to the mind through the imagination, not the senses. Once again, Hamlet was a useful touchstone. On stage, John Philip Kemble would habitually exaggerate and strain the ambiguous features and temporary deformities of Hamlet’s character in his great tête-​à-​tête with Ophelia, ‘such is the actor’s necessity of giving strong blows to his audience’.35 On the page, however, it was far easier to see the complex relation between the ruling spirit of a character such as Hamlet and its temporary excrescences. On a different tack, Lamb considered that the ghosts in Hamlet and Macbeth were never believable when given objective representation on stage, for ‘it is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these terrors’.36 The essayist 33 

Charles Lamb, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’, The Reflector, 2 vols (London, 1811), ii. 64. Lamb, ‘Hogarth’, Reflector, ii. 65. 35  Charles Lamb, ‘Theatralia No. 1.—​–​On Garrick and Acting; and the Plays of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’, Reflector, ii. 304–​5. 36  Lamb, ‘Garrick and Acting’, Reflector, ii. 311. 34 

618   Gregory Dart

Fig. 39.1  William Hogarth, Gin Lane. 1 Feb. 1751. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

closed his discussion with a neat, but by no means obvious comparison, which showed the strong links between his and Coleridge’s thinking at this time. ‘Perhaps it would be no bad similitude’, he writes, to liken the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with the quiet delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine poem. The accursed

Practical Criticism   619 critical habit,—​the being called upon to judge and pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the former.37

On the one side, then, ‘reviewing’, which is here linked with the kind of palpable, social judgement that we indulge in at the theatre; on the other, the ‘fine abstraction’ of private reading. In his Hogarth essay, while meditating further on the ‘extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject’ in Gin Lane, Lamb had quoted Shakespeare’s description of a painting of Troy in The Rape of Lucrece: For much imaginary work was there, Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles’ image stood his spear, Grip’d in an armed hand; himself behind Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, Stood for the whole to be imagined.

‘This’, Lamb wrote, ‘he [Shakespeare] calls imaginary work, where the spectator must meet the artist in his conceptions half way; and it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists show everything distinct and full, as they require an object to be made out to themselves before they can comprehend it.’38 This is a brilliant insight. The suggestion is that in a work of true genius the overall unity must be (to some degree, at least) hidden. Such was the case, Lamb argues, in the complex interplay of tragic and comic in Shakespeare, where the Grave-​ digger in Hamlet and the Fool in Lear ‘have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt’.39 But it has a further implication too, which is that the quality that gives superior life to a work of true genius is the imaginative investment that it demands of its readers—​indeed, that genius itself might be best thought of not as an attribute of individuals or indeed individual artistic works, but as the result of a kind of spiritual communication or collaboration, a creative meeting of minds. In ‘On Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen’, Hazlitt declared that it was Waterloo that had broken up the ‘little congress’ at the Lambs. But in fact tensions had been evident earlier. Wordsworth and Coleridge were not on speaking terms for most of 1811, and although the breach was patched up the following year, a fundamental bond had been shattered. Political animosities between Hazlitt and the Lakers had been present for some time, but it was not until the post-​Waterloo moment that they exploded into outright public hostility. The period 1815 to 1819 presents a paradoxical spectacle in this respect. On one level it shows Romantic literary criticism emerging definitively into print, with Wordsworth’s Excursion notes and the Preface and Supplementary Essay to

37 

Lamb, ‘Garrick and Acting’, Reflector, ii. 312. Lamb, ‘Hogarth’, Reflector, ii. 65. 39  Lamb, ‘Hogarth’, Reflector, ii. 68. 38 

620   Gregory Dart the Poems of 1815, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), which consolidated and expanded the material from ten years’ worth of lectures, and Lamb’s two-​volume Works of 1818, which reprinted the essays on Shakespeare and Hogarth. It also sees the rise of Hazlitt, as a lecturer on literature, and as a leading essayist and political journalist. But there is an irony in the fact that, as the political situation in England worsened, and ‘personalities’ (to use Coleridge’s resonant term) became even more prevalent the moment at which the genial model first gained wide circulation in print was also the moment at which the possibility of it having any significant influence upon the reviewing culture of the day dwindled almost to nothing. One way of construing Hazlitt’s literary activity in this period is in terms of an ongoing tension between the spirit of reviewing and the more genial practice he had once cultivated with Lamb and Coleridge. On Shakespeare, and on the literature and painting of the past, the former artist could be thrillingly sympathetic. If never quite a subscriber to the notion of organic form, he nevertheless had his own ideas of ‘gusto’, ‘keeping’, and what he called ‘the logic of passion’, which were all different ways of registering the principles of growth, and pressure, and unifying power that were present in works of genius.40 He was also very good at investing himself in the minds of authors and their characters, saying famously of Hamlet’s speeches they were ‘as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader’s mind.’41 Elsewhere, however, and especially in relation to contemporary figures, whether writers or politicians, his imaginative forays were invariably controlled by the reviewing spirit. Whatever fine taste he might have shown in selecting his exemplary quotations, he almost always chose to read them politically. Writing on Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Southey, he never considered it as his duty to try to relate the literary detail to the artistic whole, but to read individual lines of poetry as public promises kept or broken by the apostate poets who had made them. The national stakes were too high, he felt, to view them in any other light. Even recently established classics could become sites of contention. At the end of his fourth lecture of 1811–​12 Coleridge had cited approvingly a couplet on the transitoriness of pleasure from Burns’s ‘Tam O’Shanter’: ‘Like snow that falls upon a river | A moment white then gone for ever.’42 Clearly it was something of a favourite with Coleridge because J. P. Collier remembered it cropping up twice in his hearing in the weeks leading up to this lecture, the second time as an instance of an image that ‘must have been seen daily, but never used or applied so happily’.43 Like the lines from Venus and Adonis, or Wordsworth’s censure of Johnson’s ‘Let observation with extensive view’, this Burns reference was part of the common currency of the coterie. It was a touchstone fit to be aired 40 

For Hazlitt on ‘gusto in art as the power or passion defining any object’, see his Round Table essay ‘On Gusto’ (Complete Works of Hazlitt, iv. 77–​80); for ‘keeping’ as a notion of unity in multeity, see his discussion of Falstaff in Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (iv. 277–​9); for ‘the logic of passion’ in Lear and Othello, see the essay on Lear from the same collection (iv. 259). 41  Complete Works of Hazlitt, iv. 232. 42 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819, i. 255. 43  Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures of 1811–​12, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 41.

Practical Criticism   621 in public, but also rich in private connotations, surreptitiously referring back to a time when the Lamb circle had still made common cause together, and when quotations such these as would have been regarded as key articles of a shared faith. In his 1816 review of Coleridge’s Lay Sermon, Hazlitt was to bewail the latter’s inability to collect himself together as a writer. Parodying all those formulations in Coleridge’s lectures in which he had outlined all that might be demanded of a true poet, Hazlitt depicted him as a man blessed with all the intellectual qualities except will. ‘Everlasting inconsequentiality marks all that he attempts’, the critic wrote; ‘All his impulses are loose, airy, devious, casual.’44 This made a good general point about Coleridge’s public record as an author; but it was also an inside joke, since Hazlitt knew only too well the importance that had been placed upon the will in the latter’s transcendental philosophy. However, the unkindest cut of all was to quote from Coleridge’s favourite Burns passage in illustration of his flawed character: The strongest of his purposes is lighter than the gossamer, ‘that wantons in the idle summer air’: the brightest of his schemes a bubble blown by an infant’s breath, that rises, glitters, bursts in the same instant:—​ Or like the Borealis race, That flit ere you can mark their place: Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white, then gone for ever.

Where in lectures and in conversation Coleridge seems mostly to have concentrated on the snow couplet, Hazlitt also gives the couplet alongside it, showing its family relation to the shooting star image from Venus and Adonis. Hazlitt is quoting from memory, clearly, and has reversed the order of these two couplets for greater impact. Moreover, it is evident that in a certain sense it is Coleridge he is quoting, not Burns. The poet himself had actually written ‘a moment white—​then melts for ever’, but ‘gone for ever’ was what Coleridge had said in conversation and in his 1811 lecture, and it was also what was reported in the following day’s Morning Chronicle.45 At other times, as in his seminal essay ‘What is the People?’, Hazlitt was perfectly capable of quoting Burns’s lines accurately, hence it is above all things Coleridge’s own investment in this passage that he is remembering here—​and turning against him. What was once one of the Sage of Highgate’s favourite examples of geniality—​the beautiful image of snow melting on a river—​is transformed in the hands of the periodical reviewer into a critical verdict on the Sage himself, and his evanescent achievement. This was written in 1816, when the likelihood still seemed firmly against Coleridge consolidating his theory of literary criticism in print. So it was against all odds, and in direct contravention of the gloomy expectations of his friends, that he finally published 44  45 

Complete Works of Hazlitt, vii. 117. The passage is misquoted again in c­ h. 4 of Biographia Literaria, i. 81.

622   Gregory Dart his Biographia Literaria in 1817. Arguments about the disorderly structure of the Biographia and its own highly strained relation to organic form will surely continue, as will the debate about the ultimate viability of Coleridge’s particular model of poetic criticism. But his fundamental vision is expressed clearly enough, not least as a kind of Platonic Ideal against which to assess all existing examples of critical or poetical practice. More than this, the Biographia can also be seen to commemorate and preserve, and in a manner superior to that of any other publication of the period, the secret spirit of the literary coterie that had helped bring it into being. The first part of the Biographia is mainly concerned with philosophical matters, culminating in the famous truncated theory of the Imagination at the end of the first volume. Part Two tackles poetry, beginning with the theory of poetry that had already been aired in the 1811–​12 lectures. So when Coleridge first coins the term ‘practical criticism’ at the beginning of the following section, it is made abundantly clear that he sees this activity in terms of the practical application of a pre-​existing theory—​what we might call ‘genial criticism’ (even though he, at this particular moment, chooses not to). Coleridge evidently liked the term ‘genial’, playing many variations on it throughout this decide; to him it implied ‘genius’ and ‘generativeness’, and even the formative spirit behind ‘genre’ (a word that had recently entered English). But it is probable that some of its blander connotations of sympathy and amiability effectively dissuaded him from coining it further, and this in spite of the fact that, as we have already seen, such popular associations could not have been more germane to his overall conception. It is telling, given the enormous importance which was given to the notion of ‘practical criticism’ in the twentieth century, that when Coleridge does happen upon the term, almost in passing, at the beginning of ­chapter 15, it carries little of the self-​ conscious analytical rigour that was later accorded to it by I. A. Richards and others.46 Also banished, for the moment at least, are the claims of textual scholarship, whether elucidatory or judgemental. The primary emphasis, as Coleridge makes clear, is on the search for ‘promises and symptoms of poetic power’.47 Once again, as so often in his lectures, Coleridge chose Venus and Adonis as his test case, and if there was a certain laziness in this (as Crabb Robinson would no doubt have thought), yet there was method in it. For by fixing upon this early work of Shakespeare’s, Coleridge was able to demonstrate that the task of the truly genial critic was to sympathize with budding genius, not to pass judgement on its errors. It may have been for this reason that he chose to place this study at the beginning of Part Two—​as a kind of preface to the extended treatment of Wordsworth. Some critics have argued that the point of this juxtaposition was to demonstrate the manifest superiority of Shakespeare to Wordsworth, as poets of the Imagination. My own view is that its real aim was to try and establish, from the outset, a model of reading that was at once sympathetic and redemptive, percipient but prospective—​so that his later highlighting of Wordsworth’s defects might 46  I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929). 47 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 19.

Practical Criticism   623 be better understood in that context. Returning once more to those lines on Adonis leaving Venus, Coleridge noted how ‘the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness’, preparing the ground for his later showdown with Wordsworth on the importance of metre and poetic form by placing a distinctively new emphasis upon that capacity of poetry to transmute eternal fleetingness—​the causal, consecutive world that prose was condemned to inhabit—​into fleeting eternity. Even in the midst of his sustained critique of Wordsworth’s ‘prosaic’ bias, Coleridge strove hard to distinguish between his own genial manner and that of periodical critics such as Hazlitt and Jeffrey. These men had behaved like rogues and hypocrites, he suggested, damning Wordsworth repeatedly in public, while repeatedly professing their continued admiration for him in private. They had not begun life as such, but had become so in response to the pressures of the reviewing ‘vocation’; indeed, ‘with the pen out of their hand’, as Coleridge made a point of concluding, ‘they are honourable men’.48 ‘Genial criticism’ was an ideal that Coleridge himself could not live up to, his critique of Maturin’s Bertram, appended as an afterthought to the Biographia, being as typical an example as one could wish of the sarcastic reviewing style of the period. Still, there are examples of Romantic genial practice that managed to make the transition from private to public without being thoroughly disnatured in the process. Keats, in spite or perhaps even because of the fact that he had attracted some of the most notorious slashing reviews of the time, was also the subject of some of its most sympathetic close readings. Lamb, whose aversion to reviewing had been compounded by the Quarterly’s butchering of his essay on Wordsworth’s Excursion in 1814, still managed a brief, sensitive notice of Keats’s Lamia volume for the New Times in 1820, and in January 1835 Hunt was to insert a finely spun, stanza-​by-​stanza account of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ in his London Journal.49 The most dazzling example of close reading in the period, however, remains the lecture notes that Coleridge made on Hamlet in the interspersed leaves of a two-​ volume Ayscough Shakespeare, in preparation for his lecture series of 1818–​19.50 Here Coleridge’s attention, like that of the affrighted watchmen who open the play, is at its keenest, as he notices how the armour, the dead silence, the watchfulness that first interrupts it, the welcome relief of guard, the cold, the broken expressions . . . all excellently accord with and prepare for the after gradual rise into tragedy, but above all into a tragedy the interest of which is eminently ad et apud intra, as Macbeth e contra is ad extra. 51

Fascinated by the way in which key pieces of information are delivered in such a fashion as to cultivate imaginative belief in the audience, Coleridge finds something magical in

48 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 157. 49 

‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal 43 (Wed. 21 Jan. 1835).

50 Coleridge, Marginalia, iv. 836–​59. The original is in the British Library (BL C.16.h.7). 51 

I.e. ‘towards and in the inward as Macbeth on the other hand is [directed] towards the outward’: Coleridge, Marginalia, iv. 838n.

624   Gregory Dart the most inconspicuous of details, noting that in the line ‘What, has this thing appeared again to-​night’, ‘even the word “again” has its credibilizing effect’.52 His tracing of the main idea of the play through the details of its opening scenes is genuinely exhilarating, and builds towards that climactic moment in Act III when Hamlet flinches from killing the king at prayer because he does not want to send him to heaven. Dr Johnson had seen ‘impetuous horror-​striking fiendishness’ in this speech, Coleridge remembered, where he himself found only ‘the marks of reluctance and procrastination’. ‘Of such importance is it’, he concluded, ‘to understand the Germ of a character.’53 The Ayscough manuscript is full of insights such as this, but what is equally telling is the nagging scepticism that the critic continues to feel, even in the midst of his rapture, about the ultimate efficacy of this kind of writing. ‘O heaven!’ he writes, alongside the first exchanges of the watchmen, ‘words are wasted to those that feel and to those who do not feel the exquisite judgement of Shakespeare.’54 So deep, it seems, was the identification of genial criticism with private thoughts and spiritual communications that, like Hamlet, it was always thinking of reasons for doing away with itself.

Further Reading Bromwich, David, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Duff, David, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Hamilton, Paul, Coleridge’s Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). James, Felicity, ‘Lamb’s Essays in The Reflector:  A Bicentenary Celebration’, Charles Lamb Bulletin new series 156 (Aug. 2012), 117–​25. Leinwand, Theodore, ‘Shakespeare, Coleridge, Intellecturition’, Studies in Romanticism 46.1 (2007), 77–​104. Modiano, Raimonda, ‘Coleridge as Literary Critic’, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Natarajan, Uttara, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Parker, G. F., Johnson’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Richards, I. A., Coleridge on Imagination (London: Kegan Paul, 1934). Stempel, Daniel, ‘Coleridge and Organic Form: The English Tradition’, Studies in Romanticism 6.2 (1967), 89–​97. Wellek, René, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–​1950, vol. 2: The Romantic Age (London: Cape, 1955).

52 Coleridge, Marginalia, iv. 839. 53 Coleridge, Marginalia, iv. 855.

54 Coleridge, Marginalia, iv. 838.

Chapter 40

Word and I mag e Sophie Thomas

The Romantic period witnessed extensive experimentation with the way words and images can inter-​relate. Across visual and print culture there are a variety of sites where the possibilities are explored, reconfigured, and displayed—​such as book illustration, ekphrastic poems, satiric prints, exhibitions, literary galleries, and certain popular visual spectacles. In these encounters between words and images, which often take the form of dialogues and collaborations between writers and artists, a number of possible relationships are in play. While in some cases words and images enhance or complement one another, in others they may also compete with, supplement, or displace each other. Strategies and insights from one medium can be productive in another, such that mutually informative processes of borrowing and redeploying—​acts of ‘remediation’—​occur across and between them.1 Finally, just as there is no singular model for rethinking the relationship between text and image, that very relationship is frequently triangulated in some way: by another medium, by the conditions of production and reception, by aspects of location. This investment in the dynamic possibilities of word–​image relations occurs in an historical context in which there is access to increasing quantities of visual material, and in which visual objects and their associated cultures of display occupy a more prominent place in public discourse. There is, for example, the booming market for prints and illustrated publications beginning in the final decades of the eighteenth century, facilitated by improved technologies of print and image production. At the same time, a culture of visual spectacles and entertainments engaged a public seeking both information and diversion. Painted panoramas, for example, first developed by Robert Barker in 1787 and popular throughout the nineteenth century, were supported by explanatory and descriptive pamphlets, and engaged visitors in simultaneous acts of looking and reading.2 Museums, art exhibitions, and commercial galleries 1  Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 5. 2  For a comprehensive collection of existing source material, see Laurie Garrison, et al. (eds), Panoramas, 1787–​1900, 5 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013).

626   Sophie Thomas emerged as public institutions where an increasingly broad audience could encounter an array of artworks and antiquities, yet in a manner never entirely divorced from the medium of the text.3 A whole culture of looking thus takes new forms of expression that are reflected (and reflected upon) in literary, print, and visual culture. This is evident in satirical prints on antiquarians, collectors, and overcrowded exhibitions, and in the periodical articles and essays addressing the visual arts (often in new publications such as the Annals of the Fine Arts, established in 1817, which also published poems by Keats and Wordsworth). Since engagements between words and images run the gamut from popular to high culture, my approach here will be necessarily selective, pinpointing a variety of locations where the most indicative conceptual questions are raised. The close relation of the so-​ called ‘sister arts’ of painting and poetry was scrutinized and rethought in the Romantic period.4 The Horatian dictum ‘Ut pictura poesis’—​as a picture, so a poem—​had offered a powerful model for the relationship of literature to painting in preceding centuries: by this logic, poets create speaking pictures; painters, mute poems. This notion, however, was challenged by Lessing’s assertion in Laocoön (1766) that they belong to inherently incommensurate and separate spheres—​temporal for poetry, and spatial for painting. By the turn of the nineteenth century, a keener sense of their differences was prompted by the proliferation of visual media noted above, and (perhaps paradoxically) by new ways of bringing words and images into proximity. Many poets were eloquent on the inherent superiority of poetry over painting and other modes of visual representation. Coleridge, for example, argued in an 1808 lecture that great poets have the ‘power of so carrying on the Eye of the Reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words—​to make him see everything—​& this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without any anatomy of description’.5 Moreover, in contrast to the ‘boundless power of poetry’, painting is subject to certain limits: ‘painting cannot go beyond a certain point; poetry rejects all control, all confinement’.6 Words are, in short, better suited to chart and represent strong movements of the mind; and ekphrastic poems in particular argue for the superior power of poetry to delineate truth, to produce more nuanced representations, while outliving the material images or objects that inspired them.

3  Key institutions founded in this period include the Royal Academy (1768) and its summer exhibitions; the British Museum (founded in 1753, but later much expanded by acquisitions from collectors such as Sir William Hamilton, Charles Townley, Lord Elgin, and Joseph Banks); John Boydell’s ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ (operative 1789–​1805); the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts (1805); the Dulwich Picture Gallery (1811); commercial museums such as William Bullock’s ‘London Museum’ (1812); and the National Gallery of England (1824). 4  See Roy Park, ‘ “Ut Pictura Poesis”: The Nineteenth-​Century Aftermath,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28.2 (1969), 155–​64. 5  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–​1819 On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), i. 82. 6 Coleridge, Lectures, i. 496.

Word and Image   627 Ekphrasis has been broadly defined as a literary representation of a visual artefact, the ‘verbal representation of graphic representation’,7 and there are many well-​known examples of it in the Romantic canon, such as Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ on Beaumont’s painting of Peele Castle, Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and his lines ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’, and Byron’s passages on sculpture in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. These are texts explicitly about aesthetic objects; ekphrasis also has a number of generic cousins, such as inscriptions and epitaphs, and as a term could be extended to include writing about art (Diderot’s Salons, for example), where the text ‘creates’ a work that its readers will never actually see. While ekphrastic poems can be straightforward acts of description, or of largely reverential re-​representation, often there is a more competitive dynamic in play, involving a pitting of ‘self ’ against ‘other,’ in which elements of desire, counter-​desire, and resistance enter the contest between word and image.8 Inter-​artistic competition that thus challenges the tradition of the ‘sister-​arts’ frequently plays out along gendered lines, in which the (active) male poet dramatizes his struggle to overpower a (passive) feminized object.9 Poetic experiments with ekphrasis reveal a deep fascination with the grounds, limits, and value of visual representation. They also explore ideas about permanence (and its potentially deadening effects) in a way that is closely connected to the growth of museums and art galleries. Like Keats’s Grecian urn or Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, ekphrastic poems in the early nineteenth century were often inspired by museum objects (in Shelley’s case, the poem was written in response to articles appearing in the periodical press in 1817 anticipating the arrival in London of the colossal head of ‘Memnon’ or Rameses II, excavated in Egypt by Giovanni Belzoni), and stage a dialogue across time and place as well as across media. In such poems ‘image’ and ‘text’ are triangulated by the implied presence of a material thing, as well as the presence of a viewer and/​or speaker, whose own relationship to the image, object, or text-​in-​production is very much on display. Poems more explicitly about paintings are equally likely to engage questions of time and memory. For Wordsworth, the capacity of the image to capture only one moment in time is one of its serious limitations. In the sonnet ‘To a Painter’ (1840) he claims that while the painter may produce skilled ‘likenesses,’ the poet possesses a greater power by working in a world in which the power of time to change things, and thereby to root ‘likenesses’ in the moment of their own creating, is countermanded by memory: for

7 

James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis and Representation’, New Literary History 22.2 (1991), 297–​316 (p. 299). 8  See W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 152–​60. 9  Meanwhile for female poets of the period, such as Hemans, this relationship is rather one of mutual support: see Grant F. Scott, ‘The Fragile Image: Felicia Hemans and Romantic Ekphrasis’, in Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk (eds), Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

628   Sophie Thomas by its ‘habitual light’ the poet sees, with eyes ‘unbedimmed,’ blooms ‘that cannot fade’ or die (lines 1–​7).10 Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont’ (1806), which sets in motion a dialogue between poet, painter, and painting, makes a similar point. The poem curates at least two alternative versions of the painting, each belonging to different ‘times’: the picture of the castle that resides in memory (a revived and reviving ‘picture of the mind’), and a ‘virtual’ picture, the one the poet would himself have painted. Placed alongside the ‘actual’ Beaumont picture, which unusually for an ekphrastic poem is not described, the effect is to show the extent to which the textual mediation of images can develop more nuanced and temporally complex responses, specifically involving profound emotions (Wordsworth associated the picture with the death of his brother John at sea in 1805). Beaumont, out of sensitivity to Wordsworth’s feelings, did not lead him directly to the painting when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1806. Wordsworth saw it there nevertheless, and later thanked Beaumont—​to whom, meanwhile, he had sent a copy of the poem—​for his ‘delicacy,’ reflecting that ‘the Picture was to me a very moving one; it exists in my mind at this moment as if it were before my eyes’.11 The power of this encounter underscores how works of art, increasingly mediated and accessible, remain captivating sites for thinking about the nature of imagining—​sites to be drawn in by as well as to resist. William Blake, who devised, as he claimed in one of his prospectuses, ‘a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet’, had rather different views about the relationship of words to images.12 What he referred to as his ‘illuminated books’, composed primarily in the early and mid-​1790s, represent a significant technological innovation, since the production of text (through letterpress) and of images (via engraving) still involved, in the late eighteenth century, separate processes. Blake developed a method of relief etching on copper plates that integrated text and image, and concentrated every element of design and production, from idea to execution, in his own hands. And in those hands, text became pictorial, and pictures textual—​replete with what W. J. T. Mitchell suggestively referred to as ‘visible language’. 13 The frontispiece for Songs of Innocence (Fig. 40.1), one of Blake’s earliest experiments in this form, is a good example. In this design (dating from 1789), words become indistinguishable from the branches sprouting from the vine-​clad tree trunk, and burst into flames along the top of the plate, while letters provide frames or stages for tiny figures (human and

10  Composed in response to a portrait of Mary Wordsworth painted by Margaret Gillies in 1839: William Wordsworth, Last Poems, 1821–​1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 333–​4. 11  The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 2nd edn, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–​70), i. 63. 12  David V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 692. 13  W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 4: ‘Visible Language: Blake’s Art of Writing’.

Word and Image   629

Fig.  40.1  William Blake, title page, ‘Songs of Innocence’, Songs of Innocence and Experience (copy Y, 1825). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Rogers Fund, 1917).

angel) variously playing, piping, and reading—​the latter an echo of the children poring over a book in the bottom left. Although texts from Songs of Innocence and Experience are frequently printed and studied on their own, without reference to the colour plates, Blake’s most discerning critics have emphasized that his poems are a ‘radical form of mixed art’, best understood as unified, ‘composite,’ works.14 Joseph Viscomi’s detailed reconstruction of Blake’s methods of production has underlined the extent to which the texts and illustrations

14 

W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 3.

630   Sophie Thomas of Blake’s illuminated designs formed ‘integral wholes’.15 Similarly, James Heffernan’s analysis of Blake’s Songs shows how contrasts and juxtapositions engage the audience on multiple levels, and these nuances can only be grasped by reading text and design ‘continuously in light of each other’.16 Yet it would be a mistake to see this configuration of the relationship between word and image as based on a belief in their inherent complementarity, unproblematically affirming eighteenth-​century claims about the sister arts of poetry and painting, or as positing a stable and closed object. Mitchell notes that Blake’s strategies in combining word and image introduced a more dialectical relationship between them, frequently predicated on contrariety and resistance.17 Blake’s practice as poet and artist everywhere confirms that text and image are ‘vigorously independent modes of expression’.18 Sometimes, thus, he works through creating ironic contrasts and transformations; in other instances, images either do not illustrate the relevant text, or relate to a portion of text situated at some remove—​creating what Northrop Frye referred to as effects of ‘syncopation’.19 Blake’s illuminated and prophetic books have also been characterized as radically ‘unbound’, since there are instances of plates combined differently in different versions of the same texts; materially as well as conceptually, images can be as readily detached as attached, as Blake’s extra-​illustrations (additional illustrations inserted into the books of others) also show us.20 Indeed, the very idea of the book—​which can function suggestively like a gallery—​is rendered provisional, becoming what Saree Makdisi calls ‘a convenient rubric or packaging . . . to try and contain what turn out to be uncontainable images’.21 Key figures and images appear variously across Blake’s own corpus, rendering it suggestively dynamic, and requiring non-​linear processes of reading and viewing. In some instances, for example in the case of The Ancient of Days, first published as the frontispiece to Europe: A Prophecy (1794), designs that feature as part of an illuminated book also circulated as separate plates. Blake’s capacities as draughtsman and engraver, as well as poet and painter, meant that in addition to creating his own ‘composite’ works, much of his artistic output was in the service of illustrating the texts of others. Blake created illustrations for editions of the poems of Young, Gray, and Blair, and for Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and The Book of Job. His designs for many of these works involve his characteristic mode of energetic interrogation; they represent acts of reading and are expressions 15 

Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 16. See also Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Creation of the Songs: From Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (London: British Library, 2000). 16  James A. W. Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 96. 17 Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, 33. 18 Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, 3. 19  Northrop Frye, ‘Poetry and Design in William Blake’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 10.1 (1951), 35–​42 (p. 41). 20  Luisa Calè, ‘Blake and the Literary Galleries’, in Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee (eds), Blake and Conflict (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 194. 21  Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 191–​2.

Word and Image   631 of a process of active rewriting. Blake’s illustrations for Thomas Gray’s poems, undertaken c.1797–​8, followed the same format that he developed in his watercolour designs for Young’s Night Thoughts, for which he cut a window out of a large format page where the letterpress text would be inserted, around which he arranged the elements of his own illustration. Visually, the clever deployment of figures framing (or at times emerging self-​consciously from behind) the text box speaks for the creative possibilities of sheer juxtaposition. Blake’s drawings, however, are closely engaged with the content of the poems, and a series such as the illustrations for Gray’s The Bard (a poem Gray based on the tradition that Edward I massacred the Welsh bards at the time of his conquest in the thirteenth century) draws also on elements of Blake’s own mythology to offer a reading of the poem that is emphatically political in its denunciation of the exercise of tyrannical power (Fig. 40.2).22 Blake’s investment in this theme undoubtedly led him to include The Bard, from Gray as the fourth picture in the (only) public exhibition of his work mounted during his lifetime, in 1809–​10, for which he composed A Descriptive Catalogue. In the Catalogue, Blake explicitly defended his approach against the critical orthodoxy that pictures should mimic the real: ‘shall painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile 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?’23 In his designs to accompany the work of others, Blake’s imaginative approach overturns any expectation that illustration should re-​represent the text along obvious thematic and complementary lines. Moreover, we see in his illustrations what was fully embodied in his prophetic books, namely that objects depicted are less important for their material than for their conceptual nature: they are ideas, emanations from Blake’s complex visionary universe, where acts of representation and perception are never reducible to what meets the eye. Another site of contest and collaboration between word and image, and another instance of that relationship being shaped by the pressure of historical events, is the graphic satires of artists such as Thomas Rowlandson, George Cruikshank, Richard Newton, and James Gillray, which were also a powerful influence on Blake. While the popularity of caricature predates the Romantic period, the confluence of rapid growth in the print market in the 1790s, and the polarization of British politics during and after the French Revolution, gave rise to a rich body of work that was deeply embedded in the propaganda battles of the time.24 These caricatures, which also made use of copperplate 22  See Irene Tayler, Blake’s Illustrations to the Poems of Gray (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). The full sequence of plates can be consulted on The William Blake Archive website, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, at: www.blakearchive.org. 23  Complete Poetry and Prose of Blake, 541. 24  See David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum, 1989); M. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature: 1793–​1832: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Age of George III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); and Todd Porterfield (ed.), The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–​1838 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011).

632   Sophie Thomas

Fig. 40.2  William Blake, The Poems of Thomas Gray, design 57, ‘The Bard’ (1797–​8). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

engraving, are often as dense with text as they are with detailed images, and the relations between the two are complex, with words serving at times to make the images more transparent, but at others effectively making them more opaque by suggesting additional avenues for interpretation—​often by working against the apparent meaning of the image. Taken on their own, the images are highly textual, involving a complex visual language that asks to be read. To some extent this can be related to the numerous literary reference points present in the prints (as in Gillray’s use of Gulliver’s Travels in his satires on contemporary politics), but it also reflects the sheer quantity of information encoded in each image, and the diversity of subjects and popular discourses

Word and Image   633

Fig. 40.3  James Gillray, Maniac-​Ravings—​or—​Little Boney in a Strong Fit. 24 May 1803. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

ripe for satirical treatment—​from the antics of antiquarians and the Royal Academy to those of princes and parliamentarians. While some caricaturists such as Rowlandson did not rely as heavily on text, Gillray’s prints are particularly verbal, giving rise to debates about how this should be understood. David Bindman, for example, has argued that the inclusion of text, and of represented speech in particular, threatened to mark caricature—​at least from the perspective of Royal Academicians—​as a popular rather than a serious art form, and that this potential limitation was one Gillray negotiated skilfully.25 Gillray’s Maniac-​Ravings—​or—​ Little Boney in a Strong Fit (1803) is an excellent example of how text and design can work powerfully together (Fig. 40.3). The image depicts Napoleon responding furiously to the state of relations between France and Britain in 1803, after the brief interlude of the Peace of Amiens; his ‘transport of rage’ refers explicitly to a scene Napoleon made before 25  David Bindman, ‘Text as Design in Gillray’s Caricature’, in Peter Wagner (ed.), Icons—​Texts— Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996). See also Eirwen Nicholson, ‘Soggy Prose and Verbiage: English Graphic Political Satire as a Visual/​Verbal Construct’, Word and Image 20.1 (2004), 28–​40 (p. 33).

634   Sophie Thomas the British Ambassador in March of that year (an event alluded to in the extended title and elsewhere), as described by Lord Whitworth.26 The room is in a tumultuous state, and a veritable tempest of exclamation issues from the visibly agitated figure of ‘Little Boney’. His ‘thoughts’ are a concoction of lamentation (‘Oh Egypt, Egypt, Egypt’), threat (‘Revenge! Revenge!), and invective (‘Oh cursed Liberty of y British Press’). Words are indeed integrated everywhere into this design, from the ‘Consular Chair’ to the titles of the scattered documents, which reveal his plans and preoccupations. Underfoot, Napoleon tramples on copies of the Anti-​Jacobin Review, and Cobbet’s Weekly Journal [sic]. The power of the English press, a clear synecdoche for British supremacy, is cleverly displayed through Napoleon’s impotent rage in the face of it. Words, as in this example, appear in and alongside caricatures in numerous forms. Some appear straightforward, such as mottos and inscriptions, dedications and quotations, titles and subtitles, though these all could be satiric, and entirely fictional. Words feature extensively in speech or thought bubbles, and in internal commentaries or putative explanations—​often these serve to animate (and as often to implicate) their subjects.27 The complexity (and length) of the titles and subtitles also offers a good instance of the number of levels upon which satire can operate; titles may appear to mediate or describe the content of the image for the viewer, as in Gillray’s French Liberty. British Slavery (1792), but they can also identify and unleash its satirical power, an example being Gillray’s outrageously obscene The Apples and the Horse-​Turds—​or—​Buonaparte Among the Golden Pippins (1800). Acts of naming can be just as freighted with significance as lengthy titles that offer alternatives (with the insertion of the ubiquitous ‘or’). Moreover, dashes and strategic blanks invite the reader-​viewer to participate actively in the construction of meaning.28 Language thus often appears in fragmented forms, which is fitting since the suggestiveness of fragments (by definition) extends and resonates with the polyvalence of the satirists’ images, with their extensive networks of intertextual and allusive reference points. As in the work of Blake, these take shape not simply between an image and a text, but across a web of interpictorial and intertextual sites. The power of text within these images is by no means qualified by the way they generated both explanation and debate in other media, commentaries upon commentaries, so to speak, often intended to stabilize meanings that were either troubling or unruly—​such as ekphrastic descriptions of Gillray’s prints published, alongside the images themselves, in London und Paris, a journal based in Weimar, through the period 1798 to 1815.29 26 George, English Political Caricature, 63; Richard Godfrey, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature

(London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 124. For a detailed description of this image, see M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol. 8: 1801–​1810 (London: British Museum, 1947), 146–​8 (no. 9998). 27  Nicholson, ‘Soggy Prose’, 32. 28  Nicholson, ‘Soggy Prose’, 30. 29  See Christiane Banerji and Diana Donald (eds), Gillray Observed: The Earliest Account of his Caricatures in London und Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Wolfgang Cillessen, Rolf Reichardt, and Christian Deuling (eds), Napoleons neue Kleider: Pariser und Londoner Karikaturen im klassischen Weimar (Berlin: G & H Verlag, 2006).

Word and Image   635 As well as appearing in journals, the latest productions of the caricaturists were displayed prominently in print-​shop windows, offering a popular form of free public entertainment. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Anne Eliot has a chance encounter with Admiral Croft at a print-​shop window in Bath, where he is caught ‘in earnest contemplation of some print’.30 ‘I can never get by this shop’, the admiral confesses, ‘without stopping’. Animated street-​scenes at print-​shop windows such as Hannah Humphrey’s were also—​self-​reflexively—​the subject of the very same print genre, as in Gillray’s Very Slippy Weather (1808), which shows a crowd of people gaping at the caricatures on display, oblivious to the fate of a gentleman who has fallen on the pavement. So were exhibition scenes at the other end of the social spectrum, such as the Royal Academy summer exhibitions, where although the crowd might belong to another class, its density and distractibility appear not entirely dissimilar. These exhibitions (clearly a potential source of material for the novelist) would even more explicitly become scenes of reading, since after 1798 the Royal Academy began to allow painters exhibiting their works to include poetic quotations in addition to titles in the catalogues. As with the productions of the caricaturists, whose works included lengthy titles, painters were to an extent already engaged in creating word-​image hybrids. Painters who took immediate advantage of this new provision at the Royal Academy include J. M. W. Turner.31 Of the ten paintings Turner submitted to the Royal Academy in 1798, five included quotations from Thomson’s The Seasons in the catalogue entries. Turner’s literary reference points were in fact wide-​ranging, looking back beyond Thomson, Akenside, and Pope, to Shakespeare and Milton, and to Classical poets and the Bible. He was himself, moreover, a poet, and drew extracts from his own unpublished manuscript, Fallacies of Hope. He frequently reflected upon the relationship of poetry to painting, once commenting that ‘the painter’s beauties are defineable while the poet’s are imaginary as they relate to his associations . . . He [the poet] seeks for the attributes of sentiments to illustrate what he has seen in nature . . . [whereas] The painter must adhere to the truth of nature’.32 Turner’s investment in associating specific lines of poetry with his paintings suggests a strong conviction that the evocative nature of each could be mutually reinforcing; however, the manner in which poems must be fragmented in order to serve this purpose suggests that words must be radically circumscribed in the process, and the texture and allusiveness of language appropriated for the image. While visits to the Royal Academy had begun to involve acts of simultaneous reading and looking as viewers toured through the galleries, their attention roving between the catalogue in their hands and the paintings on the wall, the so-​called ‘literary galleries’ transposed reading more systematically into acts of viewing (and back again).

30 

Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Linda Bree (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998), 187. See Andrew Wilton, Painting and Poetry: Turner’s Verse Book and his Work of 1804–​1812 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990). 32  Quoted from Turner’s sketchbooks (which also contain his poetry and notes) by Jerrold Ziff, ‘J. M. W. Turner on Poetry and Painting’, Studies in Romanticism 3.4 (1964), 193–​215 (p. 197). See also Gerald Finley, Landscapes of Memory: Turner as Illustrator to Scott (London: Scolar Press, 1980), 32–​4. 31 

636   Sophie Thomas The first of these commercial establishments was John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, a purpose-​built exhibition space designed to display illustrations for a deluxe edition of Shakespeare’s plays prepared by prominent artists of the day.33 The gallery opened in Pall Mall in 1789. Thomas Macklin’s Poet’s Gallery was another attempt to commission and engrave artworks drawn directly from literary subjects, but focused on poets of Great Britain, both living and dead. Henry Fuseli’s Gallery of the Miltonic Sublime opened in 1799 with forty pictures from Milton on display, painted by Fuseli himself.34 All of these ventures were multi-​medial, involving paintings, illustrated books, and a series of prints, for which the gallery was effectively the commercial showroom. None, however, was successful in economic terms, and conceptually they were as problematic as they were innovative. The sequences of pictures on display, in spite of their close connection to books, did not easily lend themselves to the habitual articulations of reading; viewers, for example, were presented with a wall of pictures through which multidirectional viewing routes were possible. Rather than considering the productions of the galleries as promising visual equivalents to texts, one might see them as aiming to create a new narrative mode of high art, while circulating literature ‘in the commercial form of visual attractions’.35 Meanwhile, Fuseli declared that ‘the excellence of pictures or of language consists in raising clear, complete, and circumstantial images, and turning readers into spectators’.36 Literature’s ‘separateness’ is challenged by this idea—​and yet in general, knowledge or experience of the text was a precondition for viewing the pictures at the galleries. Such reading could take place in the gallery. Macklin, for example, provided the poems on display to visitors in their entirety. In the Milton and Shakespeare galleries, prior acquaintance with the text was largely presupposed. Either way, the scenes selected for illustration were necessarily those that lent themselves to visualization, and thus to being isolated or abstracted from the text—​in keeping with the anthological impulse evident elsewhere in the period (from commonplace books to collections of ‘beauties’, textual and otherwise). Here too, even if one text only was the subject of the exhibition (which was the case with Fuseli), the ‘whole’ text was evoked indexically through representative extracts. While this might suggest that a similar type of fragmentation is operative on the visual level—​that the images on display were more like stills than moving pictures—​ recent research such as Luisa Calè’s explores the extent to which elements of montage could be operative in the viewing experience of a literary gallery. From this perspective, dynamic formal continuities between paintings set up relays of the kind noted above in Blake’s work. 33  Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick (eds), The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (Bottrop: Peter Pomp, 1996). 34  Luisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 35 Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, 6. 36  Analytical Review (1788), quoted by Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, 5.

Word and Image   637 These projects aimed to turn a profit from the ‘old masters’ of British poetry, and even though aspects of this affirmation of a national culture (and the provision of wider access to it) were undoubtedly positive, these subjects were declining in popularity, and in the early decades of the nineteenth century painters were increasingly turning their attention to the work of their much more popular contemporaries such as Byron, Moore, and Scott.37 Byron was particularly popular: the stirring, and visually vivid nature of his poems, with their powerful central characters and intriguing settings, made him a natural choice for artists, and Turner, Martin, and Delacroix, among others, were deft translators of Byron’s verse into a visual idiom. Turner’s first subject drawn from Byron, The Field of Waterloo, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818.38 Accompanied by lines drawn from the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, stanza 28, the painting depicts the grim aftermath, in which women scour the dark battlefield, picking through the dead to find their loved ones, under a turbulent sky. Turner’s painting captures something of Byron’s searing presentation of the larger historical forces that elevate and then destroy, where the emphasis is not on victory but on the futility of human effort, and the profound grief that follows from it. The painting has been described as ‘uncompromisingly modern’ in its reference to the condition of contemporary Europe.39 Powerful as the painting is on its own, it is arguably the network of references created by the dialogue between painting and poem that makes such a claim convincing. Turner painted scenes connected to other Romantic writers, most notably Scott, whose work he would also extensively illustrate.40 There were, however, other notable painter–​poet relationships, such as the one that developed between Wordsworth and George Beaumont. Beaumont painted five works drawn from Wordsworth’s poems, including one from ‘The Thorn’, which he exhibited in 1806 at the Royal Academy.41 Wordsworth, in turn, used three paintings by Beaumont for illustrations to his poems, including the ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ on Peele Castle. These examples reveal the extent to which potential book illustrations played an important role, alongside the print market, in the work of painters and the purposes of exhibition: ‘original’ paintings would often come more fully into circulation as engraved prints and/​or illustrations for books. The expanding market for illustrated books, driven by advances in printing techniques (such as steel-​plate engravings developed in the 1820s, which produced better-​quality images 37

  David Blayney Brown, Turner and Byron (London: Tate Gallery, 1992), 28. The painting may be viewed on the Tate Britain website at:  www.tate.org.uk/​art/​artworks/​turner-​the-​field-​of-​waterloo-​n00500 39 Brown, Turner and Byron, 43; see also the discussion on p. 92. 40  See Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–​1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), ch. 5. 41  Richard Altick, Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–​1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 422. See also the account of their collaboration in Peter Simonsen, Wordsworth and Word-​Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), ch. 3. 38 

638   Sophie Thomas less expensively) whetted the public appetite for visual ‘embellishments’.42 From all this came the re-​issuing of volumes of poetry with engravings—​such as Samuel Rogers’s Italy, which sold considerably better once repackaged with illustrations by Turner, Stothard, and Flaxman—​as well as the commissioning of new work. Henry Crabb Robinson, after accompanying Wordsworth on an excursion to the British Museum in 1820, observed that ‘[the poet’s] enjoyment of works of art is very much in proportion to their subserviency to poetical illustration’.43 While this anecdote reflects a certain wariness of illustration among poets (who were nevertheless keen to make use of its potential to reach new audiences), it reminds us that the term had not yet settled into its now common meaning: the illustration of a subject or a book pictorially. ‘Illustration’ was a more fluid term, referring generally to something that elucidates or exemplifies, or, as Martin Meisel puts it, to ‘the extension of one medium or mode of discourse by another’.44 Thus it was that text might be called upon to ‘illustrate’ an image—​which was generally the case with the relationship between words and images in the literary annuals that first became a publishing phenomenon in the 1820s. As the name suggests, annuals were high-​quality gift-​ books produced for the Christmas and New Year market, and while they promoted themselves partly on the strength of the ‘original’ poetry, stories, and essays they contained, their most enticing feature was the steel engravings of famous paintings, places, and fashionable people. The inaugural 1828 volume of one of the most popular annuals, The Keepsake, sold fifteen thousand copies, and in the following year it published work by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Moore, Shelley, Hemans, the ‘Author of Frankenstein’, and the ‘Author of Waverley’.45 Typically, a number of these texts, such as Coleridge’s ‘The Garden of Boccaccio’, were commissioned to ‘illustrate’ a pre-​existent picture. Wordsworth’s ‘The Country Girl’, for example, accompanied an engraving of a painting by James Holmes of the same name (Fig. 40.4). Subsequently renamed ‘The Gleaner’, the poem only makes oblique reference to the coquettish young lady occupying the foreground of the image, which no doubt reveals something of Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for the enterprise.46 The priority given to the engravings, which were costly and labour-​ intensive to produce, generally left the correspondent poetry playing a secondary role. Letitia Landon lamented, in the 1832 volume of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-​Book, with 42 

On these and other technological developments, see Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–​1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), ch.1; and William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 116, 231. 43  Derek Hudson (ed.), The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson. An Abridgement (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 66. 44  Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-​Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 30. 45  For a full facsimile, see Paula Feldman (ed.), The Keepsake for 1829 (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006). 46  See Peter J. Manning, ‘Wordsworth in the Keepsake, 1829’, in John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (eds), Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-​Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Word and Image   639

Fig.  40.4  William Wordsworth, ‘The Country Girl’, with engraving by Charles Heath, after James Holmes, in The Keepsake for 1829, ed. Frederic Mansel Reynolds. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Poetical Illustrations (an annual for which she single-​handedly wrote the poems accompanying the plates), that ‘it is not an easy thing to write illustrations to prints, selected rather for their pictorial excellence than their poetic capabilities’.47 Put more positively, however, the annuals explicitly foregrounded the visual arts in a print medium. To this extent they reflected as well as nourished public interest. Some, such as The Literary Souvenir, and Cabinet of Modern Art, edited by Alaric Watts, deliberately focused on British art and artists, instead of on a miscellaneous array of subjects and genres. Critical of the effects of forcefully yoking prose tales of dubious literary value to engravings, Watts favoured poetry on the grounds that it ‘may illustrate, in a page, the true spirit of a picture; and . . . being a branch of the Fine Arts itself, is less out of place in such a work’.48 Yet commissioning poets to ‘illustrate’ paintings for 47  Letitia Landon, Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book; With Poetical Illustrations by L. E. L. (London: Fisher, Son, and Jackson, 1832), 3. 48  Alaric A. Watts (ed.), The Literary Souvenir, and Cabinet of Modern Art (London: Whittaker, 1835), vi.

640   Sophie Thomas the annuals tells us much about the enticements of new visual media. It suggests a lingering set of assumptions about the ‘sister arts’ and their capacity to speak for and to each other—​even while, under the pressures of the book market, that relationship was reconfigured in terms that emphasized images. The poetry that featured in the annuals tended in general to interpellate ‘the reader as a viewer and the poet as a painter’.49 James Montgomery’s introductory poem for the 1829 volume of Friendship’s Offering plays deliberately on that theme, claiming that each picture should be ‘the quintessence of Poesy’, working to make visible the ‘colours’ of ‘pure thought’ such that the admiring eye beholds it as the mirror image of the mind; the verse, it is hoped in turn, should ‘strike’ the reader/​viewer ‘with all the power of painting’.50 This ought to be understood more as wishful promotional packaging than actual accomplishment; yet one consequence of this prevalent discourse is that nineteenth-​century poetry was increasingly encouraged to conform to a ‘pictorial’ aesthetic.51 In all of the instances discussed in this chapter, ‘word’ and ‘image’ are invariably caught up in trans-​and intermedial relationships that configure these terms in different and provocative ways. Arguably, their interaction in literary cultural contexts reveals not only how the boundaries of the ‘literary’ are constantly redrawn, but also the inverse: how new visual contexts involve an inherent textuality that depends on both old habits and new practices of reading. Moreover, I have stressed the extent to which word and image in the period are not free-​standing phenomena, but rather are embedded in relationships that are at the very least triangular. In closing, I would like briefly to address the cultural context provided by travel, since many aspects of the intersection of popular print and visual culture mediate the experience of place. Image, text, and place converge in the experience, representation, and consumption of the outside world, whether in Italy or the Lake District. From guidebooks and albums, to prints that might be purchased by subscription, the public had an insatiable appetite for ‘views’—​and, by extension, for the poetry associated with the locations in question. Extracts from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage lent themselves to many such enterprises, an example being an exhibition of ‘Views in Italy’ held in Old Bond Street, London, in 1818, and the accompanying Catalogue of the Original Sketches, Made in 1816 and 1817, by James Hakewill; and Drawings by J. M. W Turner, Esq. R.A. for the Picturesque Tour of Italy. The catalogue lists nearly two hundred views, and where appropriate—​or possible—​quotes lines from Childe Harold that reference the relevant landmark: the interior of the Colosseum, the falls at Terni, the tomb of Cecilia Metella. In Venice, the Bridge of Sighs is accompanied by the lines adapted from the opening lines of Canto IV: ‘I stood upon a bridge, a palace and | A prison on each hand’. When Turner exhibited a painting of this view in 1840, he again accompanied the image with the lines from Byron, suggesting the extent to which the act of viewing might in particular instances prompt the recall of a poetic extract—​and also the extent 49 Simonsen, Wordsworth and Word-​Preserving Arts, 115. 50 

Friendship’s Offering (London: Smith, Elder, 1828), 1.

51 Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form, 41.

Word and Image   641 to which particular sights could become attached to particular texts as word–​image composites. Knowledge of a text could thus inflect and inform one’s experience of place-​as-​image. This points to a higher-​order experimentation with the way literary texts in the period represent, as well as make use of, visual experience. Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes reveals how closely related the interests of tourists, the print industry, and the aesthetic tastes of the reading (and looking) public could be. The Guide was first written in 1810, in the form of a commissioned (and unsigned) essay that accompanied a large folio of views of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire, undertaken by the Rev. Joseph Wilkinson and published by Ackermann. The essay was annexed ten years later to Wordsworth’s sonnets on the River Duddon, on the grounds that, since ‘written in the same spirit’, it would illuminate or illustrate the sonnets topographically; it was first published as a free-​standing, unillustrated text in 1822. Rhetorically, Wordsworth’s efforts to capture the dramatic landscapes of the Lake District are often shaped by an opposition between the active, imaginative work of a text and the potentially passive work of images. Yet the Guide is remarkably pictorial: it makes frequent recourse to scenes of ‘picturing’ as it explores, for example, the way reflective surfaces of bodies of water refract, reform, and re-​represent, the physical world around. It also references an array of visual technologies, from the panorama to the map, which he works both with and against. As Tim Fulford has noted, both Wordsworth and Southey in their later careers wrote about tourist sights and pictured views, effectively becoming practitioners of ‘virtual topography’.52 Reminiscent of the word–​image constructs in the literary annuals, the poems in question were ‘set piece descriptions of views that were either based on pictures, meant to accompany pictures, or framed like pictures’ (3). While this refocusing of effort reflects a degree of willingness on Wordsworth’s part to adapt to changing tastes, it is also entirely fitting for a poet frequently preoccupied, like other writers and artists of the period, by the mutually empowering confrontations of ‘word’ and ‘image’.

Further Reading Altick, Richard, Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–​1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985). Behrendt, Stephen C., ‘Visual and Verbal in Poetry,’ in Frederick Burwick, Nancy Goslee, and Diane Long Hoeveler (eds), The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2012). Calè, Luisa, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery:  ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006). Cheeke, Stephen, Writing for Art:  The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2008). 52  Tim Fulford, ‘Virtual Topography: Poets, Painters, Publishers and the Reproduction of the Landscape in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 57–​8 (Feb.–​May, 2010), at: www.erudit.org/​revue/​ravon/​2010/​v/​n57-​58.

642   Sophie Thomas Eaves, Morris, ‘The Sister Arts in British Romanticism’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Eaves, Morris, The Counter-​ Arts Conspiracy:  Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Haywood, Ian, Romanticism and Caricature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Heffernan, James A. W., Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Ionescu, Christina, and Renata Schellenberg (eds), Word and Image in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). Mitchell, W. J. T., Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Mitchell, W. J.  T., Picture Theory:  Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Rovee, Christopher, Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Thomas, Sophie, Romanticism and Visuality:  Fragments, History, Spectacle (New  York: Routledge, 2008). Thomas, Sophie, ‘Poetry and Illustration’, in Charles Mahoney (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Romantic Poetry (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2011). Wendorf, Richard (ed.), Articulate Images:  The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

Chapter 41

T he Cultu re of S ong Kirsteen McCue

The eternity of song Liveth here Nature’s universal tongue Singeth here Songs Ive heard and felt and seen Everywhere Songs like the grass are evergreen The giver Said live and be and they have been For ever 1

John Clare’s ‘Songs Eternity’, written at the time of his move to Northborough in 1832, might be used as a checklist for Romantic ideas about song. The poem pivots on the notion that song captures more than just the ‘noise and bustle’ (line 3) of human life at one moment; it also acts as a bridge to and from past lives and life experiences. We are all, Clare states, part of the sound-​worlds of the universe—​‘Melodys of earth and sky’—​and the songs we hear today are descendants of ballads heard ‘six thousand years’ before, when they were ‘sung to adams ears’ (lines 13–​17). The opening stanzas present song as creation’s music which expresses all the moods and tones of nature. In the final verse, quoted above, Clare reiterates this idea and makes further claims: that song is eternal, not fixed by temporal or mortal boundaries; that it is a ‘universal tongue’, with no obvious creator or author; that it plays to several of our senses, ‘heard and felt and seen’; that it suffuses the atmosphere and has no obvious beginning or ending; that it is a living form at one with nature and with human life; and, ultimately, that it is ‘everywhere’. Song was indeed ‘everywhere’ in the Romantic period, and the literature of this era contains numerous examples of texts in which ideas of melody, song, or singing feature

1 

‘Songs Eternity’, lines 51–​60, in John Clare, Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Subsequent references are to this edition.

644   Kirsteen McCue prominently. The ability of song (especially when performed) to transcend boundaries of class and literacy took on new significance in relation to Enlightenment notions of sympathy and civil empathy and the growing interest in social reform.2 Song’s role as the carrier of tradition crystallized contemporary notions of history and community and resonated powerfully with the often difficult relationships (particularly at times of war and unrest) between localities, regions, and nations. The genre of song, especially in its combination of lyrical text with music, was able to function within established hierarches while at the same time transcending them—​linking the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, the ‘big’ and the ‘little’.3 Song also provided opportunities for writers to develop new poetic sound-​worlds and to engage directly with contemporary literary and musical aesthetics. Consequently, we need as readers to engage not simply in ‘close reading’ of texts from this period, but in what Susan Wolfson terms ‘close listening’ too: we need to appreciate the poetic as well as the musical aurality of lyrical texts.4 Songs were created for reading silently, for reading aloud, and often for singing. Although ‘Song’s Eternity’ is a purely literary composition, Clare, like his Scottish predecessor Robert Burns, was actively involved in collecting songs and noting down or creating lyrics for existing local tunes. Indeed, one of his motives (as with Burns) was to secure the continuity of these songs, which would enable them to be performed and heard by future generations—​a central theme of ‘Songs Eternity’. As well as producing lyrics for local or national melodies, Romantic song texts in turn inspired musicians from beyond Britain, resulting in a transnational exchange within the media of art-​song (notably German lied), opera, ballet, and orchestral poetry.5 The expanding cultural reach of songwriting and performance is matched by a growing critical interest in song. While song was a well-​established poetic and musical form before this, the period 1760 to 1830 saw a significant rise in its critical status, and the emergence of a new critical discourse about song. John Aikin’s pioneering Essays on Song-​writing (1772) opens with the comment that the ‘two capital species of poetry, the epic and dramatic, have long engaged the nicest attention of taste and criticism’, whereas ‘the humbler, but not less pleasing productions of the muse have not obtained that notice from the critic to which exertions of the poet would seem 2  Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 44–​96. 3   Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, rev. edn (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 24–​9. 4  Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Sounding Romantic: The Sound of Sound’, in Wolfson (ed.), ‘Soundings of Things Done’: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (Apr. 2008), at: www.rc.umd.edu/​praxis/​soundings/​index.html. See also Wolfson, ‘Romantic Measures: Stressing the Sound of Sound’, in Jason David Hall (ed.), Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). 5  Three focal points of transnational exchange were the work of Macpherson, Scott, and Burns: see Howard Gaskill (ed.), The Reception of Ossian in Europe (London: Continuum, 2004); Murray Pittock (ed.), The Reception of Walter Scott in Europe (London: Continuum, 2006); and Murray Pittock (ed.), The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). See also James Parsons, ‘At Home with German Romantic Song’, in Michael Ferber (ed.), A Companion to European Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

The Culture of Song    645 to entitle them’.6 Amongst these ‘pleasing productions’, which include the ode, the elegy, and the epigram, the most notable in Aikin’s opinion is the varied genre of song, the different types of which are the subject of the essays that follow. Another seminal publication, Joseph Ritson’s ‘Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Song’, which forms the preface to his Select Collection of English Songs (1783), links the history of song to the progress of civilization, producing a grand narrative typical of Enlightenment genre criticism.7 Collections of songs and ballads from all corners of the British Isles included weighty historical dissertations and essays exploring the ancestry of song in their respective countries or regions. In making his case for song, Aikin refers to the work of Thomas Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) had so effectively conveyed the importance of collecting and presenting older voices and traditions. The voluminous paratexts of anthologies such as these meant that contemporary readers were discovering and rediscovering songs firmly within their historical context. Historical introductions were typically followed by an edited collection or sampler of songs and ballads, frequently packaged as both ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’. Antiquarian impulses thus ran in tandem with notions of revitalization, while issues of orality merged fluidly with those of literacy. Songs appeared in a variety of popular published formats (broadsheets, slips, and chapbooks) directly linked to modes of performance in the ‘field’, the street, the theatre, and, during this period, also in the pleasure garden and the drawing room.8 The energy with which editors and publishers created a market, and then saturated it with song-​sheets, songbooks, miscellanies, almanacs, and multi-​volume national song collections, is a striking characteristic of the Romantic movement, both in Britain and elsewhere. The classification of song texts in non-​musical collections such as those of Aikin and Ritson celebrated the natural spontaneity of song while at the same time formalizing the genre and making it ‘artful’.9 Such collections presented song and ballad as modes which could be enjoyed in a purely literary or readerly form, even though they often gave the titles of traditional melodies or tunes to the texts, thus indicating a possible oral, traditional, or demotic root. One result of this, as David Duff has shown, is a significant broadening of the category of ‘lyric’, previously understood as a ‘complex, elevated type of poetry derived from Classical and biblical models’, but now increasingly defined as ‘any kind of short poem expressing intense personal emotion’, a type of poem which dominated popular collections by the 1820s.10 The expanding range and prominence of musical forms of lyric enlarge the category still further, placing new emphasis 6  John Aikin, Essays on Song-​writing: With a Collection of such English Songs as are Most Eminent for Poetical Merit. To which are Added, some Original Pieces (London, [1772]), 1. 7  See David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 139. 8  Kirsteen McCue, ‘ “An Individual Flowering on a Common Stem”: Melody, Performance and National Song’, in Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 9  Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 25–​6. 10  David Duff, ‘The Retuning of the Sky: Romanticism and Lyric’, in Marion Thain (ed.), The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135.

