Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830 9780198833130

Table of contents :
Cover
Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760–1830
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Sick of Politics
DISAFFECTION, POLITICS, LITERATURE
INSTABILITY, CRISIS, REVOLUTION
LITERATURE ON THE SHORES OF POLITICS
LITERARY FORM AND THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK
1: Disaffected Parties, 1688–1832
‘POLITICKS’! 1688 AND THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ESTRANGEMENT
SATIRE AND CYNICISM: FROM THE MAKING OF SWIFT TO THE FALL OF WALPOLE (1714–42)
‘ALL THE DIFFERENT PARTIES ELECTRIFIED’: STRUCTURES OF POLITICAL FEELING AT THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I I I
THEATRICAL INTERLUDE: A WORD TO THE WISE (1770)
POLITICAL SCIENCE, PUBLIC FEELINGS: GOVERNANCE IN EGERIA (1802–3)
2: Tristram Shandy and the Divided Worlds of Politics
‘MY PEN I ’VE SPLINTER’D QUITE’: STERNE AND THE POLITICS OF PARTY
TAKING SIDES: LAUNCHING TRISTRAM SHANDY
‘HEARTY LAUGHING SUBJECTS’? CONSIDERING SHANDEISM
‘UTOPIA! WHERE THE DEVIL’S THAT?’
‘HEARTY LAUGHING (POLITICAL) SUBJECTS’? SHANDEISM RECONSIDERED
3: Literary Leviathans: Johnson, Boswell, and the 1790s
THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITYIN THE JOHNSON CIRCLE
JOHNSON’S ERRATIC TORYISM
LEVIATHAN IN THE 1790S: WILD DEMOCRATS AND WAYWARD PREROGATIVES
BOSWELL’S ‘WARM’ TORYISM
THE LITERARY LEVIATHAN? WRANGLING THE LIFE OF JOHNSON
4: Burke, Edgeworth, and Ireland’s Discontents
WOMEN, POLITICS, AND THE NOVEL
IRELAND’S DISCONTENTS
BURKE’S PARTIES
ABSENT FRIENDS: ‘MAJESTIC’ POLITICIANS AND ‘WRETCHED TENANTS’
PARTIAL SPECTATORS IN THE ABSENTEE
5: Austen and the Cultural Logic of Late Toryism
‘THE SCEPTER, NOW TRANSFERR’D’: POWER AND PREROGATIVE REVISITED
WILLIAM PITT AND THE IMPORTANCE OF FEELING TORY
MASTERS AND SERVANTS: THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY IN MANSFIELD PARK
‘HE MUST NOT HEAD MOBS’: NATIONAL ORDER AND THE NOVEL
AUSTEN’S WILFUL HEROINES
6: Byron’s Opposition
THE SHADOW OF OPPOSITION: BYRON AND THE ‘DEVIL’S PARTY’
BYRONIC, IRONIC, DISAFFECTED
UNSHACKLED JUNIUS
BYRON’S CYNICISM
THE TRUTH IN POLITICS
Conclusion
Works Cited
ARCHIVES AND MANUSCRIPTS
PUBLISHED MATERIAL
Index

Citation preview

D I S A F F E C T E D PA RT I E S

Disaffected Parties Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760–1830 J O H N OW E N H AVA R D

1

1 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 © John Owen Havard 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 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: 2018951741 ISBN 978–0–19–883313–0 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.

Preface After the US presidential election in November 2016, I held a discussion for students to share their feelings about the stunning upset that saw Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrat widely favoured to win, lose to the Republican candidate. The accompanying reading, from that week’s lecture, was from William Wordsworth’s Prelude. One student was visibly shocked when I pointed out her similarity in age to the poet when his own political hopes were destroyed. For those who believed, as those who experienced the French Revolution as a blissful dawn had believed, that recent progress had not only been inevitable but was assured to continue, the abrupt collapse of expectations had been shattering. The surprise vote for ‘Brexit’ that summer occasioned its own shock and disbelief. These events were experienced not only as surprise reversals (or belated revelations) of public opinion but as the stripping away of existing certainties: a violent rending aside of political life’s decent drapery and pleasing illusions. Among those shocked by the  outcome of the American election, an emphasis emerged on taking solace in  intimate bonds and small circles, a particularly Wordsworthian quantum of solace.1 (Clinton herself did a lot of walking in the woods.) Yet initial shock also quickly gave way—in contrast with the pervasive resignation and palpable malaise following the British vote to leave the European Union—to renewed commitment: the kind of perpetual resistance that we particularly associate with the second-generation Romantics. In his blistering sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’, Percy Shelley accused the poet not only of having reneged on his earlier attachment to the revolutionary cause but of a more fundamental betrayal: turning his back on a blind and battling multitude to stand above the fray, encased in solitude. Lord Byron developed a more idiosyncratic critique, voicing disdain for Wordsworth’s lowly origins and appeals to ‘natural’ language. Byron’s own poetic concerns with irreparable loss and the sublimation of self nonetheless resonated deeply with those of the older poet. Yet rather than retreating into political quietism, Byron occupied a more volatile remove. The prototypical Byronic hero, Lord Macaulay noted, was ‘proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection’.2 In his own person, Byron adopted a complex political stance and public role that combined jadedness and misanthropy with a version of the mental fight and spirited resistance witnessed in his Romantic contemporaries and precursors, continuing 1 The circulation of the following quote by Anna Freud after the election exemplifies this response: ‘I agree with you wholeheartedly that things are not as we would like them to be. However, my feeling is that there is only one way to deal with it, namely to try and be all right oneself, and to create around one at least a small circle where matters are arranged as one wants them to be.’ Quoted in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 18. 2 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Moore’s Life of Byron’, in Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, ed. G. M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 543.

Figure 1. ‘The Royal Chace’ (1770). As the king’s representatives pursue radical printers from horseback, the anonymous satirist ‘Junius’ lurks in an oak tree, watching on as fractures develop in the ground below. (Source: British Museum, AN364953001. © Trustees of the British Museum.)

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to claim the mantle of stringent ‘opposition’ (not least to the onset of a newly emboldened ‘Toryism’ taking hold at home and abroad) alongside his distinctive brand of cynicism. This stark divide, between Wordsworth’s retreat from political activity into smaller circles and the renewed commitment, voiced by Shelley if not also by Byron, to political transformation even in the face of its apparent impossibility, cuts to the heart of an abiding predicament.3 Fuller reckoning with these so-called generations of Romantic writing, building upon fuller attention to their reckoning with each other, reveals the complicated interplay between quietistic retreat and revolutionary horizons, the bonds between men (usually men) in small numbers and the commitment to mankind as a whole. The pervasive sense, exemplified in late Romantic texts including Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and the final cantos of Byron’s Don Juan, that political hopes, the human species, and even the planet itself have been exhausted, casts these respective responses to political disillusionment further into relief. In the face of dismantled certainties and impending crises, retreat and rebellion emerge less as opposites embraced by mortal enemies than alternatives embraced by men united in clinging to whatever hopes they can, on a darkling plain and shrinking shoreline. These various movements, between salving quietism and renewed idealism, between the depressed belief that possibilities have been exhausted and the radical hope that spring cannot be far behind, provide paradigms—particularly when considered in their dynamic interplay with each other—for thinking about our own moment of eroding political certainties and deepening planetary despair. ‘There is nothing in disenchantment inimical to art’, E. P. Thompson has maintained, drawing a distinction between the layered disenchanted state and the apostasy he characterizes as ‘self-mutilation and the immoderate reverse of attachments’.4 The ‘withdrawal from the vortex of an unbearable political conflict’ may cause one to clutch at sources of limited optimism, but ‘[t]here must be some objective referent for social hope, and it is one trick of the mind to latch onto an unworthy object in order to sustain such hope’—as much the case, Thompson reminds us, for Mary Wollstonecraft as for Wordsworth.5 These complementary responses to political disappointment are not the subject of this book. Although my discussions of political disenchantment, renewed commitment, and more elusive kinds of disengagement, cynicism, opposition, and 3 The student mentioned above, incidentally, inclined squarely to the latter course: ‘I can appreciate the calmness in Wordsworth’s poetry, I can understand wanting to go into nature, needing to take some time to put yourself back together, to get back on track. I definitely had to do that for a day. But it’s not enough. We can’t retreat like he did, we can’t give up. We just can’t.’ 4 ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York: Norton, 1997), 37. For Thompson, apostasy involves relapsing into ‘received patterns of thoughts and feelings’ and a psychology that includes that ‘peculiar and vengeful kind of bitterness which a certain kind of man finds for an idealized mistress who has disappointed him’ (62, 68, 63). ‘It is easy enough to make fun of Wordsworth’s apostasy, which was in some senses abject, in his last forty years’, Thompson concedes; ‘less easy is to conceive how he upheld, through all the preceding fifteen years, so great a confidence that “fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair.”’ Compare his suspicion about apostasy as a ‘stimulant to the critical faculties’ (including for jaded leftist intellectuals writing in the Partisan Review closer to his own moment) (64). 5 ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, 59, 68.

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recalcitrance take inspiration from studies of writers animated by the French Revolution or estranged by its failure, this study does not address Wordsworth and his generation of Romantic poets directly, whether critically or sympathetically (except for Robert Southey, the former radical turned Poet Laureate, whom Byron scathingly derided for having turned out ‘Tory at last’). With the crucial exception of Byron, ever an exceptional figure, I do not address Romantic writers animated by the ‘spirit’ of revolution, whether radical politicians like John Thelwall, radical nationalists like Sydney Owenson, or radical outsiders like William Blake. The French Revolution was unprecedented: electrifying and inspiring, galvanizing and  terrifying. The subsequent decades transformed the relationships—real and imagined—between political organization, religious practice, public feeling, and literary expression.6 Rather than foregrounding the French Revolution and its fractal refashioning across subsequent decades, this book instead adopts a diagonal course through the long Romantic period that locates these developments within broader contexts and against deeper histories of unrest.7 In the first instance, this means approaching the post-1789 period in relation to the global ‘age of revolutions’ that began several decades earlier; this book pays particular attention to the neglected discontent and unrest within Britain during the decades surrounding 6 These developments and the enduring transformations to which they helped to give rise have attracted extensive attention. See, inter alia, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966); John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Georgina Green, The Majesty of the People: Popular Sovereignty and the Role of the Writer in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Harriet Guest, Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 7 Although beyond the scope of this book, the Haitian Revolution presents one—though by no means the only—example of political disaffection in this period that promised to trouble EuroAtlantic society and its constitutive exploitation of unfree racialized labour. Emphasizing the global scope of upheaval in the 1790s, Ashley L. Cohen reminds us that ‘[i]n Ireland, England, India, and Jamaica, the Jacobin crisis was fueled by extreme levels of worker disaffection and resistance to Britain’s imperial-capitalist world order’ and contends that this ‘global Jacobin crisis threw into relief the ease with which processes of exploitation, dispossession, and political and economic oppression subverted boundaries between the domestic and the imperial, free and unfree labor, the East and West Indies.’ ‘Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global Labor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55 (2014), 195. The West Indian slave plantations obliquely alluded to in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee present an outer limit for this book’s more delimited concerns with disaffected political energies, amplifying the forces that promise to disrupt politics ‘at home’—a designation already fractured by the appendage of Ireland and parallel exclusion of the English working classes from political recognition—with reminders of the wider world in which the domestic polity was inescapably implicated. Given the limited control of Sir Thomas Bertram over Mansfield Park, David Bartine and Eileen Maguire, drawing upon Edward Said’s seminal discussion of the inseparable binds between ‘home’ and overseas imperial activity in Austen’s novel, intriguingly ask whether we must not ‘entertain the possibility of some sort of parallel creeping disintegration and potential rebellion’ at his Antigua slave plantation. ‘Contrapuntal Critical Readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: Resolving Edward Said’s Paradox’, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 11 (2010), 47.

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the  American Revolution. This book similarly locates the 1760–1830 period within histories of partisan contestation that span the long eighteenth century as a whole. In addition to looking ahead to transformed governing practices that accompanied the onset of nineteenth-century liberalism, this book looks backwards: to the tangled legacies bound up with Whig and Tory party labels and increasingly rickety post-1688 political structures.8 The disenchantment, reimagined horizons, and radical contestation (including the rise of a mass public and incipient democratic reforms) following the French Revolution remain crucial to thinking about political estrangement in this period. Yet in giving those developments too much centrality, this book contends, we risk eclipsing the variously distanced, conflicted, antagonistic, and simply confused relationships to politics that I emphasize here—from familiar and mundane kinds of grumbling about ‘politics’, to more subtle challenges to the status quo, to the heterogeneous constituencies that hovered at the margins of political activity and the alternative perspectives these disaffected parties helped make available. Bringing an untidier understanding of the histories shaping political activity together with attention to an expanded period of upheaval, this book accordingly returns a wider array of relationships with politics and understandings of ‘political’ writing to view, arguing in particular for an expanded understanding of the ‘parties’ animating political activity. Disaffected Parties thus examines the often uncertain relationships between disaffected responses to politics of various stripes and the changing terrain of political activity, during a moment in which partisan dynamics were at times fluid (in contrast with the ‘Rage of Parties’ in the early eighteenth century and subsequent instances of partisan deadlock) and when politics more widely was not yet dominated by the regulatory, governmental norms and liberal ideals that took hold in the nineteenth century—and that continue to shape, if not distort, our understanding of politics in the present. Byron’s own disaffection encompassed his radical detachment from the country of his birth and the trappings of his earlier life; it extended at its furthest, Swiftian extreme to his repudiation of human society as such. This radical estrangement nonetheless coincided with an abiding attachment to his Whig party identity. At a remove both from the remnants of his party and the changing guises of oppositional political activity (he was no fan of the ‘rabble’), his writings show how continuing attachment to partisan identities—even amidst political estrangement and the opening of altogether more radical possibilities—might reveal alternative political horizons, even and perhaps especially as those commitments confronted their own frustration, incoherence, or obsolescence. These competing tendencies are on display in a journal for January 1814, in which Byron noted the ‘sad enmity with the Whigs’ created by a friend’s criticisms of Charles James Fox, the earlier Whig hero, in an article for the Quarterly Review. ‘As for me,’ Byron continued, in a now familiar 8 The terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ carried wayward legacies. Established as political identities in the later seventeenth century, they were first employed as insults, derived from names for Scottish religious rebels and Irish Catholic highwaymen. See Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47–8.

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statement of cynical attitudes towards politics, ‘by the blessing of indifference, I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism.’9 Yet even amidst his growing disaffection, which became deepened by further revolutionary failures on the continent, Byron articulated an ongoing—if antagonistic—attachment to the Whigs. ‘I shall adhere to my party,’ he noted in these same remarks, ‘because it would not be honourable to act otherwise’ but, ‘as to opinions,’ he continued, in yet another reversal, ‘I don’t think politics worth an opinion [. . .] I have no consistency, except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference on the subject altogether.’ Byron’s estrangement would eventually lead him to other shores. But as closer attention to his writings makes clear, his detachment from England jostled together with a variety of competing impulses, including the increasingly coherent drive to ‘take some part’ back in political activity. These commitments also looked back to an earlier period of political dynamism. Byron’s poem The Vision of Judgment staged a trial of the late George III at the gates of heaven (in which, we learn, the angels ‘all are Tories’). Rather than looking solely to the recent international bloodshed and domestic repression following the French Revolution, however, Byron also looked back to the events of preceding decades, including the American Revolution and the related emergence of a dynamic transatlantic opposition movement. Among the witnesses that appear at the gates of heaven, Byron summoned, in shadowy guise, an anonymous satirist whose incendiary attacks on the political establishment during this period extended to the king himself. ‘Junius’ became a phenomenon in the early 1770s—analogous to the twenty-first-century graffiti artist ‘Banksy’—who remained unidentified even as he galvanized public attention with scabrous, ad hominem letters in the Public Advertiser newspaper deriding the recently crowned monarch and his ministers. In his own poem on the death of the late king, Southey had made the anonymous satirist a figure for the dangerously unshackled, monstrously inchoate mob. In a journal entry a few months prior to his remarks on ‘adher[ing] to my party’, by contrast, Byron had expressed his admiration, describing Junius’s writings as those of a ‘good hater’.10 Aside from his temperamental affinity with Junius’s anger and wit, Byron’s remarks explain his attraction to this earlier moment of political activity as one in which sharp satire could converge with active political commitment and when detachment from the established parties of political activity could coincide with renewed openings by which to take a part in politics. Looking back on recent decades in his Short History of the Opposition During the Last Session of Parliament (1779), 9 Journal entry, 16 January 1814. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 3.242. 10 Journal entry, 17 November 1813. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 3.215. The notion of a ‘good hater’, embraced with notorious zeal by William Hazlitt, looked back at least to Samuel Johnson, who applied the phrase—ironically in light of its later adoption by the anti-establishment Hazlitt—to a man he esteemed for his hostility to the Whigs. See Kevin Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17.

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James Macpherson had noted that, while the political opposition had always been ‘heterogeneous’, recently ‘the heat of resentment, and rage of disappointment’ had ‘gradually melted them into one mass; and they revived in themselves the name, though little of the principles of Whigs’.11 Junius was both product and representative of this earlier moment, in which both the practical organization and affective contours of political activity were in flux—creating new avatars for political commentary and vehicles for partisan activity. At the same time, Junius acquired a uniquely volatile reputation, at once a political scandal and public spectacle. His letters (supplied in the collected edition with a motto, ‘Stat Nominis Umbra’, alluding to his uniquely shadowy reputation) invoked rage and disdain towards politicians and the wider enterprise of politics but also the more elusive possibilities made available by a changing political landscape. ‘The Royal Chace’ (1770) gave visual expression to the various possibilities that Junius channelled (Figure 1). The print depicts state power, as embodied in the king and his prosecutors, hunting down representatives of the radical press, including those associated with the burgeoning transatlantic opposition cause. Dark divides in the ground beneath suggest growing fissures in the country at large. Above stands Junius, in the archetypally English oak tree, his face cross-hatched by shadow. We do not know whether he is about to spring, throw missiles, or do something worse. In the opacity of his intentions and the ambiguity of his position, Junius presents an apt figure for the writers addressed by this study, neither abstracted into a realm of anonymity nor potentiality but an unassimilated element, off to the side, watching (and waiting). In returning to this spectral, ghostly figure, Byron not only underscored his attachment to an oppositional ‘Whig’ identity, inflected by the unique character of this earlier moment of inchoate unrest. He thereby summoned the potential for authors to re-enter the political arena: to pivot from an uncertain remove and to take a part back in politics. This book asks how the spectral residues of long-standing partisan disputes and the perpetually contested and unfinished nature of political activity more widely animated literary forms. In identifying authors, of various political stripes and levels of engagement, with the disaffected parties of a changing political world, it presents a revised account of English literature and its relationship with politics during this seminal, transitional period. At the same time, in returning to an extended period of unrest, it reveals some of the ways that variously disaffected impulses coincided with the changing parties of political activity. The writers addressed in this book show how estrangement from politics might in turn create new openings from which to return to the fray and may thus speak anew to our own age, in which disaffected energies and the parties of political activity remain in an unfixed, unstable, unpredictable relationship to each other.

11 James Macpherson, A Short History of the Opposition During the Last Session of Parliament (London: 1779), 2–3.

Acknowledgements Appeals to luck are the first recourse of the privileged. I have received a tremendous amount of support and encouragement, even from my boyish days. At the University of Leeds, Bridget Bennett and Jay Prosser helped me forge pathways from my home town to the United States. A fellowship from the British Association for American Studies took me to the University of Virginia, where Steve Arata, Alison Booth, Alan Howard, Eric Lott, David Morris, Chip Tucker, and Jennifer Wicke were champions. Paul Hunter became an early advocate, taking much of what I would have to say about the eighteenth century on good faith (and providing excellent lunches at King’s Cross). Jerry McGann first drew me into the vale of magical dark mysteries. I am immensely grateful to Jim Chandler for his immeasurable support and our cloudless friendship. He first steered me towards a project that would draw upon both my British and American training. Any success I have had is thanks to his peerless example. Eric Slauter opened multiple doors for me and has my gratitude for the methodological provocations of his own work and his confidence in my own. At the University of Chicago, Bill Brown, Tim Campbell, Bradin Cormack, Heather Keenleyside, Lisa Ruddick, Josh Scodel, Richard Strier, Robin Valenza, and Chris Warren all made time and space of various kinds available. Elaine Hadley, trailblazing scholar of politics unusual, has been a particular inspiration; I feel fortunate to know her also as a person. Lauren Berlant’s pawprints are all across these pages. Frances Ferguson came on board the project at a crucial stage, suggesting changes that meant everything. I thank them all for making my time at Chicago an especially golden one. At conferences, I have been able to hop, Mr Spectator-like, between multiple circles, beginning with the welcome faces of James Horowitz and Toni Bowers. Tobias Menely let me take him on a wild goose chase through downtown Los Angeles and has remained a guiding spirit. Helen Deutsch let me drive her to New York (and on a ferry!) and shared love and smarts on Johnson. Claire Connolly saved me from embarrassing mistakes (and nicely assured me I should not be embarrassed). Cindy Wall took bright interest in cynicism in rainy Chicago. Jon Mee clued me into the memorandum discussed in Chapter 1. Kevin Gilmartin, Mark Knights, Trevor Burnard, Gordon Turnbull, Jim Caudle, and Kathleen Wilson are the best at what they do and made my work better. These spirits all make our field a better one, none more so than Sandra Macpherson, master cynic. David Bartine, Ben Bateman, John Cheng, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Bradin Cormack, Jessie Reeder (who also performed her reputed wizardry on the Conclusion), Matthew Sangster, Jordan Stein, and Timothy Stewart-Winter read critical sections of the Introduction at crucial times. Ala Alryyes gently steered me towards a better title. A discussion with Sewell Chan at the New York Times office in London in the dark final days of 2016 inspired the opening contrast between

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Wordsworthian despair and mental fight. Emily Rohrbach and Nancy Johnson gave me their indispensable perspectives on Austen—and warm encouragement. Andrew Walkling appeared as my eagle-eyed saviour in the final stages. Mike Conlon has been a rare mentor and the steadiest of friends. Stephanie DeGooyer has been a treasured reader—a gem—a jewel!—my Sternean rhapsodies fall short. Ashley Cohen (with Aaron) has been my other pole star: locus of the best work and the best cocktails. Tina Chronopoulos, Kevin Hatch, Jeffrey Kirkwood, Drew Massey, Sean Massey, Paul Schleuse, and Julia Walker have provided a critical mass of quick wit and warm company in upstate New York. Heather Welland, Sean Dunwoody, and Rachel Weil have been such unfailingly great friends I sometimes forget they are such brilliant historians. Aja Martinez was there from the start to the final push and continues to inspire me as a scholar, a writer, and a person. Quite what I have done to deserve trenchant, brilliant, and kind colleagues including Joe Keith, Bob Micklus, Praseeda Gopinath, Marilynn Desmond, Olivia Holmes, John Kuhn, Peter Mileur, Ali Moore, Surya Parekh, Jessie Reeder, Jenny Stoever, Susan Strehle, and Bridget Whearty never ceases to strike me. Lucky John. There are friends who make life possible by showing how to live. Then there are friends who—quite literally—provide material conditions for living. I have been blessed with both. Dan Davis and Adam Haslett have provided refuge in Brooklyn and all parts north; Auden himself could not have hoped for better comradeship. Back West, David Shorter made everything seem so much easier and has remained a steadfast support and fabulous friend. Ben Bateman has been talking me off, around, and onto ledges for well over a decade. He makes the impossible seem possible, and I would not be where I am without him. Michelle Maydanchik made grad school way too much fun and continues to make everything even better. Matt DeLaney-Lavigueur and Tim Grinsell inspired me with their recalcitrance (and kept me out too late). Hannah Dal Pozzo was there from the beginning. From Leeds to London, Charlottesville to Chicago, Los Angeles to New York and back again, Jason Anders, Brad Anderson, A-J Aronstein, Armando Arrieta, Catherine Bates, Ben Caines, the aptly named Frank Cheers, Ryan DeLaney, Adrian Dimanlig, Faye Dimdore and David Miles, J.  P.  Drury, Andrew Fagal, Jennifer Grace and the entire Bateman clan, Byron Harrison and Brian Klinksiek, Jeff Huening, Hannah Klemm, Patrick Kwan, Michael Moore, Angele Rosenberg, Jordan Stein, Krista (Krispy) Speakman-Brown, TSW, Liam Stack, Rob Stilling, Kristen Taylor, Jeremy Tworek, and above all Ben Steverman have provided me with distraction and inspiration, love and friendship (and, not infrequently, keys). Selga and Hugh, the best brother, have been the most lovings. Jacqueline Norton has my immense gratitude for her support and attention throughout this process, as does everyone at OUP (plus Chris Bessant and Abi Ward). Parts of Chapter 2 derive from my essay ‘Political Sterne’ in Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne, eds. Peter de Voogd, Judith Hawley, and Melvyn New (Delaware University Press, 2015). An earlier version of the penultimate section of Chapter 6 appears as ‘Byron the Cynic’ in Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry, eds. Roderick Beaton and Christine Kenyon Jones (Routledge, 2016).

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My parents have been an unfailing source of support and care. Although my father Cliff Havard (1954–2010) thought that dedications were corny, I take inspiration from him and his sister Bethan in dedicating this book to my students. This study has taken shape against the onset of a global epidemic of disaffection from the political process and some nasty political shocks. Even amidst creeping despair, I have remained inspired by those committed to fighting tooth-and-nail for the vulnerable and excluded. I dedicate this book—whose cover affirms that cynicism and sentimentalism may coincide, whose contents assert that protests can become parties, and whose archive vindicates being in for the long haul—to the next generation committed to causes in which, to adapt Edmund Burke, they have no party.

Contents List of Figures

xix

Introduction: Sick of Politics

1

1. Disaffected Parties, 1688–1832

44

2. Tristram Shandy and the Divided Worlds of Politics

88

3. Literary Leviathans: Johnson, Boswell, and the 1790s

123

4. Burke, Edgeworth, and Ireland’s Discontents

156

5. Austen and the Cultural Logic of Late Toryism

197

6. Byron’s Opposition

229

Conclusion Works Cited Index

264 275 291

List of Figures 1. 2. 3. 4.

‘The Royal Chace’ ‘Political Electricity; or An Historical & Prophetical Print in the Year 1770’ [‘Miseries of Social Life’] ‘The Shadow of Opposition’

vi 45 89 230

Introduction Sick of Politics During a 1783 encounter with Samuel Johnson, James Boswell ‘mentioned politicks’. ‘Sir, I’d as soon have a man to break my bones as talk to me of publick affairs, internal or external’, Johnson responded, adding that he had ‘lived to see things all as bad as they can be’.1 In the background to this exchange was the pending dissolution of yet another government ministry, amidst competing demands for greater parliamentary power and strengthened royal prerogative—developments that converged the following year, around debates over corruption in the British Empire, to create a full-blown constitutional crisis. Three decades later, Lord Byron, with a cooler political temperature, confronted a frustrating impasse between monarchy, ministry, and the political opposition. Describing the stalemate in a poetic squib included within an 1813 letter to a member of his Whig circle, Byron noted the imprint partisan deadlock had made upon the wider political mood. ‘’Tis said— Indifference marks the present time’ those lines of verse began.2 ‘No one can be more sick of—or indifferent to politics than I am’, Byron wrote at the outset of the following decade, this time describing the bleak political scene associated with a resurgent ‘Toryism’ at home and the gloom pervading post-Napoleonic Europe.3 At once expressing generalized discontent and hyper-personalized aversion, Johnson and Byron invoked an all-too-familiar condition that Byron captured succinctly in a late canto of Don Juan: ‘I am sick of politics.’4 Encompassing various levels of emotional intensity and a range of mediums (transcribed conversation, personal correspondence, published and unpublished poetry), these statements situated both authors at a pronounced distance from politics. At the same time, they directed commentaries towards the political arena—acerbic, apathetic, and somewhere in between—or claimed further, second-order removes from political discussion (‘’Tis said ’ there is indifference surrounding politics: I wouldn’t know). In professing not to care about politics, Johnson and Byron protested too much. From the almost partisan zeal with which Johnson voiced his objection to hearing 1 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, eds. George Birkbeck Norman Hill and L.  F.  Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–64), 4.173. 2 Byron to Lady Melbourne, 21 September 1813. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 3.117. 3 Byron to John Murray, 21 February 1820. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 7.44. 4 Don Juan, 12.25, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), 5.502.

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about ‘politicks’ to the oppositional commitments swirling alongside Byron’s postured indifference (including his indifference about pervasive indifference), these appeals to political disaffection affirmed continuing attachment to political discussion, if not to political activity. Where Johnson and Byron experienced uniquely personalized fits of pique and periods of malaise—asked whether he had been outside that day, Johnson responded that Boswell ‘may as well ask if I hanged myself to-day’—their works were animated by competing, often contradictory impulses (as was the literary work, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, in which this conversation appeared). No less than these authors’ personal commentaries and public personas, their writings were in often close proximity to politics and inextricable from the passions and attachments, or impassivity and detachment, associated with political discussion. In gathering followers and channelling political feeling, their writings even promised, in some instances, to become ‘parties’ all their own. Determining how we should read the literature of this period in relation to the changing parties of politics and evolving structures of political feeling is the core aim of this book. Those relations were, in the cases of the writers examined here, variously estranged. Commentators and general observers had, at least since the later seventeenth century, adopted stances at a conspicuous distance from politics.5 From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, the shifting guises of political activity and fluid boundaries of ‘political’ conversation made such an undertaking increasingly difficult. As they grappled with the desirability, or even the possibility, of removing themselves from the political arena, amidst recently amplified uncertainty around where political parties, the political nation, and ‘politics’ as such began and ended, the writers addressed in detail by this study—Laurence Sterne, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and Lord Byron—effected crucial changes to the shape and status of literary authorship. The case studies of these authors presented in this book reveal how variously distanced relationships with politics and with partisan identities converged with innovations to English literature. Disaffected Parties contends that we cannot understand Sterne’s seemingly haphazard narrative technique, Johnson’s investment in ‘authority’ (and Boswell’s efforts to smooth away its sharper edges), the shapes of individual and collective feeling imagined by Edgeworth and Austen, or the poise and bite of Byron’s late satires without understanding the changing physiognomy of politics during the 1760–1830 period. Beyond merely illuminating these wider developments, these writers’ placement on the political margins enabled them, I propose, to imagine the parties of politics anew and to cultivate unique points of view, including ways of seeing beyond politics altogether. Their works show how stances of apparent removal from politics could be animated by partisan energies and how feelings that would seem to have little to do with politics could be conscripted for political ends. The accounts of 5 Jürgen Habermas identifies the family as the source of a publicity that in turn migrated to the political arena as part of his fuller treatment of the development of domestic and political spheres in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1962] 1991).

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these authors presented here require that we rethink the relationship between literary authorship and the political arena—in ways that do not amount, at least in any straightforward fashion, to escape, retreat, or sublimation—while posing broader questions about how we conceive of the lines between politics and aesthetics. Taken together, they allow this book to plot a revised account of the relationship between politics and literary form, in and beyond this seminal period in the history of English literature. Politics has been everywhere in discussions of the Romantic period and in literary studies more widely. Yet we have risked losing sight of some of the things that ‘politics’ meant and the specific ways that political activity and discussion shaped literary works. Whether or not it is the case, as Jacques Rancière contends, that if everything is political then nothing is,6 approaching politics in the narrower sense emphasized by this book—parliamentary politics, party politics, the kind of ‘politics’ we grumble about and dream of transforming—can help us begin to get a better handle on fundamental questions (not least Rancière’s own provocative ontologies of ‘the political’). The 1760–1830 period witnessed dramatic changes to political structures and widespread political discontent in England, against a backdrop of global transformation. It saw specific moments of crisis and impasse coupled with growing disconnect from the past and unease or uncertainty about the future. Amplifying the partisanship that had been a consistent feature of national political life for a century, the period examined by this book witnessed a dramatic upsurge in attention to political affairs—and a growing emphasis on evading political discussion altogether—bringing ‘politics’ into focus as something from which to seek distance and towards which to adopt militantly critical or moderately disgruntled postures, disdainful or detached stances (even as these gestures also affirmed continuing attachment to supposedly broken political structures). The creeping realization, at once scandalous and banal, that politics could be neither escaped nor overcome effected a scepticism, extending to a bitter cynicism, recognizable as a pervasive feature of modern political life. This mode of political response first acquired some of its familiar contours, this book proposes, between the later eighteenth century and the aftermath of the French Revolution: a period encompassing the heyday of the ‘Johnson Circle’ and of Byron and his circles, the age of sensibility and the Romantic era. (One aim of this book, however, is to challenge and problematize these distinctions: Samuel Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft once sat down to tea together, after all.) In returning to this period, however, this book does not set out to find a mirror for recent predicaments—nor, for that matter, to supply the hollow reassurance that things were ever thus. These writers confronted at once familiarly broken and freshly uncertain political realities. In returning to this critical period for the making of English literature, this book seeks to remap the literary history of this period in relation to changing partisan and affective structures, and thereby to reorient our ways of thinking about the relationship between literature and politics more widely. This book thus offers a prehistory 6 See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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for modern political disaffection that underscores literature’s importance as a means of thinking about a diverse array of relationships with politics, in this period and beyond. This Introduction lays out some of the historical frameworks and evolving conceptions of politics—including the meanings of disaffection and the expanded conception of political parties—that organize this book, while looking to the broader questions posed by the disaffected stance and its bearing on the status of the literary (and literary ‘form’). What ‘politics’ was, during this period, was changing, not least to encompass a broad array of governmental practices, in and beyond Britain. These developments ultimately converged to pave the way for nineteenth-century liberalism and looked ahead to an understanding of politics encompassing the administration of collective life—an at-once rigid and impoverished conflation of the political and the social— and its ‘neoliberal’ afterlives. During the period between 1760 and 1830, these developments converged untidily with (and were for the most part subordinate to) politics in a still relatively contained sense: the parliament-centric conception of political activity on which I focus in this book. The 1688 Revolution and constitutional settlement were doubly pivotal to this more restricted understanding of politics. The events of 1688–9, which put in place the political system that endured more-or-less intact until Reform in the 1830s, also had the unenviable claim, as I discuss in Chapter 1, of initiating widespread complaining about political activity, ranging from (prospectively violent) discontent with the post-revolutionary regime to grumbling about ‘politics’ more widely. The later eighteenth century sent these tendencies into overdrive. As politics came to encompass an expanding and shifting realm of activity, ‘politics’ became the object of inordinate, even obsessive public concern. Deepening a trend set in motion a century earlier, the post-1760 period witnessed the sheer volume (in both senses) of political discussion increase, as the expansion of middle-class print culture converged with the churn of growing political discussion, creating a situation in which politics was everywhere and nowhere all at once.7 The resulting confusion was particularly apparent to Laurence Sterne. A Political Romance (1759), his coterie satire addressing recent events in the York Church, included a lengthy parody of the emerging tendency to read anything and everything in ‘political’ terms. The ‘Key’ Sterne appended to his satire imagined the preceding work being discovered in the street and taken up by members of a 7 For the increases in attention towards political activity and in sceptical attitudes about ‘politics’ during the later eighteenth century, see John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). In both Great Britain and Ireland, R. B. McDowell notes, ‘the increasing importance of the newspaper press, the reporting and publication of parliamentary debates, the swelling tide of pamphlets, and the formation of political clubs and societies, all evince a growing political consciousness’ in the decades after 1760. This coupled with an increased appetite to understand the workings of politics (and to keep watch on the activities of politicians) such that the ‘pressure of public opinion on parliament’ dramatically mounted. See ‘Colonial Nationalism and the Winning of Parliamentary Independence, 1760–82’, chap. 8 in A New History of Ireland, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, eds. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 196–7. See also George Rudé, Revolutionary Europe, 1783–1825 (London: Collins, 1964), 13, 57.