646   Kirsteen McCue on the acoustic properties of lyric poetry. Clifford Siskin sees a broader cultural shift at work here: the new investment in lyric was not simply about finding one’s intimate poetic voice but about comprehending the effects of a new division of labour. Lyric was not only part of literary history, it also played an important role in ‘the overall narrative of human development from nature to civilisation’, much as Ritson had argued.11 The idea that an older form was adopted and transformed by a new generation of writers (Siskin mentions Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in this context) and that it contributed to a wide range of social and political agendas is a helpful way in which to approach the role of song culture more widely. It is still difficult today to find commonly agreed definitions of the genres of song and ballad in any period. Both have a musical root or source. Generally the ‘ballad’, while often simple in form, is bigger and longer than the ‘song’ lyric—​the Scots tradition refers to ballad as ‘the muckle sang’ (‘the big song’). Ballads typically concentrate on the telling of stories about national, historical, or local events, whereas songs are shorter effusive lyrics expressing the personal or emotional. But there are many exceptions and many ways in which the two genres merge.12 Steve Newman’s recent study of ballad collection and lyric culture refers to the many subgenres of ballad, but he defines the ballad by its ‘performative situation (it is a verse designed to be sung) and its common-​ness’ because, he argues, these are the elements which most interested Romantic writers who were ‘trying to figure out how to adapt to fundamental changes in the structure of elite literary production, circulation and consumption’.13 In the later eighteenth century, ballads and songs were often placed side by side in collections, but from the early decades of the nineteenth century, ballads became increasingly separate from collections of shorter songs. Ballads were usually published with a reading public in mind, accompanied by editorial annotation but rarely by musical notation; songs were published in text-​only formats, but they were also frequently published with no additional editorial apparatus and with musical scores, in order to cater for a growing middle class who wished to perform them at home. Ritson states categorically that ‘All writers agree that Song is the most ancient species of poetry.’14 Aikin likewise discusses the interest which both the antiquarian and the new ‘man of taste’ have for the ancient ballads, even allowing for their ‘rough rhyme and unadorned narration’.15 Nonetheless, the contemporary fascination with adapting, amending, and recreating older material for a modern audience was not without its difficulties.16 11   Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700–​1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 136–​7. 12  As emphasized in recent studies such as Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Erik Simpson, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–​1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 13 Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon, 8. 14  [Joseph Ritson], ‘A Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Song’, in A Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols (London, 1783), i, p. i. 15 Aikin, Essays on Song-​writing, 20. 16  Nigel Leask, ‘ “A Degrading Species of Alchymy”: Ballad Poetics, Oral Tradition, and the Meanings of Popular Culture’, in Connell and Leask (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture.

The Culture of Song    647 Modern scholarship has demonstrated that James Macpherson was working in exactly this mode,17 but the contemporary controversy over the creative process of his Ossianic poems (1760–​3) was riddled with accusations of forgery. In his Essays on Song-​writing, Aikin claims that the ‘the moderns fall short of the ancients’ in their handling of the form.18 The tradition-​bearer was a powerful figure, as seen from the debates over Ossian’s historical authenticity. But ballad imitations such as those included at the end of Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–​3) and in James Hogg’s The Mountain Bard (1807) celebrated local tradition while showcasing their respective writers’ creative skills. Scott’s collection included Historical and Romantic ballads from ‘the field’ as well as his own, clearly labelled imitations, while Hogg, believing his own skills in this area to surpass those of Scott, created his own ballads in the likeness of those he already knew intimately. Clearly, neither figure could thus be labelled a forger, and, as Nick Groom has forcefully shown, forgery, as the ultimate form of imitation, should in any case be seen as ‘a site of inspiration’ rather than the negative process often presented.19 Yet, critical disagreement persists. In his influential book Fakesong (1985), Dave Harker argued that the editors and publishers of a British ‘folksong’ tradition from 1700 onwards were biased by their bourgeois social standing, and their collections and editions consequently failed to present the reality of Britain’s living song culture.20 More recently, Terence Hoagwood has drawn attention to the ubiquity in the Romantic period of what he terms ‘pseudo-​songs’: poems which purport to be songs or which simulate musical forms without actually providing music. He too thus gestures towards a sense that writers of the period, when dealing with song culture, were posturing rather than creating something genuine.21 Robert Burns’s interest in collecting, amending, and revising as well as creating songs might support but also challenge this perception. His ability convincingly to represent voices from across the social spectrum is one of his greatest achievements as a lyricist. Born to a gardener and his wife, Burns was feted by the Edinburgh establishment in the 1780s following the publication of the first, ‘Kilmarnock’ edition of his poems and songs. He subsequently progressed from the position of tenant farmer to that of exciseman, a post he held at the time of his death in 1796. Across his significant repertoire, he is, at times effortlessly, able to voice experience from a wide range of social positions and across gender too: from the sadness of the unrequited female lover in ‘Ye banks and braes o’ bonie Doon’ to the anger of the historic warrior in Robert Bruce’s army at the

17  Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988); Howard Gaskill (ed.), Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). 18 Aikin, Essays on Song-​writing, 1. 19  Nick Groom, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, 2002). See also Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–​1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 20  Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacturing of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985). 21  Terence Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-​Songs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

648   Kirsteen McCue Battle of Bannockburn (‘Scots wha hae’); from the coyness of the saucy wench who sings ‘Charlie is my darling’ to the sensibility of the man of feeling who parts from his high-​ class lover in ‘Ae fond kiss’. Burns was directly inspired by melody, as he recounts in his correspondence with George Thomson—​he needed to know a tune intimately before he could begin to write lyrics for it.22 But often in his songwriting he was using extant textual fragments and reworking them. The most famous example is his love song ‘O my Luve’s like a red, red rose’, which incorporates phrases and images from a number of published broadsides and weaves them seamlessly together to match a stately and rather modern fiddle tune; the words of the song mirror this intimate union of theme and form, describing the narrator’s love as ‘like the melodie | That’s sweetly play’d in tune’.23 A similar compositional process can be observed in his song ‘Ay waukin, O’. This contains three verses, with repeated chorus, in the course of which Burns sets the time of year—​summer, with its ‘Flowers of every colour’ (line 2), has his narrator explain she cannot sleep because she is thinking of her lover, and concludes with her noting that even when everyone else is sleeping she is always awake. The lyric is one of Burns’s simplest and most timeless, yet its timelessness and simplicity are an artful construct. The editor James Kinsley has suggested that it was a fragment in David Herd’s manuscripts which probably inspired Burns and that, while we have no further evidence of its ancestry, the fragment has ‘the purity of some medieval lyric’.24 Herd’s fragment begins: O wat, wat—​O wat and weary! Sleep I can get nane For thinking on my deary.25

Burns’s chorus transforms this into: Ay waukin, O, Waukin still and weary: Sleep I can get nane, For thinking on my Dearie.26

Burns’s text captures in its gentle rhythms the nocturnal, dreamy world which surrounds his narrator, and his reader or listener is easily transported to that sultry and 22 

McCue, ‘ “An Individual Flowering on a Common Stem” ’, 91. Kirsteen McCue, ‘ “O My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose’: Does the Melody Really Matter?’, in Patrick Scott and Kenneth Simpson (eds), Robert Burns and Friends, Studies in Scottish Literature 37 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Libraries, 2012). 24  The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), iii. 1330. 25  David Herd, Songs from David Herd’s Manuscripts, ed. Hans Hecht (Edinburgh: William J. Hay, 1904), 240. Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads &c was published in Edinburgh in 1769 and revised, enlarged, and republished in the 1770s. 26  The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns, vols 2 and 3: The Scots Musical Museum, ed. Murray Pittock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), ii. 283. 23 

The Culture of Song    649 sleepless summer night. But part of the success of the text relies on the matching simplicity and repetitiveness of its melody. The melodic phrases for the chorus are short, but the first of them, which matches the textual phrases ‘Ay waukin, O’ and ‘Sleep I can get nane’, involves only two notes and is consequently almost static, thus helping to create a musical sense of stillness for Burns’s text. The aura of antiquity that Kinsley describes is further enhanced by the decision of Burns and his editor James Johnson to print the song without a creator’s name. While we now know the song to be by Burns, contemporary readers would have first encountered it as an anonymous text, with musical notation, in Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (1790). Moving between the ancient and modern and transporting song from one source to another—​what Maureen McLane calls the ‘remediation of the oral’27—​is one way in which the Romantics engaged with song culture. But poets were also fascinated by the ability of sounds and musical terminology to express man’s moral and emotional well-​being. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge played an active role like Burns or Clare in writing lyrics to match tunes, but Wordsworth was nonetheless acutely aware of the poetic power of ballad culture, and the expressive soundscapes offered to him by writing about music. He was aware too of the capacity of music, especially in performance, to bring individuals together. His 1806 poem ‘The Power of Music’, which Wordsworth noted was ‘Taken from life’,28 features a blind fiddler rather than a singer, but it is not simply a thrilling description of the fiddler’s musicality. Wordsworth is more interested in the effect the fiddler’s musical performance has on the gathering audience, who are able to forget themselves and the trials of their lives because of his infectious playing. Describing one excited auditor, Wordsworth writes: ‘Can he keep himself still, if he would? oh, not he! | The music stirs in him like wind through a tree’ (lines 35–​6). The ‘eager assembly’—​or thankful ‘Band’, as Wordsworth terms them—​spans the old to the very young and comprises a news-​man, a lamplighter, a porter, a barrow lass, a ‘cripple who leans on his Crutch’ and a mother with her baby. As Adam Potkay notes, Wordsworth’s poem is about the space that music makes ‘for solidarity in a present moment’, but it also looks back to an ‘imaginary past of primitive equality and ahead to a future of equality restored’.29 Jeffrey Robinson has similarly argued that Wordsworth’s fascination with sound and voice (in poems such as ‘The Power of Sound’ and later works such as ‘The Unremitting Voice of Nightly Streams’) is about a sense of a ‘heavenly harmony casting its “healing influence” over all humankind’.30 The reader is thus led to believe that through sonic experiences man can achieve a deeper sense of personal balance or political equilibrium. Connections between melody

27 McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, 30.

28  Isabella Fenwick note, quoted in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 717n. 29  Adam Potkay, ‘Captivation and Liberty in Wordsworth’s Poems on Music’, in Wolfson (ed.), ‘Soundings of Things Done’. 30  Jeffrey Robinson, ‘The Power of Sound: “The Unremitting Voice of Nightly Streams” ’, Wordsworth Circle 23.3 (1992), 176–​9 (p. 177).

650   Kirsteen McCue and word, sound and feeling, were also being explored within the sphere of contemporary musical aesthetics. The sources of the ‘simple’ and ‘natural’ were a recurrent topic in this inquiry, as was the relationship between the natural and the artificial. Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau, in his influential Dictionnaire de musique (1767), had claimed that vocal music was more natural than instrumental music, and that ‘a song is said to be natural when it is effortless, sweet, graceful and uncomplicated’. Under the term ‘Unité de mélodie’, he explained that ‘the pleasure that springs from melody and song is a pleasure of interest and feeling that speaks to the heart’.31 By the 1790s, musicians were actively exploiting the emotional associations of sounds, and the connections made by listeners between particular feelings and certain kinds of melody or the keys in which music was composed.32 Jessica Quillin’s study of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s musico-​poetics maps his awareness of contemporary aesthetic debates and analyses the process by which he draws on these ideas in his poems and in prose works such as A Defence of Poetry.33 She also illustrates the importance of musical performance and social music-​making in Shelley’s work. The singing of Claire Clairmont, Sophia Stacey, Maria Gisborne, and Jane Williams inspired several of Shelley’s finest lyrics. One of them, the posthumously published poem ‘To Jane’, written in 1822, describes how the notes of her guitar only become ‘music’ when sung, and how Jane’s voice is what gives the music ‘soul’: The keen stars were twinkling And the fair moon was rising among them, Dear Jane. The guitar was tinkling But the notes were not sweet ‘till you sung them Again.—​ As the moon’s soft splendour O’er the faint cold starlight of Heaven Is thrown—​ So your voice most tender To the strings without soul had then given Its own.34

31   Quoted in Peter Le Huray and James Day (eds), Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-​ Nineteenth Centuries, abridged edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 89, 93. 32  Leslie David Blasius, ‘The Mechanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Romantic Musical Experience’, in Ian Bent (ed.), Music Theory and the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 33  Jessica K. Quillin, Shelley and the Musico-​Poetics of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). See also Jean L. De Palacio, ‘Music and Musical Themes in Shelley’s Poetry’, Modern Language Review 59.3 (1964), 345–​59. 34  ‘To Jane’, lines 1–​12, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). There were several later musical settings of this ariette, or elements of it, by composers including Edward Elgar, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Roger Quilter, and Ned Rorem.

The Culture of Song    651 In sending this poem to Jane Williams, Shelley adds a note describing it as ‘some words for an ariette’, a term which means ‘little aria’ or air; ‘aria’ is the term for a song usually performed by a solo voice.35 His use of the diminutive form underlines the special intimacy of the poem. Shelley’s lyric artistry here relies on mimetic sound effects, and words such as ‘twinkling’ and ‘tinkling’ reveal just how much of the guitar’s music is present before the singer sings. Jane’s singing then connects the sounds of the plucking guitar strings to the narrator’s emotions and consequently to his sense of his own place in the world. In the second and final verse, he emphasizes further the enchanting effects of the melody and claims that only the singer has the power to transport the listener to ‘some world far from ours, | Where music and moonlight and feeling | Are one’ (lines 22–​4). The impact of her performance allows him to forge a link between melody and emotion—​her singing, in Rousseau’s terms, ‘speaks to the heart’. As Paul Vatalaro has suggested, Shelley’s poems for Jane are intended not only to arouse her affection for him, but also to capture ‘the aural moment’ of his ‘enchantment’ with her: the hypnotic spell that her fine singing casts over him as a listener.36 While responding to the vogue for printed collections, Romantic poets were also inspired by the live songs they heard around them. Robert Burns, John Clare, Thomas Moore, James Hogg, and the ‘Welsh Bard’ Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) all traced their love of song back to their mothers’ or grandmothers’ singing voices and to hearing songs sung in the home during their childhood.37 Shelley was influenced by the singing of Jane Williams and others and by musical soirées with Leigh Hunt and his circle: besides William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and John Keats, the circle included the musical entrepreneur Vincent Novello, founder of the famous music-​publishing business.38 Byron’s friendship with the Jewish tenor John Braham, one of the celebrity singers of his day, and the Jewish composer Isaac Nathan led to his Hebrew Melodies (1815). Blake is another interesting case. Evidence of his musical interest in song is connected with his visits around 1784 to the house of the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew and his bluestocking wife Harriet in Rathbone Place in London. One of those present at the gatherings later recalled Blake reading and singing his poems (presumably the early lyrics and songs of Poetical Sketches) while everyone listened ‘with profound silence’.39 Most Blake criticism understandably points to the visual dimension of his Songs of

35   The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), ii. 437. 36  Paul A. Vatalaro, Shelley’s Music: Fantasy, Authority, and the Object Voice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 111. Shahidha Bari notes that Jane had an interest ‘in therapeutic mesmerism’ and that Shelley’s own interest in mesmerism is expressed in both this poem and ‘The Magnetic Lady’, which forms part of the same lyric sequence: see Bari, ‘Lyrics and Love Poems’, in Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, with Madeleine Callaghan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 282–​3. 37  McCue, ‘ “An Individual Flowering on a Common Stem” ’, 93. 38 Quillin, Shelley and the Musico-​Poetics of Romanticism, 12–​16. 39  John Thomas Smith, A Book for a Rainy Day (1845), 81, in G. E. Bentley, Jnr (ed.), William Blake: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 48.

652   Kirsteen McCue Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), but Peter Ackroyd has also emphasized the musical contexts of Blake’s creations, from the street singers with their often bawdy broadside ballads to the emotionally expressive arias by Handel and his contemporaries.40 Blake’s familiarity with contemporary song collections is further demonstrated by his illustrations for Ritson’s Select Collection of English Songs (1783), and it is significant that his ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence is about the sounds of songs. In this subtle pastoral lyric, Blake persuades his reader to make a direct correlation between seeing and hearing the poems, and between reading and listening. The pipe which sounds his songs in turn becomes the ‘rural pen’ which will notate them; children, through reading songs, or hearing them read, can once again listen to them. Popular song incorporated all aspects of life experience:  from contemporary politics, poverty, and disease to the woes and pleasures of love, which included all aspects of sexual activity. The traditional culture of street singing and broadside print continued unabated in this period, and the increasing involvement of all social classes in theatrical and other forms of public entertainment such as pleasure gardens led to a new genre of printed popular song, illustrated by the careers of singers such as Dora Jordan and Mary Robinson.41 The large number of song-​sheets published in the British Isles between 1800 and the 1840s demonstrates what cultural historians call the ‘commercialism, craftsmanship and consumption’ that characterized British music at this time.42 A full study of this material is still required, but what is clear is that publishers saw as their chief market the growing middle-​class audience with pianos in their drawing-​rooms or parlours and daughters and sons who could play and sing. Publishers also saw how keen this market was on popular songs from ballad operas and shows, on songs which presented idealized visions of rural life (pastoral love songs in particular), and on songs which built a sense of national pride or patriotism. Historical circumstances are a key factor in this, and the rise of the genre of ‘national song’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is intimately connected with the constitutional and social changes that Linda Colley has explored in her work on the forging of the British nation.43 National song was typically presented in large, opulent collections of songs from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as in numerous off-​prints of individual songs. Carl Dalhaus has noted that ‘One of the characteristic claims of the nineteenth century is that for individuality to be truly original it must be rooted in the “national spirit”.’44 His comment on composers of this period also applies 40 

Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Vintage, 1999), 142–​3. See Claire Tomalin, Mrs Jordan’s Profession: The Actress and the Prince (London: Knopf, 1995); and Paula Byrne, Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (London: Harper Collins, 2004). 42  Cyril Ehrlich and Simon McVeigh, ‘Music’, in Iain McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–​1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 242. See also Nicholas Temperley (ed.), The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, vol. 5: The Romantic Age 1800–​1914 (1981; Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 43  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–​1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 44  Carl Dalhaus, Nineteenth-​Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 37. 41 

The Culture of Song    653 to the Romantic writers who provided texts for the national collections. Indeed, several of the writers became feted as national bards precisely because of their involvement in these big national projects: Robert Burns in Scotland, Thomas Moore in Ireland, Felicia Hemans in Wales, and Charles Dibdin in England. Both their contemporary reputation and the longevity of their songs in print throughout the nineteenth century are testament to their broad popular appeal, not only among the public at home, but also in the growing expatriate communities in Britain’s burgeoning empire, where ideas of nationhood thrived. The widely used term ‘national song’ (which predates the more specialized term ‘national anthem’, first used in 1807) appears to originate in Ritson’s ‘Historical Essay’ of 1783, quoted earlier. However, as is the case with so many of the terms associated with song culture, it is difficult to find a satisfactory working definition. By the 1840s, ‘national song’ had been largely superseded by the term ‘folksong’ (German Volkslieder), which was ostensibly another word for the same genre. The apparent continuity is misleading, however, because in many cases national songs were at least once removed from an ethnic culture considered to be at the core of the term ‘folksong’. As Matthew Gelbart has pointed out, the term ‘folk music’ was ‘the creation of a generation’ who leant heavily on Rousseau, on cultural tourism, and, in particular, on the European reception of Ossian.45 British Romantic writers who worked with such songs bought into this sense of their own ‘national spirit’, but in a variety of different ways. Some songs by Burns, Hogg, and Clare were close to an ethnic oral culture: on occasion they gave accounts of listening to and notating songs from ‘the field’, which can be borne out by other oral testimony or written evidence. In the case of Burns and Hogg, they were also inspired by the idea of a national song project and acutely aware of the importance of the preservation of extant materials, seeing themselves as key players in this process, while also contributing new songs of their own. Moore’s Irish Melodies were mostly new compositions, but with strong connections to an existing national musical culture (his novel use of the term ‘melody’ for a type of poem underlines this connection). Many of the actual melodies with which Moore’s verbal texts were matched were those which had been notated by Edward Bunting at the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792. This gathering brought together a group of old harpers, and Bunting’s work as an amanuensis was pivotal in establishing a record of these traditional tunes at a particularly important moment in the nation’s history. Moore was introduced to the melodies by his radical friend Robert Emmett, later a leader of the United Irishmen, when they were students together in Dublin in the mid-​1790s. The songs of Felicia Hemans were marketed as translations from the Welsh, though the relation to their sources is more complex:46 as with Moore,

45 

Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 106–​7. 46  William D. Brewer, ‘Felicia Hemans, Byronic Cosmopolitanism and the Ancient Welsh Bards’, in English Romanticism and the Celtic World, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 170–​1.

654   Kirsteen McCue the lyrics were set to melodies that were presented as traditional Welsh tunes which had been shared through festival or eisteddfod performances.47 The foregrounding of elements peculiar to Scots, Irish, or Welsh tradition was commonplace. But strong political or linguistic differences caused some concerns for both editors and lyricists. The inclusion of Jacobite songs presented a wide range of editorial problems for Burns, Hogg, and their editors, sometimes resulting in an emasculation of the cause by packaging songs with a certain nostalgic sentimentalism. Highland song, and latterly Gaelic song, could also present difficulties—​not all editors had the confidence to publish Gaelic texts—​but here the precedent of Macpherson’s Ossian, and its commercial success, provided a useful editorial lever.48 Moore chose a nuanced and mythical route to deal with Irish history while distancing himself from recent bloodshed. His lyrics for Irish Melodies gesture to a time gone by with their nostalgic and often sensual visions of bard and nation.49 Indeed, it was what was not said that gave the Irish Melodies much of their distinctive power: the success of the songs hinges in part on the paradoxical experience the listener has of hearing Bunting’s Irish tunes alongside lyrics about silent or broken harps. Hemans and her fellow Welsh lyricists (some of whom had deeper knowledge of Welsh linguistic and cultural traditions than she possessed) chose also to focus on the past—​the heritage of the ancient bards and minstrels—​in order to voice the present. Again, the balance between antiquity and modernity is about much more than simply the old versus the new or the real versus the false. The figure of the bard or minstrel, established much earlier in the eighteenth century, now appeared in a new guise. Moore was packaged as the ‘Bard of Erin’, the nationalist antiquary who was, in Katie Trumpener’s words, the ‘mouthpiece for the whole society, articulating its values, chronicling its history and mourning the inconsolable tragedy of its collapse’.50 But he also quickly became the ‘Irish Minstrel’—​the ‘inspired, isolated and peripatetic figure’ who interested the English poets. National song in these contexts represented, as Trumpener notes, ‘the displacement of political anger into cultural expression’.51 It found a particularly interesting figure in Moore, whose own skills as a performer played a crucial part in the success of the Irish Melodies project. Burns also quickly became the Scottish nation’s Bard, yet rather than producing long balladic tales of a kind that Scott was later to specialize in, Burns’s contribution was as a creator of short emotive lyrics, expressing a wide range of national experience, social, historical,

47  Prys Morgan, ‘From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See also Mary-​Ann Constantine, Chapter 8 in this volume. 48  A notable exception was Alexander Campbell in his two-​volume Albyn’s Anthology of 1816 and 1818: see my introduction to James Hogg, Contributions to Musical Collections and Miscellaneous Songs, ed. Kirsteen McCue (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 5–​9. 49   Leith Davis, Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity 1724–​ 1874 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 50   Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 6. 51 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 11.

The Culture of Song    655 and aesthetic. Inspired by Burns, the Ulster-​Scots tradition is likewise full of Bards from their own local areas, notably James Orr, Bard of Ballycarry, and Samuel Thomson, Bard of Carngranny.52 Orr, like Burns, wrote lyrics to match well-​known tunes. Large national song projects, involving writers such as Burns, Moore, Byron, Scott, and Hemans, were a vital part of the cultural landscape of late Georgian Britain. The ‘feel’ of these collections differed depending on the relationship of their chosen nation (historical and contemporary) with their muscular colonizer, and on the political affiliations of their editors. Burns’s two song collections—​James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (1787–​1803) and George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793–​1846)—​shared some editorial processes, but Johnson’s can be seen essentially as a Scottish project created by Scots for Scots, whereas Thomson’s reveals more of a concern with a broader British clientele. Thomson published the work of around thirty living writers, men and women from across the British Isles. Partly inspired by Thomson’s Select Collection, the Irish Melodies project (1807–​34), which was masterminded by the Power brothers (William, based in Dublin, and James, based in London), enabled Thomas Moore to parade his Irishness to a British (and later an international) audience. A Selection of Welsh Melodies (1822), for which Felicia Hemans produced lyrics and the Welsh musician John Parry created the musical settings, was also, interestingly, published by James Power in London. The fact that translations of Welsh texts were included shows that its intended audience was not exclusively Welsh-​speaking. But, before this, Parry had also provided musical settings for The Beauties of Caledonia; Being a Selection of the Most Popular Scottish Songs, published in London around 1815. A similar versatility is displayed in Hemans’s National Lyrics, and Songs for Music (1834), which contained lyrics for Spanish war songs as well as songs from Greece, Italy, France, Germany, and England. Even Ritson’s essay on ‘National Song’ had emphasized that the culture of song was as much about transnationality as it was about nation: Ritson discusses the song traditions of Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal before he turns his attention to the Celts (in which he includes Iceland) and the Saxons, finally settling, for the last few pages of his long essay, on the poetic song traditions of England. The songs of Charles Dibdin, by contrast, appear to encapsulate an exclusively English social and bacchanalian song culture.53 Dibdin, a songwriter, singer, dramatist, and actor who worked mostly in the theatre, was particularly celebrated for his sea songs and ballads, which contributed to the sense of national pride in Britain’s naval power, not to mention her success in acquiring new lands for her growing Empire. His long career, dating back to the 1760s, received a notable boost in 1803 when, following

52 

Frank Ferguson and Andrew R. Holmes (eds), Revising Robert Burns and Ulster: Literature, Religion and Politics, c.1770–​1920 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). Carol Baraniuk, James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). 53  George Hogarth (ed.), The Songs of Charles Dibdin, Chronologically Arranged, with Notes Historical, Biographical, and Critical (London: How and Parsons, 1842). See also Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 348–​59; and Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley, and Ian Newman (eds), Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

656   Kirsteen McCue the resumption of war against Napoleonic France, he was commissioned by Addington’s government to produce each month a patriotic song suitable for ships, camp, and home. His resulting British War Songs (1803–​4) and theatrical entertainment Britons Strike Home (1803) mark a high point of Romantic-​era musical propaganda. Dibdin was rewarded for his efforts with a government pension of £200.54 The musicologist Alfred Einstein has drawn attention to the paradox whereby Romantic composers enjoyed a new-​found cultural emancipation and creative freedom while at the same time being impeded by having to toe the line of their own nationality.55 Acknowledging this paradox, Dalhaus has explained that composers were always looking for their original voices to be enjoyed and understood universally, and that their sense of national spirit could be and indeed was appreciated in these terms.56 As Sydney Smith said of Thomas Moore: ‘I swear that I had rather hear you sing than any person I ever heard in my life, male or female—​for, what is your singing but beautiful poetry floating in fine music & guided by exquisite feeling?’57 As well as being a checklist for ideas of song in the Romantic period, Clare’s ‘Songs Eternity’ signals the crucial characteristic which allows song to rise above all other poetic media—​namely, its oral and aural dimension. ‘Crowds and citys pass away’, states Clare; natural seasons, and natural disasters (like the Flood), come and go. ‘Books are writ and books are read’, but they will all decompose with those who wrote them (lines 23–​5). Inviting his readers to ‘come and see’ what he means by ‘songs eternity’, he leaves them in no doubt that song, able to transcend decay, is the one continuity.

Further Reading Connell, Philip, and Nigel Leask (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Crawford, Thomas, Society and the Lyric: A Study of the Song Culture of Eighteenth-​Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979). Davis, Leith, Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity 1724–​1874 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). Deacon, George, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London: Sinclair Browne, 1983). Gelbart, Matthew, The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’:  Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Harker, Dave, Fakesong: The Manufacturing of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985). Hunt, Una, Sources and Style in Moore’s Irish Melodies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 54 

As noted by Jon A. Gillaspie, ‘Dibdin, Charles’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, at:  www.oxforddnb.com. For the broader culture of military song, see Oskar Cox Jensen, Napoleon and British Song, 1797–​1822 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 55  Alfred Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era (New York: Norton, 1947), 18. 56 Dalhaus, Nineteenth-​Century Music, 35–​41. 57  Wilfred S. Dowden (ed.), The Journal of Thomas Moore, 6 vols (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983–​91), iv. 1412.

The Culture of Song    657 Jensen, Oskar Cox, David Kennerley, and Ian Newman (eds), Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Le Huray, Peter, and James Day (eds), Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-​ Nineteenth Centuries, abridged edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). McCue, Kirsteen, ‘ “An Individual Flowering on a Common Stem”: Melody, Performance and National Song’, in Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). McLane, Maureen N., Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Newman, Steve, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon:  The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Quillin, Jessica K., Shelley and the Musico-​Poetics of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Simpson, Erik, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–​1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Weliver, Phyllis (ed.), The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-​Century British Poetry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005).

Pa rt  X

I M P ORT S A N D E X P ORT S

Chapter 42

T he Grec o-​R oma n Rev i va l Nicholas Halmi

In memory of Stephanie Dumke

To speak of a ‘Greco-​Roman revival’ in the Romantic period is in one sense misleading, for at no time since the seventeenth century had classical literature ceased to be read and translated in Britain, or classically styled architecture ceased to be built. When Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry (written 1821), extolled ‘the revival of the study of Greek literature’ as essential to the moral development of the modern world, he was referring to Renaissance humanism, a movement that had indeed conceived itself as restoring classical culture.1 And the syncretic mixture of classical and nonclassical elements present in Romantic poems such as Keats’s Lamia (1820) and Shelley’s own Prometheus Unbound (1820) has ample precedents in the English Renaissance: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–​6), to cite an obvious example, freely combines classical with biblical, chivalric, and historical materials. What, then, was distinctive about the Romantic relation to classical antiquity? If the classical tradition had already been revived in the Renaissance, how could it be re-​revived in the eighteenth century? In trying to answer these questions, this chapter will attend to the visual arts, particularly architecture, as well as to literature of the Romantic period. While older types of relation to classical antiquity, such as translation and allusion, remained viable, the three to be considered in this chapter derived from an historically conscious sense of modernity and together constituted not a revival, strictly speaking, but a Romantic reconstitution of the classical. These relations are historical investigation, stylistic imitation, and multifaceted ironization. In their explicit engagement with or reference to classical antiquity, these relations differ from the radically declassicizing transformations of such poetic forms as the georgic, which lost its generic distinctiveness in the period, and the Wordsworthian pastoral, in which the shepherds are real and the conditions of rural life are not idealized.2 1  Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2001), 509–​35 (p. 530). All quotations of Shelley’s works are from this edition unless otherwise stated. 2  See Roman Heinzelman, ‘Roman Georgic in the Georgian Age: A Theory of Romantic Genre’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991), 182–​214; Fiona Stafford, ‘Plain Living and Ungarnish’d Stories: Wordsworth and the Survival of Pastoral’, Review of English Studies 59 (2007), 118–​33.

662   Nicholas Halmi Romantic classicism, unlike that of earlier times, indeed into the eighteenth century, could not assume the normativity of ancient Greek and (to a greater extent) Roman artistic and intellectual achievements. By normativity I do not mean that classical works—​ whether the Colosseum as an exemplar of superposed orders or the Aeneid as an exemplar of epic—​had been minutely copied by early modern artists. On the contrary, the classical canon, even as codified by a succession of humanist theorists, had defined a range of possibilities that could be adapted to serve contemporary purposes, not least in vernacular languages. Classical literature and art had been admired not for their antiquity as such but for their supposed embodiment of universally and transhistorically valid aesthetic principles: ‘Nature and Homer were . . . the same.’3 Normativity in this sense, as the realization or approximation of a definable ideal, had allowed artists to appropriate classical models even in order to contest or surpass them, as Milton did in composing a martial epic of a ‘higher Argument’ than the Iliad and Aeneid (Paradise Lost, Book 9, line 42). To consider in detail how the classical began to lose its long-​standing aesthetic, and more generally cultural, authority in eighteenth-​century Britain lies beyond the scope of this chapter. But the manifestations of this long process included the disappearance of spoken Latin at Oxford and Cambridge; the revaluation of older vernacular writers (for example, Thomas Warton’s praise of Chaucer in the Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser [1754]) and promotion of vernacular artistic traditions (English, Scottish) as supplementary or even equal to the classical; the contestation of classical or allegedly classical standards of artistic decorum (as in Samuel Johnson’s critique, in Rambler no. 156, of a rigid adherence to the dramatic unities); the transition from a rationalist, prescriptive poetics derived from classical treatises and exemplars to an affective, descriptive aesthetics grounded in Lockean psychology (such as Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers on imagination [1712] and Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the sublime and beautiful [1757]); the incorporation of the new aesthetics into Scottish university curricula by Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and others; and the development of popular literary forms without direct classical antecedents (notably the bourgeois novel and Gothic literature). Although grammar-​school curricula remained centred on Latin and Greek language and literature into the nineteenth century, a literary apprenticeship was less likely at the end of the eighteenth century than at the beginning to consist of translating or paraphrasing extracts from classical poems. And after 1749, the year Johnson published ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated’, ‘no major English poem of the century overtly derives from a Roman model’.4

3  Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), line 135, in Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (London: Methuen, 1961), 255. 4  James Engell, Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 83; cf. J. Paul Hunter, ‘Politics, Satire, Didactic and Lyric Poetry (I)’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature 1660–​1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 182.

The Greco-Roman Revival    663 A crucial factor in the changing cultural status of classical antiquity in the eighteenth century was the emergence of an historical consciousness which, differentiating modernity radically from past ages, questioned the traditional assumption of the exemplarity of the past, whether aesthetic or political, in relation to the present.5 In the early eighteenth century it was common for Whigs and Tories alike to justify their positions by reference to Republican Rome, because they understood the basic patterns of history to be finite and repeatable. But when Burke, in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), invoked Catiline’s conspiracy against the Republican government, his admonitory rhetoric was contradicted by his emphasis on the particularity of English history and the singularity of the French Revolution.6 Antiquity can teach no lessons about an event with no precedent. Dr Johnson had no patience for an elegiac reverence of the past: ‘I am always angry’, he told Boswell in 1783, ‘when I hear ancient times praised at the expence of modern times.’7 But the attitude he deplored emerged precisely out of the recognition of modernity’s discontinuity with antiquity. If history consists not in a repetition of the essentially similar but in a succession of unique events in distinct contexts, then it must entail irrevocable losses as well as undeniable gains. Unsurprisingly, Enlightenment narratives of progress generated counter-​narratives of nostalgia, which valorized the past as such. Whereas tradition had formerly been conceived as the temporal transmission of timeless cultural values and standards, it now began to be understood as a repository of historical artefacts—​a powerful but alien presence in modern life, like the ruins of the Roman Forum among the grazing cattle of the Campo Vaccino in eighteenth-​century Rome. The so-​called classical revival of the second half of the eighteenth century is therefore intimately related to the strand of primitivist thought that developed during the Restoration and the first half of the eighteenth century. Idealizing ‘simpler’ ways of life—​ closer to the state of nature, whatever that was imagined to be—​than those of contemporary Europe, this primitivism celebrated both the temporally and the geographically distant, ancient bard and South Sea Islander. The characteristic expression of primitivism in literary criticism was the lament that modern poetry, for all its sophistication and elegance, inevitably lacked the imaginative freedom and expressive vigour of older poetry: ‘As the world advances, the understanding gains ground upon the imagination; the understanding is more exercised; the imagination, less.’8 Identifying emotional and

5  See further Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne, 1995), chs. 1–​3; David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 4; and cf. Joseph Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), ch. 8. 6  See J. W. Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-​Classical Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 95–​105; Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-​Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24, 49–​51; and, on Burke, Jonathan Sachs, Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–​1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 52–​65. 7  Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 2nd edn, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–​64), iv. 217. 8  Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (London, 1763), 2, 3.

664   Nicholas Halmi linguistic authenticity with ‘[l]‌ow and rustic life’ in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth was an heir to the geographical and social variant of this primitivism.9 Although too complex to be considered in detail here, the connection between Enlightenment primitivism and an emergent historicizing classicism can be observed in the early writings of two classicists: the Aberdeen schoolmaster Thomas Blackwell, and the German antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the posthumous influence of both of whom extended through the eighteenth century. As he explained in his Letters concerning Mythology (1748), Blackwell had offered in his earlier Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) an historical explanation of an aesthetic axiom: ‘By what means did Homer become a greater Poet, than either anyone, known to us, ever was before him, or than any who has appeared since his Time?’10 Attributing Homer’s genius to a unique concatenation of conditions—​‘the happiest Climate, the most natural Manners, the boldest Language, and most expressive Religion’—​Blackwell in effect, and perhaps without meaning to, refuted the unhistorical universalist premises on which a normative classicism rested. His Homer cannot be emulated because he is unsurpassable, and should not be imitated because attempts to do so merely reveal their own inferiority to the original.11 The lesson to modern poets in Blackwell’s exaltation of Homer was therefore twofold: first, that the conditions conducive to the greatest poetry were historically specific and irreproducible; and second, that the best poetry achievable in any given time and place will be grounded in the native culture and written in the vernacular language. Small wonder, then, that poems based on classical mythology proved far less popular in the eighteenth century than in the Renaissance, the exceptionalism of Mark Akenside’s Hymn to the Naiads (1758) in this respect betrayed by the author’s posthumously published notes (1772) explaining the mythological references. On the other hand, the revival of poetic interest in ballads in the eighteenth century was a logical counterpart to the primitivist revaluation of Homer; and insofar as the Lyrical Ballads embody, or at least were claimed to embody, the same authenticity of feeling and directness of expression attributed to Homer, they ‘could very well be seen as exemplifying a kind of classicism, albeit a classicism of a different sort from what we normally associate with the term’.12 Blackwell’s work fell into neglect after the eighteenth century, owing partly to its manifest deficiencies as historical scholarship. But it was influential during that century, no less on the Continent than in Britain, because it simultaneously dissociated classical and vernacular cultures historically, affirming the independent value of the latter by insisting on the distinctiveness of the former, and associated them anthropologically, identifying the factors formative of ‘original genius’. Blackwell thus contributed on the one hand 9 

Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York: Norton, 2013), 78. Thomas Blackwell, Letters Concerning Mythology (London, 1748), 36. 11  Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735), 334, 32–​3. 12  Bruce Graver, ‘Classical Inheritances’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 41. 10 

The Greco-Roman Revival    665 to the study of ancient Greece in its historicity, and on the other hand to speculation on ‘primitive’ cultures in general—​even if other contemporaries, such as the Hebraist Robert Lowth, the antiquary Thomas Percy, and the aesthetician William Duff were far more interested in the latter subject than Blackwell himself was.13 All primitive states were historically incommensurable with the present, and anthropologically analogous to one another. Thus, from neither perspective—​the historical or the anthropological—​ could classical antiquity sustain a claim to normativity, as Richard Hurd recognized when he enumerated the parallels between Greek and chivalric literature in order to vindicate study of the latter: ‘what are the Grecian Bacchus and Hercules, but Knights-​ errant, the exact counter-​parts of Sir Launcelot and Amadis de Gaule?’14 It was in the face of the theoretical equivalence of all manifestations of antiquity (not only classical) that Winckelmann in 1755 emphatically asserted the superiority of Greek art as the representation of ideal beauty.15 Yet Winckelmann compromised his claim for the paradigmatic value of Greek art by explaining that art as the product of historically and geographically specific conditions. Inspired by the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who declared Greece the fons et origo of all arts and sciences, and by Blackwell, who seemed to demonstrate philologically Homer’s absolute originality, Winckelmann articulated a neoclassical aesthetic that was at once highly individual in its homoerotically charged descriptive power and entirely characteristic of its period in its ambivalent accommodation of historical temporality.16 Winckelmann’s famous declaration at the outset of his Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, ‘There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients’, has been interpreted variously as a call for cultural renewal or an instruction to replicate Greek art.17 But in any event, the primitivist classicism epitomized (though hardly inaugurated) by Winckelmann licensed the investigation of antiquity as an historical artefact, and such investigation in turn facilitated the increasingly accurate imitation of classical forms. Historical reconstruction and artistic reproduction thus became the principal modes of contending with the historicity of the past, and as such were mutually supportive. Examples of 13 

On Blackwell’s influence, see Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-​Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688–​1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 8; Engell, Forming the Critical Mind, 76–​92, 97–​100; and Robert Folkenflik, ‘Folklore, Scholarship and High Literary Culture’, in Richetti, Cambridge History, 1660–​1780. 14  ‘Letters on Chivalry and Romance’, in Richard Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues; with Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London, 1765), iii. 229. 15  Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755), trans. Henry Fuseli, 2nd edn (London, 1767), 12. First published privately in 1765, Fuseli’s translation reached a wider audience in its second edition, while an anonymous translation was published in Glasgow in 1766. 16  See Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London, 1714), iii. 137–​41. On Winckelmann’s reading of Shaftesbury and Blackwell, see Élisabeth Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Enquête sur la genèse de l’histoire de l’art (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 141–​6. 17 Winckelmann, Reflections, 4.

666   Nicholas Halmi investigation include accounts of the Roman Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and Ruins of Balbec (1757) by Robert Wood, the measured drawing of Athenian monuments by James Stuart and Charles Revett under the auspices of the Society of Dilettanti (1751–​5, published 1762–​1816), and the engravings of the recently ‘rediscovered’ Greek temples at Paestum by Thomas Major (1768) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1778). Examples of historically informed imitation include Lord Burlington’s strict adherence to Vitruvian proportions in the York Assembly Rooms (1731–​2), James Wyatt’s adaptation of the Athenian Tower of the Winds for the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford (1776–​94), Joseph Nolleken’s miniaturization of the Athenian Monument of Lysicrates for a funerary monument in Ripon Cathedral (1789), and William Wilkins’s imposition of a temple front copied from the Athenian Hephaisteion on a country house in Hampshire (1809).18 Jonathan Sachs and others have recently, and rightly, reminded us that the Romantic interest in classical culture was not a zero-​sum game in which increasing attention to Greece necessitated decreasing attention to Rome. On the contrary; as Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764) demonstrates, the revaluation of Greece occurred within a context of increasing attentiveness to historical distinctions between Greek and Roman antiquity and within each.19 The defining characteristic of the classical revival in the arts of the Romantic period was therefore not a specific conviction of the pre-​eminence of either Greece or Rome, but rather a general association of aesthetic value with the historicity of the past. Once historicity was abstracted as form, the actual choice of historical source mattered less than the recognizable faithfulness of the reproduction to that source. A formally accurate but superficial historical evocativeness substituted for a more profound but no longer easily sustainable sense of historical continuity. But just as classicism in the period is not reducible to Hellenism, so historicism is not reducible to classicism, for the historical scrutiny directed at classical antiquity was also directed at other distant pasts: Egyptian, German, English, Scottish, Welsh, etc. And the expanded scope of historical studies in the later eighteenth century enabled a proliferation of historically referential artistic styles. Since the distinctions among them were purely formal, the styles themselves were functionally identical as expressions of the historical in general. From this perspective, the sculptor John Flaxman’s devotion to Gothic sculpture and architecture appears perfectly consistent with his classicism.20 Analogously, Keats was equally capable of writing poems in classical and Gothic modes (‘Hyperion’, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’), and it is only too appropriate that he dedicated his neoclassical romance Endymion to an eighteenth-​century writer of pseudo-​medieval poems, Thomas Chatterton. 18 

Dora Wieberson, Sources of Greek Revival Architecture (London: Zwemmer, 1969), ch. 5; David Watkin, ‘Stuart and Revett: The Myth of Greece and Its Afterlife’, in Susan Weber (ed.), James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, 1713–​1788 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 19  Jonathan Sachs, ‘Republicanism: Ancient Rome and Literary Modernity in British Romanticism’, in Timothy Saunders, Charles Martindale, Ralph Pite, and Mathilde Skoie (eds), Romans and Romantics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 36–​8. 20  On Flaxman’s interest in the Gothic, see David Irwin, English Neoclassical Art: Studies in Inspiration and Taste (London: Faber, 1966), 87–​94.

The Greco-Roman Revival    667 Style as such being reproducible, the aestheticization of history made the distinction between original and copy largely irrelevant. The amateur engraver George Cumberland criticized Wilhelm Tischbein not for assuming that he could represent antique vases so accurately ‘that Artists may study these Outlines with as much satisfaction as if they had the originals before them’, but for failing to achieve that goal. And when Blake informed a correspondent in 1798 that his life’s purpose was ‘to renew the lost Art of the Greeks’, he was evidently referring to the ‘mathematical’ outline style of drawing and engraving promoted by Cumberland as being more faithful to antique designs than outlines of varying thickness.21 To a considerable extent, particularly in architecture, the empirical sources of neoclassical design were themselves reproductions—​and in the case of engravings, reproductions of reproductions (i.e., of drawings of the original structures). More strikingly, casts and copies of ancient sculptures, widely used in artistic training since the end of the seventeenth century, became fashionable artworks in their own right in the eighteenth century, to be displayed alongside or as substitutes for actual antiquities. Aristocratic collectors such as the Earl of Leicester and the Duke of Northumberland vied to assemble the most impressive collection of copies; and when the Westmorland, laden with purchases by milordi inglesi from their Grand Tours, was intercepted by French warships in November 1779 and relieved of its cargo, it contained few genuine antiquities but many copies in marble and alabaster, as well as forty volumes of Piranesi’s etchings.22 But classical style was disseminated more widely through domestically manufactured reproductions such as Josiah Wedgwood’s ‘Etruscan’ and jasperware pottery, patterned after illustrations of Sir William Hamilton’s first collection of antique vases.23 Appealing cannily to a growing consumer market for luxury goods, Wedgwood realized Hamilton’s vision of reviving classical taste by domesticating and commodifying it. Thus, the popular success of neoclassical design was no less owing to the socio-​economic conditions of eighteenth-​century Britain—​increasingly industrialized methods of manufacture and a growing haute bourgeoisie anxious to demonstrate

21 

George Cumberland, Thoughts on Outline, Sculpture, and the System that Guided the Ancient Artists in Composing Their Figures and Groupes (London, 1796), 16–​17, referring to Tischbein’s Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases . . . now in the Possession of Sir William Hamilton (London, 1791); Blake to Rev. John Trusler, 16 Aug. 1798, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 701. Later, in his engraved poem Milton (1804), Blake declared an antipathy to classical authority: ‘We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations’ (plate 1; Complete Poetry and Prose, 95). 22  Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–​1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), ch. 5; Jonathan Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 73–​82; Jonathan Yorker and Clare Hornsby, ‘Buying Art in Rome in the 1770s’, in María Dolores Sánchez-​Jáuregui and Scott Wilcox (eds), The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmorland, an Episode of the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 23  Pierre François Hughes d’Hancarville (ed.), Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Honble. Wm. Hamilton (Naples, 1766–​7), i, p. xviii. On Wedgwood’s entrepreneurialism, see Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 1550–​1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 220–​5.

668   Nicholas Halmi its cultural respectability—​than the greatness of Greek art had been owing to the socio-​ political conditions of Periclean Athens. Literature naturally did not allow for imitation of the same kind as the visual arts, for even its most derivative modes of relation to classical works—​translation and description—​entailed some kind of creative transformation, either between languages or between a visual medium and a verbal one. And however enthusiastically Winckelmann embraced ekphrasis as the means of possessing classical art aesthetically while displacing it temporally into the historical past, British Romantic poets were less inclined to incorporate descriptions of classical art into their poems. The most famous ekphrastic poem in English, Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820), not only describes a fictive urn, the obscurity of whose details the speaker emphasizes with repeated questions—​‘What leaf-​ fring’d legend haunts about thy shape | Of deities or mortals, or of both, | In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?’—​but it removes that urn even from its fictive historicity, reconstituting it in the poem’s closing lines as a purely aesthetic object. Addressed as an historical artefact, the urn remains silent, confirming the insuperable alterity of antiquity. Only when imaginatively projected into the future and thus freed from temporal fixity—​‘When old age shall this generation waste, | Thou shalt remain’—​does the urn acquire a voice, ventriloquizing for its beholder the aesthetic effacement of history: ‘ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—​that is all | Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’24 That to accomplish this effacement Keats required an imaginary ancient urn is a conclusion reinforced by the two sonnets he addressed to the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon in response to viewing the Parthenon Marbles in March 1817, eight months after they had been acquired from Lord Elgin by the British government. In contrast to Haydon, who praised the marbles and spent many hours sketching them, Keats more nearly averted his gaze from them: the sonnets narrate his refusal of ekphrasis.25 ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ reacts to the sculptures not as aesthetic but precisely as historical objects, the age of which provokes melancholy reflection on the speaker’s own mortality. Without referring directly to the sculptures at all except in its title, ‘To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ records the range of critical verdicts on them, from ‘freak’ to ‘most divine’ (lines 8, 11), and gently chides Haydon’s idolatry. It was Byron who, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), had ridiculed Lord Elgin for despoiling the Parthenon of its ‘Phidian freaks’ in the service of a consumer classicism:  ‘their grand saloons a general mart | For all the mutilated

24 

‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, lines 5–​7 (my emphases), 46–​7, 49–​50, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). All quotations of Keats’s poetry are from this edition. See also A. W. Phinney, ‘Keats in the Museum: Between Aesthetics and History’, Journal of English and German Philology 90 (1991), 208–​29; Martin Aske, Keats and Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 113–​15; and David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 76–​84. 25  The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. W. B. Pope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–​3), i. 28–​9, 194–​5.

The Greco-Roman Revival    669 blocks of art’.26 And in Canto 4 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), referring to the Hellenistic Venus de’ Medici in the Uffizi Gallery, he resumed this critique of contemporary connoisseurship, rejecting ‘[t]‌he paltry jargon of the marble mart’ in favour of the inarticulate authenticity of immediate apprehension: ‘we have eyes: | Blood,—​ pulse—​and breast, confirm the Dardan Shepherd’s prize’ (stanza 50; cf. stanza 53). Contrasting cold marble with warm feeling and identifying his chosen statues in one way or another with death, Byron insinuates a contradiction between historicity and exemplarity.27 Considered objectively, as historical artefacts, the statues are, however admirable, uninspiring. Only when Byron recreates them subjectively as if they were not statues but living persons, apostrophizing the Venus (stanza 51) and describing the last sensations of the Capitoline Museum’s Dying Gaul (stanzas 140–​1), can they enter into modernity. To the extent that there was a classical revival in British Romantic poetry, it was accomplished less through the ekphrastic appropriation of ancient art than through the narrative reworking of ancient myth. The Enlightenment revaluation of myth as a synoptic expression of mankind’s early history and intellectual formation could be exploited for the purpose of criticizing aspects of modernity. Affirming an anthropological conception of mythic thought as a primitive attempt to comprehend natural forces, the Wanderer of Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) contrasts Greek mythology favourably with modern scientific thought, which views ‘all objects unremittingly | In disconnection dead and spiritless’.28 This rationalist explanation of myth and poetic critique of rationalism found favour with Leigh Hunt, who adduced Wordsworth’s own sonnet ‘The world is too much with us’ (published in 1807) in defence of a poetic rehabilitation of pagan mythology.29 But whereas Wordsworth, in a relatively early example of a Romantic mythological poem, used the Greek myth of the widowed Laodamia’s grief and suicide to preach the timeless virtues of reason, self-​government, and fortitude, Hunt elaborated poetically the stories of ‘Hero and Leander’ and ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ (both 1819), as his friend Keats elaborated those of Cupid and Psyche (in ‘I stood tip-​toe upon a little hill’ [1817]) and Endymion and Diana (in Endymion [1818]), to vindicate sensuous pleasures and love.30 26  English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, lines 1027–​32, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann and Barry Waller, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-​93). All quotations of Byron’s poetry are from this edition. 27  See further James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 124–​34. 28  Book 4, lines 956–​8, in William Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James Butler, and Michael Jaye (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). 29  ‘The Spirit of Ancient Mythology’ (1820), in Leigh Hunt, Selected Writings, gen. eds Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle-​Sinatra, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), ii. 239. 30  Wordsworth, ‘Laodamia’ (1815), in Shorter Poems, 1807–​1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); cf. Virgil, Aeneid VI. 440–​9, in which Laodamia’s appearance is devoid of such moralizing. On the poetic response of Hunt and Keats to The Excursion, see Jeffrey Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 105–​22.

670   Nicholas Halmi In contrast to Renaissance writers such as Spenser, who had had to reconcile their appropriations of pagan mythology with their Christian religion, the ‘Cockney School’ poets sought to emphasize the contrast between the moral attitudes implied in that mythology and those prescribed by Christianity. In that respect Wordsworth’s description of Endymion as ‘a very pretty piece of Paganism’, however intended, was correct.31 That Wordsworth himself, ‘Laodamia’ notwithstanding, preferred English rustics to classical gods must have made the latter all the more appealing to Hunt’s circle. Even so, the explicit use of classical myths and figures in British Romantic poetry was characterized by an awkward self-​consciousness comparable to the anxiousness of Gothic novelists such as Ann Radcliffe that their references to the supernatural not be taken as evidence of their own credulity. To the historicizing literary consciousness of the period, from which the discipline of literary history emerged, the characters and plots of classical myths could not be detached from the obsolete belief-​systems in which they originated as readily as, to visual artists and architects, classical style could be abstracted from ancient artefacts and monuments, despite the fact that the numerous mythological encyclopedias published in the eighteenth century (for instance, Joseph Spence’s Polymetis [1747], Jacob Bryant’s New System, or An Analysis of Ancient Mythology [1774–​6], and John Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary [1788]) made classical sources easily available to those who, like Keats, had not received a grammar school education (although he was taught Latin). Doubtless the echoes of Addison’s warning of the ridiculousness of including classical gods in modern poems still rang in poets’ ears, and the hardening of critical opinion against allegory in the eighteenth century made that means of accommodating classical forms to new contexts and content less attractive than it had been in the Renaissance.32 Mary Tighe’s allegorical romance Psyche (1805), which Keats admired, appropriates the originally allegorical story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius’s second-​century novel The Golden Ass. As if in terror of being thought a pagan suckled on a creed outworn, Wordsworth punctuated his Wanderer’s account of the origin of Greek mythology with references to ‘unenlightened Swains’ and ‘bewildered Pagans’ (Book 4, lines 845, 923). Keats too betrayed an anxiety about anachronism, concluding the preface to Endymion, ‘I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece . . . for I wish to try once more, before I bid it farewell.’ For his part, Hunt defended the Grecian cast of ‘Hero and Leander’, in lines incorporated into the revised version of the poem published in 1832, by implying the arbitrariness of his choice: ‘What matters it how long ago, or where | They liv’d, or whether their young locks of hair, | Like English hyacinths, or Greek, were curled?’33 Adopting the architectural historian Leonardo Benevolo’s distinction between

31  Reported by Haydon to Mary Russell Mitford, 12 Feb. 1824: see Stanley Jones, ‘B. R. Haydon on Some Contemporaries: A New Letter’, Review of English Studies 36 (1975), 183–​9 (p. 189). 32  Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), iv. 361–​4 (no. 523, 30 Oct. 1712). See also Nicholas Halmi, ‘Romanticism, the Temporalization of History, and the Historicization of Form’, Modern Language Quarterly 74 (2013), 639–​89. 33  ‘Hero and Leander’, lines 5–​7, in The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (London, 1832), 121.

The Greco-Roman Revival    671 ideological and empirical neoclassicism,34 we might say that whereas Winckelmann’s was the former, identifying certain moral and aesthetic values specifically with ancient Greece, that of the Lake Poet and the Cockney Poets was the latter, because its investment in the classical was formal and instrumentalist, directed towards (opposing) ideological ends that were not themselves thought inherently classical. If the classical gods were to be repoeticized more convincingly, the question of anachronism had to be confronted more directly, as in fact it was in two poems published in 1820: Keats’s fragmentary ‘Hyperion’, and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. In effect if not in intention, these works ironize the classical tradition precisely by exposing the disparity between antiquity and modernity. Referring, in Canto 11 of Don Juan (1823), to the purported effect of the reviews of Endymion on its author, Byron registered as well the peculiarity of Keats’s naturalistic treatment of the gods in ‘Hyperion’: John Keats, who was killed off by one critique, Just as he really promised something great, If not intelligible,—​without Greek Contrived to talk about the Gods of late, Much as they might have been supposed to speak. (Canto 11, stanza 60)

Keats did not in fact require a knowledge of Greek for his task, which was, as Francis Jeffrey perceptively and sympathetically observed in the Edinburgh Review (1820), to imagine the old gods as ‘an entire new set of characters’, endowing them with ‘loves and sorrows and perplexities’.35 In contrast to classical epics, which represent the interactions between the gods and humans, ‘Hyperion’ is concerned solely (in its first two books) with the gods, specifically the usurped Titans, whom however it humanizes as physical and emotional wrecks (Book 2, lines 92–​7). But if the gods must become mortal, why bother to resurrect them in the first place? Keats’s inability to answer that question compellingly is signalled in Book 3, where he abruptly abandons the Titans for the human Apollo, whom he then proceeds to apotheosize (lines 113–​20)—​at which point the poem is abandoned, as if unable to comprehend a god as a god. ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ (begun in spring 1819), his renewed attempt at a mythological epic, though cast in Dantean fashion as a dream vision, similarly comes to grief when, after a prolonged debate about poetry between the narrator and the goddess-​muse Moneta, the Titans themselves appear. Shelley’s classicism was informed by an explicitly temporalized understanding of history: ‘the Greeks of the Periclean Age were widely different from us. It is to be lamented that no modern writer has hitherto dared to show them precisely as they were’.36 By 34 Benevolo, Storia dell’architettura moderna, 27th edn (Bari: Laterza, 2006), 47–​8. 35 

Reprinted in G. M. Matthews (ed.), Keats: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1971), 206. Shelley, ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love’ (1818), ed. James A. Notopoulos, in Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley (Durham: Duke University Press, 1949), 405. 36 

672   Nicholas Halmi ironizing the classical tradition more thoroughly, acknowledging the very superfluity of the gods, he succeeded where Keats failed. Just as in Adonais (1821), his elegy to Keats, Shelley revived the form of the classical elegy (which Johnson, in his Life of Milton, had declared moribund) by replacing its traditional consolatory appeal to an afterlife with the promise of death itself—​‘Die, | If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek’ (lines 464–​5)—​so in Prometheus Unbound he revived mythological tragedy by transforming it into a hybrid of epithalamion and other genres. The third act celebrates the love of Prometheus and Asia as they are presented with a vision in which they are supplanted not by the Olympians (for Jupiter has been overthrown) but by sculptural representations of themselves: ‘Praxitelean shapes, whose marble smiles | Fill the hushed air’ (III. iii. 165–​6) and ‘Phidian forms . . . looking the love we feel’ (III. iv. 112–​14). Repeatedly affirming the mind’s ability to realize what it contemplates,37 Shelley dramatizes, in the gods’ contemplation of their humanly sculpted forms, what the play itself does in another medium, to reconstitute the gods as aesthetic spectacles and moral models for a world in which humanity must learn to become, without assistance from any gods, fully human: ‘Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed—​but man’ (III. iv. 194). Detached from their antiquity, as figures created both by and within the play, the gods confront us with our modernity. Shelley’s Hellas (1822) is an expression of the last aspect of Romantic classicism we must consider here, the very name of which (with its cognates) dates from the early nineteenth century: Philhellenism, or support for Greek independence from Ottoman Turkish rule. Written expressly to stimulate British interest in the Greek rebellion against the Turks, which had begun in March 1821, Shelley’s poem, modelled after Aeschylus’s tragedy The Persians, makes some gestures towards the characteristic Philhellenist identification of modern with ancient Greece, particularly in its famous prefatory declaration, ‘We are all Greeks—​our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece’ (Preface, 431). But the Greece presented in the poem proper is largely abstracted from history, modern as well as ancient, so that it might serve as ‘a metaphor for the principle of liberty and independence everywhere’.38 Only if considered in isolation from its historical particularity, which Shelley viewed privately with ambivalence, could the Greek cause encourage revolution elsewhere, not least in England—​a hope entertained in the penultimate paragraph of his preface, which was suppressed by the publisher: ‘Should the English people ever become free they will reflect upon the part which those who presume to represent their will, have played in the great drama of the revival of liberty’ (432). The imagined exemplarity of the abstracted modern Greek revolution in Hellas thus contrasts sharply with that of the aestheticized ancient Greece in Felicia Hemans’s 1,000-​line poem Modern Greece (1817), which despite its title is concerned largely with justifying the installation of the Parthenon marbles in London. Noting the contrast 37 

In passages such as I. 380–​1, 450–​1; IV. 473–​4, 486–​7, 583–​4. Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 196–​205 (p. 202). 38 

The Greco-Roman Revival    673 between Greece’s former freedom and current subjugation—​‘Alas for thee, fair Greece! when Asia pour’d | Her fierce fanatics to Byzantium’s wall’—​and taking her cue from Haydon, Hemans names Britain the rightful heir of the classical tradition: ‘thou hast power to be what Athens e’er hath been’.39 Sent a copy of the anonymously published poem, Byron dismissed it as ‘good for nothing—​written by some one who has never been there’.40 Byron in contrast had been there for more than a year, in 1809–​11, and his writings reveal a considerably more ambiguous attitude towards modern Greece than his posthumous appropriation by Philhellenist propaganda would suggest, even though his own account of contemporary Greece in Canto 2 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) was a major stimulus to the Philhellenist movement.41 His own financial and personal involvement in the Greek War of Independence seems to have been motivated more by a general antipathy to political oppression and a desire for adventure than by a particular devotion to Greece, a place which he judged to have ‘no distinct country and no distinct people’.42 If anything, Byron admired the Turks rather more than the Greeks, and in a note to Childe Harold he contrasted the financial probity of the former with the ‘dirty peculations’ of the latter.43 His celebrated apostrophe to Greece in Canto 2—​‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! | Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great’ (stanza 73)—​emphasizes the disparity between present reality and mythical past, while his notes lament the paucity of reliable information about the modern Greeks and express impatience with ‘the paradoxes of men who have read superficially of the ancients, and seen nothing of the moderns’.44 Read without regard to its context in Canto 3 of Don Juan (1821), the interpolated lyric ‘The Isles of Greece’ might appear a Philhellenist anthem, typical of the hundreds of such poems anthologized across Western Europe and in the United States in the 1820s: ‘The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! | Where burning Sappho loved and sung, | Where grew the arts of war and peace.’45 But the surrounding cantos establish that the lyric is sung by a ‘sad trimmer’—​associated explicitly with Robert Southey (Canto 3, stanzas 79–​82)—​who changes his tune to suit whatever country he visits, and the lyric even ironizes itself, or rather the Philhellenist songs it pastiches: ‘and where art thou, | My 39 

Felicia Hemans, Modern Greece, A Poem (London, 1817), 19, 50 (stanzas 36, 99). To John Murray, 21 Aug. 1817, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols (London: Murray, 1973–​94), v. 262–​3. As might be expected, Hemans conflates classical (pagan) with late antique (Christian) Greece. 41  On Byron’s inspiration to Philhellenes, see William St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 17–​19; and Fani-​Maria Tsigakou, The Rediscovery of Greece: Travellers and Painters of the Romantic Era (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 44, 46, 49. 42  Quoted in William Parry, The Last Days of Lord Byron: with His Lordship’s Opinions on Various Subjects (London, 1825), 170. 43 Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ii. 209 (n. 26). 44 Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ii. 204. 45  Byron, ‘Isles of Greece’, stanza 1. The lyric appears between stanzas 86 and 87 of Canto 3 of Don Juan. On the popular poetry of the Philhellenist cause, see St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free, ch. 5. 40 

674   Nicholas Halmi country? On thy voiceless shore | The heroic lay is tuneless now . . . And must thy lyre, so long divine, | Degenerate into hands like mine?’ (‘Isles’, stanza 5).46 In Don Juan, as in Childe Harold, Byron’s engagement with the tropes and sentiments of Philhellenism is calculated to subvert an aestheticized identification of modern with ancient Greece. Thus, the poet who undertook militarily to realize his dream ‘that Greece might still be free’ (‘Isles’, stanza 3) sought poetically to return that nation to the historicity from which he understood it could never be free.

Further Reading Bush, Douglas, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (1937; New  York: Norton, 1963). Cheeke, Stephen, Byron and Place:  History, Translation, Nostalgia (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Grafton, Anthony, Glen Most, and Salvatore Settis (eds), The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Halmi, Nicholas, ‘Ruins without a Past’, Essays in Romanticism 18 (2011), 7–​27. Harding, Anthony John, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995). Irwin, David, Neoclassicism (London: Phaidon, 1997). St Clair, William, Lord Elgin and the Marbles, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Saunders, Timothy, Charles Martindale, Ralph Pite, and Mathilde Skoie (eds), Romans and Romantics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Webb, Timothy, ‘Romantic Hellenism’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Webb, Timothy (ed.), English Romantic Hellenism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982).

46  See Diego Saglia, ‘’Tis Greece: Byron’s (Un)Making of Romantic Hellenism and its European Reinventions’, in Gilbert Hess, Elena Agazzi, and Élisabeth Décultot (eds), Graecomania: Der europäische Philhellenismus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 204–​5.

Chapter 43

Orienta l i sm and Hebr a i sm James Watt

In his preface to Persian Eclogues (1742), William Collins suggested that poetry in English was in need of external stimulation but that the national taste might be ‘too cold’ for the sentiments displayed in Arabian or Persian composition.1 Collins was the first British author to incorporate Eastern imagery into poetry, but he later distanced himself from his literary experiment, and it would be another three decades before anyone resumed the project that he had tentatively begun. The temperature metaphor that Collins used to refer to the Eastern ‘genius’ resurfaced, however, in accounts of the Hebrew Bible, which was commonly interpreted as a kind of Oriental literature. Robert Lowth, for example, in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787; originally delivered in the early 1750s) drew attention to the ‘parabolic style’ and ‘warmth and force of sentiment’ characteristic of Hebrew poetry, and called for the modern reader to ‘imagine himself exactly situated as the persons for whom it was written, or even as the writers themselves’.2 Rejecting any merely ‘cursory’ interest in the novel associations and ideas that such poetry generated, Lowth argued for a historical understanding of poetic imagery, and explained how the impassioned style and highly figurative language employed by the Hebrew poets was the product of a distinctive set of cultural beliefs and a society ‘simple and uniform in the greatest degree’.3 Sir William Jones refers to Lowth’s example in his essay ‘On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations’ appended to his Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (1772). Jones at once appeals to an inclusive sense of ‘the East’ and insists that ‘every nation has a set of images, and expressions, peculiar to itself [and] the difference

1  William Collins, Persian Eclogues. Written Originally for the Entertainment of the Ladies of Tauris. And Now First Translated (London, 1742), iii. 2  Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 2 vols (London, 1787), i. 109; ii. 409; i. 114. 3 Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry, i. 145.

676   James Watt of its climate, manners, and history’.4 He explicitly rejects the neoclassicism of Voltaire, and in his commentary on ‘Eastern’ poetry broaches larger questions about cultural authority and hierarchy that would in different ways be taken up by many of the Romantic writers to be discussed in this chapter. Jones’s collection may best be understood, however, not so much as challenging the status of Greek and Latin literature, but as seeking to define, in the words of Zak Sitter, ‘an expanded classicism that places Arabic and Persian among the classical languages’, an idea Jones later developed in his linguistic work on the Indo-​European language family.5 This desire to broaden the parameters of classical tradition is especially clear in a second essay from the 1772 volume, ‘On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative’, in which Jones aligns his understanding of ‘true poetry’ with ‘what it really was among the Hebrews, the Greeks and Romans, the Arabs and Persians’.6 Jones argues that greater engagement with the writings of ‘the Asiaticks’ would help to reinvigorate European literary culture by circulating new raw materials for poets and scholars. There is ostensibly a paradox here because, as Sitter points out, ‘Jones recommends the imitation of Oriental poetry as a cure for Europe’s imitativeness.’7 If Jones regards the lack of originality as a symptom of modernity, however, he also sees imitation as a means of access to that distant time when poets such as Homer and Ferdusi drew from nature and possessed the true ‘spirit’ of poetry. In his essay on imitation, Jones more precisely identifies the origin of poetry in the ecstasy experienced by a man who for the first time experiences the wonders of the natural world and then pours out his praise to the Creator. Jones emphasizes his familiarity with original texts, and in doing so he not only stakes a claim for the revitalizing impact of his own self-​styled ‘translations’, but also defines his project against the recent literary forgeries of Chatterton and Macpherson. While the narrative trajectory of his poems tends to be predictable (several of them, for example, feature protagonists who finally learn to distinguish between true and illusory pleasures), Jones combines elements from heterogeneous sources—​stories from The Arabian Nights as well as manuscript materials belonging to the Orientalist scholar Edward Pocock—​so as to produce new, composite works. His critical account of the expressiveness that he attempts to channel in these pieces has been widely regarded as a watershed in late ​eighteenth-​century conceptions of poetry. By the time that Jones’s translations were published, the thematic repertoire of British poetry had already begun to expand following what P. J. Marshall has termed ‘the British Discovery of Hinduism’—​itself consequent upon the consolidation of East India Company authority after the Seven Years’ War.8 In 1768 Alexander Dow, an 4  Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael J. Franklin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 329. Except where indicated, subsequent quotations from Jones are from this edition. 5  Zak Sitter, ‘William Jones, “Eastern” Poetry, and the Problem of Imitation’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50.4 (2008), 385–​407 (p. 399). For Jones’s influence on Romantic ideas about translation, see Michael Rossington, Chapter 35 in this volume. 6  Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 343. 7  Sitter, ‘William Jones’, 388. 8  P. J. Marshall (ed.), The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

Orientalism and Hebraism    677 Orientalist scholar who was also a military officer in the Company’s service, conceded that the British had hitherto ‘never had the curiosity to examine’ Hindu culture, since ‘literary inquiries’ were not a priority for ‘our adventurers in Asia’. Now, however, according to Dow, the time was ripe for exploring the hundreds of volumes of ‘literary treasures’ in Sanskrit and Persian.9 Dow recognized the important role that Orientalist researches would go on to play in legitimizing Company sovereignty, and the way in which he presented his own quest for scholarly gold might be seen to undercut his effort to differentiate seemingly disinterested ‘literary inquiries’ from the profiteering single-​ mindedness of ‘our adventurers’. As unstable as this distinction appears to be, it is nonetheless significant that Dow invoked it. His doing so points to the concern that he and others had to negotiate the troubling disjunction between their personally enlightening experience of cultural discovery and their awareness of the colonial situation which made that discovery possible. As the interrelationship between Britain and Bengal was increasingly recognized in educated metropolitan circles, writers who never travelled to the East but who appear to have responded to Jones’s call for the ‘Asiatic’ regeneration of English poetry confronted their own version of Dow’s problem. The ‘Oriental Eclogues’ published in the late 1770s by the Quaker John Scott are especially interesting in this respect, because even as the title of the series harks back to Collins, Scott’s poems display a familiarity both with Jones’s work and with recent polemics against Company rapacity. ‘Serim; or the Artificial Famine: An East-​Indian Eclogue’, for example, is a formally conventional yet topical poem which addresses British culpability for native suffering during the Bengal famine of 1769–​70. Another poem by Scott pays fulsome tribute to Jones, declaring how, in his translations and imitations, ‘The Arabian Muse, a Stranger Fair!, | Becomes at length Britannia’s care.’10 ‘Serim’, however, pre-​empts any such argument regarding the Company’s protection of its subject-​peoples. That it concludes by describing the death of a grieving Brahmin at the hands of a ‘British ruffian’ is particularly striking, for his demise—​as he is ‘headlong plung’d  . . .  into [a]‌foaming tide’—​recalls, and accentuates the starkness of, the conclusion to Thomas Gray’s poem ‘The Bard’ (1757): whereas Gray’s narrator commits suicide, Scott’s is murdered.11 Gray’s account of English colonial conquest in medieval Wales as a process of cultural subjugation offers no real parallel for East India Company activity in the late eighteenth century. Scott’s adoption of Gray’s poem as the foundation for his own does, however, render more dramatic his work’s recognition of the gulf between the kinds of enquiry and exchange which took place under the aegis of ‘Britannia’s care’ and the violence by which the Company established and expanded its power.

9 

Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, 2 vols (London, 1768), i, pp. xxi–​xxii. ‘On the Ingenious Mr. Jones’s Elegant Translations and Imitations of Eastern Poetry, and His Resolution to Decline Translating the Persian Poets’, in The Poetical Works of John Scott (London, 1782), 332. 11 J. Scott, Poetical Works, 152. 10 

678   James Watt Jones himself, by contrast, appears to have been relatively untroubled by this contradiction. It is instructive here to consider Jones’s account of his journey to India to take up his judgeship in the supreme court of Bengal. In his inaugural 1784 address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Jones—​like Dow—​identifies Sanskrit as a treasure to be ‘unlocked’, and presents the ‘immense mine’ of Asiatic learning as a source of ‘equal delight and advantage’. Although the ‘delight and advantage’ formulation is a ubiquitous one, in this context it offers an important assertion of the compatibility between individual scholarly pleasure and collective Company gain. The polymathic Jones depicts himself as a kind of scholar-​hero, dramatizing how, in his first direct encounter with the East, he found ‘one evening, on inspecting the observations of the day, that India lay before us, and Persia on our left, whilst a breeze from Arabia blew nearly on our stern’.12 While the ‘pleasing’ nature of the situation recalled by Jones is shadowed by his allusion to Satan’s approach to Eden in Paradise Lost, there is also a no less resonant echo of The Spectator in his account of his ‘inexpressible pleasure’ at finding himself in the ‘amphitheatre’ constituted by the proximity of Arabia, Persia, and India—​a maritime analogue of Mr Spectator’s delight in the company of international merchants at the Royal Exchange.13 Jones takes ‘Hindostan as a centre’ and acknowledges Europe’s ‘provincial’ position in relation to Asia, but he nonetheless presents his experience of Asia’s sublime magnitude as an expansion of intellectual horizons that generates ambition rather than anxiety. Developing his future-​oriented focus on what was yet ‘unexplored’ and ‘unimproved’, Jones states that the Asiatic Society’s objects of enquiry are ‘MAN and NATURE . . . whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other’.14 When Jones’s Discourse was published in 1784, it appeared together with ‘A Hymn to Camdeo’, the first of nine poems addressed to Hindu deities which incorporated for metropolitan readers a new level of culturally specific reference. The preface to this poem begins by stating that Camdeo was ‘evidently the same with the Grecian EROS and the Roman CUPIDO’, and Jones goes on to substantiate this assertion in his essay ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India’ (1784).15 Numerous scholars have argued for the revolutionary consequences of his claim that different systems of mythology were versions of one another, as well as of his insight about the structural affinity between Sanskrit and European languages: as Raymond Schwab put it in The Oriental Renaissance, the work of Jones and others made the world ‘truly round’ for the first time.16 Where Jones’s hymns are concerned, however, there has been considerable debate as to the larger significance of their analogizing perspective on Hindu mythology. According to critics such as Kate Teltscher, Jones sought to minimize the dissonance of the Hindu pantheon,

12 

Sir William Jones, A Discourse on the Institution of a Society (London, 1784), 10 The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), i. 292–​6 (no. 69, 19 May 1711) 14 Jones, Discourse, 3, 4, 6, 8. 15  Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 99. 16  Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 16. 13 

Orientalism and Hebraism    679 and by employing the poetic genre of the Miltonic or Pindaric ode he helped to make new imagery available to British readers in a consumable form that ‘fixed’ Indian culture in terms of a stable, classical ideal.17 Others have asserted by contrast that Jones was imaginatively ‘possessed by India’, and that his mediation of Hinduism exemplified his sympathetic and enlightened vision of the kinship of the peoples and cultures of the world.18 The differing emphases of such readings may in part be attributable to the way in which Jones’s diverse writings resonated in different contexts. In the light of contemporary debate about the scandal of empire (which culminated in the impeachment of Warren Hastings), one poem that illustrates the political ramifications of Jones’s work is ‘A Hymn to Ganga’ (1785), addressed to the presiding deity of the River Ganges. Introducing itself as the product of ‘a BRAHMEN, in . . . Hindu antiquity’, the poem begins by celebrating the stately Ganges, as it ‘sweetly . . . glides’ from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal: ‘Her waves perpetual verdure spread, | Whilst health and plenty deck her golden sides’ (lines 1, 3–​4). If the poem is situated in its historical context and read alongside the writing of contemporaries such as John Scott, however, it is possible additionally to appreciate its ideological significance. Whereas Scott’s ‘Serim’ clearly alludes to recent events, Jones’s poem represents the timeless passage of the sacred Ganges, and the only violence that it records is the ‘fury’ of the river and its ‘companion’, the Brahamputra, as they are kept apart from each other. In its mythopoeic account of ‘perpetual verdure’ and ‘health and plenty’ on the Ganges basin, Jones’s poem might be seen to offer a kind of ‘counter-​ventriloquization’, an implicit response to Scott’s protesting Brahmin which also serves to efface the realities of the famine of which Jones must have been aware. As Jones’s preface makes clear, the poem’s ‘author’ pays homage to ‘the BRITISH government’ as much as to Ganga, praying ‘for its peaceful duration under good laws well administered’.19 In other poems, however, Jones uses an elevated poetic register to style himself as an ardent votary of the deities he addresses. ‘A Hymn to Surya’ (1786), for example, is the most enraptured of Jones’s compositions, reflecting the fact that it was written just after Jones ‘discovered’ what was to him the new world of Sanskrit. Jones’s preface refers to Surya as the Hindu Phoebus, and the poem identifies the common ground between Vedic and Platonic traditions, highlighting the ‘heav’nly truth’ that breathes in ‘Sanscrit song’ (lines 191, 188) and capturing that yearning for the divine that Jones had earlier presented as the origin of all poetry. When Jones invokes the testimony of the deity as to his skill in drawing ‘orient knowledge from its fountains pure’ (line 186), he implicitly acknowledges the way in which Company scholars sought to displace the authority of

17  Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–​1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 208. 18  Michael J. Franklin, ‘Cultural Possession, Imperial Control, and Comparative Religion: The Calcutta Perspectives of Sir William Jones and Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’, Yearbook of English Studies 32 (2002), 1–​18 (p. 1). 19  Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 124.

680   James Watt brahmanic custodians of Hindu tradition; Jones himself began to learn Sanskrit so as to enable him to discharge his professional duties without being reliant upon Indian interpreters of legal texts.20 However, the various products of Jones’s Sanskrit studies also appealed to audiences with little interest in Company governance. The impact of his 1789 translation of Kalidasa’s play Sakuntala, for example, has been likened to that of The Arabian Nights eighty years earlier, and prominent German intellectuals, especially, saw in its allegory of the original union between god and creation a sublime testimony to humankind’s ‘Indian’ roots.21 Five editions of Jones’s collected writings appeared between 1799 and 1810, and many of the major figures in British Romanticism closely engaged with his work. Traces of Jones’s Hindu hymns are evident in a number of canonical Romantic poems. To give two well-​known examples, Coleridge’s portrayal of the ‘fast thick pants’ of the river Alph in ‘Kubla Khan’ (line 18)22 echoes the description of the ‘trembling panting surges’ of the Ganges in ‘A Hymn to Ganga’ (line 99), while Shelley’s exploration of the ‘unseen Power’ whose shadow ‘Floats though unseen amongst us’ in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (lines 1–​2)23 draws on the imagery of ‘A Hymn to Surya’. At a broader level, too, the scholarly research done by Jones, as well as his poetry, provided subsequent writers with a diverse range of intellectual and creative stimuli, enormously rich in potential. The precise nature of ‘influence’ here is sometimes difficult to determine, however, since a poet such as Shelley engaged with Jones’s work as much through others’ reading of it as via direct contact with Jones’s writing itself. As Nigel Leask has shown, Shelley responded to Jones via his enthusiastic reception of Sydney Owenson’s novel The Missionary (1811), whose heroine Luxima was inspired by Sakuntala and in turn provided the type of a feminine ideal recurrent in poems such as Alastor (1815) and Prometheus Unbound (1820).24 The most important point to emphasize here is that contemporaries identified a number of different Joneses, seizing upon different aspects of his wide-​ranging work. While Jones himself was careful to defend Mosaic chronology from the possible challenge posed by his research into other cultures and mythological systems, some writers accentuated what was implicit in particular areas of Jones’s work in order to attack the foundations of the Christian state. Erasmus Darwin in The Botanic Garden (1791), for example, extends Jones’s interest in Linnean classification (as evident in his poem ‘The Enchanted Fruit’ [1785]), and in the process pursues the sceptical, materialist argument that Christianity, like other mythologies, might ultimately be reducible to sexual allegory. After Jones died in 1794, many obituarists sought instead to downplay his literary 20 

Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 152. Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–​1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 251–​86. 22  Quoted from The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, Part 1: Poems (Reading Text), 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001), i. 513. 23  Quoted from The Poems of Shelley, vol. 1: 1804–​1817, ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (Longman: Longman, 1989). 24  Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ch. 2. 21 

Orientalism and Hebraism    681 legacy, which they regarded as secondary in importance to his codification of Hindu and Muslim laws. They also attempted to close down any hint of subversive potential in Jones’s writings on religion, the most overt instance of this endeavour being William Hayley’s claim that the analogies offered by Jones’s ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India’ actually pointed out ‘the only promising mode of converting the Musulmans and Hindus to Christianity.’25 The defensiveness of such attempts to accommodate Jones’s work suggests that we should question the scale and depth of any ‘Oriental Renaissance’ in Britain. While Owenson and Shelley, among others, testified to the enduring appeal of Jones’s literary productions well into the 1810s, poets such as Walter Savage Landor, towards the end of the 1790s, distanced themselves from ‘Jonesian’ Orientalism altogether. Landor dismissed Arabic and Persian poetry as ‘high-​seasoned garbage’, and in his verse romance Gebir (1798), inspired by Clara Reeve’s adaptation of an Arabian romance, he pioneered a different kind of literary turn to the East.26 Landor worked within a long tradition of republican thought that conceived of Islam as ‘a model and an idiom for the definition of political liberty’, as Humberto Garcia has argued, and he was probably the first to use a historical verse romance set in the East as a means of reflecting, albeit obliquely, on the politics of the revolutionary era.27 A tale of the King of Spain’s ill-​fated attempt to conquer ancient Egypt, written shortly before Napoleon’s invasion, Landor’s poem is especially significant because of the way in which it contrasts Napoleon with George III—​ respectively praised and damned—​but additionally demonstrates the potential overlap between its critique of old regime despotism and a new discourse of liberal imperialism. Such political complexity is similarly evident in Robert Southey’s epic Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), itself indebted to Gebir. The poem displaces Southey’s radicalism of the 1790s, and its Bedouin hero is motivated by a revolutionary enthusiasm as he pursues his campaign against the magicians of the Domdaniel caverns who had been responsible for the death of his father. While it begins by defining Thalaba’s primitive Islam against ‘Oriental’ decadence, however, the poem also goes on to complicate the meaning of the desert wilderness that it presents as the anchor of his identity, since ‘desert’ at times stands for barrenness and vacancy as well as moral purity. In a letter of 1800, Southey refers to ‘the desarts that, to the disgrace of man, occupy so great a part of the world’,28 and in Book 5 of Thalaba, after an account from the present of the ‘fallen’ city of Baghdad, the poem anticipates a day when ‘the Crescent from thy Mosques | Be plucked by Wisdom, when the enlightened arm | Of Europe conquers to redeem the East’ (lines 84–​6).29 This 25 

William Hayley, An Elegy on the Death of . . . Sir William Jones (London, 1795), 38. Walter Savage Landor, Poems from the Arabic and Persian (Warwick, 1800), 1. 27  Humberto Garcia, Islam and the European Enlightenment 1670–​1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 10. 28  To John May, 18 Feb. 1800, The Collected Letters of Southey, Part 2: 1798–​1803, ed. Lynda Pratt and Ian Packer, Romantic Circles Electronic Edition (2011), at: www.rc.umd.edu/​editions. 29  Lines 84–​6, in Robert Southey, Poetical Works 1793–​1810, vol. 3: Thalaba the Destroyer, ed. Tim Fulford (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004). Subsequent quotations from Thalaba are from this edition. 26 

682   James Watt appeal to European powers of ‘redemption’ suggests that ‘the East’ might be freed from the yoke of Islam and reclaimed for future cultivation or habitation. Significantly too, though, the poem’s description of the ‘pomp’ of Babylon as well as Baghdad (Book 5, lines 87, 99) echoes well-​known eighteenth-​century portrayals of London as the hub of global commerce (as in Spectator 69), and the poem’s representation of the ‘imperial dotage’ (Book 5, line 134) of Babylon thus implicates modern Britain in its account of the rise and fall of empire, by alluding to the inevitable decay of any advanced commercial society. The complexity of Southey’s poem is further illustrated by its generic and stylistic eclecticism. While reviewers said little about Thalaba’s political allegory, they identified the way in which, at the level of form and metre, Southey sought to reinvigorate modern verse more fundamentally than Jones had anticipated thirty years earlier. In his preface, Southey refers to the poem’s irregular rhythm as ‘the Arabesque ornament of an Arabian tale’, seemingly contradicting his footnote about the ‘waste of ornament and labour [that] characterizes all of the work of the Orientalists’ which he drew upon in composing Thalaba.30 That the latter claim appears in a note suggests that Southey is using the apparatus of annotation as a mean of providing editorial distance from the poem itself, offsetting any authorial ‘absorption’ in its contents.31 The relationship between verse narrative and annotation across the work as a whole is nonetheless a fluid one. At the start of the poem, when Thalaba’s mother invokes Job in her attempts to come to terms with her grief, Southey’s note declares that ‘It had been easy to have made Zeinab speak from the Koran, if the tame language of the Koran could be remembered by the few who have toiled through its dull tautology.’ As derisive as this may sound, the interplay between note and text serves to unsettle the opposition between Christianity and Islam. Southey’s claim that the resignation associated with Job is ‘particularly inculcated by Mohammed’ emphasizes the proximity between the two faiths, while his subsequent point about resignation being ‘the vice of the East’ is instantiated by the sublime Book of Job that Zeinab cites as much as by the ‘dull’ Koran.32 In a similar way to Jones’s writing, then, Thalaba can be seen to display an interest in the affinities between different forms of worship and belief. The nonconformist Southey was even more ambitious in his authorship plans than Jones, declaring his interest in writing ‘a metrical romance upon every poetical faith that has ever been established’.33 If this might be regarded as a totalizing aspiration, however, the notes of Thalaba—​far more detailed than those of Jones’s Hindu hymns—​accumulate in such a way as to constitute a vast, heterogeneous digest of unrefined information. This information may 30 Southey, Poetical Works, iii. 3, 194. 31 

Nigel Leask, ‘ “Wandering through Eblis”: Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism’, in Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism, 1780–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 32  Thalaba, 193; David Simpson, ‘The Limits of Cosmopolitanism and the Case for Translation’, European Romantic Review 16 (2005), 141–​52 (p. 149). 33  To Anna Seward, 28 May 1808, Collected Letters of Southey, Part 3: 1804–​1809, ed. Carol Bolton and Tim Fulford (2013).

Orientalism and Hebraism    683 be encyclopaedic in bulk and scope, but it does not straightforwardly provide readers either with a proto-​imperial position of objective knowledge or a consumer-​style access to pleasurable novelty. Instead, as David Simpson argues, Thalaba makes its readers encounter a ‘significant otherness’ that is too rich and multifarious to be immediately assimilable.34 Southey’s Hindu epic The Curse of Kehama (1810) still more clearly demonstrates how some of his poems resisted audience ‘consumption’, because it is a work that appears to be divided against itself, signalling in its preface and many of its notes Southey’s increasing proximity to the Evangelical campaign for the Christianization of India, but displaying at points in its verse narrative a fascination with Hinduism as a belief-​system as well as a fund of literary novelty. For numerous contemporary critics, the detail of Hindu mythology as depicted by Southey constituted an otherness not only beyond the possibility of comprehension, but beyond anything in which Britons might be interested in the first place. Southey may have anticipated the hostile reception that Kehama would receive from many reviewers, because his next major poem, Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814)—​ started before Kehama was finished—​is emphatically concerned with the forging of nationhood via the purging of foreign contamination. Focusing on the deep historical origins of the Reconquest of Spain and thereby allegorizing the Peninsular War (1808–​ 14), Roderick refamiliarizes the experimental genre of Romantic Orientalist epic, since while it still displays the intellectual curiosity of Southey’s earlier works, it presents a relatively clear-​cut story of conflict between Spanish Christians and North African Muslims. In penance for his rape of Florinda (which, according to Southey’s source, led her father to ‘invite’ the Moorish invasion of Spain), Roderick becomes energized by a Thalaba-​like righteousness. If Roderick likewise resembles Thalaba in the poem’s final battle-​scene as he actively seeks his death, however, his agency is represented as ultimately restorative rather than destructive, since it provides an example to others such as Alphonso, the future King of Spain. Whereas the asexual virtue of Thalaba can only find consummation in his own demise, the masculine virility of Alphonso invites readerly participation in Britain’s final military triumph over France. Rather than simply depicting Moors as proxies for Napoleon’s armies, though, the work situates Islam in the context of a ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative that revives notions of crusading enthusiasm and holy war. Roderick at one point refers to ‘an impious foe’ who ‘brings with him strange laws, | Strange language, evil customs, and false faith’ (section 12, lines 167–​ 9), and such a racialized discourse indeed pervades the whole poem, with the Moorish hordes repeatedly referred to as ‘locusts’ or ‘vultures’, flocking to ‘that free feast which in their Prophet’s name | Rapine and Lust proclaim’d’ (section 20, lines 13–​14).35 Southey in the early 1810s clearly sought to distance himself from his radical and religiously heterodox positions of the 1790s, but in other respects his political vocabulary remained consistent. In describing the Spanish Goths as ‘effeminated’ by ‘settled 34 

Simpson, ‘The Limits of Cosmopolitanism’, 148. Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, vol. 2: Roderick, The Last of the Goths, ed. Diego Saglia (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). All quotations from Roderick are from this edition. 35 

684   James Watt life’ prior to the Europe-​wide renovation of the race by the Normans, for instance, he again suggested that a state akin to ‘imperial dotage’ was the likely terminus of any developed society, including his own.36 While Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge at this time all in different ways appealed to the Gothic as a form of exceptionalist virtue that might equip the nation to resist its otherwise inevitable corruption, as Tom Duggett has shown, they also represented this as a heritage that itself had to be insulated from ‘Oriental’ degradation.37 Wordsworth’s ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815) provides an illuminating perspective on such anxieties of empire in the mid-​1810s, because in its attempt to bring into being a self-​disciplined audience that is ‘invigorated and inspirited by [its] leaders’, it repudiates an explicitly Orientalized mode of reading embodied by the figure of a pleasure-​seeking ‘Indian prince . . . stretched on his palanquin, and borne by his slaves’.38 Wordsworth’s account of a susceptible public liable to be ‘dazzled’ by glittering poetic ‘ornament’—​which recalls Southey’s conflicted relation to ‘ornament’ in Thalaba—​is, in part, an allusion to the popular success of Byron’s Turkish tales of 1813–​14: The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour, The Corsair, and Lara. If Wordsworth saw Byron’s Eastern poetry as having a debilitating influence on its readers, these tales reflexively acknowledge their own complicity in providing, as Byron later put it in Beppo (1818), ‘samples of the finest Orientalism’ in a commercialized marketplace.39 They stage their heroes’ transcultural desire for the East (most memorably as Conrad in The Corsair is tempted by the allure of the Turkish heroine Gulnare) but, as Leask has argued, they also present this desire as a ‘fatal attraction’ that is corrosive of civic order and virtue.40 The ‘renovatory’ project of Roderick is thrown into relief when Southey’s poem is read alongside The Giaour, published in the previous year, because the final ‘confession’ of Byron’s Venetian hero only draws attention to his proximity to the Turk Hassan, whom he had killed in revenge for the latter’s killing of his Circassian lover Leila. Referring to Hassan’s drowning of his harem slave (‘in the Mussulman manner’, according to the poem’s Advertisement), the Giaour states: ‘Yet did he but what I had done | Had she been false to more than one’ (lines 1062–​3). Byron’s poem thus undercuts any idea of a ‘Christian’ moral superiority distinguishing European men from their Eastern counterparts, and it additionally rejects the association of violence and redemption that would be so central to Roderick. Although the Giaour resembles a crusader when he describes his vengeance on the ‘Paynim’ Hassan, he presents himself as an irreparably ruined figure, the intensity of whose past experience is beyond his interlocutor’s comprehension. Francis Jeffrey identified the ‘strong sensations’ to which Byron offered access as a source of his poems’

36 Southey, Later Poetical Works, ii. 211 (Southey’s note to section 1, lines 5–​7).

37  Tom Duggett, Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 38  William Wordsworth, Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 410. 39  Beppo: A Venetian Story, line 408, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​93), iv. 145. All Byron quotations are from this edition. 40 Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, 10.

Orientalism and Hebraism    685 appeal to an audience for whom ‘the pleasures of security are no longer new’.41 Byron’s depiction of the Giaour clearly riled some contemporaries too, though, since the incorporation of Turkish voices into the poem in effect ‘others’ the work’s hero: the Turkish term ‘Giaour’ might be seen as an equivalent to ‘Paynim’, and the New Review indeed declared its shock at hearing ‘a raging turbaned-​Turk calling a Christian infidel’.42 In Canto 2 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Byron courts similar controversy by referring to the Greek hero Alexander by his Turkish name of ‘Iskander’. Like The Giaour, Childe Harold satirizes the military masculinity celebrated by Tory writings on the Peninsular War. Byron uses his knightly persona to traverse ground that he himself had covered during his travels in 1809–​10, and he includes footnotes that recall his own first-​hand experience while also contesting the claims of prior travellers. While Canto 2 of Childe Harold and its notes reflect on the inability of modern Greeks to safeguard the legacy of Greek civilization and to live up to the example of their heroic forbears, they also offer a revalorization of ‘savagery’ in their account of the ‘Land of Albania! Where Iskander rose’. Having ‘bade to Christian tongues a long adieu’, Harold enters the mountainous enclave of Ali Pacha, where he enjoys the heterogeneous spectacle of ‘the Turk, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Moor | . . . mingled in their many-​hued array’ (stanza 57). Though the poem had earlier denounced all religious superstition, here it concludes its itemization of the throng of warriors in Ali Pacha’s camp by bearing enchanted witness to how ‘From the mosque the nightly solemn sound, | The Muezzin’s call doth shake the minaret, | “There is no god but God!—​to prayer—​lo! God is great!” ’ (stanza 59). As Saree Makdisi has argued, Byron in this passage reproduces the Muezzin’s call to prayer without supplementary comment, depicting Ali Pacha and his men as ‘savage’ or ‘uncouth’ but without suggesting that they need to be ‘civilized’ or brought into the time of Western modernity.43 Such an ‘anti-​modern’ East, for Makdisi, contrasts with the ‘pre-​modern’ East of Shelley’s Alastor, where the Orient is depopulated and in effect hollowed out in anticipation of transformative external intervention, and where the transcultural encounter that is pivotal to a poem such as Byron’s The Corsair appears to be restaged as an effect of the visionary poet’s imagination. However, if Childe Harold distances itself from modernizing ideologies of ‘improvement’ and seeks to apprehend ‘otherness on its own terms’,44 Harold’s contact with the other in the poem is often framed as the function of an intrepidness that generates the experience of novelty rather than any personal disturbance or discomposure: ‘Peril he sought not, but ne’er shrank to meet: | The scene was savage, but the scene was new’ (Canto 2, stanza 43). Even as Byron’s Orientalist poetry works against the cultural grain, therefore, it also invites us to see Harold as a spectator who freely views others without himself being the object of their

41 

Edinburgh Review 23 (1814), 200. Cited in Peter Cochran (ed.), Byron and Orientalism (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 65. 43  Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 133 44 Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, 133. 42 

686   James Watt gaze. As Simpson suggests, the Romantic Orientalist epic as developed by Southey—​at least prior to Roderick—​might be seen as ‘the bearer of a prospective cosmopolitanism’, exposing readers to a potentially disorientating as well as horizon-​expanding density of unfamiliar cultural detail.45 By contrast, Childe Harold at times presents itself as the product of an already achieved knowledge of the world consequent upon the privileges of social status and leisure travel, such that Byron (in a note) appeals to his own impressions of Albania as a partial corrective to Gibbon’s claim that ‘a country “within sight of Italy is less known than the interior of America” ’.46 Byron’s Don Juan (1819–​24) again creates a mobile and worldly—​if world-​weary—​ persona, while also playfully alluding to the terms of an established Orientalist discourse regarding the comparative condition of women. An example is the scene in Canto 5 where, mimicking numerous eighteenth-​century heroines, the poem’s hero tells his captor, the female despot Gulbeyaz, that ‘Love is for the free!’ (stanza 127). Just as Don Juan ‘challenged Evangelicanism . . . by giving new literary life to libertinism’, so too, as Caroline Franklin has argued, did Byron in his poetry from the Hebrew Melodies (1815) onwards interrogate the ideology of a self-​consciously Christian culture, by ‘invading its own territory and bringing a defamiliarizing, primitivist vision to the Bible’.47 Byron produced this series of poems to accompany music written by the composer Isaac Nathan, and in doing so he inserted himself into the tradition of scholars, such as Lowth, who approached the Bible as Oriental literature. As in the lyric ‘From Job’, which opens with the narrator declaring that ‘A spirit pass’d before me: I beheld | The face of Immortality unveil’d’, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies explore the roots of poetry in acts of ecstatic communion with God that are common to all religions. These poems further stage a nationalist consciousness as their narrators lament the oppression of the Jewish people by tyrants such as Belshazzar, Herod, and Sennacherib. In his proto-​Zionist attention to the suffering of the Jews, Byron offers what Franklin terms a ‘sympathetic identification’ not only with the condition of the modern Greeks, but with all peoples dispossessed by the redrawing of European territorial boundaries at the Congress of Vienna.48 Byron’s Hebrew Melodies are closely modelled on the popular Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore, but Byron also styles himself as a mentor to Moore in his famous 1813 letter advising his friend to ‘Stick to the East’ so as to ensure future literary success.49 Moore’s ‘Oriental Romance’ Lalla Rookh (1817) was indeed a commercial hit, and this was at least partly a result of the way in which Moore, as Byron had recommended, used ‘Southey’s unsaleables’ as an example of what to avoid. The first of Lalla Rookh’s constituent tales, ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’, is clearly indebted to Southey’s Thalaba at the 45 

Simpson, ‘Limits of Cosmopolitanism’, 148

46 Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ii. 192.

47  Caroline Franklin, ‘ “Some Samples of the Finest Orientalism”: Byronic Philhellenism and Proto-​Zionism at the Time of the Congress of Vienna’, in Fulford and Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism, 234. 48  Franklin, ‘Some Samples’, 237 49  To Moore, 28 Aug. 1813, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​94), iii. 101.

Orientalism and Hebraism    687 level of plot, yet it also provides a rich and often comic surplus beyond the—​far from straightforward—​allegory of revolution and reaction that it narrates. While the young warrior Azim, like Thalaba, is motivated by righteous feelings of vengeance as he seeks to rescue his sweetheart Zelica from the clutches of the impostor-​prophet Mokanna, the tale presents both hero and heroine as hapless figures, making a jest of Azim’s rage when, in a fatal consummation of their union, Zelica impales herself on his spear. (Just as Moore responded to Southey, so Shelley in turn rewrote Moore, depicting in The Revolt of Islam [1818] a counterpart to Zelica, Cythna, who becomes an agent of revolution.) Moore’s manipulation of his hero is especially evident in the long temptation scene earlier in the poem, when—​entering Mokanna’s harem in search of Zelica—​Azim is entranced by ‘lightsome maidens’ seductively dancing to musical accompaniment.50 The effects of pleasurable illusion that Moore generated throughout the poem arguably provide an analogue to the architectural and decorative innovation of the Prince Regent’s Royal Pavilion at Brighton, and for all that he wrote numerous satires of the Prince, Moore might be regarded as the purveyor of a kind of neo-​aristocratic ‘Regency Orientalism’. The frame story of Lalla Rookh sets up the title character, an Indian princess, as the auditor of stories told by the young poet Feramorz (in fact, the king to whom she is betrothed), and the early reference to the ‘palankeen prepared for her’51 invites us to consider the poem as a whole as a riposte to Wordsworthian notions of active and disciplined reading. Where Southey was ambivalent about the ‘ornamental’ idiom of his early epics, and where Shelley eschewed Oriental costume altogether, Moore readily acknowledges that his poem is embedded in a material East, channelling ‘the finest Orientalism’ without any attendant anxiety regarding the corrupting effects of Asiatic luxury. Moore’s frame tale further draws attention to the poem’s status as a literary pastiche rooted in heterogeneous textual sources. The new Orientalist aesthetic of Lalla Rookh is thus a hybrid one, characterized above all by its inclusive and largely accessible ‘Eastern’ reference. One reviewer declared that Lalla Rookh provided ‘a renewal of the delicious moments of our childhood, when we first read . . . the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’, and this claim that the poem gave readers access to a familiarly fabulous Orient nicely illustrates the way in which, for some at least, Moore’s work was a source of un-​guilty pleasure.52 The other long narrative in Lalla Rookh, ‘The Fire-​worshippers’, deals with the doomed revolt of Zoroastrian Ghebers against the Arab Emir Al Hassan (after Hafed, the leader of the Ghebers, has fallen for Hinda, the Emir’s daughter), and invites itself to be read as an allegory of the Irish rebellions of 1798 and 1803 and the situation of colonized cultures more generally.53 Yet, while Moore directs readers to what he calls

50  The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, ed. A. D. Godley (London: Oxford University Press, 1910), 367 (line 286). 51  Poetical Works of Moore, 340. 52  Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register 4 (1817), 457. 53  Julia M. Wright, Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-​Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 98–​105.

688   James Watt the tale’s ‘doubleness of application’, with ‘Iran’ standing for Erin, he also situates ‘The Fire-​worshippers’ within an established if by now contested tradition of Company Orientalism. The second section of the tale begins with a set-​piece description of how The morn hath risen clear and calm, And o’er the Green Sea palely shines, Revealing BAHREIN’s groves of palm, And lighting KISHMA’s amber vines. Fresh smell the shores of ARABY, While breezes from the Indian Sea Blow round SELAMA’s sainted cape.54

Although the reference here to the greenness of the sea has been seen to underscore the ‘Irish’ resonance of ‘The Fire-​worshippers’, Moore’s note cites Jones’s identification of the Persian Gulf as ‘the Green Sea’, and the passage from which this phrase is taken clearly alludes to Jones’s awestruck account of his proximity to India, Persia, and Arabia in his 1784 ‘Discourse’.55 As much as ‘The Fire-​worshippers’ elicits sympathy for ‘glorious but unsuccessful’ resistance struggles, therefore, it additionally offers to the reader what Leask refers to as ‘an easy poetic parade of a sensuous and luxurious Orient’.56 Moore’s final tale, ‘The Light of the Haram’, presents a perfumed, flower-​strewn Kashmir, seemingly detached from any larger ‘application’, as a pleasurable destination in itself. Lalla Rookh is such an important poem not just because of its engagement with many of the other key texts discussed in this chapter, but also because of the range of subsequent responses that it would generate. What was seen by some as the un-​British gaudiness of Moore’s work sparked a literary as well as a critical backlash, as a new style of picaresque fiction, exemplified by James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1824), sought to deflate Lalla Rookh’s aura of romance, rejecting the Orientalism which, especially via the mediating influence of Jones, had stimulated so much remarkable poetry. Moore’s poem continued to have a rich and varied afterlife, nonetheless, and its representation of a fabulous Eastern exoticism made it congenial to diverse forms of excerpting and adaptation. This was perhaps most notably evident during the state visit of the Russian Grand Duke Nicholas to Berlin in 1822, when—​as Moore’s 1841 prefaces notes, with obvious satisfaction—​a ‘crowd of royal personages’ played the parts of the poem’s ‘principal characters’ in a lavish court spectacle.57 I will conclude by referring briefly to an even more influential text, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), because of the way in which it might be seen to allegorize a larger story about ‘Orientalism and Hebraism’ in the Romantic period. In his survey of the field of 54 

Poetical Works of Moore, 412 (lines 1–​7). Poetical Works of Moore, 412, n. 2. 56  Nigel Leask, review of Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (1992), History Workshop Journal 36 (1993), 242–​9 (p. 247). 57  The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 10 vols (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1841), vi, p. xxiv. 55 

Orientalism and Hebraism    689 literary Orientalism in the introduction to The Talisman (1826), Scott claims that the success of Byron, Moore, Morier, and Southey had made him reluctant to attempt to join their ranks.58 He had already cleared a space for himself in Ivanhoe, though, by producing an enormously resonant narrative about the state of England in the aftermath of the Third Crusade. While it is best known as a Unionist allegory of national reconciliation, Ivanhoe also obliquely reflects on the claims of Jones and others regarding the idea of a ‘familial’ resemblance between the peoples and cultures of the world. The novel depicts its Jewish heroine Rebecca as its most sympathetic character, distinguishing her in part by her ability to cure the sick, whatever their background. Many readers have observed that Rebecca is in fact the truest Christian in the novel, and Scott’s work appears to suggest that it is her outsider status which helps to make her particularly sensitive to the idea of a human commonality transcending religion and other markers of difference. If Rebecca represents an exotic source of healing power, however, this agency goes unappreciated, and she can find no home in twelfth-​century England, since she refuses to be converted to Christianity: aware that people of her faith are scapegoated as sources of infection, Rebecca, with her father, opts for exile in Moorish Grenada. The story of Rebecca is so suggestive because even as she conceives of shared histories and traditions, in a manner analogous with the affinity-​seeking project of Jones, hers is a vision that is at once utopian and impossible, offering a pessimistic anticipation of a more general ‘condition of antagonism’ in years to come.59 Ivanhoe thus provides a sombre counterpoint to the expansive imaginings of Jones, as its representation of a ‘Christian’ society closing its ranks invites us to recognize the losses attendant upon such acts of self-​definition.60

Further Reading Barrell, John, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Butler, Marilyn, ‘Orientalism’, in David Pirie (ed.), The Penguin History of Literature, vol. 5: The Romantic Period (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). Cohen-​Vrignaud, Gerard, Radical Orientalism:  Rights, Reform, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Das, Nandini, ‘ “[A] Place Among the Hindu Poets”: Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones (1746–​1794)’, Literature Compass 3.6 (2006), 1235–​52, at:  https://​onlinelibrary.wiley. com/​journal/​17414113. Garcia, Humberto, Islam and the English Enlightenment 1670–​1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Leask, Nigel, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 58 

Walter Scott, Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Ivanhoe to Castle Dangerous, ed. J. H. Alexander (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 393–​4. 59  David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 107. 60 Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, 107–​8.

690   James Watt Majeed, Javed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Makdisi, Saree, Romantic Imperialism:  Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Marshall, P. J. (ed.), The British Discovery of Hinduism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1970). Page, Judith, Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). Rudd, Andrew, Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770–​1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). Schwab, Raymond, The Oriental Renaissance:  Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Sharafuddin, Mohammed, Islam and Romantic Orientalism:  Literary Encounters with the Orient (London: Tauris, 1993). Spector, Sheila A. (ed.), British Romanticism and the Jews:  History, Culture, Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008). Warren, Andrew, The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Chapter 44

C on tinental Roma nt i c i sm in Brita i n James Vigus

This chapter considers how Romantic debates on the function of literature and the nature of criticism were shaped by direct contact with European writers and their work. I begin with the term ‘romantic’ itself and its contemporary definition as a polar opposite of the ‘classical’, then trace how this distinction emerged in conflicting views about the freedom or instrumentality of art. The examples I sketch will indicate that British Romanticism, far from being a purely ‘Europhobic’ phenomenon as it is sometimes labelled, drew strength at every stage from the literature and philosophy of Continental Europe. Nevertheless, one of the results of amalgamated German and French influence was a reinforcement of literary nationalism, especially after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Writing in 1820 on the topic of drama, William Hazlitt declared: ‘The age we live in is critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic’.1 The comment foreshadows Hazlitt’s subsequent work The Spirit of the Age (1825), the title of which echoes the German term Zeitgeist—​and indeed the four adjectives Hazlitt selects archly align the British literary scene with (perceived) tendencies on the European continent, especially Germany. A  universally ‘critical’ approach, originally associated with the three Critiques of Immanuel Kant, was the aspiration of the Romantic-​period review periodicals, credit for which Hazlitt justly assigned to one particular pioneer in mediating and translating German work, William Taylor of Norwich.2 The new German literary historiography, as we will see, could appear to provide a ‘didactic’ view of aesthetic education, while a spirit of ‘paradox’ was what Hazlitt himself had identified in the most prominent of

1 

‘The Drama: No. IV’, London Magazine (Apr. 1820), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), xviii. 302. 2  ‘Mr. Jeffrey’, The Spirit of the Age (1825), in Complete Works of Hazlitt, xi. 127 n. On Taylor, see John Boening, ‘Pioneers and Precedents: The “Importation of German” and the Emergence of the Periodical Criticism in England’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 7 (1982), 65–​87.

692   James Vigus those literary historians, August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose taste in poetry seemed systematically ‘the reverse of the popular’. All these tendencies of the age are gathered in the vague yet resonant term ‘romantic’. But what does Hazlitt mean by ‘romantic’? He provides an explanation in his 1816 review of Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, in which he addresses ‘the nucleus of the prevailing system of German criticism’: the contrast between ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ art. In Schlegel’s presentation the reviewer finds ‘a singular mixture of learning, acuteness and mysticism’. Hazlitt expounds the key distinction in his own terms, employing the language of British associationist psychology and using familiar images to connect the ‘classical’ with ancient and the ‘romantic’ with medieval and modern art: The most obvious distinction between the two styles, the classical and the romantic, is, that the one is conversant with objects that are grand or beautiful in themselves, or in consequence of obvious and universal associations; the other, with those that are interesting only by the force of circumstances and imagination. A Grecian temple, for instance, is a classical object; it is beautiful in itself, and excites immediate admiration. But the ruins of a Gothic castle have no beauty or symmetry to attract the eye; and yet they excite a more powerful and romantic interest from the ideas with which they are habitually associated.3

In keeping with his association of the ‘romantic’ with sublimity, Hazlitt adds that its further characteristics include ‘pleasing horror’, along with ‘passion and imagination’. The manner in which Hazlitt appropriates the romantic-​classic distinction is exemplary for the importation of literary-​critical ideas from Germany, France, and Italy in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Although Hazlitt, as his sometime friend Henry Crabb Robinson recognized, evinces a ‘kindred spirit’ with Schlegel, what he performs is not a neutral act of mediation, but a rewriting informed by national stereotypes: he asserts that the Germans, being ‘naturally a slow, heavy people’, require interpreters who display greater ‘ease, quickness and flexibility’.4 Hazlitt thus advertises his transfer of the idea of the ‘romantic’ from a German into an English idiom. Further, the term ‘romantic’, though here taken from a German author, was not so much a new import as a repatriated export. Ultimately of Latinate French derivation, the epithets ‘romanesque’ and ‘romantisch’ gained popularity only in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the fashion for the English garden spread to France and Germany.5 Friedrich Schlegel, who indicated that ‘our German criticism certainly received its first impulse from the study of the English works of Harris, Home, Hurd,

3 

‘Schlegel on the Drama’, Edinburgh Review 26 (Feb. 1816), in Complete Works of Hazlitt, xvi. 61.

4 Robinson, Diary (MS, Dr Williams’s Library, London), 12 May 1816; ‘Schlegel on the Drama’,

Complete Works of Hazlitt, xvi. 58. 5  Hans Eichner, ‘Introduction’, in Hans Eichner (ed.), ‘Romantic’ and its Cognates: The European History of a Word (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 5.