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‘Political Club’ who proceed to read this controversy over ecclesiastical preferment (presented, à la Swift’s Tale of a Tub, as a dispute over an old coat) in the light of their own hobby-horsical preoccupations. Sterne thereby gestured towards an overwhelming, confounding increase in political discussion, while pointing to the ways that parliament-centred political activity clashed with a newfound self-consciousness about the differing ways in which (and the varying scales at which) things could be ‘political’—an impulse that contemporary readers, not unlike recent generations of literary critics, were inclined to indulge.8 Following the initial publication of his comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in 1760, an anonymous pamphlet depicted the fictional patrons of a London coffee-house (one of them tellingly named ‘Mr. Profound ’) proclaim that Sterne’s ostensibly domestic novel comprised ‘one compleat system of modern politics’.9 Sterne was himself attuned to this trend, as A Political Romance attests. Yet for all the ways that recent developments had scrambled the various scales of ‘political’ activity, Sterne also remained sharply attuned to the relationship between his writings and politics. When he supplied Tristram with the same birthdate as the anniversary of the 1688 Revolution, he gestured to an elusively indeterminate yet insistently stated relationship between the ‘Life and Opinions’ of his hero and the origins of modern politics, on the one hand, and the proliferating guises of political discussion and activity, on the other. This book asks what it would mean, following Sterne’s invitation, to read works including Tristram Shandy in proximity to politics and at the same time to hold them at a remove from politics: an apparent contradiction, albeit one we inhabit every day, which this book addresses most directly in its attention to cynicism as a stance (or ‘attitude’) defined by its being at once inside and outside, on the verge of taking a part while defiantly refusing to be taken in. In attending to the ways that authors like Sterne located their writings at a complex, disaffected remove, this book attends to a broader—or at any rate different— array of responses to politics than those addressed in existing studies of political 8 For Sterne’s wider reflection on the interrelated scales of ‘political’ activity—from the interpersonal or ‘office’ politics of close-knit communities to larger local, national, and geopolitical contexts—see my ‘Only Disconnect? Laurence Sterne, Politics, and the Public’, in Social Networks of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Ileana Baird (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014). 9 Explanatory Remarks on the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; wherein, the Morals and Politics of this Piece are clearly laid open, by Jeremiah Kunastrokius (London, 1760), 44. The Seven Years’ War was one referent for the increased discussion of politics in the Political Romance: some members of the ‘Political Club’ read the allegory of the coat for its relevance to the spoils of that geopolitical conflict. The pamphlet of Explanatory Remarks similarly depicted Tristram encountering debates over that conflict (with ‘Mr Profound’ determined to read the Siege of Namur in Tristram Shandy as depicting the recent defeat of Admiral Byng at Fort St. Philip’s in Minorca and Toby’s wound as ‘the distress the nation was thrown into thereupon’ [45]). As Daniel O’Quinn has emphasized, anxieties around the unprecedented amount of print commentary devoted to recent geopolitical affairs (apparent in the confused, news-obsessed title character of Arthur Murphy’s 1758 play The Upholsterer) became an explicit locus for reflection in the period. See Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 6–11. See also Keymer, ‘Paper Wars: Literature and/as Conflict during the Seven Years’ War’, in The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, eds. Frans de Bruyn and Shaun Regan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014) and Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

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engagement and literary production in the later eighteenth century and Romantic age. Aside from an overview, in the first chapter, of some of the changing shapes taken by political disaffection over the long eighteenth century as a whole, this book does not set out to present an exhaustive survey of malcontented, critical, and satirical voices during a period that witnessed such voices proliferate in and beyond literature. Nor do I seek to establish a comprehensive genealogy for disaffected and cynical attitudes towards politics.10 This book similarly looks elsewhere than the elevated and idealized political horizons that have tended to dominate the study of Romantic authors (not least in its attention to how writers encoded a sense of inevitable failure into even their most idealistic political gestures). Andrew Franta has argued that the conviction, emphasized by writers including Percy Shelley, that poetry might ‘redefine the form that political action takes’ extended to a belief in ‘poetry’s capacity to reach a future audience unbounded by the terms of present political opposition’.11 Drawing similarly upon detailed attention to print culture and associated questions of reception, I differ from Franta and aligned critics in emphasizing the ways that writers remained self-consciously bound, albeit from a distance, with existing parties and forums of political discussion, even in their efforts to imagine altogether different political horizons, register their recalcitrance, or more subtly dislodge the status quo. This book seeks in particular to propose new approaches to how we think about the partisan identities of literary writers, particularly when those identities were strained, muted, or seemingly incoherent. As I have already noted, this book looks to a period which itself saw increasing attention to the ways that writings could be ‘political’ and in which politics became an increasingly fixed and unavoidable object of attention. The political realignments following the French Revolution and associated transformations of governance profoundly reshaped and arguably reduced the relevance of partisan political activity. The convergence between these respective developments—the increasing attention to and in some respects expanded scope of politics alongside the narrowing or at least reorientation of ‘parties’ and of partisan engagement—provides rich terrain in which to re-examine what it means for a work of literature to engage with ‘politics’ or to evade that engagement.12 In attending to authors who ostensibly 10 ‘Each year,’ David Mazella has observed, ‘we seem to progress toward ever-greater degrees of cynicism, disbelief, or disenchantment.’ As Raymond Williams argued about the disappearance of ‘the country’, the tendency to believe we are ever more cynical may be traced back decades, if not centuries (with the appeal of refreshing escape to the ‘country’ providing, I will suggest, an important barometer for this concern). David Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 1; Raymond William, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, [1973] 1975). 11 Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11, 16. 12 For seminal approaches to Romantic literature that approach politics—typically the evasion and erasure of class-based politics—through ideology critique, see, inter alia, John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems:

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eschewed political engagement, we place added pressure on these questions. By emphasizing the misalignment between writers and available political roles, as well as their estrangement from politics more widely, that is to say, we open up other ways of thinking about the ‘politics’ of literature (a notion whose various complexities this Introduction will unpack further). Johnson’s and Byron’s disaffected removes from politics, like those of all the writers considered here, did not amount either to a straightforward retreat from the political arena or the pursuit of an idealized alternative: whether the harmonized collective feeling associated with the rise of ‘sensibility’ or the ‘party of humanity’ discussed by Blakey Vermeule in her elegant study of that title.13 By taking estrangement not as a terminus or badge of failure but as a starting point for rethinking possible relationships with politics, we bring to light the alternative political orientations latent within stances of apparent disengagement, even as the outcome is unlikely to be a politics we ourselves want to get behind or believe in. While we might not want to look to the writers I examine here, that is to say, as guides either to buried political possibilities within this period or to the ways that estrangement might open up new political vistas, we can look to their works as sites at which the relationship between disaffection and the parties of politics becomes productively confused—giving rise to new ways of looking at politics or beyond its frustrations altogether. The experience of disconnection from politics has been of particular concern recently, especially as this bears on questions of personal and public feeling. Critics and activists have described the ‘political depression’ that might result from ‘the sense that customary forms of political response’, including forms of direct action and critical analysis that move outside conventional channels, ‘are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better’.14 Even the feelings of repudiation associated with detaching from politics, Lauren Berlant has noted, might maintain a binding force, serving to ‘confirm our attachment to the system and thereby confirm the system and the legitimacy of the affects that make one feel bound to it, even if the manifest content of the binding has the negative force of cynicism or the dark attenuation of political depression’.15 Disengagement from politics, including from available oppositional stances, has, at the same time, prompted Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Although I am concerned with a more delimited realm of ‘political’ activity, partisanship, and fine-grained changes in political mood, my discussion nonetheless builds upon the pioneering historical-materialist work of these earlier critics. This scholarship has had particularly fruitful implications for thinking about politics and aesthetics: see, for example, the discussions of Keats in Jerome  J.  McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 13 See James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 14 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1. 15 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 227.

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some thinkers to emphasize the alternative social and political possibilities made available by marginal, antagonistic, even avowedly hostile stances: those ‘recalcitrant or inassimilable elements’ that resist containment by state power and nationalist narratives of progress; uncooperative, ‘willful’, or otherwise critical attitudes; and more extreme calls for absolute withdrawal (or ‘subtraction’) from the field of established political activity.16 This book asks how these questions take on a new cast when we look to a period in which politics was not yet fixed into static (not to mention stagnant) partisan dynamics or constrained by rigid (not to mention morbid) governmental regimes. The authors addressed here draw our attention to a period in which the lines between political engagement and estrangement were often uncertain. In arguing for the significance of this dynamic political landscape to the making of English literature—and its potential relevance more widely to our thinking about politics—this book returns to view a period in which disaffected elements in the political margins jostled alongside, thereby becoming inextricable from, the changing parties of political activity. The authors and the wider political landscape addressed by this study contribute to an expanded prehistory for contemporary concerns with the growth in cynical and disaffected attitudes, then, but also seek to reformulate the relationships between estrangement and engagement, cynicism and critique.17 By calling attention to the alternative perspectives and reimagined parties that might coincide with political disaffection, this book thereby seeks to enrich accounts of the relationship between literature and politics and, in so doing, to infuse the recent disaffective turn, in critical practice and political life, with a greater sense of possibility. 16 David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 5. Lloyd’s powerful call to ‘trace an alternative cultural politics in the resources of recalcitrance’ (2) particularly informs my attention to Ireland. For willfulness and ‘subtraction’, see Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) and Alain Badiou, ‘We Need a Popular Discipline: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative’, Critical Inquiry 34 (2008). Anne-Lise François accounts for a ‘recessive action’ that dovetails with some of my concerns here in Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 17 Cynicism may describe an atmosphere of pervasive inertia and alienation: ‘a generalized feeling of discontent’ or tendency towards ‘moral nihilism’ that may, Louisa Shea notes, be considered a constituent element of modernity. The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 134. See also Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism; Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Timothy Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1997); Keiran Curran, Cynicism in Post-War British Culture: Ignorance, Dust and Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). With Mazella, Shea attends to an alternative literary history of cynicism bound up with the volatile legacies of the ancient Greek Cynics. I take up cynicism in these terms as a critical ‘attitude’ with respect to Byron in Chapter 6. Alex Woloch locates in the heyday of critical theory a lingua franca of ‘despair [. . .] bitter irony, disgust, disheartenment’ in tandem with political developments that ‘punctured the era with frustration, anger, and bewilderment’. Although this moment coincided with a sharp rightward turn in the United States and Britain, criticism and theory from this period, in a dark irony, ‘often seemed to avoid the painful political developments most close to home (even while ostensibly turning more politicized)’. Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), xii. Criticism insulated itself, that is to say, from a mounting array of presently  unfolding developments to be critical about—a situation that may no longer hold in our present  moment of heightened self-awareness about limited political efficacy and a turn against ‘critique’. See Critique and Postcritique, eds. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

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D I S A F F E C T I O N , P O L I T I C S , L I T E R AT U R E ‘Disaffection’ first acquired widespread political significance in the seventeenth century, during a fraught period in English history. Fears that ‘affection’ might be corrupted, imperilling established power, were of long standing, as Shakespeare’s plays repeatedly evidence. John Milton made reference to ‘disaffection’ in his published defences of divorce, where the term referred to a breach within the marital state—‘the unaccountable and secret reasons of disaffection between man and wife’—underscoring its association with an indeterminate zone of affiliation, obligation, and absent or inactive affection (an emphasis on alienated affection that persists within divorce law). Rachel Weil has shown that ‘disaffection’ acquired currency as a political designation during the mid-century period of civil war and regime change, when almost incessant conflict and shifting demands for allegiance placed a premium on being ‘well affected’ to the government (or at least appearing so). As Weil notes, the deployment of this term by the state became a means to construct the ‘disaffected’—together with ‘delinquents’ and other ‘malignants’—as threats to contain and groups to target.18 The early eighteenth century saw disaffection towards politics begin to take more familiar and anodyne guises, even as the attendant complaining and discontent remained bound up with questions of loyalty and allegiance. ‘Disaffected’ attitudes, ranging from violent antipathy to the post-1688 constitutional settlement and rejection of Britain’s newly imported Dutch ruler William III, down to hostility towards the political establishment and general grumbling about the present state of things, became increasingly familiar responses to political activity. While these disaffected elements were not, by and large, hostile to the government in the sense of organizing for its removal—with the exception of the ‘Jacobite’ supporters of the exiled James II and his son—the relative proximity of revolutionary upheaval made these currents of discontent inextricable from more thoroughgoing scepticism and even the prospects of more dramatic change. ‘I heartily wish you were what they call disaffected’, Jonathan Swift implored Alexander Pope in 1735, calling attention to his use of a resonant term still carrying the frisson of violent rebellion.19 The writers I address here were at greater historical distance from 1688, as well as varying levels of distance from the front lines of political activity. After 1789, they confronted an altogether new set of challenges to the establishment, associated with ‘Jacobin’ supporters of the French Revolution. Politics nonetheless continued, in many respects, to mean post-1688 politics, and the late seventeenth-century Revolution remained a continuing locus for ambivalence and agitation as well as more violent antagonism. When Swift had the wreckage of Gulliver’s first voyage and thus the first of his Travels commence on 5 November, the anniversary of William’s landing in Torbay 18 Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking About Allegiance in the English Civil War’, History Workshop Journal 61 (2006). Milton quoted in David Sigler, Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1753–1835 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 61 (emphasis added). 19 Quoted in Dustin Griffin, Swift and Pope: Satirists in Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131. I address both writers’ oscillation between radical rejection of the status quo and appeals to higher ideals in Chapter 1.

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and thus of the 1688 Revolution, he invoked these unsettled legacies (a precedent on which Sterne built in Tristram Shandy). That date would acquire newly heightened significance after the French Revolution, but that significance was also newly bifurcated. The year 1688 was invoked both by radicals as a precedent for events in France and, more pervasively, by an expansive counter-revolutionary movement as a bulwark against change: evidence that, in contrast with revolutionary explosions elsewhere, politics in England was fixed and settled. These overarching contexts, together with more localized sources of controversy and contention, frame the case studies examined in the subsequent chapters. Backing away here from the historical particulars will permit us to pose some wider questions about ‘disaffection’: as an attitude or orientation towards politics, as a more generalized stance or subject position, and in terms of how these may coincide at the level of literary form. As applied to the authors examined here, ‘disaffection’ signals partial detachment, often ambivalent or ambiguous, from political activity and discussion, which took shape in relation to a frequently uncertain and shifting political situation—and in proximity to diverse sources of unease and discontent. Disaffection also describes a more general condition whose contours, including in some of its familiar contemporary guises, prove surprisingly challenging to determine.20 Examining these complexities in some detail will help clarify why the relationship between different formulations of disaffection remained uncertain for the period examined by this study, in ways that might further enrich our appreciation for the divisions still animating current usage of the term. The first definition for ‘disaffection’ in the Oxford English Dictionary emphasizes emotional withdrawal bordering on antipathy: ‘Absence or alienation of affection or kindly feeling; dislike, hostility’. This break with or within affection need not necessarily signal a breakdown. As Martin F. Manalansan IV emphasizes, accounting for a scene of contemporary disaffection in such a way that helps bring out tensions animating the term, ‘disaffection’ need not represent an affective impasse or emotional dead end but might instead present a ‘crossroads’ at which the possibilities of movement or moving on—despite appearing ‘unmoved’—become apparent.21 The political context brings this crossroads into relief. As a response to politics and political activity, 20 In what follows, I discuss the first two parts of the definition for ‘disaffection’ from Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (1989). Rather than making a claim for a stable disaffected stance (or attendant affective subject), I am concerned with the tensions that continue to animate various usages of the term and that Martin  F.  Manalansan IV, for example, exploits in characterizing one contemporary site of ‘disaffection’ as ‘emotional distance, alienation, antipathy, and isolation’ and in making the term synonymous with ‘indifference’ while also the site for prospective resistance or recalcitrance. As Manalansan’s inclusion of ‘antipathy’ in his characterization of the impassive disaffected stance and his allusion elsewhere to militancy suggest, moreover, ‘disaffection’ may always have a latent combative streak. See ‘Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life’, in Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication, eds. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds (New York: Routledge, 2010). The recently updated definitions for ‘disaffection’ in Oxford English Dictionary, third edition (2017) begin to expand the term’s range of applications in a manner consistent with my concerns here to include ‘[a]lienation from or dissatisfaction with an authority, government, system of organization’ (or ‘a feeling of dissatisfaction or alienation’ more generally) and ‘disenchantment or discontent with the status quo’ as well as specific acts of rebellion, demonstration, complaint, and grievance. 21 See Manalansan, ‘Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life.’

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disaffection in the sense of becoming apathetic, indifferent, checked-out, or cynical has become close to a familiar—even normative—response to political activity. The term obviously has a further meaning, or parallel application, to aggression, or rebellion, by guerrilla forces or marginal populations. Where the former ‘disaffected’ stance appears to foreclose the potential for political action altogether, ‘disaffection’ in this sense appears only as action (as with the violence associated with the French Revolution, especially after the 1798 uprising in Ireland). The use of the term to describe aggression towards established power becomes more audible in the second Oxford English Dictionary definition: ‘Political alienation or discontent; a spirit of disloyalty to the government or existing authority.’ While the inclusion of ‘hostility’ in the previous definition similarly establishes points of connection with outright rebellion, that presumptively individualized condition, characterized by the withdrawal—or withholding—of positive feeling, remains without clear content. Where the latter definition points directly to the barricades, the withdrawal of emotion or antipathy of the former definition provides only a ghostly echo of its violent, collectivist manifestations. ‘Disaffection’ thus points in several apparently distinct directions, its respective sides only connected in their estrangement (or ‘alienation’) from the established channels of political activity and expression. This book, while attuned to prospectively violent challenges to the state, remains most concerned with the volatile relationship between the opposing faces of the term. These respective definitions, whether taken separately or together, raise complicated questions in their own right, leaving unsettled as they do the affective contours of the disaffected stance, its individual or collective basis, and its relationship to action. Does the ‘[a]bsence or alienation of affection or kindly feeling’ imply only the withdrawal of feeling, or might this alienated stance have positive affective contours of its own? How does this absence in turn relate to negative, even vehement feelings of ‘dislike, hostility’? This equivocation also appears in the second, explicitly ‘political’ definition, which might appear to promise active, critical engagement but has an emphasis on alienation and estrangement that equallys suggest the repudiation of action (with antipathy towards ‘the government or existing authority’ surfacing only by way of a diffuse ‘spirit of disloyalty’). In putting these accounts side by side, moreover, we are left with the further question of how they fit together. The ‘[a]bsence of [. . .] feeling’ in the former definition would seem to describe experience at an individual level, the discontented ‘spirit’ of the latter indicating the prospects of larger-scale shifts in a polity. What might ‘disaffection’, described as the deficit or disconnect of ‘kindly feeling’, have to do with political disaffection, understood as a broad-based mobilization away from support for existing governing structures? Might even supposedly loyal or non-political stances become infiltrated with disaffected, oppositional elements? And how might individual and collective conditions fit together, other than through their respective abandonment of ‘politics’ in its given forms? The relationship between differing guises of disaffection became uniquely volatile in the period examined by this study. Expressions of indifference towards politics reflected a creeping sense that change was not possible, at least within the established channels (or in any case, not likely). Disaffection from established political

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structures might, in principle, lead into engagement in revolutionary, rebellious movements, outside established guises of political activity. Yet aside from the rare eventuality in which disengagement from established forms looped back into engagement through others, the respective faces of the ‘disaffection’ encountered in the Romantic age (as exemplified by Byron, whose estrangement even from emergent revolutionary causes left him disaffected with his own disaffection) had few points of contact beyond their shared distance from available parties. Amidst more confused periods of brewing political unrest and widespread discontents, however, these responses appeared in a different light. The earlier decades of the period addressed by this book were one such period, as this Introduction will go on to discuss in greater detail. During this complex transitional period, in which the parameters of political activity and the contours of estrangement from or antipathy towards politics remained unclear, authors found themselves implicated with rebellious, unstable, incendiary, or simply unpredictable elements of the wider body politic. Even the embrace of avowedly loyal or ostensibly disengaged stances could not insulate authors from unassimilated elements and wayward impulses that hovered at the political margins. These elements were not simply external to established parliamentary political channels. They came together, during a moment when political structures and identities were under challenge, from both within and without, with the established political parties in unpredictable, unprecedented ways. Matters were further transformed, but also to some degree contained, after 1789 with the onset of a further ‘revolutionary’ age. This book thus makes the gambit signalled in its title. By returning to view the interplay between the various and shifting parties of political activity and dissatisfied or simply disengaged stances towards the established political system, this book asks how these might finally connect up with each other. Neither in a stable relationship with (themselves often unstable) parties nor able to stand fully outside the shifting ‘political’ arena, authors remained at a volatile remove from political activity. We need not make appeals to an obscured political purpose or lost potential for political involvement on their part to recognize that the political significance of their writings cannot be fully stabilized. In asking how writers, despite their various kinds of disinterest towards the political arena, came close to disaffected parties at its margins, we may thereby revise some of the ways that we think about political estrangement generally. The fraught site of reconnection with politics adumbrated in the works examined here, in which disengagement from some channels for political activity led into potential re-engagement through others, allows us at any rate to break down a fixed or stable opposition between literature and the political arena. That this distinction remained fluid, at least for the earlier part of this period, can be seen from Explanatory Remarks, the pamphlet alluded to above that introduced the unlikely hero of Laurence Sterne’s infamous comic novel into a contemporary coffee-house, which discerned a latently political agitation in Tristram Shandy that has been lost to subsequent readers and critics approaching Sterne’s works through the lens of his sentimental reputation. This agitation might be said to infiltrate all of these writings, even in the cases of authors whose political commitments impelled them to support and uphold the authority of the state.

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The works examined here accordingly reveal some of the abiding ways that the ‘literary’ entails an uncertain or unsettled relationship with the ‘political’ (and perhaps even an enabling one). They also permit us to reflect more widely, in ways that have no necessary bearing on politics, on what we might call a literature of disaffection. The familiar account of Jane Austen as an author who disappears completely into her works—and whose works detach themselves altogether from the vicissitudes of their age—has given way to both sensitive and polemical discussions (even, in some cases, both at the same time) of her fiction’s political investments. Anne-Lise François has addressed the similarly challenging question of how we may account for Austen’s withdrawal without erasing her own authorship or the relationship of her novels with the world they describe.22 Disaffection closely resembles familiar ways of conceptualizing aesthetic and literary form, but it also makes room, in this way, for complex stances of emotional withdrawal and critical reflection. As Alex Woloch has illuminatingly written, the experience of encountering politics for the first time may itself be ‘strangely intertwined with rejection and withdrawal [. . .] shot through with bitterness [. . . as] the affirmation implicit in reasoning itself is resolved in other terms altogether: turning away, daydreaming or abstraction, casting down eyes, cultivating various forms of detachment or retreat’.23 Woloch’s concern in his study of George Orwell with writing’s ‘(tenuous) detachment from, and thus opposition to, the world it represents’24 comprises a powerful meditation on how writing engages with politics, to the point of direct convergence, on one side, or disappointed failure, on the other. We may adopt this emphasis on tenuousness and indeterminacy here to draw a distinction with literary works and authorial stances defined by their a priori detachment. The ‘dis-’ prefix proves crucial here, in articulating a continuing hinge-point rather than constitutive apartness or absolute negation. The ‘dis-’ that continues to bind disaffection with feeling can in turn be differentiated from disinterested spectatorship and related appeals to ‘disinterest’. Adam Smith’s influential formulation of the ‘impartial’ spectator, like the general point of view articulated by David Hume, pointed to the standardization of aesthetic response. For Immanuel Kant, ‘disinterest’ could characterize a faculty of aesthetic contemplation with no bearing on questions of interest, purpose, or emotional investment: whose ‘optics’, to use a word favoured by Byron, have nothing to do with other ways of seeing.25 As various commentators 22 See the discussion of Mansfield Park in Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. ‘What has attracted generations of comfortable English matrons, clergymen, antiquarians—in general, those retired from public life’ to Austen’s novels, one critic has observed, ‘is more than a set of religious, social, or political values. Her appeal is to the need for retirement itself [. . . and she maintains] the illusion that nothing is happening in the rest of the world—that nothing can happen in the world to change things very much.’ Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), first emphasis added. 23 Alex Woloch, Or Orwell, x. 24 Or Orwell, 257. 25 In both Kant and Byron those aesthetic orientations coincided in complex ways with their detached, partially removed spectatorship of politics and history. As Surya Parekh reminds me, ‘disinterest’ also characterizes Kant’s embrace of a partial remove, at once proximate to and at a distance from historical events: the ‘disinterested’ spectator capable of looking beyond matters of immediate interest to take an interest in the future of humanity, from a situated historical vantage point. In ‘An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’ Kant reflected upon the

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have shown, this account of the Kantian aesthetic, building upon a foundation in moral sense philosophy, nonetheless remains animated by questions of feeling and opens back in turn onto political and social considerations. Jacques Derrida, for one, saw ‘auto-affective’ appeals to reflective judgement as inevitably divided against themselves by supplemental commitments. Even ‘disinterest’ becomes expropriated by outside investments on Derrida’s reading, to become a ‘dis-interest’ taken over by interests of and for the other—reintroducing the ‘interest’ suppressed or otherwise finessed into generality by Kant, Smith, and Hume.26 The affective surpluses and displaced investments that intervene within even the most programmatic appeals to aesthetic autonomy thus break down putative divisions between alienation and affect and similarly confuse the distinctions between disinterest and disaffection. Disinterest, understood in these terms as animated by displaced commitments and even by wayward affective investments, thus belies appeals to aesthetic autonomy from the outset. Rather than collapsing artistic production back into interested, affectively charged, and politically invested discussion, however, we may continue to emphasize its removal and even identify disinterest as an ideal to which disaffected responses to politics might aspire. Asking how close disaffection might come, that is to say, to the emptying out of specific attachments and investments—to which appeals to disinterest, however suspiciously or unsuccessfully, aspire—provides one means of asking how literature might become a means to step outside politics altogether. This book’s concluding discussion of Byron tests this claim, in asking how the unimpeded ‘optics’ (contrasted explicitly with worldly ‘opinions’) that Byron claimed to have adopted in his Vision of Judgment coincided with his claims to have detached himself from England, personally and politically, affectively and ethically: a retreat he identified with a ‘clearer’ atmosphere and with feeling like the dead. In allowing these terms to complicate one another, we may, at a more downto-earth level, view disinterest as a limit-case of disaffection, a means of asking how far the affective alienation associated with the latter term might carry us towards aspirational detachment. This conjunction, in turn, brings out the proximity of disinterest and disaffection to a wider spectrum of terms—indifference, disillusionment, discontent, dissatisfaction—with similarly valuable implications for thinking about the status of literary form and the diverse affective and social-political currents animating appeals to aesthetic or philosophical detachment. Taken to its  furthest extreme, dissatisfaction with the status quo might occasion outright prospect of human progress but recognized that ‘we are not capable of placing ourselves in [. . .] the standpoint of Providence which is situated beyond all human wisdom [. . .] because, in the final analysis, the human being requires coherency according to natural laws, but with respect to his future free actions he must dispense with this guidance or direction.’ Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 300. I take up related questions with respect to Byron’s pursuit—through a stance similarly detached from England’s very different public sphere and political culture—of a progressive, ‘Whig’ point of view. See the discussion of his ‘optics’ in The Vision of Judgment in Chapter 6. 26 See Sean Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest (London: Continuum, 2005). Gaston identifies expropriation in an early use of ‘disinterest’ by Francis Bacon and notes that the notion of being divested of something internalized (or private) by an outside force also informed Thomas Hobbes’s use of the term.

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rejection of the given world. Yet the grumbling, irritability, affective saturation, and absence of feeling altogether associated with feeling ‘sick’ of politics might equally contribute to a sense of malaise and dis-ease with more equivocal and suggestive implications.27 ‘Disaffection’ as I discuss the term here nonetheless remains immanent to a field of political communication: closer to what writers did in coffee-houses (and what academics do on Facebook) than the wider horizons at which they otherwise strained. Aside from its bearing on more abstract concerns with estrangement and a priori detachment, the term belongs, at the same time, to a rich lexical field including such terms as discontent, dissatisfaction, dissension, and dissent. The use of ‘Dissent’ as a name for nonconforming religious practice (nomenclature that associated those various constituencies with incipient disloyalty and suspected rebellion) exemplifies the continuing proximity of the case studies presented here to this historically operative field of political debate and the responses, from grumbling dissatisfaction to more incendiary demands, to which this gave rise.28 Disaffection accordingly functions in this book, beyond these more speculative questions about emotional withdrawal and aesthetic autonomy, to capture the ways authors remained in some proximity to politics; this term also belongs to a broader vocabulary for characterizing day-to-day political unrest. Rather than turning up evidence of a single emotional tone or (dis)affective stance, then, excavating disaffected responses, particularly in light of the complexities that attend even abstracted discussions of the term—which wavers between the absence of positive feeling or the presence of antipathy, the emptying out of affect, equivalent to the stripping away of attachment and interest, or a more complex act of dispossession and divestment, which creates the opening for new kinds of commitment—ultimately reveals that their political valences cannot easily be stabilized. The ‘withdrawal in  disgust’, which Woloch sees veering dangerously ‘close to apathy’ in modern contexts,29 remained in the mix for the period considered here, simply put, with an array of impulses. That is not to suggest that efforts at withdrawal, emboldened by aesthetic form, were not possible. The chapters that follow become progressively more interested in asking how far and to what ends works of literature might step outside from politics, society, and the world as such. Yet as those discussions and 27 Rather than rejection of the given, dissatisfaction hereby creates space for what Rei Terada terms a ‘counter-aesthetics’ that attends to responses that are ‘not nothing’ perceptually or, perhaps, politically. Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For a nuanced discussion of the alternative relational and affective possibilities organized by ‘sickness’, see Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary  U.S.  Fiction: Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 28 ‘Dissent’ had its ‘legislative inception’ in the 1662 Act of Uniformity. The association of this term with opposition, if only to secular morality and the established church, thus remained baked into this identity. See Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7–8. As White notes, the association of Dissent with reformist causes throughout the later eighteenth century—from ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ and American independence to support for the French Revolution and abolition of the slave trade—contributed to the ‘broad association of Dissent with political dissidence’ that ‘could all too easily be branded sedition’ amidst the ‘heated atmosphere’ of the early 1790s (9–10). 29 Woloch, Or Orwell, x.

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their growing focus on literary form emphasize, even the most crystalline disaffected stances and lofty removes took shape in response to the discontents of a given moment: a fact underscored as much by the repeated contemporary variations on the title of Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents as by the continuing use of ‘discontents’ to translate Freud’s epochal study. I N S TA B I L I T Y, C R I S I S , R E VO LU T I O N The period addressed by this book was characterized by a pervasive ‘sense of instability’ and impending crisis.30 In the years that led up to the Declaration of Independence, revolution appeared at least as likely, if not more likely, within Britain as in the American colonies. A seemingly endless litany of destabilizing events—the 1763 Cider Excise protests, the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ movement, the colonial crisis and American War, the 1780 Gordon Riots, the 1783 India Bill and ensuing constitutional crisis, the repeated dissolution of government ministries— collided with an explosion of political discussion. Equally crucial were newly emergent guises of extra-parliamentary political activity, in particular those associated with the opposition movement around populist figurehead John Wilkes, which both helped create and capitalized upon the ferment of the 1760s and ’70s. These various developments contributed to an ongoing sense of unrest and the prospect of dramatic, even revolutionary transformations.31 Political upheaval in this period also coincided with wider challenges to social organization (not least those focalized by the spectacles of fashionable ‘macaroni’, Anglo-Indian ‘nabobs’, and oversized women’s wigs). These changes to both domestic politics and national society were inextricable from Britain’s shifting imperial role. The social developments that took 30 The general sense of tumult, dislocation, and confusion in the later eighteenth century, Paul Langford notes, created an ‘almost permanent sense of instability and crisis’ within England and the repeated expectation of change. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 331. See also O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis. 31 Abolition was an especially notable way that the constituencies, tactics, and targets associated with political activity in England were changed during this period. For the coalescence of the abolition movement during the 1780s and its setbacks in the 1790s (partially in reaction to the Haitian Revolution), see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York: Mariner, 2006). I discuss the tension between James Boswell’s pro-slavery views and his sentimental Tory authoritarianism (which proved far more compatible with Britain’s burgeoning Indian Empire) in Chapter 3. With some notable exceptions, the exclusion of slaves from political recognition and social belonging places them at a further remove from the marginal, estranged domain that concerns this book. Sterne, Johnson, and Byron included flashes of anti-slavery sentiment in their writings and Sterne had a brief correspondence with Ignatius Sancho, while Johnson’s Jamaican-born servant Francis Barber maintained a prominent role in his household and worked on his dictionary. See ‘ “The House of Bondage”: Sentimentalism and the Problem of Slavery’, chap. 2 in Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); ‘Byronic Abolitionism’, chap.  8 in Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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shape alongside these interrelated changes to the domestic polity and Britain’s burgeoning global Empire have attracted rich discussion.32 Harriet Guest has shown how women employed their marginal public role to create alternative spaces to the side of politics, as the ‘small change’ that jostled around a political world still organized around individual men.33 Gillian Russell has unfolded the ways that fashionable sociability centred around women galvanized attention in its own right as an alternative to the male-dominated realms of the theatre and the traditional ‘public sphere’.34 Daniel O’Quinn has attended in fine-grained detail to the symbiosis between theatrical and political culture in their engagement with the Indian Empire and American crisis, with particular attention to the implications for patrician governance and conceptions of the wider social body.35 These discussions provide counterpoints for this book’s concerns with politics in a narrower sense and with a more tightly delimited realm of literary authorship. Although this book is not concerned with the theatre, my discussion in Chapter 1 of a disturbance at Drury Lane—in which the 1770 performance of a sentimental comedy became a proxy war for factions of audience members over the ‘political’ status of authorship— builds on critical accountings of how theatrical spaces figured social anxieties and emergent fractures within the body politic. This book similarly builds upon attention to how ‘Bluestockings’, debating societies, and feminized sociability created new public opportunities and political openings for women during this period (and remains cognizant of the ways that male literary authority was built in part upon the suppression of these female voices).36 Women writers have a central role in the account of authorship developed in this book: not despite their political marginality but as its result. The equivocation and distance that their gender built into their relationship with politics made women authors not outliers, for my purposes here, but exemplary of the marginal, interstitial realm occupied by literary authorship more widely. Austen and Edgeworth occupied a different space to their more visible female counterparts, in particular those precursors and contemporaries who helped expand and reimagine what counted as politics and the limits of the ‘political’ arena. While concurring with Guest that women were ‘not necessarily at 32 For the transformation of the British Empire in this period, see C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Sudipta Sen, A Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London: Routledge, 2002); James M. Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 33 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 34 Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 35 Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Entertaining Crisis. 36 For the role that the suppression (and derision) of women played in establishing the standing of Sterne and Johnson as authors, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and ‘Boswell’s Treatment of Johnson’s Temper: “A Warm West-Indian Climate” ’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 14 (1974).