Continental Romanticism in Britain    693 Watson, &c’,6 retained much of the older (medieval) sense of ‘romance’ in his manifesto for ‘romantic poetry’—​though his definition of it in ‘Athenaeum-​Fragment’ 116 (1798) as ‘a progressive, universal poetry’ also launched a modern literary programme. It was only when A. W. Schlegel, drawing on his brother’s ideas, established the distinction between classical and romantic that the latter term properly re-​entered British critical discourse. Hazlitt’s use of the term ‘romantic’ also points to a terminological stumbling block that brings in its wake more substantial questions of method for the modern scholar. ‘Continental Romanticism’ is in two senses admittedly a misnomer. First, few writers of this period designated themselves ‘Romantics’, despite the widespread use of cognate terms to describe both great works of the past and present-​day ideals. As a label for a literary movement, ‘romantic’ was a hostile epithet bestowed in polemic against the Schlegels in 1807–​8; it was only much later that literary historians such as Rudolf Haym (in Die romantische Schule [The Romantic School], 1870) employed it with a neutral or favourable connotation.7 Moreover, notwithstanding the synthesizing efforts of such later nineteenth-​century historiographers, there was by no means a unified Romantic movement throughout Europe. Not only is Romanticism in France and Italy generally considered to begin only with the controversy surrounding the romantic-​classic distinction, some twenty years after the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, but the views and practices of writers nowadays termed ‘Romantic’ are often irreconcilable with one other. In emphasizing the diversity of Romanticism(s), Christoph Bode thus observes that some Romantics ‘were politically progressive and others reactionary; some were internationalist and cosmopolitan, others fiercely nationalistic; some of them believed in the Enlightenment project of rational perfectibility, while others opposed it’—​and such polarities even occur as different phases in the careers of individual writers.8 Bode argues that the very heterogeneity of Romantic writing is—​paradoxically—​its unifying characteristic, and, as such, that we best approach it via the concept of ‘family likenesses’: even in the absence of a single common denominator, one Romantic writer may display a characteristic that overlaps with another, who in turns shares a different characteristic with another Romantic, and so on. Though a helpful tool that frees a purely comparatist criticism from narrow assumptions about the nature of Romanticism, however, the model of family likenesses does not provide a framework within which to explore direct communication between different writers in Romantic-​period Europe. We will still wish to enquire what was the intellectual effect of travel, translations, and reviews, as well as of informal contacts through letters, private conversations, marginalia, and manuscript exchange?

6  Friedrich Schlegel, Lectures on the History of Literature [trans. John Gibson Lockhart], 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1818), i. 365. 7  See Hans Eichner, ‘Germany: Romantisch-​Romantik-​Romantiker’, in Eichner (ed.), ‘Romantic’ and its Cognates, 146. 8  Christoph Bode, ‘Europe’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 127.

694   James Vigus Some recent work on Continental influences on British Romanticism leaves the impression that such interaction was purely confrontational. According to Peter Mortensen’s New Historicist analysis, British Romanticism was ‘Europhobic’:  in his view, Romantic writers duplicitously confirmed popular prejudice against the dangers of Continental culture even as they plundered its literary techniques and topics, often in the service of a conservative ideology.9 For instance, Wordsworth, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), inveighed against the vitiation of public taste by ‘sickly and stupid German Tragedies’, while he nevertheless borrowed both plot and rhythms from the German ballad-​writer Gottfried August Bürger in poems such as ‘Hart-​Leap Well’.10 It is true that hostile critics such as Francis Jeffrey triumphantly asserted affinities between the Lake School and a ‘German’ revolutionary or anarchic sensibility.11 Yet the sensational label ‘Europhobic’ remains very one-​sided, obscuring the extent to which shared intellectual activity occurred. A more fruitful concept with which to examine the literary-​critical crosscurrents of this period is that of the ‘constellation’. This term, which has informed Dieter Henrich’s reconstructions of post-​Kantian philosophical debates, may be extended to wider networks of European writing. A constellation is ‘a small creative group of persons in face-​ to-​face contact or at least in correspondence with each other. Through their interchange emerge theories, which could not be understood by looking only at the development of the members of the group separately.’12 In what follows, I consider from the British perspective some results of the most important constellations of British, German, French, and Italian writers: in the earlier generation Henry Crabb Robinson, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and the Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich; in the next generation Lord Byron, John Cam Hobhouse, Ugo Foscolo, and the Shelleys; and then Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt. These choices of focus do not diminish Coleridge’s role as a mediator and interpreter of Continental and especially German ideas (on which, see Tim Milnes, Chapter 38 in this volume), but serve to illustrate that Coleridge was not alone or unique in his interests. These writers, through their interactions, produced views of art that relate closely to what Hazlitt—​himself a more isolated figure thanks to his stubborn pro-​Bonapartism—​identified as central to the spirit of the age: the paradoxical coexistence of the ‘didactic’ and the ‘romantic’. In other words, the debate revolves around (to borrow the more modern terms of David Duff) the dialectic

9  Peter Mortensen, British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 10  The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), i. 238. On Gothic imports, see F. W. Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period 1788–​1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926); and Angela Wright, Britain, France, and the Gothic, 1764–​1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 11  See, for instance, Jeffrey’s review in the first number of the Edinburgh Review (1802) of Robert Southey’s poem Thalaba: ‘their doctrines are of German origin’ (63). 12  Martin Mulsow, ‘The Third Force Revisited’, in Jeremy D. Popkin (ed.), The Legacies of Richard Popkin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 118.

Continental Romanticism in Britain    695 between two basic views: that art should be ‘instrumentalized’ for moral ends, and that it is essentially free and an expression of liberty. As befits a dialectic, these positions do not remain polar opposites but continually push towards a third idea: that of the indirect instrumentality of literary art.13 The flexible critical model of the constellation enables us to account for the fashioning of European Romantic literature and criticism in terms of the political scenes in which these writers operated, and to show the great extent to which Continental ideas were constitutive for the evolution of what we now term ‘British Romanticism’. The first of the literary constellations—​ Robinson, Staël, Constant, and subsequently the Schlegels—​assembled by chance in Weimar, the unofficial literary capital of Germany, in 1804. It was the least well known of these writers who, for a brief period, occupied the key position in the evolution of critical ideas. When Henry Crabb Robinson, utilizing a modest inheritance, travelled to Germany in 1800, he pursued the education that, as a Dissenter who could not take a university degree, had been denied him in England. He soon embarked on a fashionable Bildungsreise in Saxony, probably inspired in part by Jean-​Jacques Rousseau and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Robinson’s wandering was, however, intensely sociable, and his interests soon broadened through conversations with young advocates of the ‘new school’, as early Romanticism was then known in Germany.14 As the Englishman learnt, the early German Romantics were inspired by the philosophy of Kant, though unsatisfied by Kant’s modest restrictions on human knowledge. Rapidly improving his German, Robinson struggled through Kant’s Critiques, convinced that, for better or worse, Kantianism (in its broad sense) ‘will and must be the great ruling system’.15 To the astonishment of English friends accustomed to hear Kant disparaged as a mystagogic revolutionary, several months of this reading produced a profound change in Robinson: in April 1802 he declared that he had ‘converted’ from the philosophical empiricism associated with John Locke and Joseph Priestley to a new position, named ‘Kantianism’. Robinson’s response to German thought thus followed a similar pattern to that of Coleridge, who as a student at the University of Göttingen in 1798 reported that ‘all are Kantians whom I have met with’, and in 1801 composed Kant-​inspired letters to challenge the philosophy of Locke.16 Both English writers felt the force of Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ in philosophy, which reversed the empiricist paradigm of the mind as a blank slate upon which objects impinge.17 Most importantly, Kant, in establishing that ‘the mind alone is formative’ (Hazlitt’s phrase), provided rigorous arguments for the freedom of the will as the basis for a practical

13 

David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 116–​18. Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30. 15  Henry Crabb Robinson, Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. James Vigus (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2010), 6. 16  Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–​7 1), ii. 677–​703. 17  I have developed this comparison further, with reference to Heinrich von Kleist’s contemporaneous Kant-​crisis, in ‘Romantic Insight’, in Klaus Vieweg (ed.), Die Aktualität der Romantik (Berlin: LIT, 2012). 14 

696   James Vigus affirmation of metaphysical principles that mere understanding cannot establish. This was the approach that Robinson took in his pioneering publications on the topic.18 Despite the efforts of Robinson and Coleridge, and the presence in London of an able proselyte in Friedrich Nitsch, the philosophy of Kant nevertheless entered British Romantic discourse slowly and indirectly. Augmenting the difficulty of Kant’s German (a full translation of the Critique of Pure Reason would not appear until 1838), the campaigns of the government-​sponsored Anti-​Jacobin and its successor the Anti-​ Jacobin Review against the importation of Continental culture were in this respect successful: Kant continued to be stigmatized as an atheistic revolutionary in the mould of the legendary Illuminati. It was a sign of the times that a periodical designed to diffuse German work, The German Museum, collapsed in only its second year of production, in 1803; while the Monthly Register, where Robinson published his ‘Letters on the Philosophy of Kant’, likewise had a truncated lifespan (1802–​3). Robinson’s immersion in German thought was nevertheless informally productive. When he matriculated at the University of Jena in October 1802, he studied the Naturphilosophie and philosophy of art taught by F. W. J. Schelling, a charismatic young lecturer associated with the Schlegels’ early German Romanticism. Although Robinson had brought primarily religious concerns to his study of German philosophy, eventually finding that (contrary to anti-​Jacobin polemic) it effected ‘a sort of peace and union between it and religion’, his own literary ambitions gave him a special interest in the new discipline of aesthetics.19 This was why he found himself summoned in early 1804 to nearby Weimar, to provide tuition for Madame de Staël, who had arrived in this town as an exile from Napoleonic France, accompanied by the novelist and political writer Benjamin Constant. To assist her research for the book that would eventually become De l’Allemagne (‘On Germany’), Staël wished to be initiated into the ‘new’ aesthetics. The constellation Stäel–​Constant–​Robinson that now flourished was initially beset by national as well as gender stereotypes. When he first called on Staël, the Englishman was pleasurably shocked to find the ‘French lady’ ‘sitting most decorously in her bed’; she proceeded to ‘force’ him to prepare a series of private lectures. Echoing the collective judgement of the German literati about Staël, Robinson complained that ‘She has not the least sense for poetry and is incapable of thinking a philosophical thought.’20 The French visitors, meanwhile, mistakenly assumed Robinson to be a disciple of Schelling, and Constant tersely noted in his diary ‘l’absence de finesse des Anglais’ (the lack of refinement of the English). Following a propitiatory letter from Robinson to Staël, however, the meetings became tangibly more productive. An introductory presentation on Kant and another on Schelling prepared the way for Robinson’s final lecture, entitled ‘On the German Aesthetick or Philosophy of Taste’. This lecture pinpoints how Kantian philosophy paved the way to a new, romantic form of literature.

18 

Complete Works of Hazlitt, i. 130; Robinson, Essays, 28–​55.

20 

Robinson, letter to Thomas Robinson, 20 Jan. 1804, quoted in Essays, 19.

19 Robinson, Essays, 33.

Continental Romanticism in Britain    697 In recounting Kant’s controversial doctrine of the autonomy of aesthetic judgement—​ according to which beautiful objects such as works of fine art may symbolize moral concepts but cannot be determined by a moral purpose—​Robinson enlivened his exposition with an allusion (to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) of the kind which delighted Staël: The beautiful object must have in itself a form that intimates design, i.e. a harmony of parts propriety and fitness, a series of connections & dependencies, which being contemplated excite the Sense of Beauty, but it must not manifest in itself any precise & definite purpose—​it must have no object out of itself. Every definite purpose limits & chains the aesthetical feeling which must be free. N.B. This Result, which I have stated very loosely (in Kant it is left very obscure) has also led to many favourite doctrines of the modern Critics. That pure poetry & works of pure art must be judged of in this way is obvious—​Art is like Jehovah a jealous God, or rather it may be said, that the Muses in their connection with the Artist, resemble Corporal Trim whose wound was dressed by a Nun—​Trim was grateful & in truth in Love with the pious doctress—​‘C’est tout pour l’amour de Jesus Christ’ said the Nun And that displeased the honest Corporal—​‘I would rather it were for the Love of me, said Trim.’ ’tis so in respect the application of the Arts—​The Artist must always have a subject & an interesting subject too but he must contrive to render the aesthetical Interest predominate [sic] over the material—​he must make no poem or painting which is obviously produced ‘par l’amour de Jesus Christ’—​21

Immediately after this lecture, Constant noted that Robinson’s work on Kant had contained ‘Idées très ingénieuses’ (very ingenious ideas), and entered a remarkable coinage in his diary: ‘l’art pour l’art, et sans but; tout but denature l’art: mais l’art atteint au but qu’il n’a pas’ (art for art’s sake, and without a purpose; all purpose distorts art; but art reaches the purpose it does not have).22 This usage of the phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’ predates its first appearance in print by thirty years. Although commentators have usually assumed that the derivation of this ‘decadent’ slogan from the morally rigorous Kant must reflect a hopeless misunderstanding on the part of the foreign visitors to Weimar, the context of Robinson’s recently rediscovered lecture proves the contrary. In the above-​ quoted passage he correctly points out that the Kantian notion of aesthetic autonomy is ‘obscure’, and that its more radical formulations occur rather in the ‘modern Critics’, a reference perhaps primarily to Schelling, whose theories regarding the self-​sufficiency of ancient mythology the group discussed at length. Constant’s note on ‘l’art pour l’art’, suggested by Robinson’s interpretation of Kant, might appear the apex of a ‘free’, as opposed to ‘instrumentalist’, critical view of art. Yet attention to the rest of Constant’s sentence shows that he does not regard art for art’s sake as implying the renunciation of moral purpose. Instead, art ‘reaches’ the purpose that it does not ‘have’: the instrumentality of art is to be indirect, its effectiveness guaranteed 21 Robinson, Essays, 130–​1. The Corporal Trim and Nun exchange is from vol. 8, ch. 20 of Tristram Shandy (trans.: ‘It is all for the love of Jesus Christ’). 22  Quoted in Robinson, Essays, 22.

698   James Vigus precisely by the fact that it does not aim to be useful. There is further evidence of agreement on this topic. In the margin of Robinson’s lecture script, which Staël eventually brought back with her to her family seat at Coppet, near Geneva, she scribbled a note that reveals how she applied this thought to her own creative work: ‘delphine montre trop son but moral[;]‌la vie humaine est sans but evident’ (Delphine shows its moral purpose too much; human life is without an obvious purpose). In the light of the (post-​) Kantian theory of aesthetic autonomy, Staël thus reflects that her own recent novel, Delphine (1802)—​a work commonly viewed in England as an immoral onslaught on the sanctity of marriage—​was too morally didactic.23 Again, Staël by no means denies the potential social utility of art, but her note suggests that such utility should not be overtly invoked, since human life itself does not have an obvious ‘purpose’. In place of didacticism, she now prefers Friedrich Schiller’s notion of the ‘play-​drive’ (Spieltrieb). In response to Kant’s division of the human mind into different powers, Schiller had insisted instead that aesthetic play unites our faculties and makes us fully human.24 Thus, Staël’s marginal note continues: ‘Quand l’homme joue il vaut mieux que quand il agit’ (when man plays it is better than when he acts), a view consonant with Coleridge’s later assertion that pleasure is the only possible vehicle for a poet to ‘moralize his readers’.25 Staël, though never a revolutionary, was thus one of many Romantic authors who learned to renounce the hope of immediate political reform in favour of the ideal of a more gradual, moral amelioration. From the dialectical relationship between the traditional view that art should perform a directly moral function and the ‘romantic’ counter-​ argument that art should exist only for its own sake, there emerged a consensus that moral design should be impalpable: in the words of Thomas De Quincey, another author steeped in Continental sources, ‘not direct or explicit, but lurking, implicit, masked in deep incarnations’.26 Staël duly adjusted her technique in her next and greatest novel, Corinne, or, Italy (1807), in which the narrative dwells on aesthetic more than directly political matters. Received with great interest in Britain, not least due to its picturesque descriptions of ruins and other historical sites in Italy, as well as its depiction of an inspired improvisatrice, Corinne offered a compelling plot for war-​ torn Europe:  as James Mackintosh pointed out in his review, ‘the difference of national character is the force that sets all in motion’.27 The frivolous French count d’Erfeuil, an unsuitable friend for the morally earnest Scotsman Lord Nelvil (Corinne’s beloved), embodies the cultural 23 

Axel Blaeschke, ‘ “The First Female Writer of the Age”: Zur Staël-​Rezeption in England’, in Madame de Staël und die Internationalität der europäischen Romantik: Fallstudien zur interkulturellen Vernetzung, ed. Udo Schöning and Frank Seemann (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 35. 24  Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 106–​7. 25  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), ii. 131. 26  Rev. of Roscoe’s edition of Alexander Pope, North British Review 9 (Aug. 1848), quoted in Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre, 117–​18. 27  Edinburgh Review 11 (1808), 183.

Continental Romanticism in Britain    699 orientation that Staël was to attack in her next work, On Germany (1810). This ambitious four-​volume survey formed a companion piece to Corinne in its focus on national character, and promoted the exportation of the ‘new’ German aesthetics. At a culminating point in her discussion of German philosophy, she articulates the principle that the whole book is designed to enforce: a clear purpose in a work of art ‘borne et gêne l’imagination’.28 This is a formulation that closely echoes the phrase from Robinson’s notes that she had annotated: ‘Every definite purpose limits & chains the aesthetical feeling which must be free.’29 The Weimar constellation of 1804 thus informed the subsequent ‘romantic’ challenge to an instrumentalist or ‘classicist’ view of art. The chief influence on Staël’s work was, however, not Robinson but A. W. Schlegel, whom she had approached in Berlin in 1804 (on Robinson’s recommendation) and who had since then accompanied her in the role of travelling tutor to her son. On Germany proved an even greater success in England than any of the writings by the men in Staël’s circle, in part because she remained sufficiently independent from them to pursue her own agenda. Robinson and other readers who complained that she simplified the nuances and eradicated the conflicts of German thought failed to acknowledge the extent to which this was a deliberate policy to further her propagandist aim. For Staël aimed to contrast what she regarded as French superficiality with German depth, and accordingly On Germany establishes a contemplative hero in Immanuel Kant as a new model for Europe, to trump the martial force of Napoleon. Staël’s challenge to the literary tyranny of the neoclassical criticism institutionalized in France, then, is simultaneously a critique of the Napoleonic regime. Napoleon’s censors, recognizing Staël’s work as a direct threat, had the first edition of 1810 pulped; in 1813 Staël arrived in England and published the book with John Murray, utilizing the services of Robinson (by now qualified as a barrister) to negotiate the contract.30 The preface to the 1813 edition judiciously emphasizes the persecution Staël had suffered from Napoleon, an aspect calculated to recommend the work to English readers. A decade after its first vogue, in Francis Hodgson’s 1813 translation, Blackwood’s could still report in October 1823 that ‘Madame de Staël’s Germany is in every hand’. Indeed, On Germany became a standard authority on its topic—​doubtless to the frustration of Coleridge, who complained of the diluted mediation of Kantian thought at the hands of ‘Reviewers and Frenchmen’.31 The success of On Germany, together with Staël’s social prominence during her stay in London, also paved the way for the reception of a major work by her long-​term companion A. W. Schlegel: Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, a book that enjoyed pan-​European fame. John Black, editor of the politically radical Morning Chronicle, 28 

Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne, ed. Comtesse Jean de Pange and Simone Balayé, 5 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1958–​60), iv. 281. 29 Robinson, Essays, 130 (italics added). 30  Robinson noted this on 11 July 1813: Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, Barrister-​at-​Law, F. S. A., ed. Thomas Sadler, 2 vols (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1871), i. 267. 31 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 153. On the British reception of Staël’s De l’Allemagne, see Blaeschke, ‘The First Female Writer’; and Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88–​92.

700   James Vigus translated it from German into English in 1815; the previous year, the work was translated into French by Albertine Necker de Saussure, Staël’s cousin; and an Italian version was made from the French in 1817. These translations both reflected and actively increased the extent to which a ‘romantic’ movement in Western Europe defined itself against a notionally preceding era of ‘classicism’. In elaborating and justifying a contemporary ideal, the ‘romantic’, Schlegel turned to works of the past for exemplification and inspiration. In Schlegel’s comprehensive history of European drama and literature, Shakespeare is presented as the romantic artist par excellence. Schlegel repudiated the older critical tendency to celebrate the beauties of Shakespeare’s plays while deploring the blemishes: he thus defended Shakespeare against the charges that he lacked learning and committed ignorant anachronisms. Crucial to Schlegel’s method was the ‘romantic’ notion of organic form, whereby all the parts of a work, however discordant they might appear if judged in isolation by predetermined rules of composition, contribute to the gradually emergent effect of the whole. This approach was consonant with the prototype version of ‘l’art pour l’art’ worked out by the Weimar constellation: the critic should judge a work of art according to its own inner purpose, rather than by measuring its individual details against the ‘moral’ standard erected by neoclassicist critics. Schlegel conducts his discussion in highly nation-​conscious terms:  for instance, he laments the inability of English critics to understand the excellencies of their own greatest writer. As with the term ‘romantic’ itself, Shakespearean drama thus becomes a kind of repatriated export. But it is one of the paradoxes of the importation of ‘Continental Romanticism’ that it involved assimilating ultra-​patriotic attitudes from a foreign source. German scholarship was enlisted to celebrate the achievements of English culture.32 Rivalries in the proper appreciation of Shakespeare and, by extension, of ‘romantic’ art, developed along both national and personal lines. In a typical manoeuvre to establish national hierarchies, Hazlitt declared that ‘I have done something (more than anyone except Schlegel) to vindicate the Characters of Shakespeare’s plays from the stigma of French criticism’, thus implicitly snubbing his rival London lecturer, Coleridge, whose detailed comments on the organic form of Shakespeare’s plays, and on the primacy of Shakespeare’s artistic ‘judgement’, developed along parallel lines to Schlegel’s (see Gregory Dart, Chapter 39 in this volume).33 Wordsworth, too, acknowledged the supremacy of German Shakespeare criticism over French, Italian, and English criticism—​an evaluation to which Coleridge took exception as a further slight to his own work.34 Shelley was another writer whose thinking about Shakespeare and about dramatic form was powerfully influenced by Schlegel, as the echoes of the Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature in his Defence of Poetry (written in 1821) demonstrate.35 32 

Thomas G. Sauer, August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Shakespeare Criticism in England, 1811–​1846 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), esp. 172. 33  Complete Works of Hazlitt, xii. 122. 34  ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815), in Wordsworth, Prose Works, iii. 68–​9; Coleridge, Letters, iv. 839. 35  Michael Rossington, ‘Tragedy: The Cenci and Swellfoot the Tyrant’, in Michael O’ Neill and Anthony Howe, with Madeleine Callaghan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Oxford

Continental Romanticism in Britain    701 The excitement that surrounded Schlegel’s work might seem puzzling, given that there was some justice in Hazlitt’s opinion as to its pedestrian style. A key to Schlegel’s appeal lay in the opposite directions in which his ongoing manifesto for Romanticism pointed: on the one hand, he promoted Weltbürgertum, a cosmopolitan and tolerant attitude to different cultures; on the other, he propagated nationalistic sentiment, pleading especially for the recognition of Germany as an independent nation. What ensured the relevance of Schlegel’s scholarship to the British Romantic scene was above all the potential for the anti-​instrumentalist discourse of ‘l’art pour l’art’ to be appropriated to a nationalistic context. Following the Congress of Vienna, moreover, the other Schlegel brother assumed fresh prominence. As an employee of the Austrian civil service from 1809, Friedrich Schlegel had completed a trajectory (catalyzed in his case by Napoleon’s invasion of Prussia in 1806) analogous to that of Coleridge and Wordsworth, from revolutionary sympathizer to political conservative. The translator of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lectures on the History of Literature, the Scottish patriot John Gibson Lockhart, seized upon the work’s message that ‘literature’ itself is nothing more than ‘the aggregate mass of symbols in which the spirit of an age or the character of a nation is shadowed forth’.36 As Ian Duncan has shown, ‘Lockhart imports Schlegel’s scheme to found, in effect, the nationalist topos of the Scottish literary tradition.’37 Lockhart’s translation is frequently inaccurate, and from the outset intensifies the nationalistic tone of Schlegel’s work: Lockhart inserts the adjective ‘national’ where it did not appear in the original and translates, for instance, ‘die Bildung des menschlichen Geistes’ (the education of the human spirit) as ‘the formation of a national character’.38 Yet, as Lockhart’s unsigned review of his own translation in the 1818 Blackwood’s indicates—​he praised Schlegel’s work as ‘by far the most rational and profound view of the history of literature which has yet been presented to Europe’—​it helped to set the intellectual agenda for Blackwood’s and thus profoundly to influence Romantic culture.39 Thus, although the Romanticism of the Weimar constellation and subsequently of the Schlegel brothers was initially founded on an anti-​instrumentalist and anti-​ authoritarian endorsement of a non-​‘classical’ aesthetic, it was readily appropriated to an exclusive nationalism in England and especially in Scotland, whose tenor was quite alien to the spirit of revolution prevalent two decades previously. This context helps to explain why the second constellation I will examine, consisting of members of a younger generation whose Continental interests were more Swiss and Italian than German, regarded Schlegelian Romanticism with ambivalence and sometimes hostility—​while

University Press, 2013), 304. Shelley’s reading of A. W. Schlegel is noted in The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–​1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-​Kilvert, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), i. 198 (entries for 16–​21 Mar. 1818). 36 Schlegel, Lectures, i. 274.

37  Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 60. 38 Schlegel, Lectures, i. 5. 39  Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 3 (1818), 511; Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 57.

702   James Vigus nevertheless operating within the terms of the familiar dialectic. Shelley’s interest in A. W. Schlegel has already been noted. Better documented is Byron’s debt to Staël. Already on passable terms with her in London in 1813, he befriended her in Geneva in 1816; and Childe Harold resembles in world-​weariness, if not in moral outlook, the gloomy hero of Corinne, Oswald.40 Yet Byron considered Staël’s politics ‘sadly changed’, and ripe for the kind of conservative appropriation that Lockhart implemented with Friedrich Schlegel’s work.41 Moreover, Byron consistently expressed suspicion of Staël’s literary theorizing: he considered her 1816 article on translation for the periodical Biblioteca italiana, which called for Italian writers to revitalize their literature with English and German models, to be partly to blame for the ‘bitterness of the classic and romantic war’.42 Following Staël’s lead in a somewhat different direction, Byron, like the Shelleys, invoked another French influence and predecessor in the struggle for freedom: Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau. In Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron admires Rousseau for his legendary role in preparing the French Revolution:



For then he was inspired, and from him came, As from the Pythian’s mystic cave of yore, Those oracles which set the world in flame, Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more: Did he not this for France? Which lay before Bowed to the inborn tyranny of years? (Canto 3, stanza 81)

A consideration of the upheavals in Rousseau’s reputation during the Romantic period sheds light on the extent to which Byron’s forceful invocation of Rousseau constituted a response to Madame de Staël. As spokesman for egalitarianism, Rousseau had once appeared the foremost intellectual icon of the French Revolution. Rousseau’s reputation then declined, primarily because Robespierre had claimed him as a kindred spirit during the Terror. But following the phase of conservative, anti-​Enlightenment vilification of Rousseau, it became common among both admirers and detractors to portray him as a dreamy idealist of deep feeling as opposed to a coldly calculating rabble-​rouser, 40   See ‘Some Recollections of My Acquaintance with Madame de Staël’ (1821), in Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 184–​6; and Byron’s note to Canto 4, line 478 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​93), ii. 235–​6. For a comparison between Childe Harold and Corinne, see Joanne Wilkes, Lord Byron and Madame de Staël: Born for Opposition (Farnham: Ashgate, 1999), 100–​31. 41  Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​94), iii. 66 (22 June 1813). 42  ‘Preface’ to The Prophecy of Dante (1821), in Byron, Complete Poetical Works, iv. 215; Wilkes, Lord Byron and Madame de Staël, 10. For a concise account of the dispute, see Fabio A. Camiletti, Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature: Leopardi’s ‘Discourse on Romantic Poetry’ (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), introd.

Continental Romanticism in Britain    703 a shift exemplified by the first ‘landing-​place’ essay in Coleridge’s The Friend (1809).43 In the wake of the Congress of Vienna’s ‘king-​making’, as Byron contemptuously termed it in Childe Harold (Canto 3, stanza 17), a sublimely eloquent version of Rousseau now became a literary focal point of resistance to the new order. The Shelleys read Rousseau when they travelled to Geneva and to Clarens, the place rapturously described in the novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Byron, too, shared pilgrimages with the Shelleys, recording: ‘I have traversed all Rousseau’s ground—​with the Heloise before me—​and am struck to a degree with the force and accuracy of his descriptions—​and the beauty of their reality.’44 In the above-​quoted stanza, Byron evokes an inspired, prophetic version of Rousseau, placing him in the same Delphic company (the ‘Pythian cave’) as Staël’s prophetic heroine, Corinne, yet pointedly linking Rousseau’s faculty of composition to violent revolution. Neither Byron’s implicit outdoing of Staël, nor his explicit appeal to the pre​revolutionary sensibility of Rousseau, however, sufficed to keep him aloof from the romantic-​classic controversy that he wished to repudiate. Through his contacts with Italian writers in Italy and his reading and translations of Italian works, Byron inevitably became involved in this dispute, central as it was to the new debate about Italian literary and political identity. In 1818–​19 a group of young, liberal writers enlisted Byron’s recently translated works to the Romantic cause; the anti-​Romantics, or classicists, responded by first attacking Byron, then claiming him for their own side.45 Ugo Foscolo was, with Alfieri, the ‘classicist’ poet of greatest importance to Byron. Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798), inspired by Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, attracted Byron’s admiration; and his poetic reflections on the immortality of Italy’s men of genius probably inspired the nostalgic tone of Byron’s self-​fashioning in Canto 4 of Childe Harold. But Foscolo’s role in relation to Childe Harold went further. Byron, also in this respect competing with Staël, decided to supplement this canto with a prose exposition of the state of Italy. For assistance with the notes, he turned to John Cam Hobhouse, the disconsolate friend with whom he had toured Rome and stayed in Venice in 1817. Hobhouse swiftly embarked upon a companion project: Historical Illustrations to the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818). It was after his return to England that Hobhouse first met Foscolo (in February 1818), for just as Byron was self-​exiled in Italy, so Foscolo had been living in London in self-​imposed exile from Austrian domination since 1816. This parallel would not have escaped Hobhouse, who noted in his diary: ‘Foscolo is an extraordinary man; he talks poetry. He said Napoleon’s dominion was like a July day in

43 

See Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre, and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 16–​21. 44  Byron’s Letters and Journals, v. 82. On this group’s literary tourism in Switzerland and France, see Patrick Vincent, Chapter 45 in this volume. 45  See Eduardo Zuccato, ‘The Fortunes of Byron in Italy (1810–​70)’, in Richard Cardwell (ed.), The Reception of Byron in Europe, vol. 1: Southern Europe, France and Romania (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), 81–​2.

704   James Vigus Egypt—​all clear brilliant and blazing; but all silent not a voice heard, the stillness of the grave.’46 The constellation Byron–​Hobhouse–​Foscolo is another instance of the way in which the transfer of Continental ideas in this period occurred in a two-​way movement and through direct personal contacts. Foscolo, an adherent of English empiricist philosophy, was a suitable ally for writers who opposed the tendencies of German idealist thought; he also concurred with Byron in considering Corinne a factually inadequate work.47 The impecunious Italian poet had already begun writing for the British press, notably on Petrarch and Dante: he would publish five major articles on Italian literature and history in the Edinburgh Review between 1818 and 1827, as well as three in the Quarterly Review in 1819–​20.48 Hobhouse persuaded him to contribute a section of biographies of modern literary writers to his volume of Historical Illustrations. Foscolo’s resulting ‘Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’, translated by Hobhouse, performed a dual task: it was an exile’s intervention in the romantic-​classic dispute taking place in his own country, and at the same time a source of information about Italian literature for English readers, who would have been unfamiliar with the names that Byron presents in an incantatory list in the Preface to Canto 4 of Childe Harold. Readers in Italy at once discerned the authorship of the ‘Essay’, despite the fact that Foscolo, who was accustomed to publishing unsigned work, denied it. The ‘Essay’ courted controversy: it promoted Foscolo himself, treated other contemporary Italian writers with condescension, and most provocatively of all, it dismissed the romantic-​ classic controversy as an ‘idle question’. Ludovico di Breme, a partisan of the romantici who was doubtless offended by being omitted from the ‘Essay’, wrote letters of protest to both Byron and Hobhouse.49 Two aspects of Foscolo’s approach are especially important. First, he emphasizes the importance of Anglo–​Italian exchange; and second, he suggests that the spirit of Dante—​the original romantic exile—​might revive in the present day to reinvigorate both Italian blank verse and political attitudes. Increasingly, the group of expatriate English liberal Italophiles found a cultural focus in Dante, by way of counterpart to the patriotic version of Shakespeare promoted by Coleridge and August Wilhelm Schlegel.50 Leigh Hunt’s poem The Story of Rimini (1816), a ‘cockney’ satire on authoritarian politics written in rhyming couplets and dedicated to Byron, was based on

46   Foscolo, diary entry for 22 Aug. 1823, quoted in E. R. Vincent, Byron, Hobhouse and Foscolo: New Documents in the History of a Collaboration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 113. 47  See Sandra Parmegiani, Ugo Foscolo and English Culture (Oxford: Legenda, 2011). The remarks on Corinne appear in Lettere scritte dall’Inghilterra (Letters from England) (1817): see Joseph Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Ann Arbor: Sheridan Books, 2008), 71–​6. 48  For a bibliography, see Francesco Viglione, Ugo Foscolo in Inghilterra (Pisa, 1910), 319–​21. 49  Nick Havely, ‘ “This Infernal Essay”: English Contexts for Foscolo’s Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’, in Lila Maria Crisafulli (ed.), Immaginando l’Italia: Itinerari letterari del Romanticismo inglese /​ Imagining Italy: Literary Itineraries in British Romanticism (Bologna: CLUEB, 2002). 50  Caroline Franklin, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Catholic Culture: Byron, Italian Poetry, and The Liberal’, in Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia (eds), British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (New York: Rodopi, 2005), 268.

Continental Romanticism in Britain    705 Dante’s story of the lovers Paola and Francesca in Hell. Byron, in The Prophecy of Dante, ventriloquizes Dante’s sublime voice to produce a dramatic portrayal of the artist’s revolutionary role. In 1822 Hunt, persuaded by Shelley, brought his family to Leghorn to collaborate with his two fellow-​poets in founding a journal, The Liberal. The first number announced programatically in its first issue that ‘Italian Literature, in particular, will be a favourite subject with us’. Although the constellation Byron–​Shelley–​Hunt was short-​ lived, undermined by the uneasiness of Byron’s relationship with Hunt and then ended by Shelley’s death, this expatriate publication received a level of attention in the London press commensurate with the importance of some of its contributions.51 It opened with Byron’s A Vision of Judgment, his sharpest attack yet on British establishment politics; offered renditions of Ariosto and Alfieri, and critical ‘Letters from Abroad’; and wryly dissected the over-​disciplined ‘Scotch Character’. The Liberal, then, like Blackwood’s, took both political and literary inspiration from Continental sources, yet the ideological orientation of the two periodicals was diametrically opposed. In this sense, Staël’s perception of the division of national characters according to geographical features, especially climate, came to fruition: The Liberal’s provision of ‘Verse and Prose from the South’ contrasted with the northern bias of Blackwood’s. In both cases, the supposed freedom represented by a form of European literary art was instrumentalized for a new critical programme; but in the work of the Byron–​Shelley–​Hunt constellation, Dante and his notional heirs in the early Risorgimento were pitched against the appropriation of the romantic by the ‘conservative’ group of Shakespeare critics including Coleridge and the Schlegels. That it had been the Schlegels’ work that helped to inform Robinson’s mediation of the notion of aesthetic autonomy to Staël in 1804 reflects the fragility as well as the intensity of each of the constellations traced in this chapter, as British attitudes to European romanticism shifted according to particular personal contacts and political circumstances.

Further Reading Burwick, Frederick, and Paul Douglass (eds), Dante and Italy in British Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Class, Monika, Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–​1817 (London: Continuum, 2012). Corrigan, Beatrice (ed.), Italian Poets and English Critics, 1755–​1859: A Collection of Critical Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). Ferber, Michael (ed.), A Companion to European Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Furst, Lilian R. (ed.), European Romanticism: Self-​Definition (London: Methuen, 1980). Hamilton, Paul, Realpoetik:  European Romanticism and Literary Politics (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013).

51  William H. Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and The Liberal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 90–​134. See also Maria Schoina, ‘Byron and The Liberal: A Reassessment’, in Alan Rawes and Mirka Horová (eds), ‘ “Tears, & Tortures, & the Touch of Joy”: Byron in Italy’, Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture 23, no. 46 (Dec. 2013), 23–​37.

706   James Vigus Hamilton, Paul (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016). Isbell, John, The Birth of European Romanticism:  Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s ‘De l’Allemagne’, 1810–​1813 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Kooy, Michael John, Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Paulin, Roger, The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel: Cosmopolitan Art and Poetry (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014). Prickett, Stephen, and Simon Haines (eds), European Romanticism:  A Reader (London: Continuum, 2010). Saglia, Diego, European Literature in Britain, 1815–1832: Romantic Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Schoina, Maria, Romantic ‘Anglo-​Italians’: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Simpson, David, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). Stock, Paul, The Shelley-​Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Wellek, René, A History of Modern Criticism:  1750–​1950, vol. 2:  The Romantic Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). Woudenberg, Maximiliaan van Woudenberg, Coleridge and Cosmopolitan Intellectualism 1794–​1804: The Legacy of Göttingen University (London: Routledge, 2017).

Chapter 45

British Rom antics  A broa d Patrick Vincent

Edward John Trelawny, the dashing navy veteran, adventurer, and Romantic biographer, opens his Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878) with an embellished tale of his electrifying discovery of Shelley’s poetry, quickly followed by a chance meeting with William Wordsworth in person. Both encounters took place in Lausanne, a town on the shores of Lake Geneva popular with British travellers and expatriates, in September 1820. Trelawny describes how a young German bookseller handed him a copy of Shelley’s Queen Mab under the same acacia trees where Edward Gibbon had finished his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, an elegant way to draw a link between the two writers’ corrosive scepticism. A few days later, he found a sunburned Wordsworth with his wife and sister breakfasting at a hotel at the end of their Continental tour, the aim of which was to revisit the places the twenty-​year-​old William had toured on foot in 1790 and had then immortalized fifteen years later in The Prelude.1 The two incidents related by Trelawny suggest two possible interpretations of British Romantics abroad, the first most obviously referring to the many Romantic-​period writers and artists who visited or lived in foreign countries in this period, the second to the Romantic-​authored texts that widely circulated outside of Britain. This chapter will examine both meanings, focusing on Continental Europe not only because it was the most common destination of the British Romantics abroad, but also because these travellers as well as their books contributed to a shared sense of European identity and helped foster liberal democracy in an age of political reaction. A significant number of Britain’s gentry and educated middle classes, including poets but also artists, retired military officers, and other professionals, travelled abroad after 1815, many of them taking advantage of the cost of living on the Continent

1 

Edward Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, introd. Anne Barton (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), 13–​17.

708   Patrick Vincent to retire.2 In Lausanne that same summer one could meet the Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, the celebrity actor John Kemble, and the artist Marianne Colston, as well as a host of unknown tourists. A friend of the Shelleys, the bookseller Thomas Hookham, encountered mountain peasants in 1816 who believed the large number of travellers passing through was due to a revolution in Britain.3 A revolution was indeed taking place, but one of a cultural rather than political order—​the modern vogue of tourism.4 As Coleridge writes in his satire, ‘The Delinquent Travellers’ (1824): ‘But O, what scores are sick of Home, | Agog for Paris and for Rome! . . . For move you must! ’Tis now the rage, | The law and fashion of the Age.’5 For the generation that came of age directly after the twenty-​year war with France, and which included writers such as Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Thomas Moore, and Hazlitt, travel abroad was indeed all the rage, but their wanderlust was unexceptional. To this group one may add writers who had reached their maturity in the 1790s but waited until after 1815 to set foot on the Continent, including Samuel Rogers, Lady Morgan, Walter Scott, and Francis Jeffrey. A small number of their peers, on the other hand, did set out during the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, among them Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Coleridge, Henry Crabb Robinson, Walter Savage Landor, Robert Southey, and, of course, Wordsworth. For these first-​generation Romantics, travel abroad had been a more singular affair, still filled with the dangers of the road, regimented by Grand Tour conventions, and complicated by war. Wordsworth’s complaint to Trelawny that the introduction of carriages and roads across the Alps after 1800 made travellers soft, diminished the locals’ virtue, and destroyed the traveller’s solitude eloquently illustrates the gap between these two generations of writers and their different modes of travel. Speaking of the British Romantics abroad as a single, coherent category is therefore misleading:  the Romantic period overlapped with two distinct forms of social practice: the Grand Tour and modern tourism, to which one may add the Revolutionary tourism of the 1790s. Furthermore, as scholars have shown, male and female travel writers did not always represent the places they visited in the same way.6 Finally, the Romantics travelled abroad for a variety of reasons, from business and pleasure to bad health and unhappy relationships, and they did so in sometimes starkly different 2 

See Benjamin Colbert, ‘Bibliography of British Travel Writing, 1780–​1840: The European Tour, 1814–​1818 (excluding Britain and Ireland)’, Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 13 (Winter 2004), at: www.romtext.org.uk/​issues/​issue-​13/​. 3  Thomas Hookham, A Walk Through Switzerland in September 1816 (London, 1818), 103–​4. 4  For some precise figures, see Michael Heafford, ‘Between Grand Tour and Tourism: British Travellers to Switzerland in a Period of Transition, 1814–​1860’, Journal of Transport History 27.1 (2006), 25–​47. 5  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 378–​82. 6  See, for example, Jeanne Moskal, ‘Gender and Italian Nationalism in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy’, Romanticism 5.2 (1999), 188–​201; Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–​1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Brian Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-​ Century Europe (New York: Harper Collins, 2001).

British Romantics Abroad   709 manners. Wordsworth and Jones’s three-​month pedestrian tour of Europe, labelled by Robin Jarvis a form of ‘radical walking’,7 is not the same as Byron’s journey twenty-​six years later in a replica of Napoleon’s carriage; nor can Helen Maria Williams’s thirty-​six year exile in Paris be judiciously compared with Scott or Jeffrey’s brief post-​Waterloo forays. Coleridge first travelled abroad in 1798 to learn German and read philosophy at Göttingen, then between 1804 and 1806 to serve as Public Secretary in Malta, and finally in 1828 on a Rhine Tour with Wordsworth and his daughter Dora, the only one of his Continental travels that qualifies as touristic. This impossibility of defining a distinctly Romantic mode of travel or of travel writing does not preclude our identifying features salient to many of the writers in this period. The first of these is the opposition between traveller and tourist. Anticipating Evelyn Waugh’s quip, ‘But we are travellers and cosmopolitans, the tourist is the other fellow’,8 many of the leading Romantics refused to identify themselves as tourists and rejected modern travel as inauthentic, unfashionably middle-​class, and overly commodified.9 One way they did so was by showing their attachment to the residual ideology of the Grand Tour in order to imagine Europe as a system of independent, politically emancipated nations, a second, even more significant feature of the British Romantics abroad.10 The Grand Tour celebrated European civilization, what Gibbon called ‘the Great republic of Europe’,11 as a careful equipoise between southern classical culture, most commonly identified with Italy, and northern political liberty, best exemplified by Great Britain. As late as 1878, Trelawny could still play on features of the Grand Tour to describe the British propensity to travel: ‘Our icy islanders thaw rapidly when they have drifted into warmer latitudes: broken loose from its anti-​social system, mystic castes, coteries, sets and sects, they lay aside their purse-​proud, tuft-​hunting, and toadying ways, and are very apt to run riot in the enjoyment of all their senses.’12 Rehearsing the Grand Tour’s preoccupation with national character, the author develops the necessary narrative movement from north to south, guilt to pleasure that undergirds accounts both non-​fictional and fictional, from Joseph Addison’s classical Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705) to Germaine de Staël’s sentimental Corinne; ou, l’Italie (1807).13 The Grand Tour was often satirized as an alibi for sexual tourism, but Trelawny here is endorsing southern pleasure as sign of open-​mindedness to foreign alterity and to a

7

  Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 34–​8. Evelyn Waugh, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (London: Duckworth, 1930), 44. 9  Carl Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 10  See Benjamin Colbert, Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), ch. 1; and Paul Stock, The Shelley-​Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 11  Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: A One-​Volume Abridgement by Dero Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 624. See also Colbert, Shelley’s Eye, 18–​24. 12 Trelawny, Records, 15. 13  Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–​ 1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 1–​18. 8 

710   Patrick Vincent sensual experience that is as much aesthetic as sexual. This cosmopolitan taste was both a mode of class distinction and a sign of belonging to classical European civilization. Alongside, and sometimes in counterpoint to, the Grand Tour narrative’s southern-​ inflected cosmopolitanism, one often finds Whiggish celebrations of British liberty grounded in a civic humanist ideal of virtue. The eighteenth-​century poetic correlative of the prose travelogue was progress poems such as James Thomson’s Liberty (1734) and William Collins’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1746), which imagined history as the struggle for liberty, reproduced the ideology of the Grand Tour in verse form, and provided a narrative model for Romantic travel verse.14 A late example, Goldsmith’s The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society (1764), opens the way with its world-​weary, solitary speaker to Romantic travel writing by destabilizing the earlier poems’ Whiggish confidence in Great Britain, offering ‘a more subjective dramatization of the traveller as melancholic exile’, and creating new tensions ‘between individual and national identity, patriotism and dissidence, travel and domestic yearning’.15 The new sensibility expressed in Goldsmith’s poem is more representative of the middle-​class tourist than of the aristocratic traveller. In the second half of the century, influenced by Rousseau’s works and by such popular travelogues as Tobias Smollett’s cantankerous Travels Through France and Italy (1766) and Laurence Sterne’s rival A Sentimental Journey (1768), travel writing became less didactic, more personal, and, above all, more emotional. The cult of sentiment, together with the expanding literary market, authorized middle-​class writers both male and female to publish travel accounts, often in personal genres such as letters, diaries, and journals. Johnson’s characteristic remark in a letter to his friend and fellow traveller Hester Thrale Piozzi that ‘the use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are’ is as much a reaction to this new sensibility as it is a description of Grand Tour ideology.16 Yet even the Continental travel journals of Johnson’s biographer James Boswell are filled with personal anecdotes dramatizing the author’s overactive imagination and ardent sensibility. This expressive revolution helps explain the rise of scenic tourism in the 1780s and 1790s, the search for the picturesque serving as a source of imaginative pleasure among the educated elite.17 It also appears very clearly in landscape painting—​for example, in between what Simon Schama has identified as the ‘laboriously conscientious’ alpine landscapes of William Pars, on the Grand Tour with Lord Palmerston in 1770, and John Robert Cozens’s visionary sceneries of the same subject produced at the end of the same decade.18 Ironically, Claude-​glass 14  See Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750–​1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 13–​15; and William Levine, ‘Collins, Thomson, and the Whig Progress of Liberty’, Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900 34.3 (1994), 553–​77. 15  James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–​1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15–​16. See also Turner, British Travel Writers, 14. 16  Hester Thrale Piozzi, Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson (Dublin, 1780), 1, 101. 17  See Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–​1800 (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1989), 40–​5. 18  Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996), 469.

British Romantics Abroad   711 carrying British travellers applied the aesthetic norms of the sublime and the picturesque to the foreign landscapes that had given rise to these new norms in the first place and that aristocratic collectors had carried back home as prints and paintings from their Grand Tour. These norms were often simply labelled as ‘romantick’, the term used to characterize wild or fanciful scenery in the eighteenth century. The Alps, a romantic landscape par excellence whose sublimity John Dennis had celebrated as early as 1688 as a ‘delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy’,19 became a destination of choice primarily because of the heightened emotion they excited, but also because of their symbolic function as a threshold between north and south, republican virtue and cosmopolitan pleasure. While tourists continued to follow the beaten track established by the Grand Tour, their stated aim was less self-​improvement and more openly leisure, and their travelogues increasingly became a record of personal responses to the world at large, and even an interior journey. Dean MacCannell has gone so far as to argue that the tourist, in his expressive quest to feel that he or she exists, is the prototypical modern subject, and tourism the paradigmatic illustration of the modern turn to subjectivity.20 At the same time, Chloe Chard notes that the tourist ‘recognizes that travel might constitute a form of personal adventure . . . but, as a result of this recognition, attempts to keep the more dangerous and destabilizing aspects of the encounter with the foreign at bay’.21 In other words, modern tourism drew on the Grand Tour’s aura of exclusivity and danger, but, like the Burkean sublime, avoided placing the traveller in situations of risk by standardizing the tourist experience. Tellingly, guidebooks intended to contain the risks inherent in travelling abroad and to give tourists more autonomy began to proliferate at the end of the eighteenth century. Among the best known was Mariana Starke’s Letters from Italy, which included ‘Instructions for the Use of Invalids and Families, Who may not Wish to incur the Expence attendant upon Travelling with a Courier.’22 The French Revolution not only reduced travel abroad significantly, but also marked a hiatus in the passage from eighteenth-​century modes of travel to modern tourism. Notwithstanding the association of cosmopolitanism with Jacobinism, the craze for Gothic fiction that provided British readers with an imaginative substitute to travel, and the sharp increase in home tourism within the British Isles, the general concern with politics created a demand for Continental travel accounts that could be both more factual and less personal. As Katherine Turner has argued, the Revolution ‘necessitated a rigorous reworking of the discourse of travel’, giving the genre an overtly political awareness that was much more polemical than the earlier, more complacently Whiggish narratives.23 Even travelogues that wanted nothing to do with politics had difficultly avoiding discussion of governments or manners: for example, in his humorous Letters

19 

Journal entry for 21 Oct. 1688, in John Dennis, Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (London, 1693), 134. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 21 Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, 11. 22  Mariana Starke, Travels in Italy between the Years 1792 and 1798, 2 vols (London, 1802), i, title page. 23 Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe, 182–​5. 20 

712   Patrick Vincent during the Course of a Tour through Germany, Switzerland and Italy (1794), the conservative vicar Robert Gray promises to collect ‘no trash of foreign politics’ as he travels across Europe, yet he finds himself repeatedly combatting democratic principles. In the The Wanderer (1798), on the contrary, the republican Joshua Lucock Wilkinson, a childhood friend of Wordsworth, relates two walking tours in France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy in 1791 and 1793 in which he acts the role of a Revolutionary tourist seeking out the friends of humanity.24 The best known of these Revolutionary tourists was Helen Maria Williams, whose eight volumes of Letters from France (1790–​6) present her as a ‘citizen of the world’ and a friend of the Girondist faction. Williams hosted a salon at her home on Rue Helvétius in Paris, where Revolutionary leaders such as Brissot and Madame Roland mingled with British and Irish expatriates including Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. Williams’s earlier volumes of the Letters make her more controversial political opinions more palatable by aetheticizing them as sublime setpieces or as sentimental anecdotes, notably the story of the Du Fossé family. Her later volumes, as well as her A Tour in Switzerland (1798), on the other hand, adopt a more unsentimental, impersonal, but also unapologetically ideological style to openly embrace the Enlightenment principles of cosmopolitanism, liberty, and progress.25 First-​generation Romantic writers wavered between the private discourse of sensibility and the more impersonal, masculine discourse that was still the norm in Grand Tour narratives. In the advertisement to her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), for example, Mary Wollstonecraft apologizes for writing in the first person and being the ‘little hero of each tale’, arguing that it is not egotism but the only way she is able to give a ‘just view of the present state of the countries’ she is travelling through.26 Descriptive Sketches (1793), Wordsworth’s first poem to address his walking tour of 1790, is written in the same melancholy voice as Cowper’s eminently private The Task (1785) and William Lisle Bowles’s Fourteen Sonnets (1789), but like Thomson’s Liberty it follows a progressive geographic and historical trajectory. The poem’s speaker passes from Italy’s feminine, private sociability to the primitive freedom of Switzerland before reaching its apotheosis in Revolutionary France as the fullest achievement of political liberty. Even The Prelude, often cited as the paradigm of the Wordsworthian ‘egotistical sublime’, borrows features of the Grand Tour, apostrophizing liberty and claiming that ‘Time, place, and manners, these I seek’ in Book 1 (line 169), and passing from Switzerland to Italy, north to south in the famous Simplon

24  Robert Gray, Letters during the Course of a Tour through Germany, Switzerland and Italy (London, 1794), vi; Joshua Lucock Wilkinson, The Wanderer, or Anecdotes and Incidents, the Result and Occurrences of a Ramble on Foot, through France, Germany and Italy, in 1791 and 1793 (London, 1798). 25  Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, ed. Neil Fraistat and Susan Lanser (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001); A Tour in Switzerland, ed. Patrick Vincent and Florence Widmer-​Schnyder (Geneva: Slatkine, 2011). 26  Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’, ed. Richard Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 62.

British Romantics Abroad   713 passage in Book 6.27 However, the poet recasts the picturesque tour of 1790 into what Harold Bloom has called an ‘internalization of quest-romance’:28 in a passage central to our understanding of the transcendental power of the imagination, or, according to New Historicism, of Romantic ideology, the tour is made into a symbol of the poet’s creative mind. As Richard Onorato notes, ‘the whole account of the actual experience of the Alps seems figurative because of Wordsworth’s figurative use of it in the Imagination passage’.29 Except for Books 9 and 10, when the speaker takes on the persona of the Revolutionary tourist ambivalently plunging us back into history, aesthetics trumps politics and travel becomes introverted and local in the rest of the poem, reflecting the hegemony of Burkean domestic ideology and the growing insularity of British culture after 1792. While the English set off again for the Continent following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, a majority now insisted on travelling as Englishmen rather than as citizens of the world. Travelogues such as publisher William Jerdan’s Six Weeks in Paris: Or, A Cure for Gallomania (1817), William Hazlitt’s equally anti-​French Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1826), Anna Jameson’s delightfully ironic Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), and Shelley’s friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s Two Hundred and Nine Days (1827), whose title denotes the time he had to survive without law, Greek, or an English newspaper, satirized the new fad for travel abroad as well as their countrymen’s prejudices, yet all take pride in never forgetting their own nationality. Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Going a Journey’ (1822) gives short shrift to foreign travel, arguing that when abroad we ‘are lost to ourselves’ and unable to bring anything back of value.30 He recommends travelling with a companion so as to hear the sound of one’s own language and because Englishmen are antipathetic to social contact with locals. These national prejudices were tempered by a second surge of cosmopolitan feeling that arose in Britain in reaction to Napoleon’s military actions in the Mediterranean and later to the Risorgimento and the Greek War of Independence. What Marilyn Butler has called the ‘the Cult of the South’ was bipartisan, uniting liberals and conservatives, aristocrats and members of the middle class in a fragile truce, so that, superficially at least, Byron and Shelley’s liberal internationalism could coexist with the Lake poets’ domestic nationalism.31 What united these writers was the gloomy political situation on the Continent, particularly in Spain and Italy. The Convention of Cintra in August 1808 gave Robert Southey (who had lived in Portugal in 1795 and 1800 and was considered 27 

1805 version, in William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). 28  Harold Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-​Romance’, in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970). 29  Richard Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in ‘The Prelude’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 145. 30  ‘On Going a Journey’, The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), vi. 169–​70. 31  Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–​1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 116–​19.

714   Patrick Vincent a specialist on the Iberian Peninsula), as well as his friends Walter Savage Landor, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, a golden opportunity to sympathize with the Spanish while sounding the patriotic trumpet and calling for total war against Napoleon. It also inspired a series of Hispanophile literary works, including Felicia Hemans’s England and Spain (1808), the first canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Landor’s Count Julian: A Tragedy (1812), and Southey’s epic poem Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814).32 Landor, who had been bold enough to volunteer on the Spanish side in 1808, was also the first of the Romantics to settle in Italy, moving to Como with his Swiss wife in 1815, then living for many years in Florence, where writers including Trelawny, Hazlitt, Hunt, Crabb Robinson, and, later, the Brownings came to visit. Italy was the Romantics’ destination of choice, its art, climate, low cost of living, and greater social freedom proving as much a draw as it had been for the Grand Tourists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.33 Landor, Byron, Keats, the Shelleys, the Williamses, Thomas Medwin, and Lady Blessington are only the best known of the many British expatriates who settled there. Familiar with Sismondi’s History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages (1807–​ 18), they often sided with the liberal faction in the Risorgimento, and, as was the case with Byron in Venice, aided the Carbonari on occasion. Even Wordsworth, who finally toured Italy with Crabb Robinson in 1837, only three years after Mazzini and Garibaldi’s unsuccessful revolt, was able to timidly re-​articulate the republican ideals of his youth as a liberal form of nationalism solidly grounded in civil liberties in his Memorials of a Tour in Italy (1837). Keats’s sonnet ‘Happy is England’, composed in 1816, nicely illustrates the tensions created by the awkward pairings between liberal internationalism and domestic nationalism, and aristocratic and bourgeois values in this period. The first quatrain expresses a patriotic contentment with England’s romantic landscape in the conditional form, which is then opposed in the second quatrain where the speaker admits a ‘languishment | For skies Italian, and an inward groan | To sit upon an Alp as on a throne’.34 The speaker in this poem is bound to Britain as much by domestic ideology as he is by class, his yearning to sit on a throne expressing his desire to escape from his ‘wordling’ straits and, like a gentleman, to embark on the Grand Tour in search of Italy’s ‘Beauties of deeper glance’. Keats expressed the hope in 1818 that his book sales would allow him to ‘take all Europe in turn’ with his companion Charles Brown,35 but by the time he arrived in Rome in late 1820 his health was too impaired for him to be able to appreciate 32 

See Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 33  See, for example, Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: Tauris Parke, 2007); Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglas (eds), Dante and Italy in British Romanticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c.1690–​1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Jane Stabler, The Artistry of Exile: Romantic and Victorian Writers in Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 34  Keats’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Jeffrey Cox (New York: Norton, 2009), 58. 35  To J. H. Reynolds, 9 Apr. 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 268.