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a remove’ from political discussion, I also emphasize the ironic centrality of certain women authors to a realm defined by its exclusions, both willed and otherwise, from political engagement.37 This book builds, more widely, upon critical attention to the social dynamism of the later eighteenth century, calling attention to the political uncertainty of the pre-1789 decades (and even, to some degree, their political fluidity). Russell’s powerful argument that the unprecedented significance given to the status of women early in the reign of George III has fallen out of our histories of the wider period, while not directly relevant to my own discussion of these decades, thus finds a close parallel in my own emphasis on the neglected political unrest of this same period.38 This study takes further orientation in this regard from Marilyn Butler, whose seminal study Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries expanded the purview of literary criticism concerned with political upheaval to the decades preceding the  French Revolution.39 This book, adopting Butler’s time frame, follows her study in approaching this extended period, since dubbed the ‘long’ Romantic age, as one of continuing unrest. Drawing upon the wider Atlantic and global perspectives emphasized in recent scholarship, I combine an emphasis on these earlier decades with attention to the global ‘age of revolutions’: an extended period of conflict and political restructuring in and beyond the European Atlantic world.40 Attending to this temporally and geographically expanded revolutionary age helps further situate and thereby decentre the French Revolution. The year 1789 has been understood, particularly within literary studies, as marking a decisive break. The outbreak of revolution in Europe unleashed wildly original ways of thinking about politics and society and, in the coming decades, transformed conceptions of the body politic and wholly new ideas about ‘society’ (not to mention new horizons for 37 Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). My approach here thus builds upon but also diverges from the important angles on these questions in Guest’s invaluable study and its precursor Small Change, which  demonstrate the importance of privatized, feminized feeling to national political cohesion and  the ways the language of sensibility uniquely equipped women writers to traverse public and private spheres. 38 Edgeworth and Austen, Russell proposes, were ‘haunted by the complicated allure of the woman of fashion’ and thus by their belatedness to the ‘revolution’ of sociability that her study identifies in this earlier period. See Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London, 230. Clifford Siskin discusses the forgetting of earlier histories of female authorship in The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 39 See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), especially chap.  1 ‘The Arts in an Age of Revolution: 1760–1790’. For a literary-critical approach to political writings from these decades that precedes Butler’s study, see James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge, 1963). 40 Emma Rothschild proposes that the ‘ “age of revolutions” began in the 1740s, in contemporary descriptions, and lasted until the 1790s’; she identifies the overthrow of Mughal power in Bengal between 1757 and 1765 and subsequent upheaval in the Americas as initiating the second, lengthier phase of this unified period of global conflict. See The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1–14, 311n.6. Although this study overlaps with the more typical account of the ‘age of revolutions’—encompassing the Seven Years’ War and American Revolution through to the 1790s and their fallout in and beyond Europe—I attend to the period surrounding the fall of Walpole in the 1740s and its broad-reaching social and political-economic transformations in Chapter 1.

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individual freedoms and collective ‘liberty’) took hold within Britain, in tandem with wider governmental shifts. Aside from the question of whether and how we can meaningfully speak of a Romantic movement within Britain—Butler, for one, was sceptical—the French Revolution has come to stand for a perception that literary production was newly conditioned by political ferment and excitement. Yet this prevailing assumption proves misguided, this book proposes, in two related ways. In the first place, Britain witnessed a dramatic counter-revolutionary turn during the Romantic age: the prevailing political atmosphere from the 1790s onwards in Britain was not so much revolutionary as, in Butler’s term, reactionary.41 Second, scholarly preoccupations with the actual and perceived proliferation of radical activity in Britain and the heightened political temperature more widely—while valuably opening up attention to the myriad ways that the French Revolution ‘politicized’ everything, from the contents of private conversations to wayward sexuality— have risked obscuring the political turbulence within Britain during the directly preceding decades. Aside from its social ferment and geopolitical realignment, the political discontent of the 1760–90 period—presciently termed an ‘Age of Revolution’ by Butler—was, in important respects, far more widespread than after the fall of the Bastille. Although their consequences, at least within Britain, have been viewed as ephemeral, the events of the 1760s through the 1780s sowed the seeds for radical political possibilities, in parallel with the revolution in sociability that Russell and others have identified with the same period. These radical possibilities were partially realized, with the turn of the nineteenth century, by the ensuing push towards Reform. Yet the French Revolution also had a dampening effect on these earlier political energies, whose more radical potential was in part contained—and even, as I suggest in the Conclusion, deliberately suppressed from the historical record.42 This book accordingly adopts a diagonal approach to the Romantic age, displacing the centrality of the French Revolution to attend to a broader array of developments both within and beyond the preceding decades. It thus emphasizes the neglected importance of the politically inchoate pre-1789 period for thinking about the relationship between literary production and political unrest. The 1760s and ’70s witnessed wholesale challenges to the established political system. Taking place within a global context, those developments in turn had international implications. The discontents given voice by a dynamic transatlantic opposition movement associated with Wilkes bore fruit, among other places, in the creation of the United 41 Revolutionary energies and political reaction were in many ways inseparable, transmuted back and forth into each other. For an eloquent discussion of the political atmosphere following the French Revolution, which remains attuned to its pitfalls as a guide to the actual threat of revolutionary activity, see Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism. The fears, in the wake of 1789, that the violence unleashed overseas amidst transformations of existing power regimes might take root nearer home were reinforced by continual revelations of brewing plots—both real and imagined—and given further fuel by repressive government responses, as the paranoid atmosphere of the period created the ‘sense that everything had suddenly been or could suddenly become politicized’ (4, 14). 42 Robert  E.  Zegger, for example, identifies the ‘rampant discontent’ of the 1760–90 period as both antecedent and point of origin for early nineteenth-century radicalism in John Cam Hobhouse: A Political Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 9, 6–23.

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States of America. As Pauline Maier noted, ‘disillusionment’ in America with the perceived defeat of radical possibilities in Britain between 1768 and 1770 directly fuelled the revolutionary cause.43 Within Britain, these burgeoning discontents collided with ‘micropolitical’ developments, including sudden and dramatic changes of ministry.44 By unseating the radical response to the French Revolution from its crowning role in discussions of political unrest over this wider period, we return to view a wider array of challenges to existing political structures (and a wider array of ‘parties’). Democracy, moreover, did not begin in 1789. Although stories about Reform often begin with Tom Paine and Jeremy Bentham, parliamentary reforms and more radical shake-ups were discussed throughout the 1760–1830 period and took shape amidst constitutional debates with their own deep histories. For well over half a century before the Reform Act of 1832, debates about parliamentary representation and reforms to the profoundly undemocratic constitution and electoral system had rumbled (and also, at times violently, erupted). Although widespread participation for the poor and working classes would not come until Paine’s Rights of Man, demands for political reforms, including for more regular parliaments and an expanded franchise, together with myriad political clubs, societies, and diverse forums for extra-parliamentary organization and agitation were all in operation before 1788.45 These developments had their own precursors, which themselves built upon precedents dating back to the later seventeenth century.46 43 ‘John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain’, William and Mary Quarterly 20 (1963). Gordon S. Wood also notes the challenges to the ‘whole political system’ in the 1760s and ’70s and their significance to the brewing conflict in the American colonies in The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 21. Steve Pincus has recently located the upheaval in Britain and America during the decades preceding the American Revolution within a shared ‘British imperial political culture’ and amidst larger currents of transimperial discontent. See The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 17, 68–79. 44 Compare Nathan K. Hensley, whose account of developing literary forms similarly ‘touch[es] on micropolitical debates within the British parliamentary system’, in tandem with wider governmental and conceptual shifts. See Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8. 45 See George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983); Ian  R.  Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760–1785 (London: Macmillan, 1962); Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 547–8, 713; R. J. White, The Age of George III (New York: Anchor, 1969), 133. James A. Epstein has emphasized the continuing significance, even after Paine’s Rights of Man, of ‘popular constitutionalism’, including the ‘continued vigor of arguments that base political and social claims on historical precedent and the predominance of closely related strategies of constitutionalist action’. See Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 9. Compare E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 80–101. 46 During the decades directly preceding the start date of this study, England had witnessed an energized political culture in tandem with dramatic increases to the scale of political discussion. As Kathleen Wilson notes, in her seminal study of eighteenth-century political culture, the ‘vibrant, national and predominantly urban’ extra-parliamentary political activity of preceding decades was reined in after 1760 by the reintegration of the ruling class and sidelining of dissident politics (even as followers of John Wilkes, among others, helped keep radical possibilities alive). See The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For the scope of political activity and diversity of political debate in the decades following 1688, see especially Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain:

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None of this need suggest that we should replace the break represented by the French Revolution with a date from the preceding decades, which could itself be pushed further back into the eighteenth century (and even earlier still). The 1790s were, indeed, transformative: scholars have rightly devoted considerable attention to their unprecedented dimensions and complex aftermath, and in the chapters that follow I engage with their implications for thinking about questions including the ‘people,’ the press, sentiment, and ‘Dissent’. This book sets out, however, to supplement the French Revolution with attention to plural, overlapping sources of unrest and discontent, including more mundane varieties of disillusionment with and grumbling about ‘politics’ with much deeper histories. These ongoing challenges and contestation meant that political instability was, to some degree, the norm, rather than the exception, for much of the long eighteenth century.47 The French Revolution maintains its unique status as a source of political upheaval. Yet, ironically, this supposed watershed may be seen as having effected a reactionary turn—in concert with larger shifts in governmental control and affective regulation—that served to contain the teeming discontents of the recent decades and the uncertainty of the preceding century, at least as much as its events heightened the sense of ‘revolutionary’ possibility. This book, then, returns to view a fuller history of the political upheaval in and around the Romantic age and recovers a deeper history for the increasing sense of discontent with ‘politics’ as such. It aims in doing so to advance richer ways of thinking about the relationship between politics and literary authorship. Butler again proves an invaluable guide in this undertaking. The discussion in Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries of the ‘pervasive mood of rejection of current society’ during the later eighteenth century helps to establish an alternative baseline for the politics of literary authorship during this period: one of unease and unrest, not acquiescence to authority and political stability.48 In addition to locating literary production in the pre-1789 decades in closer proximity to political unrest, these remarks point to specific ways of thinking about the status of the literary. Butler herself echoed and amplified these observations in a contemporary study in which Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The demands of the ‘Association’ movement of the early 1780s—which included calls for a return to triennial parliaments and the prospect of annual elections—looked back to debates surrounding the opposition to extending the duration between parliaments to seven years in the early eighteenth century. As Knights notes, those voting in 1715 amounted to ‘almost 20 per cent of the adult male population—a higher percentage than after the 1832 Reform Act’ (12). 47 This book thus builds upon continuing historiographical challenges to the premise that the eighteenth century, following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, was an ‘age of stability’: compare J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967). Plumb’s assertion that ‘[b]y the middle 1720s the English political system had begun to assume the air not only of stability but also of historical inevitability; it had become a child of Time and of Providence, an object of veneration, the Burkeian fantasy, and a halo of glory was forming about those muddled, incoherent events of 1688, events that had so very nearly spelt anarchy and ruin to the English nation’ (16) has faced increasing challenge; belief in providential design (as opposed to ‘muddl[e]’) behind the events of 1688 was already seen as fractured, I have suggested elsewhere, by Laurence Sterne: see my ‘Arbitrary Government: Tristram Shandy and the Crisis of Whig History’, ELH 81 (2014), 611n.51. 48 Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 22.

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she astutely noted that the ‘most consistent feature of eighteenth-century literature’ was ‘its alienation from power, its oppositional bias, its search for alternatives to the status quo’.49 Unavailable for three decades, the recently published study that features these arresting remarks recovered a distinctive oppositional strain in works by eighteenth-century writers including James Thomson and William Collins. In their efforts to excavate England’s mythological past, Butler demonstrated, these writers sought to preserve and revivify the ‘Patriot’ tradition of virtuous resistance (associated with the ‘country’ in an earlier, specifically partisan sense). That ‘Patriot’ tradition in turn had vigorous afterlives, including in the arguments that shaped the American Revolution.50 This book follows Butler, as I have noted, in situating the imaginative outpouring following the French Revolution alongside the unrest of preceding decades. We would similarly do well, I have also proposed, to keep the  ongoing constitutional debates and radical energies that had circled around politics throughout the eighteenth century in view when approaching the long Romantic age. This book calls for renewed attention in particular not only to the epoch-shaping role of the 1688 Revolution but also to its ongoing contestation (including, but not limited to, conservative and ‘Jacobite’ challenges to the legitimacy of the resulting constitutional settlement).51 Appeals to the radical, or merely unresolved, legacies of 1688, together with appeals to an enduring ‘Patriot’ opposition, intersected with the broader challenges to the status quo that Butler saw infusing literary production throughout the eighteenth century, particularly its later decades. Looking beyond the French Revolution to the diverse ways in which the fundamentals of politics were contested, both throughout the preceding century and with particular urgency in the decades preceding the fall of the Bastille, we may locate the continuing political discontents addressed in this book against other horizons than outright (violent) rebellion, revolutionary breaks in time, or apocalyptic transformation, calling attention instead to the inchoate political agitation that may exist in the absence of sweeping reforms or widespread challenges to things as they are.52 49 See Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 10. This study was completed in 1984, making it contemporary with Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, but first published in this posthumous edition. 50 In The Heart of the Declaration, Steve Pincus argues for a coherent ‘Patriot’ ideology, which endured from the early eighteenth century, both in Britain and in the American colonies. 51 Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) has been central in resuscitating the importance of the debates associated with the Revolution. In Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Anthony Jarrells draws upon the now discredited—yet increasingly current by the early nineteenth century—account of 1688–9 as a non-violent transition to argue that the Romantic period witnessed a similarly benign transition wherein literature rose in place of the people. For challenges to the nonviolent accounts of the Revolution, which suggest that its violence rivalled that of the French Revolution and that less controversially emphasize the bloodshed in Ireland, see Pincus, 1688 and Tim Harris, The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Penguin, 2007). 52 For apocalypticism in the Romantic period, see especially Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) and Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For the conjuncture between militant apocalypticism and political radicalism, which remained in proximity both to generalized discussion of politics and to

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L I T E R AT U R E O N T H E S H O R E S O F P O L I T I C S Butler’s characteristically acute insight about the alienated, oppositional bent of eighteenth-century writers captures an important truth about the evolving status of the literary on which this book seeks to build by posing still-broader questions about the relationship between literature and politics. Literature may occupy various removes from politics, from the Horatian retreat presented by the country to the safely insulated spaces of domesticity—tendencies that converge in Sterne’s dedication to Tristram Shandy, written from a ‘retired thatch’d house’ and inviting prime minister William Pitt to retreat with his book to ‘the country’.53 By contrast, authors may keep their political commitments front and centre, upholding partisan agendas and ideological principles alongside and even directly through their writings. This book addresses a more diverse group of writers than Butler’s account of Patriot poets, including Whigs and Tories, men and women, writers born in the early eighteenth century and others with long Victorian afterlives. These writers nonetheless stood, like Butler’s poets, in between the respective extremes of withdrawal or engagement. Their estrangement, to be distinguished from total disengagement, kept them at a partial and provisional remove from the political arena; at the same time, their writing largely kept them at a distance from political commitment, at least by way of established channels. This intermediary domain differs, if only in degree, from the extremes of disenchantment, contemptuous detachment, and outright rebellion reached by other writers between the Augustan and Romantic ages.54 This space of retirement might appear analogous to the pleasant ‘loop-holes of retreat’ from which William Cowper ‘peep[s]’ at the world in The Task: the domesticated, quasi-rural remove from which he can ‘behold / The tumult’ from a ‘safe distance’ and remain ‘still’.55 As a realm that provides compensation ‘enfranchised public opinion’ in the early nineteenth century, see, respectively, Jon Mee, ‘Apocalypse and Ambivalence: The Politics of Millenarianism in the 1790s’, South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996) and Kevin Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 135–40. 53 The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Vols. 1–3, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, eds. Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 1.[9]. Retreat to natural scenes acquired more programmatic significance in the Romantic age, apparent in John Thelwall’s reported observation to Samuel Taylor Coleridge that the Somerset countryside made one forget the need for treason and in the retirement imagined by Leigh Hunt and his circle, as luxuriated in by Keats. 54 I address Swift and Pope in Chapter  1. Disenchantment with the revolutionary cause by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other ‘apostates’ made them pointed targets for opprobrium but was also of a piece with a larger national trend. For the ways frustration with the ‘languishing parliamentary reform movement’ occasioned disenchantment in the radical press—and provided the wider context for the ‘bitter detachment’ increasingly apparent in William Hazlitt’s responses to Britain’s unreformed constitutional monarchy—see Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist, 289, 273. As Marilyn Butler notes, the ‘rebelliousness’ of the Romantics, consolidated by their Victorian-era reputations, was ‘outrageous and total, the individual rejecting not just his own society but the very principle of living in society [. . . T]he Romantic and post-Romantic often dismisses political activity of any kind, as external to the self, literal and commonplace.’ See Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 30. 55 William Cowper, The Task (London: 1817), 94. Christopher Reid adopts Cowper’s remarks on newspaper accounts of parliamentary debates as the title for his study of parliamentary speechmaking and the changing arenas of its reception. See Imprison’d Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House

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for marginalization within or outright exclusion from the political arena, this remove may similarly overlap with the ‘juxtapolitical citizenship’ that Lauren Berlant identifies with the binding force of sentimentalism.56 The middle ground foregrounded here nonetheless differs from those realms of muffled comfort or affective saturation. This book remains concerned instead with the ways that politics continued to attract the attentions and energies of writers, at times despite their conscious desires to the contrary, such that the ‘Indifference’ that Byron absorbed from his age, for example, appeared less as a pat response than an unknown quantity.57 Authors occupying the limited remove emphasized here, amidst the changing parameters of ‘political’ activity and discussion, could not help but become caught up, to some degree, in politics, their purported disinterest frequently betraying a  continuing interest, their apparent withdrawal papering over more conflicted and antagonistic, confused and indeterminate modes of political response—and engaging the ‘affections’ under erasure within ‘disaffection’, thus recalling the origins of the term as one for broken attachments, blocked sympathies, and more unpredictable conjunctures of action and feeling. This book accordingly locates literature at a complex remove from the evolving parties of political activity. To the degree that they are concerned with partisan alignment, the case studies of authors presented here emphasize how literary authorship may render questions of partisan identification and political allegiance uncertain, ambivalent, or indeterminate.58 By situating parliamentary politics amidst a wider field of political activity and discussion, this book argues for an expanded approach to political ‘parties’. Chapter 1 discusses in detail a 1770 visual print in which a version of a two-party system remains in the mix with myriad of Commons 1760–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Cowper’s combination of the poetry of sensibility with evangelical piety made him (in the words of biographer William Hayley) the ‘poet of affection’. Recent critics, including Tobias Menely, have emphasized Cowper’s politicized channelling of wayward currents of feeling. See The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Hayley quoted 147. 56 See Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), especially 160–7. 57 Kevis Goodman has similarly rerouted our understanding of ostensibly absent feeling in The Task. In her compelling discussion of the ambiguities attending Cowper’s ‘loop-hole’, Goodman argues that the ‘affective dissonance’ attending engagement with politics-at-a-distance in that poem— including the ‘indolent vacuity of thought’ that nestles alongside experiences of informational overload—betrays uncertainty, if not unease, about the potential for subjective access to the historicity of the present. See ‘Cowper’s Georgic of the News: The “Loophole” in the Retreat’, chap. 3 in Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 67–105. For a valuable account of ‘indifference’ as related to Jacques Rancière’s account of aesthetic indeterminacy, see Elizabeth Adan and Benjamin Bateman, ‘Emergent Precarities and Lateral Aesthetics: An Introduction’, Minnesota Review 85 (2015), 110. 58 For a seminal account of a writer’s ambivalent relationship to politics, see John Wallace, Destiny his Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). Valuable discussions of literature and partisanship during the first half of the eighteenth century, a period in which the complexity and multiplicity of partisan identities makes for particularly rich consideration of partisan alignment, include Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1976); Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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other elements (described in the caption beneath as ‘all ye different parties electrified’). We may simply note here that amidst the various demands and expectations summoned by this rather overwhelming image—in which familiar structures of parliamentary organization inhabit a teeming field of political activity and social change—its visualization of the political scene elicits, above all, a combination of exhaustion and incomprehension from the spectator. In contrast with studies that emphasize shifts in domesticity, public institutions, sociability, and wide-ranging governmental practices—or that make still wider gestures to the ‘political’ dimensions of sexual identities or ethical practices—this book remains squarely focused on politics in the narrower sense already outlined and, in particular, on the domain between political engagement and its margins: the liminal space in which much reading, writing, and, indeed, much of everything else takes place. This was nonetheless a period, as the ‘Political Electricity’ print suggests, in which established political structures became available, however fleetingly, to being reimagined—or even cast aside altogether. The wider ‘discontents’ of this period confronted political spectators, however erratically and intermittently, with the prospects for sudden change, as well as the continuing reinvention, or at least reconfiguration, of the available political parties. Writers thus witnessed politics becoming strange, even as they also marked their estrangement from political life. During a period of continuing uncertainty and widespread discontents, this book shows, variously estranged and distanced stances, disengaged and disaffected attitudes, gave rise to glimpses of alternative conduits for political life. The writings that channelled such perspectives even became the rallying points for other parties in their own right. Building upon this expanded account of politics and its discontents over this wider period, the case studies of works and authors presented in this book thus suggest a new approach to what a study of Jonathan Swift’s ‘Disaffection’—and the alternative, indeterminate picture of his partisanship that follows from the rebellious, even incendiary impulses in his writing—terms the ‘political character’ of literary authorship.59 Aside from revealing how writers remained in proximity to an evolving but also frustratingly, or reassuringly, unchangeable political system, the chapters that follow show how distanced, indifferent, conflicted, or simply confused relationships towards politics may emerge as those through which literature may, in an important sense, be most ‘political’. This need not imply that these writings were most political in the sense of meaningful engagement (whether or not that engagement would be a good thing), and writers in this estranged position were less clearly political than their more obviously partisan contemporaries. This book does not propose that disengagement comprises its own kind of politics, even as it recognizes that claims to be uninterested in politics and even to elude the status of political subjects might in certain times and places constitute ‘a form of alternative politics’ in their own right.60 From the other direction, this book seeks to ask 59 Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I discuss this study further in Chapter 1. 60 Alexei Yurchak convincingly makes this assertion about certain artistic and intellectual groups in post-Soviet Russia: without ‘challenging the state by occupying an oppositional subject position’,

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wide-ranging questions about whether and why we might want to read literature for its political uses or applicability in the first place. (Why would we want or expect or require literature to have a ‘politics’, after all? Why not just have politics?)61 We might accordingly contrast the ‘literature of politics’, in which literature becomes so bound up with or swallowed up by political activity as to become indistinguishable from politics itself, with the ‘politics of literature’, an altogether different formulation that involves attending to the unique ‘political’ status of literary works and the relationships with politics they organize, including relations that are estranged, indeterminate, or even non-existent. Approached as writers on the ‘shores of politics’, in the apt phrase of philosopher Jacques Rancière, the marginal, estranged condition of their authorship becomes central, I propose, to its interest in ‘political’ terms (which is not to suggest that this relationship with ‘politics’ necessarily had any actual bearing on political activity). Following Rancière, we might even locate the ‘politics’ of literature—as opposed to more clear-cut instances of the literature of politics—precisely in the failure, if not more active refusal, to align with established parties or available conceptions of the political nation.62 More broadly, Rancière’s valuable models for thinking about the non-alignment between literature and political activity underpin the account of estranged and disaffected authorship presented in this book.63 For Rancière, the polity remains perpetually ruptured, its parties failing to align either with institutional norms or with a fixed and stable conception of the political nation. During the ferment and uncertainty of the period under consideration here, in which the parameters of politics were often uncertain and to some degree fluid, this misalignment of parties took concrete form: political estrangement thus not only put authors at a complex remove from politics but brought them, in their positions on its ‘shores’, into proximity with other variously discontented and disaffected elements that also found themselves at the political margins. Those left out, excluded, or not included within the ‘count’ of politics remain central for members of these collectives ‘carved out a subject position that the state could not recognize in “political” terms and therefore could not easily define, understand, and control’. Despite obvious differences with the prescriptive, coercive situations Yurchak describes, this ‘peculiar form of subversive politics’ finds an analogue here in the case of Byron, whose militant estrangement similarly differed from ‘what is usually described as the politics of opposition or resistance’ and in this book’s similar attention to diverse modes and forms of political response that similarly ‘challeng[e] us to broaden our understanding of what politics is, what forms it may take, what effects it may produce, and in what terms we must describe it.’ ‘Necro-Utopia: The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non-Soviet’, Current Anthropology 49 (2008), 200–1. 61 Woloch locates Orwell’s writings at a version of this hinge: Orwell’s columns ‘retain a poised balance, “alit” on the ground of politics without ever collapsing the text into the world (so that the essential motive or ground of the columns could be reduced to a purely propagandistic intention) or estranging the text stably and completely from the world.’ Or Orwell, 383–4n.41. Even the most politically committed, plainspoken writing, in this accounting, remains at a necessarily oblique angle to the world, if only by virtue of that writing’s own acknowledged materiality (and the materiality of the thought for which that writing doubles). 62 See Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, [1992] 1995); The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). 63 Disaffection as discussed in this book thus overlaps with the ‘dissensus’ that Rancière views as fundamental to politics. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 244.

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Rancière, whose politics involves ‘taking the part of those that have no part.’64 His account of politics maps, to some extent, onto a period in which the poor—the prototypical figures with ‘no part’ for Rancière—and working classes comprised a social constituency whose demands increasingly skirted the edges of political discussion, even as they remained disenfranchised and denied fundamental recognition. At the same time, there are inevitable challenges associated with extending Rancière’s account of politics—more accurately described as an account of ‘the political’—across to the messy specifics of politics in a given period, least of all one of complex transitions. Rancière’s philosophical concerns and Marxist political formation (however estranged) give him limited interest in the concrete guises taken by political activity and partisan culture. As remains the case, to a greater or lesser degree, for any historical instantiation of political culture, moreover, politics in this period was sedimented by historical legacies and contingent peculiarities. These difficulties redound still further for a period in which politics had so little to do with an even minimal recognition of the national population en masse. Although my approach in this book departs from Rancière’s ontology of politics as class-based conflict, as well as from his claims for the emancipatory potential of writing (which he sees effecting a necessarily democratic ‘redistribution of the sensible’),65 Rancière’s thinking nonetheless proves invaluable to the discussions that follow for keeping political contestation and the clash between different representational systems in view. Rancière’s account of politics as a perpetually contested field—in which the parties that comprise politics are themselves contested—particularly resonates, moreover, with the concerns of this study. The large-scale exclusions on which the established political system was predicated became a matter of increasingly urgent attention during this period, becoming especially acute from the years surrounding the American Revolution onwards. These debates did not circle, in any straightforward sense, around the class-based concerns that would take hold in the wake of the French Revolution. Rancière’s assertions about the poor may nonetheless open out into a broader concern with the disjuncture between representational ‘regimes’ and those constituencies they purport to represent. As Sara Ahmed clarifies, ‘Rancière’s argument implies a gap between two ways of being part: those who are parts of a social body but have no part in a political body.’66 The idea of the ‘social body’ came into increasing focus at the turn of the nineteenth century, albeit haltingly and in increasingly palpable tension with political norms.67 The more untidy and volatile situation during 64 See Rancière, Disagreement. 65 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). 66 See Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 230n.10. As Davide Panagia elaborates, Rancière’s ‘aesthetics and politics address emergent collective formations that arise from the active participation of individuals and groups unauthorized to partake in those same activities that constitute their collectivity’ (2), and his emphasis on practice means that ‘we can’t speak of a general concept of solidarity or equality or emancipation’ in his work beyond ‘the construction and reconstruction of the sensible world to which a specific activity and event of assembly-forming belongs’. Rancière’s Sentiments (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 2. 67 As Mary Poovey has shown, the ‘social body’ in the nineteenth century was an unstable entity imagined both in relation to the poor and a larger national whole. Making a Social Body: British

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previous decades presents, in many ways, a more illuminating test ground for thinking about clashing collectives. The ‘people’, the ‘population’, and the messy totality of the political nation (including its imperial peripheries) were contested and incommensurate entities. Those formulations, in addition to differing from each other, were neither homologous with a recognized body politic nor self-identical to themselves. Ireland presents this book’s most pointed example of the ways that peripheral and excluded constituencies—here colonized subjects within the wider imperial polity, but also partial members of a more proximate Anglo-Irish polity— agitated at the margins of a political arena from which they were excluded but which, in calling its parameters into question, they thereby promised to unsettle. The structural exclusion of its majority-Catholic population from political recognition made Ireland a fractured mirror for the exclusion of the wider populace from the political system within England (and was also connected in more complex ways to colonial and enslaved populations overseas). The egregious denial of even basic political recognition to Catholics, that is to say, not only presented a more extreme counterpart to exclusions within pre-Reform Britain but overlapped in complicated ways with some of those same exclusionary procedures, aligning and even assimilating those respective political bodies, ‘Ireland’ and ‘England’, with each other. The discontents promised by an unsettled Irish periphery and a rowdy domestic mob were ultimately different from each other. Yet these respective scenes also reverberated suggestively, each calling the parameters of the political ‘nation’ into question. Rancière’s gestures towards an expanded conception of the political nation, whose ends were not in sight, thus resonate powerfully within a period in which both the parties of politics and the parameters of the social whole remained in flux. They similarly illuminate the larger questions about the limits of the nation, questions that, in the case of Ireland, the Act of Union at the turn of the nineteenth century only partially contained (even as its legislative enactment subsumed existing lines of division and questions around political representation within transformed national and imperial logics of governance). The limits of communities were especially challenged by the politics of ‘sensibility’, which called attention to those dispossessed from political belonging and exploited far beyond the shores of the British Isles, while extending the limits of community nearer home, for example, to include the claims of animals.68 At its furthest remove, Jane Bennett has proposed, politics might expand, along lines proposed by Rancière, to include Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). During the preceding decades and centuries, the subsequent chapters will show, conceptions of the body politic remained multiple and incommensurate both with each other and with parallel formulations of the ‘people’ and political nation. 68 See Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility and Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in EighteenthCentury Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). As Tobias Menely has argued, although appeals from animals had been recognized throughout history and across cultures, ‘it is only in the long eighteenth century that [. . .] the meaningfulness of the claim borne by animal signs came to be widely accounted for’, including in political terms. Menely draws directly upon Rancière’s discussion, following Aristotle, of what kinds of speech are recognized as political. See The Animal Claim.

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‘inklings of and opportunities for a more (vital) materialist theory of democracy’ and receptivity to non-human and non-living agencies and agents.69 Aside from their speculative claims about exceeding the limits of human community, these accounts of politics, à la Rancière, as concerned with jostling energies and incommensurate parts, have particular relevance to the expanded approach to the ‘parties’ of politics developed in this book. In its concern both with clashing parties and with the shifting parameters of politics more widely, this study emphasizes the perpetual misalignment between diversely conceived political ‘parties’ and a stable social whole (without necessarily following Rancière as seeing this as desirably democratic in its outcome). It follows Rancière more broadly in emphasizing the perpetually contested, unfinished basis of political activity.70 These wider concerns also inform this book’s approach to more familiar forms of political engagement. Although not a study of literary partisanship as such, this book does examine authors in relation to available party identities, strained, disavowed, compromised, or conflicted as those partisan commitments often were (and are). The authors addressed in this study remained in often ambivalent relationships with partisan labels, and this book ultimately seeks to overcome the stillpervasive tendency, in accounts of the politics of literary production both in this period and beyond, to shoehorn writers into party labels and ideological orientations: to determine whether they were ‘really’ Whig or Tory, or whether their works were conservative or progressive. Such approaches may equally result in reading subversively or suspiciously: to reveal how authors were, despite appearances to the contrary, actually progressive or, beneath their apparent progressiveness, not all that progressive after all. By contrast, this book attends instead to the often subtle disjuncture between authors and their ostensible political identities and the divisions between the individuals nominally behind literary works and the stances adopted by those works themselves. This need not amount to the claim that authors, to whatever extent they did profess partisan alignments, could not be true Whigs or staunch Tories, in their writings or otherwise. Rather, this means attending to the inevitable gaps and excesses that intervene between any literary work and an assumed political identification, as well as the inevitable disjunctures within and between the respective ‘sides’.71 Those partisan commitments themselves look 69 See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 106. 70 Davide Panagia’s gloss on what Rancière terms ‘the measurelessness of the mélange’ (an ‘amorphous form of solidarity devoid of any common principle that might act as a qualifying condition for participation in the ensemble’) illuminates the polymorphous partiality, as open to garden vegetables as to people, at which I see Edgeworth glancing in Chapter 4 (Rancière’s Sentiments, 5–6, quoting The Future of the Image). 71 This may, to some extent, be considered a deconstructive argument. As Homi Bhabha has observed, ‘[p]olitical positions are not simply identifiable as progressive or reactionary, bourgeois or radical [. . .] outside the terms and conditions of their discursive address.’ The constitutive ‘ambivalence’ that results, for Bhabha, from adopting a position within the political field draws our attention to the site of enunciation—and passage through a ‘Third Space’ between the subject of discourse and the presumed addressee—as the source of proliferating complexities. Appropriately enough, the example Bhabha uses to introduce this ‘Third Space’ comes from the intersections between race and class occluded by ‘Third Way’ politics. The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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different, moreover, once we take fuller account of the contested terrain in which they took shape, taking cues both from Rancière and from fuller attention to a heterogeneous political field (in which the parties were divided from themselves and divisions further exacerbated by the fractured affects and recalcitrant energies surrounding political engagement). The complex personal circumstances and diverse commitments of individual writers inevitably complicate efforts to identify them with a fixed partisan stance. The stances adopted within literary works, themselves neither reducible to nor entirely separable from available partisan roles, acquired their own unique significance, moreover, amidst the changing parameters—and shifting parties—of politics in this period. Literature in this period had begun to make perspectives available that pushed against the limits of politics, going beyond existing political and social arrangements (and even the limits of species and human agency).72 The writers and works I examine here nevertheless remained in some kind of proximity to the ongoing workings of politics, more or less as usual. The chapters that follow dig into the specifics of their cases in greater detail. William Hazlitt may stand here as an example of an author animated in diverse and contradictory ways by the politics of his age, in ways that illuminate both the distance and disjunctures I have been discussing, as well as their broader implications for thinking about the political character of literary authorship. Hazlitt’s partisan commitments were neither selfidentical with themselves, as Kevin Gilmartin has detailed, nor harmonized with the causes of his moment, by which he nonetheless remained fervently animated.73 Extrapolating from the resistance, contradiction, volatility, invective, and scorn— which were central, as Gilmartin has powerfully shown, both to Hazlitt’s brilliance as a writer and to his significance as political commentator and thinker—we might in turn include a wider array of impulses into our reckoning with the status of the ‘political’ writer. Even a writer like Charles Lamb, depicted by Butler as a genial humourist in the line of Oliver Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne, registered antagonism from within his cosy retreat to the seventeenth century towards repressive moralism of his moment (a central tenet of what this study will term the ‘late Toryism’ of the early nineteenth century).74 The variously estranged, agitated, and 72 Poetic appeals to non-verbal expressions of suffering by animals, for example, came to inform welfare legislation. See Menely, The Animal Claim. 73 Hazlitt’s defiant, at times paradoxical commitment to partisanship included the ‘habit of revisiting England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 in order to come to terms with the French Revolution of 1789’ with this ‘restless movement back through time’, Kevin Gilmartin notes, indicating ‘an effort to animate the radical hostility in ways that are sufficiently principled and historically embedded’ (so as not to ‘reduce to the “mere antipathies” ’ he attributed to William Cobbett). See William Hazlitt: Political Essayist, 13, 18. The Spirit of the Age (1825) was in part an effort to capture the heady swirl of  ‘Jacobinism’, popular radicalism, economic distress, and creative activity associated with the post-revolutionary period. As Gilmartin shows, however, the divided commitments and diverse antagonisms propelling Hazlitt’s writings went far beyond the fault lines of recent decades; the challenge of pinning Hazlitt down, moreover, remains bound up, in Gilmartin’s account, with his insistence, however paradoxical, on holding to ‘principle’ and partisan attachments, even and perhaps especially in the face of apparent irrelevance or unsuitability to present purposes. Woloch presents a similarly expanded approach to what makes writing ‘political’ in Or Orwell. 74 Butler, Romantics, Rebels, Reactionaries, 177. This corresponded to a broader division between the respective halves of the 1760–1830 period: in his essay ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last

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alienated stances that belong to a more expansive account of disaffected responses to politics may prove equally significant to the warp and weft of ‘political’ authorship as partisan identifications and ideological commitments or swings between disenchantment and re-engagement, betrayal and fierce commitment. That need not be to suggest that what made literature ‘political’ had anything to do with productively engaging in actual politics. Following Ahmed, we might nonetheless conceive of disaffection, a stance of having given up on politics without fully letting go of political engagement, in terms of a ‘willful’ attachment to alternative possibilities.75 Whether in the ways they exceeded and overpowered existing partisan identities, in their subtle differentiation from avowed political purposes, or simply in holding to their own idiosyncratic perspectives, literary works may thereby comprise disaffected parties in their own right—whether they promised to create other conduits for political activity or looked beyond the world of politics altogether. L I T E R A RY F O R M A N D T H E M A K I N G O F E N G L I S H L I T E R AT U R E Literary form had a crucial role both in illuminating the shifting parameters of politics during this period and in allowing writers to navigate their positions on the political margins. Form equally provided a means, this book proposes, of making new perspectives available, including stances at complex removes from existing political configurations—and points of view that looked beyond politics altogether. ‘Form’ has recently returned to the forefront of debates in literary study.76 This book is broadly sympathetic with efforts to discuss literary works in close proximity to a wide array of practices and discourses (a core aim of what has been termed the ‘New Formalism’).77 At the same time, it argues for the importance of attending to the unique shapes and perspectives of literary works in their own right, without Century’, Lamb contrasted the moralism of the early nineteenth century with the enthusiastic reception of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal a generation earlier. 75 Ahmed suggests that ‘willfulness’ can be ‘a trace left behind, a reopening of what might have been closed down, a modification of what seems reachable, and a revitalization of the question of what it is to be for’. Although applications—and accusations—of ‘willfulness’ have been used to discredit given political dispositions, Ahmed contends that being ‘willful’ might also ‘be thought of as political art, a practical craft that is acquired through involvement in political struggle, whether that struggle is a struggle to exist or to transform an existence.’ See Willful Subjects, 140, 133. 76 See especially Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Sandra Macpherson, ‘A Little Formalism’, ELH 82 (2015); Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, ‘Form and Explanation’, Critical Inquiry 43 (2017); Alex Woloch, Or Orwell. For important discussions of form and Romantic literature, see, inter alia, Frances Ferguson, ‘Emma and the Impact of Form’, Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000); Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 77 Levine proposes that literary studies should expand its ‘usual definition of form’ to include ‘patterns of sociopolitical experience’. I share Levine’s broad aspiration to ‘consider clearly the relations among forms—discursive, aesthetic, conceptual, material, political’ (2), although this book discusses what Levine terms ‘politics’ (synonymous in her study with ‘social structures’ and the organization of bodies more widely) under what I follow Foucault in terming the broader category of governance.