British Romantics Abroad   715 Italy’s beauties and he lived, as he writes, a ‘posthumous life’. Other writers with pretensions considered above their station, most notably Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans, were also bound for economic and gender-​related reasons to travel mainly on the wings of poesy. They modelled their poetry on Staël’s Corinne and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to almost obsessively roam the Continent, and, in best-​selling works such as Landon’s The Improvisatrice (1824) and Hemans’s Records of Woman (1828), expressed their feeling of domestic exile, dramatized the foreign Other as an alternate self, and imagined Italy as a promised land. One might argue that, much like Byron, Samuel Rogers, or Lady Morgan, these poetesses were simply banking on the new middle-​class fad for foreign travel, and in particular on the exotic appeal and aristocratic pedigree of Italian travel, to sell books. Many gift and coffee-​table books, including Thomas Roscoe’s Landscape Annuals and Rogers’ Italy (1828), undoubtedly served as material tokens of taste, commodifying travel as a well-​regulated aesthetic experience while exploiting the notoriety of the exiled Romantic poets Byron and Shelley. But as the thirteen-​year-​old John Ruskin’s imaginative response to J. M. W. Turner’s and Samuel Prout’s vignettes to Rogers’ Italy suggest,36 these commodities could also provoke an unruly and potentially disruptive desire to escape the uniformity and routine of modern-​day life, especially among those who could not afford to go abroad. The great mass of travel literature published after 1815, but also the many new visual media such as the panorama, the diorama, relief models, and even an ‘Alps in a box’, answered to this new structure of feeling by attempting to recreate the strong imaginative experience of travel for homebound audiences. 37 Byron’s popularity obviously had a lot to do with this desire for escape and for imaginative transgression in the increasingly regimented society of nineteenth-​century Britain. Along with Percy Bysshe Shelley, he is perhaps the most representative of the Romantics abroad, not simply because he chose to live on the Continent or wrote so much about it, but because he both contributed to and resisted the modern tourism vogue described above. Several of the best-​known examples of this Romantic resistance to tourism took place during the so-​called ‘haunted summer’ of 1816, when Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, her half-​sister Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s physician John Polidori spent three rainy months in Geneva and in the Alps. In his Alpine Journal, Byron famously scolds a lady ‘fast asleep in the most anti-​narcotic spot in the world’, whereas Shelley in Chamonix laments ‘the melancholy exhibitions of tourism  . . .  which corrupt the manners of the people, and make this place another Keswick’.38 Anti-​tourism had become the new pose, and as aristocrats, Byron and Shelley were particularly anxious not to mix with the ‘cockney’ tourists who surrounded them. They signalled

36  John Ruskin, Praeterita: The Autobiography of John Ruskin, ed. Kenneth Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 20. 37  See Richard Altick, The Shows of London: A Panorama History of Exhibitions, 1600–​1862 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1978). 38  Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–​94), v. 97; Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), i. 501.

716   Patrick Vincent their difference in various ways: by repeatedly finding fault with their compatriots; by justifying their travels not as an opportunity for leisure but as a form of self-​exile; and by representing themselves in their letters as professionals, for instance as historians commenting on the battlefields of Waterloo and Morat, or traveller-​scientists, counting the rings on a chamois horn at the natural history cabinet in Servox, or mountaineers and mariners, ascending peaks or braving storms on Lake Geneva and the Gulf of Spezia. In practice, however, these Romantic travellers behaved much like the unfashionable tourists they enjoyed criticizing. At Chamonix, for instance, the Shelley party, in Mary Shelley’s words, ‘made some purchases’, including crystal seals showing Mont Blanc, while Byron, an avid souvenir collector, brought away ‘the quarter of a hero’ from the ossuary at Morat. Most tellingly, perhaps, John Cam Hobhouse reveals in his factual, unromanticized record of the Oberland trip in September 1816 that he and Byron were not alone at the summit of the Lauberhorn, but were followed by ‘two or three females on horseback’, a description starkly different from what Byron wrote in his Alpine journal or in the lyrical drama based on the experience, Manfred.39 Rather than through any distinct travelling practices, it is through their imaginative writing that the Shelley–​Byron circle was best able to stand out. Tourists flocked to the sites made famous by Byron’s work such as Chillon Castle, Rome’s moonlit Colosseum and Venice’s Grand Canal; some, like Stendhal and Lamartine, even imagined fictional sightings of their hero. Yet the Shelley–​Byron circle’s poetry, fiction, and drama inspired by travel shows a seriousness of intent very different from the frivolity of this Byron tourism or from the colour pieces, conventional picturesque descriptions, and canned expressions of sublimity that filled the periodicals and travel books. In spite of the failure of the Revolution, Napoleon’s defeat, and the Bourbon restoration, these works argue for a progressive theory of history, albeit inflected by an acute awareness of historical loss and contingency. In Canto 3 of Childe Harold, for example, we discover for what reason Byron collected his souvenir: ‘Here Burgundy bequeath’d his tombless host, | A bony heap, through ages to remain, | Themselves their monument’ (stanza 63, lines 605–​7).40 Linking Morat with Marathon, the poet transforms the bones into a republican symbol. Bones furthermore invoke the memory of Bony, the name commonly given Bonaparte in period caricatures, suggesting not only his defeat or coming apart at Waterloo, but also, as Simon Bainbridge has shown, the poet’s desire to recuperate the historical force of Bonapartism to restore liberty across Europe.41 Composed a few weeks later, Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ adopts many of the same images as in Byron’s poem and develops its sceptical idealism, arguing for the mountain

39 

The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-​Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 116; ‘The Journal of John Cam Hobhouse, 17–​29 September 1816’, in John Clubbe and Ernest Giddey (eds), Byron et la Suisse: deux études (Geneva: Droz, 1982), 45. 40  Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 123. 41  Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. ch. 4. See also Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

British Romantics Abroad   717 as a progressive historical force, its power repealing ‘Large codes of fraud and woe’ (line 81).42 The civic humanist ideal of virtue, which was central to many Grand Tour narratives and to Whig progress poems, is also crucially important to our understanding of the travel account in which ‘Mont Blanc’ was first published, the Shelleys’ A History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817); as well as to Canto 4 of Byron’s Childe Harold, also set in Italy; Mary Shelley’s historical novel, Valperga (1823); and many of Percy Shelley’s Italian lyrics, including ‘Ode to Liberty’ and ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’.43 Imitating Corinne’s improvisation at the Cape of Misena, Shelley addresses Venice and the other Austrian-​ruled Italian republics in the latter poem, writing: But if Freedom should awake In her omnipotence, and shake From the Celtic Anarch’s hold All the keys of dungeons cold,  . . .  Thou and all thy sister band Might adorn this sunny land, Twining memories of old time With new virtues more sublime (lines 150–​9).

Shelley, unlike Wordsworth, continues to associate the sublime with civic virtue. Travelling abroad was a way for the Shelley–​Byron circle to re-​instil liberty to the Continent’s monumental ruins and defunct republics, and to flaunt their faith in liberal democracy in the face of the restored monarchies. Readers across Europe were well aware of the politically emancipatory nature of these texts. Trelawny’s German bookseller expresses familiarity not just with Shelley, whose radical Queen Mab was anathema in the age of Metternich, but even more so with Scott, Moore, and Byron. It was Byron’s cosmopolitanism, his liberal politics, and the fact of his being an écrivain engagé, not just the brooding sensationalism of his verse, that made him a celebrity on the Continent and a hero among democratic-​minded writers and reformers, including Stendhal, Heine, Mazzini, Mickiewicz, Pushkin and the Decembrists, Nerval and the Bousingots, to name just a few. As Richard Cardwell writes, Byron’s reception mirrored the ‘preoccupations and obsessions’ of the Continent, or, as Matthew Arnold put it slightly differently in his own travel poem, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ (1855), ‘Europe made his woe her own’.44 The British Romantic literature that circulated abroad was generally appreciated for what Eric Partridge in a 42  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 122. 43  See Michael Rossington, ‘Rousseau and Tacitus: Republican Inflections in the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour’, European Romantic Review 19.4 (2008), 321–​33. 44  Richard Cardwell (ed.), The Reception of Lord Byron in Europe, 2 vols (London: Continuum, 2004), introd., i. 1.

718   Patrick Vincent pioneering study called its ‘spirit of revolt’, even though the first-​generation poets were discovered after they had already become identified with conservatism, and thus too late to have a similar impact as the younger generation.45 Several ambitious new essay collections published in the ‘Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe’ series edited by Elinor Shaffer have made the political significance of these writers to their European readers perfectly evident. In the remaining paragraphs, I will focus less on the reception of these authors than on the channels of transmission that made a transnational circulation of their works possible and that developed their international reputations. Groups of like-​minded readers and writers, but also periodicals that reviewed foreign literature and pirated editions of foreign authors, helped place British Romanticism alongside German literature at the forefront of a European-​wide cultural movement. The association of Britain with modern liberalism was a commonplace well before the Romantic period thanks to influential anglophile texts that placed a high value on British liberty, most notably Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733). Germaine de Staël’s statement in De la littérature (1800) that ‘the poetry of the north better fits the spirit of a free people than that of the south’ sums up a century of like-​ minded arguments.46 And while Staël could be critical of the limited freedom of women in Britain and was too much a product of eighteenth-​century classicism to fully appreciate its modern poets, she remained an inveterate Anglophile throughout her life, much like her father Jacques Necker and many of the intellectuals who surrounded her at Coppet, including Benjamin Constant, Simonde de Sismondi, and Charles-​Victor de Bonstetten. Britain’s constitutional monarchy remained a cornerstone of these writers’ cosmopolitan ideal of Europe, built as much on individual liberties as on national differences. British literature, they believed, reflected and could help spread these values. The Coppet circle, which met off and on during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, was thus the first of several groups to promote the British Romantics on the Continent. Staël had met both Byron and Coleridge during her second visit to London in 1813–​14, famously complaining that the latter did not know how to ‘dialogue’. Byron was a frequent visitor to Coppet during the summer of 1816. He and Staël shared the same cosmopolitan, liberal outlook on Europe, and she later praised him in her posthumously published Considérations sur la Révolution française (1818), alongside Moore, Campbell, and Scott, all of whom belonged to a new school of British poetry which she defined according to her own ideal of enthusiasm.47 There were many other figures and circles that helped the transmission of British Romantics abroad. Among them were Goethe, who discovered Byron in 1816 and 45 

Eric Partridge, The French Romantics’ Knowledge of English Literature (1820–​1848) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1924), 17. 46  Germaine de Staël, De la littérature, ed. Gérard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1991), 206. 47  Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur la Révolution française, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Tallandier, 2000), 551. See also Joanna Wilkes, Lord Byron and Madame de Staël: Born for Opposition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 9. For Staël’s reciprocal role in transmitting European Romanticism to Britain, see James Vigus, Chapter 44 in this volume.

British Romantics Abroad   719 selflessly glorified him despite different political positions; Chateaubriand, who had lived in London from 1792 to 1800, and by 1816 was already calling Byron the greatest poet alive; the Spanish exiled poet Joseph Blanco White, who met Scott and Coleridge while living in London; and the Karamzin and Zhukovsky circles in Russia, which fostered a taste for Western, notably British, writers. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, books and periodicals were replacing salon culture as the new vector of ideas, especially among the new middle-​class readership. Shaffer notes that British writers were almost always introduced to the Continent via France or French-​ speaking Switzerland then translated from the French.48 One of the earliest sources of knowledge on British literature and science on the Continent in the Romantic period was the Bibliothèque britannique, a monthly journal launched by Genevan patricians Marc-​Auguste and Charles Pictet in 1796, which ran until 1816 before becoming the Bibliothèque universelle. Although a fervent admirer of Ossian, Napoleon considered the importation of English literature as a violation of the Continental blockade:  he was especially wary of the city-​republic of Geneva’s Anglophilia. The Bibliothèque britannique was nevertheless available everywhere that educated classes spoke French, including Scandinavia and Russia, keeping European readers abreast of the latest intellectual developments across the Channel despite the war. The journal’s ideological bent was utilitarian, liberal, and moralistic: Godwin and Bentham appeared in early editions, as did extracts on political philosophy by Ferguson, Hutton, and Smith; treatises on education by the Edgeworths; Malthus on political economy; and William Roscoe on Italian history. More entertaining forms of literature found their way into the journal too. Many of the texts and writers we today consider as Romantic were first translated into French here, including Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian tour, Mungo Park’s travels, Hannah More’s Repository Tracts, Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art, Amelia Opie’s Simple Tales, Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions, poetry by Burns, two novels each by Radcliffe, Godwin, and Scott, and, most remarkably perhaps, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park.49 The first French article to be published on Byron also appeared in the Bibliothèque britannique in 1814 under the title ‘Two Men of Genius’, the second genius being Scott. Charles Pictet then developed the essay into a series of twelve articles in 1817 with the approval of the poet, helping launch a twenty-​year-​long vogue of Byromania on the Continent that made him into what Richard Cardwell calls a ‘world-​ historical’ figure.50 Even more influential in disseminating Byron’s and other British Romantics’ work abroad was the Parisian Librairie Galignani, which proclaimed itself the ‘first English

48 

Elinor Shaffer and Edoardo Zuccato (eds), The Reception of S. T. Coleridge in Europe (London: Continuum, 2007), introd., 3. 49  David Bickerton, Marc-​Auguste and Charles Pictet: The Bibliothèque Britannique (1796-​1815) and the Dissemination of British Literature and Science on the Continent (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1986), 500–​20. See also Valérie Cossy, Jane Austen in Switzerland: A Study of the Early French Translations (Geneva: Slatkine, 2006). 50 Cardwell, The Reception of Lord Byron in Europe, i. 6.

720   Patrick Vincent bookshop established on the Continent’. Started by a Venetian entrepreneur, Giovanni Antonio Galignani, at 18 Rue Vivienne in 1800, Galignani’s shop very quickly became the ‘home away from home’ of British expatriates. Not only did it sell books, it also provided tourists with a guest book, a general delivery service, a circulation library, the latest English papers, and, beginning in 1814, its own newspaper, the Galignani Messenger, available in all the major Continental cities until 1890 and to which the Shelleys in Italy subscribed.51 William St Clair has shown how, between 1800 and 1852, when an Anglo–​French copyright convention was passed, Paris was the main hub for Continental piracies of British works. French publishers including Galignani bypassed British copyright laws to produce inexpensive but often high-​quality editions of both major and minor British authors. By the late 1820s, every new British novel could be found on sale in Paris within three days of its publication in London at a quarter of the British price. Galignani published Byron’s verse in newspaper form, then, from 1826, as a hugely popular single volume of complete works (Fig. 45.1). The firm also published the complete works of other Romantic authors, including Thomas Moore, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Samuel Rogers, Henry Kirke White, Thomas Cambell, and James Montgomery, as well as one-​volume novels in partnership with Baudry’s Librairie europénne, founded in 1815 and Galignani’s main competitor for pirated books.52 These publications circulated widely across Europe and even back into Britain, helping canonize Romantic authors back home.53 For example, one finds Galignani editions of Byron and of other male Romantics in the 1830 catalogue of the Librairie Sémen’s circulating library in Moscow alongside titles by a number of female authors from the 1790s, including Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft.54 Other specialized periodicals such as the Revue britannique (1825–​40) were also created in response to the new demand for British literature. Finally, essays by literary correspondents in London as well as reviews of new British books appeared regularly in progressive journals such as Le Globe and the Revue des deux mondes in France or Vestnik Evropy in Russia. Contributors included Amédée Pichot, whose translation of Byron dominated the market and who had also translated novels by Godwin and Scott as well as Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Irish Melodies; Philarète Chasles, another important mediator of British Romanticism on the Continent who praised Landon and Hemans among others; and Charles-​Augustin Sainte-​Beuve, France’s most important Romantic-​ period critic and a connoisseur of English literature whose elegiac Vie, poésies et pensées de Josephe Delorme (1829) owes much to Wordsworth. With so many British-​authored 51 Colbert, Shelley’s Eye, 120 n. 13. 52 

William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 295–​6; Giles Barber, ‘Galignani’s and the Publication of English Books in France from 1800 to 1852’, The Library 4.1 (1961), 267–​86. 53  St Clair, The Reading Nation, 296, 302–​3. See also Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fischer (eds), Shelley and His Circle 1773–​1822, vol. 10 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 995. 54  Patrick Vincent, The Romantic Poetess: European Culture, Politics and Gender 1820–​1840 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004), 80. See also M. P. Akseev, Russki-​angliiskie literaturnye svyazi xviii-​pervaya polovina xix veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1982).

British Romantics Abroad   721

Fig. 45.1  Catalogue of new publications, A. and W. Galignani, Paris. c.1826. Private collection.

books circulating on the Continent, one can clearly argue that British Romanticism belonged to the wider phenomenon of European Romanticism and that it contributed significantly to its development, notably by keeping alive the ideal of liberty among several generations of liberal writers and politicians.

Further Reading Black, Jeremy, The British Abroad:  The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton, 1992). Bohls, Elizabeth, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–​1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Bohls, Elizabeth, and Ian Duncan (eds), Travel Writing 1700–​1830:  An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Buzard, James, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–​ 1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

722   Patrick Vincent Cardwell, Richard (ed.), The Reception of Byron in Europe, 2 vols (London: Continuum, 2004). Chard, Chloe, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–​1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Colbert, Benjamin, Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Dekker, George, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism:  Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Gilroy, Amanda (ed.), Romantic Geographies:  Discourses of Travel 1775–​ 1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Pittock, Murray (ed.), The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (London: Continuum, 2007). Shaffer, Elinor, and Edoardo Zuccato (eds), The Reception of S. T. Coleridge in Europe, 2 vols (London: Continuum, 2007). Schmid, Susanne, and Michael Rossington (eds), The Reception of P.  B. Shelley in Europe (London: Continuum, 2008). Stock, Paul, The Shelley-​Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Thompson, Carl, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). Turner, Katherine, British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750–​ 1800:  Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Vincent, Patrick, ‘Europe’s Discourse of Britain’, in Paul Hamilton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Chapter 46

Transatl a nt i c Engagem e nts Fiona Robertson

In a letter dated 18 May 1810, written from Natchez, in the Mississippi Territory, the Scottish-​poet-​turned-​American-​ornithologist Alexander Wilson describes listening to a mockingbird, the first he had heard in ‘the western country’ (as Mississippi, not a state of the Union until 1817, then was). Its song was cut short: One of the savages had marked his elevation, and barbarously shot him. I hastened over into the yard, and, walking up to him, told him that was bad, very bad! that this poor bird had come from a far distant country to sing to him, and that, in return, he had cruelly killed him. I told him the Great Spirit was offended at such cruelty, and that he would lose many a deer for doing so.1

The episode is full of echoes and paradoxes. Writing in the middle years of the Romantic period, and in a ‘western country’ east of the Mississippi River, Wilson audibly recalls both the situation and the ‘far countree’ of Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’—​a poem which in turn had been influenced by the writings of Wilson’s patron and friend, the American naturalist William Bartram.2 Born in Paisley in 1766, Wilson is one of the truly transatlantic figures of the Romantic period. By trade a handloom weaver, he was twice imprisoned in the early 1790s for writing radical satires against mill-​owners, and emigrated to the United States in 1794, becoming a citizen in 1804. The Foresters: A Poem Descriptive of a Pedestrian Journey to the Falls of Niagara in the Autumn of 1804 (published in The Port Folio in 1809–​10 and in volume form in 1818) is one of the earliest

1  To Alexander Lawson, in The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson, ed. Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 366. 2  See John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (London: Constable, 1927), 46–​53.

724   Fiona Robertson extended poetic treatments of North American scenery, and his nine-​volume American Ornithology; or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States (1808–​14) is the first systematic study in its field. The reprise of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in Natchez, 1810, introduces the main themes of this chapter: intertextual transatlantic cultures, and their consequences for British Romantic writing and subsequent scholarship; the boundaries of national identity, national literary history, and the ‘literary’ itself; the conditions and contexts of intellectual exchange; altercations between cultures (or, rather, as in the figure of Wilson’s silent ‘savage’, constructed images, often stereotypical, of cultures). There is a mutually formative but exceptionally intricate relationship between what is now called British Romanticism and the new political, social, and literary culture taking shape in the United States during the decades following the ratification of its constitution in 1787. Ideas, and books, moved back and forth across the Anglophone Atlantic, as did increasing numbers of travellers and migrants. Transatlantic reception became a crucial element in the dissemination of Romantic poetry and prose; and in theatre, too, new performance histories, for American and British works alike, were fashioned transatlantically. Amid complex networks of cultural exchange in local and specific contexts, it can be difficult to disentangle terms of engagement, especially over a period of swift change which included years of military and naval conflict between the nations in question (the War of Independence [1776–​83], and the 1812–​14 war). In this period, neither nation could gauge the boundaries (conceptual as well as territorial) of the other, or be entirely sure of its own. This statement may seem, pragmatically, more true of ‘the’ United States, which added thirteen to its original thirteen constituents between 1791 and 1837, and which, with a population which nearly equalled that of Britain by 1830 and far exceeded it by 1840, was a fast-​expanding as well as an ethnically and linguistically varied interlocutor in the years of British Romanticism. Britain’s boundaries also changed in these years, however, with the Acts of Union incorporating Ireland, a strengthening of empire in India, and the growing importance of Australia and New Zealand as alternative frontiers ‘south of the west’. This chapter addresses key areas of debate in transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Anglophone engagements between Britain and the United States as a distinct force in Romanticism—​that is, as distinct from British engagements with South and Central America, with Canada, and with the West Indies—​in order to identify a culturally specific aesthetic interaction. The recorded history of the word ‘transatlantic’ places it as a late ​eighteenth-​century conceptualization of space. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation of the term is from a letter written in 1779 by John Wilkes, referring to a ‘trans-​atlantic voyage’. In 1782 Thomas Jefferson employed it when considering ‘whether nature has enlisted herself as a cis-​or trans-​Atlantic partisan’.3 As these early usages show, on both sides of the Atlantic the term described either a crossing of the ocean or something on the other side. As ‘America’ became established British parlance for the United States specifically,

3 

As cited in Oxford English Dictionary (at: www.oed.com): Wilkes, Correspondence (1805), v. 212; Jefferson, Writings and Correspondence (1894), iii. 193.

Transatlantic Engagements   725 ‘transatlantic’ took on cultural as well as geographical meanings. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine used the collective noun ‘The Trans-​Atlantics’, meaning ‘Americans’, in 1826; and Walter Scott wrote in his Journal on 2 May 1831 ‘I must get finishd with Count Robert [of Paris—​his penultimate completed novel] who is progressing, as the transatlantic say, at a very slow pace indeed.’4 From the late 1830s, when transatlantic steamships began regular voyages, to the mid-​1860s, when the first long-​functioning transatlantic cable was laid, the term became increasingly associated with travel and communications across the Atlantic, as distinct from something which was, from either land-​mass, ‘over on the other side’. As late as 1989, in the second edition of the OED, ‘transatlantic’ continued to be explained as ‘passing or extending across’ the Atlantic or ‘situated, resident beyond’ it. Intriguingly, however, the term has been very subtly on the move since then. Today, the OED Online glosses ‘transatlantic’ as ‘crossing the Atlantic’, ‘concerning countries on both sides of the Atlantic’, and ‘related to or situated on the other side’. Since 1989, that is, ‘transatlantic’ has become more relational and more inclusive, suggesting links (economic, intellectual, intercultural) between rather than merely passage across. It may be that this subtle shift reflects a movement in literary and historical scholarship: over the last thirty years, historiographical work, taking many of its cues from Robert Weisbuch’s model of ‘Atlantic double-​cross’, has transformed understandings, and conceptualizations, of Romanticism.5 Part of a more general shift towards transnational interpretation, transatlantic Romanticism examines points of contact and contestation, emphasizing shared conversations and the links and continuities between Britain and the former colonies. Readings of individual works and genres have been guided or more locally inflected by an appreciation of transatlantic contexts and by specific topics such as emigration, political idealism, slavery, ethnicity, travel-​narrative, and trade. Paul Gilroy’s model of the ‘Black Atlantic’ has been adapted to the ‘Red’ or ‘Indian’ Atlantic;6 and the human freight of the slave trade has been a constituent factor in transatlanticism, which implicitly, on an ideological level, refashions the routes of trade and human trafficking. Transatlantic scholarship has made it possible, too, to see the close connections between communities of readers, further breaking down what have traditionally been regarded as separate national literary histories. Lateral confluences, rather than linear influences, have provided a new model for intertextual studies: in this and in other ways,

4 

The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 650. Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-​Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). In addition to other studies listed in Further Reading, see Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson (eds), New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002); Laura M. Stevens, ‘Transatlanticism Now’, American Literary History 16.1 (2004), 93–​104; and Chris Koenig-​Woodyard, Lance Newman, and Joel Pace (eds), Transatlantic Romanticism, double special issue, Romanticism on the Net 38–​9 (2005), at: www.erudit.org/​en/​journals/​ron/​2005-​n38-​39-​ron988/​. 6  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-​Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings (eds), Native Americans and Anglo-​American Culture, 1750–​1850: The Indian Atlantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5 

726   Fiona Robertson transatlanticism has had methodological as well as material consequences for readings of Romanticism.7 The other term of my title, ‘engagements’, however, suggests something both more intimate and more barbed than ‘dialogues’ or ‘confluence’. It denotes debts and contracts, skirmishes and joined battle, as well as intellectual and creative involvement. Much transatlantic writing was openly combative, a prime example being Thomas Moore’s caustic epistles ‘To the Lord Viscount Forbes’ and ‘To Thomas Hume’, in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), both addressed ‘From the City of Washington’ to prominent Irish politicians he had met in London. Moore’s political deflations were all the more damaging for being written (as he describes in the collection’s Preface) by someone prepared to be convinced by the United States. The rhetoric of disappointment was powerful and was deployed by both sides. In 1815, just after the end of armed combat between Britain and the United States, hostilities resumed in the so-​called ‘Paper War’, at its centre a critique of Charles Jared Ingersoll’s Inchiquin the Jesuit’s Letters (1810) in the Quarterly Review.8 This drew a response from one of the most formidable intellectual figures of the early republic, Timothy Dwight—President of Yale, Congregationalist preacher, professor of theology, author (amongst many other works) of the nation-​ building song ‘Columbia’ (1777) and the United States’ first epic poem, The Conquest of Canaan; The Triumph of Infidelity (1785). Dwight’s Remarks on the Review of Inchiquin’s Letters (1815) offered an extensive comparative analysis of elements in the social, political, and professional systems of Britain and the United States, and argued for the preservation of a ‘natural’ friendship. That this rebuttal should have been occasioned by a review (which Dwight, like others, wrongly traced to Southey, who had also written about ‘unnatural strife’ in his ‘Ode, 1814, Written During the War with America’) indicates the growing power of the British literary reviews (see William Christie, Chapter 18 in this volume), and the extent to which the United States had become a common target. In the very different world of popular theatre, British–​American rivalries were expressed even less temperately. Walter Scott records, with barely suppressed delight, the frays induced by a stage adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pilot (1824) at London’s Adelphi Theatre in 1826 which ‘turned the odious and ridiculous parts assigned by the original author to the British, against the Yankees themselves’, guaranteeing American displeasure and the influx each night of sailors from Wapping to cheer on the British national cause.9 Despite the close transatlantic bonds forged by individuals in this period—​Mary Wollstonecraft’s relationship with Gilbert Imlay; Coleridge’s friendship with Washington Allston; Francis Jeffrey’s second marriage, to Charlotte

7 

See Susan Manning, ‘ “Grounds for Comparison”: The Place of Style in Transatlantic Romanticism’, in Joel Pace and Matthew Scott (eds), Wordsworth in American Literary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Manning’s Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), esp. ch. 1. 8  See Joseph Eaton, The Anglo-​American Paper War: Debates about the New Republic, 1800–​1825 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), ch. 2. 9 Scott, Journal, 219.

Transatlantic Engagements   727 Wilks, in New York; and the conversations, in person and across novels, between Scott and Cooper, who met in Paris soon after the performance at the Adelphi—​in the culture at large, national antagonisms and prejudices remained strong on both sides. Some writers and commentators, however, tried to challenge these prejudices and to create a more inclusive and connected literary culture. Two striking examples of this, and of the ambivalence that frequently accompanied such attempts, are William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age (1825) and Thomas Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets (1819), a little-​known work which constitutes British literary history’s first alternative canon. Were it not for a coda praising the minor historical dramatist Sheridan Knowles, Hazlitt’s definitive survey of Romantic-​period Britain would have ended with an assessment of the ‘literary anachronisms’ of the New York essayist Washington Irving. ‘Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon’, the final substantial essay of The Spirit of the Age, contrasts the ‘native’ idiosyncrasies of ‘Elia’ (Charles Lamb) to the imitative charm of ‘Crayon’ (Irving), who ‘has culled and transplanted the flowers of modern literature, for the amusement of the general reader’.10 Four years later, in a long review essay for the Edinburgh Review occasioned by William Ellery Channing’s Sermons and Tracts, Hazlitt once again delights in picturing Irving ‘in the bare, broad, straight, mathematical streets of his native city, his busy fancy wander[ing] through the blind alleys and huddled zig-​zag sinuosities of London’.11 One culture is empty, but clear; the other dense and intricate, but constrained. ‘Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon’ bristles with a larger, unvoiced, spirit of competition. If Lamb’s culturally earned peculiarities cannot reach the readership captured by Irving, coming to ‘the parent country’ and working ‘at second hand’, what is to prevent the United States ventriloquizing and appropriating British culture, at least in the opinion of that unknown quantity, ‘the general reader’? In itself, the turn to designedly old-​fashioned writers at the end of The Spirit of the Age counteracts the presumed progressiveness of the age’s ‘spirit’ (as Hazlitt argues, Lamb succeeds not by conforming to this spirit, but ‘in opposition to it’). Like other British writings of its time, The Spirit of the Age is unable to repress, but also unable fully to include, its sense of a future forming in the west. The alternative to Hazlitt’s spiky comparativism was Campbell’s apparently untroubled reappropriation. Like Hazlitt, who spent three years of his childhood in Boston, where his father was a prominent Unitarian preacher, Thomas Campbell had personal ties with the United States and supported its political values. His father had lived in Virginia and had owned a tobacco import business in Glasgow which was badly affected by the War of Independence. Campbell twice came close to emigrating to the United States, in 1797–​8 and 1817–​19. When he took over the editorship of the New Monthly Magazine in 1821, he declared pro-​Americanism a principle of editorial policy, and he applies a similar policy to his Specimens of the British Poets by including an American voice, Timothy Dwight, from whose epic The Conquest of Canaan he gives

10  11 

The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–​4), xi. 178. Complete Works of Hazlitt, xvi. 318–​19.

728   Fiona Robertson nine pages of excerpts. He takes a section from Book 5 describing the death of Irad and lamentation of Selima, followed by an extract from the angel’s prediction of ‘the future discovery and happiness of America’, ‘a mighty realm’ which is to be ‘the last retreat for poor oppress’d mankind’ but also a ‘world imperial’ distinct from all others and awaiting its ‘destined period’ and its new Moses.12 The details of the selection suggest a wish on Campbell’s part to counterbalance eighteenth-​century British imperial verse with a vision of colonial emancipation. Yet his introductory remarks on Dwight are strangely disengaged: ‘Of this American poet I am sorry to be able to give the British reader no account. I believe his personal history is as little known as his poetry on this side of the Atlantic.’ (The manuscript supports the view that he had nothing to add. Campbell begins ‘Of this American I believe’, then crosses out ‘believe’ and moves straight to the apology.)13 The generous space given to Dwight’s poetry contends with the unexplained decision to include him in the first place, and with the paucity of information supplied. Despite the apparent contradictions, the effect for Campbell’s readers was to present Dwight as new poetic territory to be explored. This literary invitation echoes opportunities for American exploration of a more literal kind. In the years following the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1787, the French Revolution, Britain’s war with France from 1793, and the repressive political climate in Britain had made the United States an increasingly attractive prospect for emigration. Emigration had a double, and somewhat contradictory, appeal, as radical alternative and as conservative refuge. The United States offered political and religious freedom, but also land for sale and the chance to reinstate an agrarian economy. The demography of emigration is complicated, and the available statistics reveal little about reasons for emigration to and from the United States, or about the motivations of the many back-​migrants. Indeed, as Stephen Fender has shown, the discourses of emigration contradict the statistics, which indicate that between 1815 and 1832 the number of people emigrating from British ports to the United States (around 205,500) was greatly exceeded by the number emigrating to Canada (334,000), with significant numbers also going to Australia and New Zealand.14 The encouragement to enter United States society offered in the early stages of independence, notably in Benjamin Franklin’s Information to Those Who Would Remove to America (1782), was followed by more guarded accounts as the population grew. Emigrant guides became a flourishing subgenre of Romantic-​period travel writing, and the market for settlement was competitive. Some of these guides, notably those by Henry Bradshaw Fearon and Morris Birkbeck (which helped inspire the emigration of Keats’s brother George and

12  Thomas Campbell (ed.), Specimens of the British Poets; with Biographical and Critical Notices, and An Essay on English Poetry, 7 vols (London: John Murray, 1819), vii. 135. For biographical information, see Charles Duffy, ‘Thomas Campbell and America’, American Literature 13 (1942), 346–​55. 13  Huntington MS HM 33781, f. 151. 14  Stephen Fender, Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 37–​8.

Transatlantic Engagements   729 sister-​in-​law Georgiana in 1818), have become focal points for the analysis of discourses about the United States in the Romantic Period.15 The emigration of the political philosopher and Unitarian Joseph Priestley was especially influential, helping to shape Southey’s and Coleridge’s plans to form a Pantisocracy on the banks of the same river, the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania, and focusing the minds of many conservative critics in the United States, most vociferously William Cobbett in this ‘Peter Porcupine’ stage of his journalistic career, on the disruptive effects of the wrong kind of ideological immigrant. Pantisocracy was the product of the belief, as Southey put it in his 1837 Preface to his collected works, ‘that a happier order of things had commenced with the independence of the United States, and would be accelerated by the French Revolution’.16 Textually, the scheme produced Coleridge’s sonnets ‘Pantisocracy’ and ‘On the Prospect of Establishing a Pantisocracy in America’ (both dating from 1794, though not published until 1826 and 1849 respectively), and the lines on ‘the Dell | Of Peace and mild Equality’ in ‘To a Young Ass’ (published in the Morning Chronicle in December 1794 and in Poems on Various Subjects in 1796) which became a target for Coleridge’s contemporary detractors—​and a source of amusement for later writers such as Byron and Peacock. Increasingly, critics have regarded the aborted Pantisocracy project as foundational to Coleridge’s and Southey’s subsequent thinking, and to key elements of British Romanticism as a whole.17 Of more enduring interest to Southey was the belief in a tribe of Welsh-​speaking Indians said to be descended from the followers of Prince Madoc who sailed to the west in 1170, an idea promulgated by, among others, the Welsh poet Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg), whose work Southey consulted in preparing his epic poem on this theme, Madoc (1805) (see Mary-​Ann Constantine, Chapter 8 in this volume). Williams’s quasi-​ autobiographical ‘Sonnet, to Hope, on an Intention of Emigrating to America’ and his ‘Address to the Inhabitants of Wales, Exhorting them to Emigrate, with William Penn, to Pennsylvania’ (purportedly written, in Welsh, by an ‘Anonymous Emigrant, about the Time of the first Settlement of that Colony’) are two of his many works on the theme of emigration, real and fictitious, and the ‘Address’ is a notable instance in a modern context of the idea of emigration to escape religious persecution.18 The interlinked stories of Pantisocracy and the Welsh Indians reinforce the point that the United States, and the western territories beyond it, had a far from simple, or uniform, political meaning

15  See James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), ch. 8. 16  The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself, 10 vols (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1837–​8), i, p. xxix. 17  For examples, see Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 257–​62; Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘The Political Sciences of Life: From American Pantisocracy to British Romanticism’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Michael Wiley, Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 63–​87. 18  Both poems appear in Edward Williams, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 2 vols (London: for the author, 1794).

730   Fiona Robertson for British writers and thinkers. Pantisocracy was underpinned by a variety of not easily compatible philosophical and social convictions, as was demonstrated when Southey and Coleridge turned out to have deep disagreements both about Godwinianism and about the keeping of servants. Yet the scheme harnessed a radical social idealism to the excitement of a new-​found territory, just as the project of finding the Welsh Indians, implying as it did a protest against English rule, was, at the same time, a territorial enterprise, a way of reclaiming a lost inheritance. A transatlantic ideological engagement of a more tangible and historically important kind was the involvement of writers and campaigners in the pressure, building from the late 1780s in Britain, to abolish the slave trade. In the early 1790s, British traders were consigning 45,000 Africans annually to the West Indies and the United States. In the same period, British readers consumed eight editions of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789) by 1794. Powerfully focused politically, with parliamentary leadership from William Wilberforce and abolitionist organizations across Britain (led by the example of Thomas Clarkson), abolitionism appealed across all social sectors and cut across established boundaries of political conviction and class. Writers played a vital role in imagining, and drawing attention to, the horrors of slavery, and slavery—​literal or symbolic—​became a central theme in the thinking of several Romantic authors. The best example of this is William Blake, who depicts enslavement, physical and mental, as a universal evil. In ‘The Little Black Boy’, from Songs of Innocence (1789), Blake shows the internalization of ethnic difference: ‘my soul is white’, the speaker declares, feeling that the white child will love him if he can ‘be like him’, even though it is the black child who leads the white to God.19 Oothoon, ‘soft soul of America’, in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1791–​2) speaks for the victimized and to the ‘enslaved’ daughters of Albion, reinforcing the connection made by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) between the condition of women and of slaves. Slavery was also a connecting topic in the later work of William Cowper, linking sharp social observations in poems such as ‘The Morning Dream’ and ‘Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce; or, the Slave-​Trader in the Dumps’ with the political endorsement of his 1792 sonnet ‘To William Wilberforce’ and the humanitarian pathos of his much-​anthologized poem ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ (1788). Coleridge lectured on the slave trade as part of his 1795 lecture series, undertaken to finance the Pantisocracy project, and returned to the theme in his poem ‘Fears in Solitude’ (1798), which offers a damning acknowledgement of Britain’s global guilt (‘The wretched plead against us’ [line 45]). Slavery was a recurrent element, too, in Southey’s work: his poetic corpus on this theme includes the six anti-​slave-​trade sonnets of 1794, ‘To the Genius of Africa’ (1795), ‘The Dancing Bear: Recommended to the Advocates for the Slave-​Trade’ (1799), and ‘Verses, Spoken in the Theatre at Oxford, upon the Installation of Lord Grenville’ (1810). The topic was equally prominent in women’s writing, notable examples being Mary Robinson’s ‘The Negro Girl’ (1800), Amelia Opie’s ‘The Black Man’s Lament’ (1826), and Hannah More’s

19 

Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson, 3rd edn (Harlow: Longman-​Pearson, 2007), 63.

Transatlantic Engagements   731 widely read The Sorrows of Yamba; or, The Negro Woman’s Lamentation, published in her Cheap Repository Tracts series in 1795. Many of these works were expressly intended as anti-​slavery propaganda and, as such, they constituted an important part of the pressure for abolition.20 Necessarily, some anti-​slavery literature, such as James Montgomery’s poem The West Indies (1809) and Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), analysed slave economies beyond the United States, but after the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, critiques bifurcated. One strand, which included the continuing work of Clarkson, focused on ending the practice of slavery, not only the trade in slaves; and, in the British empire, acts to bring about a partial emancipation of slaves were in place in 1834, with full emancipation in 1838. Literary reflections of these campaigns appear in works such as Wordsworth’s 1807 sonnet to Clarkson and the account of ‘The Anti-​Saccharine Fête’ in ­chapter 27 of Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Melincourt (1817). Accounts of the United States, meanwhile, increasingly focused on slavery as a way of criticizing the new democracy as a whole. Instead of the stylized ‘laments’ of the 1790s, perfectly suited to marshall sympathy in a political cause, writers, especially in social analyses of the 1820s and 1830s, detailed the conditions of slaves, personal encounters, and the complications of economic and social circumstances. The Wollstonecraftian social reformer Frances Wright first visited the United States in 1818–​20, published Views of Society and Manners in America in London in 1821, then returned to establish the ‘model plantation’ of Nashoba, Tennessee (1824–​8). Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) was infamously hostile to the United States and correspondingly tender in its accounts of slave children. Harriet Martineau’s Society in America (1837) looked forward to the elimination of slavery from the United States, which need no longer be ‘the country of the double-​faced pretender to the name of Liberty’.21 I turn now to another kind of ‘transatlantic engagement’ which underpins all literary exchange: the contractual. Books, and the essays, poems, reviews, and extracts contained within them, are physical objects, produced, shipped, bought, circulated, reviewed, pirated, plagiarized, annotated. The transatlantic literary marketplace in the Romantic period was an economic and legal structure which shaped which books were read, how, and where; and who profited from them, financially and intellectually. During the colonial period, American readers depended on supplies of books from London (and, increasingly, from Edinburgh and Dublin). Organized book-​reading communities began early, the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731) soon being followed by societies in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. Supplying a transatlantic market was logistically complicated, but, partly because of

20  See Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–​1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 21  Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), i. 199.

732   Fiona Robertson rapid population growth, bonds between British booksellers and American markets strengthened even at the point of political independence and during the 1812–​14 war.22 However, the variable distribution of population in the United States, and competition between large cities, created market conditions quite distinct from those within Britain. Detailed studies of particular reading communities, manufacturers, and suppliers—​ notably the all-​important paper-​mills—​highlight the variables in centres of production and of consumption, and in transatlantic interactions.23 In the first half of the nineteenth century, moreover, domestic book production in the United States grew even more rapidly than population: valued at $2.5 million annually in 1820, it stood at $12.5 million by 1850. Major names in American publishing (including Houghton, Harper, Ticknor and Fields, and Carey and Lea) date from the same half-​century, and new technologies of print manufacture (and, in turn, stereotyping, case binding, and the powered press) reinforced a new American independence in the production and sales of books. A major factor in the transatlantic book economy was a contentious piece of protectionist legislation which had long-​term and far-​reaching consequences. From 1787, American states established a new copyright system, based on the British Act of 1710 and protecting American publications, but excluding from copyright any work first published outside the United States. This entered federal law in 1790 and, supported by a levelled pricing structure for new and old titles, made available to American readers the latest publications and editions of collected or extracted works not commercially viable in Britain. Most prominently in the case of Scott—​all of whose novels were pirated, sometimes from pre-​publication proofs, in the United States, and who was ruinously in debt from January 1826—​this caused individual hardship and growing public aggravation. After meeting James Fenimore Cooper in Paris in November 1826, Scott took up with his publishers Cooper’s suggestion that the problem might be overcome by registering the works as the property of a United States citizen—​but to no avail.24 For readers, however, the situation had more than the obvious financial advantages. William St Clair notes: ‘The three poets whom it was most difficult to buy from mainstream bookshops in Britain, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, were available to mainstream readerships in the United States a generation before they reached such audiences in Britain.’25 The consequences of this for the reception of individual authors, and works, are locally significant but also add up to a major pressure on transatlantic literary relations, involving hard commercial competition but also ideological contests over intellectual property and democratic access to knowledge and diversion. 22  William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 374–​93; John Hruschka, How Books Came to America: The Rise of the American Book Trade (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), chs 5 and 6. 23  John Bidwell, ‘The Brandywine Paper Mill and the Anglo-​American Book Trade, 1787–​1837’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1992); James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–​1811 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), xix. 24 Scott, Journal, 231. 25  St Clair, Reading Nation, 387.

Transatlantic Engagements   733 As part of the growing campaign for fair recompense, which intensified after Scott’s death in 1832, British writers engaged directly with the federal government. One revealing record of this is a manuscript deposition, on vellum, dated 2 February 1837 and now in the Huntington Library. Address of Certain Authors of Great Britain to the Senate of the United States, in Congress Assembled presents an eleven-​point argument for the restitution of copyright law protecting foreign publications. Henry Clay introduced it to Senate on the same day, and it was referred (inconclusively) to a committee. The Address is attested by fifty-​one authors, some of whose signatures are cut out from sheets of the printed address (these include Moore, Southey, Amelia Opie, Thomas Carlyle, and Joanna Baillie), though others sign the document itself. The first of these is Campbell, followed by Charles Lyell, Harriet Martineau, and Maria Edgeworth.26 As had happened in previous submissions, the case of Scott was used to sharpen the appeal. Authors had to wait until the Chace Act of 1891, however, for the introduction of international copyright in the United States. Literary works were produced in transatlantic contexts in other ways. Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was written in Boston but first published in London. The novelist and essayist John Neal spent four years working in Britain (1823–​7) and publishing with British presses, especially Blackwood in Edinburgh. John James Audubon published Birds of America (1827) in Edinburgh and London. Bentley’s Standard Novels series included American works such as Cooper’s, both reflecting and extending an appreciative British readership. In his Lectures on American Literature (1829), Samuel L. Knapp reflected that defences such as Dwight’s Remarks on the Review of Inchiquin’s Letters had produced a reaction, especially in Britain, in favour of American literature, making Charles Brockden Brown, for example, far more acclaimed abroad than in the United States.27 In turn, American editors, commentators, and collectors proved instrumental in the textual histories of major British works. Freshly set editions of Wordsworth’s collections of poems were available in the United States from 1802. The first American edition of Wordsworth’s poems appeared in 1824; and in 1837 Henry Reed edited the (then) complete works, published in Philadelphia and reprinted many times throughout the nineteenth century. As Lance Newman has shown, this was ‘greeted as a national triumph’ for American publishing.28 In 1832 Fitz-​Greene Halleck published the first complete edition of Byron’s works and letters (some of them previously suppressed). The most complex and surprising case is that of Keats, whose long letters to George and Georgiana in Louisville include drafts of poems not as addenda but as part of a narrative. Here, the textual evidence of Romanticism is embedded in a consciously transatlantic

26 

Huntington MS HM 11234. The number of signatories claimed in the document is fifty-​four. Samuel L. Knapp, Lectures on American Literature, with Remarks on Some Passages of American History (New York: Elam Bliss, 1829), 139. 28  Lance Newman, ‘Henry David Thoreau as Wordsworthian Poet’, in Pace and Scott (eds), Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, 122–​3. 27 

734   Fiona Robertson discourse, and details within the letters and the poems are in dialogue with each other.29 Furthermore, some of Keats’s writing appeared first in the United States. George Keats showed his brother’s letters to like-​minded intellectuals in Louisville. John Howard Payne recorded his impressions of these in the New York Ladies’ Companion in 1837, and in turn this piece was reprinted in the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine in London in 1838. Two of Keats’s letters to his brother Tom, and the ode ‘To Apollo’, appeared in the Unitarian and transcendental journal The Western Messenger (1836–​8), edited in Louisville by James Freeman Clarke. Keats’s fame, as notices of George’s death in Louisville in December 1841 clearly show, had become part of the intellectual culture of Kentucky. In 1839, George Keats sent the manuscript of ‘To Autumn’ to Anna Barker, subsequently married to Samuel Gray Ward; from their granddaughter the manuscript passed to Amy Lowell and then into the collections of the Houghton Library at Harvard. This is just one example of the personal and family connections leading to the deposition of central Romantic texts in United States libraries. The routine model of the literary collector, often casually maligned as an acquisitive cash-​purchaser of cultural heritage, is entirely inadequate to the ways in which British Romantic texts found safe haven, and future scholarly editors, in the United States. Major editions such as the Bollingen Coleridge and the Cornell Wordsworth have underpinned subsequent interpretative scholarship and also attest to the cultural weight of British Romanticism in the United States, established much earlier than in British literary-​critical history. The more hostile implications of ‘engagement’ remained pertinent in the period itself, however. Robin Jarvis’s work on transatlantic readers of travel accounts includes analysis of an often rebarbative reviewing culture, and of wars between periodicals with different political stances on the United States.30 I would like to take an example from an especially hard-​edged transatlantic cultural dispute. This is the case of John Dunn Hunter, a white American who was captured as an infant, in about 1800, and brought up west of the Mississippi by the Kansas and Osage peoples. He returned east about 1816, and in 1822 published Manners and Customs of Several Indian Tribes Located West of the Mississippi, in Philadelphia. In 1823 the retitled and enlarged Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America was published in London. There were two London editions in 1823 and a third in 1824. A  series of enthusiastic British reviews ensued, with prominent notices in the Quarterly Review and the Monthly Review criticizing United States policy towards the peoples Hunter had described in attentive, unsentimental, detail.31 Hunter was fêted in London society over the winter of 1823–​4, was presented at court, and won influential support for his schemes to improve the lot of

29 

Fiona Robertson, ‘Keats’s New World: An Emigrant Poetry’, in Michael O’Neill (ed.), Keats: Bicentenary Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Denise Gigante, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). 30  Robin Jarvis, Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions and Tours in North America, 1760–​1840 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 31  John Dunn Hunter, Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America, ed. Richard Drinnon (New York: Schocken, 1973), xv–​xxix.

Transatlantic Engagements   735 American Indians. On his return to the United States in 1824, however, he faced a hostile campaign to prove him a fake. After a trip down the Ohio with Robert Owen, who was seeking lands to form the model community of New Harmony, Hunter involved himself in trying to find a haven for the Quapaws, then developed a wider scheme to secure lands for displaced tribes on the border with Mexico. Britain’s Prime Minister George Canning supported Hunter’s plan, but it was strongly opposed in the United States, and early in 1827 Hunter was murdered by Cherokees in the pay of prominent white Texans. British writers drew extensively on accounts of North America by earlier writers (most famously Bartram, Hearne, and Adair). As the case of Hunter shows, however, British reception was also a highly political factor in the current affairs of the United States; and could be both high-​profile and dangerous. Hunter’s case also highlights the widespread interest in American Indian cultures which recent scholarship has made central to discussions of Romanticism. In the United States, American Indians were used to represent and authenticate the freedom and ‘natural’ politics of the new United States (hence the rebels of the Boston Tea Party, dressed as Mohawk warriors) just as they faced displacement and suppression within it.32 Tim Fulford has argued for ‘Indians’ formative role in the aesthetics and politics of Romanticism’, and there is an expansive critical literature on the ‘Red’ or ‘Indian’ Atlantic, especially on the figure of the ‘dying’, solitary, and isolated American Indian.33 Eulogistic imaginings all too easily served an increasingly aggressive federal policy and seemed to aestheticize, in advance, the genocide sanctioned by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Writers inherited from Enlightenment analyses (by Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Ferguson, Raynal, Lahontan, and Robertson) a belief that societies observing non-​Christian beliefs and non-​European trading practices represented not a different but an earlier culture, feeding fantasies about ‘primitive’ ways of life. Their ventriloquisms of primitivism were influenced by other eighteenth-​century imaginings of older cultures, notably those associated with the Gaelic warrior-​bard ‘Ossian’. The comparison with American Indians was drawn by Hugh Blair in A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), and Thomas Jefferson’s debts to Ossian are clear in his representation of the speech of Chief Logan in Notes on the State of Virginia. In contrast to British writings about the slave trade, British writings about American Indians emphasize difference and the possibility of danger. American Indians occupying their own territories, unlike Africans abducted from theirs, were a threat to expansion—​of settled land, crops, white populace. In a different way, however, American Indians became

32 

See Helen Carr, Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789–​1936 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), ch. 1; Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and US Indian Policy (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), esp. part 1. 33  Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–​ 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12 (and, on Hunter, 236–54). See also Astrid Wind, ‘ “Adieu to all”: The Dying Indian at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century’, Symbiosis 2.1 (1998), 39–​55; and Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–​1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), ch. 2.

736   Fiona Robertson objects of barter in the transatlantic economy, a selling point of poems, plays, travel writings, and in visual culture. The native ‘song’, as in Southey’s sequence of five Songs of the American Indians (1799), was especially popular in the form of the ‘death-​song’, other examples of which are Joseph Warton’s ‘The Dying Indian’ (1755; judged to be the first example of that major force in nineteenth-​century writing, the dramatic monologue)34 and Felicia Hemans’s ‘Indian Woman’s Death-​Song’ (1828). There were also more positive images, of life rather than death, including William Bowles’s ‘Song of the American Indian’, which invites the stranger to abide safely and to share in the hunt and in the deep forests; and more extended engagements, especially in prose fiction, where the depiction of American Indian communities often serves as social critique of European norms. Examples of the latter include Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia (1790) and the third volume of Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793), though in both these cases any admiration for tribal community is heavily qualified. Wordsworth’s Solitary, in Book 3 of The Excursion (1814), finds American Indians a degraded people in modern life. The most important representation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ American Indians, influential for Cooper and founding a long transatlantic tradition, was Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), the first long British poem to be set entirely in the American colonies. Campbell took the name of the virtuous Oneyda chief, Outalissi, from Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801), and portrayed as a ‘Monster’ the Mohawk Joseph Brant/​Thayendanegea, a characterization to which Brant’s children objected and which, in later editions, Campbell clarifies in an explanatory note.35 It is important, in consequence, to recognize that American Indians were not merely a topic within Romantic-​period writing, but also a style of thought and expression, a way of writing outside established norms, or, as in the case of Gertrude of Wyoming’s Spenserian stanzas, a way of bringing new linguistic registers to bear on established poetic form and generic expectation. ‘Indian songs’ and the subgenre of the death-​ song were, often, notable experiments in language and metre. In ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’ (1798), Wordsworth chooses a language of dignified simplicity, with just two lines (8 and 25) breaking out of the regular tetrameter. In contrast, and in undeclared dialogue with Wordsworth’s ‘Complaint’, each of Southey’s Songs of the American Indians experiments differently with irregular verse forms and varied stress patterns suggestive of ‘impassioned’ speech. Hemans’s ‘Indian Woman’s Death-​Song’ uses different metrical forms for the narrator’s scene-​setting (blank verse, but of an irregular, fluid, kind, distinctly un-​Miltonic) and the woman’s song (couplets of rhymed heptameters, a form described as ‘nearly obsolete’ in R. S. Skillern’s 1802 comments on English prosody).36 34 

Philip Hobsbaum, ‘The Rise of the Dramatic Monologue’, Hudson Review 28 (1975), 227–​45. See Fulford, Romantic Indians, ch. 11. 36  R. S. Skillern, A New System of English Grammar; or English So Illustrated, as to Facilitate the Acquisition of Other Languages, whether Ancient or Modern. With an Appendix, containing A Complete System of Parsing (Glo[u]cester: R. Raikes, 1802), 143. 35 

Transatlantic Engagements   737 One final consequence of Romanticism’s transatlantic engagements serves as a reminder that these were just as much aesthetic as they were economic and material. Imagining across the Atlantic produced versions of an alternative culture, but also created new versions of British culture. Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, number 33 of his Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1820), commemorates a young Bostonian, Frederick William Goddard, who had travelled briefly with Wordsworth’s party in Switzerland and had drowned in Lake Zurich soon afterwards. Wishing for ‘Herbs moistened by Virginian dew’ to strew Goddard’s grave, since it ‘may never know the care | Of kindred human hands!’, Wordsworth apostrophizes not only Goddard’s youthful promise but also European cultural capital: Beloved by every gentle Muse He left his Transatlantic home: Europe, a realised romance, Had opened on his eager glance: What present bliss!—​what golden views! What stores for years to come!37

In a reversal of the discovery-​narratives of European exploration of a golden west, Wordsworth sees the visiting American storing up culture for future years: the whole of Europe reprises the faith expressed in ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘[t]‌hat in this moment there is life and food | For future years’ (lines 65–​6). Only Europe, not the Americas, can be a ‘romance’ fully ‘realised’. Against this, however, we can set the remark made in 1851 by Henry David Thoreau, an admirer of Wordsworth but one who refashioned his philosophy of nature into an expression of American consciousness: ‘We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.’38 In their imaginings of American Indians, British writers had explored the ‘primitive’ societies of an earlier stage of culture. In their encounters with the United States, however, British writers were themselves becoming types of an older culture—​authoritative, but newly relative. Even anglophiles such as Washington Irving subtly brought British culture within the descriptive grasp of American writers. In 1817 Irving spent four days visiting Walter Scott at Abbotsford, part of a tour of Britain which led to The Sketchbook and, in 1835, to the publication of ‘Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey’, in which Irving adds to first-​hand accounts of Scott a series of anecdotes and descriptions of Newstead Abbey, its environs, and people known to Byron. As recorded by Irving, Scott was fascinated by the vast natural forms of North America, and also interested in its history (as instanced by a memorial Scott had found among the papers of Charles Edward Stuart, dated 1778, from American Jacobites). Although Irving’s accounts celebrate Scott and 37  Lines 45–​64, in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), 275–​6. All other Wordsworth quotations are from this edition. 38  Henry David Thoreau, Annals of America, 8 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976), 126.