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quite following F.  R.  Leavis in identifying literature as ‘the thing achieved and detached’.78 I thereby differentiate the works I examine from the evolving contours of political activity and discussion (including disaffected responses to politics) and from the ways that shifting political lines and attitudes took shape across a diverse array of genres, from newspaper poetry and visual caricature to ephemeral pamphlets and mainstream fiction. These works, that is to say, cannot be collapsed with a wider field of political activity and debate nor with literary and cultural production more generally, even as they remained at unfixed removes from both. Form had a crucial role, I propose, in setting these writings apart, in ways that also pertain to their uniquely disaffected perspectives. Although I locate disaffection at an uncertain remove from a changing political arena—and while I recognize that the literary domain as we know it only haltingly came into focus over this period—literary form as defined here had a privileged role in revealing some of the precise ways that these changes were taking shape. Although the relationship between literature and politics was indeterminate, that is to say, acknowledging that fact and attending to the ways that writers navigated between these domains need not amount to saying that everything can be collapsed with everything else.79 In attending closely to the ways that distinct realms became confused with each other, I mean more stringently to clarify the relationship between literature and politics, even while recognizing that both remained moving targets. Beginning with Laurence Sterne’s quirky and iconoclastic Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the case studies that follow examine the relations between different arenas closely, critically, and even sceptically. That may entail, in the first instance, attention to reception. In the responses to which such works as Sterne’s novel and Boswell’s Life of Johnson gave rise within pamphlets, poems, and newspaper satires—including those that located these authors and their avatars amidst a bustling realm of political discussion—those works, not yet confined to a stable literary domain, appear as focal points for changing responses to politics. This book also attends to the propensity for literary objects to channel political feeling and even organize political activity in their own right (as with the ‘parties’, discussed in Chapter 1, that formed, amidst wider disaffection, in response to performances of a sentimental comedy). At the same time, the distinctive use authors made of literary form was inextricable from the uniquely disaffected removes from which they wrote. The works examined here are ultimately notable for the distinctive stances and points of view they uniquely adopted. This book accordingly approaches literary works from various angles, including as part of a wider field of political expression and through their reception history, but ultimately focuses on their internal organization. These points of focus need not be 78 F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), 73. Tellingly, Leavis finds Swift’s writings—at least that aspect of them he values—vexingly difficult to square with this depersonalized ideal. 79 Levine is similarly wary about appeals to ‘fissures and interstices, vagueness and indeterminacy, boundary-crossing and dissolution’ that confuse the distinctions between distinct realms. These appeals may coincide, as Levine notes, with an overarching emphasis on the ‘formless or antiformal’— typically carrying a broadly anti-normative political charge—that includes the assumption that dissolving boundaries at the level of literary expression might translate into institutional change. Levine, Forms, 9.

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mutually exclusive, as evidenced in my attention to Tristram Shandy in relation both to Viktor Shklovsky’s account of Sterne’s self-organizing ‘form’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s emphasis on novels’ semantic and social open-endedness. The detailed discussions of individual works in this book, beginning with Tristram Shandy and concluding with Byron’s late satirical poetry, nonetheless become progressively more concerned as the study progresses with literary form on something closer to its own terms than its socially determined reception. Form, as I use the term here, marks a distinction from generic modes of expression. We find a helpful means of breaking down this multifaceted distinction in the lines by Byron to which I alluded at the outset of this Introduction. Here is that poem in full: ’Tis said Indifference marks the present time Then hear the reason—though ’tis told in rhyme— A King who can’t—a Prince of Wales who don’t— Patriots who shan’t, and Ministers who won’t— What matters who are in or out of place The Mad—the Bad—the Useless—or the Base?80

This squib draws upon a long-standing fault line between the ‘Patriot’ opposition and the king’s ministry; its concluding lines, resonating with Byron’s own mad, bad, and dangerous reputation, gesture to broader national realignments around shifting class lines and popular radicalism.81 We may put matters of content aside here, however, to attend instead to Byron’s mode of expression. This ephemeral piece of early verse, included in a letter to a female political acquaintance, may be considered ‘generic’ in several intersecting senses. Byron drew upon the general discursive situation (‘’Tis said . . .’) to make this assertion about the ‘Indifference’ that marked his moment. These lines thereby express an identification with generality, understood as an available collective orientation towards politics, while at the same time participating within a domain of generalized conversation. This statement was thus generic in a further, related sense. Byron not only joined here with a generally held feeling: he did so by way of a familiar, much-elaborated lament that the parties were no better or worse than each other. He thus articulated a generic sentiment in a generic mode.82 This familiar statement or sentiment was articulated here in poetry, making this statement ‘generic’ in a further way: its generic use of a specific poetic mode. Responses to politics made in conventional literary modes and those made in letters, conversation, or as responses to the newspaper all take place within genres; those made within literary forms may, indeed, be considered in some ways more generic than more messily improvisational everyday 80 Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, 3:91. McGann supplies the title ‘[Politics in 1813].’ 81 Boyd Hilton adopts the famous characterization of Byron—as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’—to characterize the social changes and popular unrest that were reshaping the nation during this wider period in A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 82 My discussion of ‘genre’ and generality here is indebted to Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

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modes. (Writing a novel may set that work apart from other kinds of expression, that is to say, but not from other works that belong to the same generic category; my fulmination at the newspaper headlines, followed by spitting out my breakfast or breaking into outlandish dance moves, may begin from a familiar starting point but ends up somewhere else entirely.) Byron explicitly observed, indeed, that his generic use of a literary mode compounded the generic nature of his statement more broadly: rather than setting these lines at an elevated remove from more generic political complaining, he instead downplayed, to the point of downgrading, the medium in which these lines themselves appeared (‘Then hear the reason—though ’tis told in rhyme—’). Rather than a privileged literary mode, verse here appeared closer to a lowest common denominator, collapsing an identification with political generality with undistinguished, commonplace genres of literary expression. The works by Byron that concern this book stand apart from these ephemeral early lines, much as the literary works on which the following chapters focus as a whole occupy a remove both from generalized political attitudes and from established literary genres. ‘Form’ provides this book with a means of maintaining this distinction. In its heightened attention to literary form, this study holds this term at a remove from more conventional modes of expression, literary and otherwise. In his satirical masterpieces Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment, Byron drew upon precursors and contemporaries including Charles Churchill and William Gifford. He also remained in proximity to the evolving contours of political discussion, from dwindling opportunities for opposition and dissent to the wider political mood of exhaustion and cynicism (in addition to pursuing specific points of complaint and targets of opprobrium). Yet in drawing upon these generic precedents, generic discussions, and generic feelings, he transformed them, if not into something entirely new then into something newly pointed, aided in large part by his distinctive use of the ottava rima stanza. His poetry cultivated perspectives towards politics that were not available elsewhere—stances and points of view that at times intersected with what, following Michel Foucault, we might term critical ‘attitudes’.83 The same may be said to some degree for all the works examined here, whether or not, like Byron, they adopted partisan or otherwise political stances. Discussions of form and genre are liable to become tangled: accounts of 83 In ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Foucault called for a critical ‘attitude’ that would both establish and experiment in going beyond the limits constituting the modern subject: ‘by “attitude,” I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; and in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task [. . .] a bit like what the Greeks called an ēthos’. In Essential Works of Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 309. In his final lecture courses at the Collège de France, Foucault developed this account of Kantian ‘enlightenment’ as the task of establishing the ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ into a wider exploration of relations to truth and truth-telling in philosophical practice. In the lectures published, in two parts, as The Government of the Self and Others—commencing with the lecture that became ‘What is Enlightenment?’—he sought to establish a genealogy linking fearless truth-speaking with processes of subject-formation. Foucault was particularly concerned with the ancient Greek practice of parrêsia: ‘une modalité du dire-vrai’ characterized by frank, courageous speech, described by Foucault as ‘une attitude, une manière d’être [. . .] de faire.’ I discuss the elaboration of this account, by way of the ancient Greek Cynics, with respect to Byron in Chapter 6.

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literary genres, formal features, and the more specific shapes taken by literary form inevitably loop back and forth endlessly into each other. Verse has ‘formal’ features but may not necessarily count as a use of literary ‘form’; poems like Byron’s, generic in content, may or may not also belong to a literary genre, another name for which could be ‘form’; and so on. For some critics, ‘form’ can describe anything with an enduring or essential structure, from a concept to a wall to a mountain. My use of the term signals the more delimited desire to keep these writers in dialogue with other modes of political expression and various kinds of literary production while providing a rationale for why we would want to look at these works in particular (and why we would want to look at literature, rather than at some other cultural object or document that could point to the relations between or shifting parameters of this or that concept or practice or idea). By attending to writers’ use of hybridized modes and innovative perspectives, I show how they navigated between established and emergent modes of political expression, generalized currents of political discontent and pointed vantage points; at the same time, I show how they made new possibilities available through the ways their works stood apart (but always in some proximity to the prospect of taking a part). The unique perspectives including the uniquely disaffected political stances or attitudes that these works bring into focus illuminate larger questions in literary study. Attention to form in the ways I emphasize, from close attention to authors’ manipulation of verse forms or fictional narration to the bearing of their works on categories including satire or the aesthetic, might thereby help to explain what we mean by the category of the ‘literary’ more widely.84 Rather than drawing upon any period-specific or retroactively invented category of ‘literature’ as a means to privilege specific works, this book instead locates the literary as and at a complex site of intersection. Bradin Cormack proposes that literature ‘belongs to a given historical culture as part and parcel of that culture, but also as a force that might disrupt that culture’s relation to itself ’.85 I similarly emphasize the dislocating propensities of literary authorship, discussing works that were not self-identical with themselves, even as they also established generic norms to which they have become retroactively assimilated. (Sterne and Edgeworth and to some degree Austen helped to invent the kinds of fiction that they wrote, that is to say, but their works stood apart, including from the types of novels they helped bring into being.) Cormack sees literature as ‘implicated in the same process of shaping unruly practice’ as legal procedure in the Tudor and early Stuart periods.86 My discussion here will align, to some degree, with accounts that view literature adopting a disciplinary role, particularly as this pertained to transformed conceptions of 84 Compare the discussion of literariness in ‘Form and Explanation’, 666–7. As Kramnick and Nersessian emphasize, ‘form’ need not be defined as anything ‘over and above the explanation through which it comes into view and whose ends it serves’—an ‘inquiry relative’ explanation of form that necessarily remains sedimented with disciplinary histories (651). I argue here for something like the same understanding of the ‘literary’. 85 A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 11. 86 A Power to Do Justice, 4.

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governance and the conscription of sentiment for regulatory ends at the turn of the nineteenth century. Yet even when examining authors, like Austen or Edgeworth, whose commitments to conservative principles and regulatory standards are the sine qua non for meaningfully understanding their writings in political terms, I recognize the ways literary works exceeded and complicated emerging norms. Following Rancière, I ultimately emphasize an account of the literary as fundamentally unruly in its own right, without following him in claiming that this unruliness necessarily inclines towards subversion. If Mansfield Park cannot be considered a conservative novel, then no such thing as a conservative novel exists. But in the final accounting, perhaps no such thing does exist. The distinction between literary authorship and what I term its generic and conventional counterparts inevitably remains imprecise and mobile. For my purposes here, what counts as ‘literature’ hinges upon the negotiation between general and particular, convention and innovation, engagement (or critique) along established lines and more volatile or uncertain stances of disengagement, disaffection, discontent, and recalcitrance. The works examined here participated within a wider field of political expression, encompassing fellow writers, commentators, and grumbling observers of the political arena; at the same time, in describing these writings as ‘literary’, I emphasize the ways they stood, in various ways, at a unique (and uniquely disaffected) remove. This study does not accordingly make overarching claims about formal modes of literary expression or treat poetry, novels, or letters more widely as a subset of a larger marketplace for print and cultural expression or as the master-key to shifting attitudes. While the case studies of individual authors that follow reveal broad changes and specific developments—within both the structures of politics and the structures of political feeling—their ultimate significance resides less in how they exemplified larger trends than in how they turned those insights to particular effect. In attending to the specific over the general, I emphasize, finally, how attention to the former might reroute and rescript the latter: how literary form, that is, might not only echo or mirror political formations and attitudes apparent elsewhere but become an opening onto other possibilities. As much as the domain in which I locate the disaffected stance remains proximate with a familiar domain of grumbling, irritability, and agitation, then, it might also become one of re-engaged possibility. Literature might thereby provide, if not a point of assembly for other parties, then a means of imagining other perspectives on politics, the nation, and the world at large, as Sterne and Byron acknowledged when they described their works as issuing from another country and as being written from the other side of the moon. T H E O RG A N I Z AT I O N O F T H I S B O O K The chapters that follow become progressively more concerned, as I have noted, with literary works on their own terms. Attending to emerging patterns of political response, within and beyond literary genres, can nonetheless help to reveal with greater precision the ways that writers inhabited existing modes of political expression

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and where they exceeded, contorted, and reimagined their constraints.87 Chapter 1 accordingly establishes some broader frameworks in which to situate the detailed case studies of literary texts that follow. This introductory chapter, in the first instance, provides an overview of some of the changing shapes taken by responses to the shifting parties of politics and emergent disaffected political attitudes between the 1688 Revolution and the onset of Reform in the early nineteenth century. By looking at flashpoint moments, including the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ movement in the early 1770s, the chapter also sets out the expanded approach to political parties and partisan activity adopted in this book. Different genres operate in different ways and at various levels,88 and this chapter establishes a more expansive field in which to situate the detailed case studies of literary form in the chapters that follow, while beginning, in anticipation of those subsequent discussions, to examine the specific ways that disaffected attitudes towards politics took various shapes across a range of modes and media: a political poem by Nahum Tate, the writings of Jonathan Swift, a 1770 visual print, written accounts of protests at a theatrical performance, and the early nineteenth-century periodical Egeria. The accounts of the ‘parties’ that formed in response to performances of A Word to the Wise at Drury Lane in 1770 in turn introduce questions about the potential for literary authorship to harness and organize disaffected political energies on which I touch in Chapters 2 and 3, which take as their points of departure pamphlets written in response to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and satirical depictions of Samuel Johnson from the decades around the American War and the French Revolution. The claims by authors about the reception of their works and material examples of their reception histories in this book call attention to the ways that literary texts circulate in the world, organizing attitudes and agencies in their own right. In a letter to his publisher, finalizing plans for the first edition of the opening volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Sterne adopted political language to identify ‘a Strong Interest form’d and forming on its behalf ’ (while elsewhere he wrote of having a ‘party against him’ of those who would not laugh).89 Austen playfully imagined an interventionist role for her most conservative novel: ‘make everybody [. . .] admire Mansfield Park’, she forthrightly instructed one friend.90 These assertions allow us to reflect upon whether and how authors and their works might become disaffected parties in their own right, a question engaged most directly in my attention to Byron’s reflection on what ‘part’ he could play back in politics. As this book’s case studies progress beyond the late eighteenth century to the Romantic age, they nonetheless focus increasingly on what set the literary 87 Kevin Gilmartin similarly examines the ways that William Hazlitt participated within (even as he also transformed) conventional expressive modes, creating a critique of political reform ‘as representative as it is idiosyncratic, and representative in its contrary individualism’. William Hazlitt: Political Essayist, 107. 88 I thank the reader for the Press for this formulation. 89 Sterne to Robert Dodsley, 5 October 1759. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Vols. 7–8, The Letters of Laurence Sterne, eds. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2008), 7.97. 90 Austen to Anne Lefroy, 22 November 1814. Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deidre Le Faye, 4th edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 294.

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works in question apart from the wider terrain of political activity. The opening chapter establishes a broad foundation for these accounts of the ways that estrangement and distance from politics took shape, then, while the subsequent chapters track in greater detail the perspectives that specific literary works afforded on the political world, including the ways they looked beyond politics altogether. Readers more interested to begin with close attention to literary texts may wish to bypass this more general overview and commence with the detailed discussion of Sterne in Chapter 2, while those readers most eager to engage core questions about the relationship between literature and politics, including whether and how literary authors might take some part in political activity, may wish to read Chapter 6, on Byron, sooner rather than later—it represents the summation of this book’s wider arguments and, as its concluding case study, the test case for the question of whether disaffection may lead back to partisan engagement. In 1773, David Hume wrote in a letter to his publisher that the ‘best Book, that has been writ by any Englishman these thirty Years [. . .] is Tristram Shandy, bad as it is’; Hume tellingly excluded Benjamin Franklin (‘an American’) from this assessment, calling attention to the chaotic political environment and factious print marketplace that were inescapable conditions of contemporary authorship.91 Both Sterne and Johnson were recognized as eminent figures within an increasingly delimited domain of English literature (including, as I show in the case of Johnson, by readers within the American colonies).92 Their works equally served to complicate and even challenge the limits of that emergent realm, while opening up breaks with—and within—their identities as ‘English’ authors.93 Both Sterne and Johnson began their writing lives with political journalism in the early 1740s in the late Walpole era. Their works and reputations took shape against the backdrop of dramatic political shifts. Critics have tended to see Sterne retreating from a world of political division, much as the dedication to Tristram Shandy, as we have seen, 91 Hume to William Strahan, 30 January 1773. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.  Y.  T.  Greig, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1983), 2.269. 92 As Alan B. Howes emphasizes, Sterne was far more prominent as a ‘literary figure’ in the 1760s than Smollett, Wilkes, ‘Ossian’, or Garrick; he does not mention Johnson, whose eminence as a man of letters may elevate him to a category beyond literary ‘fame’. Yorick and the Critics: Sterne’s Reputation in England, 1760–1868 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 1–2. 93 Aside from the accidents of birth that saw Sterne and Byron born in Ireland and Scotland respectively, Edgeworth spent considerable time in Ireland (and holds a vexed position within the Anglophone Irish literary tradition). Byron spent much of his adult life in exile on the European continent after leaving England in 1816 under a cloud of scandal. My discussion of these writings under the rubric of ‘English’ literature does not accordingly entail assumptions about an autochthonous national identity but instead—following Hume—emphasizes the ways their works remained embroiled, at least to some degree, within domestic politics. To suggest that these writers were thereby, at least to some degree, bound up with politics within England need not suggest fixed boundaries, conceptually or geopolitically, for the ‘English’ polity—not least given the vexed status of Ireland—and this book recognizes that ‘domestic’ politics was in some respects an artificial political distinction (as the personal and parliamentary lives of Edmund Burke, which straddled England and Ireland, America and the Empire in India, made readily apparent). For the relatively autonomous development of Scottish literary culture over the coming decades, see Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Although Hume was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, we might equally view him, given his close involvement with English political debate and society, in the terms I develop here as a disaffected member of the English polity.

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invited prime minister William Pitt the elder to retreat with the book to ‘the country’. Chapter 2 plots a revised approach to Sterne’s epoch-defining innovations to the novel form. It begins by examining his early political writings and shows that his eventual retreat from party politics was bound up with what I argue was the first widespread popular expression of cynicism towards the political establishment. The chapter goes on to demonstrate the continuing proximity of his fiction to contentious political discussion. The development of Tristram Shandy over the better part of the decade brought an emphasis on sentiment increasingly to the fore, which has been cemented by Sterne’s subsequent reputation. Yet this was by no means a foregone conclusion. By attending closely to the shifting tone and developing narrative perspective of the novel, I show how Sterne continued to situate the wayward trajectory of Tristram’s ‘Life and Opinions’ at a complex remove from the dislocation of post-1688 political certainties (while obliquely registering his own fraying attachment to the ‘Whig’ political past). Tristram Shandy took shape in relation both to the shifting parameters of political activity and to the growing need to escape from politics altogether. The chapter brings into focus the alternative possibilities Sterne made available in his fiction—and the ways those trajectories were subsequently closed down or rerouted, both within his later writings and in the developing reception of his work. While Hume and other readers saw Tristram Shandy escaping from the fray, whether through a distinctively Shandean obliviousness or an insular, solipsistic turn towards sentiment, the origins and development of Tristram Shandy reveal the role of factious political division in shaping the novel. They equally, I propose, disclose the latent antagonism towards established political structures driving Tristram’s narration. Far from pointing only towards good feeling, as Thomas Jefferson and other sentimentalists would claim about his writing, Sterne’s ‘analytic delicacy’ prompted him, as one critic strikingly asserts, to trace the ‘conflicts of the benevolent impulse with a continually-rising midge-like swarm of mean ideas, which are so whimsically minute in their expression and so deep in their implications’. That ‘grimace’ has been obscured and even effaced entirely in the subsequent reception of Sterne’s writing: its pointedly political dimension, I propose, reached its apogee in Byron’s more naked cynicism.94 Chapter 3 shows how Johnson’s erratic authorial persona focalized a larger crisis of political and literary authority during the period spanning the American War and the French Revolution. Beginning with Johnson’s reputation in America— where he clashed with the emphasis on properly managed feeling in the emergent public sphere—I show how Johnson’s dogmatic views on authority, together with his volatile personality, infused both his writings and his partisan persona with political uncertainty. Despite his ostensible attachment to upholding established authority and his disdain for populist political energies, Johnson came to be seen as an unknown quantity, liable to subvert his own commitments to political stability and to exceed attempts at containment. Boswell’s depiction of Johnson as the 94 J.  M.  S.  Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (London: Constable & Co., 1932), 52. For the ‘grimace’ (a kind of ‘broken mirror’) held up to society by the ancient Greek Cynics, see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth.

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‘Monarch of Literature’ in his 1791 Life of Johnson in turn acquired heightened and transformed significance amidst fears of anti-royalist unrest and the explosion of plebeian political activity associated with the aftermath of the French Revolution. Boswell’s monumental biography was acutely responsive to brewing political changes in Britain during the early phases of the French Revolution. To an important and neglected degree, I argue, The Life of Johnson—whose original readers included Edmund Burke and George III himself—was the product of this changing political atmosphere. Yet despite the best efforts of Boswell, Johnson remained at odds with attempts to establish him as a proxy for stolid British authority and to make literature a bedrock for harmonious feeling in the nation at large. Rather than aligning Sterne and Johnson with the culture of sentiment or comfortably ensconcing them within the emergent literary sphere, returning to the decades in which they first came into focus as recognized authors returns to view their status as variously disaffected parties amidst a fractured literary and political environment. Boswell, by contrast, provides a guide to the changes that accompanied the transition into the nineteenth century. The conduits of his literary and political ambitions align closely with the evolution of the counter-revolutionary response to the French Revolution into a broader affective and cultural logic: what this study terms the ‘late Toryism’ of the early nineteenth century. Aside from bringing The Life of Johnson into focus in its own right as an important and neglected literary production of the early Romantic era,95 this chapter serves as a bridge to this book’s discussion of the early nineteenth century as a period overshadowed by frequently repressive governing norms and a growing emphasis on the regulation of feeling. Chapters 4 and 5 engage with these questions through attention to Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. The later eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of attention to prominent women, with important implications for the shifting interrelationships between politics, the public sphere, sociability, and literary culture. The Romantic age spotlighted the political implications of fiction, especially fiction by women. Edgeworth and Austen nonetheless occupied complex removes both from the emerging commercial marketplace for professional authorship and from the public sphere of political debate. Both writers became commanding presences within their given domains, yet the precise limits and contours of those domains remained uncertain (at times profoundly so). These chapters examine how the unique status of their writing was bound up with and illuminated by their estranged relationships with politics, while turning more directly to the study of literary form. The Absentee and Mansfield Park placed particular emphasis, these chapters demonstrate, on the anchoring roles played by individuals in upholding governing structures and wider circuits of feeling; those novels equally bring into view incommensurate, clashing conceptions of the wider political nation. Engaging 95 Although The Life of Johnson was ‘among the signal events of 1790s British literary culture’, as Timothy Michael has similarly noted, the work has been sidelined in discussions of Romantic-era writing. Timothy Michael, ‘Wordsworth’s Boswellian Life-Writing’, Wordsworth Circle 44 (2013), 37. Michael proposes that ‘Boswell’s formal and conceptual developments in biography opened up a space for Wordsworth to imagine his own literary life in the 1805 Prelude’ (37).

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pioneering scholarship on the ‘politics’ of fiction by women together with attention to the relay points between political activity, the domestic sphere, social networks, and distributed feeling, I show how these writers employed the novel form as a means to navigate these tensions—although only up to a point. By resituating Edgeworth and Austen in relation to the relatively circumscribed political realm from which they were necessarily at a complicated remove, as well as to the changing parameters of political activity and discussion more widely, these chapters ask how we might expand on and cut across existing accounts of women, politics, and the novel to disclose alternative vectors for female authorship in this period with an important bearing on how we think about the shape and status of literary authorship more widely. As a ‘true woman’, in her own words, Maria Edgeworth avoided discussion of political matters.96 Edgeworth has also been viewed to align closely with the political-economic governance and moral reforms in which her family were, quite literally, invested. By attending to a deeper history of ‘discontents’—including those surrounding the violent disaffection of the 1798 Irish uprising—Chapter 4 returns to view the uncertain, even radically unsettled political horizons invoked by her celebrated 1812 novel The Absentee. It does so, in the first instance, by returning to view a fuller account of Edmund Burke. Looking beyond Burke’s conservative reputation and appeals to tightly orchestrated national political sympathies, I show how Burke’s conflicted role in English ‘party’ politics (and the related uncertainties attending his Anglo-Irish background) made him a wayward figure, in ways that illuminate divides between political representatives and the body politic while opening up new approaches to engagement of those problems within fiction. Burke’s involvement in a 1773 controversy about Anglo-Irish ‘absentee’ landlords, in particular, I propose, suggests a new angle of entry onto Edgeworth’s engagement with the same controversial topic. Like Rancière, Edgeworth looked beyond emerging political-economic norms and disciplinary procedures, I propose, to an account of politics in The Absentee in which excluded parts and wayward agencies continued to assert their presence. Building upon this revision to ‘Burkean’ accounts of novels of this period, Chapter 5 turns to the more specific question of affective atmosphere to plot a revised approach to Austen’s politics. Although Austen was closely aligned with the political turn to the right in early nineteenthcentury Britain, the neglected affective dimension of this cultural shift, I propose, leaves the precise status of her novels in question. By developing a more fully elaborated account of this period’s conservative ‘tone’, in which emboldened authoritarian practices and attitudes coupled with a changed affective atmosphere, I propose that Mansfield Park exemplified the wider cultural logic by which this ‘late’ Toryism was placed on a revised footing. By revealing the dense layering of hierarchical networks and harmonious sympathies on which this reinvented authority depended, however, I show how the novel also set the stage for their undoing, not least by way of the disaffected elements and misaligned sympathies 96 Quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 113–14.

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to which Austen, in her own writing, was at once scrupulously attentive and dangerously proximate. By asking how and in what ways these writers engaged with politics, these chapters do not assume that their works were already ‘political’ (or seek uncritically to expand that categorization) but instead pose focalized questions about the extent to which these female writers engaged with changing political parties and disaffected energies, in ways that cast light on the political status of literary authorship tout court. Political disaffection takes its most familiar guises in complaints like those expressed in Johnson’s wish to have ‘a man to break [his] bones’ before any further discussion of politics. Expressions of irritability and grumbling, disdain and indifference, apathy and inertia with respect to the political arena might intersect with feeling overwhelmed, frazzled, brain-dead, numb, or ‘over it’ in the face of partisan debate. Latent throughout preceding decades, as evidenced from Sterne to Smollett, these impulses received particularly rich expression during the Romantic age. Byron’s remarks on being ‘sick of politics’ in Don Juan echoed his remarks on being ‘sick of ’ and ‘indifferent to’ politics elsewhere, while cementing the cynical stance associated with his satirical masterwork. For all his notorious cynicism, Byron nonetheless remained invested, Chapter 6 shows, in the ways poetry presented a potent vehicle for commentary and critique—even, perhaps, for political action in its own right. The chapter employs Byron as a test case for thinking about the ways that literary authorship might coincide with ‘taking some part’, as Byron repeatedly stated, back in political activity. By recovering his ambivalent attraction, from within his exile, to the political arena, I approach Byron as a limit case for thinking about the volatile relationship between literature and politics: in particular, the ways that literary form might navigate between estrangement from (including profound disdain towards) the political arena and the impulse to establish alternative conduits for partisan activity and changed horizons for political life. At once crisply poised and militantly critical, his late satire The Vision of Judgment, written from a ‘Whig point of view’, reveals disaffection and partisanship not as opposed conditions for Byron but in an unstable relationship with each other. By approaching Byron as both frustrated partisan and disaffected element at the margins of the English polity, this concluding chapter asks how Byron’s cynicism (aligned with the original Greek Cynics, as discussed, among others, by Michel Foucault) might help to recover the agitated impulses and even the latent desire to enter political activity within ‘cynical’ attitudes towards politics more widely. This book advances an argument about the changing status of the literary between the mid-eighteenth century and the onset of the Victorian age, a period bracketed by the changes to the structures of politics and attendant explosion of ‘political’ discussion and activity associated with the accession of George III in 1760 and the emergence of the liberal governance, normative political subjectivities, and transformed reading protocols associated with the transition into the nineteenth century. At the same time, this book calls attention to a period in which neither the parties of politics nor conceptions of the wider political nation were fixed into what have become their familiar guises. The Conclusion to this book looks ahead to the decades immediately following Byron’s death as a period in

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which increasingly rigid conceptions of literary aesthetics took hold, in tandem with wider governmental shifts. The unrest of the pre-1789 decades was, as the Conclusion shows, partially written out of the historical record during this same period, in ways that have persisted in literary-historical approaches to the long Romantic age. Although the Conclusion looks ahead to the transformations that accompanied the Victorian period and that have persisted into our own present, this book largely resists the temptation to look forward. It instead provides an account of the 1760–1830 period that, emphasizing obscured continuities across these decades, attends to its unique character. The emphasis on what characterized this period as distinct may, nonetheless, open up new ways of connecting this tumultuous period to our own fractured present. The period addressed by this book does not present a stable precursor for the endless deadlock and fruitless division ascribed to contemporary partisanship, or for more recent political dysfunction and crisis: from the disruption of organized partisanship by populist challenges to the political establishment to crises of institutional and individual agency in the face of impending ecological catastrophe. This period located familiar versions of political deadlock amidst a more capacious and fluid understanding of the parties of politics. At the same time, the ways that politics in this period does not align with familiar ways of thinking about partisanship and the wider political nation might in turn suggest ways of approaching politics differently in our own moment. The same goes, as the Conclusion emphasizes, for the ways that the responses to politics examined in this book do not conform with models of liberal subjectivity, not least in rendering personal and political ‘discontents’ inseparable from each other. Where recent accounts have shown that liberal subjecthood remains animated by a recognition of its own limitations, not least its pained estrangement from scenes of political engagement, this book remains driven by the conviction that the excessive, wayward, or otherwise unaccountable feelings associated with the heterogeneous field of political activity, even when engaged from a distance, cannot be extricated from the prospect of larger changes— and greater unrest.

1 Disaffected Parties, 1688–1832 The New Whig-Catechism (1784) presented a damning account of prospects for the parliamentary opposition. On its surface, this work sought to stoke old loyalties and revivify opposition principles. In calling upon the Whigs, the historic party of opposition, to ‘forc[e] upon the prince upon the throne the man or men who have rendered themselves personally the most obnoxious and the most odious to him’, this satire voiced a firm commitment to antagonism between monarchy and ministry.1 Yet this was an agonistic relationship strangely devoid of agon. A ‘patriotking’, the satirized Whig speaker of the Catechism continued, was only a ‘name, a pageant, a thing of mere representation; one who, for our sakes, must presume to have opinions, and who, for his own sake, should try to divest himself of feelings’. As long as the ministry were held ‘exactly in the same degree of affection and esteem by the people’, then ‘every thing will be kept in the most perfect constitutional equilibrium’, thus ensuring ‘stability to government, vigour to our measures, and prosperity to the country’.2 The unpropitious situation meant that the monarch could only hope that—in ‘try[ing] to divest himself of feelings’—he would prompt the people to follow suit and have them esteem the ministry as little as he did, with the same minimal degree of ‘affection’. This was an exercise in creating balanced government through omniscient apathy and widespread disdain. Asking who, given this state of affairs, ‘would be the best possible king of the whigs?’ the New-Whig Catechism introduced William III as an obvious candidate and imagined the body of the late monarch (he had been dead since 1702) being ‘taken up from Westminster-abbey, and laid in his coffin, with the regalia, under the state in the audience chamber at St James’s’.3 Rather than a spectral remainder of undead possibilities, the long-deceased king here appeared as an empty vessel: a receptacle to contain, or sop to absorb, political feeling. Rather than channelling oppositional energies, the resurrected Whig leader promised merely to preserve the equipoise between monarch, ministry, and people, balancing out their antagonistic responses

1 A New Whig-Catechism . . . (London: J. Debrett, 1784), 14. 2 A New Whig-Catechism, 14–15. 3 A New Whig-Catechism, 8. Before reaching its more absurdist conclusions, the Catechism voices a more familiar critique. Asked to define ‘thy duty towards thy party’, the Whig speaker responds: ‘To swear by the leaders of it; to flatter them; to lie for them; to make a violent noise in the house for them, at least, if I have not the parts to speak for them; to throw dirt upon every one who opposes them, by abuse, true or false; to be a spy for them in all private companies; to allow neither common sense nor common honesty to any man who dares think our fools are fools and our knaves are knaves’ (6).

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Figure 2. ‘Political Electricity; or An Historical & Prophetical Print in the Year 1770.’ An ‘Electrical Chain’ traceable back to the Earl of Bute (in the ‘Character of Dr. Franklin’) connects disparate sources of political disruption—and prophesied unrest. (Source: Lewis Walpole Library, LWL 770.00.00.22.1. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

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to each other and maintaining the blockages identified with their disaffected responses to politics.4 In his lines on ‘Indifference’, Byron described an equivalent impasse between the king and ministers, the prince and patriots. Those fault lines had a deep history. During the Walpole era, in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the Prince of Wales became the rallying point for the so-called ‘Patriot’ opposition, which became a counterpoint to the king and his ministry.5 The idea of the ‘Patriot King’, put forward in an infamous tract by Bolingbroke, called for the monarch to become a unifying figure capable of subsuming partisan feuds. George III, drawing upon the teachings of his controversial Scottish adviser the Earl of Bute, would later draw upon this model (with short-lived benefits and ill-fated consequences). By the moment at which Byron wrote, these respective hopes, for a spirited opposition and unifying monarch, had fallen apart. In his damning satire The Vision of Judgment (1821), Byron pointedly described the recently deceased George III as ‘neither a successful nor a patriot king’.6 Byron’s personal shift from fleeting involvement with Whig party politics to exile in Europe coincided with deepening national despair about the prospects for political opposition. Later in the same year as the New Whig-Catechism, the ascent of William Pitt the younger heralded the start of a revived Tory leadership. The subsequent decades witnessed the increasing hold of rightward-leaning, authoritarian governance and repressive moralism: what this book terms the ‘late Toryism’ that took hold in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the preface to Don Juan, Byron lambasted Poet Laureate Robert Southey, avatar for the lapsed revolutionary idealism of the first-generation Romantic poets, for turning out a ‘Tory at last’. ‘Nought’s permanent among the human race, / Except the Whigs not getting into place’, Byron noted later in that poem, lines that recalled the earlier squib on ‘Indifference’ (which similarly rhymed on ‘place’). Yet Byron also smoothed out the stomping conclusion of that poem—with the rowdiness suggested by the ‘Mad ’, ‘Bad ’, ‘Useless’, and ‘Base’— by instead turning ‘not getting’ into an active pursuit at which the Whigs so consistently prevailed. This chapter has three interlocking aims. The first is to trace some of the changing shapes taken by political disaffection over the course of the long eighteenth century.7 Beyond omnipresent apathy, stagnant inertia, or the sleek cynicism voiced by 4 A New Whig-Catechism, 8. Compare Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: ‘We have no sympathy with those who claim that, because of the weakness of the movements and the illusions of reform through electoral means, we need to resuscitate the corpse of the modern vanguard party and the charismatic figures of liberation movements past, propping up their rotting leadership structures. We too recognize ourselves as part of the modern revolutionary and liberation traditions that gave birth to so many parties, but no act of necromancy will breathe life into the vanguard party form today.’ Assembly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8. 5 See Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 6 Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), 6.310 (emphasis added). 7 I follow Frank O’Gorman in approaching this period as bracketed by the constitutional upheaval associated with the 1688 Revolution and the 1832 Reform Bill. The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History, 1688–1832 (London: Arnold, 1997).

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Byron, disaffected responses to politics adopted diverse guises throughout this period. In the aftermath of 1688, individual and collective expressions of feeling ‘sick’ of politics, grumbling, and irritation converged with factious division and revolutionary agitation (as well as more elusive ‘discontents’). As the excavation of the past in the New-Whig Catechism confirms, these legacies continued to be felt throughout the subsequent century.8 By surveying major shifts in the physiognomy of national political life, this chapter accordingly establishes deeper context for the case studies in the chapters that follow, including attention to some of the continuing fault lines that continued to underpin Whig and Tory party identities. The first sections address the three quarters of a century preceding the start date of the present study and two crucial moments for developing attitudes towards the political establishment and conceptions of politics more widely: the 1688 Revolution, which saw William III, formerly the Dutch Stadtholder, become the joint ruler of England, and the fall of Robert Walpole, whose apparent championing of political corruption became the locus for critical responses to modern political structures. The 1688 Revolution, aside from attracting variously disaffected, antagonistic, and incipiently (or actually) rebellious responses in its own right, occasioned more equivocal reckonings with the changing course of political life. By looking in detail at a poem by Nahum Tate from the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, I show how post-1688 fault lines accommodated a growing awareness of inescapable facts about ‘politicks’, including the development of a political arena whose noise could be muffled and held at a distance—but which writers like Tate, despite their best efforts to escape its ‘Dissention’, could not ultimately escape. The fall of Walpole in the early 1740s, I argue, witnessed a further shift: the first widespread popular expression of cynicism towards the political establishment. The failure of the ‘Patriot’ ministry that took power on Walpole’s departure not only disappointed those hoping for change but helped crystallize disaffected attitudes towards politics as such. Among those whose writings took shape against the backdrop of these developments was Jonathan Swift: sharp critic of the mounting corruption associated with Walpole and irritable observer of post-1688 politics more widely. Swift’s disaffection, as I show, nonetheless differed from the modes of response that concern this book, both in its attraction towards idealized alternatives and in its pursuit of an escape from politics, society, and even the human species. 8 The Catechism recalled the long-standing emphasis on ‘affection’ in discussions of ‘disaffection’ and post-1688 political allegiance more widely. Compare the hope expressed in a ‘publick and solemn declaration’ from early eighteenth-century Ireland that ‘no person whatever will be so unjust and uncharitable as to declare, or insinuate, that the clergy of the Church of Ireland, as by law establish’d, were not intire [sic] in their affections for the late King William, of glorious memory; or are not in the true interest of the present government; or that they are any way disaffected to the succession in the Protestant line, as by law establish’d.’ Quoted in Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, his Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 2.160 (emphases added). The father of Swift’s patron described a 1641 Dublin rebellion as ‘a most disloyal and detestable conspiracy intended by some evil-affected Irish Papists’. Sir John Temple, The Irish Rebellion . . . ed. Francis Maseres ([1646] 1812), quoted in John Stubbs, Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel (New York: Norton, 2016), 28. In his essay ‘Of Parties in General’, David Hume puzzled over the misguided foundation of partisan attachments in the ‘affections of men towards particular families and persons’. Quoted in James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 170.

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These flashpoints in changing political attitudes provide important reference points for the chapters that follow. The onset of the period that directly concerns this book represents a further watershed. The accession of George III to his grandfather’s throne in 1760 scrambled existing partisan alignments and helped unleash widespread upheaval, at home and abroad. The central sections of this chapter examine the affective responses and disaffected removes created by these changes to the structure of politics. They do so through detailed attention to two cases—a visual print that provided a vivid snapshot of political activity in 1770 and the controversy unleashed by interrupted performances of a sentimental comedy at Drury Lane that same year—that introduce questions about the role of shared perceptual objects in channelling political feeling that are explored further in the literary case studies that follow. The chapter concludes by turning to the evolving conceptions of governance and public feeling that accompanied the turn of the nineteenth century (and that would in turn displace existing political structures) through attention to the early nineteenth-century periodical Egeria. The case studies addressed in this chapter accordingly move from the post-1688 origins of modern politics and partisanship to the transformed conceptions of political activity that accompanied the transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the emerging significance of sensibility, the ‘political science’ of changing governmental practices and population management, and the rise of economic and political ‘liberalism’ (raising questions about the development of ‘liberal’ subjectivities to which I return in the book’s Conclusion). This chapter, in its second aim, introduces the expanded approach to political parties and partisan activity adopted in this book. Whether or not parliamentary parties existed in eighteenth-century Britain has been a contentious issue among historians of politics. In the most infamous argument to the contrary, Lewis Namier memorably observed that in the eighteenth century men went into parliament ‘ “to make a figure” and no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it’.9 This claim, dubious enough as an assertion about childhood psychology, belongs to Namier’s similarly questionable dismissal of the role of ideology or party organization in shaping political activity. Historians have subsequently approached the complications of eighteenth-century partisanship from various angles and through diverse lenses.10 This book will be sympathetic with accounts that emphasize the roles of ideological debate, enduring historical formations, and wider cultural forces in shaping political activity during the eighteenth century. By and large, this book will not be concerned with following the often kaleidoscopic changes in 9 Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1929), 2. 10 See Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III; J. C. D. Clark, ‘The Decline of Party, 1740–1760’, The English Historical Review 93 (1978); J. C. D. Clark, The Dynamics of Change: The Crisis of the 1750s and English Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century; John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

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government ministries—those who were ‘in or out of place’ in Byron’s words—nor with tracing the rise and fall of Whigs and Tories, Court and Country. Rather than tracking the changing fortunes of political groupings (such as they were) in any sustained fashion, this book instead adopts a broad perspective on the changing operations of politics, including the ways that ‘politics’ came to encompass a broad realm of discussion and to characterize an expanding range of governmental practices. The individual chapters, beginning with this one, do nonetheless pay detailed attention to the changing ‘parties’ of politics at crucial junctures and to the evolving ways that parliamentary parties and partisan orientations were understood. Rather than taking a position on the existence of political parties, this book exploits the fluid status of this term in the period. Contemporaries frequently commented upon the ‘parties’ of politics. The History of Benducar the Great (1742), a thinly disguised account of Robert Walpole’s recently concluded tenure as prime minister (and its attendant ‘Bribery and Corruption’), noted that his supporters in Parliament—described in this Eastern allegory as an ‘Assembly’ of nations under a despotic ruler—‘never fail of Promotion if they happen luckily to be of the Side of that Party which is uppermost’.11 Yet when this work described Members of Parliament joining the ‘disaffected Party’ in response to the financial disaster of the 1720 South Sea crash, this term pointed not towards parties in the more restricted parliamentary sense; instead, the author described an expansive assemblage of discontented elements with which parliamentarians had aligned themselves, rather than the other way around. The ‘Rage of the People’ determined the ‘parties’ of politics here, rather than parliamentary forces having the organizing role.12 As the case of a theatrical disturbance, which I discuss later in this chapter, made particularly apparent, the often loose relationship between various modes of ‘party’ organization was recognized and manipulated by contemporary observers, particularly at the extra-parliamentary margins. Following Kathleen Wilson’s valuable injunction to address the wider ‘discursive contexts’ in which party identities were approached by ordinary people, this book recovers the dynamic ways in which the ‘parties’ of politics were understood, as well as the often profound uncertainty around how the core parties of political activity functioned.13 While this book as a whole accordingly proposes an expanded approach to politics and the parties of political activity, some attention to micropolitical developments remains necessary. The present chapter establishes some broader frameworks in which to locate the literary case studies that follow, connecting up those accounts of individual authors and the immediate political contexts for their works with wider trends and developments. At the same time, in its third and final aim, this chapter examines the ways that disaffected attitudes and responses to the shifting parties of politics took shape across a range of genres, literary and otherwise. As 11 The History of Benducar the Great (London: [1742]), 11, 14. 12 The History of Benducar the Great, 14. John Stubbs notes that ‘disaffected Party’—used by Swift, appropriately enough, with reference to debates over piles of human excrement in Dublin—was a ‘stock phrase for the Tories’ during a period of Whig supremacy. Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel, 390. 13 The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14.

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I noted in the Introduction, responses to politics, from generalized complaints to more specific interventions, take diverse guises. In examining an array of generic responses, both to specific moments of controversy and to broader shifts, this chapter also looks ahead to the ways authors made use of literary form to pivot between generalized disaffection and more pointed, detached, or otherwise unique vantage points. The chapters that follow take up this question in greater detail with reference to specific literary works, but Swift may provide an illuminating example at the outset. Although one important account of Swift’s politics, subtitled ‘A Study in Disaffection’, has drawn on his writings as evidence for Swift’s disaffected political attitudes—seeking to determine the ‘partisan meanings’ of those writings, including their occluded militant and extremist streaks, as well as their subsequent ‘political impact’—we may equally consider the converse: that the works of literary authors articulate disaffected attitudes and impulses that only became available in and through those writings, regardless of whatever partisan views they channel or wider impact they sought (assuming that any such delineation of those views or of their imagined or actual outcome were even possible).14 As much as they belonged, that is to say, to a more generalized realm of political discussion, grumbling, and discontent, Swift’s writings also cultivated a uniquely disaffected perspective, all their own. This emphasis on the distinctive points of view made available by literary works, even as they remained in proximity to—and even participated within—the wider field of partisan activity and political discontent guides the case studies of individual authors that follow in subsequent chapters. ‘POLITICKS’! 1688 AND THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ESTRANGEMENT The year following the exchange in which Johnson stated that he would have someone break his bones before talking about politics, Boswell received a letter that vividly described the ‘political conflagration of our Capital’: In one Quarter is to be seen Lord North & Charles Fox firing red hot whigs into St. James’s Palace and Buckingham House And Mr. Pit [sic] & the Chancellor trying to smother the flames with the wet blankets and dish Clouts of Prerogative. In another you find Patriots heating in St. Stephens Chapel like cannon balls in a Furnace. Here every Press in the City fabricating stinck pots and other Combustibles. There the Bench of Bishops praying for Prerogative & preferment. In the midst of all which however it is some consolation to reflect that the mince pies were never better the play houses never fuller and that Mr. Bagginis Air Baloon [sic] will be launched next Tuesday.15

The subsequent chapters of this book engage in greater detail with the larger transitions at stake in this account of the ‘red hot whigs’ organized around Charles James Fox, the reinvention of ‘prerogative’ around William Pitt, and the fragmentation 14 Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 15 George Dempster to James Boswell, 9 January 1784. Boswell Collection, MSS 89, C950, 2–3.

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of opposition ‘Patriots’—in particular, the resurgent ‘Tory’ authoritarianism heralded by the elevation of the younger Pitt to power. Boswell was closely implicated with these shifts (the author of this letter, George Dempster, went on to celebrate him as ‘an advocate of the right Divine’), but equally at stake in the passage quoted here was the turn aside from politics altogether. The ‘consolation’ provided by ‘mince pies’ could have been lifted directly from the homely delights celebrated in William Cowper’s The Task, while the hot air balloon similarly offers itself as a deliberate distraction: the eighteenth-century equivalent of a cat video shared with friends as partial respite from crushing or simply confusing political realities (gestures whose self-conscious frivolousness performs their inadequacy to the larger task of explaining or defusing keenly felt political tensions). There was a deeper history at play in Johnson’s remarks, quoted in the Introduction, lamenting that political affairs were ‘as bad as they can be’. Two days earlier, Johnson had ‘talked with regret and indignation of the factious opposition to Government at this time’.16 Although he referenced recent events, Johnson ‘imputed’ this situation in a ‘great measure’ to an earlier development: the Revolution of 1688.17 The events of the later seventeenth century gave rise to enduring debates about the limits of monarchical prerogative and the rights of the people to resist their rulers. These lines of division continued to underpin Whig and Tory identities, despite their origins in increasingly archaic debates over the Stuart succession and religious conformity—debates that were already bound up with larger structural changes at their point of origin. The change of regime in 1688 and continuing debate over the consequences of the Revolution and constitutional settlement both coincided with and were driven by the expansion, if not explosion, of political discussion. The later seventeenth century thus saw not only the origins for the specific party identities but also the beginnings of partisan political culture as such. This expansion built upon an earlier conflagration: England’s bitter civil war in the 1640s and related conflicts across the three kingdoms. Those events witnessed an explosion of print political commentary. Although we do not typically think of partisanship as a dynamic in which opponents seek to kill each other, the use of ‘faction’, ‘sect’, and ‘schism’ as synonyms for partisan contention continued to invoke both the late seventeenth-century origins of the parties and the bloody conflict close behind. That much was undoubtedly the case for Johnson, whose absolutist views on political authority and popular resistance remained coloured by the spectre of regicidal civil war. The French Revolution cemented the sacrosanct status of the 1688 Revolution. The supposedly stable post-1688 constitutional settlement became a proxy for the stability of English tradition to be preserved at all costs, in the face of widespread radicalism and an incipient mass politics (developments Robert Southey condemned in an early nineteenth-century essay as those of ‘Popular Disaffection’). At the same time, ‘1688’ had come to stand, in other quarters, for everything that needed to 16 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, eds. George Birkbeck Norman Hill and L.  F.  Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–64), 4.164–5. 17 Life of Johnson, 4.165.

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change. Amidst demands to reform and even eradicate existing systems of governance, this totemic date galvanized attention as the symbol of archaic legacies in need of transformation. These legacies, particularly during the later eighteenth century, also became the locus for a more ambivalent, uncertain, and layered reckoning with the past, as well as the rallying point for alternative, radical readings of the Revolution and its democratic potential.18 When Johnson ‘imputed’ the 1688 Revolution with responsibility for the present state of affairs, then, he pointed to deep origins for the ‘factious’ political environment and acknowledged the continuing pertinence of debates, following the crowning of William and Mary, around the abridgement of royal prerogative and granting of parliamentary sovereignty. Yet he also pointed to something else. Beyond specific political debates and partisan fault lines, Johnson called attention to the normalization of political contention that was both their by-product and their enabling condition. Those events had not only created specific political debates, that is to say, but had in an important sense given rise to political debate as an ongoing fact of national life. The concomitant increase in printed material and expansion of the ‘public sphere’ of political debate—subsequently built upon, including notable expansions in the late Walpole era—established the foundations for the political culture of the eighteenth century. Indeed, the post-1688 decades may be said, in important respects, to witness the origins of ‘modern’ politics.19 The ‘Glorious Revolution’ had until fairly recently been viewed by historians as an ‘easy, consensual, and [. . .] conservative’ transition. This account of a fundamentally ‘sensible’ revolution was ‘enshrined’ by Edmund Burke, who compared the events of the later seventeenth century favourably to the French Revolution, a view handed down to the twentieth century through Macaulay and his successors.20 As historians have increasingly recognized, however, far from the smooth 18 For the ‘myriad interpretations and meanings’ given to the events of 1688–9 in the pre-1789 period, which included a ‘constant if checkered history’ of radical and libertarian readings, see Kathleen Wilson, ‘Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics’, Journal of British Studies 28 (1989), 350–1; see also The Sense of the People, 209–18. William Hazlitt challenged the Burkean account of the secure post-1688 order that endured into the early nineteenth century and emphasized the subversive potential of the Revolution, thereby aligning himself with ‘Dissenting radical interpretations of the Glorious Revolution, and with the polemical intensification of those interpretations during the revolution controversy of the 1790s’. See Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 188, 223. For the wider counter-revolutionary reaction, for which Burke became an overdetermined proxy, see Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 19 As Mark Knights has shown, this period put onto the agenda ‘matters to do with partisanship, politeness, sociability, public opinion, political economy, truth, fiction and reason, together with the means available for the construction of new individual, group and national identities’. See Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For the modernity of the later seventeenth century, see Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, ‘Introduction: Modernity and Later Seventeenth-Century England’, in A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration, eds. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Compare Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 57–67. 20 Rachel Weil, A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III’s England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 3. ‘In the immediate aftermath of 1688,’ by contrast, ‘contemporaries could not be confident that the new regime would last a year, let alone three centuries’ (3).

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transition and settled outcome celebrated by Burke, the later seventeenth century witnessed a violent regime change, whose consequences continued to be debated well into the eighteenth century.21 James II, despite having absconded, maintained a base of avid supporters in his exile that endured, albeit in attenuated form, through to the 1745 uprising launched by ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’.22 But during their own moment and into the subsequent century, opposition to William of Orange and his wife Mary, who asserted their joint claim to the throne, was not limited to support for the return of the exiled Stuart king. As Rachel Weil has noted, even in the immediate aftermath of 1688–9, Jacobitism, whether committed or ‘partial’, comprised ‘only the extreme end of a spectrum’ of distrusting responses to the Williamite regime.23 Active efforts to overthrow the government swirled together with antagonism, agitation, and ambivalence.24 Aside from the more obviously militant opposition—including myriad plots associated with ‘papists’ and other ‘disaffected persons’25—the post-Revolution decades witnessed disaffected and discontented responses of various stripes. By the early eighteenth century, this disaffection had extended to familiar kinds of ‘grumbling’ at politics. As Brandon P. Turner notes, whether conceived in terms of ‘discontent, complaint, bellyaching, or “tatling” ’ (party fervour), the ‘theme of “grumbling” ’ played a particularly crucial role in the political thought of Bernard Mandeville. Behind his infamous economic defence of private vice in The Fable of the Bees was an antecedent poem entitled ‘The Grumbling Hive’, while Mandeville’s Pamphleteers: A Satyr (1703) similarly defended William III and the post-Revolution settlement against ‘a grumbling Nation that was ne’er at ease’: an experience of being sick of politics that bound public ills together with private discomfort.26 F.  P.  Lock notes that ‘the political world was more complex and less stable [in the 1690s] than it became under Queen Anne.’ Lock quoted in Ashley Marshall, Swift and History: Politics and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 21 Steve Pincus has argued that the 1688 Revolution, far from the consensual, non-violent, inconsequential event handed down by historians, resulted from competing agendas for state modernization and coincided with revolutions in the church, foreign policy, and the economy. See Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). As part of a wider revisionist challenge to the political ‘stability’ of the long eighteenth century, Pincus’s study amplifies the significance of disputes—over royal prerogative and the constitutional settlement—that resurfaced under George III. 22 For the continuing cultural and political significance of the ‘Jacobite’ cause into the eighteenth century, see Murray G. H. Pittock, Jacobitism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998). 23 A Plague of Informers, 13. 24 In A Plague of Informers, Weil eloquently describes the ambivalence of the elites on whose nominal support William’s regime continued to depend (and whose qualified loyalty had therefore to be tolerated). See A Plague of Informers, 13, 66. 25 As Weil notes, ‘[n]ewsletters, diaries, government correspondence, and transcripts of parliamentary debates from the first years of the revolution are full of reports that “papists and disaffected persons” were meeting, collecting arms and horses, and receiving commissions from King James to form an army that would rise up on his arrival.’ A Plague of Informers, 3. 26 See Brandon P. Turner, ‘Mandeville Against Luxury’, Political Theory 44 (2016). As Turner notes, that poem concluded—mobilizing ‘content’ as the antonym of ‘discontent’—by wishing London well: ‘May in your Days the Gift of Heav’n be sent, / Which we ne’er tasted yet, to be CONTENT.’ Turner emphasizes the role Mandeville’s medical background played in his recognition that ‘political grumbling and private grumbling are symptoms of the same condition’ (32).

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We can already see this pivot, between targeted unease with the post-1688 political climate and more generalized discontent with politics, at play in the later seventeenth century. Facing the aftermath of the recent Revolution in the preface to his Poem Occasioned by the Late Discontents & Disturbances in the State (1691), Nahum Tate described, even as he also found himself drawn into, a condition of widespread political disaffection: After so happy and wonderful a Revolution as we have seen, when our Hopes were grown desperate, and our Liberty reduc’d to its very last gasp, to have the only Remedy in Nature so effectually apply’d, so miraculous a Recovery perform’d; after all this, to find English-men, and such as pretend to no other Interest or Religion but That of their Country; to find Them expressing Dissatisfaction, everywhere busie in sowing Dissention, obstructing, as far as in them lies, the Progress of Affairs, and unhinging the present Settlement (upon which alone depends the Safety of these Nations, and common Quiet of Europe); This is so just a Cause of Indignation, as must make every Lover of his Countrey to turn Satyrist, or, at least, excuse the honest Zeal of such as upon this Occasion express their Resentments.27

First published anonymously as A Pastoral Dialogue the previous year, the ensuing poem attended to the widespread ‘Discontent’ that had emerged since the events of 1688–9.28 In contrast with the chaste delights sought in retirement by Philander—who credulously asks his friend Palaemon how the nation can ‘so soon grow sick’ of the ‘Happiness’ after William III claimed the throne—the poem delineated the ‘Fears’ for his ‘Countries Peace’ that continued to intrude upon ‘private Cares’ and the quest for a ‘Peaceful Life’.29 Written in support of William as a devout and legitimate ruler, the poem targeted the specific figure of the Jacobite, described as not knowing even the ‘Sentiments of his own Wayward Mind’; at the same time, the poem laid further blame with those elements of the established church that continued to fuel discontent, whose arguments in support of the deposed Stuart monarch (for passive obedience and the ‘constant Peal, Prerogative’) exemplified the ‘Mistaken Politicks’ that continued to disfigure the present.30 ‘Disorder’ witnessed previously only among the ‘Swains’ had come to infect the 27 A Poem Occasioned by the Late Discontents & Disturbances in the State With Reflections Upon the Rise and Progress of Priest-craft (London: 1691), [i]. 28 A Poem Occasioned by the Late Discontents & Disturbances, 5. The poem may have helped Tate become Poet Laureate the following year. See Christopher Spencer, Nahum Tate (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972), 30–1. Although Tate had been identified with Tory poets, even writing a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel in collaboration with Dryden, his investment in established authority apparently overrode any dynastic commitments. Spencer notes that William and Mary, ‘reserved, conservatively Protestant, and inclined to encourage a higher standard of public morality, were a royal couple whom Tate could celebrate with genuine enthusiasm’ (29). For Dryden’s programmatic association with the Stuart monarchy in his writing for Charles II—despite claims to impartiality—see Phillip Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 29 A Poem Occasioned by the Late Discontents & Disturbances, 6, 5, 1–2. 30 A Poem Occasioned by the Late Discontents & Disturbances, 8–9. The poem identifies women (together with ‘sleepy Scots’ who ‘think the wondrous Change’ of rulers ‘a Dream’) as especially susceptible to confused political thinking, by way of a biblical precedent: ‘The frailer Souls (for when were Women wise?) / Give ear to murm’ring Fiends suggested Lyes, / Fair gloz’d to cheat ’em of their Paradise’ (8).

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‘Flocks’ more widely, and Tate’s poem, expanding on its pastoral topos, accordingly described the pervasive unrest brewing in the nation (or ‘Country’) at large in terms of disrupted quiet and ruined bliss. Echoing the contrast in the earliest political usages of ‘disaffection’ between those ‘well-affected’ to the government and its supposedly ‘disaffected’, ‘delinquent’, or ‘malignant’ opponents, indifference or disdain here appeared as its own form of politically resonant affective alienation, with those ‘unconcern’d for a Man’s Country’ described as having ‘the worst want of natural Affection’.31 Tate described various factors contributing to the lingering ‘Cloud / Of Discontent’ around the new regime. At the same time, the Pastoral Dialogue marked a further shift. Politics itself was the problem here. The domain of political discussion had increasingly become a source of unease and disquiet, aside from the disputes vented therein. Aside from specific fault lines and factious legacies—which particularly adhere to the archaic spelling ‘politicks’—Tate’s poem thereby pointed towards a familiar situation, in which ‘political’ discussion not only gave voice to pervasive division and frustration but became a source of annoyance (or worse) in its own right. Describing hostile groups within the established church, Tate’s poem challenged their criticisms of the new regime. Yet he also supplied this critique with a wider resonance, describing the ways this ‘young and dapper Brood of forward Chicks / No sooner Perch, but scream out politicks.’32 Together with the agitation of the ‘Flocks’ more widely, this detail pointed to the increased volume, in all senses, of political debate (in what would not be the last instance of outraged tweeting on political affairs).33 Whether the chicks’ screams indirectly characterized their partisan accusation—of underhand conduct, playing ‘politics’—or replicated their undifferentiated chatter—politics, politics, POLITICS!—Tate delineated an emerging domain of political discussion that would reach further levels of saturation over subsequent generations. Even his own poem could not escape, moreover, from the stultifying, circular situation, whereby controversies and the heated discussion by which they were sustained became mutually reinforcing (a dynamic characteristic of heightened partisanship, later prevalent with the ‘Rage of Parties’ under Queen Anne, which continues in current cycles of outrage and rhetorical escalation). Those depicted in the Pastoral Dialogue as ‘expressing Dissatisfaction’ were also, the philological similarity would seem to imply, those ‘sowing Dissention’.34 Tate proceeded to validate ‘Indignation’ as a response to this state of affairs, thereby excusing those who ‘express their Resentments’—not least, presumably, himself. 31 A Poem Occasioned by the Late Discontents & Disturbances, [i]. 32 A Poem Occasioned by the Late Discontents & Disturbances, 10. These critical elements in the church are compared with those ‘elder Chanticleers’ who were ‘inspir’d, / To sound the Spiritual Watch alone’ (9). 33 Compare Donald J. Trump: ‘I promise to rebuild our military and secure our border. Democrats want to shut down the government. Politics!’ Twitter post, 27 April 2017. 34 As Tate’s spelling of ‘Dissention’ suggests, nonconformist religious practice remained tainted by the suggestion of factiousness and disloyalty: as Daniel E. White has noted, in his eloquent discussion of Dissenters’ individualized and collective oppositional identities, ‘one cannot be a Dissenter without dissenting from something else’. See Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Yet this gesture also left him implicated, enveloping his own writings within the self-perpetuating situation his own poem described: in which those blaming others for ‘expressing Dissatisfaction’ and ‘sowing Dissention’ might themselves equally be accused of fuelling discontent and breeding division. S AT I R E A N D C Y N I C I S M : F RO M T H E M A K I N G O F S W I F T TO T H E FA L L O F WA L P O L E ( 1 7 1 4 – 4 2 ) The later seventeenth century witnessed dissatisfaction with the current political situation take shape within an expanding domain of political discussion. Discontent that inclined towards more active, militant guises jostled alongside more general ‘grumbling’ towards (and being ‘sick’ of ) politics. Discontent was thus addressed not only at the present state of political affairs but, increasingly, towards ‘politics’ tout court. This was the situation, Tate claimed, that might prompt ‘every Lover of his Countrey to turn Satyrist’. Among those to take up this mantle over coming decades was Jonathan Swift. Although his satire would ultimately come to have different and broader targets, extending to humanity as such, Swift remained uneasy with the post-1688 Whig regime. While some scholars maintain that Swift ‘never seriously doubted the legality, necessity, or rightness’ of the Revolution— even as they acknowledge, in Ashley Marshall’s nice phrasing, that he was ‘grumpy’ about post-revolution England—others have proposed that his ‘disaffection’ went considerably further, extending to support for Jacobite calls to overturn the 1688–9 settlement.35 Critics are more uniform in noting Swift’s disdain for the Hanoverian monarchs who acquired power following the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Swift’s ‘most derisive comments’ about governance date from the reign of George I and reflected his sense ‘that the English government was moving further away from constitutional rule’ during this period.36 Gulliver’s Travels (1726) repeatedly attacked the corrupt governance of the Hanoverian age, as exemplified by the ascent of Robert Walpole. Yet this critique was of a piece with a larger picture. Despite his ostensible focus on this later period, the wreckage of Gulliver’s first voyage on 5 November—the anniversary, we recall, of the date William and Mary landed in England—located Swift’s satire, or at least its political dimensions, in an 35 My discussion here is indebted to the valuable account of Swift’s ‘conflicted Toryism’ in Ashley Marshall, Swift and History: Politics and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For accounts of Swift as a conservative Whig and disaffected Tory respectively, see J. A. Downie, Jonathan Swift, Political Writer (London: Routledge, 1984) and F. P. Lock, Swift’s Tory Politics (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983). For Swift’s more indeterminate and militant oppositional streak, see Higgins, Swift’s Politics. As Marshall summarizes, Higgins does not brand Swift as a supporter of the exiled Stuart monarchy but does ‘trace the consonance of Swift’s political works and statements with militant Jacobite Tory rhetoric and distinguishes him from the Old Whigs’ (199). Marshall concludes that ‘there is no reason to believe that Swift was a Jacobite’, as some critics have conjectured, ‘but neither are we wise to suppose that he was entirely innocent in his disaffection’ (175). In addition to registering this general discontent, or ‘grump[iness], Marshall herself maintains that we ought to give greater weight to his negativity about 1688–9 and its consequences, beginning with his ‘disappointed irritation’ at the deposing of James II (162; 211). 36 Marshall, Swift and History, 187.

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oblique relationship with the revolutionary settlement and thus with the post-1688 period as a whole.37 Swift was arguably ‘first and foremost a political writer’.38 His writings were also marked by profound disillusionment and alienation. In Gulliver’s Travels, estrangement extended to outright disdain towards—and even the attempt to detach completely from—the modern world, if not humanity as such. While the foundering of Gulliver’s initial voyage on the Revolution anniversary yoked his travels to ambiguously disaffected attitudes towards the post-1688 settlement, the deepening chasm of alienation that built over the book as a whole ultimately extended beyond politics, as Gulliver’s initial disorientation and disillusionment with England become compounded by the disgust and derangement that leave him wholly incapable of returning to human society. The concluding confrontations with the dispassionately rational Houyhnhnms and humanoid Yahoos nonetheless looped back into the political critiques signalled at the outset. These respective vectors of estrangement—Gulliver’s alienation from a corrupt political world and his desire to escape humanity as such—converge in the ‘Letter to Sympson’ that prefaced later editions of Gulliver’s Travels. In the guise of a fauxtesty letter from his fictional alter-ego to his publisher, Swift here had Gulliver write from his ‘Retirement’ about changes he would have made to the Travels (emboldening his support for Queen Anne, the monarch ‘of most pious and glorious memory’) and voice his reservations about publishing the book in the first place. Referring to the barbaric yet biologically human creatures encountered on his last voyage, Gulliver explained that he had implored his addressee—who had insisted upon the ‘Motive of publick good’ in encouraging the original publication for English ‘Yahoo’ readers—to consider that the Yahoos were a Species of Animals utterly incapable of Amendment by Precepts or Examples: And so it hath proved; for instead of seeing a full Stop put to all Abuses and Corruptions, at least in this little Island, as I had Reason to expect: Behold, after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions: I desired you would let me know by a Letter, when Party and Faction were extinguished; Judges learned and upright; Pleaders honest and modest, with some tincture of common Sense; and Smithfield blazing with Pyramids of Law-Books.

37 In having the first voyage undertaken by Gulliver ‘split’ on the 5 November anniversary of the Revolution, Swift prefigured the irreconcilable perspectives and divided loyalties with which Gulliver’s Travels would associate the post-1688 regime. See Lock, Swift’s Tory Politics and Higgins, Swift’s Politics, 154–5. After the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Marshall notes, Swift became ‘retrospectively increasingly disaffected’ towards 1688; Swift’s ‘most insinuating or explicitly disapproving comments about William III and 1688 occur relatively late in his writing life, as do his vitriolic remarks on abuses of royal power. The Revolution of 1688 [. . .] came to look a lot less satisfactory after the accession of George I and the Whig oligarchy.’ Swift and History, 170; 200–1. 38 Christopher Fox, ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. For the complex relationship between the preponderance of occasional, political works in Swift’s writings and the exiled presence instantiated between his posthumous archive and the world, see ‘Swift’s Tory Anarchy,’ in Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 71.

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The encounter with the Yahoos in the final part of Gulliver’s Travels undermines the supposed elevation of man (and subverts the status of English men in particular). Aside from its reversal of expectations about ‘animal’ behaviour, the depiction of this ‘Species’, as Gulliver terms the Yahoos here, drew in part upon depictions of African ‘natives’ (or slaves) and the savage ‘old Irish’. Yet this expansive, quasianthropological critique of the human species was subsumed by the letter within the early voyages’ critiques of ‘Faction’ (a term we may understand to encompass not only partisanship but debased legal and religious reasoning and the wider propensity of mankind to form sects and interest groups, closed off to outsiders).39 Gulliver proceeds from this swelling catalogue to observe that ‘seven Months were a sufficient time to correct every Vice and Folly to which the Yahoos are subject; if their Natures had been capable of the least Disposition to Virtue or Wisdom’. As much as Swift’s portrayal of the Yahoos inverted beast–human dichotomies and rescripted putative ‘savagery’ as enlightened barbarism, then, the worst traits of the ‘Yahoos’ become apparent here in their irredeemably corrupt, debased, unreasonable politics. The encounter with the Yahoos thus not only effects Gulliver’s alienation from his own ‘Species’ but underscores his continued estrangement from national political life.40 Swift maintains a towering role in any discussion of political disaffection in literature (and beyond). Yet for all his importance as a model of disaffected authorship, both in his own moment and subsequently, the stances adopted in Swift’s writings were ultimately distinct from the relationships with politics that concern this study. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s critiques ranged beyond topical reference points to a broader, despairing picture of debased governing principles; in the book as a whole, these critiques of the court and national (as well as colonial) governance coupled with an increasingly scathing critique of the entire human species. Both this mounting political despair and blooming misanthropy can be discerned in his claim, elsewhere in the letter wishing that Pope were ‘disaffected’, to ‘detest abominate & abhor every Creature who hath a dram of Power in either Kingdom’.41 At the same time, Swift at least kept in view the prospect that the ills of the current political regime might be overcome: if not through more virtuous politicians, then by appeals to higher causes, or a superior past, or sweeping the

39 Daniel Elion astutely identifies ‘faction’ as central to Swift’s visions of national disintegration and wider fragmentation. ‘His common accusation is that every cabal, club, and faction is a union of interest whose internal coherence is a product of ruthless repression, and whose ultimate purpose is usurpation on a broader scale.’ See Faction’s Fictions: Ideological Closure in Swift’s Satire (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). ‘Swift’s interest in linguistic issues is, at root,’ Elion maintains, ‘a matter of practical ethics rather than abstract or philosophical speculation’; at its sharpest extreme, Swift’s animus directs itself at ‘the creation of private moralities [. . .] limited and proprietorial perspectives that are designed to disown or disenfranchise others from ethical consideration’ (and that find more modest but related expression in the private jokes to which his satires risked turning) (19). 40 For an example of the tendency to detach the misanthropy of Part IV from the rest of the Travels, see George Orwell, ‘Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels.’ In ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and Other Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950). 41 Quoted in Dustin Griffin, Swift and Pope: Satirists in Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131.