738   Fiona Robertson Byron, they also locate both writers among legends, superstitions, amassed historical detail, and (for Byron) a haunted ancestral pile. In so doing, they show once again how temporal and geographical comparison, differential constructions of national identity and authenticity, and a pervasive, shifting, cultural relativity proved central to literary self-​definition and to the evolution of Romanticism, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Further Reading Ahern, Stephen (ed.), Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-​ Atlantic, 1770–​ 1830 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Flynn, Christopher, Americans in British Literature, 1770–​1832:  A Breed Apart (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Fulford, Tim, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–​1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Fulford, Tim, and Kevin Hutchings (eds), Native Americans and Anglo-​American Cultures, 1750–​1850: The Indian Atlantic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Giles, Paul, Transatlantic Insurrections:  British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–​1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double-​Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Gravil, Richard, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-​American Continuities, 1776–​1862 (Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press, 2000). Hemingway, Andrew, and Alan Wallach (eds), Transatlantic Romanticism:  British and American Art and Literature, 1790–​1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). Hutchings, Kevin, and Julia M. Wright (eds), Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–​ 1870: Gender, Race, and Nation (New York: Ashgate, 2011). Jarvis, Robin, Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel:  Expeditions and Tours in North America, 1760–​1840 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Manning, Susan, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Manning, Susan, and Andrew Taylor (eds), Transatlantic Literary Studies:  A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Mee, Jon, ‘Morals, Manners, and Liberty: British Radicals and Perceptions of America in the 1790s’, in Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey (eds), The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–​1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Pace, Joel, ‘Towards a Taxonomy of Transatlantic Romanticism(s)’, Literature Compass 5.2 (2008), 228–​91, at: http://​onlinelibrary.wiley.com/​doi/​10.1111/​lico.2008.5.issue-​2/​issuetoc. Robertson, Fiona, The United States in British Romanticism (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2019). Verhoeven, W. M., Revolutionary Histories:  Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1777–​1815 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002).

Index

Abbotsford 737 Aberdeen  95, 517, 518, 664 Aberystwyth 95 abolitionism, see slavery Abrahams, Roger  384 Abrams, M. H.  93–​4, 342, 569, 582, 592 absenteeism 13 Ackermann, Rudolph (publisher)  80, 489, 641 Ackroyd, Peter  652 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807)  55–​6, 95, 100, 731 Act of Settlement (1701)  16 Act of Union (1707)  28, 112, 115 Acts of Union (1800)  46, 50–​1, 52, 95, 97, 138, 144, 149, 381 Adair, James  735 Adams, John  359 Addington, Henry  47, 656 Addison, Joseph  469, 471, 670 ‘Account of the Greatest English Poets’  22 Remarks on Several Parts of Italy 709 ‘Taste and the Pleasures of the Imagination’  16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 662 Thoughts of a Tory Author 468 See also The Spectator Address of Certain Authors of Great Britain 733 Adelphi Theatre  260, 261, 726, 727 Adolphus, John Memoirs of John Bannister  257, 260 advertising, see book trade Aeolean harp  569–​7 1 Aeschylus The Persians 672 Aesop Fables  196, 227 aesthetics  27, 137, 290, 311, 331, 580, 583, 592, 595, 598, 599, 604, 605, 606, 609, 611, 644, 650, 662, 696, 699

Africa  26, 56, 91, 209, 290, 538, 683, 730, 735 Agha, Asif  524 Aikin, Arthur  357 Aikin, Charles  357 Aikin, John  356, 357–​9 Biographical Memoirs of Medicine  358, 359 ‘The Cost of a War’  224 Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry 357 Essays on Song-​Writing  567, 646, 647,  664–​5 Evenings at Home  224, 225, 358 General Biography 226 Specimen of the Medical Biography of Great Britain  358–​9 Aikin, Lucy (Mary Godolphin) Books in Words of One Syllable 213 Ainsworth, William Harrison  199 Akenside, Mark  22, 605, 635 Hymn to the Naiads 664 The Pleasures of Imagination  21–​2 Albania  62, 685, 686 Alderson, Amelia  424 Alexander I, Tsar  61 Alfieri, Vittorio  553, 705 Alfoxden  123, 408, 429, 493, 498 Alfred, King  53, 113, 377 Aliens Act (1793), see repressive legislation Allan, David  485 allegory  67, 149, 166, 562–​8, 573, 670, 680, 687, 689 political  16, 57, 682, 687 romantic  49, 670 seditious 537 sublime  564–​5 and symbol  268–​70, 568, 575 Allen, Ralph  422 Allott, Miriam  390, 399 Allston, Washington  588, 726

740   Index allusion  13, 170, 199, 269, 291, 330, 441, 507, 551, 567, 661, 684, 697 intertextual  99, 145, 170, 277, 349, 405, 407, 409, 414, 507, 551, 678 self-​citation  393 almanac  37, 64, 420, 645 Almeida, Hermione de  356 Alps  130, 708, 711, 713, 714, 715, 716 America, Central  76, 724 America, South  76, 146, 290, 497 America, United States of  82, 94, 110, 208, 219, 245, 285–​6, 315, 344, 355, 359, 452, 524,  723–​38 book trade in  728, 731–​4 constitutional debate in  31, 32 Declaration of Independence  266, 359 emigration to  37, 38, 126, 135, 147, 238, 361, 423, 429, 728–​9 literary exchange with Britain  384, 385, 559–​60,  737–​8 and Madoc legend  57, 125–​6, 377, 498, 729 and Native Americans  81, 734–​7 and slavery  100, 725, 730–​1 War of Independence  31, 95, 100, 123, 359–​60, 534, 535, 724, 727 War of 1812  61, 63, 724, 732 See also transatlanticism Amiens, Peace of  46, 633 amor patriae (love of country)  93, 100, 102, 103, 104 Amyot, Thomas  426 anachronism  65, 171, 670, 671, 700, 727 Anacreon  149, 384 Analytical Review  444, 445, 636 anatomy  328, 355, 357, 362, 363, 504 Anatomy Act (1815)  342 Ancient British Fencibles  129 Ancient Britons  38, 127, 134 Anderson, James The Bee 37 Anderson, Robert (publisher) Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain  453–​4, 455, 456 anecdote  22, 137, 196, 327, 492, 638, 710, 712, 737 Anglesey  132, 134 Anglicanism  23, 32, 68, 133, 241, 322, 426, 541

Anglophilia 719 Anglo-​Saxon language  184, 519, 520 Annals of the Fine Arts 626 Anne, Queen  366 annotation  367, 368, 376, 377, 646, 682. See also paratext annuals  78, 80–​1,  638–​40 The Amulet 168 Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-​Book 81, 638–​9,  641 Forget-​Me-​Not 80 Friendship’s Offering  507, 640 Heath’s Book of Beauty 81 The Keepsake  80, 81, 168, 638, 639 The Literary Souvenir 639 See also gift-​books anonymity  86, 233, 234, 245, 319, 355, 365, 540, 729 and celebrity  77–​8,  464–​77 in drama  500 in fiction  77, 85, 468, 469, 476 in poetry  77, 176, 177, 183, 468, 469, 551, 673 in political publication  36, 51 of reviewers  78, 179, 182, 192, 281, 288, 292, 475, 612 in song  649 anthology  26, 80, 189, 196, 404, 452–​4, 496, 533, 553, 569, 645, 654 anthropology  289, 375 antiquarianism  24–​8, 199, 453, 459, 484, 497, 626, 633, 645, 646 German 664 Irish  40, 143, 147 and minstrelsy  376–​7, 380, 384 Scottish  37, 112, 114, 115, 118 Welsh  127, 132, 134 Anti-​Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner  41, 282, 292, 367, 502, 504, 696 Anti-​Jacobin Review and Magazine  41, 53, 227, 269, 281, 353, 495, 496, 497, 634, 696 Antrim, County  147 aphorism 125 apocalypse  54, 201 apostrophe  102, 311, 673 Apuleius The Golden Ass 670 Arabian Nights’ Entertainment 687

Index   741 Arabic  548, 555, 676, 681 archaeology 134 archaism  378, 380, 390, 520 archipelagic approach  94, 124 architecture  16, 22, 69, 543, 661, 666, 667 ariette 651 Ariosto, Ludovico  549, 705 aristocracy  33, 83, 173, 580 Aristophanes 291 Aristotle  268, 273, 328, 364 Arne, Thomas Love in a Village  457, 458, 459 Arnold, Matthew  59, 369 ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’  717 Arnold, Samuel The Maid of the Mill 457 art for art’s sake  697 Arthur, King  24 Asia  56, 91, 201, 385, 555, 677 Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register 687 Asiatic Society of Bengal  678 assemblage  241, 244, 246 assembly rooms  252, 543, 666 Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property  35 associationism  290, 320, 322, 324, 333, 598, 599, 692 Astley’s Amphitheatre  252, 255, 261 astronomy  487, 504, 543 asylum, lunatic  82, 411, 413 atheism  248, 312, 495, 598, 599 Athenaeum (English periodical)  358, 500 Athenaeum (German periodical)  693 Athens  91, 142, 145, 362, 402, 524, 668, 673 Atkinson, Joseph Killarney 147 Attorney General  441–​2 Aubin, Penelope The Noble Slaves 30 Audubon, John James Birds of America 733 Augustine, Saint  318, 361 Confessions 319 Austen, Cassandra  292, 421 Austen, Jane  46, 65, 198, 199, 200, 202, 209, 416, 505 as letter-​writer  314, 421

and parody  214, 409–​11, 487–​8 and her publishers  283, 472, 484 translations of  719 Works Catharine, or the Bower 409 Emma  96–​9, 104, 210–​11, 314, 411, 449, 472, 484 Lesley Castle 409 Love and Freindship 409 Mansfield Park  56, 411, 472, 484, 488, 719 Northanger Abbey  214, 215, 392, 410, 411, 472,  487–​8 Persuasion  63–​5, 338, 392, 411, 472, 635 Pride and Prejudice  47, 64, 283, 314, 472, 487, 719 Sanditon 487 Sense and Sensibility  209, 410, 411, 472, 488 Austin, Gilbert  532 Australia  56, 95, 238, 724, 728 Austria  46, 553, 701, 703, 717 authenticity  25, 27, 74, 82, 83, 85, 111, 127, 143, 163, 271, 375, 377, 393, 497, 595, 600, 647, 664, 669, 738 autobiography  118–​19, 199, 200, 237, 315, 318, 323, 324, 551–​2, 557, 715 epic  45, 208 history of term  320 physician 360 spiritual  315, 361 autonomy, aesthetic  592, 598, 604, 606, 697–​8,  705 autotelism  605, 606 Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de  193 Awsiter, John Essay on the Effects of Opium 350 Ayrshire  86, 108 Babbitt, Irving  327 Bacon, Francis  328, 530 Bage, Robert Hermsprong 296 Bagster, Samuel (publisher) Poets of Great Britain 454 Baillie, Joanna  356, 362–​4 on sympathetic curiosity  306, 363

742   Index Baillie, Joanna (cont.) Works A Collection of Poems 496 Count Basil 363 De Monfort  306, 363, 364 The Election 363 Plays on the Passions  208, 272, 306, 363, 364, 719 ‘Introductory Discourse’  272, 306, 363, 364 Poems . . . of Nature and Rustic Manners 362 The Tryal 363 Baillie, John Essay on the Sublime 19 Baillie, Matthew  356, 362, 364 Morbid Anatomy of . . . the Human Body  362, 363 Bainbridge, Simon  716 Bakhtin, Mikhail  190, 416 ballad  114, 129, 148, 189, 192, 208, 212, 270, 376, 412, 472, 524, 566, 643, 655, 664 Border  114, 116 broadside 652 collecting  115, 151, 377, 380, 453, 645, 646 German 694 imitation  26, 116, 409, 584, 647 medieval  16, 26, 646 Scottish  115, 378, 380, 646, 647 See also lyrical ballad ballad opera  652 Ballantine, John  174 Ballantynes (publisher)  116 Novelist's Library  193, 194 ballet 644 Ballycarry  147, 665 Bampfylde, John  24 Bancroft, George History of the United States 362 Banim, John  146 The Anglo-​Irish of the Nineteenth Century 147 The Boyne Water 147 The Croppy; A Tale of 1798 147 The Nowlans 147 Revelations of the Dead-​Alive 85 Tales of the O’Hara Family 147 Banim, Michael  147 Bank of England  76

Bank of Ireland  142 Banks, Joseph  626 Bannister, Charles  253, 257 Bannockburn, Battle of  648 Bantry Bay  40 Baptists  37, 121, 123, 226, 290, 427, 541 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia  35–​6, 128, 160, 219, 357, 407, 609 British Novelists  192, 193, 461, 462 Eighteen Hundred and Eleven  50, 565 Evenings at Home  224, 225, 358 Hymns in Prose for Children  213, 221, 222, 223 ‘The Mouse’s Petition’  337 ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing’  212, 462 Sins of the Government, Sins of the Nation 36 Barchas, Janine  366 bard  16, 22, 26, 38, 49, 52, 114, 117, 125, 181, 374, 375, 378, 413, 529, 653, 663 English  114, 164, 269, 286, 292, 390, 668, 669 Gaelic  25, 111, 147, 196, 377, 735 Irish  52, 380, 654 Scottish  107, 116–​17, 174, 374, 647, 654 Ulster-​Scots  655 Welsh  24, 25, 26, 38, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 381, 453, 631, 632, 651, 654, 677 See also minstrelsy Barker, Anna  734 Barker, Henry Aston  75 Barker, Mary  450 Barker, Robert  625 Barrell, John  39, 238, 303 Barrett, E. S. The Heroine 410 Barrett-​Browning, Elizabeth  344 Barrow, John  282, 290 Bartholomew Fair  545 Bartram, William  723, 735 Bassnett, Susan  556 Bastille, Fall of the  99, 162, 240 theatrical representation of  255 Bate, Jonathan  406, 407, 414 Bate, Walter Jackson  405

Index   743 Bath  64, 125, 126, 485, 635 Battle of the Books  375 Baudry (publisher) Librairie européenne  720 Beattie, James  107, 108, 602 Dissertations Moral and Critical 20 The Minstrel  109, 376, 383 Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order 518 Beauclerc, Amelia Disorder and Order 523 Beaumont, Francis  450 Beaumont, George  612, 627, 628, 637 beautiful  331, 614, 682, 697 and sublime  19, 337, 587, 595, 662 Beckford, William Vathek 214 Beddoes, Thomas  45, 122, 290, 329, 344, 345, 346, 347, 353 Notice of Some Observations 348 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell  161, 167, 170–​2, 407 The Brides’ Tragedy 170 Death’s Jest-Book 171 The Improvisatore 170 ‘Lines Written in Switzerland’  171 Bedford, Grosvenor Charles  498 Behn, Aphra  195, 456 Agnes de Castro 460 Oroonoko 460 Belchem, John  536 Belcher, James (printer)  245 Belfast  37, 147, 259 Belfast Harp Festival  653 Bell, John (publisher)  486 ‘British Library’ imprint  451 British Theatre  452, 456, 457, 458 New Pantheon; or, Historical Dictionary 572 Poets of Great Britain  452, 453, 454, 456 Shakespeare 453 Bellamy, George Anne Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy  320 belles lettres  30, 31, 111, 453, 592, 612 Belzoni, Giovanni  627 Bengal  61, 62, 677, 678, 679 Benjamin, Walter  84, 384, 550 Bennett, Andrew  165

Bennett, Betty T.  48 Bentham, Jeremy  719 Fragment on Government 295 Bentley, Richard (classicist and theologian) The Folly of Atheism 312 Bentley, Richard (publisher) Standard Novels  191, 193, 733 Berkshire 83 Bermuda 384 Berquin, Arnaud The Looking-​Glass for the Mind 226 Berry, Neil  285 Betty, William Henry West (Master Betty)  259, 260, 262 Bevis, Matthew  17 bibliomania  119, 446, 482 bibliophobia  501, 502, 503, 504 Biblioteca italiana  556, 702 Bibliothèque britannique 719 Bibliothèque universelle 719 Bickerstaff, Isaac The Maid of the Mill 457 Bildungsreise 695 Bildungsroman 199 Binder, Guyora  294 Bindman, David  633 biography  194, 200, 226, 335, 343, 358, 359, 431, 455, 487, 488 Birkbeck, Morris  728 Birmingham  245, 365, 592 Birmingham Riots  35, 240, 241–​2 Black, John  699 Black Dwarf, see Wooler, Thomas blackface  385–​6 Blackmore, Richard Advice to the Poets 16 Blackstone, Sir William Commentaries on the Laws of England 295 Blackwell, Thomas Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer 664 Letters Concerning Mythology 664 Blackwood, William (publisher)  473, 733 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine  60, 79, 81, 84, 85, 87, 116, 118, 182, 195, 280, 281, 293, 364, 367, 409, 473, 475, 476, 664, 699, 701, 705, 725

744   Index Blair, Hugh  516, 662 Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian  25, 111, 663, 735 Blair, Robert  630 Blake, Catherine  390 Blake, Norman  513 Blake, William  164, 173, 185, 206, 379, 395, 597, 636, 667 and antiquarianism  27–​8 as book illustrator  213, 226, 630–​2, 652 and children’s literature  213, 222–​3, 226 illuminated books of  27, 38, 243, 390, 396, 628 influences on  27–​8, 125, 222–​3, 565, 631, 634, 652 and music  651–​2 paintings of  127, 568 and slavery  730 trial for sedition  236 use of allegory  564–​5, 568 and vision  130, 333, 569, 575, 596 Works America: A Prophecy 243 The Ancient Britons 127 The Ancient of Days 630 ‘Auguries of Innocence’  590 The Bard, from Gray  630–​2 The Book of Urizen  38, 65, 596 ‘A Cradle Song’  223 Descriptive Catalogue  127, 631 Europe: A Prophecy 630 The Four Zoas 564 The French Revolution 38 Jerusalem  45, 207, 562 ‘The Little Black Boy’  730 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell  38, 208, 243, 341, 596 Milton  33, 45, 175, 236, 564, 569 Poetical Sketches 631 ‘Public Address’  500 Songs of Innocence and Experience 207, 222–​4, 392, 583, 628–​30, 651–​2, 730 The Spiritual Form of Nelson guiding Leviathan 568 The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth 568 ‘The Tyger’  583

A Vision of the Last Judgment 564 Visions of the Daughters of Albion  65, 730 Blanchard, Laman  473 blank verse  68, 162, 163, 171, 176, 411, 504, 506, 559, 560, 704, 736 blasphemy  70, 233, 234, 236, 238, 246, 247, 300, 303, 304 Blessington, Lady  714 Blomfield, Charles J.  290 Bloom, Harold  400, 405, 414, 713 Bloomfield, George  181 Bloomfield, Nathaniel  181 Bloomfield, Robert  52, 181 The Farmer’s Boy  45, 177–​8, 179, 472 Nature’s Music 569 Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs 472 Boccaccio, Giovanni  81, 504, 550, 638 Decameron 446 Il Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia 554 Bode, Christoph  693 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith  205 Boehme, Jakob  504 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount  16 Bolter, Jay David  373 Bonaparte, Napoleon  48, 59, 60–​1, 166, 214, 691 coup d’état of 1799  46 escape from Elba  46, 57, 60, 166 exile on St Helena  46 Hazlitt’s biography of  379 import ban on English literature  719 literary responses to  49, 50, 57, 77, 681, 714, 716 as ‘master spirit of the age’  46 persecution of Madame de Staël  77, 699 Scott’s biography of  46 visual caricature of  633–​4, 716 and Waterloo  46, 49, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 64, 67, 73, 166, 507, 637, 713, 716 Bonnell, Thomas  452 Bonstetten, Charles-​Victor de  718 book clubs  446, 484, 488, 542 book illustration  81, 189, 191, 192, 451, 625, 629–​31, 636, 637–​9, 652, 667 book societies  483, 484, 487, 731

Index   745 book trade  38, 76, 80, 85–​6, 117, 167–​9, 173, 174, 189–​201, 282–​3, 288, 356, 438, 439–​40, 441, 450–​2, 461–​2, 470, 475–​6, 479, 492, 502, 631, 637–​8, 640, 645, 652, 684, 710, 720 advertising  80, 190–​2, 197, 281, 375, 377, 392, 439, 445, 450–​2, 456, 461, 484, 496, 532, 568 American  728,  731–​4 children’s  226–​7 Continental  708,  720–​1 Irish 141 London  128, 191, 226, 439, 450–​6, 489–​90, 557, 651, 720 prices  80, 190–​2, 441, 442–​4, 446, 454–​5, 460, 483–​4, 557, 720 Scottish  117, 247, 450, 451, 453 See also booksellers; printers; publishers booksellers  38, 80, 115, 128, 191–​2, 226, 451, 252, 281, 439, 450, 453, 455, 462, 479, 486, 489–​90, 491, 502, 707, 708, 732 Boozey, Thomas (bookseller)  486 Borders, Scottish–​English  47, 52, 108, 114–​16, 195, 296, 376, 378, 383, 453, 496, 520, 647 Borlase, William  134 Boston Tea Party  735 Boswell, James  17, 108, 318, 663, 710 Life of Johnson  319, 663 Bosworth, Joseph Elements of Anglo-​Saxon Grammar  519–​20,  524 Bosworth Field, Battle of  505 botany  355, 356, 365–​7, 504 Bourne, Hugh  541 Bowdler, Harriet  125 Bowles, William Lisle  24 Coombe Ellen 484 Fourteen Sonnets 712 The Invariable Principles of Poetry  267–​8 ‘Song of the American Indian’  736 Boyd, Henry  558 Boydell, John (publisher) Shakespeare Gallery  626, 636 Bradshaw, Michael  407 Braham, John  651 Braudy, Leo  465–​6

Breme, Ludovico di  704 Brewer, John  438, 439 Briggs, Peter  318 Brissot, Jacques-​Pierre  30, 712 Bristol  28, 41, 60, 113, 121, 122–​6, 129, 175, 176, 250, 254, 329, 344, 346, 377, 497, 502, 608, 612, 613, 615 British Convention  37 British Critic  48, 60, 281 British Empire  42, 50, 52, 56, 61–​2, 66, 69, 202, 208, 243, 253, 256, 653, 655, 679, 682, 684, 724, 731. See also imperialism British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts 626 British Magazine 612 British Museum  626, 627, 638 British Review  144, 281 Britishness  22, 28, 51, 96, 121, 452 Brittany 134 Broadhead, Alex  514, 517, 519, 522, 525 Brock, Claire  466 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre 64 Brooke, Charlotte Reliques of Irish Poetry 40 Brothers, Richard  541 Brougham, Henry  179–​80, 237, 282, 283, 286, 290 Brown, Charles Brockden  733 Arthur Mervyn 362 Brown, John  329 Elements of Medicine 344 Brown, Marshall  14 Browning, Robert  68, 160, 714 Brummel, Beau  70 Bryant, Jacob New System, or Analysis of Ancient Mythology  572, 670 Buchan, Earl of  34, 39 Buchan, William  350 Domestic Medicine  343, 344 Bucholtz, Mary  523 Buenos Ayres  497 Bullock, William  626 Bulwer-​Lytton, Edward  199, 474 Paul Clifford 198 Pelham 84

746   Index Bunting, Edward  653, 654 Bunyan, John Pilgrim’s Progress  420, 564 Bürger, Gottfried August  694 Burges, James Bland  42 Richard Coeur de Lion 42 Burgess, Anthony  159 Burgh, James  532 Burke, Edmund  17, 36, 42, 406, 599, 604, 713 as Irishman  33 literary influence of  406, 529, 530, 534, 595, 596, 604 as orator  530, 533, 534–​5, 536, 537 and Paine  28, 33, 593 Works Philosophical Enquiry into . . . the Sublime and Beautiful  19, 25, 89, 207, 565, 587, 595–​6, 662, 711 Reflections on the Revolution in France  28, 32, 34, 123, 142–​3, 173, 211, 442, 593–​5, 663 burlesque  400, 409, 411 burletta 261 Burlington, Lord  666 Burney, Charles  176–​7, 184, 290 Burney, Frances  46, 194, 199, 498 Burnham, Dorothy  492 Burns, Robert  37, 38, 52, 106, 107–​8, 185, 290, 453, 468, 520, 644, 655, 719 epistles  107–​8, 170, 174 as national bard  653, 654 poetic responses to  55, 106–​7, 147, 186, 412 and Scots dialect  109, 114, 513–​15, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 524 as song-​collector  116, 644, 647–​9, 653 as song-​writer  96,  647–​9 and working-​class poetry  38, 124, 125, 174, 179–​80,  185–​6 Works ‘Ae fond kiss’  648 ‘The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer’ 174 ‘Ay waukin, O’  648, 649 ‘Charlie is my darling’  648 ‘Epistle to Davie’  174 ‘Epistle to J. L[aprai]k’  170 ‘To a Mouse’  108

‘O my Luve’s like a red, red rose’  648 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect 114, 116, 174, 519 ‘Scotch Drink’  514, 521 ‘Scots wha hae’  648 ‘Song—​For a’ that and a’ that—​’  186 ‘Tam O’Shanter’  620–​1 ‘The Twa Dogs’  174 Burton, Robert The Anatomy of Melancholy 20 Bury, Lady Charlotte Campbell  199 Bushell, Sally  395, 396 Butler, Eleanor  131 Butler, Marilyn  288, 289, 713 Butler, Samuel Hudibras 194 Butler, William  358 Butts, Thomas  564 Byron, George Gordon, Lord  64, 160, 161, 198, 290, 344, 369, 470, 535, 694, 708, 729, 733, 737, 738 aristocratic status  93, 179–​80, 199, 206, 472 artists’ responses to  637, 640 attack on Lake School  68, 93, 164, 272–​3, 507, 682 and celebrity  71, 76, 77, 82, 86, 169, 179, 200, 325, 382–​3, 466, 467, 475–​6, 637, 715,  717–​21 and Clare  82, 412–​13 and Coleridge  164, 268, 272–​3, 602, 729 Continental reception  93, 708, 717–​21 and England  83, 91–​3, 99, 101, 102, 105 and foreign travel  91–​2, 715 funeral  77, 82, 159, 160 and Greece  70, 77, 93, 105, 672–​4, 686, 713 and improvisation  383 influence on contemporaries  77, 82, 86, 166, 168, 182, 183, 186, 411, 412–​13, 703, 704,  717–​21 and Ireland  140, 143 and Italy  77, 548, 557, 558–​9, 703–​4, 705, 713, 714, 715, 717 and the Jews  686 and Keats  166, 168, 325, 369, 671 as letter-​writer  430, 686 and The Liberal  77, 552, 558, 705

Index   747 literary influences on  17, 27, 45, 105, 164, 267–​8, 269, 292, 325, 383, 454, 582, 702–​3,  705 and minstrelsy  383, 384 and Napoleon  50, 709, 716 and Orientalism  45, 56–​7, 385, 684–​6, 689 political speeches  55, 140 and the Pope controversy  267–​8 and revision  389–​92, 393 and Scotland  92, 93, 99, 286, 382–​3 and Shelley  62, 64, 408, 582, 715–​16 and song  385, 386, 651, 655, 686 and Spain  50, 91, 105, 713, 714 and Staël  56, 76, 77, 702–​3, 715, 718 and Switzerland  62, 715, 716 and translation  548, 557, 558–​9, 560, 703 unwritten works  505 and women poets  183 and Wordsworth  93, 164, 166, 268, 273, 390, 582 Works Alpine Journal  715–​16 Beppo  71, 684 The Bride of Abydos 684 Cain 77 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage  45, 50, 57, 62, 63, 71, 182, 325, 374, 383, 391, 412, 582, 585, 627, 637, 640, 669, 673, 674, 685–​6, 702–​4, 714, 715, 716, 717 The Corsair  45, 684, 685 The Curse of Minerva 91 Don Juan  50, 68, 71–​2, 83, 91–​4, 99, 100, 101, 104–​5, 164, 165, 183, 267–​8, 272–​3, 280, 325, 383, 390, 391, 393, 412–​13, 492, 501, 505, 573, 602, 671, 673–​4,  686 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 164, 269, 286, 292, 390, 668, 669 ‘Francesca of Rimini’ (translation of Dante)  558, 560 The Giaour  57, 385, 684–​5 ‘Harmodia’  388–​9 Hebrew Melodies  385, 386, 651, 686 ‘The Highland Harp’  505 Hours of Idleness  179, 286, 472 The Island 91 ‘Isles of Greece’  673

‘From Job’  686 Lara 684 Letter to John Murray  267, 268 Manfred  208, 571, 716 Marino Faliero 77 Morgante Maggiore (translation of Pulci)  558, 559 The Prophecy of Dante  558, 702, 705 ‘Recollections of . . . Madame de Staël’ 702 Sardanapalus 77 ‘Sun of the Sleepless!’  388–​9 The Two Foscari 77 A Vision of Judgment  507, 705 Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges  328 Caernarfon 126 Caerphilly 121 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro  549, 550 El mágico prodigioso 552 Calè, Luisa  630, 636 Callendar, J. T. The Political Progress of Great Britain 37 Calvinism  118, 119, 133, 315, 320 Cambridge Platonists  18 Cambridge University  69, 122, 180, 181, 358, 365, 504, 662 Cameron, Kenneth Neill  431 Campbell, Alexander Albyn’s Anthology 654 Campbell, George The Philosophy of Rhetoric 517 Campbell, Thomas  45, 69, 268, 543, 544, 718, 733 ‘The Exile of Erin’  52, 147 Gertrude of Wyoming 736 Specimens of the British Poets  727–​8 ‘Ye Mariners of England’  52, 96 Canada  61, 384, 724, 728 Canning, George  49, 282, 289, 292, 504, 735 ‘Loves of the Triangles’  367 Canterbury 254 Canton 61 Capitoline Museum, Rome  669 Caradogion (Caractacan) Society  127 Cardwell, Richard  717, 719

748   Index Carey and Lea (publisher)  732 Caribbean  56, 86 caricature  68, 72, 123, 245, 353, 466, 495, 536, 538–​9, 631–​5,  716 Carles, Joseph  241 Carlile, Richard (publisher)  239, 241, 246, 248 The Republican  237, 238, 247 Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register 237 Carlsbad Decrees  76 Carlson, Julie  227 Carlyle, Thomas  289, 557, 733 ‘Signs of the Times’  185 Carolina, South  731 Caroline, Queen  67, 75, 165, 246, 500 Cary, Henry Francis  558 The Vision of Dante  559, 560 Cassirer, Ernst  572 Castlereagh, Viscount  60, 61, 391 Catalani, Angelica  137, 142 Catholic Association  137 Catholic Emancipation  82, 95, 137, 139, 140, 146, 152 Catholicism  33, 35, 46, 51, 54, 133, 137, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 571, 704 Cato Street Conspiracy  538 Cefn Hengoed  121 celebrity  45, 71, 74, 77, 80, 82, 117, 189, 196, 239, 259, 260, 318–​20, 323–​5, 378, 382, 413, 455, 464–​76, 544, 651, 708, 717 Celtic  28, 106, 109, 111, 114, 134, 150, 385 censorship  129, 234–​5, 246, 251, 255, 256, 261, 262, 277, 393, 438, 501, 502, 699. See also freedom of the press; repressive legislation; trials, legal Centlivre, Susanna  457 Cervantes, Miguel de  193 Don Quixote 194 Ceylon 62 Chalmers, Alexander Works of the English Poets  454, 455 Chambers, Ephraim Cyclopaedia 315 Chambers, James ‘On the Death of Lord Nelson’  567 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 191 Chamonix  715, 716 Chancery, Court of  303

Chandler, James  158, 285, 379, 571, 574 Channing, William Ellery Sermons and Tracts 727 chapbook  148, 189, 190, 192, 194, 196, 490, 645 Chapman, George  369, 548, 559–​60, 584 Chard, Chloe  711 Charles II, King  251 Charles Edward Stuart, Prince  85 Charlotte, Princess  70, 473, 574 Chartier, Roger  440, 441, 443 Chase, Cynthia  414 Chasles, Philarète  720 Chateaubriand, François-​René, Vicomte de  719 Atala 736 Chatterton, Thomas  14, 25, 26–​7, 122, 176, 180, 414, 415, 490, 666, 676 ‘Englysh Metamorphosis’  27 Rowley poems  13, 27–​8, 122, 497 Chaucer, Geoffrey  16, 449, 513, 550, 662 The Knight’s Tale  553–​4 Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale  411 Cheetham, James  360 Cheltenham 485 chemistry  343, 355, 357, 425, 504 Chepstow 130 Chester 357 Chester Chronicle 37 children’s literature  206, 213, 215, 217–​29, 458, 481, 608, 652 Chile 109 Chillon, Castle of  716 China  61, 290 Chodorow, Nancy  210 Christensen, Jerome  409 Christ’s Hospital  181, 608 Churchill, Charles  25, 27 Cibber, Colley Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber 318 The Careless Husband 240 The Provok’d Husband 240 Cicero  531, 535 Cintra, Convention of  49, 50, 713–​14 circuses  252, 253, 255, 256, 439. See also theatres under London Clairmont, Claire  62, 557, 558, 650, 715 letters  420–​1, 423, 424, 427, 428, 429, 430

Index   749 Clare, John  96, 161 asylum years  82, 411–​13 and Byron  82, 412–​13 and enclosure  55 and Helpston  55, 96 and intertextuality  411–​13 and natural description  27, 82–​3, 480, 643 and his publishers  413, 490, 491 as reader  455, 481, 489, 491–​2 and ‘self-​identity’  490 and song  643, 644, 649, 651 use of dialect  513, 521–​3 and working-​class poetry  82, 175, 378, 522 Works ‘Autumn’ 521 ‘Child Harold’  412, 413 ‘Childhood’ 480 ‘Dolly’s Mistake’  521 ‘Don Juan’  412, 413 ‘Pastoral Poesy’  82 Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery 82 ‘A Poets Wish’  480 ‘Popularity in Authorship’  82 ‘The Progress of Rhyme’  175 ‘Remembrances’ 55 ‘Songs Eternity’  643, 644, 656 The Shepherd’s Calendar 82 The Village Minstrel  82, 521, 522 ‘Written in a Thunderstorm, July 15, 1841’ 412 Clarke, James Freeman  734 Clarke, Samuel  312 Clarkson, Thomas  55, 286, 730, 731 classicism  17, 22, 26, 57, 60, 63, 150, 176, 196, 230, 267, 268, 289, 291, 367, 370, 382, 456, 514, 524, 531, 567, 573, 574, 614, 635, 645, 661–​74, 676, 679, 691, 692, 693, 709, 710 Claude-​glass  710–​11 Clausewitz, Carl von  47 Clay, Henry  733 Clement, John  358 closet drama  213 clubs  31, 34, 245, 425, 427, 446, 484, 488, 529, 535, 538, 539, 542 Coachmakers Hall  35

Cobb, James Public Readings 543 Cobban, Alfred  437 Cobbett, William  83, 248, 446, 594, 729 Parliamentary Debates 534 Political Register  82, 237, 238 Porcupine’s Gazette 361 Rural Rides 82 The Soldier’s Friend 238 Cochran, Peter  92 Cockburn, Henry Thomas, Lord  116, 282 Cockney School  60, 182, 183, 184, 262, 264, 280, 367, 408, 608, 670, 671, 704 coffee house  30, 31, 37, 252, 374, 385, 493 Colburn and Bentley (publisher)  191, 193 Colchester 426 Colclough, Stephen  483, 491 Coleridge, Derwent  217 Coleridge, Hartley  217 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  701 and associationism  275–​6, 323, 333, 598 and autobiography  321, 323, 324 and Bristol  41, 502 and Burns  620–​1 and Byron  164, 268, 272–​3, 602, 729 and celebrity  476 on children’s reading  217–​18, 221–​2, 226–​7 and contemporary psychology  329–​30 and Continental travel  429, 708, 709, 714 contributions to annuals  80–​1, 638 and Darwin  335, 365, 367 and Davy’s nitrous oxide experiments  122, 330, 347 and De Quincey  349, 350 and Fichte  601 and the French Revolution  41, 163, 164, 208 and genial criticism  265, 614–​16, 622, 623–​4 and Goethe  468, 564 and Gothic  217, 684 and Hazlitt  455, 493, 617, 621 on imagination  18, 207, 320, 333–​4, 574, 586, 598, 605, 613 and intertextuality  406, 408–​9, 412, 415 and Ireland  139 and Kant  564, 598, 599–​601, 602, 695, 699 and Lamb  499, 611, 616 as letter-​writer  418, 419, 423–​5, 429

750   Index Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (cont.) literary and philosophical lectures  69, 543, 544, 609, 626, 700 and manuscript circulation  498, 499 marginalia  409, 413, 415, 612, 613, 616,  623–​4 and Maturin  141, 348, 623 and Milton  330 and opium  324, 342, 346, 350 on organic form  605, 700 and Orientalism  680 and Pantisocracy  499, 729–​30 and Peacock  602, 729 and plagiarism  409 and Platonism  18 on poetry as self-​experiment  330 as political journalist  41, 49, 534 as political lecturer  41, 123, 530, 730 and the reading public  441, 479 and revision  390, 392, 393, 395, 500 and Schelling  564, 601 and the Schlegel brothers  564, 601, 615, 694, 699, 700, 704 Shakespeare criticism  613–​24, 700, 704, 705 and the slave trade  730 and Southey  499, 500, 502, 614 on symbol and allegory  208, 564, 566–​70 and Thelwall  485, 543 transatlantic connections  723, 726 and translation  468, 551, 564 unwritten works  504–​5 and Wales  134 and Williams (Iolo Morganwg)  38 and Wordsworth  41, 275, 276–​7, 311, 390, 408, 500, 593, 594, 598, 602 Works ‘The Ancient Mariner’  115, 337, 342, 390, 409, 584–​5, 723, 724 Biographia Literaria  18, 24, 68, 141, 142, 207, 275, 288, 320, 323, 330, 333, 347, 348, 409, 470, 476, 482, 503, 504, 551, 552, 574, 586, 598, 599, 600–​1, 602, 603, 615, 620, 621, 622, 623, 698, 699 Christabel  68, 277, 342, 498 ‘Dejection: An Ode’  18, 393, 408 ‘The Delinquent Travellers’  708 ‘The Eolian Harp’  339, 570 ‘Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism’  614,  615–​16

‘Fears in Solitude’  42, 730 ‘France: An Ode’  41, 70 The Friend  139, 482, 605, 608, 703 ‘Frost at Midnight’  207, 229, 392 ‘The Garden of Boccaccio’  81, 638 ‘Kubla Khan’  68, 131, 341, 342, 409, 415, 498, 585, 586–​7, 605, 680 Lay Sermons  323, 441, 564, 569, 570, 605 Lyrical Ballads  14, 41, 45, 53, 68, 113, 115, 123, 160, 176, 177, 184, 272, 273, 275, 176, 277, 322, 331, 335, 347, 393, 396, 408, 478, 479, 480, 484, 492, 493, 525, 581, 608, 646, 664, 693 ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’  24–​5 Notebooks  217, 218, 321, 323, 367, 505 ‘On the Prospect of Establishing a Pantisocracy’ 729 Osorio 296 ‘The Pains of Sleep’  342 ‘Pantisocracy’ 729 Poems on Various Subjects  425, 570, 729 ‘The Recantation’  41 ‘Religious Musings’  41 ‘Reply to a Lady’s Question’  81 The Statesman’s Manual  564, 568, 569, 570, 605 ‘This Lime-​Tree Bower My Prison’  39, 320, 500 ‘To William Wordsworth’  408 ‘To a Young Ass’  729 College of Physicians (London)  358 College of Physicians (Philadelphia)  360 Colley, Linda  51, 96, 652 Collier, J. P.  616, 620 Collier, John (Tim Bobbins) View of the Lancashire Dialect 519 Collins, Wilkie  344 Collins, William  25, 106, 677 ‘Ode to Fear’  23 ‘Ode to Liberty’  710 ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’  23 ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands’  23–​4 Persian Eclogues 675 Collyer, Mary  193 Colman, George  253 Colosseum  640, 662, 716 Colston, Marianne  708

Index   751 Combination Acts (1799, 1800), see repressive legislation comedy  63, 68, 71, 251, 630 dramatic  198, 253, 362, 363, 456, 458, 459, 515 commonplace book  505, 636 complaint (literary genre)  19, 21, 730, 736 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de  328 confession legal  298, 302, 303 literary  85, 99, 117–​18, 132, 133, 160, 198, 294, 314, 315, 319–​20, 320, 324, 341, 343, 344, 349–​53, 481, 482, 521, 599, 684 spiritual  319, 514 Congreve, William The Way of the World 99 conjectural history  603 Connecticut 731 Connolly, Claire  143 Constable, Archibald (publisher)  282, 283 Constant, Benjamin  694, 695, 696, 697, 718 Cook, Captain James  128 Cooke, Charles (publisher)  191, 192 British Novelists 193 British Poets 455 Cooper, Astley  329, 367, 368 Cooper, James Fenimore  727, 732, 733, 736 The Pilot 726 Copenhagen House  39, 536, 537, 538 Coppet  698, 718 copyright  193, 281, 283, 450–​6, 460, 462, 484,  491–​2 Chace Act (1891)  733 and Continental publishers  720 Copyright Act (1842)  491 Donaldson v. Beckett (1774)  192, 404, 439–​40, 451, 452, 456, 459, 461, 484, 491 Engraver’s Copyright Act (1735)  235 in Ireland  141 in Scotland  451–​2 Statute of Anne (1710)  450, 451, 456 in United States of America  732–​3 See also piracy (publishing) Cork, County  148 Corn Laws (1815)  55, 82, 186 Corresponding Societies Act (1799), see repressive legislation

cosmopolitanism  81, 91, 92, 261, 355, 384, 558, 686, 693, 701, 709, 710, 711, 712, 717, 718 cosmorama 75 Cottle, Joseph  27, 53, 113, 123, 418, 498 Alfred 377 Early Recollections 500 The Courier  49, 142 couverture  204–​5,  209 Covent Garden Theatre,  49, 141, 239, 240, 246, 250–60, 262, 456, 457 Coventry, Francis  193 Cowbridge 124 Cowley, Hannah  213 The Siege of Acre 53 Cowper, William  96, 412, 422, 472 ‘The Morning Dream’  730 ‘The Negro’s Complaint’  730 ‘Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce’  730 The Task  99–​101, 104, 411, 712 ‘To William Wilberforce’  730 Cozen, John Robert  710 Crabbe, George  96, 268, 290, 344 Craciun, Adriana  214 Crary, Jonathan  75 Crawford, Robert  93 creativity  18, 19, 21, 59, 64, 77, 79, 161, 207, 265, 277, 341, 342, 374, 376, 381, 389, 390, 396, 404, 408, 409, 415, 416, 524, 547, 587, 593, 598, 600, 605, 668, 713 Creech, William (publisher) British Poets  451, 452 Critical Review  281, 285, 286, 452 Croker, John Wilson  143, 182, 183, 184, 280–​1, 282, 288, 290, 291 Familiar Epistles to Frederick Jones 141 Crosby and Co. (publisher)  392 Croxall, Samuel Fables of Aesop 227 The Novelist; or Tea-​Table Miscellany 460 Select Collection of Novels 460 Cruikshank, George  68, 233, 631 The New Union-​Club  538, 539 Cruikshank, Isaac Debating Society 536 Cullen, Stephen The Castle of Inchvally 146

752   Index Cullen, William  329, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 365 Cumberland  104, 114, 134, 273, 518, 641 Cumberland, George  667 Cumbria  104, 134. See also Cumberland; Westmoreland Cunnington, William  134 Curran, John Philpot  139 Curran, Sarah  151 Curtis, Jared  397 Cylchgrawn Cynmraeg (‘Welsh Magazine’)  37, 129 Dacre, Charlotte (Rosa Matilda) Hours of Solitude 472 Zofloya  57, 198, 214 Daer, Lord  34 Dafydd ap Gwilym  124 Dalhaus, Carl  652, 656 dance  75, 258, 260 dandy  70, 83 Dante Alighieri  272, 413, 548, 550, 704 Il Convivio  551, 554, 568 The Divine Comedy  558, 559, 560, 630, 671, 705 Vita Nuova  551, 554 Darley, George  161, 170 The Errors of Ecstasie 169 Sylvia  169–​70 Darnton, Robert  483 Dart, Gregory  262 Darwin, Erasmus  329, 347, 356 The Botanic Garden  335, 365–​7, 680 The Economy of Vegetation  365, 366 The Loves of the Plants  335, 365–​6, 367 Zoonomia 365 Davidson, William  538 Davies, Edward Mythology and Rites of the British Druids 127 Davies, Hugh Sykes  396 Davies, Walter  128 Davis, Thomas  152 Davy, Humphry  122, 337 and Lyrical Ballads  346–​7

nitrous oxide experiments  122, 330, 341, 344–​9,  351 as poet  346–​7 Works ‘As I was walking up the street’ 347 ‘On breathing the Nitrous Oxide’  346 Researches, Chemical and Philosophical  330, 344, 345, 346, 348, 352 Dawson, P. M. S.  403 de Man, Paul  531 De Quincey, Thomas and Burns  185 and Coleridge  324, 342, 343, 346, 349, 350, 498 and Davy  349–​54 and German philosophy  599, 681 and intertextuality  324, 350, 353, 406 and medicine  349–​54 and opium  324, 341, 343, 344, 349–​54,  481 and periodical culture  83, 87 his reading  481–​2 and Wales  132–​3 and Wordsworth  160, 324, 350, 498, 534 Works ‘Autobiography of an English Opium Eater’ 185 Confessions of an English Opium-​ Eater  118, 132, 324, 343, 349–​54, 481, 482 translation of Häring’s Walladmor 86 debating society  35, 248, 529, 536 Declaration of Independence  266, 359 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 266 Defoe, Daniel  200 Journal of the Plague Year 360 Robinson Crusoe  194, 490 Deism  18, 124, 239, 312, 490 Delhi 62 DeLanda, Manuel  244, 245 Denbighshire 129 Dennis, John  19 Miscellanies in Verse and Prose 711 Dent, John The Bastille 255 Deresiewicz, William  411

Index   753 Derrida, Jacques  374–​5 Devis, Arthur William Death of Nelson in the Cockpit of HMS Victory 567 dialect  53, 95, 200, 513–​27 and class  174, 200, 524–​5, 526–​7 English regional varieties  114, 515, 518, 519,  521–​3 Irish  54–​5 Scots  114, 116, 174, 514–​15, 517–​19, 520–​1, 524, 525–​6, 646, 648 stage 515 Standard English  200, 201, 514, 515, 516, 518, 527 Welsh 126 Dibdin, Charles  653, 655–​6 British War Songs 656 Britons Strike Home 656 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall Bibliomania 199 Bibliophobia 503 Dickens, Charles  87, 344 dictionary  158, 238, 243, 418, 470, 516, 572, 593, 613, 670 didactic poem  365, 367, 393, 533 didacticism  13, 144, 176, 193, 196, 198, 284, 365, 367, 393, 533, 691, 694, 698, 710 Diderot, Denis ‘L’éloge de Richardson’  314 Salons 627 Disorderly Houses Act (1751)  235 Disraeli, Benjamin  199 Vivian Grey 84 The Young Duke  464–​5, 467, 474, 476 Diss 426 Dissent  30, 32, 35, 36, 41, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 133, 181, 241, 357, 358, 427, 490, 497, 540, 541, 695 Dissenting academy  122, 123, 357, 358, 490 Dixon, George Washington  386 Donaldson, Alexander  192, 404, 439–​40, 451, 452, 456, 459, 461, 484, 491 Donaldson v. Beckett (1774)  192, 404, 439–​40, 451, 452, 456, 459, 461, 484, 491 Donne, John ‘The Canonisation’  611 Dorchester Gaol  247, 248

Douce, Francis  286 Dover  91, 92, 93, 102, 105 Dow, Alexander The History of Hindostan 676–7 Drakard, John  237 drama, see theatre Drayton, Michael  415 dream  20, 81, 165–​8, 182, 246, 342, 346, 352, 353, 389, 397, 401, 481, 500, 560, 561, 586, 587, 730 dream vision  165–​8, 343, 346, 401, 500, 560, 587, 671 Drennan, William  37, 40 Fugitive Pieces 150 ‘Glendalloch’ 150 ‘To Ireland’  150 ‘Wake of William Orr’  150 druid  16, 125, 127, 134 Drury Lane Theatre  75, 141, 239, 240, 246, 250–60, 456, 457 Dryden, John  19, 164, 268, 270, 364, 450, 456 Dublin  37, 52, 95, 130, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 147, 151, 237, 239, 250, 303, 384, 426, 534, 653, 655, 731 Dublin Examiner 142 Duff, David  116, 264, 645, 663, 694, 695 Duff, William  404, 665 Essay on Original Genius 21 Duffy, Charles Gavan  151–​2 Duffy, Cian  131 Duggett, Tom  684 Dulwich Picture Gallery  626 Duncan, Ian  283, 701, 712 Dundas, Henry  37 Dundas, Robert  37 Dunlop, John History of Fiction  197, 461 Dunne, Tom  138 Durham 116 Dusautoy, James  504 Dutch East Indies  62 Dwight, Timothy ‘Columbia’ 726 The Conquest of Canaan  726,  727–​8 Greenfield Hill 95 Remarks of the Review of Inchiquin’s Letters  726, 733 Dyer, George  128, 427

754   Index East India Company  56, 61, 95, 354, 676, 677 Eaton, Daniel Isaac  37, 238, 239, 241, 246 Hog’s Wash 35 Eckert, Penny  519 Eclectic Review  281, 502 eclogue  353, 524, 675, 677 Edda 26 Edgeworth, Maria  40, 45–​6, 194, 199, 209, 226, 290, 407, 410 and absenteeism  138 and American copyright law  733 attitudes to Union  54, 138, 144 and Catholic Emancipation  140 and Continental Europe  708, 719 educational writing  218, 220, 223–​4, 719 and generic hybridity  137, 144 influence on Austen  409–​10 and intertextuality  145 and the moral tale  195 and the national tale  53, 96, 143, 521 use of dialect  54, 144, 513, 521 Works The Absentee 138 Belinda  144, 195, 332–​3 Castle Rackrent  53, 54, 137, 144, 521 Ennui  144–​5 ‘Lazy Lawrence’  224 Letters of Julia and Caroline 410 Letters for Literary Ladies  143–​4 ‘Mademoiselle Panache’  410 ‘The Orphans’  224 The Parent’s Assistant  223, 226 ‘Preface’ to Leadbeater’s Cottage Dialogues 140 ‘Simple Susan’  224 ‘Waste Not, Want Not’  223–​4 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell  122, 137, 407 Edinburgh  34, 37, 48, 75, 85, 86, 109, 111, 115, 116–​18, 141, 174, 250, 281–​92, 302, 303, 329, 355, 357, 358, 361, 365, 422, 451, 525, 647, 731, 733 Edinburgh Annual Register 497 Edinburgh Convention  37 Edinburgh Evening Courant 451 Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany  118, 364, 553 Edinburgh Medical School  329, 355, 357, 359

Edinburgh Review  48, 49, 59, 78, 116, 146, 179, 281–​92, 323, 325, 364, 454, 507, 608, 671, 685, 692, 694, 698, 704, 727 Edmonton 367 education  74, 79, 122, 173, 202, 229, 289, 290, 331, 480, 490, 516, 523, 526, 541, 546, 571, 695 aesthetic  691, 698, 701 and children’s literature  189, 217–​24, 227 and class  45, 66, 115, 175, 176, 182, 184, 289, 405, 489, 522, 527, 536, 541, 707, 710, 719 classical  108, 173, 180, 481, 530, 670 Dissenting  32, 122, 123, 124, 357, 358, 427, 490 elocutionary  532, 533, 542 and libraries  486, 487, 488 literary  79, 125, 180, 181, 548, 558 medical  329, 355, 357, 359, 360, 367 political  424, 426, 442, 530, 538 self-​  124, 125, 129, 174, 186, 426, 489, 490, 536 women’s  65, 122, 144, 176, 204, 205, 209, 269, 427 See also libraries; schools; universities Edward, Anna Maria ‘The Princess of Killarney’  147 effusion  132, 404, 553, 570 Egan, Pierce  262 Life in London  83, 261 Egypt  56, 290, 384, 627, 634, 666, 681, 704 Einstein, Alfred  656 Eisner, Eric  466 eisteddfod  127, 654 ekphrasis  627, 668 Elba  46, 57, 60, 166 elegy  49, 60, 96, 151, 161, 162, 279, 288, 402, 627, 628, 637, 645, 672, 681, 720 Elgar, Edward  650 Elgin, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of  626, 668 Elgin Marbles  69, 399, 668 Eliot, George  474 Middlemarch 289 Eliot, T. S.  588 Ellenborough, Lord  302 Elliot, Ebenezer ‘Burns, from the Dead’  186 ‘Corn Law Rhymes’  186

Index   755 Ellis, George Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances 53 Elmsley, Peter  290 elocution  516, 530, 531–​2, 533, 535, 538, 542–​3,  544 emigration  38, 95, 110, 122, 211, 214, 429, 724, 725, 728, 729 Emmet, Robert  52, 139–​40, 151, 653 Emmett, Daniel Decatur  385, 386 empiricism  13, 328, 593, 596–​8, 599, 600, 604, 695 enclosure  55, 178 encyclopedia  206, 213, 288, 438, 670 Enfield, William The Speaker 533 England  28, 33, 41, 48, 50–​5, 76–​7, 85, 91–​105, 108, 113–​15, 122, 130, 135, 176, 183, 205, 209, 221, 228, 235, 237, 241, 244, 247, 295, 304–​5, 310, 311, 328, 332, 357, 361, 384, 400, 402, 423, 427, 441, 451, 476, 518, 520–​1, 526, 529, 530, 620, 652, 655, 672, 689, 695, 698–​9, 701, 703, 714 Englishness  82, 91–​105, 452 Engraver’s Copyright Act (1735)  235 engraving  80, 81, 98, 444, 445, 617, 628, 630, 632, 637, 638, 639, 666, 667 Enlightenment  31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 100, 107, 199, 201, 207, 220, 238, 264, 266, 267, 322, 329, 356, 365, 441, 645, 663, 664, 669, 693, 712, 735. See also Scottish Enlightenment epic  102, 160, 164, 567 ancient  25, 26, 377, 662 autobiographical  45, 53, 104, 206–​7, 208, 325 epomania 53 female  53, 213 fragmentary  25, 26, 166, 386, 671 historical  42, 113, 125, 377, 498, 505, 714 mock-​  83, 99, 101, 286 national  53, 57, 91, 93, 99, 100, 104, 125, 128, 498, 726–​7, 729 Oriental  62, 160, 377, 681, 683, 686 political  38, 66, 165 theories of  504, 644, 662, 665 unwritten  504, 505

Epictetus 490 epigram 645 epigraph  81, 392, 393 epistle  48, 107–​8, 141, 174, 210, 286, 318, 384, 428, 524, 726 epitaph  359, 609–​11, 616, 627 epithalamion 672 Equiano, Olaudah The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano  34, 730  Erickson, Lee  483 Erskine, Esme Stewart Alcon Malanzore 213 Erskine, Thomas  36, 39, 239, 442, 544 essay  68–​9, 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 159, 180, 213, 284, 289, 292, 315, 351, 406, 407, 415, 446, 447, 455, 481, 493, 533, 594, 603, 608, 609, 616, 617–​19, 620, 621, 713, 727 Esterhammer, Angela  384 Estlin, John Prior  123 Etruria  421, 422 Europe  31–​2, 45, 54, 57, 60–​3, 69, 80, 82, 91, 93–​7, 102–​4, 106, 142, 151–​2, 199, 210, 256, 281, 355, 365, 382, 384–​6, 427, 439, 464, 479, 548, 549, 555–​6, 572–​3, 575, 598, 630, 637, 653, 663, 673, 676, 678, 681–​4, 686, 691–​705, 707–​21,  735–​7 European Magazine  51, 75, 82 European Romanticism  93, 106, 142, 691–​705, 718, 721 Evans, Evan (Ieuan Fardd) Specimens of . . . the Antient Welsh Bards  127, 453 Evans, John  126 Evans, Thomas (Tomos Glyn Cothi) Trysorfa Gymmysgedig 128 The Examiner  57, 69, 237, 270, 281, 501, 507, 548 Examiner of Plays  239, 241 exile  41, 46, 52, 60, 61, 63, 67, 70, 71, 77, 93, 117, 132, 147, 238, 259, 423, 689, 696, 703, 704, 709, 710, 715, 716, 719 fable  196, 226, 227, 564 Fabricius, Vincent  366 Factory Act (1802)  55

756   Index Fairer, David  28, 392, 499 fairy tale  193, 221 fancy  19, 20, 22, 24, 196, 221, 228, 324, 413, 549, 569, 613, 614, 727 Faraday, Michael  543 Faubert, Michelle  356 Favret, Mary  336, 338 Fawcett, Julia  320 Fearon, Henry Bradshaw  728 Feather, John  438 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal 615 Felpham 236 Fénelon, François  36, 193 Ferber, Michael  93 Ferguson, Adam  522, 719, 735 Fergusson, Robert  518 Ferrier, Susan  199, 209 Marriage 109 Ferris, Ina  112, 138 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  605 ‘Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre’ 601 Fielding, Henry  193, 195, 197, 198, 251, 456 Amelia 460 Joseph Andrews 460 Shamela 314 Tom Jones  295, 314, 461, 491 Fielding, Penny  375 Fielding, Sarah  193 Fisher, Henry (publisher)  194 Fishguard  40, 129 Flaxman, John  609, 616, 638, 666 Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun  212 Fletcher, Angus  563, 566 Fletcher, John  406, 450 Fliegelman, Jay  219 Flimston 124 Flintshire 132 Flynn, Philip  285 Ford, Sir Richard  245 forgery  38, 85, 86, 122, 127, 497, 647 Forster, Michael  558 Foscolo, Ugo  694 ‘Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’ 704 Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis 703 Foster, Donald  467, 472