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deck clean altogether and starting over.42 Both Swift and Pope, his intimate friend, thereby remained invested in what we might consider, however counter-intuitively, a kind of idealism, holding out the prospect that politics might be transformed, if only in its wholesale evacuation of current ills or its sublimation into a higher moral ideal or cultural standard. Their disillusionment revealed how confronting the impossibility of change might instead occasion mud-slinging anger and searing misanthropy: the grubby underside beneath the pristine alternatives and lofty ideals at which their works strained. This underside became, at times, the most apparent surface feature of their writing. Yet even their most acerbic critiques remained inflected by the desire to fashion an alternative, whether political and cultural transformation or the more modest possibilities fashioned from within a space of retreat. Swift and Pope disagreed with each other, Dustin Griffin notes, as to whether it was ‘better to express resentment in bitter satire, or to rise above such feelings in philosophical detachment’; these stances coincided with and implicated each other.43 Swift’s often splenetic disaffection came together with detachment from the world altogether. The Travels culminate in the outright alienation from mankind described in the letter to Sympson, with Gulliver sleeping away from his family in a stable (while Swift inhabited his own version of the ‘Retirement’ from ‘this little island’ described in that fictional author’s preface). Both writers occupied a shared remove and alternated between extreme impulses to condemn and transform politics or to escape and transcend the debased political world. With disintegrating hope of political change at least came fidelity to friendship, exemplary of a commitment to moral truth not available elsewhere. The retreats and tarnished pursuits of an alternative by these ‘Augustan’ writers, already outliers within their own moment,44 were thus distinct from the stances adopted by subsequent generations facing lessened hopes of an escape beyond the available parties. Swift and Pope may be identified broadly speaking with the ‘Country’ opposition, during a period in which the Court/Country division had emerged as an important axis for political debate and organization and come to some degree to eclipse Whig and Tory divides. Yet their conception of the ‘country’ was not the only one. In her compelling account of the complex revivalist impulses behind a strain of eighteenthcentury poetry, Marilyn Butler, as noted in the Introduction, put forward an alternative lineage of poets who reimagined the eighteenth-century tradition of ‘Country’ opposition on more radical grounds. Rather than viewing Pope as 42 For Swift, this past was the reign of Queen Anne. See Marshall, Swift and History and Stubbs, Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel, 337–8. 43 Griffin, Swift and Pope: Satirists in Dialogue, 132. Swift and Pope differed greatly in their levels of partisan engagement and in their modes of responding to politics in their writings. Swift recognized that Pope—at least until his alignment with the Patriot cause—did not ‘have any thing to do with Party [. . .] while I am raging every moment against the Corruptions in both kingdoms, especially of this’ (a reference to Ireland, echoed in remarks on his ‘foolish Zeal in endeavouring to save this wretched Island’) (131). As Stubbs similarly concludes, where Pope ‘was a poet who ultimately despaired of civic action bringing any good’, Swift was a poet who ‘felt nevertheless the attempt to improve the polis needed to be made even if defeat were certain’. Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel, 564. 44 See especially Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

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exemplary of this ‘Country Alternative’ (‘a Twickenham garden is after all a half-and-half retreat’, Butler astutely notes), her study recovers the ‘enlarged [. . .] more imaginative and theoretical’ perceptions of ‘the country’ and ‘the land’ apparent in what amounts to a profoundly expanded ‘patriot’ tradition.45 This neglected strain of eighteenth-century poetry provides just one example of the ways that the post-1688 decades gave rise to myriad varieties of disaffected response whose channelling of discontent provided this stance of alienated removal with a sharply different cast to these Augustan contemporaries, at once more realistic and more radical. Beyond the specific oppositional strains identified by Butler, moreover, the ‘Country’ opposition—closely associated with the ‘Patriot’ cause—was an expansive and incoherent coalition that sought to realize or at least give voice to these challenges to the political status quo. As its parallel titling as a Pastoral Dialogue made explicit, Tate’s poem imagined its setting as an escape from the noise and bustle of the political arena. Yet we are far from an idealized country retreat here, let alone the transcendent Romantic experience of nature celebrated by Wordsworth and his contemporaries. In the most mundane sense, Tate depicted a space withdrawn from the discussion of politics. Beyond specific fault lines in the post-revolutionary polity, his poem looked ahead towards a transformed world of political contention: a new normal in which ‘politicks’ was now a fact of everyday life, which could no more be overcome than escaped.46 As Johnson looked back on the events of the Revolution from the distance of almost a century, we have seen, he identified specific points of origin for contemporary discontent in political divisions dating from the late seventeenth century. Those discontents acquired increased momentum and diverse modes of expression over the ensuing decades, finding one locus in the ‘Country’. The fall of Walpole presented a further milestone: the disintegration of the ‘Patriot’ opposition, who reneged on their opposition commitments upon taking office. Among those who witnessed these events first-hand was a young Laurence Sterne, who thereby came of age politically and as a writer amidst what I identify in Chapter 2 as the first widespread popular expression of cynicism towards the political establishment (and whose own retreat to the ‘country’ was shaped by these complex Country party and ‘Patriot’ legacies). In giving Tristram Shandy the same birthdate at the Revolution anniversary, Sterne built upon Swift’s precedent in Gulliver’s Travels. 45 Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 10, 15. This account of the ‘drive to unseat or delegitimise something in the present, by claiming authority from the past’ (4) dovetails with the explicitly political challenges to the established order in the later eighteenth century noted in the earlier study. See Romantics, Rebels, Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 16, 19, 22. For a parallel political story about the ‘tory populism’ that temporarily took shape in the 1714–60 period, see Linda Colley, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1981). 46 Swift tends to use the term ‘politicks’ to describe a realm of activity—and a particular kind of politicking—rather than this more generalized domain. When he comments, in the Journal to Stella, that evils attending the quarrel between Oxford and Bolingbroke have ‘now spread more than ever— But burn politicks’ he seems to refer to the ways these machinations have soured interpersonal relationships, while looking ahead, as with many of his remarks, to a more generalized disdain for political activity and discussion (quoted Marshall, Swift and History, 145).

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At the same time, he registered a further and growing remove from the post-1688 moment that was bound up, in his novel’s parodic depiction of confused ‘Patriot’ argumentation, with a further break: the realization that the insurmountable divisions and inescapable noise of politics were facts of modern life. Those realizations were in turn raised to a new pitch but also thrown through a loop, with the accession of George III and the onset of the period that concerns the remainder of this book. ‘A L L T H E D I F F E R E N T PA RT I E S E L E C T R I F I E D ’ : S T RU C T U R E S O F P O L I T I C A L F E E L I N G AT T H E A C C E S S I O N O F G E O RG E I I I Writing to his London publisher in 1773, David Hume remarked in exasperation that England was ‘so sunk in Stupidity and Barbarism and Faction that you may as well think of Lapland for an Author’.47 In the same letter, Hume went on to make his observation, quoted in the Introduction, about Tristram Shandy (bad as it was) as the ‘best Book’ by an Englishman in the past thirty years: ‘[a] Remark which may astonish you; but which you will find true on Reflection.’48 The end of the Walpole era three decades earlier, as Hume had emphasized in his Essays, Moral and Political (1741–2), had witnessed long-standing points of partisan division subsumed beneath a variety of political divides.49 The early 1740s also marked the onset of changed conceptions of governance (what Foucault, as the concluding section of this chapter will discuss, termed ‘governmentality’). This earlier transitional moment was an important antecedent for some of the larger shifts examined in this book, not least as the period in which both Sterne and Johnson had their earliest experiences as published writers. At the same time, Hume’s remarks about modern ‘Barbarism’ made a pointed claim about the post-1760 moment, whose political upheaval constituted for Hume an inescapable context for contemporary authorship. Looking back on recent decades in his Short History of the Opposition During the Last Session of Parliament (1779), James Macpherson described how, in adopting ‘different principles and characters,’ dogged partisans had reignited smouldering disputes and ‘formed new factions, on the shadows of departed political

47 David Hume to William Strahan, 30 January 1773. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1983), 2.269. 48 The Letters of David Hume, 2.269. 49 In his essays on parties, Hume posited that partisan disputes could be overcome or at least displaced by the forces of social progress (even as sentimental attachments nonetheless continued to drive dangerous forms of political irrationality). See Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography, 169–71. As further elaborated in his History of England (1754–61), the affective mechanisms and theories of social development described by Hume were in turn applied to intergenerational conflicts in AngloScottish history in the vividly imagined historical fictions of Walter Scott. Scott’s novels nonetheless presented these dynamics with frequently exaggerated or distorted expression, absorbing disparate conflicts into a dialectical theory of progress and erasing the dynamic contours of eighteenth-century political debate (including the erasure of post-1760 unrest). See this book’s Conclusion.

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tenets’.50 As Matthew Bramble observes upon his arrival in London in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), ‘the dæmon of party seems to have usurped every department of life. Even the world of literature and taste is divided into the most virulent factions, which revile, decry, and traduce the works of one another.’51 The accession of George III not only scrambled existing political lines and unleashed new sources of political division; it also created fresh uncertainty about the ‘parties’ of political activity. Beyond localized, micropolitical developments, such as the kaleidoscopic changes in government ministries, this period witnessed dramatic shifts to both political and affective structures. ‘I wish you was here’, Sterne wrote to a friend from London, in December 1760, ‘to see what changes of looks and political reasoning, have taken place in every company, and coffee-house since last year.’52 With the arrival of the new king, two months earlier, there had seemed cause for renewed optimism that partisan division—and political malaise—might be overcome. The young monarch appealed directly, as we have noted, to the idea of the ‘Patriot King’ advanced by the political opposition of a preceding generation, appearing to augur a fresh start for English politics. These hopes were coupled with renewed—or at least reset—expectations for literary authorship. Writing to his London publisher, Hume asked whether the new reign was ‘to be the Augustan Age’; Elizabeth Montagu expressed related hopes that the ‘young monarch will copy his predecessor’s solid virtues’, adding that ‘if he endeavours to make them more brilliant by the help of poetry, eloquence, &c. &c. the happiness and glory of Britain will be great’.53 Recalling the rather sorry figure of George II in a letter to a friend, Samuel Johnson more coolly observed that ‘we are much pleased with his successor; of whom we are so much inclined to hope great things, that most of us begin already to believe them’. As Johnson’s knowing remarks anticipated, the hope and change portended by the new king did not last. Anticipation quickly dissolved into controversy, as George III took a newly active and divisive role in ministerial politics. In addition to scrambling existing political configurations— Sterne noted that the new alignments around ministers, including the king’s controversial adviser the Earl of Bute, would ‘do as well as Whig and Tory’54—his interventions appeared radically to overstep his role. Accusing the king of 50 James Macpherson, A Short History of the Opposition During the Last Session of Parliament (London: 1779), 2–3. 51 Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Lewis  M.  Knapp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 104–5. 52 Sterne to Stephen Croft, 25 December 1760. Letters of Laurence Sterne, 7.177. 53 David Hume to William Strahan, 27 October 1760. The Letters of David Hume, 1.336; The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, 4 vols. (T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813), 3.316. Horace Walpole anticipated openings for men of letters and art collectors. See Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George III, ed. Derek Jarrett, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 1.16. The purposes behind the literary patronage promoted by the king’s long-term adviser the Earl of Bute ranged from making the king ‘seem a generous supporter of the arts’ (presiding over what Alexander Carlyle, anticipating Hume, termed a ‘new Augustan age’) to promoting political considerations. Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 61–9. Johnson received a state pension from the early 1760s. 54 Sterne to Stephen Croft, 25 December, 1760. Letters of Laurence Sterne, 7.177.

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unconstitutional conduct, breaching the terms of the post-1688 settlement that limited the influence of royal prerogative and affirmed the sovereignty of parliament, more radical voices called for the ‘Glorious Revolution’ to be mounted once again.55 In the American colonies, these controversies fuelled the gathering winds of the American Revolution.56 Within England, these developments unleashed widespread discontents and pervasive disorientation. In his Memoirs of the Reign of George III, Horace Walpole reflected back on an unusual alignment of constituencies. The protests in response to the 1763 Cider Excise had seen an alliance emerge between rural opponents of the tax and petitioners in London. ‘Few political clouds seemed less big with mischief than this storm, unnaturally conjured up, and little likely to last’, Walpole noted. But he went on to make an ingenuous addition: ‘for what principle of union could there be in common between the City of London and two or three distant counties whose apples were to be taxed?’57 Writing with the hindsight of some years, Walpole imbued these recollections of the early decades of King George III’s reign with a combination of feigned credulity and gloomy foreboding more characteristic of his career as a Gothic novelist. As he well knew, writing from a greater historical remove, diverse and uncertain ‘political clouds’ had been gathering for some years. These ‘principle[s] of union’—even and perhaps especially between seemingly incongruous groupings, comprising disparate political actors—would prove to have peculiar staying power. In the American colonies, fears about government overreach became entangled with mounting anger towards hotly disputed imperial legislation and led to protests that not only took place in parallel with developments in England but had immediate precedents in English unrest. The political ferment of this moment was accompanied, on both sides of the Atlantic, by the emergence of a dynamic populist opposition movement that became inseparable from the excitement and unpredictability, frustration and fear to which those emergent political energies gave rise. At the forefront of this explosion of popular political activity was an unlikely figurehead: an establishment outsider turned celebrity politician. Born a Londoner, after a youth spent as a pornographer and philanderer John Wilkes turned his attention to politics; opportunistically advancing nativist claims and appeals to the rights of the subject—following apparent persecution by the government—Wilkes promptly became a cause célèbre. Wilkes’s role in existing literary-historical accounts of the period has typically been limited to his rakish persona and his respective reputations as a libertine and a demagogue. As Crane Brinton noted in a 1926 study, literary scholars remained hesitant about ‘whether to assign Wilkes to the 55 The passage of an infamous motion in April 1780, declaring that ‘the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’, prompted Charles James Fox to hail the beginning of a ‘second revolution’. Quoted in Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 547–8. 56 For the impact of fears that the English constitution was under threat in the American colonies, fuelled in part by contemporary unrest within England, see Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Logic of Rebellion’, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 94–159. 57 Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George III, 1.165–7.

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eighteenth century for his aristocratic vices, or to the nineteenth for his democratic virtues’.58 Yet Wilkes and his moment warrant fuller scrutiny in their own right. However deplorable—or, to his supporters, delightful—he may have been as an individual, Wilkes was a significant political personality and partisan figure. As a ‘malicious jester’, in John Brewer’s resonant phrase, with a reputation for scurrilous behaviour and an uncanny command of the media, Wilkes became the figurehead for a wide-reaching populist opposition movement that mobilized diverse constituencies during the early decades of George III’s reign (including within the American colonies). Under the banner of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’, the protest movement fuelled by Wilkes’s supposed mistreatment at the hands of the government and unconstitutional bar from office became a magnet for mounting debates about the rights of the people and civil liberties.59 The ascent of Wilkes as an opposition figurehead remains equally worthy of attention for its role in channelling the ‘parties’ of political activity at this moment of ferment. The controversy that engulfed Wilkes began with the North Briton (1762–3), a short-lived publication that had as its stated purpose ‘to heap all manner of abuse and ridicule on the government and its friends’ (and whose ribald satire Horace Walpole attributed with ‘an acrimony, a spirit, and a licentiousness unheard of before even in this country’).60 Founded in response to Tobias Smollett’s progovernment Briton, Wilkes’s paper played upon fears about the Earl of Bute’s ‘secret influence’ upon the king—which became legendary in this period61—and played up their basis in Bute’s Scottishness, by adopting the ironic guise of an admiring ‘North Briton’. These attacks extended to the political conduct of the monarch. The notorious ‘forty-fifth paper’ asked how the king could ‘give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures and the most unjustifiable public declarations’. The charge gave rise to outrage. The parliamentary motion condemning Wilkes asserted that ‘the Paper entitled “The North Briton, No. 45” is a false, scandalous, and seditious libel’ and that its attacks on the king were ‘most manifestly tending to alienate the affections of the people from his majesty, to withdraw from their obedience to the laws of the realm, and to excite them to traitorous insurrections against his majesty’s government’—language redolent of the earliest commentaries on political disaffection.62 Wilkes eluded subsequent prosecution by escaping to France. Following his return to England four years 58 The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 12. See also James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge, 1963) and Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 11. 59 For the best overview of the development of Wilkes’s fame and the bearing of the wider movement on these political and constitutional questions, see Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 60 Cash, John Wilkes, 65. 61 These fears played a central role in Walpole’s quasi-Gothic Memoirs, as Lewis Namier repeatedly noted, and had further purchase within the American colonies themselves. For fears of Bute’s ‘secret influence’ and its continuing purchase even into the later eighteenth century, see O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century, 204, 210, 220. In Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bailyn observes that the meaning of disputes in the American colonies was shaped in part by fears of a ‘Stuart-Tory party [. . .] seeking to reverse the consequences of the Glorious Revolution’ in which Bute figured heavily (123). 62 Quoted in Cash, John Wilkes, 151 (emphasis added).

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later, he inflamed controversy once again by running for parliament, whereupon efforts to exclude him from office, by appealing to his earlier conviction (in the event for a pornographic poem) prompted significant popular support to coalesce. Wilkes in turn became the unlikely figurehead for a vast popular movement. Building from the widespread opposition to the ‘general warrants’ issued for his arrest after the North Briton controversy, ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ became a broadbased popular movement, propelled by extensive written addresses, public protests, and imaginative uses of public space (including repeated use of the number ‘45’ that alluded to the controversial number of the North Briton).63 Amidst an ongoing wave of nationwide activity, efforts to suppress a rally outside King’s Bench Prison in 1768, where Wilkes was then imprisoned, witnessed soldiers fire into a crowd, killing at least five—an event that Wilkes naturally turned to his polemical advantage.64 Wilkes became identified not only with an electrifying transformation of national political activity but also with a perceived breakdown in political rationality. In The False Alarm (1770), Samuel Johnson sought to puncture the momentum around the Wilkite cause with a dismissive attack on its ‘false’ sense of urgency. This pamphlet included a particularly vicious attack on petitioning, which Johnson depicted as allowing ignorant (not to mention drunken) members of the rabble to assert their claim on the political process.65 As Johnson intimated, in later pairing this pamphlet with others on the incipient American revolutionary cause, the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ movement was bound up with the gathering momentum of the global age of revolutions. There were, moreover, direct points of connection between the rise of Wilkes and the American Revolution. Political unrest in both countries was frequently compared and traced to similar roots.66 The unrest that commenced (in Horace Walpole’s telling) with the Cider Excise, indeed, belonged to a broader wave of Anglo-American political activity that culminated in protests in response to the Stamp Act, while the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ movement, which 63 See especially George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983); John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People. 64 After this rally outside his prison on 10 May 1768 ended with soldiers firing without warning into the crowd, Wilkes had evidence published that Lord Weymouth had enjoined the magistrates ‘to make full use of the military in the event of riots’, thereby portraying events ‘as an affair deliberately staged by a brutal and tyrannical executive’ and increasing sympathy for his cause among those higher up the social ladder. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 49, 56. See also Cash, John Wilkes. 65 Johnson’s remarks, in his subsequent pamphlet The Patriot (1774), on those ‘whose opinions are not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion’, parallel Mary Fairclough’s observation that sympathy became ‘the medium not of polite opinion [. . .] but of the “popular opinion” of Wilkes’s supporters’, apparent in both ‘the transmission of unrest from person to person and the diffusion of texts written in support of Wilkes’s cause’. The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 42. 66 American opposition to the Stamp Act was compared by Grenville to the protests against the Cider Excise tax which, aside from its economic implications, Wilkes had framed as a privacy issue since the measure would ‘legitimate forced entries and searches of houses and barns’; the Boston ‘Massacre’ that saw death at the hands of British soldiers in 1770 was also compared to the 1768 shooting outside King’s Bench Prison. See Cash, John Wilkes, 78, 261. See also Steve Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 74, 76.

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helped inspire the ‘Sons of Liberty’ in America, was similarly part of a larger transatlantic oppositional network.67 In England, this was an inchoate political moment, for whose capacious and uncertain parameters Wilkes and his followers became proxy. Defending the government for its refusal to make concessions towards Wilkes during the election controversy, Walpole asserted that ‘Wilkes and every turbulent agitator in the several counties would have risen on the froth of a cauldron composed of such pernicious ingredients.’68 But as his remarks on the surprising ‘principl[e] of union’ between diverse constituencies confirm, the parties of politics were already in ferment from early in the new monarch’s reign. The Wilkite movement has been viewed as a way station in the transition between the post-1688 political system and the reforms of the early nineteenth century. As with the Gordon Riots later in the century, ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ has most commonly been viewed as a symptomatic outburst, an ephemeral flash in the pan, which saw the limited eruption of deeply rooted tensions and frustration with an inequitable and unrepresentative political system that were brought more fully to light following the French Revolution. Yet aside from this teleological narrative remaining questionable in its own right, Wilkes and his followers were far from simply creating momentary flashpoints for unrest, despite their overall failure to effect lasting change. John Brewer proposes that Wilkes and his followers ‘plant[ed] the seeds’ ‘of a political sensibility that was to flower in the 1780s and 1790s’.69 As part of a reintegrated account of the wider period addressed by this study, the movement around Wilkes belongs within an expanded genealogy for the eventual burgeoning of Reform in the early nineteenth century, a story too often assumed to begin with the French Revolution.70 The widespread discontent and disaffection of these decades also deserve attention in their own right. This was a moment in which challenges to existing forms of governance—including radical agitation more typically associated with the post-1789 period—remained in the mix with established party-political activity, dramatically reconfiguring the sense of what the

67 Arthur Lee and his brother, Virginia merchant Richard Henry Lee exemplify these close ties. Arthur Lee became active in the Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, an organization formed in support of Wilkes. The two men remained in close contact—including about the electrifying consequences of recent events in the American colonies—in addition to assisting in ‘disseminating American pamphlet literature in England’. See William B. Warner, Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 39 and Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics, 204. For the development of a transatlantic communication network, see Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972), which details the correspondence between Wilkes and the Boston Sons of Liberty, including about the 1770 ‘massacre’. See also Cash, John Wilkes, 261. 68 Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George III, 4.92. 69 Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics, 179. 70 The Westminster radicals of the early nineteenth century, Robert  E.  Zegger notes, were the ‘inheritors, as well as the creators, of a rich, diverse tradition of protest’ with deep roots in ‘constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century, the Wilkes affair, and the various parliamentary reform movements of the 1780s’ in addition to ‘the working-class agitation that arose during the French Revolution’. John Cam Hobhouse: A Political Life, 6.

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parties of politics looked like and what relationships to politics were possible.71 This unique political moment saw revolutionary energies that would take firmer hold in America take shape in a more inchoate and unpredictable fashion, but also within a context where restlessness might equally tip back into resignation and confusion, irritation or violent antipathy. ‘Political Electricity; or An Historical & Prophetical Print in the Year 1770’ (Figure 2) presents a vivid snapshot of developments that contributed to widespread unrest at home and abroad—or at least the perception of unrest, present and future—and the supposed effects upon the wider political system.72 The upper third of this extremely busy image appears anchored, to some degree, by a weighing scale depicting two groups of ministers, the actors of ‘high’ politics. The elongated figure of George Grenville floating above, metonym for the ministerial failures and popular unrest unleashed since the Cider Excise, presents only the most obvious challenge to the functioning of this provisional, minoritized two-party system and a host of further disconnected elements promise to overwhelm its operations. The myriad contending elements in the print are further directed, if not deranged, by an electrical current that can be traced back to the Earl of Bute (who appears, on the shore of France, in the ‘Character’ of Benjamin Franklin, his ‘secret influence’ compounded by suggestions of treachery in his peace negotiations with France). Despite Bute’s initiating role in the master narrative connecting these disparate scenes, the elements that he first appears to influence—or otherwise affect—remain disorganized. A narrative begins to take shape in the middle of the image, where the electrical chain makes an abrupt swerve, beneath the window of an imprisoned John Wilkes, to pass through the musket being fired by a soldier, following a moment of ‘instantaneous communication’ between the representatives of the state and their armed representatives on the ground.73 This central frame 71 E. P. Thompson identified the 1790s ‘as the moment when “revolution was possible” in Britain as at no time since the seventeenth century’. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 737, quoted in Kevin Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 140. In the decades surrounding the American Revolution, however, the prospects of revolution within Britain seemed far from unlikely—and in certain respects appeared more likely, as we will see, than in the American colonies—while the French Revolution, notwithstanding its ephemeral promise of radical transformations, ultimately guaranteed that Britain would not see the fulfilment of the revolutionary possibilities unleashed well before the fall of the Bastille. I thank John Brewer for discussions on this point. Compare Ian  R.  Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 72 Elaborate even by the standards of eighteenth-century visual designs, the image contains more than thirty-one distinct elements. My account here draws upon details provided in Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, eds. Frederic George Stephens, M. D. George, et al., 12 vols. (London: 1870–1954), 4.654–7. 73 As Mary Fairclough notes, the print’s commentary makes this connection, stating that the justice of the peace, depicted reading the riot act, passes the ‘electrical chain’ to the soldier firing his musket on the crowd. While Fairclough, emphasizing sympathetic communication, discerns a shift in the significance of the electrical line of connection here, from ‘corrupted ministerial power’ to ‘the unruly political energies catalysed by Wilkes’, my concern is less with the content attributed to the electric current than with the (ultimately questionable) efforts to narrate a coherent sequence of historical events in the first place, although my concern with the resulting confusion of political ‘parties’ maps closely onto Fairclough’s account of contagious political sympathies. See The Romantic Crowd, 44. My

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provides a hinge point of sorts, between the events of 1763–8, as depicted in the upper ‘Historical’ section of the print, and the ‘Prophetic’ scenes of future unrest that comprise its lower sections. As the turn, or volta, between these respective developments, the print locates pointed significance in the 1768 ‘Massacre’ of Wilkes’s supporters outside King’s Bench Prison.74 The print hearkens back to the events of May ’68 to establish continuity between the inchoate sources of earlier unrest and the more clearly delineated consequences to which they are prophesized to lead, with this violence as the trigger. The scenes surrounding the central frame accordingly scramble together actual events with counterfactual developments (and speculative prophecy). Directly prior to Wilkes, for example, the electrical chain passes through the autopsy of a man killed at an election contest in 1768. The ensuing prophetic scenes include images of the ‘City of London in Flames’— alluding to ‘ye furious Distress & Anger of ye Inhabitants occasioned by ye late Unconstitutional Proceedings’—and a ‘Country Mob coming through Hyde Park Turnpike to demand relief to their Distresses’ (with signs making calls to dissolve parliament and one man’s cries of ‘We are starving for Bread ’).75 The London stock exchange and butcher’s shops appear derelict, the ‘Port of London’ similarly ‘destitute of Trade’ (with wild animals stalking the banks of the Thames).76 Among the only sites not touched by prophesized unrest and prospective rebellion, ironically, are the American colonies. Although protests associated with the Stamp Act had already taken place, the eruption of more considerable upheaval and even revolution appears far more likely in England at this moment, the print implies, than in the port of Boston, whose inhabitants appear industriously going about their business (with the added suggestion that they may, as a renovated, less dysfunctional London, eclipse the mother country). When Hume condemned the pervasive ‘Stupidity’ that had made Sterne the best English author for decades, he had Wilkes and his movement in mind. The sheer volume of attacks on the political establishment and the perceived breakdown in political rationality more broadly during this period prompted Hume to starkly revise his earlier views about the evolution towards social cohesion. As existing discussion aligns to some degree with Kyle Parry’s theory of ‘generative assembly’: ‘the meaning and implication of any instance of generative assembly depends partly on audiences’ production of something—of interpretation, imagination, affect, a new concept for a contribution, a new plan of action—out of some subset of documentary, informational, and architectural arrangements’. Although I will go on to describe the vantage point elicited by this print as less settled on prospects for political agency than his examples, Parry also emphasizes ‘unanticipated or esoteric ways of reading generatively, such as recognizing and valuing idiosyncratic associations within and among the frames of comics, or finding patterns that link scenes and writing across divergent sequences of photographs, or opting to share or remix fragments across social media platforms’ such that ‘any given assembly presents, at least in part, a structured and conditioned field of open interpretation’. See ‘Generative Assembly after Katrina’, Critical Inquiry 44 (2018). 74 The print depicts the receipt of Weymouth’s letter and scathingly glosses this frame: ‘The Kings Bench with Mr Wilkes looking out of ye Window to see ye Soldiers defend ye Prison against a few old Women’. See Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 4.654–5. 75 Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 4.655. For domestic protest in this period and its bearing on the American crisis, see Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration, 76. 76 Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 4.657.

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controversies over the king’s conduct were given added fuel by the explosion of oppositional activity, Hume believed the nation had reached quite literally insane levels of contention.77 Parliamentary factions and popular activity clashed and coincided in new constellations over this period, building upon popular political expression from earlier in the century, as the role of an aristocratic parliamentary elite in ensuring political health, or in imperilling national stability, was openly debated, at home and abroad. In a series of letters (including the one referencing Tristram Shandy), Hume described the broad-based movement with Wilkes at its forefront as emblematizing a ‘Stupid’ and ‘Barbarous’ decline in political rationality.78 ‘Political Electricity’ might appear to confirm a similar conclusion. But whether its aim was parody or polemic, mocking hysterical claims for Bute’s ‘secret influence’ or disclosing dangerously bottlenecked and erratically discharged political energies— and we might most plausibly suggest that its aims encompassed both at once—the overall impression left by the print was one of confusion. The print purports to explain and narrate the workings of politics. But the comprehensive vantage point on the workings of both established and emergent guises of ‘political’ activity cultivated by the print equally estranges its viewer, locating their gaze at a disaffected remove from politics. Yet even as the lower part of the print remains dominated by the image of administration politicians feasting upon the body of the nation (allegorically depicted in the guise of a lion’s carcass), the print remains animated by the ongoing prospect of considerable upheaval, even violent political rebellion.79 Following the French Revolution, Britain experienced unprecedented unrest but also witnessed a two-party system take renewed hold. By contrast, ministerial activity during preceding decades (with the important exception of the Rockingham Whigs)80 remained less fixed, evident in the floating ‘third’ party of Grenville, whose memory hovers over the groupings of ministers in ‘Political Electricity’. The fragmentation of existing parties and interest groups in mid-century Britain has led to continuing debates over the analytic and historiographical value of partisan identifications, during a period when no fixed mechanisms of party organization were operative. We can begin to overcome this impasse, as I proposed in the Introduction, by adopting a more fluid approach to the ‘parties’ of political activity— taking cues from within the period itself. Given the unfixed basis of ministerial organization and the assembly of heterogeneous constituencies (extending as Walpole noted to ‘two or three distant counties whose apples were to be taxed’), the later eighteenth century presents an especially rich canvas for thinking about the status of ‘parties’ in both their narrower and wider senses, their more fixed and more inchoate forms. As evidenced in the commentary to the ‘Political Electricity’ 77 See Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 78 See Livingston, ‘English Barbarism: “Wilkes and Liberty” ’, in Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, 256–89. See also J.  G.  A.  Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 190–1. 79 In her elaboration of the dangerously ‘pent-up political energies’ given expression by the print, Fairclough sees the rioting citizens advancing upon the image of the cabinet at dinner (Romantic Crowd, 45–6). 80 See the discussion of Burke in Chapter 4.

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print, where the connecting chain leaves ‘all ye different parties electrified ’, the question for contemporaries was not whether parties existed but what kinds of political agency they channelled,81 whether they could be organized, and what distinguished legitimate and illegitimate sources of political activity from each other—questions that deeper histories of partisan contention, together with the often amorphous character of recent unrest, had made radically uncertain. T H E AT R I C A L I N T E R LU D E : A W O R D TO T H E W I S E ( 1 7 7 0 ) As Sterne had anticipated in his letter describing the ‘changes of looks and political reasoning’, these changes led to shifted perspectives. The following chapters explore how variously estranged and disaffected responses to politics took shape in relation to literary form, including attention to the real or imagined ‘parties’ assembled by written works and shared perceptual objects. Those case studies become progressively more focused on the perspectives uniquely made available through literature. We may initiate those discussions here by making an excursion to the theatre. The often raucous space of the eighteenth-century playhouse provides a privileged site for asking how reflection and commentary about politics met with the organizing of audiences around shared objects of perception. Theatres during the long eighteenth century were frequently the forums for partisanship and even staging grounds for conflicts between warring parties. The ‘Rage of Parties’ during the reign of Queen Anne saw divides between Whigs and Tories in parliament by day continue into the evening at the theatre. The early papers of Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711–) feature memorable instances of theatregoers displaying signs of support for Whigs or Tories; early the following decade, Richard Steele wrote to the Lord Chamberlain that ‘the Crowd Assemble themselves, even in their Pleasures, according to their inclinations in Politicall [sic] Affairs’. As Lisa Freeman reminds us, moreover, it was not uncommon in the eighteenth-century theatre ‘for wits in the pit to form themselves into claques, cabals, and parties in order to influence the fate of plays, hissing and directing catcalls toward plays they wished to damn and clapping up plays they wished to succeed’ (with these ‘parties in the pit’ on rare occasions even proving ‘able to incite a riot’).82 The case of a theatrical disturbance associated with a further outburst of Wilkite unrest in 1770 aligns fruitfully with these traditions. At the same time, the parties that organized themselves around performances of the play A Word to the Wise belonged squarely to the transformed post-1760 political environment. Daniel O’Quinn has scrutinized the mediation of domestic and imperial political activity through theatrical entertainments during the years after the Seven Years’ War. My discussion here builds 81 For an invaluable discussion of ‘party’ as a genre of political action, which begins to open up expanded ways of employing the term, see Clark, The Dynamics of Change. 82 Steele quoted in Tone Sundt Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets: The Use of Literature as ProGovernment Propaganda, 1721–1742 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999),16. Lisa Freeman, Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 5.