Foster, Stephen Ethiopian Melodies 386 Foucault, Michel  471 Foulis, Andrew and Robert (printer and publisher)  451, 452, 453 Fourdrinier, Henry and Sealy (paper-​makers)  439 Fowler, Alastair  467 Fox, Charles James  48, 235, 238, 298, 535, 536 fragment  26, 57, 110, 111, 113, 150, 196, 217, 220, 272–​6, 313, 322, 368, 390, 400, 402–​3, 406, 453, 497, 505, 549–​51, 553–​4, 556, 605–​6, 634–​6, 648, 671, 693 Fraistat, Neil  396 Franklin, Benjamin  123, 124, 365 Information to Those Who Would Remove to America 728 Franklin, Caroline  686 Fraser’s Magazine 471 A Freeborn Englishman! (anonymous etching)  233–​4 freedom of the press  31, 233–​48, 294–​307, 441. See also censorship; repressive legislation; trials, legal Freeman’s Journal 137 French Revolution  44, 46, 95, 255, 274, 282, 711, 728, 729 Bastille  99, 162, 240, 255 Committee of Public Safety  595 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 266 emigration  162–​3,  211 intellectual origins of  31, 290, 593, 594, 702 invasion attempts in Ireland and Wales  40, 129 September Massacres  163 Terror  99, 211, 214, 295, 598, 702 trial of Louis XVI  291 trial of Marie Antoinette  162, 497 See also Bonaparte, Napoleon; Revolutionary Wars French Revolution, British writing about literary  38, 66, 70, 76–​7, 104, 129, 139, 160–​4, 184, 196, 199, 208, 211, 214, 219–​20, 255, 256, 266, 274, 282, 284, 290, 379, 404, 581, 602, 631, 702, 729

Index   757 pamphlet war  28, 32, 37–​43, 47, 124, 127, 128, 139, 196, 242, 266, 424, 425, 437, 593–​4, 595, 663 Frend, William  427 Fricker, Edith  122 Fricker, Sara  122 Friends of the Liberty of the Press  239 Fritz, Paul  439 Frye, Northrop  13, 572, 573, 630 Fulford, Tim  413, 641, 735 Fuseli, Henry Milton Gallery  636 Royal Academy lectures  565 translation of Winckelmann  665 Gaelic language  108, 110, 114, 143, 147, 196, 379, 520, 654, 735 ‘Gagging Acts’ (1795), see repressive legislation Gainsborough, Thomas  466 Gale Jones, John  39 Galignani, Giovanni Antonio (publisher)  721 Galignani Messenger 720 Librairie Galignani  719–​20 Galt, John  87, 513, 520 Annals of the Parish 603 ‘Anonymous Publications’  471, 473 The Ayrshire Legatees 86 Bogle Corbet 86 Eben Erskine 86 The Entail 86 The Gathering of the West 75 Lawrie Todd 86 Life of Lord Byron 86 The Omen 86 The Provost 603 Ringan Gilhaize 86 Rothelan 86 The Steam-​Boat  75, 87 Garcia, Humberto  681 Garibaldi, Giuseppe  714 Garrick, David  251, 253, 256, 318, 456 ‘Heart of Oak’  51 Miss in Her Teens 240 Gay, John  17, 251 The Beggar’s Opera  457, 458 Geddes, Alexander  35

Gelbart, Matthew  653 Genesis, Book of  550 genetic criticism  395 Genette, Gérard  467 Geneva  62, 423, 552, 698, 702, 703, 707, 715, 716, 719 genial criticism  614–​24 genius  18, 19, 21, 25, 27, 42, 52, 82, 109, 145, 148, 158, 170, 174, 176, 180, 228, 259, 270, 276, 280, 288, 329, 330, 337, 390, 404, 407, 664, 665, 730 Gentleman’s Magazine  49, 51, 52, 125, 281, 357, 444, 445, 446, 470, 488 geology  284, 504 George III, King  35, 70, 86, 166, 508 George IV, King  70, 74, 75, 86, 508. See also Prince Regent georgic  24, 147, 148, 174, 213, 338 Gerard, Alexander  404 German Museum (periodical)  696 German Romanticism  106, 159, 315, 557, 564, 601–​2, 605–​6, 644, 691–​705, 718 Germany  52, 80, 111, 419, 423, 425, 598, 606, 655, 691, 692, 693, 695, 696, 699, 701, 702 Gerrald, Joseph  238 Gerrard, Christine  19 Ghent, Dorothy Van  166 Gibbon, Edward  686 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire  707, 709 Giddy, Davies  345, 346 Gifford, William  183, 272, 282, 283, 287, 290 The Baviad  41, 269, 270, 292 The Maeviad  41, 269, 292 gift-​books  80, 81, 189. See also annuals Gilbert, Geoffrey The Law of Evidence 295 Gill, Stephen  394, 396 Gillray, James  68, 246, 631, 632 The Apples and the Horse-​Turds 634 Copenhagen House  536, 537, 538 French Liberty. British Slavery 634 Maniac-​Ravings 633 A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism  495, 496 Very Slippy Weather 635 Gilmartin, Kevin  35

758   Index Gilpin, William  132 Observations on the River Wye 130 Gilroy, Paul  75 Giordani, Pietro  556 Gisborne, John  430 Gisborne, Maria (Maria Reveley)  424, 427, 428, 430, 650 Gisborne, Thomas Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex 488 Glamorgan  123, 124, 126, 134 Glasgow  86, 247, 451, 727 Glendalough  148, 150 Glorious Revolution  15, 16, 32 Goddard, Frederick William  737 Godolphin, Mary, see Aikin, Lucy Godwin, Mary Jane  419 Godwin, William  38, 42, 123, 131, 159, 165, 197, 199, 208, 220, 273, 303, 408, 424, 437, 444, 595, 603, 616, 730 archival legacy  430 Continental reception  719, 720 diary  36, 429, 431 and Ireland  139–​40 Juvenile Library  226–​8, 608 and legal trials  36, 238, 296–​9, 306 letters  419, 421–​3, 425, 426, 427, 430 objections to oratory  533 unpublished children’s story  222 Works Caleb Williams  36, 65, 117, 198, 200,  296–​9 Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bill 426 Cursory Strictures  238, 299 The Enquirer  227, 228 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice 36, 139, 220, 238, 244–​5, 298, 299, 425, 427, 533, 552 Fables, Ancient and Modern 227 The Looking-​Glass  226, 227 Mandeville 140 The Pantheon 228 A Parent’s Offering 226 St Leon  526–​7 Thoughts Occasioned by . . . Parr’s Spital Sermon 229

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  193, 549, 552, 556, 558, 560, 561, 564, 718 ‘On Carlyle’s German Romance’ 557 Dichtung und Wahrheit 557 Faust 549 Sorrows of Young Werther  25, 703 Goldsmith, Jason  323 Goldsmith, Oliver  193, 460, 461, 612, 613 The Citizen of the World 91 The Deserted Village  95, 178 The Traveller 710 The Vicar of Wakefield 460 Golinski, Jan  349 Goodman, Kevis  331, 338 Goodridge, John  413 Gordon Riots  269 Gore, Catherine  199 gorsedd 127 Goslee, Nancy  113, 392 Gosson, Stephen The Schoole of Abuse 264 Gothic  23, 26, 27, 277, 334, 580, 684 architecture  16, 22, 481, 666, 692 drama  258, 306, 464 female  214–​15 history of term  15–​16, 17 Irish  144, 146, 148 novel  13, 57, 65, 86, 194, 196, 199, 200–​2, 214, 334, 410, 484, 662, 670, 711 poetry 666 and Romanticism  17, 684 satire of  83, 214, 410–​11, 488 Scottish  85, 118 Welsh 132 Göttingen  695, 709 Graffigny, Françoise de  193 Graham, Robert  174 Grand Tour  667, 708, 709–​11, 712, 714, 717 Grasmere  50, 96, 408, 418, 429 Grattan, Henry  40 Gray, Robert Letters during the Course of a Tour 711–12 Gray, Thomas  26, 106, 127 ‘The Bard’  24, 25, 130–​1, 375, 381, 631 Blake illustrations  630–​2 Great Reform Act, see Reform Act

Index   759 Greece  22, 63, 77, 93, 176, 198, 208, 228, 404, 524, 549, 550, 551, 552, 661–​74, 676, 678, 685, 686 Greek War of Independence  70, 77, 105, 672, 673, 713 Green, Sarah  194 Scotch Novel Reading 114 Green, Thomas Dissertation Concerning Enthusiasm 343 Gregory, John  355–​6, 357, 359, 369 Observations on the Duties and Offices of a Physician  355, 370 Griffin, Robert  467 Griffiths, Ann  133 Griffiths, Ralph  281 Grusin, Richard  373 Gueulette, Thomas-​Simon  193 gusto  338, 339, 579, 588, 589, 620 Guy’s Hospital  329, 367 Gwyneddigion 127 Habeas Corpus  38, 205, 235, 237 suspensions of  38, 235 Hackney  123, 359 Hafod 131 Halifax  194, 247, 487 Halkett, Samuel  470 Hallam, Arthur Henry  290, 338–​9 Halleck, Fitz-​Greene  733 Halmi, Nicholas  566, 575 Hamilton, Alexander Edith of Glammis  525–​6 Hamilton, Elizabeth  45, 199 The Cottagers of Glenburnie  53–​4,  514–​15 Hamilton, Terrick Anta: A Bedoueen Romance 555 Hamilton, Sir William  626, 667 Hammond, Brean  93 Hammond, Thomas  367 Hampshire 666 Handel, George Frideric  652 Harding, Anthony  574 Hardy, Lydia  34 Hardy, Thomas  34, 38, 39, 238, 300, 424 Memoir 299 Häring, W. H. (Willibald Alexis) Walladmor  86–​7

Harker, Dave  647 Harness, William  364 Harper (publisher)  732 Harris, James  692 Harris, Jocelyn  411 Harris, John (publisher)  226 Harris, Thomas  253 Harrison, James (publisher) The Novelist’s Magazine  192, 193, 460–​1 Hartley, David  273, 275, 320, 324, 598, 599 Observations of Man 333 Harvey, William  328, 358 Hastings, Warren  254, 535, 679 Hawkesworth, John  193 Almoran and Hamet 460 Hawkins, Ann  466 Hawkshead 181 Haydon, Benjamin Robert  271, 327, 399, 503, 668, 670, 673 Hayley, William  175 Elegy on . . . Sir William Jones 681 Haym, Rudolph  693 Haymarket Theatre  250, 252, 253, 254, 457 Hays, Mary  199, 424, 427 Memoirs of Emma Courtney  314–​15 Hayter, George The Trial of Queen Caroline 75 Haywood, Eliza  193 Fruitless Enquiry 460 Hazlitt, William  160, 262, 288, 446, 507, 651 and American literature  727 on the art of criticism  272, 274, 284, 287, 292, 620, 623 and the Cockney School  280, 408, 479, 493 and Coleridge  323, 455, 493, 617, 619, 621 collaboration with Leigh Hunt  69 concept of gusto  338, 588–​9, 620 and confessional writing  314 Continental travels  708, 713, 714 Dissenting background  123, 727 and the essay form  83, 407, 415 and extempore writing  79 and German Romantic theory  691, 692,  700–​1 influence on Keats  69, 338, 415, 588–​9 and Irish poetry  150–​1 and Kant  598, 695 as lecturer  69, 529, 533, 543–​4, 620

760   Index Hazlitt, William (cont.) and literary quotation  406–​7, 413, 621 his love of books and reading  446, 455 and Napoleon  479, 694 as painter  608 on the period’s contradictions  159, 691, 694, 727 as philosopher  159, 197, 324, 594, 598, 608 as political journalist  534, 609 on the politics of imagination  594 use of term ‘romantic’  692, 693 and Wordsworth  158, 455, 493, 581, 619 Works ‘The Character of Mr. Pitt’  534 Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays  69, 594, 620, 700 ‘Coriolanus’ 594 ‘The Dandy School’  83 ‘On the Difference between Writing and Speaking’ 533 ‘The Drama: No. IV’  691 ‘On Editors’  287 ‘Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon’  727 The Eloquence of the British Senate 533 Essay on the Principles of Human Action  324, 336, 338, 594, 609 ‘On Genius and Common Sense’  407 ‘On Going a Journey’  713 ‘On Gusto’  338, 339, 588–​9, 620 Lectures on the English Comic Writers 69 Lectures on the English Poets 69 Liber Amoris  199, 314 Life of Napoleon 379 ‘On the Living Poets’  581 ‘Lord Byron’  159 ‘Mr. Brougham—​Sir F. Burdett’  534 ‘Mr. Jeffrey’  691 ‘Mr. Wordsworth’  158 ‘On My First Acquaintance with Poets’  455, 493 Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy 173 ‘Paragraphs on Prejudice’  604 ‘The Periodical Press’  78–​9 ‘Of Persons One Would Wish To Have Seen’  608, 619 The Round Table 69 ‘Schlegel on the Drama’  692

‘On Shakespeare and Milton’  406–​7 The Spirit of the Age  69, 70, 150–​1, 158–​9, 534, 691, 727 ‘What is the People?’  621 ‘William Godwin’  159 Hearne, Samuel  735 Hebraism  385, 386, 520, 550, 651, 675, 676, 686, 689 Heffernan, James  630 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  606 Heine, Heinrich  384, 717 Helpston  55, 96 Helvétius, Claude Adrien  328 Hemans, Felicia  47, 113, 168, 169, 173, 209, 627 and annuals  80, 81, 183, 630 and Continental Europe  81–​2, 553, 655, 715, 720 juvenilia 473 and minstrelsy  385 her publishing signatures  473 and translation  553, 653 and Wales  82, 134, 653, 654, 655 Works ‘On the Death of Princes Charlotte’  473 England and Spain  53, 714 ‘Indian Woman’s Death-​Song’  81, 736 ‘Joan of Arc, in Rheims’  81 ‘Lays of Many Lands’  385 Modern Greece  672–​3 National Lyrics, and Songs for Music 655 ‘Patriotic Effusions of the Italian Poets’ 553 Records of Woman  81, 715 Selection of Welsh Melodies 655 ‘The Sicilian Captive’  81 ‘The Switzer’s Wife’  81 Translations from Camoens, and Other Poets 553 ‘The Widow of Crescentius’  183 Henkle, Roger B.  169 Henrich, Dieter  694 Henry II, King  24 Herd, David Ancient and Modern Scots Songs 648 Herder, Johann Gottfried  111, 558, 564 Herodotus 549 heroic couplet  14, 335

Index   761 Highlands, Scottish  23, 25, 95, 104, 108, 109, 110, 112, 377, 379, 385, 453, 505, 654 Hill, Richard A Letter from Richard Hill 240 Hills, Matt  474 Hinduism  572, 676, 677, 678, 679, 680, 681, 682, 683 A Hint to the Inhabitants of Ireland 472 Hoagwood, Terence Allen  374, 647 Hoare, Sir Richard Colt  134 Hobhouse, John Cam  391, 430, 694, 716 Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto  703, 704 Hodgson, Francis  699 Hogarth, William  616, 620 Gin Lane  617–​19 Hogg, Alexander (publisher)  194 Hogg, James  374, 378, 520, 651, 653, 654 The Mountain Bard 647 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner  85–​6, 117–​19, 160, 198, 315, 521 The Queen’s Wake  116–​17, 146, 385 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson  551, 552 Two Hundred and Nine Days 713 Holbach, Paul-​Henri Thiry, Baron d’  328 Holcroft, Thomas  38, 199, 238, 290, 302, 306 Anna St Ives 300 A Narrative of Facts  299–​300 A Tale of Mystery 258 Holford, Margaret Margaret of Anjou 213 Holland 366 Holland, Henry  256 Holmes, James The Country Girl  638, 639 Holmes, Richard  408, 505, 554 Holyhead 130 Homer  22, 48, 105, 171, 407, 490, 548, 549, 559, 560, 565, 575, 584, 662, 664–​5, 676 Hone, William  241, 246, 298, 300, 301–​2, 303, 304, 306 The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism 238 Political Litany 238 The Sinecurists’ Creed 238 Hood, Thomas  161, 169, 170, 407 Hook, Theodore  80, 195, 199 Sayings and Doings  83–​4

Hookham, Thomas (publisher)  486 A Walk Through Switzerland 708 Hookham’s Circulating Library  486 Horace  415, 626 Horner, Francis  282, 284 Houghton (publisher)  732 Howell, Wilbur Samuel  531 Hucks, Joseph  131 Hulme, T. E.  327 Hume, David  106, 315, 319, 320, 323, 324, 599, 602, 603, 605 Essays 313 ‘My Own Life’  313 A Treatise of Human Nature  312–​13, 316, 317, 331, 593 Hunt, Henry ‘Orator’  67, 534, 538, 539–​40 Hunt, John (publisher)  83, 183, 237, 432 Hunt, Leigh  60, 83, 161, 271, 272, 287, 428, 557, 651, 669, 670, 694, 708 and Byron  390, 705 and the Cockney School  182–​3, 408 and Hazlitt  69, 280, 446 and Italy  77, 550, 705, 714 and Keats  60, 69, 271, 280, 390, 396, 413, 414, 548, 560, 623 and Lamb  616 prosecution for libel  237, 269 and Shelley  183, 390, 501, 549, 550–​1, 705 Works Autobiography 237 ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’  669 ‘Bonaparte in France Again’  57 The Examiner  57, 69, 237, 270, 281, 501, 507, 548 The Feast of the Poets  269–​70,  272 ‘Hero and Leander’  669–​7 1 The Indicator  369, 560 The Liberal  77, 550, 552, 705 London Journal 623 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries 390 ‘My Books’  447 The Reflector  270, 616, 617 The Round Table 69 ‘The Spirit of Ancient Mythology’  669 The Story of Rimini  182, 183, 704–​5 translation of Tasso’s Aminta 549 ‘Young Poets’  548

762   Index Hunt, Lynn  219 Hunter, John  362 Hunter, John Dunn  734–​5 Manners and Customs of Several Indian Tribes 734 Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians 734 Hunter, Joseph  483 Hunter, William  362, 365 Hurd, Richard  692 Letters on Chivalry and Romance  22, 665 Hutton, James  419 Huxley, Aldous  341 hymn  20, 128, 133, 208, 213, 217, 221–​3, 337, 490, 563, 664, 678–​80, 682 Iliff, Edward Henry A Summary of the Duties of Citizenship 238 imagination  15, 17–​24, 50, 63, 111, 158, 177, 207, 209, 228–​9, 271, 276, 313–​14, 320, 324, 328, 333–​6, 343, 376, 389, 396, 406–​9, 415, 501, 532–​4, 564–​5, 569, 571, 579, 580, 584, 586, 589, 593, 594–​8, 600, 603–​5, 613–​17, 622–​3, 662–​3, 667, 685, 692, 699, 710, 713 imitation  13, 16, 23, 116, 202, 223, 378, 404, 407, 413, 555, 647, 661, 665–​8, 676–​7 Imlay, Fanny  220, 422, 423, 429 Imlay, Gilbert  421, 422, 429, 726 imperialism  52, 62, 65, 171, 322, 378, 531, 534, 565, 681. See also British Empire improvisation  87, 373, 374, 375, 381, 382–​3, 384, 386, 554, 555, 717 Inchbald, Elizabeth  194, 199, 213 British Theatre 459 Lovers’ Vows 411 Nature and Art 719 India  56, 61–​2, 344, 395, 534, 678–​81, 687, 688, 724, 725. See also East India Company Indian death-​song (literary genre)  81, 736 Indian Removal Act (1830)  735 Industrial Revolution  44, 54–​5, 60, 66, 76, 95, 196, 279, 318, 467, 485, 572, 667 Ingersoll, Charles Jared Inchiquin the Jesuit’s Letters 726 inscription  627, 634

intertextuality  145, 170, 171, 350, 389, 400, 404–​16, 634, 724, 725 Ireland  37, 40–​1, 50–​1, 52, 53–​4, 95, 96, 97, 98, 109, 129, 137–​52, 237, 239, 255, 259, 295, 355, 378, 381–​2, 384–​5, 472, 521, 652, 653, 724 Ireland, William Henry  497 Irish Rebellion (1798)  40–​1, 51, 52, 129, 146, 148–​9, 381, 426, 687 Irish Rebellion (1803)  52, 151, 687 Irish Romanticism  94, 137–​52 Irish Volunteers  40 irony  13, 63, 64, 68, 270, 304, 377, 415, 421 Romantic  71, 315, 605 Irving, Washington  195 ‘Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey’  737 The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon  737–​8 Italy  67, 70, 75, 77, 145, 380, 382, 427, 450, 501, 552, 553, 555, 638, 640, 655, 678, 681, 686, 692, 698, 703, 704–​5, 709–​15, 717, 720 Ives, Maura  466 Jackson, Heather  483 Jackson, Noel  320, 322 Jackson, Revd William  246 Observations in Answer to . . . Paine’s Age of Reason 239 Jacobite Rebellion (1745–​6)  25, 109, 110, 112–​14,  236 Jaffe, Alexandra  513 James VI of Scotland, King  525 James, Henry  410 Jameson, Anna Diary of an Ennuyée 713 Jardine, Nick  438 Jarvis, Robin  709, 734 Jefferson, Thomas  359, 724 Notes on the State of Virginia 735 Jeffrey, Francis  48, 49, 281, 282–​8, 290, 291, 364, 608, 623, 671, 684–​5, 691, 694, 708, 709, 726 Jena 696 Jenkins, Geraint  126 Jerdan, William Six Weeks in Paris 713

Index   763 Jews, see Hebraism Jewsbury, Maria Jane ‘The Age of Books’  479 Johnes, Thomas  131 Johns, Adrian  440 Johnson, James (publisher) Scots Musical Museum  116, 649, 655 Johnson, Joseph (publisher)  38, 42, 128, 226, 238, 425, 444, 624 Johnson, Samuel  13, 26, 125, 193, 319, 516, 663 Dictionary of the English Language 158, 516, 519 Journal to the Western Islands 108 Lives of the Poets  22, 395, 452, 455, 461, 479, 610, 611, 672 The Rambler  421, 662 Rasselas 20 ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’  620, 662 Johnston, James (publisher)  500 Johnston, Kenneth  150 Johnstone, Barbara  524 Johnstone, Christian Isobel  199 Jones, Edward Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards  128, 133 Jones, Frederick  141 Jones, Hannah Maria  194 Jones, Huw ‘The Life and Death of the King and Queen of France’  129 Jones, John Attempts in Verse 184 Jones, John (Jac Glan y Gors) Seren Tan Gwmmwl 129 Jones, John Gale  39 Jones, Owen (Owain Myfyr)  127 Jones, Robert  130, 709 Jones, Thomas  131 Jones, Sir William  134, 548, 559, 677–​81, 682, 689 ‘On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative’ 676 Dialogue between a Gentlemen and a Farmer 235 Discourse on the Institution of a Society  678, 688 ‘The Enchanted Fruit’  680

‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India’  678, 681 Grammar of the Persian Language 555 ‘A Hymn to Camdeo’  678 ‘A Hymn to Ganga’  579, 680 ‘A Hymn to Surya’  679, 680 ‘A Persian Song’  555 Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations  555, 575 ‘On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations’  675–​6 translation of Kalidasa’s Sacontalá  556, 680 Jones, Steven E.  291 Jones and Co. (publisher)  192 Jonson, Ben  450 Jordan, Dora  652 Jordan, Jeremiah Samuel  242 Journal of Natural Philosophy 345 journal (diary)  418–​32 Joyce, Jeremiah An Account of the Author’s Arrest 299 Juvenile Libraries  226–​8, 608 Kalidasa Sacontalá, or The Fatal Ring  556, 680 Kames, Henry Home, Lord  603 Elements of Criticism  332, 564 Essays on Antiquities 112 Essays on the Principles of Morality 313 Kant, Immanuel  207, 276, 277, 324, 564, 589, 598–​602, 614, 615, 691, 694–​9 An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ 220 Critique of Judgment  587, 590, 601, 695 Critique of Pure Reason  362, 599, 600, 695, 696 Karamzin, Nikolai  719 Karnataka 62 Kaye, John (Caius)  659 Kean, Edmund  250, 262 Kearsly, George (publisher) Collection of Novels 460 Keats, Fanny  420, 429–​30 Keats, George  423, 604, 728–​9, 734

764   Index Keats, John  63, 70, 77, 160–​1, 168, 213, 454, 490, 492, 584, 626, 708 American publication of  732, 733–​4 and ballad  115, 584 and Beddoes  171 and Burns  107, 168 and Byron  166, 168, 325, 369, 671 and the ‘camelion poet’  338, 589 and Chatterton  27 and classicism  22, 661, 666, 668, 669, 670,  671–​2 and Coleridge  68, 368, 407, 415 Continental editions of  720 and Dante  413 and ekphrasis  627, 668 and epic  166, 584 and foreign travel  708, 714–​15 and Hazlitt  69, 406, 415, 588, 589 hostile reviews of  60, 279–​80, 287, 288, 291, 325, 367, 503, 623 and Lackington’s ‘Temple of the Muses’ 489 and Leigh Hunt  60, 69, 271, 369, 413, 414, 548, 584, 651 letters of  271–​2, 327, 369, 420, 421, 423,  429–​30 and Milton  368, 369, 399, 405, 413, 414 and medicine  329, 342, 343, 356, 367–​70 and ‘Negative Capability’  210, 574, 604 and Pope  14, 17 and revision  389, 390–​1, 396, 398–​9, 396, 398–​9, 400, 401 and Shakespeare  389, 399, 405, 413, 414 and Shelley  171, 279, 369, 503, 672 and Spenser  399, 413 and theatre  262 and Tighe  149, 670 tour of Scotland  107, 429 and translation  559, 560–​1 unwritten works  505 and Wordsworth  68, 166, 207, 369, 407, 413, 415 Works ‘To Apollo’  734 ‘To Autumn’  72, 734 ‘A Dream, after reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca’  560

Endymion  27, 280, 454, 503, 666, 669–​70,  671 The Eve of St Agnes  390–​1, 623, 666 ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’  21, 165–​6, 346, 369–​70, 400, 490, 500, 571 ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’  548, 559, 584 ‘Happy is England’  714 ‘To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles’  668 ‘How many bards gild the lapses of time’ 413 ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’  368–​9, 165–​7,  666 ‘I stood tip-​toe upon a little hill’  669 Lamia  207, 334, 623, 661 ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’  115, 584 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’  69, 157, 167, 584, 627, 668 ‘Ode on Indolence’  342, 500 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’  157, 341, 343,  414–​15 ‘Ode to Psyche’  64 ‘Otho the Great’  20 ‘On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt’  584 ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’  399, 668 ‘On sitting down to King Lear once Again’ 389 ‘Sleep and Poetry’  14–​15, 269 ‘On Visiting the Tomb of Burns’  107 Keats, Tom  423, 604, 734 Keen, Paul  31 Kelley, Teresa  566 Kelly, Gary  54 Kelly, Thomas (publisher)  194 Kemble, John Philip  250, 257, 617, 708 Kent  102–​3,  105 Kentucky 734 Kermode, Frank  390 Kerry, County  147, 148 Kett, Henry  24 Khalip, Jacques  467 Kildare, County  148 Killarney  147–​8 Killiecrankie, Battle of  104 Kilmarnock  116, 174, 647

Index   765 Kinder, Thomas  497 King’s Bench  236, 237, 239, 242, 247 Kinnaird, Douglas  292 Kirke White, Henry  180–​2, 502–​4 Clifton Grove  180, 181, 502 ‘Melancholy Hours [No. VI]’  181 Remains (ed. Southey)  180, 503–​4 Klancher, Jon  280, 285, 441 Knapp, Samuel L. Lectures on American Literature 733 Knaresborough 485 Knickerbocker, or New-​York Monthly Magazine 362 Knight, Richard Payne Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus 572 Knox, Vicesimus  445 Kohler, Michael  303 Kotzebue, August von  257 Lovers’ Vows 258 The Stranger 258 Kramnick, Isaac  221 Lackington, James (bookseller) Memoirs of the First Forty-​Five Years  479, 490, 491 ‘Temple of the Muses’ (shop)  489 Ladies’ Companion 734 Ladies’ Pocket Magazine 734 Lady’s Magazine 82 Lahontan, Louis Armand, Baron de  735 Laing, John  470 Laing, Malcom  377 Lake District  96, 104, 123, 171, 259, 408, 418, 429, 640, 641 Lake School  123, 164, 270, 408, 497, 502, 581, 694 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de  L’Homme machine 316 Lamartine, Alphonse de  716 Lamb, Lady Caroline  199, 467 Lamb, Charles  69, 78, 83, 96, 160, 272, 424, 491, 651, 727 aversion to reviewing  623 and Coleridge  499, 611, 617, 619–​20

and genial criticism  265, 608, 616–​17, 619–​21,  623 and Godwin’s Juvenile Library  226, 608 and Leigh Hunt  616–​17 and Wordsworth  493, 500, 609, 619–​20, 623 Works ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’  351 Dramatic Specimens 708 ‘On Garrick and Acting’  617, 619 ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’  616,  617–​19 ‘Imperfect Sympathies’  603, 604 Mr. H—​ 608 Tales of Shakespeare 608 ‘The Two Races of Men’  481 ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’  616 ‘Witches and other Night Fears’  481 Lamb, Mary  226 Tales of Shakespeare 608 ‘The Young Mahometan’  481 Lancashire  55, 67, 519, 522, 641 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (L. E. L)  77, 80, 209 and annuals  80–​1, 168, 638–​9 and the Continent  715, 720 and Hemans  81, 168–​9 as third-​generation Romantic  161, 167–​70,  407 use of moniker ‘L. E. L.’  472–​3, 474, 475 Works ‘The Altered River’  168 The Golden Violet 385 The Improvisatrice  77, 473 Romance and Reality 473 The Troubadour 385 The Venetian Bracelet 473 Landor, Walter Savage  201, 287, 501, 708 Count Julian 714 Gebir  160, 681 Imaginary Conversations 160 Poems from the Arabic and Persian 681 Landry, Donna  176 Langan, Celeste  332 Langford, Paul  96, 98 Langhorne, John  193, 460 Larpent, Anna  241 Larpent, John (Examiner of Plays)  239, 241 laudanum, see opium

766   Index laughing gas, see nitrous oxide Lausanne  707, 708 Lavater, Johann Kaspar  532 Lawlor, Denys Shyne The Harp of Innisfail 148 Lawrence, Sir Thomas  257 Lawrence, William  329 Lawson, Alexander  723 Le Brun, Charles  163, 532 Le Globe 720 Le Noir, Elizabeth Anne  199 Le Sage, Alain-​René  193, 461 Gil Blas 361 Leadbeater, Mary ‘Ballitore’ 148 Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry 140 Poems 148 ‘The Triumph of Terror’  148 ‘View of Ballitore, Taken from Mount Bleak’ 148 Leader, Zachary  394, 396 Leask, Nigel  524, 680, 684, 688 lectures  67, 75, 374, 543–​4 on art  565, 588 Continental  556, 615, 692, 693, 696–​701 on elocution  531–​3, 538, 542–​3, 544 lecturing institutions  69, 357, 543 literary  69, 184, 323, 330, 406, 409, 479, 529, 530–​1, 533, 556, 581, 608, 609, 614–​17, 620–​3, 626, 675, 693, 696, 700, 733 medical  355, 357, 365 philosophical  312,  696–​8 political  35, 39, 40, 41, 123, 255, 485, 531, 534, 537, 543, 544, 730 Lee, Richard ‘Citizen’  39–​40 King-​Killing 40 The Happy Reign of George the Last 40 Leerssen, Joep  141 Legrand, Pierre Nicholas The Apotheosis of Nelson 567 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  276 Leicester, Earl of  505, 667 Leiden 457 Leland, Thomas  134 Longsword 13 Lemprière, John  Classical Dictionary 670

Lennox, Charlotte  193 Euphemia 736 The Female Quixote 410 Leslie, John Killarney 127 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Laocoön 626 letters  271–​2, 418–​32,  500 Lettsom, J. C.  Recollections of Rush 362 Levinson, Marjorie  414 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude  374 Levy, Michelle  495 Lewis, Matthew Gregory  456 The Castle Spectre 258 Journal of a West India Proprietor 731 The Monk  198, 214 Lhuyd, Edward  134 libel  182, 233, 235–​7, 245, 269, 298, 300, 301, 361, 441, 444, 495 Libel Act (1792), see repressive legislation The Liberal  77, 550, 552, 558, 705 libraries American 731 circulating  80, 86, 190, 194, 195, 206, 252, 446, 452, 483, 484–​7, 488, 489, 493, 497, 720 Continental 720 fictional portrayals of  487, 489, 490 mechanics’ institute  485–​6 subscription  446, 485–​7, 488 Library Company of Philadelphia  731 Lichfield 365 Limbird, John (publisher) British Novelist  192, 194 Linacre, Thomas  359 Linley, Thomas  253 Linnaeus, Carl  365, 366 Lister, Anne  487 Lister, Thomas Henry  199 Arlington 527 Granby 84 Literary Fund  30, 31, 34 Literary Gazette  168, 473, 474 Little Theatre, Haymarket  250, 252, 253, 254, 457 Liverpool  185, 194, 254 Liverpool Library (‘The Lyceum’)  485, 487, 488

Index   767 Liverpool Mechanics’ and Apprentices’ Library  485, 488 Livorno 70 Livy 533 Llangollen  130, 131 Lloyd, Charles  500 Llwyd, Richard Beaumaris Bay 132 Llyswen 132 Locke, John  19, 219, 228, 266, 315, 316, 320, 322, 328, 333, 593, 598, 599, 662, 695 Essay Concerning Human Understanding  311, 312, 317, 318 ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’ 218 Two Treatises of Government 206 Lockhart, John Gibson  291, 292 ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry’  182, 280, 357 Life of Sir Walter Scott 48 translation of F. Schlegel’s Lectures  701, 702 Lofft, Capel  179, 181 London  70, 71, 75, 77, 122, 192, 246, 360, 402, 413, 453, 651, 696 Almack’s 86 Bartholomew Fair  545 Billingsgate 486 book trade  128, 191, 226, 238, 282, 391, 425, 439, 440, 444, 450–​6, 461, 489–​90, 557, 651, 720, 731 Carnaby Market  245 Christ’s Hospital  181, 608 circulating libraries  486 coffee houses  30 College of Physicians  358 Copenhagen Fields  536, 538 Coronation of George IV  75, 86 East End  250 fashionable entertainment in  75, 493, 567 foreign visitors to  699, 702, 703, 705, 718, 719 founding of London University  69 Guy’s Hospital  329, 367 Institution of Eloquence (Thelwall’s)  532, 542 Irish community  138, 141, 142 Lambeth 252 lecturing culture  69, 75, 543, 609, 612, 614, 616, 700

literary representations of  54, 83–​4, 101–​2, 110, 131, 177–​8, 529, 534, 545, 623, 682 Moorfields 269 museums and art galleries British Museum  69, 626, 627, 638 Dulwich Picture Gallery  626 London Museum  626 Milton Gallery (Fuseli’s)  636 National Gallery  75, 626 Poet’s Gallery (Macklin’s)  636 Shakespeare Gallery (Boydell’s)  626, 636 ‘Views of Italy’ exhibition  640 New College, Hackney  123 Newgate prison  199, 202, 242, 243 Old Bond Street  640 Old Jewry  181 Pall Mall  75 political radicalism in  32, 34–​6, 39, 41, 69, 126, 237–​8, 254, 296, 303, 356, 359, 536–​8 (see also London Corresponding Society) popular song culture of  656 Royal Institution  184, 346, 543 Soho 359 Spitalfields 532 Surrey Gaol  182 taverns  248, 486 Temple of the Muses (Lackington’s)  489 theatres Adelphi (Sans Pareil Theatre)  260, 261, 726, 727 Astley’s Amphitheatre  252, 255, 261 Covent Garden  49, 141, 239, 240, 246, 250–​60, 262, 456, 457 Drury Lane (Theatre Royal)  75, 141, 239, 240, 246, 250–​60, 456, 457 Haymarket (Little Theatre)  250, 252, 253, 254, 457 Royal Coburg  261 Royalty  250, 252–​5, 257, 260 Sadler’s Wells (Aquatic Theatre)  250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 258, 259 Surrey Theatre (Royal Circus)  252, 255 Tower Hamlets  253 Tower of London  253 Trusler’s London Adviser and Guide 486 Welsh community  32, 124–​7, 135, 142

768   Index London Corresponding Society  34, 35, 39, 40, 126, 235, 238, 247, 424–​5, 536 London Magazine  79, 86, 181, 281, 351, 413, 481, 490, 560, 617, 691 London und Paris (journal)  634 Longford, County  143 Longinus  19, 268, 587 Longman & Co. (publisher)  283 Lord Chamberlain  239, 241, 252, 254, 260, 262 ‘Lord Maxwell’s Good Night’  383 Losh, James  498 Louis XIV, King  224 Louis XVI, King  296, 497 Louisville  733, 734 Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de  131 Lovejoy, Arthur O.  592 Lowell, Amy  734 Lowes, John Livingston  409 Lowlands, Scottish  108, 109, 110, 174 Lowth, Robert  665 Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews 675 Short Introduction to English Grammar 516 Lowther Hills  485 Luckhurst, Mary  466 Luddites  55, 66 Ludgvan 134 Lunar Society of Birmingham  365, 592 Lyell, Charles Principles of Geology  284, 733 Lyme Regis  64 lyric  7, 38, 82, 124, 125, 160, 167, 200, 208, 314, 412, 497, 514, 555, 594, 645, 651, 652, 673, 729 expanding definition of  645 and song  645, 646, 648, 673, 686 See also lyrical ballad; lyrical drama lyrical ballad  14, 41, 45, 53, 68, 113, 115, 123, 160, 176, 177, 184, 272, 273, 275, 277, 322, 331, 335, 347, 393, 396, 408, 478, 479, 480, 484, 492, 493, 525, 581, 608, 646, 664, 693 lyrical drama  169, 208, 716 Macaulay, Catherine  213 Macaulay, Thomas Babington  290, 322

McCann, Anthony  52 MacCannell, Dean  711 McDayter, Ghislaine  466 Macdonald, Archibald  441–​2 McFarland, Thomas  409, 570 McGann, Jerome  94, 388, 389, 392, 394, 395, 579 McIlvanney, Liam  518 McKenzie, D. F.  495 Mackenzie, Henry  193, 496 Mackintosh, James  28, 289, 698 Vindiciae Gallicae 33 Macklin, Thomas Poets’ Gallery  636 McLuhan, Marshall  373 McMillan, Dorothy  363 McNish, Robert ‘The Metempsychosis’  195 Macpherson, James  13, 25, 26, 146, 374, 377, 647, 654, 676 influence of Ossianic mode  25–​6, 106, 146, 150, 151, 644, 654, 676 Ossian controversy  25, 111, 127, 377, 647 Works Fingal  25, 377 Fragments of Ancient Poetry  25, 110–​11, 113, 453 ‘Songs of Selma’  25 Madison, James  501 Madocks, William  131 Maentwrog 130 magazines and anonymous authorship  78, 470–​5 and blurring of genres  78, 85, 86, 87, 118 distinction between ‘magazine’ and ‘Review’  59, 79, 281 and the essay form  69, 78, 82, 213, , 481, 608, 612 impact of Blackwood’s  79, 116, 280 literary reviewing in  60, 181, 280, 281,  470–​5 publication of fiction in  78, 85, 189, 192, 193, 195, 213, 460, 461, 462 publication of poetry in  81, 85–​6, 413, 484, 490 readership  78–​9,  189 Magna Carta  15 Maidstone 250

Index   769 Major, Thomas  666 Makdisi, Saree  630, 685 Malta 709 Malthus, Thomas  110, 290, 719 Essay on the Principle of Population 552 Manchester  55, 67, 194, 241, 246, 250, 350, 357, 538–​9,  543 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society  34, 592 Mangan, James Clarence  152 manifesto  266–​77, 500, 580, 606, 693, 701 Manley, Delarivier  195 Manning, Susan  119 Mansfield, Lord  205 Manzoni, Alessandro  553 Margarot, Maurice  238 Marie Antoinette  162, 497 Marivaux, Pierre de  193 Marmontel, Jean-​François  193 Marshall, P. David  466 Marshall, P. J.  676 Martin, John  131, 637 Martineau, Harriet  733 Illustrations of Political Economy 197 Society in America 731 Marx, Karl  202 The Communist Manifesto 266 Mary, Queen of Scots  116 masque  16, 67–​8, 183, 501, 565, 566 masquerade 493 mathematics  32, 276, 290, 349, 355, 365, 504 Mathew, George Felton  414 Mathew, Revd Anthony Stephen  651 Mathias, Thomas James The Pursuits of Literature  41, 437, 442, 443, 444 Matthews, Samantha  499 Maturin, Charles Robert  137 Bertram  141, 142, 348, 623 Melmoth the Wanderer 146 ‘Novel-​writing’  144 The Wild Irish Boy 141 Women, or, Pour et Contre 142 Mays, J. C. C.  395 Mazzini, Giuseppe  714, 717 mechanics’ institute  543 Medical Pneumatic Institution  327, 344

medicine  60, 204, 306, 320, 328, 329, 331, 334, 341–​54, 355–​70, 484, 504, 532, 593, 613 medievalism 26. See also minstrelsy Medwin, Thomas  714 Conversations of Lord Byron 582 Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley 555 Mee, Jon  133 Meisel, Martin  638 Mellor, Anne K.  169 melodrama  194, 202, 258, 259, 260, 261 melody  117, 555, 643, 648, 649, 650, 651, 653 Melrose Abbey  113 Menzel, Wolfgang  440, 447 Merry, Robert  37, 41, 269 mesmerism 651 Metastasio, Pietro  555 Methodism  132, 133, 149, 490, 538, 541, 542 metrical romance, see romance Metternich, Klemens von  61, 735 Mexico  195, 735 Mickiewicz, Adam  717 Milbanke, Annabella  389, 467 Mill, James ‘Periodical Literature’  79 millenarianism  31, 38, 121, 530, 541 Milton, John  16, 22, 26, 42, 45, 53–​4, 101–​5, 169, 175, 236, 268, 273, 330, 369, 399, 404–​8, 413, 415, 450–​1, 506, 533, 550, 564–​5, 569, 635–​6, 672, 679, 736 Comus 393 Paradise Lost  131, 276, 353, 368, 395, 409, 414, 499–​500, 549, 630, 662 ‘On Shakespeare’  482 Minerva Press  190, 488 minstrelsy  24, 26, 45, 48, 52, 82, 92, 109, 111, 113–​17, 376–​86, 453, 454, 496, 646, 647. See also bard; scald Mississippi  634, 723 Missolonghi 70 Mitchell, Samuel  344 Mitchell, W. J. T  628, 630 Mitford, Mary Russell  82–​3, 87, 143, 170, 195, 199, 670 Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery 83 mock-​epic, see epic

770   Index Mole, Tom  77, 169, 318 Moler, Kenneth  410 Moncrieff, W. S. Tom and Jerry 261 Monmouthshire 124 Mont Blanc  571, 588, 716 Montagu, Elizabeth  125, 175, 176 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley  314 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat  100, 109, 753 Lettres Persanes 91 Montgomery, James  185, 646, 720 Lectures on Poetry and General Literature 184 The West Indies 731 Montgomeryshire 123 Monthly Magazine  82, 358, 484, 487, 488, 522 Monthly Review  177, 181, 183, 197, 281, 282, 325, 359, 502, 503, 507, 521, 734 Monti, Vincenzo  553 Moody, Jane  466 Moody, John  245 Moore, John  191, 194, 199 Moore, Thomas and American copyright law  733 and Catholic Emancipation  146–​7, 152 and Continental Europe  151–​2, 708, 717, 718, 720 contributions to annuals  80, 638 critical reception of  150–​1, 281, 286, 656, 689 and Dublin  137, 384 friendship with Byron  45, 56, 140, 268, 430, 535, 686 and Irish nationalism  40, 52, 140, 151–​2, 384, 653, 655 as literary reviewer  146–​7, 289 and minstrelsy  374, 384, 385, 654 and national song  40, 151, 384–​5, 651, 653–​4,  655 and North American travel  384, 726 and Orientalism  56–​7, 62, 146, 199, 385,  686–​8 and painting  637 and Robert Emmet  151, 653 as translator  149, 384 and Union  140, 151

Works Corruption and Intolerance 152 Epistles, Odes and Other Poems 286, 384, 726 ‘Erin! The Tear and the Smile in Your Eyes’ 151 ‘The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls’ 151 Irish Melodies  40, 52, 149, 151–​2, 384–​6, 654, 655, 686, 720 Lalla Rookh  57, 62, 146, 199, 385, 686–​7,  720 ‘Let Erin Remember’  151 Letters and Journals of Lord Byron 430 ‘To the Lord Viscount Forbes’  726 Memoirs of Captain Rock  140, 152 ‘The Minstrel Boy’  385 National Airs 385 ‘Oh! Breathe not his name’  52, 151 Odes of Anacreon 179 Poetical Works of Thomas Little 149 ‘Prefatory Letter on Music’  151 Sacred Songs 385 ‘To Thomas Hume’  726 Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion 152 moral tale  195, 218, 226 Morat, Battle of  716 More, Hannah  122, 125, 126, 161 Cheap Repository Tracts  35, 176, 196, 480, 719, 731 ‘A Prefatory Letter to Mrs. Montagu’  175 ‘Sensibility: A Poetical Epistle’  210 Slavery: A Poem 209 The Sorrows of Yamba 731 More, Sir Thomas  258 Morgan, George Cadogan  123, 124, 126 Morgan, Lady, see Sydney Owenson Morgan, Monique  322 Morganwg, Iolo, see Williams, Edward Morier, James Justinian  199, 289 The Adventures of Hajji Baba 288 Morning Chronicle  35, 439, 452, 507, 534, 621, 699, 729 Morning Post  41, 49, 439, 466

Index   771 Morris, Lewis  127 Morris, Richard  127 Morris, William  127 Morrison, Robert  352 Mortensen, Peter  694 Moschus 551 Moscow  50, 428, 429, 720 Mosher, Fredric J.  470 Mouhy, Charles de Fieux  193 Mount Tambora  62 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  72 Mudie, Robert Glenfergus 521 Mugglestone, Lynda  516 Muir, Thomas  165 Mulready, William  266 Murray, John (publisher)  183, 267, 268, 269, 282, 390, 391, 392, 496, 501, 505, 558, 673, 699 Murray, John Archibald  282 Murray, Lindley  516 museum  75, 362, 625, 626, 627, 638, 669 music  21, 49, 80, 114, 116, 128, 133, 142, 151, 171, 200, 239, 242, 251, 261, 290, 331, 374, 380, 385, 386, 415, 465, 543, 544, 555, 569, 631, 643–​56, 686, 687 mutiny, naval  40, 296 myth  26, 28, 77, 110, 111, 113, 127, 160, 165–​6, 228, 236, 279, 294, 562, 563–​4, 566, 567, 568, 572–​6, 631, 654, 664, 669, 670, 672, 678, 679, 680, 683, 697 Myvyrian Archaiology 127 Naples 63 Napoleon, see Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleonic Wars  46–​7, 49–​50, 55, 66, 76, 194, 254, 262, 281, 656, 708 Nashoba 731 Natchez  723, 724 Nathan, Isaac  651, 686 National Gallery  75, 626 national tale  53–​4, 109, 138, 145, 146, 147, 149, 199, 201, 215, 521 national song, see song nationalism  378, 381, 384, 452, 691, 701, 713, 714

nature, as a literary topic  13–​15, 18–​19, 21–​3, 25, 30, 63, 66, 82–​3, 106–​7, 160–​1, 167, 174, 186, 195, 207, 211–​12, 217, 221–​2, 229, 267, 277, 321, 337, 362, 368, 393, 397, 479, 491, 504, 525, 530, 532, 569, 571, 573, 579–​83, 585, 588, 596–​7, 600, 614–​15, 635, 643, 646, 663, 676, 678, 719, 724, 737 753 Neal, John  733 Nelson, Horatio  48, 49, 565, 567–​8, 573, 575 Nelson’s Glory 49 neoclassicism  13, 14, 16, 671, 676 Nerval, Gérard de  717 Nether Stowey  123, 425, 479 New College, Hackney  123 New England  195 New Harmony  734 New Lanark  131 New Monthly Magazine  79, 81, 138, 608, 727 New Times 623 New York  431, 432, 734 New Zealand  724, 728 Newbery, John (publisher)  226 Newcastle  116, 518 Newcastle-​under-​Lyme  422 Newgate prison  199, 202, 242, 243 Newlyn, Lucy  270, 279, 288, 405 Newman, Jon  47 Newman, Lance  733 Newman, Steve  646 News-​Letter (Belfast)  259 newspaper  31, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 48, 78, 129, 141, 181, 188, 189, 196, 206, 238, 247, 251, 256, 259, 260, 261, 294, 361, 439, 465, 466, 480, 497, 713, 720 Newspaper Publications Act (1798), see repressive legislation Newport  240, 242 Newstead Abbey  105, 737 Newton, Isaac  349, 570, 592, 598 Newton, Judith  285, 287 Newton, Richard  631 Newtown 131 Nicholson, George (publisher) ‘Literary Miscellany’  196 Nicholson, William  345 nitrous oxide  122, 330, 341, 342–​9, 351, 352, 353

772   Index Nitsch, Friedrich  696 Nolleken, Joseph  666 Normanby, Constantine Phipps, 1st Marquess of  199 Norse  26, 81 North, Marcy  467 North British Review  406, 698 Northampton Lunatic Asylum  413 Northamptonshire  82, 522 Northern Star 40 Northumberland, Duke of  667 Norwich  250, 254, 290, 426, 485, 491 Norwich Public Library  485 notebook  131, 217, 218, 321, 323, 344, 346, 347, 348, 367, 368, 392, 400, 402, 403, 413, 429, 430, 500, 505, 552, 554 Nottingham  180, 485, 502 Nottinghamshire  55, 77 novels advertising of  190–​2, 197, 392, 484 and anonymous publication  77, 85, 468, 469, 476 anti-​Jacobin  42, 199, 200 ‘autobiografiction’ 315 and circulating /​subscription libraries  190, 194,  487–​9 Continental  25, 145, 380–​3, 555, 698–​9, 702, 709 courtship  144, 211 critical discourse about  42, 144, 197, 212, 334, 462 cross-​reference to magazines  85–​6, 188 didactic  98, 113, 144, 196, 198 of education  199 epistolary  86, 200, 300, 313, 314 and free indirect discourse  213 and generic hybridity  144 Gothic  13, 57, 65, 83, 199, 200, 202, 214, 410, 484, 487, 670 historical  45–​6, 54, 85–​7, 112–​13, 143–​4, 146, 147, 525, 717 and improvisation  373, 382 intertextuality in  409–​11 Irish national tale  53–​4, 109, 138, 145–​7, 149 Jacobin  36, 42, 99, 200 of manners  83, 109, 197, 197 Newgate  199, 202 picaresque  189, 193, 194, 200, 361, 688

quasi-​  85,  199 publishers’ collections  191–​4, 212, 460–​2 Quixotic  410, 411 reading of  114, 480, 483, 487–​8, 491 realist 606 satirical  30, 152, 193–​4, 196, 199 sentimental  131, 197, 198, 410, 411 serialization of  78, 87, 189, 190–​3, 460, 462 silver-​fork  83–​4,  199 transatlantic 86 use of dialect in  54, 514, 521, 523, 526 Welsh-​based  132 Novelist’s Library, see Ballantyne, James Novelist’s Magazine, see Harrison, John Novello, Vincent  651 nursery rhyme  226 O’Connell, Daniel  137 ode  18, 23, 41, 50, 64, 69, 70, 72, 96, 128, 157, 167, 207–​8, 335, 337, 341–​3, 393, 401–​3, 408, 414–​15, 500, 507, 551–​3, 571, 581–​4, 627, 645, 668, 679, 710, 717, 726, 734 Offa’s Dyke  130 Offer, Avner  419, 420 Ogilvie, John Britannia 53 Ohio 735 Old Price riots  259–​60 Ong, Walter  375, 480, 530 Onorato, Richard  713 opera  72, 75, 137, 142, 251, 252, 261, 352, 439, 457, 458, 459, 464, 486, 644 Opie, Amelia  195, 424, 733 ‘The Black Man’s Lament’  370, 730 Simple Tales 719 ‘Stanzas written under Aeolus’ Harp’  509, 570 opium  27, 61–​2, 118, 132, 324, 341–​2, 345–​6, 348, 349–​54, 481, 599 orality  373–​86, 529, 530, 645 oratory  529–​45. See also rhetoric organic form  160, 574, 605, 615, 620, 622, 700 organicism  14, 18, 329, 337, 365, 390, 569, 573, 579, 605, 610, 617 Orientalism  20, 56, 57, 146, 199, 201, 385, 460, 461, 555, 556, 675–​89

Index   773 originality  17, 18, 19, 21, 86, 87, 96, 143, 169, 174, 196, 403–​7, 414, 415, 508, 548, 579, 586, 604, 664, 665, 667, 679 Orr, James  147, 165 ‘Song Composed on the Banks of Newfoundland’ 147 Ossian, see Macpherson, James ottava rima  412, 559 Ottawa 573 Ottoman Empire  70, 71 Otway, Thomas  369 Venice Preserv’d 255 Ovid 365 Owen, Robert  131, 735 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan)  45, 143, 199, 287, 385, 715 attitudes to Union  146, 147, 381–​2 and Catholic Emancipation  152 and Continental Europe  382, 708 and Dublin  137 as Glorvina  374 and improvisation  382 and minstrelsy  381, 382 and Orientalism  680, 681 and Ossian  382 theatrical background  145 Works Absenteeism 138 Book of the Boudoir 152 Florence Macarthy 143 Lay of an irish Harp 381 The Missionary  57, 680 The Novice of St. Dominick  145, 382 The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys 138 Patriotic Sketches of Ireland 146 St Clair, or, The Heiress of Desmond 145 The Wild Irish Girl  53, 145, 146, 147, 380–​2 Woman, or, Ida of Athens 145 Oxford University  69, 122, 183, 272, 351, 358, 462, 662, 730 Oxfordshire  134, 532, 666 Paestum  63, 666 Paine, Thomas  123, 124, 129, 196, 241, 245, 444, 538, 712 and the American Revolution  359–​60

and Burke  28, 593, 594 and popular radicalism  129, 130, 196, 245, 246, 247, 442–​3 trial (in absentia)  36, 239, 242, 441–​3 Works The Age of Reason  238, 247 Common Sense 33 Letter Addressed to the Addressers 239, 242, 245 Rights of Man  33–​4, 239, 242, 245, 425, 441–​2,  497 ‘The Theological Works’  239, 246 painting  83, 127, 131, 163, 247, 257, 335, 367, 567, 568, 572, 589, 609, 619, 620, 626, 627, 628, 630, 631, 635–​40, 665, 687, 710, 711 palimpsest 402 Palmer, John (actor)  250–​5, 257, 258, 260, 261, 263 Palmer, John (postal innovator)  422 Palmer, Thomas  225 Palmer, William  253 Palmerstone, Lord  710 Paltock, Robert  193 pamphlet  33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 50, 82, 129, 130, 139, 141, 148, 235, 238, 239, 243, 260, 267, 359, 425, 426, 625 distribution  245–​6, 248, 442, 443, 480, 495, 497 fiction  189, 190, 191, 192, 196, 197, 200, 201, 490 wars  37, 133, 141, 268, 535 (see also French Revolution, British responses to) panegyric  16, 610 panorama  75, 82, 258, 259, 625, 641, 715 Panoramic Miscellany 83 Pantisocracy  123, 126, 131, 499, 729, 730 pantomime  75, 239, 258, 293 paper-​making  79, 189, 191, 192, 439, 443, 455, 495, 732 Paracelsus 343 paratext  86, 141, 375, 376, 377, 380, 455, 467, 645. See also annotation; preface Paris  37, 41, 60, 123, 124, 173, 318, 497, 634, 708, 709, 712, 713, 719, 720, 721, 725, 727, 732 Paris, Treaty of  173

774   Index Park, Mungo  719 Park, Thomas  24 Parker, Mark  78 Parnell, William Enquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents  140, 141 parody  34, 40, 42, 75, 86, 93, 140–​1, 146, 151, 214, 268, 271, 301–​2, 304, 409–​10, 487, 537, 621 Parrish, Stephen  394, 396 Parry, John  134 The Beauties of Caledonia 655 Pars, William  710 Parsons, Eliza  214 Partridge, Eric  717 pastiche  171, 673, 687 pastoral  17, 38, 82, 99, 124–​5, 148, 161, 174, 499, 506, 661, 729 anti-​  178 and dialect poetry  514, 524, 525 elegy 279 fiction  194, 210 lyric 652 song 652 pathetic  331, 533 Pattisson, William  426 Paulin, Tom  407, 415 Payne, John Howard  734 Peacock, Thomas Love  199, 424, 486 and Wales  130 Works Four Ages of Poetry  264, 265–​6, 267, 270, 279, 602, 603, 729 Melincourt 731 Nightmare Abbey 602 Pearson, Jacqueline  488 peasant poet  82, 174, 378, 411 Peninsular War  42, 46, 48, 50, 55, 96, 683, 685 Pennant, Thomas  38, 133 Tour in Wales 132 Pennsylvania  121, 122, 729, 731 Penzance 95 Percy, Thomas  25, 43, 127, 665 Anthology of Norse Verse 26 Collection of ballads  26 Edition of the Edda 26