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upon his careful attention to the ways these events were mediated (and their social parameters policed) by print.83 I am less concerned here with the theatre per se than with imagined literary and political publics and their relationship with literary authorship. The controversy around A Word to the Wise nonetheless reveals how the changing status of the theatrical space and the mediation of political disputes by newspapers and periodicals became crucial to the reception of plays (not least those by a supposedly ‘Political Writer’). This wider affective and media environment, illuminated by recent critical discussions, helps in particular to show how the changes of ‘looks’ that Sterne identified with his changed political reality became associated with other scenes of perception and ultimately, I will propose, with literature. On the evening of Tuesday, 6 March 1770, Hugh Kelly’s sentimental comedy False Delicacy was performed at London’s Drury Lane Theatre amidst scenes bordering on chaos. Before the play could even begin, the audience had divided into warring camps. With a ‘party being formed’ against the performance and another promptly arising in its support, beleaguered theatre manager David Garrick lamented that ‘the only method [. . .] for quieting all, would be to dismiss the house’. As the Town and Country Magazine reported, this the partizans of the play would not agree to; whereupon the curtain drew up, and the actors went through their parts as well as they could, amidst shouting, clapping, squalling, and pelting; which induced them to shorten the acts, as they judged themselves in a very disagreeable situation, from a shower of oranges and apples: Mrs Baddeley, in particular, having received a violent blow.84

The upheaval had begun a few nights earlier with the debut of A Word to the Wise, a new play by Kelly. Despite valiant efforts by its performers to struggle through this tale of a kind-hearted baronet, his sprightly daughter, and an elaborate story of mismatched suitors, the refractory audience had sought to knock them off course and succeeded, at various points, in bringing the action to a complete standstill. As The London Magazine elaborated: ‘The performers, totally disconcerted by the tumult, were unable to exercise their abilities, or to remember their parts—Whole speeches, essentially necessary to the conduct of the fable, were left out, and others mutilated for the sake of brevity. In short, the sole consideration was to get the comedy through the five acts in any manner.’85 ‘By what could be collected from such an interrupted representation,’ The Town and Country Magazine noted, ‘this piece was replete with sentiment and morality; but seemed defective in incident and character, and possessed but a small share of the vis comica.’ A ‘proper judgment’ of the play was impossible, however, given ‘the opposition it met with almost throughout, by a party who seemed resolved at all events to damn it’.86 83 See Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). O’Quinn devotes some attention to the expanded guises of party activity associated with the Wilkite movement. Gillian Russell has shown how increasing attention to female sociability and its spectacular entertainments impressed upon the theatrical space in Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 84 ‘The Theatre. No. XV’, The Town and Country Magazine (1770), 2.155. 85 ‘The British Theatre’, The London Magazine, March 1770, 119. 86 ‘The Theatre. No. XV’, 2.154.

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What was the matter? At issue was not the play’s overwrought story, nor its failure to generate enough benevolent laughter from the audience. The uproar that overwhelmed the theatre for several days had other concerns than Kelly’s strengths, or shortcomings, as a sentimental dramatist. The lengthy plot summary in The London Magazine review describes a play whose plot was somewhat belaboured (‘Mr. Willoughby having found the Captain, intreats him with irresistible pathos to restore his child [. . .] Miss Willoughby, dreading to encounter an offended, though hitherto most indulgent father, flies to Miss Montague’) but hardly offensive.87 As this report on the ‘British Theatre’ proceeded to explain, theatregoers had ‘pronounced the play political’ before the curtain was even drawn. The London Magazine account of the upheaval at Drury Lane noted that Kelly had ‘for some time been very unpopular, from a general supposition, that he was employed by government to defend many measures generally disapproved’. Hearing that he had a play to come out, this report continued, a group of antagonists had ‘determined to shew their dislike of the man, by preventing the exhibition of his piece’. With claims that the play had been written to ‘serve the purposes of administration’, the stage was set for conflict with a ‘party’ determined to destroy its author. Following assertions that the play was ‘political’, ‘large parties were formed, and every art, which prejudice could make use of, exercised to inflame the minds of the audience’.88 Yet this hardly clarifies matters. The claim that Kelly was to be ‘amply rewarded by a place or pension’ was prescient: the playwright would indeed receive a pension from Lord North at some point later that year.89 The assertions that Kelly wrote in support of the government, despite having some foundation, ultimately fell short, however, as an explanation of the disturbance. The playwright and journalist maintained that he had written for ‘impartial’ publications and that he had not been paid directly by the government; regardless of what political commitments Kelly might have displayed—and been rewarded for—in his journalism, there was no indication that they carried across to his writing for the theatre.90 A Word to the Wise was not an incendiary drama, after all, let alone a polemical tract, but a sentimental comedy. Claims that the play’s author had political motivations ‘appeared quite destitute of foundation’, The Town and Country Magazine flatly 87 ‘The British Theatre’, 117. Objections to plays on moral grounds had occasioned vocal disputes. As Johnson had noted, Otway’s comedy Friendship in Fashion ‘was, upon its revival at Drury-lane in 1749, hissed off the stage for immorality and obscenity’ and subsequently ‘provoked a near riot’. Weinbrot, ‘ “’Tis Well an Old Age is Out”: Johnson, Swift, and his Generation’, 60 and n.29 quoting Johnson and Robert D. Hume, ‘Otway and the Comic Muse’, Studies in Philology 73 (1976). The dispute around A Word to the Wise, by contrast, was apparently detached from its content. 88 ‘The British Theatre’, 119. 89 ‘The British Theatre’, 119; Robert R. Bataille, The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly: Politics, Journalism, and Theater in Late Eighteenth-Century London (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 69. 90 Claims about Kelly’s partisanship were not unfounded. For his status as a ‘major propagandist for George III and his ministers’ in his editorship of the Public Ledger and related undertakings, see Bataille, The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly, vii. There were parallels, moreover, between the ‘interlocking directorates’ of the press and monopolistic control of London theatres—and the resulting interconnection between politics, theatre, and journalism in a period in which the ‘world of politics presented the same opportunity for the exploitation of the literary market’ that a successful play did. See Bataille, The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly, 41, 65.

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asserted.91 Given the ‘severe inspection that dramatic productions undergo’ by theatre managers, claims that the play contained ‘political strokes’ against them, as critics of the king’s government, were ‘impossible’ to credit.92 Already unlikely to surface amidst the intricate affairs of the Willoughby and Montague families, any such ‘strokes’ would, in any case, have quickly been drowned out. The London Magazine pointed towards a particular source for the disturbance: a group of ‘several respectable, though misinformed, friends to freedom, who eagerly credited even the most inconsistent reports’ to Kelly’s disadvantage.93 The original outburst at the theatre was thus linked to ‘a report having been circulated that there were several political strokes in this comedy against the supporters of the Bill of Rights’—a group founded by followers of Wilkes. Audience members were thereby linked directly with contemporary challenges to perceived government overreach, as well as far-reaching constitutional debates. Alongside its uniquely populist and innovative character, the Wilkite movement, as we have seen, was both produced by the rapidly shifting contours of political action and public debate and itself helped to further propel changes to the scope and shape of political activity. At Drury Lane, the overzealous, even paranoid ringleaders of the original disturbance were themselves overtaken by wider circles of theatregoers, as the situation in the theatre became progressively more bizarre and confused. Claims about Kelly’s apparent political entanglements were thus ultimately pushed aside, as events in the theatre took over. Following the shouts that the play was ‘political’, The London Magazine observed, the curtain ‘was no sooner raised, than a loud hissing prevented the performers from beginning the play a considerable time’—against this were heard the ‘plaudits of the author’s numerous friends, as well as of the unprejudiced, who desired to give him a fair hearing’ (wanting to ‘express their censure or approbation’ only after viewing the completed performance).94 The original shouts of the ‘several [. . .] friends to freedom’ had burgeoned into a wider opposition, and this gave rise to a further wave of support for the players. The emergence of warring camps from amidst the unruly body of theatregoers in turn obliged even the most ‘unprejudiced’ spectators to choose sides between what both published reports described as two ‘parties’. Above all, The London Magazine concluded, the upheaval created a general state of ‘confusion’.95 Disputes along partisan lines surfaced repeatedly, as we have noted, in London theatres during the long eighteenth century. The period since the ‘Rage of Parties’ in the early eighteenth century and Walpole era had witnessed continued instances in which the celebration, or vilification, of contemporary events and figures became the occasion for politicized disputes.96 By the early nineteenth century, political 91 ‘The Theatre. No. XV’, 2.154. 92 ‘The Theatre. No. XV’, 2.154. 93 ‘The British Theatre’, 119. 94 ‘The British Theatre’, 119. 95 ‘The British Theatre’, 119. 96 After Drury Lane refused to stage The Merchant of Venice amidst the controversy surrounding the so-called ‘Jew Bill’ of 1753, for example, theatre manager Richard Cross noted that ‘some people called out for the Merchant of Venice, and a letter was thrown upon the stage’, followed by ‘some little hissing’. Quoted in James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 215.

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lines were overtaken by incipient class warfare, as theatre-based rioting recapitulated, in displaced form, emergent socioeconomic disputes.97 The upheaval surrounding A Word to the Wise was nonetheless different from these localized controversies or sociopolitical distinctions, even as its contours illuminate both continued partisan struggles and emergent class divides. The resistance to which the play gave rise did not hinge upon professed ideological or partisan commitments. Nor were claims for its author’s direct involvement within political activity either plausible or accurate. A Word to the Wise had, in the first instance, become the site of a proxy war for an ongoing dispute between the current administration and those calling out its corruption and arbitrary practices. Yet while they emerged, at least grammatically, as autonomous actors, the parameters of these parties were uncertain. Alongside appeals to the pre-existing animus of a ‘party’ resolved to damn the play, both accounts depicted the entities that issued from these original efforts to ‘inflame the minds of the audience’ as also driving the events by which they were formed in the first place. These ‘parties’ were thus made antecedent to their own creation, issuing from their own partisan will. The content and contours of this wider dispute remained obscure, moreover, perhaps even to its participants. It became increasingly uncertain not only to whom, precisely, this dispute mattered but also what the matters concerned even were. The disputes in which spectators of A Word to the Wise became embroiled turn the spotlight on the period of transition and tumult we have been tracking. Aside from the scrambling of partisan identities following the accession of George III, the workings and wider operations of politics were scrutinized in this period, as we noted in the Introduction, by a dramatically expanded public for political discussion. The scenes at Drury Lane resulted from the factious impulses of a particularly restive body of theatregoers but also dramatized uncertainty concerning the ‘parties’ of politics; they also gave voice to a pervasive and growing propensity to discuss everything in ‘political’ terms. This was a period in which ‘large sections of the public’ were newly eager to ‘discover how the political machine worked’ and ‘determined to keep a close watch on politicians’.98 Yet the operations of politics— as the ‘Political Electricity’ print also evidenced and exploited—remained opaque to outsiders, even as they attracted ever-heightening scrutiny. At Drury Lane, nascent demands for popular engagement in politics spilled over into the extra-political domain of the theatre, reflecting both the transposition of political debates to adjoining realms and the subsuming of disparate arenas into the expanded reach of ‘political’ discussion. The scenes at Drury Lane did not merely comprise an incoherent outburst, reflecting pent-up, incipiently revolutionary energies (any more, dismissive accounts of its symptomatic character notwithstanding, than the Wilkite movement was a momentary outburst of deeper tensions that would find more 97 See Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactic: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 98 R.  B.  McDowell, ‘Colonial Nationalism and the Winning of Parliamentary Independence, 1760–82’, chap. 8 in A New History of Ireland, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, eds. T. W. Moody and W .E. Vaughn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 196.

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direct expression following the outbreak of the French Revolution). As the unfolding of subsequent events within the theatre reveals, the disturbance at Drury Lane was not merely reflective of bewilderment or frustration at a restrictive and unrepresentative political system, however closely its originators were involved with contemporary populist movements. The factious public that embraced A Word to the Wise, waywardly or playfully, as the occasion for a partisan dispute asserted an ambiguous investment in the evolving forms of political discussion, and its actions—without quite asserting any claim to political agency—betray a version of what Lauren Berlant has termed the desire for the political.99 The dispute at Drury Lane thus provides a test case for thinking about the alternative conceptions of politics that the ferment and shifting ‘parties’ of this moment made available. Far from comprising a coherent group that might organize itself roughly around contrasting poles, if not neatly divide into dual camps, this audience remained multiply divided against itself. As parties to a dispute that had, itself, first constituted them as ‘parties’, whose precarious connection with ‘outside’ debates became ever more evident in the prevailing ‘confusion’ about what the object of their dispute even was, participants in the events at Drury Lane exemplify the uniquely fluid, increasingly volatile ‘politics’ that became a pointed feature of the surrounding decades. The dispute at Drury Lane similarly illustrates a period in which politics and ‘political’ discussion were at once everywhere and nowhere. In the liminal spaces of the theatre, as these scenes tellingly demonstrate, this had particularly unpredictable consequences. We may find a literary counterpart by looking ahead to Jane Austen. As the ‘theatricals’ that overturn the studied calm of Mansfield Park brilliantly dramatize, theatrical performance and spectatorship disclose, but also thereby confuse, the limits between ostensibly separate spheres of feeling and activity. In these scenes at Drury Lane, what The London Magazine termed the ‘confusion’ around the theatrical entertainment became the added occasion for an explicitly political dispute.100 The status of the theatre, clearly understood as an extension of the ‘public sphere’ but also imagined as a space for tranquil contemplation and polite entertainment, remained uncertain, and the precise status of the work at hand was thus called, at multiple levels, into question. There was only one way to restore clarity: an appeal to authority. As he sought to quell the crowd and thereby restore consensus around their shared object of assembly, David Garrick, manager of the theatre and celebrity actor in his own right, invoked the very arguments about shared objects of knowledge by which Locke had sought to contain the warring factions of his own late seventeenth-century moment. In seeking out a source of consensus apparently not available in the political arena, he made himself the conduit for a complex authority, reminiscent in its effects of how Ranciére describes ‘auctoritas’: as organized around an ‘auctor’ able ‘to sift sense, and hence justice’ from surrounding noise and upheaval, while employing ‘words 99 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 100 For aesthetics as a site of ‘confusion’, in which what is proper to the regime of art—and what is proper to other domains of experience, including politics—remains at once available for unknotting and radically undecidable, see Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 4.

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to quell squabbles; to unite people by apprehending meaning to pacify by virtue of a strength that precedes the exercise of power’.101 Following the upheaval around the opening performance of A Word to the Wise, a further ‘contest’ arose between factious audience members. Those opposing the performance of the play ‘peremptorily insisted, with an unaccustomary severity, that it should never be exhibited again’, while its supporters insisted, with equal vehemence, that it should.102 The showdown took place the following Monday. In response to the play’s prologue, the ‘opposition, with encreased numbers, hissed, cat-called, and threw oranges’; on the ‘other side’, the ‘demand for the new play was equally violent’ and these supporters, in turn, cast ‘several out of the house, whom they considered as general disturbers’.103 Garrick appealed to the moderate impulses of the audience, but the opposition were so violent, they would not listen to him. However, upon his second appearance, he informed them, ‘That it was his duty, and had ever been his inclination, to please them.’ [. . .] [A]fter much further shouting and hallowing, he was allowed to say, ‘He begged to know the sense of the audience, whether they chose the new play, or Cymbeline?’ Now the clamour became general, one party calling out for the new play, and the other for Cymbeline; so that nothing could be determined[.]104

The theatre decided to replace A Word to the Wise with the apparently innocuous substitute of Shakespeare’s play. But this ‘conciliating measure was not attended with the desired effect’: the ‘friends of the play, who were much more numerous than the opposers, would by no means admit the comedy to be withdrawn’, leading to the unlikely scenes of ‘above two hundred gentlemen calling out for the manager, and threatening immediate demolition to the house, if A Word to the Wise was not performed as originally given out’.105 An exasperated Garrick reminded theatregoers that, having chosen Kelly’s play over an offered substitute, they now refused to allow its performance.106 He would eventually resort to the founding axiom of empiricist philosophy, observing that ‘it was not in the nature of things to comply with opposite demands’.107 In a last-ditch attempt at reconciliation, he turned to the written word. Advancing ‘with a written paper in his hand’, Garrick made ‘one more grand effort to appease both parties’, instructing the audience—‘the instant he could make himself heard’—that ‘it was Mr. Kelly’s earnest desire they would permit him to read a short address, under his own hand’. If ‘party disputes were once introduced into the theatre’, a worried Garrick stated, ‘our most rational amusements must be quickly at an end’.108

101 Jacques Ranciére, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, [1992] 1995), 10. 102 ‘The British Theatre’, 119. 103 ‘The British Theatre’, 120. 104 ‘The Theatre. No. XV’, 2. 154 (emphasis added). 105 ‘The British Theatre’, 119–20 (emphasis added). 106 Despite having the lead role in A Word to the Wise, Mr King (who had played Sir George Hastings, the ‘baronet of great fortune’) had appeared following the original performance ‘to promise the play should not be again acted’, but ‘some gentlemen from the pit got on the stage, and insisted upon its being given out [i.e., performed] for the Monday following’ (2.154). 107 ‘The British Theatre’, 121. 108 ‘The British Theatre’, 120.

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As both ‘guarantor’ and ‘master of words’—as maîtrise des lettres, ‘letters’ like that which Garrick wielded, as well as belles-lettres—the ‘auctor’ functions to ‘demilitarize and diminish’ politics: to manage a social unit by employing appeals to social unity to relieve the political of its inherent division (thereby ‘maximizing the chances of success for the collective being, for the simple management of the social’).109 To make Garrick the poster child for this wider development might appear like an extreme case of shooting the messenger, but the response to the disturbance at Drury Lane more widely turns the spotlight onto a conception of authorship that increasingly came to the fore in the later eighteenth century, beginning with the defensive manoeuvring against female sociability that Gillian Russell has identified in Garrick’s own posturing. ‘Theatre performed the socially and morally useful role of representing the culture to itself,’ Russell has noted, ‘rather than letting the culture promiscuously constitute itself.’110 The tensions on display around A Word to the Wise point to associated developments in the literary realm. Authors would indeed seek to provide ‘rational amusements’ to their readers, as literature came into focus as the object of ‘proper judgement’ and as the source in its own right of properly managed perception. Both the periodicals in which he wrote (as Kelly noted of the journalism condemned by his opponents for its partisan support for the government, he had written ‘to promote, not disturb, national tranquility’)111 and the theatre in which his plays were performed helped to cement these emerging identifications. A Word to the Wise not only staged sentimental norms in the moral education of characters: the disruption of its performance became a lesson in the need to instil and preserve them in its audience. The London Magazine noted that ‘party rage’ had led theatregoers at Drury Lane into ‘excesses’ that—in ‘the candour of their own hearts’—they would be more inclined to condemn ‘in the tranquil moment of recollection’.112 This phrasing, which quite uncannily looks ahead to the account of poetry given by Wordsworth in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads (as the soothing product of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’), reveals how an analogous understanding of literature had already begun to take shape during these earlier decades. Alongside articles describing the same upheavals that erupted at Drury Lane, a further article in the London Museum—a periodical published by radical affiliate John Almon that explicitly separated out its literary and political concerns—celebrated the availability of books ‘to read for half an hour [. . .] not so much to get new ideas but obliterate others’.113 The threats of violent unrest, on the one hand, and efforts to install 109 On the Shores of Politics, 10. Compare Ranciére, Aux bords du politique (Paris: Gallimard, [1990] 2004), 32. In his discussion of ‘auctoritas’, Ranciére gives the example of the French presidential candidate who ‘wrote a letter to the French people’ (identified in the original French text as François Mitterrand). 110 Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London, 141. 111 In The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly, Bataille draws parallels between Kelly’s sentimental comedies and his professed commitment to the cult of sensibility in his political writings, which emphasized retreat from the contentious sphere of the coffee-house to the harmoniously reconciled domestic space. 112 ‘The British Theatre’, 119. 113 London Museum, July 1770. This periodical appeared among the publications pursued by the king’s representatives on horseback in the print ‘The Royal Chace’. Its proprietor John Almon—who

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literature as a means of diffusing factionalism and conflict, on the other, were interdependent developments. These divides would only become more pronounced, their consequences more entrenched, with the revolutionary upheavals of coming decades. In the divide between the ‘written paper’ of Kelly and the restive theatregoers at Drury Lane, we encounter a gap that became ever greater with subsequent transformations of the national body politic and the concomitant reorganization of the literary field. At the same time, in the breach that Garrick worked to overcome, we glimpse something else: the magnanimous gestures of reconciliation that invoked the mantle of authorship to subdue the unruly elements of a restive polity. POLITICAL SCIENCE, PUBLIC FEELINGS: G OV E R N A N C E I N E G E R I A ( 1 802 – 3 ) These developments were bound up with larger shifts in governance. As James Chandler has emphasized, Adam Smith developed a version of what David Hume termed the ‘steady’ point of view into an internalized ‘spectator’, assimilating the ‘sentimental’ mode to mechanisms of social regulation.114 Hume’s remarks in his 1773 letter deploring English ‘Barbarism’ look back, in their commentary on ‘these thirty Years’, to the early 1740s. This was an important moment of transition in more ways than one. In one of the perhaps more unexpected manoeuvres in French intellectual history, Foucault began his 1977–8 course at the Collège de France by turning to Robert Walpole.115 With this unlikely reference to the eighteenthcentury statesman, Foucault inaugurated the concern with questions of governance that would dominate his later thinking. Beginning with this discussion of what would come to be known as laissez-faire economics (Foucault quoted Walpole’s maxim ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’), Foucault’s consideration of governance provides an invaluable framework for approaching political changes between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter has identified the fall of Walpole, during precisely the period to which Foucault alluded, as a pivotal moment in developing attitudes towards ‘politics’. But this encompassed, beyond questions of party, a larger shift: the reshaping of what the objects and objectives of political activity even were. For Foucault, the notorious prime minister did not exemplify partisan intrigue nor the growing cynicism to which politics-as-usual gave rise. Walpole stood as an example of a leader who purported not to govern, whose agency (both individually and as proxy for the larger political class he came to represent) was subsumed in the wider workings of government. ‘Politics’ in the narrow sense was notoriously defended publication of the ‘Junius’ letters—was closely associated with the radical London press. 114 For the proximity of Smith’s theories to the emerging grammar of sentimentalism, see James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 171–2. 115 The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), 1. ‘I think he said this around the 1740s’, Foucault noted (20).

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here eclipsed by changing practices of what Foucault termed ‘governmentality’, and these lectures built upon his definition of this unlovely word the previous year as an ‘ensemble formed by institutions, procedures [. . .] and tactics’ that had ‘the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument’ (an ‘ensemble,’ moreover, whose operations were ‘both external and internal to the state’).116 In addition to introducing, with ‘biopolitics’, a wholly new area of study, Foucault thereby set in motion the intellectual trajectories that eventually carried him to the care of the self and what has been termed the ethical turn of his final work (which might more accurately be understood as a continuation of his long-standing concern with matters of governing, subjectivity, and truth). Critics have emphasized unidirectional shifts in the direction of governmentality during the long Romantic period.117 Yet while pointing to important changes in the organization of the state and deployment of power, these accounts risk overstating the novelty of these shifts. As Foucault himself maintained, the developments he identified with the shift between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remained bound up with existing conceptions of authority, such that the question of sovereignty was ‘never posed more sharply’ than at this moment.118 ‘Politics’ in the narrower sense emphasized by this book remained anchored to an important extent (at least for Tories) by the sovereign authority embedded in ‘Church and King’. The transition into the nineteenth century did nonetheless coincide with dramatic shifts, which increasingly brought the ‘ensemble’ of governing practices foregrounded by Foucault into focus. An understanding of the population as a body to be managed came into focus as a core political concern in ways that had simply not been the case during previous decades; these developments intersected, in complicated ways, with the outburst of popular political energies following the French Revolution. These mounting demands for popular sovereignty and the increasing visibility of the lower and working classes converged at the same time with the questions of political economy and population management posed both in Godwinian philosophy (and its Malthusian opponents) and under the more pragmatic banners of ‘Reform’. These changes were bound up in complex ways with the changing regulatory role of sentiment and collective feeling, as will become particularly apparent in subsequent chapters from the authoritarian, yet sentimental, views about power and land management advocated by James Boswell (and their correlatives in the growing authoritarianism of the British Empire in India). These shifts are especially apparent in the Anglo-Irish fictions of Maria Edgeworth, which built in part upon practices implemented at the Edgeworths’ own family estate. I turn here to Egeria, or Elementary Studies on the Progress of Nations in Political OEconomy, Legislation, and Government, a short-lived periodical 116 See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), 108–9. 117 See, for example, Anne Frey, British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). For a nuanced discussion of these intersecting developments and their imperial dimensions, see O’Quinn, Staging Governance. 118 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 108.

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by David Williams, which shows emerging ideas about political reform and management of the body politic in action. At the same time, this work illuminatingly reveals the ways that its author failed to live up to these lofty aspirations to subsume existing lines of political division. The ‘political science’ for which Williams advocated collided both with existing political structures and with the divisive feelings associated with a ‘politics’ still comprised of contending parties, challenging these political-economic visions of enlightened public opinion and harmonious national sympathies. The introduction to the collected edition of Egeria papers observed that this work had sought to ‘prevent the recurrence of similar evils’ to those witnessed around the French Revolution, while advancing its own programme for ‘Reform’.119 The ‘sublime’ views and ‘frenzy’ opened up by events in France had unleashed a ‘political fanaticism’ described, in one tellingly confused sentence, as ‘commenc[ing] its career, by pressing gradually the bloody drops on the brows of useful labour, and producing the voracious and insatiable monsters which consume even the sources of their own support’.120 Egeria sought to exorcise these spectres, restoring harmony to a body politic fractured by recent upheaval. ‘The answer of most radicals’, J. A. W. Gunn notes, ‘had been to reassert the balance of the constitution while pouring invective on the personal failings of the politicians’. Williams offered a different approach to ‘political science’ grounded in a deeper commitment to organicist models over mechanistic ones and a revised approach to ‘public opinion’ oriented by attention to capillary-like currents of feeling.121 The respective essays emphasized various putative sources for national stability that, while secured by the constitution, also had a newly ‘scientific’ basis. The recovery of national cohesion entailed the proper management of public passions. ‘Political, like human bodies’, Williams optimistically noted, seem ‘destined to rise gradually from irrational to rational life’.122 Expanding upon the ‘maxim of Hobbes’, he identified ‘the first state or period of what is called civil society’ as ‘a state of war’ in which ‘every community is actuated by some predominant passion or passions’, every action ‘influenced by force’ or its threat.123 During this intermediary phase—one with no equivalent in Hobbes’s account of the transition from state of nature to contractual obedience—the ‘social feelings of political bodies become complicated’.124 Polities experience the debilitating force of ‘[f ]ear, shame, and despondence’ as much as ‘physical bodies’; ‘irregular and excessive passions’ during this phase of social 119 Egeria, or Elementary Studies on the Progress of Nations in Political OEconomy, Legislation, and Government (London: 1803). 120 Egeria, 6. 121 See J. A. W. Gunn, ‘David Williams: Organicism and Reform’, chap. 5 in Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), 200. Although tied to radicalism and Dissent—albeit as an ‘unclubbable philosopher’ with a reputation as a ‘tiresome scold’ and ‘savage satirist’—Williams was ‘sobered’ by revolutionary excesses and his fear of mobs (197, 207–8), and Gunn notes the ‘Burkean tone’ of his resistance to revolutionary change. Williams emphasized the distinction between sympathy as ‘a condition in which there was a genuine community sentiment that served as a “connecting principle” ’ and the sympathy of Adam Smith, but Gunn notes their broader compatibility (216–17). 122 Egeria, 57. 123 Egeria, 45. 124 Egeria, 54 (emphasis added).

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development accordingly had ‘similar effects’ as on physical bodies (‘communities having their mental imbecilities, their frenzy, and their mania’).125 During a period ‘deprived of those aged counsels which tempered the violence of savage resolution’ (‘for age does not then possess the privilege and authority of experience’) but not yet advanced towards rational governance, the ‘first internal condition of pastoral and agricultural life’ Williams proposed was ‘more perplexed and turbulent than that of savage hordes’.126 Once these ‘passions’ and ‘social feelings’ were released into the public realm, innumerable points of conflict were unleashed, without any means to contain them. The earliest version of the public sphere, that is to say, unleashing ‘irregular and excessive passions’ and the attendant ‘frenzy, and [. . .] mania’, was worse than the putatively savage, violent state of nature. Political stability could trace its origins, Egeria maintained, to ‘a very late discovery’ whose influence in ‘political science’ has been ‘wholly overlooked’ even as its ‘effects must be immense’: the ‘difference between irritability and sensibility in animal bodies’.127 As the ‘first property of animal life,’ ‘irritability’ was one of the ‘laws of animation’ driving these early social bodies in their contentious interactions with each other. In more ‘perfect’ animals, by contrast, each ‘irritable fibre’ acted on the next, creating an extended chain of perceptions that made corresponding impressions on the senses: these were the workings of ‘sensibility’. The responses of the individual adopted, as the result, a stable, homogenized ‘form’, mirrored at the social level by men acting on each other in ‘proper arrangements’. These respective social levels were harmonized through institutions. Villages and towns acted as ‘organs’ diffused over the national ‘body’, communicating reciprocally (with more or less ‘intimacy’) to establish ‘a national feeling improveable into public opinion and public intellect’. Coordinating the operations of ‘public body, public spirit, and public mind’, this arrangement would organize the ‘feelings and judgments of all men who are not grossly ignorant or actually deranged’, with this ‘regulated population’ representing the ‘probable source of all political blessings’.128 ‘[A]dvances in social and political may then proceed further than those in physical knowledge’ with the ‘direction of an experience truly philosophic’ pointing the way for ‘arrangements and combinations which, in any given cases, may produce public feeling, thought, reason, will, or, as it may be properly called, the public mind’.129 Among the ‘philosophic’ agencies dictating these ‘advances’, we may infer, were the contributions of Egeria itself. These were not airy musings; a commitment to 125 Egeria, 26–7. 126 Egeria, 54 (emphasis added). 127 Egeria, 58. Gunn notes that Williams drew upon M. A. Haller, A Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals (London: 1755), which also influenced Johann Gottfried Herder. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel similarly drew a distinction between ‘sensibility’ and ‘irritability’ in his Philosophy of Nature. While for Hegel, as Tilottama Rajan has emphasized, ‘irritation’ surfaced as a non-physiological blockage to thought, other nineteenth-century figures identified ‘irritability’ as, in the first instance, a physiological response: Théodule Armand Ribot argued in Diseases of the Will (1874) that all living matter had the property of ‘irritability’ or ‘reaction to external forces’, while Michael Foster in his Text Book of Physiology (1877) similarly described ‘irritability as characteristic of living matter’. Quoted in Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 76, 230n.7. 128 Egeria, 6 (emphasis original). 129 Egeria, 58.

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checking the ‘visionary projects’ of the new ‘race of reformers’ (those of a more radical stripe) coupled with the desire to promote the ‘political science’ that would keep an evolving constitution and properly managed populace harmoniously aligned with each other.130 Egeria had been written in ‘the form of short periodical Essays’, Williams noted in a preface, ‘in the hope that Members of the British Legislature might be induced to study them; to transfer a considerable portion of their attention from the intrigues of domestic factions, and the spurious species of eloquence it produces and supports, to those general principles of legislation, those truths of political economy, and those relations and laws of nations, for the neglect of which they are commonly reproached’.131 With an eye on ancient Greece, the opening paper asserted, ‘every citizen should take a part in all public questions’ and added—in a version of the argument advanced by Milton in Areopagitica—that ‘[s]uch a law, like the unlimited liberty of the press, would be in favour of truth, if it were to allow of no exceptions; if the real opinions and the real attachments of all men were truly and fairly expressed.’132 Yet this came with what would turn out to be an enormous caveat. ‘This may not be a duty when the community is divided into parties,’ the author of Egeria continued, with ‘each having a specific interest, absorbing all private opinion, and the effect of all discussions.’ Such ‘parties’, we learn, ‘introduce a worse state of society than modern despotism; as the human constitution may sustain less injury by the total loss of reason, than by the perverted or interrupted use of it’ (a point with which Swift would agree). Within ‘such a state’, described at once as a disease and a mental disorder afflicting the body politic, ‘to record political facts, with all their modifications; to seize the circumstances of resemblance with candour and impartiality, in order to discover those principles of connection, on which a real theory may be founded, would require the Author to be patient of self-denial, calumny, and sometimes oppression; impassioned for real, but future glory, and despising present praise’.133 The ‘Author’ of Egeria rose to this challenge. Alongside his more dispassionate aims to serve as a mouthpiece for ‘Reform’, Williams depicted himself taking on the noble mantle of this national service, such that the rational, impartial, truthspreading influence of Egeria might succeed in overcoming the factious and degraded state of political knowledge and restore national stability. These lofty hopes were not to be realized. We know as much from a memorandum that Williams wrote to then home secretary Thomas Pelham.134 Egeria had reached, its author noted to Pelham, the ‘true & false principles of Reform’—‘a subject I know to be in the contemplation of a party as soon as it is reinforced from abroad’. Yet Williams concluded this commentary on the press by stating that the periodical ‘must be discontinued’.135 As he elaborated: ‘I am of this opinion because the 130 Egeria, 6. 131 Egeria (‘Preface’), 4. 132 Egeria, 2. 133 Egeria, 2–3. 134 Pelham was closely associated with the emerging, Pittite ‘Tory’ milieu—and would be responsible for some of its coercive measures. After chairing a ‘secret committee on Irish disaffection’ and introducing the Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill, in 1801 he replaced the Duke of Portland as home secretary in the short-lived Addington ministry. D. R. Fisher, ‘Thomas Pelham, Second Earl of Chichester’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 135 British Library Add. MS 33124, 1.

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considerations, on which I understood it to be undertaken, are not fulfilled, viz—to circulate the numbers among those who might render it a Text book for discussion,—& for the production of new Topics for writers in the Newspapers.’ ‘Philosophical disquisitions & enquiries cannot immediately be rendered popular,’ Williams somewhat peevishly went on to note, ‘without peculiar notice from persons of rank & influence both in conversation & in parliament—if circulated & commented by persons of popular talents, Egeria might be more useful than declamation & satire’ (which have ‘no reference to a real system’) by instead inducing its readers ‘to think, on subjects which have furnished only occasions of Irritation & Passion, during the greater part of the present reign’.136 There was no little irony in Williams’s realization that his programme for a harmoniously organized national polity could not gain a foothold—Egeria having failed, in this account, precisely due to those tendencies, the factious disputes and wayward passions of contemporary politics, which the periodical sought to overcome. This correspondence with Pelham evidences palpable frustration that public acquiescence to dispassionate political wisdom had proven so hard to implement. While taking issue with those statesmen who were preoccupied with the echo chambers of parliament (not least because he would prefer to have them promoting his own cause), these remarks described a larger communicative breakdown within the nation as a whole.137 As long as members of the legislature remained distracted by their own ‘spurious species of eloquence’, the wider public would be similarly consumed by the ‘Irritation & Passion’ that continued to inflame political conversation and the corresponding ‘declamation & satire’. The growing pervasiveness of these divisive modes, already under way in the later seventeenth century, had been deepened, Williams noted, by the emergence of ranks of writers from the ‘lower’ orders committed to mounting attacks on their superiors (a fear connected with the frenzied scenes from the French Revolution he had evoked earlier in Egeria). In conclusion, he lamented the resulting state of affairs in which ‘Ministers at a Crisis so important, & with the opinion of the best friends of the Country in their favour’ were obliged to ‘suffer themselves to be degraded in the public opinion, & loose [sic] the public confidence, thro’ unanswered misrepresentations’ such that ‘the Country [is] deprived of the benefit of their councils & labours by the unceasing Cavils & Calumnies of interested or disaffected opponents’.138 The stilted progress beyond the Hobbesian state of nature in Egeria was here transposed to contemporary political reality. Based upon its account of the declamatory and distrustful political environment, we might well question whether the nation had indeed overcome the ‘perplexed and turbulent’ condition associated with the early days of civil society: a period in which ‘irregular and excessive passions’ clashed, in the absence of wise elders (not to mention elder statesmen) to leave the body politic closer to a condition of war than peace. Indeed, the reference 136 MS 33124, 1–2 (emphasis original). 137 For an important account of the changing status of ‘conversation’ as a barometer of this shift, see Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 138 MS 33124, 7–8.