‘Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels’  114, 376, 380 Five Pieces of Runic Poetry 26 Hermit of Warkworth  26, 376 Northern Antiquities 26 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry  13, 26, 376, 453, 496, 645 Persian  193, 548, 555, 572, 672, 675, 676, 677, 681, 688 Peterloo Massacre  55, 67, 68, 70, 72, 76, 235, 237, 241, 246, 247, 501, 539, 565 Pforzheimer, Carl H.  430–​1 Pharmacy Act (1868)  344 Philadelphia  359, 360, 362, 731, 733, 734 Philhellenism  672, 673, 674 philosophical poem  367, 605 philosophy  60, 109, 160, 275, 276, 331, 369, 426, 709 empiricism  13, 328, 593, 596–​8, 599, 600, 604, 695 German transcendental idealism  599–​601,  602 Kantian  207, 276, 277, 324, 562–​3, 587, 589, 592, 598–​602, 614–​15, 691, 694,  695–​9 of language  266, 558 literature and  551, 592–​606, 691–​705 materialism  276, 312, 316, 317, 323, 324, 328, 330, 543, 595, 596, 598, 615 metaphysics  273, 276, 323, 486, 593, 595, 598, 599, 602, 604, 696 moral  108, 336, 486, 603 natural  345, 355, 592, 595 (see also science) Neo-​Platonism  18,  602 philosophy of mind  315, 325, 331 Platonism  622, 679 political  426, 719 of rhetoric  517 scepticism  313, 323, 331, 593, 600, 602 Scottish common-​sense  593, 602, 603, 604 shifting definition of  543 See also aesthetics; associationism Phreas, Jon  359 Pichot, Amédée  720 Pictet, Charles  719 Pictet, Marc-​Auguste  719

Index   775 picturesque  48, 114, 147, 148, 199, 367, 640, 698, 710, 711, 713, 716 Pigott, Charles The Jockey Club 245 A Political Dictionary  238, 243 Pilkington, Mary The Subterranean Cavern 484 Pindar 679 Pindar, Peter, see Wolcot, John  35 Pinkerton, John (Robert Heron) Ancient Scottish Poetry 114 Letters of Literature 444 Piozzi, Hester Thrale  388 Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson 710 Piper, Andrew  376, 440, 447 piracy (publishing)  83, 350, 492, 718, 720, 731, 732 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista  481, 666, 667 Pitt, William  35, 37, 40, 48, 225, 236, 534, 568 Pittock, Murray  94, 101, 126 Pittsburgh 524 Pixérécourt, Gilbert de Coelina 258 Place, Francis  481, 482 plagiarism  404, 409, 731 Plato  18, 273, 374, 552, 622, 679 Ion 554, 586 Phaedo 551 The Symposium 552 Playfair, John  290 pleasure garden  252, 439, 645, 652 Plumb, J. H.  439 Plymouth  242, 243, 244 Pocock, Edward  676 Poe, Edgar Allan  87 Poet Laureate  24, 53, 171, 179, 318, 506–​8 poetry, see individual genre entries ‘The Polemics’ (Spencean debating society) 248 Polidori, John  62, 715 Political Register, see Cobbett, William Pollok, Robert  201 Polwhele, Richard The Pneumatic Revellers 353 Pomfret, John Poems 490

Pompeii 63 Ponsonby, Sarah  131 Poole, Thomas  221, 330, 419, 423, 424, 598, 599 Pope, Alexander  25, 71, 107, 164, 228, 605, 635 critical controversy over  14–​15, 17, 23, 267–​70, 610–​11,  698 Works The Dunciad  27, 269, 270 ‘Eloise and Abelard’  16, 200 Essay on Criticism  404, 582, 662 Essay on Man  78, 108 ‘Lately found in an old Manuscript’  16 ‘Preface’ to Shakespeare  16, 22 The Rape of the Lock  20, 365 ‘The Temple of Liberty’  16 Porden, Eleanor Anne  201 Port Folio 723 Porteous Riots  304–​5 Porter, Anna  45 Porter, Jane  54 The Scottish Chiefs 53 Thaddeus of Warsaw 53 Porthmadog 130 Portsmouth 488 Portugal  50, 290, 655, 713 postal system  422–​3 Postle, Martin  466 pottery 667 Poussin, Nicolas  617 Powys 131 practical criticism  608–​22 Pratt, Lynda  57 preface  272–​4. See also paratext Pre-​Raphaelites  344 Preromanticism  14, 260 Presbyterianism  34, 147, 365, 541 Prevesa 91 Prévost, Abbé Antoine François  200 Price, Richard  38, 126, 208 Discourse of the Love of our Country 32, 123, 124 Priestley, Joseph  32, 35, 121, 128, 240, 242, 328, 344, 353, 517, 599, 695, 729 An Appeal to the Public 241 Lectures on Oratory and Criticism  530, 542 The Proper Objects of Education  220–​1,  224 The Trials of the Birmingham Rioters 241

776   Index Priestman, Martin  367 primitivism  14, 22, 26, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 198, 201, 229, 265, 327, 380, 520, 581, 582, 649, 663–​4, 665, 669, 681, 686, 735, 737 Prince Regent  70, 74, 182, 237, 246, 269, 687 printers  126, 184, 191, 245, 451, 461, 471 Prior, Matthew  450 prison  40, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 246, 255, 260, 269, 298, 302, 306, 527, 545, 640, 723 Proclamation Society  235 progress poem  710, 717 prophecy  176, 243, 558, 630, 702, 705 Protestantism  15, 16, 31, 32, 51, 137, 140, 142, 149, 152. See also Anglicanism; Baptists; Dissent; Methodism; Presbyterianism; Quakerism; Unitarianism Prout, Samuel  715 Prussia  46, 47, 701 pseudonymity  77, 226, 465, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472, 474, 476 psychology  107, 320, 323, 329, 375, 599, 662, 692 Public Entertainments Act (1752)  251, 252, 253, 261 public house, see tavern publishers  74, 80, 85, 86, 87, 95, 173, 174, 178, 179, 184, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196, 202, 215, 283, 393, 439, 441, 446, 452, 454, 460, 471, 472, 492, 496, 501, 502, 645, 672, 699, 713 American  732, 733 Continental  552, 720 London  191, 226, 238, 282, 391, 425, 439, 440, 444, 450, 453, 455, 461, 490, 557, 731 music  80, 647, 652 provincial  53, 113, 116, 123, 498, 500 radical  35, 83, 237, 238, 246, 492 Scottish  116, 282, 451, 453, 455, 733 See also book trade; booksellers; printers Puchner, Martin  266 Pughe, William Owen  130 Heroic Elegies of Llywarç Hen 127 Pulci, Luigi Il Morgante 558

Pushkin, Alexander  717 ‘Egyptian Nights’  384 Pye, Henry James  53, 507 Quakerism  290, 362, 541, 542, 677 Quarterly Review  54, 60, 116, 182, 270, 280, 281, 282, 283, 287, 290, 454, 503, 704, 726, 734 Quillin, Jessica  650 Quintilian  The Orator’s Education 332 Radcliffe, Ann  145, 194, 197, 198, 199, 209, 214, 306, 411, 488, 670, 708, 719 The Italian 215 The Mysteries of Udolpho  215, 334, 400, 410 Radcliffe Observatory  666 Ramsay, Allan  116, 117, 518, 520, 522, 524 The Ever-​Green 115 The Tea-​Table Miscellany 115 Rawson, Claude  27 Raymond, Joad  19 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François  735 readers  478–​93. See also book clubs; book societies; booksellers; reading public reading public  59, 78, 91, 279, 285, 286, 413, 441, 444, 446, 495, 498, 553, 646 Reed, Henry  733 Reeve, Clara  681 Fatherless Fanny 194 The Progress of Romance 197 Reeves, John  35, 42 Reform Act (1832)  55, 82, 95, 173, 183, 185, 191, 501 reform, political  32–​4, 36–​7, 39–​42, 55, 66–​7, 82, 95, 123, 139, 158, 165, 173, 183–​5, 191, 211, 295, 302–​4, 306, 424–​6, 437, 500–​1, 534–​5, 644, 698 Reformation 15 Regency  62, 64, 70, 72, 83, 84, 166, 182, 247, 261, 399, 538, 543, 687 Reid, Thomas  602, 603 Inquiry into the Human Mind  593, 604 Reiman, Donald H.  395, 403

Index   777 Religious Tract Society  196 remediation  373, 375, 380, 383, 625, 649 Renaissance  63, 171, 264, 358, 405, 565, 661, 664, 670 repressive legislation Aliens Act (1793)  235 Combination Acts (1799, 1800)  239 Corresponding Societies Act (1799)  235 ‘Gagging Acts’ (1795), see Seditious Meetings Acts (1795); Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act (1795) Libel Act (1792)  235, 298 Newspaper Publications Act (1798)  235 Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Writings and Publications (1792)  35, 242, 244 Seditious Meetings Act (1795)  40, 235 Seditious Meetings Act (1817)  235 Six Acts (1819)  67, 183, 235 Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act (1795)  40, 235 Unlawful Oaths Act (1797)  235 republic of letters  31, 116, 280, 284 The Republican, see Carlile, Richard republicanism  17, 19, 30, 39, 41, 52, 61, 150, 185, 237, 245, 247, 537, 594, 663, 666, 681, 711, 712, 714, 716 Restoration  457, 663 Revelation, Book of  571 reverie  332, 342, 346, 352, 695 Revett, Charles  666 Reviews distinction between ‘Review’ and ‘magazine’  60, 79, 281 domination of Edinburgh and Quarterly  281–​3 influence of Kant’s Critiques on  199, 691 links with book publishers  80, 283 payment of contributors  283–​4 political character of  60, 264, 281–​3 and public opinion  78, 182, 281, 284 quarrels over American policy  734 reviewing of poetry  60, 279, 282, 283, 285–​6, 288, 291, 325, 502–​3, 522, 620, 622, 683 revision  274, 322, 382, 388–​403, 419, 498, 507, 583

Revolution debate, see French Revolution, British writing about Revolutionary Wars  46, 161, 163 Revue britannique 720 Revue des deux mondes 720 Reynolds, Fredric Mansel The Keepsake for 1829  80, 81, 639 Reynolds, John Hamilton  334, 367, 369, 399, 714 Reynolds, Joshua  466 rhetoric  319, 332, 376 classical  60, 196, 322, 530–​1, 533 critiques of  286, 531 Enlightenment  517, 530 journalistic  286, 287, 291 legal  296, 303 and literature  101, 148, 273, 274, 277, 304, 479, 529, 533, 544, 563, 571, 641 political  67, 123, 534–​40, 593, 594, 663 religious  540–​2 See also elocution; oratory Rhode Island  731 rhyme  50, 81, 92, 108, 175, 186, 268, 335, 391, 398, 401, 412, 413, 472, 558, 559, 584, 646, 736 Rhymes without Reason, with Reasons for Rhyming 472 Rhys, Morgan John  37, 121, 123, 124, 129, 135 Richards, George  24 Richards, I. A.  622 Richardson, Alan  208, 221, 229, 339, 356, 480 Richardson, Samuel  193, 195, 197, 198, 200, 313, 315, 461, 491 Clarissa  314, 410 Sir Charles Grandison 411 Richmond, Legh Annals of the Poor 198 Rickman, John  53 Ricks, Christopher  399 riots  39, 233, 240–​2, 259–​60, 261, 269, 304 Ripon Cathedral  666 Risorgimento  705, 713, 714 Ritson, Joseph  116, 376 Ancient English Metrical Romances 52 ‘Historical Essay on . . . National Song’  645, 646, 653, 655 Select Collection of English Songs  453, 460, 645, 652

778   Index Rivers, David Observations on the . . . Protestant Dissenters 497 Robertson, William  602, 603 History of America 559 Robespierre, Maximilien  595, 702 Robinson, Charles  391 Robinson, Henry Crabb  426, 598, 614, 616, 622, 694, 695–​705, 708, 714 diary  608, 609, 638, 692, 699 ‘Letters on the Philosophy of Kant’  696 ‘On the German Aesthetick or Philosophy of Taste’  696, 697–​8,  699 Robinson, Jeffrey  554, 649 Robinson, Mary  41, 466, 652 The Natural Daughter 489 ‘The Negro Girl’  730 Robinson, Robert  427 Robison, John Proofs of a Conspiracy 31 Roche, Regina Maria  214 The Children of the Abbey 146 Trecothick Bower 488 Rodenburg, Patsy  531 Roe, Nicholas  342, 343, 368, 489 Rogers, Samuel  45, 179, 268, 708, 720 Italy  638, 715 Roland, Madame  712 Rollright stone circle  134 romance  15, 48, 146, 298, 368, 379, 597, 737 allegorical  49, 670 and ballad  114, 376 critical accounts of  22, 197, 376, 665 Gothic  57, 65, 83, 200, 202, 484 historical  86, 113, 114, 376 and Ireland  381 metrical  45, 52, 53, 113, 114, 195, 378, 666 Oriental  49, 77, 199, 555, 681–​2, 684, 686–​8 prose sub-​genres of  189, 194, 195, 198, 199, 202, 381, 473, 488 quest  573, 713 and Scotland  106, 112, 114, 376 See also minstrelsy; novel romantic (literary term)  121, 157, 162, 188, 197, 579, 580, 605, 606, 691–​4, 699, 700 and classical  691–​3

Rome  15, 63, 70, 93, 228, 381, 663, 666, 703, 708, 714, 716 Romney, George  466 Room, Adrian  474 Roper, Derek  290 Rorem, Ned  650 Roscoe, Thomas  698 Landscape Annuals 715 Roscoe, William  719 Rose, Jonathan  492 Ross 130 Ross, Marlon  378, 379 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  369 Rounce, Adam  22 Rousseau, George  328, 329 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques  31, 62, 181, 200, 228, 273, 311, 325, 361, 594, 595, 603, 651, 653, 702, 710, 735 Confessions  319–​20 Dictionnaire de musique 650 Émile  218, 219 Essay on the Origin of Languages  373–​4,  375 Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise 703 Reveries of a Solitary Walker 695 Rowan, Archibald Hamilton  423 Rowe, Nicholas The Fair Penitent 240 Rowland, Ann Wierda  380 Rowlands, Henry  134 Rowlandson, Thomas  131, 631, 633 Roxburghe Club  446 Royal Academy  565, 589, 626, 628, 633, 635, 637 Royal Circus (Surrey Theatre)  252, 255 Royal Coburg Theatre  261 Royal Institution (London)  184, 346, 543 Royal Institution (Manchester)  543 Royal Literary Fund, see Literary Fund Royal Navy  61 Royal Pavilion, Brighton  687 Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Writings and Publications (1792), see repressive legislation Royalty Theatre  250, 252–5, 257, 260

Index   779 Rush, Benjamin  356, 359–​62 Account of the . . . Yellow Fever  360, 362 Eulogium on William Cullen 360 ‘Travels through Life’  361 Rush, James Hamlet, A Dramatic Prelude 362 Rush, Julia Stockton  360 Ruskin, John Praeterita 715 Russell, Thomas  24 Russia  290, 412, 429, 719, 720 Ruthin 131 Ryley, Samuel William The Itinerant 320 Sachs, Jonathan  666 Sadler’s Wells Theatre  250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 258, 259 Said, Edward  56, 358 St Bartholomew’s Hospital  358 St Clair, William  483, 484, 491, 492, 496, 720, 732 St George’s Hospital  362 St Pierre, Bernadin de Paul and Virginia 493 Sainte-​Beuve, Charles Augustin Vie . . . de Josephe Delorme 720 Salisbury Plain  134, 502 salon  125, 137, 374, 712, 719 Salzmann, Christian Elements of Morality 226 Samwell, David (Dafydd Ddu Feddyg) The Padouca Hunt 128 Sans Pareil Theatre, see London theatres Sanskrit  548, 556, 677, 678, 679, 680 Sappho  380, 382, 673 satire  295, 504, 610, 709, 723 in drama  165, 167, 170–​1, 362, 500, 543 in fiction  54, 85, 130, 152, 193, 194, 196, 199, 245, 276, 314, 375, 410, 411, 487, 488, 593, 602, 713 in pamphlets  245, 301 in periodicals  35, 83, 291–​2 in poetry  13, 17, 25, 27, 35, 41, 71, 72, 83, 91, 93, 108, 141, 152, 164, 222, 267–​9, 270, 291, 292, 367, 472, 529, 545, 685, 687, 704–​5,  708

visual (see caricature) See also parody satirical print, see caricature scald 81 scepticism  164, 680, 707, 716 legal  295, 296, 297, 299, 303–​6 philosophical  313, 323, 331, 593, 600, 602 Schama, Simon  710 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph  564, 605, 696, 697 System of Transcendental Idealism  601–​2,  604 Schiller, Friedrich  549 On the Aesthetic Education of Man 698 On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry 530 Schlegel, August Wilhelm  564, 692, 694, 695, 696, 701, 702, 704, 705 Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature  615, 692, 693, 699–​700 Schlegel, Friedrich  564, 694, 695, 696, 705 Athenaeum Fragments  606, 693 Critical Fragments  315, 605 Dialogue on Poetry 267 Lectures on the History of Literature  692–​3, 701, 702 Schleiermacher, Friedrich ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’  556, 558 Schneider, Elisabeth  342 Schoenfield, Mark  78, 281 schools  123, 124, 176, 181, 228, 357, 362, 436, 519, 532, 542, 608, 662, 670. See also education Schwab, Raymond  678 science  30, 60, 69, 79, 85, 122, 220, 271, 276, 294, 306, 346, 349, 350, 355, 365, 444, 487, 532, 592, 593, 596, 598, 601, 719 history of term  592 lectures on  439, 542, 543 in periodicals  60, 288, 289, 290 and poetry  274–​5, 276, 330, 331, 332, 335, 337, 339, 346, 367, 504, 593, 594, 598 and religion  614 ‘science of happiness’  353 ‘science of man’  106, 319, 320–​1, 328–​9 ‘science of mind’  328–​30, 339, 356 and women  146, 363

780   Index Scotland  23, 25–​7, 37, 41, 48, 50–​4, 75, 85–​6, 92–​3, 94–​6, 98–​101, 104, 106–​19, 131–​2, 145, 147, 174, 195, 212, 219, 225, 237–​8, 280, 282, 284, 286, 295, 304–​6, 315, 329, 332, 355–​8, 362, 375–​8, 380, 382, 425, 444, 450–​5, 496, 498, 514, 517–​22, 524–​6, 602–​3, 644, 647, 652–​5, 662, 666, 701, 723 Scots language, see dialect Scott, John ‘On . . . Mr. Jones’s Elegant Translations’  677 ‘Serim; or the Artificial Famine’  677, 679 Scott, Walter  160, 199, 505 adaptations of  261 American piracies of  732, 733 anonymity and pseudonymity  77–​8, 469,  474–​5 as ballad editor  115, 116, 376, 378–​9, 647, 655 and Byron  45, 719 and celebrity  54, 77, 78, 114, 116, 382 contributions to annuals  80 and Cooper  726 and coronation of George IV  75 critical reception of  45, 46, 286, 290 and Edgeworth  45–​6 European reception  45, 54, 717, 718, 719, 720 and forgery  85–​6 and Hazlitt  46 invention of historical novel  45, 54, 114 and Irving  737 his knighthood  179 Journal 725 and metafiction  85 and minstrelsy  11, 113, 116, 374, 378–​9, 382, 383, 385, 453, 454 and Napoleon  49 and publishers  116, 193, 198 and the Quarterly Review  270, 282, 283, 289 representation of dialect  513, 520 success of Waverley novels  54, 114, 193 and tourism  108, 708, 709 and trial literature  304–​6 and war literature  48–​9 Works The Antiquary  112, 113 Count Robert of Paris 725 English Minstrelsy 454

Guy Mannering 143 The Heart of Midlothian  304–​7 Ivanhoe  113–​14, 688, 689 The Lady of the Lake  45, 48 The Lay of the Last Minstrel  45, 48, 92, 113, 378 Life of Napoleon Bonaparte 46 Marmion 48 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border  52–​3, 111, 115, 378, 453, 496, 647 Peveril of the Peak 85 Quentin Durward 85 Redgauntlet 85 Rob Roy  109, 112 St. Ronan’s Well 84 Tales of my Landlord 272 The Talisman 689 ‘Voyage in the Lighthouse Yacht’  108 Waverley  45, 54, 77, 85, 109, 113–​14, 116, 146, 193, 449, 469, 472, 475, 476, 603, 638 Scottish Enlightenment  25, 26, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 284, 355, 538, 602–​3, 605, 606, 644 Scottish Romanticism  93, 106–​19 Scrivener, Michael  501 sculpture  567, 627, 665, 666, 667, 668 Secord, James  284 sedition  36, 37, 132, 225, 233–​48, 295, 298, 300, 441, 444, 445, 495, 537, 538 Seditious Meetings Act (1795), see repressive legislation Seditious Meetings Act (1817), see repressive legislation Segrais, Jean Renaud de Zayde 460 sensation  107, 167, 193, 195, 209, 273, 320, 322–​3, 327–​39, 346, 368, 419, 565–​6, 594, 604, 684, 717 sensibility  13, 25, 108, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 159, 162, 199, 214, 279, 328–​9, 334, 336–​7, 348, 410–​11, 494, 534, 586, 594, 648, 703, 710, 712 critique of  209–​10 sentiment in fiction  144, 145, 149, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 311, 709, 710, 712

Index   781 and gender  146, 210, 214 ‘naïve’ vs ‘sentimental’  530 parody of  146, 410, 411 in poetry  26, 52, 149, 150–​1, 168, 653, 654, 675 theory of moral sentiments  210, 420, 336, 420, 594 sermon  32, 123, 181, 242, 243, 244, 315, 317, 318, 361, 411, 540, 541, 621, 727 Servox 716 sessions of the poets (genre)  269 Severn, Joseph  414 Seward, Anna  682 Llangollen Vale 131 Memoirs of the Life of Dr Darwin  335, 365, 367 Sgricci, Tommaso  554 Shaffer, Elinor  718, 719 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Characteristicks  18, 592, 665 The Moralists  17–​18 Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author 18 Shakespeare, William  16, 20–​2, 26, 42, 69, 102, 169, 208, 250–​3, 273, 286, 316, 364, 404–​7, 409, 412–​15, 451, 458, 482, 550, 608, 615–​16, 622, 626, 635–​6, 700,  704–​5 Antony and Cleopatra 533 As You Like It 252 Hamlet  239, 316, 414, 458, 459, 582, 612, 613, 617, 619, 620, 623, 624 Henry V 102 Henry VIII 411 King John 402 King Lear  158, 389, 458, 459, 571, 619, 620 Macbeth  364, 458, 459, 617, 623 Measure for Measure 414 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 411 Othello  240, 364, 458, 459, 545, 613, 620 The Rape of Lucrece 619 Richard III  262, 456, 458 Troilus and Cressida 399 Venus and Adonis  614, 620, 621, 622 Shebbeare, John  193 Sheffield  34, 483, 518 Sheil, Richard Lalor  137, 141

Shelburne, Lord  123 Shelley, Mary  199, 209, 402, 423, 557, 708, 715 correspondence  420, 424, 427–​8, 429, 430 as editor  400, 401, 548 journals  427–​8,  716 Works Frankenstein  62, 65, 80, 198, 202, 212, 296, 321, 329, 336, 343, 391, 498, 571, 573, 638 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour  429, 717 The Last Man 85 Mathilda 215 Valperga 717 Shelley, Percy Bysshe and Beddoes  70–​2 and Byron  62, 64, 408, 582, 715–​16 and classicism  63, 70, 661, 671–​2 and Coleridge  68, 70, 277, 407 collaboration with Mary Shelley  62, 391, 424, 429, 717 and De Quincey  353 and ekphrasis  627 and figurative language  563, 565–​6, 571 and the French Revolution  66, 70, 163–​4 and German criticism  700–​2 and Godwin  139–​40, 165, 425, 552, 603 and Goethe  550–​1, 552 and Gothic  472 on the hostile review culture  62, 160, 161, 277–​80,  503 and Humean scepticism  331 and Hunt  183, 390, 501, 549, 550–​1, 705 and improvisation  554–​5 and Ireland  139–​40,  425–​6 and Italy  63, 70, 427, 501, 553, 705, 709, 717 and Keats  171, 279, 369, 503, 672 and legal trials  303–​4 as letter-​writer  424–​6 and The Liberal 705 and mental theatre  208 and Orientalism  555, 680, 681 and Peacock  264–​6, 279, 424, 602–​3 and Peterloo  67, 501 and Platonism  273, 552 on poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators’  43, 208, 266, 276, 579, 606

782   Index Shelley, Percy Bysshe (cont.) pseudonyms  472, 474 and the radical canon  186, 492 and revision  389, 390, 392–​3, 396–​403, 498 and Rousseau  703 and Scott  64 and Shakespeare  273, 700 suppressed works  183, 500 and Switzerland  62, 429, 715–​16 theory of inspiration  582–​3, 586 and translation  547–​56, 561 unwritten works  505 and Wales  131–​2 and Wordsworth  68, 273, 402, 407 Works Adonais  171, 279, 503, 672 An Address to the Irish People 129 Alastor  68, 551, 561, 680, 685 The Cenci  77, 302, 303, 304, 700 ‘Dal spiro della tua mente’  553 A Defence of Poetry  104, 208, 264–​7, 271, 273, 377, 338, 389, 400, 500, 547–​50, 552, 554, 556, 563, 566, 573, 586, 587, 602, 650, 661, 700 ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks’  552, 671 ‘England in 1819’  183 Epipsychidion  170,  551–​4 ‘Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa’  400 Hellas  165, 400, 672 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour  429, 717 ‘To Jane’  650–​1 Laon and Cythna /​The Revolt of Islam  66, 164, 253, 390, 393, 400, 565, 687 ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’ 717 The Mask of Anarchy  67–​8, 183, 501, 565, 566 ‘Mont Blanc’  64, 571, 583, 588, 716, 717 ‘My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few’ 551 ‘Ode alla Libertà’  553 ‘Ode to Liberty’  402, 553, 717 ‘Ode to the West Wind’  72, 337, 401, 582 Oedipus Tyrannus, or, Swellfoot the Tyrant  165, 500

‘On leaving London for Wales’  131 ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci’ 672 Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire 551 ‘Otho’ 505 ‘Ozymandias’  165, 627 ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’  303, 304, 500 ‘Preface’  66, 164 Posthumous Poems  160, 170, 400 Prometheus Unbound  63, 70, 72, 77, 165, 185, 208, 272, 400, 553, 554, 565, 566, 575, 661, 671, 672, 680 Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists 139 Queen Mab  131, 165, 269, 367, 492, 707, 717 The Revolt of Islam (see Laon and Cythna) St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian 472 ‘Song. Translated from the German’  551 ‘Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante’  551 The Triumph of Life  346, 505 ‘To a Sky-​Lark’  583 ‘Translated from the Greek of Moschus’ 551 translations of Calderón’s El mágico prodigioso 552 of Goethe’s Faust 552 of Plato’s Symposium  549, 552 volume of ‘popular songs’  501 Shelley, Percy Florence  428, 430 Shelley, William  401 Shenstone, William ‘The Schoolmistress’  23 Sher, Richard  438 Sheridan, Frances  193 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley  257, 535, 536 Begum speech  535 Pizarro  257–​8 The School for Scandal  252, 459 Sheridan, Thomas  535, 544 British Education  532, 533, 542 A Course of Lectures on Elocution 532 Lectures on the Art of Reading 542 Sherwin, William  238, 248 Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register 237 Shipley, William Davies  235

Index   783 short story  195, 196, 227 Shrewsbury  129, 240, 241 Shrewsbury Chronicle 37 Sicily  81, 194, 385 Siddal, Lizzie  344 Siddons, Sarah  247, 250, 251, 259, 456, 544 Sidney, Philip Apologie for Poetry /​Defence of Poesie 264, 265, 332 silver-​fork novel, see novel Simond, Louis Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain 281 Simpson, David  550, 683, 686 Siskin, Clifford  646 Sismondi, J. C. L. Simonde de  718 History of the Italian Republics 714 Sitter, Zak  676 Six Acts (1819), see repressive legislation sketch (literary)  83, 84, 146, 180, 195, 196, 245, 275, 323, 394, 479, 533, 651, 712, 737 Skillern, R. S. New System of English Grammar 736 Skirving, William  238 slavery  61, 100, 218, 219, 248, 290, 538, 634, 684, 725 abolitionist campaign  34, 55–​6, 730–​1 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807)  55–​6, 95, 100, 731 analogy with women  205, 209 anti-​slavery lectures  123, 730 anti-​slavery poems  209, 223, 730–​1 autobiographical narratives about  34, 730 fictional representations of  731 Somerset v. Stewart (1772)  205 Sleath, Eleanor  214 Smith, Adam  662 The Theory of Moral Sentiments 210, 336, 420 Smith, Charlotte  24, 161, 194, 198, 199, 415, 419, 720 and the cult of nature  161, 211 and fashionable melancholy  162, 163 and the French Revolution  36, 162–​3, 211 and georgic  213 and the Jacobin novel  36 and the sonnet revival  161–​2

Works Beachy Head  211, 212, 213 Desmond 36 Elegiac Sonnets  161–​2 The Emigrants  162–​3,  211 Emmeline 410 The Old Manor House 736 ‘To the South Downs’  161–​2 Smith, Horace  199 Smith, John Russell  518, 519 Smith, John Thomas  651 Smith, Sydney  282, 283, 290, 656 Smollett, Tobias  193, 283, 290, 656 Critical Review  185–​6 Roderick Random  460, 491 Travels through France and Italy 710 Snowdonia 130 Society of Antiquaries  34 Society for Constitutional Information  31, 34, 126, 238 Society of the Cymmrodorion  127, 128 Society of Dilettanti  666 Society of Free Debate  35 Society for the Literary Fund  30 Society for the Suppression of Vice  235, 247, 500 song  643–​56 and children’s verse  207, 222–​3 critical discourse on  357, 644–​7 English  130, 453, 460, 472, 518, 651, 655, 656 Gaelic  25, 379 ‘Indian death-​song’ genre  81, 736 Irish  40, 52, 149, 151–​2, 384–​6, 653–​4, 655, 720 national  81, 115, 132, 152, 453, 645, 652–​5 performance of  544, 545, 651, 652 political  35, 40, 130, 208, 243, 501 pseudo-​song  374, 551, 647 Scottish  96, 107–​8, 116–​17, 186, 453, 648–​9, 653, 654, 655 theatrical  261,  655–​6 transnationality of  655 Welsh  125–​6, 133, 651, 653, 654, 655 sonnet  24, 50, 101–​4, 161, 162, 389, 499, 548, 551, 555, 559–​61, 575, 627, 641, 668–​9, 712, 714, 729–​31 Southam, Brian  97

784   Index Southcott, Joanna  127, 541 Southey, Robert  160, 161, 201, 242, 244, 376, 450, 454, 470, 496, 497, 500, 608, 620, 713–​14, 726 and Bristol  122–​3, 377, 502 and Byron  268, 391, 507–​8, 673, 686 and Chatterton  27 and the Coleridge-​Wordsworth circle  45, 125, 408, 452, 502, 614, 730 contributions to annuals  80, 507–​8, 638 and Davy’s nitrous oxide experiments  122, 330 and epic  53, 164, 681–​3, 686, 714 harshness as a critic  616 and the Iberian Peninsular  713–​14 and Ireland  139 and Kirke White  180–​1, 503–​4 and the ‘Lake School’  408, 452 and Orientalism  49, 62, 681–​4, 686–​9 and Pantisocracy  122–​3,  729–​30 as Poet Laureate  171, 179, 506–​8 his political apostasy  171, 507 and the Quarterly Review  282, 289, 290 and slavery  730 and tourism  641, 708 unwritten works  505, 506 and war literature  47–​9, 713–​14 and Williams (Iolo Morganwg)  125 Works Carmen Triumphale 507 ‘On the Catholic Question’  139 Congratulatory Odes 507 The Curse of Kehama  49, 62, 685 ‘The Dancing Bear’  730 The Doctor 199 edition of Chatterton  27 ‘To the Genius of Africa’  730 Joan of Arc  81, 498 The Lay of the Laureate 507 Lives of Uneducated Poets 184 Madoc  57, 125, 377, 498, 729 The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo 507 The Remains of Henry Kirke White  180, 503 Roderick, the Last of the Goths  683, 684, 686, 714 Songs of the American Indians 736

Specimens of the Later English Poets 454 Thalaba the Destroyer  62, 377, 681 ‘Verses, Spoken in the Theatre at Oxford’ 730 A Vision of Judgement  507, 508 Wat Tyler 242 Southwark 427 Spain  49, 50, 91, 93, 96, 105, 146, 193, 194, 201, 257, 290, 385, 460, 550, 553, 608, 655, 681, 683, 713, 714, 719 spectacle  75, 77, 87, 182, 252, 256, 257, 258, 545, 562, 595, 625, 672, 688 The Spectator  16, 19, 20, 22, 196, 662, 670, 678, 682 speculation  76–​80, 84, 85, 87, 276, 290, 450 Spence, Joseph Polymetis 670 Spence, Thomas  233, 241, 245, 248, 538 Pig’s Meat  35, 178 The Restorer of Society to Its Natural State 239 Spenser, Edmund  16, 149, 405, 406, 412, 413, 450, 454, 670, 736 The Faerie Queene  22–​4, 26, 399, 661, 662 Spezia, Gulf of  716 spies  228, 244, 245, 248, 300, 302. See also surveillance Spinoza, Baruch Tractatus Theologico-​Politicus 551 Spirit of the Public Journals 35 spontaneity  19, 26, 108, 207, 273, 286, 314, 373, 374, 388, 389, 390, 405, 409, 415, 419, 479, 541, 579, 583, 584, 594, 600, 645 Stacey, Sophia  650 Stackhouse, Thomas History of the Bible 481 Staël, Germaine de  146, 694, 705 and A. W. Schlegel  699 and Byron  56, 76, 77, 702–​3, 715, 718 and Henry Crabb Robinson  696–​8 and Napoleon  77, 699 Works De l’Allemagne  599, 696, 699 Considérations sur la Révolution française 718 Corinne  145, 374, 380–​3, 555, 698–​9, 702, 709

Index   785 Delphine  145, 698 De l’Esprit des traductions  556, 702 De la littérature 718 Stamford  254, 491 Stamford News 237 Stanhope printing press  438 Starke, Mariana Letters from Italy 711 Starr, Gabrielle  314, 339 steam press  79, 439 Steele, Richard  102, 107 Stendhal (Henri Beyle)  716, 717 Sterne, Laurence  14, 193, 315, 322, 461 ‘Memoirs’ 315 A Sentimental Journey  311, 315, 316, 710 Tristram Shandy  25, 312, 315, 316–​18, 320, 321, 323, 324, 376, 697 Stewart, Dugald  592–​3, 600, 602, 603 Stewart, Susan  116, 373 Stillinger, Jack  390, 393, 452 Stoke Newington  357 Stonehenge 134 Stow 23 Strutt, Jedediah  196 Stuart, Charles Edward  85, 737 Stuart, James  666 sublime and beautiful  19, 337, 587, 595, 636, 662 Burkean  19, 25, 28, 207, 331, 534, 565, 587, 595, 662, 711 Kantian  207, 587–​8, 589 in nature  25, 132, 146, 147–​8, 171, 337, 582, 588, 712 paradox of ‘pleasing horror’  692, 711 in poetry  13, 17–​19, 21, 26, 271, 321, 325, 331, 447, 564, 565, 579–​80, 587, 596–​7, 610, 678, 701, 717 politics of  18–​19, 148, 160, 534, 595, 717 in scientific discourse  337, 341, 346–​9 sublime allegory  564–​5 translations of Longinus  18–​19, 587 Welsh 131 Suckling, John  269 Suffolk  96, 178, 211 Sullivan, Hannah  388 Surrey Gaol  182

Surrey Theatre (Royal Circus)  252, 255 surveillance  36, 83–​4, 242, 245–​6, 248, 306. See also spies Sussex  177, 236 Sutherland, James  291 Sutherland, Kathryn  391, 482, 483 Swansea 291 Swift, Jonathan  17, 140, 193, 290, 469 Gulliver’s Travels 632 Tale of a Tub 376 Swinburne, Algernon Charles  160 Switzerland  62, 103, 171, 708, 712, 719, 737 symbol  63, 67, 70, 132, 208, 233, 244, 266, 285, 374, 438, 443, 445, 481, 562, 568–​72, 605, 697, 701, 713, 730 and allegory  268–​70, 568, 575 table talk  83, 374, 409 Tacitus  533, 549 Tahiti 128 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine  185, 349 Talfourd, Thomas Noon  406, 502 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de  6 Tasso, Torquato Aminta 549 Taunton 123 tavern  235, 246, 248, 250, 286, 486, 529 taxation  129, 446 Taylor, Archer  470 Taylor, Charles  311, 319 Taylor, John (publisher)  391, 413, 490, 491, 505, 522 Taylor, Richard C.  461 Taylor, Samuel Coleridge  650 Taylor, William  290, 330, 691 Taylor and Hessey (publisher)  490 Teltscher, Kate  678, 679 Tennenhouse, Leonard  94 Tennyson, Alfred Lord  68, 338, 339 The Princess 204 Terrell, John  244 Terry, Richard  17 terza rima  71, 548, 558 Thackeray, William Makepeace  87

786   Index theatre amateur  250, 251 architectural design  25–​7 illegitimate  252, 253, 257, 258, 259, 260, 262 Irish 141 legal regulation of  234, 240, 244, 250–​63 Disorderly Houses Act (1751)  235 Public Entertainments Act (1752)  251, 252, 253, 261 Theatre Licensing Act (1737)  234, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 261, 262 Theatre Regulation Act (1843)  262 Theatrical Representations Act (1788)  254–​5 Vagrant Act (1822)  262 mental  213, 317, 363–​4 patent  141, 240, 250–​62, 457, 459 prices  192,  259–​60 private theatricals  84, 250, 251 provincial  240, 250, 254, 255, 457 publishers’ collections  452, 456, 457, 458, 459 tickets 486 and war  49, 257–​8 See also theatres under London Theatre Licensing Act (1737)  234, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 261, 262 Theatre Regulation Act (1843)  262 Theatre Royal, Dublin  141 Theatric Tourist  254, 255 Theatrical Representations Act (1788)  254–​5 Thelwall, John  34, 38, 39, 41, 208, 281 and Coleridge–​Wordsworth circle  41, 235, 424, 425, 426, 485 critical reception  286 Institution of Eloquence  532, 542 and London Corresponding Society  39, 238 oratorical theory  531–​2, 537–​8,  542–​4 as political lecturer  35, 39, 40, 255, 533–​4,  536–​8 and political theatre  255–​6, 260 prison poetry of  39, 299 and Society of Free Debate  35 trial for treason  39, 238, 299, 300 Works Introductory Discourse on . . . Elocutionary Science  531–​2

Introductory Essay on . . . English Rhythmus 544 Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons 300 Panoramic Miscellany 83 The Peripatetic  35, 199 Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement  132, 486 Poems Written in Close Confinement  39, 299 Selections for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures  542, 545 Selections and Original Articles 542 Theobald, Lewis  613 Theocritus 174 Thiongo, Ngugi wa  531 Thomas, David (Dafydd Ddu Eryri)  128 Thomas, Ralph (Olphar Hamst)  470 Thomson, George (publisher)  648 Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs 655 Select Collection of Original Welsh Airs 134 Selection of Welsh Melodies 134 Thomson, James  605 The Castle of Indolence 23 Liberty  710, 712 ‘Rule Britannia’  96 The Seasons  455, 490, 491, 492, 635 Thomson, John  358 Account of the Life ... of William Cullen 356 Thomson, Robert God Save the Rights of Man 126 Thomson, Samuel  147, 655 Thomson, Thomas  282 Thoreau, Henry David Annals of America 737 Thucydides 575 Ticknor and Fields (publisher)  732 Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, Ingrid  516 Tighe, Henry  149 Tighe, Mary ‘Bryan Byrne, of Glenmalure’  149 Psyche  149, 670 Selena 149 Tillotson, Revd John  317 Tintern Abbey  346, 347 Tischbein, Wilhelm  667

Index   787 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli)  338 Tonson, Jacob (publisher)  16, 450, 451 Tooke, John Horne  34, 39, 238, 300 Diversions of Purley 593 Tory  70, 185, 322, 378, 501 periodicals  59, 60, 269, 282, 292 poetics  16–​17, 27, 270, 282, 468 Toulmin, Joshua  685 tourism  113, 163, 254, 255, 281, 454, 652, 653, 737 anti-​  709,  715–​16 Continental  429, 498, 598, 640, 703, 707, 708–​16,  737 in England  130, 641 in Ireland  137, 147, 259 in Scotland  107, 108, 132, 429, 498 in Wales  130, 131, 132 Tower Hamlets  253 Tower of London  253 Townley, Charles  626 Trafalgar, Battle of  49, 104, 567, 573 tragedy  170, 171, 194, 208, 251, 253, 255, 362, 363, 393, 456, 458, 459, 549, 619, 623, 672, 714 transatlanticism  86, 125, 147, 196, 361, 723–​38 history of term  724–​6 See also America, United States of transcendental idealism (German)  599, 601, 602 Transcendentalism (American)  734 translation  122, 384, 454, 547–​61, 557–​8, 676–​7, 680–​2,  693 Asiatic  548, 555–​6, 675–​8, 682 classical  19, 375, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 587, 661, 668 from European languages  194, 226, 252, 258, 365, 382, 460, 461, 468, 497, 504, 548–​61, 665, 686, 699–​703 European translations of English works  85, 549,  719–​21 ‘foreignizing’  556, 558 and forgery  85, 86, 110, 196, 676 from Gaelic  25, 110, 196, 379, 505 from and into Welsh  128, 653 and improvisation  554–​5, 561 pseudo-​  551 self-​  551 theories of  547–​50, 556–​8, 675–​6, 702

travel writing  60, 213, 215, 707–​21. See also tourism treason  39, 40, 233–​9, 246, 295, 296, 299–​300,  302 Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act (1795), see repressive legislation Trelawney, Edward John  428, 553, 708, 714, 717 Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author  707, 709 Tremadog  131, 132 trials, legal of actors  300 of authors, booksellers, printers, and publishers Belcher, James  245 Blake, William  236 Carlile, Richard  238 Drakard, John  237 Drennan, William  40 Eaton, Daniel Isaac  238 Holcroft, Thomas  299–​300 Hone, William  238, 298, 302 Hunt, John and Leigh  237 Jackson, Revd William  239, 246 Johnson, Joseph  238 Jordan, Jeremiah Samuel  242 Paine, Thomas  36, 239, 242, 441–​3 Thelwall, John  39, 238, 299 Tooke, John Horne  300 Wedderburn, Robert  538 Winterbotham, William  242–​4 Wright, Susannah  247 of the Birmingham Rioters  240–​1 of Caroline, Queen  75 of Emmet, Robert  151 fictional representations of  236, 296–​9, 303–​6 of Hastings, Warren  254, 535 London treason trials of 1794  39, 299–​300 of Louis XVI  296 of Luddites  95 of Marie Antoinette  162, 497 prosecution statistics  236 Scottish sedition trials of 1793  225, 238, 302–​3 of the United Irishmen  151, 237, 239 of Watt, Robert  302–​3 See also blasphemy; libel; repressive legislation; sedition; treason

788   Index Trimmer, Sarah The Guardian of Education  219, 227 Trinity College Dublin  534 Trollope, Frances Domestic Manners of the Americans 731 True Briton 247 Trumpener, Katie  141, 146, 378, 654 Trusler, Revd Dr John  565, 667 London Adviser and Guide 486 Tucker, Herbert  74, 467 Turkey  45, 57, 77, 91, 92, 253, 385, 672, 673,  684–​5 Turner, Joseph Mallord William  131, 638, 715 Catalogue of the Original Sketches 640 Fallacies of Hope 635 The Field of Waterloo 637 Turner, Katherine  711 typography  79, 189, 191, 192, 438, 439, 452 Tytler, Alexander Essay on the Principles of Translation 548 Uffizi Gallery, Florence  669 Ulster Rebellion (1641)  140 Union of Britain and Ireland, see Acts of Union Unitarianism  38, 123, 128, 240, 426, 541, 727, 729, 734 United Irishmen  31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 51, 52, 94, 95, 146, 147, 150, 151, 237, 239, 423, 653 United Kingdom  46, 50, 94, 96, 97, 138, 139 United States, see America, United States of universities  69, 122, 180, 181, 183, 272, 329, 351, 355, 357, 358, 359, 365, 462, 504, 534, 662. See also education Unlawful Oaths Act (1797), see repressive legislation Unwin, William  422 The Use of Circulating Libraries Considered 488 utilitarianism  36, 273, 603, 719 utopia  126, 131, 195, 462, 689 Vagrant Act (1822)  262 Venice  255, 256, 260, 400, 640, 703, 714, 716, 717 Vergy, Pierre Henri Treyssac de  193

Vernon and Hood (publisher)  486 Vestnik Evropy (‘Herald of Europe’)  720 Victoria, Queen  70, 508 Victorian period  65, 70, 160, 168, 169, 182 Vienna, Congress of  60–​1, 70, 608, 686, 701, 703 Virgil  22, 174, 565 Aeneid  662, 669 Georgics 24 Virginia  385, 727, 735, 737 Viscomi, Joseph  629 vision (literary)  66, 196, 343, 346, 347, 369, 389, 401, 507, 508, 559, 564–​5, 568, 569, 575, 590, 596, 597, 671, 705 Viviani, Teresa  553, 554 Volney, Constantin François de Chassebœuf, Count of Ruins 572 Voltaire (François-​Marie Arouet)  31, 32, 124, 193, 208, 676 Candide 593 L’Ingenu 91 Letters Concerning the English Nation 718 Philosophical Dictionary  418, 593 Wade, Josiah  365 Wakefield, Gilbert Reply to . . . Bishop of Llandaff ’s Address 238 Walbrook  127–​8 Waldron, Mary  409–​10, 411 Wales  37–​8, 40, 47, 50, 82, 98, 112, 121–​35, 235, 378, 588, 652, 653, 677, 729 Walford Davies, Damian  126, 132, 133 Walker, George The Vagabond 42 Walker, John  532 Walker, Joseph Cooper Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards 380 Walpole, Horace  13, 197 Anecdotes of Painting in England 22 The Castle of Otranto  13, 214 Catalogue of the Noble and Royal Authors 179 Walpole, Robert  251, 533 Walton, Shana  513, 515 Wang, Orrin  333 Wanlockhead Miners’ Library  485, 487, 488

Index   789 Warburton, William  611, 613 Ward, Catherine  194, 199 Ward, Samuel Gray  734 Warrington Academy  357, 358 Warton, Joseph  25, 267 ‘The Dying Indian’  736 The Enthusiast 23 Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope 15 Odes on Various Subjects 23 Warton, Thomas  23, 25 ‘Essay on Romantic Poetry’  15 History of English Poetry 461 Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser  22, 26, 662 Waterloo, Battle of  46, 49, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 64, 67, 73, 166, 507, 637, 713, 716 literary responses to  50, 507, 637, 716 Waters, Mary  213 Watt, Gregory  290 Watt, Robert  305, 306 Declaration and Confession  302–​3 Watts, Alaric The Literary Souvenir 639 Watts, Isaac ‘A Cradle Hymn’  223 Divine Songs  222, 223 ‘The Hurry of the Spirits’  20 Reliquiæ juveniles 20 Waugh, Evelyn  709 Waunwaelod 124 Weaver Poets  147 Webb, Timothy  403 Weber, Henry Metrical Romances 53 Wedderburn, Robert  248, 538, 541 Wedgwood, Josiah  421, 423, 667 Wedgwood, Tom  344, 424 Weimar  634, 695, 696, 697, 699, 700, 701 Weisbuch, Robert  725 Wellek, René  592 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of  44, 60, 67, 289 Wells, Charles Jeremiah  262 Welsh, Alexander  294, 295, 298 Welsh language  37, 38, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 453, 653, 654, 655, 729 Welsh Romanticism  121–​35

Wesley, John  490 West, Benjamin Death of General Wolfe 567 Death of Nelson 567 Death on a Pale Horse 589 The Immortality of Nelson 567 West, Gilbert Institution of the Order of the Garter 16 West, Jane A Gossip’s Story 410 West Indies  61, 724, 730, 731 Western Messenger 734 Westminster Review  79, 281 Westmoreland  583, 641 Wheatley, Kim  281 Wheatley, Phillis Poems on Various Subjects 733 Whig  23–​4, 33, 39, 40, 59, 70, 140, 185, 257, 535, 663, 710, 711, 717 journalism  282, 294 poetics  15–​28 White, Daniel  54 White, Joseph Blanco  719 Whitefield, George  541 Whitehead, Charles  199 Whittingham, Charles (printer) British Poets: Including Translations 454 Whytt, Robert  329 Wicklow, County  140, 148, 149 Wilberforce, William  34, 55, 56, 235, 344, 730 Wilkes, John  25, 27, 238, 724 Wilkins, William  666 Wilkinson, Joshua Lucock The Wanderer 712 Wilks, Charlotte  726–​7 Willey, Basil  17 William IV, King  508 Williams, David (cultural historian)  439 Williams, David (Welsh dissenter)  124, 126,  301–​2 Claims of Literature 42 Williams, Edward (Iolo Morganwg)  38, 124–​8,  134–​5 and bardism  125–​7, 130, 134, 651 and bilingualism  124, 125–​6 and forgery  124–​5, 497 and the Joseph Johnson circle  38, 125, 128 as labouring-​class poet  38, 124

790   Index Williams, Edward (Iolo Morganwg) (cont.) and the London-​Welsh  38, 126–​8 and the Madog legend  125–​6, 729 Works ‘Address to the Inhabitants of Wales’  729 Breiniau Dyn 126 Poems, Lyric and Pastoral  38, 124, 125, 497, 729 ‘Sonnet, to Hope, on an Intention of Emigrating’ 729 Williams, Edward Ellerker  428, 714 Williams, Gwyn Alf  121 Williams, Helen Maria  161, 708, 709, 720 Letters from France  214, 712 Narrative of the Events . . . in France 214 ‘To Sensibility’  214 A Tour in Switzerland 712 Williams, Jane  428, 650–​1 Williams, William (Pantycelyn)  133 Willis, Thomas  328 Wilson, Alexander American Ornithology 724 The Foresters  723–​4 Wilson, John (Christopher North)  292, 476 Winchester 267 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim  664, 668, 671 History of Ancient Art 666 Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks 665 Winston, James  255 The Theatric Tourist 254 Winterbotham, William  242–​4, 247 Commemoration of National Deliverances 242 Trial of Wm. Winterbotham 243 Wolcot, John (Peter Pindar)  35 Wolfe, Charles ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’ 96 Wolfson, Susan  166, 206, 644 Wollstonecraft, Mary  28, 42, 199, 405, 421, 422, 424, 427, 430, 444, 708, 720, 726, 731 correspondence  421–​3, 424, 427, 429, 430 Works Letters Written . . . in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark  331, 429, 712, 719

Mary: A Fiction 65 Original Stories from Real Life 213, 221, 226 Vindication of the Rights of Men  32–​3 Vindication of the Rights of Woman 205, 209, 215, 220, 331, 333, 730 The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria  65, 198, 205, 209, 215, 296 Wood, Robert Ruins of Balbec 666 Ruins of Palmyra 666 Woodhouse, Richard  338, 421, 589 Wooler, Thomas  248 The Black Dwarf 247 Woolf, Virginia  316 Wordsworth, Dorothy  107, 122, 209, 210, 389, 390, 425, 498, 500 Alfoxden Journal  408, 429, 498 Grasmere Journal  408, 418, 429 Wordsworth, Jonathan  396 Wordsworth, William and the Borders  115 and Burke  530, 594 and Burns  107, 114 and Byron  93, 164, 166, 268, 273, 390, 582 and childhood  207, 229, 368, 581, 597 and classical mythology  661, 664, 684 and Coleridge  41, 275, 276–​7, 311, 390, 408, 500, 593, 594, 598, 602 condemnation of ‘frantic novels’  42, 334, 480, 487 and Continental travel  102, 498, 707–​9, 712–​14,  737 contribution to annuals  638–​9 and copyright reform  491 and De Quincey  160, 324, 350, 498, 534 and Dorothy Wordsworth  389, 390, 408, 418, 428, 429 and the epitaph  609–​11, 616 and the French Revolution  41, 44, 162–​3, 164, 208, 295, 380 and German aesthetic criticism  700 and Hazlitt  158, 455, 493, 581, 619 and Keats  68, 166, 207, 369, 407, 413, 415 and the Lake District  96, 104, 171, 259, 418, 641 and Lamb  493, 500, 609, 619–​20, 623

Index   791 as letter-​writer  418, 425, 429 and London  101, 102, 171, 256, 258–​9, 529, 545 and manuscript culture  498–​9 and Milton  42, 53, 102 and minstrelsy  114, 376, 378, 379, 453–​4, 649 and Napoleon  46, 50, 104 and oratory  529, 530, 533, 534, 536, 545 as a philosophical poet  602, 605 poetics of the ‘ordinary’  524–​5, 580, 581, 589, 590 on poetry as the ‘science of feelings’  331, 339 and the reader  479–​80, 482, 492, 493 and revision  392–​7, 400 and Shakespeare  42, 102 and Shelley  68, 273, 402, 407 and the slave trade  731 and Thelwall  485–​6 and trial literature  299–​303 unpublished works  498, 502, 506 and visual art  627, 628, 637–​40, 641 and Wales  130, 131, 134, 135, 588 and war  46, 50, 102, 103 Works Adventures on Salisbury Plain 502 ‘Alice Fell’  583 ‘Anecdote for Fathers’  492–​3 ‘Anticipation, 1803’  103 ‘At the Grave of Burns’  107 The Borderers  115, 296, 299, 392–​3, 397, 502 ‘The Brothers’  115 ‘Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old’ 583 ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’ 736 ‘Composed by the Sea-​side, near Calais’  103 ‘Composed in the Valley, near Dover’  102 The Convention of Cintra 50 ‘The Country Girl’  638–​9 Descriptive Sketches 712 ‘Elegiac Stanzas’  402, 627, 628, 637, 737 ‘England! The time is come’  102 Essays upon Epitaphs  609–​11 The Excursion  68, 151, 277, 395, 396, 415, 484, 609, 619, 623, 669, 736 ‘Expostulation and Reply’  478–​9, 483, 492, 493 ‘Great Men have been among us’  102

Guide to the Lakes 641 ‘To H. C. Six Years Old’  583 ‘The Idiot Boy’  177 ‘Laodamia’  669, 670 ‘The Last of the Flock’  177 A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff  41, 502 ‘Lines Written a few Miles above Tintern Abbey’  64, 122, 177, 320, 333, 346, 347, 583, 588, 597, 737 ‘London, 1802’  101, 102 Lyrical Ballads  14, 41, 45, 53, 68, 113, 115, 123, 160, 177, 176, 184, 272, 273, 275, 176, 277, 322, 331, 335, 347, 393, 396, 408, 478, 479, 480, 484, 492, 493, 525, 581, 608, 646, 664, 693 ‘Advertisement’ (1798)  176, 483 ‘Preface’ (1800)  42, 44, 45, 104, 106, 256, 264, 272, 274, 277, 322, 328, 330, 337, 339, 343, 379, 479, 482, 487, 513, 524, 563, 580, 583, 590, 594, 595, 598, 609, 617, 664, 694 ‘The Mad Mother’  583 Memorials of a Tour in Italy 714 Memorials of a Tour on the Continent 737 ‘To the Men of Kent, October 1803’  102, 103 ‘Michael’  115, 525 ‘Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour’  101–​2 ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’  207, 335, 408, 581–​2 ‘The Old Huntsman’  177 ‘Old Man Travelling. Animal Tranquillity and Decay’  394, 396 Poems (1815)  620 ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’  684, 700 ‘Preface’ 396 Poems, in Two Volumes  68, 335, 379, 581, 608, 609 ‘The Power of Music’  649 The Prelude  25, 45, 46, 53, 104, 130, 134, 162, 163, 206, 207, 208, 229, 258, 259, 295–​6, 311, 320, 321–​2, 324, 333, 335, 368, 393, 396, 408, 498, 500, 502, 506, 529, 530, 533, 545, 571, 582, 588, 589, 597, 707, 712–​13

792   Index Wordsworth, William (cont.) The Recluse 505 ‘Ruth’ 583 Salisbury Plain 502 ‘Simon Lee’  177 ‘The Solitary Reaper’  379, 415 ‘The Somnambulist’  397 The River Duddon 641 ‘Strange fits of passion’  492–​3 ‘The Tables Turned’  207, 478–​9, 492 ‘Thanksgiving Ode’  50 ‘The Thorn’  583 ‘Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’  103 ‘The Unremitting Voice of Nightly Streams’  396–​8,  649 ‘We Are Seven’  177, 492 ‘The Westmoreland Girl to My Grandchildren’ 583 ‘The world is too much with us’  575, 669 ‘Written in London, September, 1802’ 102 The World 452 Worrall, David  35, 261, 501 Wright, Frances Views of Society and Manners in America 731

Wright, Julia M.  145 Wu, Duncan  396 Wyatt, James  666 Wye Valley  130, 132, 178, 346, 425, 584 Wynn, Sir Watkins Williams  129 Yearsley, Ann  122, 161, 175–​6, 177, 178, 214 ‘The Genius of England’  176 A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-​Trade 209 Poems on Several Occasions 175 The Royal Captives 497 The Rural Lyre 176 York 250 York Assembly Rooms  666 Yorkshire 418 Young, Edward  20, 21, 404, 491, 630 Conjectures on Original Composition 19 Night Thoughts  19, 21, 320, 490, 631 Young, Thomas  290 Zhukovsky, Vassily  719 Zimmerman, Sarah  69, 543 zoonomy 543 Zurich, Lake  737