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to the ‘Irritation & Passion’ during the ‘greater part of the present reign’ here brings us full circle as the ‘irritation’, located by Egeria in animal bodies not yet socially harmonized by the workings of ‘sensibility’, resurfaced as a placeholder for the wayward political feeling and transgressive conduct on which the author sought to impose political norms. The pairing with ‘Passion’ made a more explicit claim about the political impulses that continued to disrupt and divide the body politic against itself (and that the periodical, imploring its readers to ‘think’, had sought to overcome). In a version of the dynamic we encountered in Tate’s Pastoral Dialogue, pervasive discontents here give rise to similar impulses in those seeking to diagnose and condemn them. Williams’s own exasperation does not locate him outside this dynamic—in which division breeds irritation, irritation further driving division—but leaves him trapped within the same self-factioning feedback loops. Despite the quite literally high-minded perspective of his periodical (indeed, partly as a consequence of its claims to secure the ‘public mind’), Williams’s authorship remained animated by ‘party’ concerns. For all his apparent disdain for partisan writing, moreover, Williams evidently believed in the importance, at least in the case of his own work, of securing the support of a political elite (in ‘diffusing’ the ‘Principles’ of his work, as a ‘method of properly informing & directing the public mind’). ‘Bearing no part in the deliberations of those bodies which are considered as constituting, or at least representing the country’, Egeria had noted, an author ‘can have but little personal weight. By influencing those who have, he may be of some utility.’139 He in turn supported the reciprocal use of the press by government ministries to prop up their support. As he would go on to note to Pelham, with some apparent sarcasm, at present ‘the public are to look for the justification & actual system of Ministers, not in any work which may give Gentlemen or Scholars the trouble of thinking, but occasional & unimpressive paragraphs in two or three papers of no respectability’; ‘I do not mean to insinuate that these paragraphs are unnecessary’, he continued, noting that they ‘would be useful in longer numbers if they made parts of a national & fixed system’ (one that, he noted, ‘might influence men of sense as well as fools’).140 Williams went on to develop an illuminating parallel between his own early nineteenth-century moment and preceding decades. As he had instructed Pelham, drawing upon his insight into an earlier phase of George III’s reign: ‘I am old enough to be able to produce Proofs, that the Press is a power seldom much inferior to the Government.’ ‘Since the accession of the present Ministry,’ by contrast, ‘that power, usurped & monopolised by the lower orders of writers, has had more divisions than usual.’141 ‘I will not say as Lord Mansfield said of the Americans, “if you do not destroy such writers [those at the ‘disposal of the vilest Factions’] they will destroy you” ’, Williams went on—in fact saying exactly that when he added that ‘this opinion might be very usefully enforced’—and proceeded to warn that in ‘measures of this nature Government has not a moment to loose [sic]’. It was ‘owing principally to the separation made between the philosophical & satirical writers’ that Lord Shelburne had fallen two decades earlier, he wrote, adding that these 139 Egeria, 1.

140 MS 33124, 6.

141 MS 33124, 4–5.

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satirical writers ‘would have submitted to the former under proper direction;—but separated they confounded good & evil, & misled friends & foes into that perpetual species of warfare which has ever since infested the country’.142 ‘Literary Talents, the instruments of incalculable Good or Evil’, had since been ‘left to the disposal of the vilest Factions’ (with some driven to ‘hiring themselves to the enemy & abusing the government of their country’).143 Williams located Egeria outside circuits of ‘party’ discussion, a remove his writings both described and modelled. He emphasized the need for all citizens to take a role in public debates but also noted their responsibility to decouple themselves from the attachments that contributed to ongoing partisanship. His own work thus served as a model for how these channels of information and wider conduits for feeling might be redirected. ‘If these Studies should obtain attention,’ he observed in the preface, ‘it may induce other and abler Writers to afford their assistance, to withdraw the legislative and public mind from the contests of interested parties, and the low and rancorous ribaldry of personal satire, and to elevate it to the awful exigency of the moment.’144 The concluding reference, in the note to Pelham, to those ‘interested or disaffected opponents’ linked up with the earlier account of ‘parties’ as those who (in ‘each having a specific interest’) absorb ‘all private opinion, and the effect of all discussions’. Politics had become inextricable from ‘Irritation & Passion’ (which had, indeed, become, to some degree, the substance of political conversation, as Tate anticipated). Rather than those ‘interested or disaffected’ antagonists—forces that might also be described, with relation to this account of ‘parties’, as those with an ‘interest’ in their disaffected feelings—the political establishment would be better served by those promoting the ‘public feeling’ and thereby securing the operations of the ‘public mind’. As witnessed in his own privately expressed desire to secure the guiding support of those ‘persons of rank & influence’—whose ‘peculiar notice’ he solicits for his work ‘both in conversation & in parliament’—Williams emphasized the continuing need for a government elite to assist in carving out these channels for successful dissemination and reception. Yet as his remarks to Pelham also register, at times with irritability of their own, this was a tall order and an aspiration of which Egeria in particular would fall short. Williams may not have been correct about the influence of politicians in shaping public opinion (or in his assertions that the press ‘certainly decided the American war’), but these assertions cast light on continuing assumptions. That includes Williams’s conception of his own political role. He clearly remained invested in a conception of the author organized around existing partisan structures; more widely, his remarks illuminate the role of feeling in shaping the public sphere, 142 MS 33124, 7, 4. Shelburne, during his brief ministry in the 1780s, had made his fatal ‘Error’, Williams notes, in losing control of the press: ‘Literary hounds, well packed and well fed, opened on the Premier, and worried him out of his Place, his Reputation, & even his private Character’ (4). Had Shelburne ‘comprehended in one system every species of political literature, abominable as some of it appeared, he might perhaps have been minister to this day’, Williams asserted. Failing to do so, he had instead planted the seeds for the ‘perpetual [. . .] warfare’ between writers that now characterized Williams’s own factious moment (2–3). 143 MS 33124, 6. 144 Egeria (‘Preface’), 7.

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including the propensity for individuals to become caught up in factious divisions. But for all the continuities that Williams suggests, between the upheavals of the American War and the aftermath of the French Revolution, he also pointed to creeping changes that would make the partisan role (on which Williams, against his higher motivations, was apparently so eager to maintain a grasp) ultimately irrelevant. Egeria belonged to a new age. Its accounts of governance and the body politic correspond closely to the changing conceptions of individual feeling and collective regulation on which emerging practices of governance would depend. Political systems organized upon these principles in turn became crucial to the consolidation of Liberalism as a political force during the middle of the nineteenth century. The periodical’s emphasis on correctly managed, ‘formal’ sympathies anticipates models of individual ‘liberal’ subject formation that would have powerful afterlives.145 These emerging models clashed with existing party dynamics—but also converged with changing understandings of political parties. During the early nineteenth century, they became bound up with the reconstitution of state power. In writing to the home secretary of the Addington ministry, Williams brought his account of ‘Reform’ into the milieu of the regrouped ‘Tory’ circles, whose grasp on national governance finally ended only in 1832 with passage of the Reform Bill. Rather than bypassing existing political structures, the deepening influence of governmental practices further entrenched authoritarian tendencies, within and outside Britain. Yet these models of subjecthood were also bound up with a wider shift, whose influences were apparent at both ends of the political spectrum. The resolutions published following an 1819 ‘Meeting of Electors of the Parish of Saint James, Westminster, the Voluntary and Conscientious Constituents of Sir FRANCIS BURDETT, Bart., their Representative in the Commons House of Parliament’ provide a case in point. Westminster had been infamous since Wilkes as a political hotbed, and Burdett was central to the medley of oppositional, reformist, and radical political energies that would forge the Reform of the early 1830s (and in turn open the door for the Liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century). Yet in their first resolution, this group of electors, for all their associations with anti-establishment radicalism, asserted their distance from political factiousness: [Be it resolved] That, during the late Election, we have witnessed with Detestation and Disgust, the time-serving Union of selfish Public Men of discordant Parties, for the purpose of wresting from the People, by dint of Terror on the one hand, and Corruption on the other, the Constitutional exercise of their free and unbiassed [sic] Judgment, in the choice of a Citizen to represent them in Parliament.146

The resolutions went on to state that ‘the Exhibition of so profligate a contempt for public Opinion’ inspired ‘a well-founded distrust of all public Men’ and tended to ‘vitiate and destroy the effects of every Moral and Religious Precept’. These efforts to assert the ‘Corruption’ and factiousness of the political establishment over the 145 I discuss these questions further in the Conclusion. 146 British Library Add. MS 36458 18.

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‘Virtue and Integrity’ of its popular opposition would take time to bear fruit. Before Liberalism took hold as a political force, existing political structures retained a tenacious hold while opposition continued to be stigmatized as what Robert Southey derided as the unhinged, factious force of ‘Popular Disaffection’. The later chapters of this book emphasize the political and cultural clout wielded by a renovated ‘Toryism’ (as well as its imperial correlatives) and its neglected role in shaping the political climate of the Romantic age. As the appeal here to the unbiased judgement of reformist circles confirms, however, radicalism was similarly amenable to emerging conceptions of a normative subject.147 Both those who sought to reinvent and embolden post-1688 political structures and those who sought to dismantle and renovate them on the way to Reform were increasingly subsumed within changed logics of governance and social regulation that look ahead to the nineteenth century and beyond. For the period addressed by this book, however, disaffected parties of various stripes continued to challenge appeals to harmonious order and contest the organization of ‘politics’. Among them, as Chapter 2 will now go on to show, was Laurence Sterne, for whom, despite his sentimental reputation, private feeling remained animated by party spirit—as was also the case for his fictional alter ego, who came to have a political life all his own.

147 Compare Saree Makdisi’s discussion of the ‘sovereign’ subjecthood advanced by middle-class reformers during the 1790s and its analogues in Romantic literature, in Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

2 Tristram Shandy and the Divided Worlds of Politics The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman did not want for attention. A motley array of fictional imitations, poems, pamphlets, social practices, and drawing-room discussions promptly arose to celebrate Tristram (or to condemn his antics). Sterne’s book was the ‘talk of the fashionable world’ and lent its name to ‘many of the fads of the day’ including a soup, a card game, and a country dance.1 Amidst the outpouring of public attention to Sterne’s fictional alter ego, the following lines, addressed to ‘the ingenious Mr. Tristram Shandy’, appeared in several Irish newspapers: Ha, ha, my old Friend; you’re alive then I see, And as merry a Wag as you us’d for to be. Faith, Shandy, thy Writings have banish’d my Care, Dispers’d all my Gloom, and expell’d my Despair. I can now laugh, and sing, and pursue your good Rules To contemn wealthy Villains, and pity poor fools.2

The ongoing development of Sterne’s novel, comprising nine volumes published over the better part of a decade,3 brought the ‘Shandean’ humour and good cheer emphasized in these lines increasingly to the fore. This free-spirited impulse would have a long afterlife. The latter volumes of Tristram Shandy did much to promote and further consolidate this identification, which was secured by Sterne’s continuation of Parson Yorick’s adventures in A Sentimental Journey (1768). David Hume, in the 1773 letter lamenting that Tristram Shandy was the ‘best Book, that has been writ by any Englishman these thirty Years’ (‘bad as it is’), disparaged a recent book of travel writings by noting that its ‘Levities’ were too much in the ‘Shandean style’.4 The whimsical, discontinuous narrative technique of Tristram 1 See Alan  B.  Howes, Yorick and the Critics: Sterne’s Reputation in England, 1760–1868 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 1–2, 8. 2 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, and Septennial Parliaments, 2nd edn. (Dublin: R. Lewis, 1762), 24. 3 The first instalment of Tristram Shandy, encompassing the first and second volumes, had been published in London in 1760, after original publication in York. Further pairs of volumes appeared in each of the subsequent two years—volumes 3 and 4 were issued in January 1761 and volumes 5 and 6 a year later—with others to follow later in the decade, culminating with volume 9 in 1767. 4 David Hume to William Strahan, 30 January 1773. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1983), 2.269.

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Figure 3. [‘Miseries of Human Life’] (1806). (Source: British Museum, PPA108047. © Trustees of the British Museum.)

Shandy had been assimilated, by the time Hume wrote, to a more pervasive phenomenon: the cult of sentiment. Sterne’s distinctive brand of humour and fictional practice thereafter became inseparable from the sentimental mode, for which he became a culture hero, frequently hailed as an inspiration by writers during subsequent decades.5 The verse addressed to ‘the ingenious Mr. Tristram Shandy’, published while the novel was still in its relatively early stages, might appear to confirm the emerging sentimental trajectory of this reputation in its praise for the ‘merry’ author whose writings banish ‘Care’, ‘Gloom’, and ‘Despair’. Yet these lines were only indirectly addressed to the protagonist of Sterne’s novel. They appeared, instead, in response to a recent, Dublin-published pamphlet entitled Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, and Septennial Parliaments (1762).6 As one of the countless responses to Sterne’s novel, this piece might not seem to warrant further comment or explanation. Sterne was, after all, the talk of the day; his fictional practice had saturated the print marketplace to such an extent, we might conclude, that his 5 J.  M.  S.  Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (London: Constable & Co., 1932), 50–3. See also James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 6 The lines to Tristram were reproduced in the second edition of Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, and Septennial Parliaments, which noted they had appeared ‘in several of the public Papers’ (24).

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fictional avatar was inevitably appropriated for all manner of discussions, even the unlikely ones of politics. What connection could there be, after all, between the putative author of this pamphlet, which addressed the practice of elections and frequency of parliaments, and the inhabitant of Shandy Hall? What did Tristram have to do with politics? Yet this Shandean facsimile was, this chapter will demonstrate, a far-from-distant relation. The leap from Sterne’s seemingly haphazard fictional technique to contemporary political debate, specifically the raucous world of extra-parliamentary politics and ongoing contestation of 1688, was not irresponsible plagiarism or pure poetic licence. An illuminating instance of the ‘imaginative expansion’ that David Brewer has identified as a crucial facet of eighteenth-century novel reading, this pamphlet helps to open up an expanded approach to Sterne’s novel.7 Far from random or coincidental, this chapter will argue, the proximity of Tristram Shandy to a contentious field of political discussion was crucial to both the original reception and the continuing development of Sterne’s novel. The incorporation of Tristram into political discussions did not witness his celebrated ‘anything goes’ mentality unthinkingly cross over into a realm of sharply polarized debate; for at least some of his readers, Tristram seemed already poised to enter politics, if not already to inhabit its indeterminate margins. The author of Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections at once appreciated and shrewdly exploited this existing tendency within Sterne’s fiction, as did the Explanatory Remarks that introduced Tristram into London coffee-house discussions of the Seven Years’ War; one reviewer even conjectured, plausibly, that Sterne was himself the author of this latter pamphlet, in which Tristram was ironically commended for his ‘self-evident’ ‘political notions’.8 The leap to politics was not that much of a leap after all but a further hop within the already wayward course of Tristram’s own narration. Tristram Shandy was at once inside and outside, caught up in the fray and straining far beyond. Sterne pointedly crafted his fiction to engage with a world of proliferating divisions, this chapter proposes, while also seeking to make other positions and perspectives available, including ways of looking beyond what Tristram termed ‘this unsettled island’ altogether. This chapter accordingly builds upon critical discussions that have valuably expanded the contexts in which we locate Sterne’s fiction but with a view to rethinking the political status of literary form. Tristram Shandy, I argue, initially belonged at least as much to the heterogeneous field of political debate as to the contemporary emergence of ‘the novel’. In his important 7 David Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 8 Explanatory Remarks on the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; wherein, the Morals and Politics of this Piece are clearly laid open, by Jeremiah Kunastrokius (London: 1760), 37. In April 1760, the Critical Review conjectured that Sterne was the possible author of this pamphlet, voicing suspicions that ‘the author himself is [. . .] under the form of explanatory notes, pointing the finger at some of those latent strokes of wit in Tristram’s life and opinions, which may perchance have escaped the eye of the less discerning reader’. Sterne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Alan B. Howes (London: Routledge, 1974), 62. The pamphlet promised to provide a political ‘Key’ to Tristram Shandy—closely recalling Sterne’s same gesture the previous year in A Political Romance—and advanced, perhaps tellingly, a sophisticated commentary on anonymous political journalism.

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study Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, Tom Keymer has returned Tristram Shandy to its contemporary moment, arguing for Sterne’s acute responsiveness to recent developments in the print marketplace. But in its early volumes especially, I contend, Tristram Shandy was not yet confined to the literary domain, however broadly conceived or roughly delineated. Recognizing the importance that politics and the shifting guises of political debate played in the development of Sterne’s eventual novel requires us to triangulate anew between Tristram Shandy and contemporary print culture, looking beyond established concerns with the nascent culture of sentiment and models of satire and coterie authorship dating back to the age of Swift.9 At the same time, decoupling Sterne from his sentimental reputation allows us to revisit accounts of the novel’s internal coherence—from Viktor Shklovsky’s emphasis on form as content to Wayne Booth’s discussion of Tristram’s engaging mode of address—with a view to their political implications. As the opening sections of this chapter will show, Sterne’s earlier experiences of partisan journalism and his insight into the changing physiognomy of contemporary politics (including the proliferating, increasingly incommensurate scales of ‘political’ discussion) directly shaped the composition of Tristram Shandy. Excavating Sterne’s earliest experiences as a published writer and his accompanying involvement in political campaigning allows us to reappraise both the origins and endpoints of Sterne’s masterwork. The chapter goes on in the subsequent sections to ask where Tristram ended up, returning to view the paths both taken and not in the continuation of Sterne’s novel and its reception. From the novel’s pointed inclusion of topical political references to the double-edged temperament papered over by his sentimental reputation, Sterne continued to locate his writing at an uncertain political remove that in turn shaped his fictional practice. Tristram Shandy belonged squarely amidst the disaffected parties animating politics during this critical period: occupying a retreat from politics shared by its author, on the one hand, while channelling an at-times antagonistic attraction back to political activity, on the other. 9 Although Keymer discusses Sterne’s fiction in dialogue with a range of ‘contemporary intertexts’ in addition to serial and experimental fiction, including some political satire, his focus inevitably precludes attention to further intersections with contemporary political debate. See Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a more freewheelingly ‘Shandean’ approach to the immediately contemporary—and anticipatory or proleptic—political contexts of the novel, see Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). In recognition of the market forces highlighted by Keymer, Melvyn New acknowledges the ‘license inherent in an open-ended and digressive nonnarrative structure and in serial publication’ as potentially significant to Sterne’s commencement of Tristram Shandy and to ‘whatever new directions he pursued in the ensuing eight years of his literary career’ but maintains that A Political Romance and the ‘Rabelaisian Fragment’ ‘strongly suggest that Sterne initiated his creative motions by thinking of himself as a Scriblerian satirist’. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Vol. 9, The Miscellaneous Writings and Sterne’s Subscribers, an Identification List, eds. Melvyn New and W. B. Gerard (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2014), xviii. For Sterne’s indebtedness to Augustan tradition and Anglican theology, see Melvyn New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of ‘Tristram Shandy’ (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1969). For accounts of Sterne’s fiction in relation to social and political practice, see especially Brewer, The Afterlife of Character and Jonathan Lamb, ‘Sterne and Irregular Oratory’, in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Attending in particular to the final volumes of the novel and A Sentimental Journey, Chandler proposes that ‘we might do just as well to label [Tristram Shandy] a Shaftesburyan soliloquy’. See An Archaeology of Sympathy, 160.

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We do not tend to think of Sterne as a political writer. He was, by his own account, not a ‘party-man’.10 Although Sterne undertook scattered partisan writing that appeared in the local and national press, this intersected in no direct way with his major works. After writing for his uncle in his York Gazetteer, Sterne began a longstanding feud with this problematic relative following his eventual refusal to ‘write paragraphs in the newspapers’. With the partial exception of his satire of the York church in A Political Romance, in which he returned to some of these disputes, he never returned to the front lines of political activity. In his 1929 study The Politicks of Laurence Sterne, Lewis Perry Curtis focused on the 1741–2 period when Sterne had been involved in election campaigning, the ‘dirty work’ that had prompted the conclusion that he was ‘no party-man’. Curtis ultimately depicted Sterne withdrawing from these partisan scrapes, however, to write ‘one of the gayest of books’.11 This has been a standard assessment—one promoted, in good measure, by Sterne himself. As he wrote to prime minister William Pitt, in the dedication added to the first London edition of Tristram Shandy, ‘if I am ever told, [this book] has made you smile, or can conceive it has beguiled you of one moment’s pain— I shall think myself as happy as a minister of state’.12 That dedication, conflating Sterne with the gregarious narrator about to crash onto the scene, situates both the Shandy universe and Sterne’s authorship at an emphatic remove from the world of politics. We would do well, however, to tarry with this apparently straightforward invitation to retreat into the ‘country’ and the accompanying claim on the part of ‘The Author’ (as the dedication is signed). Approaching Sterne primarily as a comedian or entertainer, we are liable to dismiss this analogy with ‘a minister of state’ as a throwaway remark. Whether implicitly disparaged, held at a distance, or simply dismissed, the rewards of politics here are contrasted with the compensatory happiness provided by Sterne’s fiction. Revisiting the crossroads between Sterne’s early engagement with partisan disputes and his fiction lets us begin to complicate this picture. Sterne’s engagement with the political press gave him ‘a measure of conviction and a sense of his own expressive powers’, Pat Rogers has noted Aside from supplying Sterne with a journalistic repertoire—a hemmed-in sense of urgency, polemical intent, and self-display, as well as an impulse to critique, or attack—these experiences may also have equipped Sterne with the confidence to approach his publisher.13 10 As Sterne had written in his brief Memoirs: ‘My uncle and myself were then [in 1741] upon very good terms [. . .] but he quarreled with me afterwards, because I would not write paragraphs in the newspapers—though he was a party-man, I was not, and detested such dirty work: thinking it beneath me.’ Miscellaneous Writings, 10. 11 Lewis Perry Curtis, The Politicks of Laurence Sterne (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 130. 12 The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Vols. 1–3, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, eds. Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978). 13 ‘Sterne and Journalism’, in The Winged Skull: Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference, eds. Arthur H. Cash and John M. Stedmond (London: Methuen, 1971), 134–6.

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But rather than simply viewing his entanglement in partisan campaigning as ‘a straitjacket reluctantly donned and gladly cast off ’,14 we might equally ask how this  experience meaningfully shaped Sterne as a writer. The Florida edition of Sterne’s writings rejects more fulsome claims for his active involvement in partisan campaigning as overzealous and based upon limited evidence. Raising questions about the extent to which Sterne was drawn into writing for his uncle’s paper, the editors propose that Sterne may have served as a copyist for materials composed by others, authored material that was subsumed into standard partisan fare, or resisted being involved much at all. The positions available to Sterne may thus have extended only to amanuensis, on the one hand, or Bartleby-like abstention, on the other. Despite these chastened conclusions about Sterne’s active engagement in politics, this episode during his early life remains crucial, I contend, to understanding the emergence and development of his fiction. Even and perhaps especially if his direct involvement was limited, these experiences with the press provided Sterne with acute insight into the restrictive channels of political expression. The election controversy in question also returns us to a pivotal moment in the development of local and national partisan debate (a period in which William Pitt was himself coming to grips with the fractured political landscape).15 Approached as formative moments in Sterne’s development as a ‘writer’, these experiences permit us to develop new lines of approach, so to speak, to Sterne’s paths of retreat, complicating and destabilizing the presumed distance between his authorship and politics. Sterne’s uncle Jaques had founded the York Gazetteer in the early 1740s to ‘correct the Weekly Poison’ of its rival, the York Courant.16 Sterne, conscripted by his uncle into writing for the paper in the run-up to a contested election, wrote scattered pieces in support of the candidate aligned with the Walpole ministry. This experience, which included some especially vicious exchanges, prompted Sterne’s conclusions about the ‘dirty work’ of politics and supplied him with acute insight into the workings of party political debate and organization. The ill will between the respective sides of the campaign can be seen from a series of ‘Queries’ that Sterne helped to compile in response to a number of attacks on Cholmley Turner, his paper’s preferred candidate.17 The pamphlet version set itself up as a ‘Repulse’ against ‘rude Attack[s]’ and the ‘merciless Fury’ unleashed by the rival press against Turner after he reversed his plans to retire, dressing down these attacks on his ‘Character and Conduct’ with an abrasive irony: Upon casting up the three first Paragraphs, the Sense Total amounts just to this single Proposition, ‘That last April Mr Turner (as appears by Letter) had resigned all Thoughts of acting in a publick Station; but, that, at the Sollicitations of his Friends [. . .] He had altered his Intentions, which if He had not done, the Country had been at Peace, 14 Rogers, ‘Sterne and Journalism’. 15 See my ‘Arbitrary Government’, 601–2. 16 Miscellaneous Writings, 28. 17 These were published as a separate pamphlet, entitled Query upon Query, and also reprinted in the London-published Daily Gazetteer. Although Sterne was certainly involved in writing the original piece, the editors of the Florida edition of Sterne’s writings maintain that the eventual pamphlet was jointly authored with Jaques Sterne and may also have involved other collaborators. Miscellaneous Writings, 69n.9. For simplicity, I refer to this work as a pamphlet.

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and there had been no contested Election.’ A most admirable and important Conclusion! You have been pleased, Sir, to inform us, that before any Offer was made to Mr Turner, every Person of Figure had given an absolute Refusal; And if He had likewise refused—What then? Why then every Body had refused; and unless two Candidates had offer’d themselves, there could have been no such Thing as a controverted Election.18

Had everybody, including Turner, continued to refuse to stand, there would be no ‘controverted Election’. By going back on his original decision, Turner had thereby created contention: reversing course on his original refusal to engage, he had unleashed conflict. But as this sarcastic exposition of the logic underpinning these attacks on his character spelled out, that is what politics is. The absurdities of partisan attacks here reach their zero degree. ‘I readily confess’, the piece went on, ‘that had a Discovery of so profound a Nature happen’d to be made in a Neighbouring Island, it seems so curiously adapted to the Taste and Genius of that Nation, that past Doubt it would have been thought of singular Benefit to the Publick. But alas! Sir, it is a discovery unluckily miscalculated for an English Meridian; ’tis so many Degrees either above or below our Researches, that it is quite lost upon us.’19 Describing the confused reasoning of the opposing side as more at home in the ‘Neighbouring Island’, the piece pointed to the supposed Irish connections of the rival candidate,20 implicitly contrasting the ‘Taste and Genius of that Nation’ with the better ‘sense’ and moderation of the English. Despite these efforts to assert the superiority of an ‘English Meridian’, domestic politics had its own propensities for unreason and contention. The letter to which this piece responded, from the rival York Courant, had been prefaced by a note from its proprietor who, seeking ‘to preserve that Impartiality, he has constantly observ’d ’, remained willing to insert ‘any Advertisement relating to the present contested Election, come it from what Quarter it will ’ and invited letters in response to the present piece.21 The more scurrilous exchanges—which saw Sterne compare his opponents to nasty animals strewing their filth behind them, followed by a series of poems that satirized Sterne as ‘Lorry’ and depicted him roasting at the spit like a candle that ‘drops more turd than tallow’—have been well documented.22 Published as Query upon Query, the ensuing pamphlet, as part of the general back-and-forth of partisan debate indicated in this title, displayed its own share of virulence and scorn. The ‘Queries’ proceeded to assert that Turner’s ‘merciless’ antagonists had been responsible for breaking the peace and creating the resulting conflict, and went on to expose the faulty basis for the claims that their candidate had been a factious presence by emphasizing its ad hominem basis: ‘You inform 18 Miscellaneous Writings, 56–7. 19 Miscellaneous Writings, 57. 20 While Sterne may or may not have been uncomfortable with this attack, he ultimately went along with its inclusion regardless. The Florida editors ‘do not believe Sterne would attack Ireland in this gratuitous manner’ and have ‘no doubt’ that his anti-Catholic uncle would. Miscellaneous Writings, 73n.17. 21 Miscellaneous Writings, 70. 22 See especially Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (London: Routledge, 1975), 87–115 and Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 62–90.

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us, “That if Mr Turner gave no Votes contrary to the publick Welfare, that then His Time has been spent in the Service of his Country; but if on the contrary He acted in Opposition to the general Sense of the Nation, That then He could not be said faithfully to have discharged his Trust”.’23 A sarcastic addition underscored the partisan delusion to which this argumentation had succumbed: ‘I  fancy the Meaning of this mysterious Assertion converted into plain English amounts to no more than this, That if Mr Turner acted well, He acted well; and, vice versa, If He acted wrong, He certainly acted wrong. This Specimen of your Casuistry, and the Paradox subjoined to it, “That Age, and consequently a Knowledge in Parliamentary Affairs, is a Disqualification for a British Member;” As the First is supported with great Logic, I know not how to venture a Reply; and as the Second is grounded upon false Suggestions I think it does not deserve one.’24 Regardless of how Turner acted, including the very fact of his standing for election in the first place, the blinkered reasoning of his antagonists would find reasons to discredit and attack him for falling short of their own supposed ideals. At the same time, wherever his agenda did not coincide with that of the opposing side, they would question his capacity to promote the ‘publick Welfare’ and represent the ‘Sense of the Nation’. As Kathleen Wilson and Mark Knights have detailed, appeals to the ‘sense’ of the ‘people’ or ‘nation’—and related appeals to the national, or public, interest— played a crucial role in eighteenth-century political debate.25 These appeals could include wider groups within political deliberation but could also depict their demands as suspicious and incendiary, confirming the need for wise statesmen whose trust in their own judgement signalled their superiority to the wider populace. The everyday workings of politics mediated between these competing demands (leading Edmund Burke, among others, into seemingly tortured argumentation).26 In the case of the present pamphlet, the failure to reconcile appeals to the people or nation with the action of rulers gave rise to mockery. Asking whether ‘Mr Turner, in voting against the Repeal of the Septennial Bill, did any Thing more than act consistently with Himself ’ and whether the rival author ‘by a numerous standing Army, does not intend such an Army as is necessary to check the Fury of the People spirited up to any Enterprize by Party-Artifices and false Clamours’,27 these ‘Queries’ concerning Turner’s conduct were turned back against his antagonists. Turner’s support for this military measure had been held up by his critics not only as evidence of his opposition to national freedom but also as indicating the corruption that sets him at odds with the interest of the people. In response, the pamphlet 23 Miscellaneous Writings, 58. 24 Miscellaneous Writings, 58. 25 See especially Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in  England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Knights emphasizes the role attributed to the ‘public’ in adjudicating political disputes and holding leaders accountable, while Wilson details the ways that appeals to the extra-parliamentary interests channelled by the ‘people’ shaped political deliberation; both note the direct influence of these at once real and imagined entities in shaping local affairs and government policy. 26 See Chapter 4 of this book. 27 Miscellaneous Writings, 59.

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cleverly proposed that such state-sponsored forces were now needed—but only to quell a population riled up by such venomous political attacks, a result of the ‘Fury [. . .] spirited up [. . .] by Party-Artifices and false Clamours’. Sterne’s role in this pamphlet left him caught up in a local political squabble. But his involvement in this heated local election also implicated him within a larger national campaign. Turner was the ministerial candidate at the local election; support for him upheld the self-proclaimed Whig ministry of Sir Robert Walpole. The ‘Patriot’ opposition to Walpole claimed supposedly pure ‘Whig’ principles and a traditional ‘country’ platform. Sterne’s efforts to defend Turner’s steadfast commitment to constitutional principles thus clashed with assertions, mounted by the ‘Patriot’ side, that ‘Whig’ principles had been travestied by the Walpole regime and abandoned by its followers. Sterne subsequently defended Turner once more against a ‘pretended Piece of Inconsistency’ by noting that he had ‘always acted from a disinterested and unbyass’d Principle’ and was ‘a real Patriot’ who was at last prompted by ‘a Love to his Country in general, and an Affection, in particular, to the County which He had long represented with so much Credit’.28 Terming his candidate ‘a real Patriot’, Sterne turned opposition nomenclature against itself. Despite its pretensions to ideological cohesion, the ‘Patriot’ opposition was a motley coalition, encompassing both local ‘Tory’ squires and inchoate popular energies, internal fissures that Sterne was well placed to observe. Turner opposed the Triennial Bill, which would have reduced the length between elections, then long-established at seven years, and this commitment to established constitutional principles both served to reinforce claims for and was bolstered by his ‘consistency’. Demands for more frequent elections, by contrast, were identified with the subversion portended by the ‘Clamours’ and raucous conduct of the opposition.29 Where Turner upheld stability, his opponents threatened chaos; the frequency of elections became central to this debate. Sterne’s writings were partisan, wanting his candidate to win. Yet at the same time they voiced caution about more contentious, inclusive, popular political activity. These debates provide limited insight into any avowed political commitments on Sterne’s part. We cannot be sure whether Sterne placed stock in any of the arguments advanced in these disputes, whether those mounted against his paper’s opponents or in support of its chosen candidate. His writing for the Walpole side was primarily motivated by obligation 28 Miscellaneous Writings, 60–1, emphasis original. Events had seen Turner ‘lay aside all Considerations of Domestic Troubles, and again offer His Service at Parliament, at a Time, when he thought every Gentleman, who express’d a Satisfaction in his Conduct in the strongest and most honourable Terms, had too large a Stake depending, to mean any Thing or regard any Thing but the Publick—Good’. 29 In an earlier item from the Gazetteer and perhaps his first piece of published writing, Sterne had voiced concern about the conduct of supposedly ‘free’ elections, questioning those who launch ‘Tumults to perplex and prolong them’ and their ‘riotous, insulting Behaviour’ and (employing the same ‘query’ format as the later pamphlet) had asked whether ‘Elections ought not by our Laws to be Free, unawed and undisturbed’ and thus whether the actions of ‘a Person who raised and headed Tumults to perplex and prolong them [. . .] deserves either Thanks or Recompense, from any but Those, who are Enemies to the Constitution, and consequently to their King and Country’. Miscellaneous Writings, 56.

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to his uncle.30 There are indications that he may, in fact, have inclined towards more radical appeals to restoring the legacies of 1688 (given his ties to the original Whig generation and the approving references to William III and his campaigns in Tristram Shandy). Regardless of what they tell us about Sterne’s political views, these events unquestionably provided him with insight into the wider operations of politics, particularly the fault lines within and between the established parties. Aside from the obvious strains associated with upholding Walpole and his supporters as exemplars of what his uncle’s paper boldly declared as the ‘Cause of Liberty and Protestantism’,31 his involvement in the election campaign attuned Sterne to the contradictions within the demands of the opposing side, as well as its unruly and more raucous edges. He was thus aligned with a side to which he apparently had no natural inclination, facing a ‘Patriot’ opposition with whose purer tendencies he may have been inclined to agree but whose coherence was dubious (and whose campaigns were associated with mounting, disturbing levels of political contention). His observation of the political machine presided over by his uncle thus provided Sterne with pointed insight into the limited room for manoeuvre, not to mention the excess of vitriol, within the established field of political debate and surrounded him with the din of constant partisan conflict as well as the prospect of more dramatic ‘Tumults’ promised by such ‘riotous, insulting Behaviour’. What his uncle termed the ‘Poison’ of the political press clearly exerted a longlasting toll, as the vignettes describing the trials of Yorick in Tristram Shandy attest.32 Whatever the extent of his involvement in writing for the political press, this reputation dogged him: Sterne was seen to be closely involved in scurrilous partisan campaigning and was attacked for his perceived toadying. This experience was not only personal, a discovery that launched him on the way to a leisured, conflict-free, untroubled literary domain, as previous commentators have tended to emphasize, but also converged with a seminal moment in the development of national politics and a mounting crisis within Whiggism. The Patriot opposition to Walpole was, as already noted, an unruly, ragtag coalition. In a topical poem from the late Walpole era, by contrast, we encounter a seemingly more tidy reconciliation of a virtuous, principled, ‘Patriot’ position, resting on stable national ground. An Epistle from Lord Lovel to Lord Chesterfield (1740) appeared to escape party divides and, indeed, the world of ‘politics’ altogether: ambitions that meet in the ‘country’. As with the disrupted quiet in Nahum Tate’s Pastoral Dialogue, however, this idealized scene revealed telling fractures. The Epistle purported to be written by the politician William Pulteney, who occupied a prominent role in the dissident Whig opposition to Walpole. Writing from a ‘beauteous’ rural scene, we find the author ensconced beneath an oak pondering an ode, then in the 30 The Florida editors note the unlikelihood that an admirer of Pope and Swift could have been an enthusiast for Walpole, not least in his twilight hours. Miscellaneous Writings, 46–7n.4. 31 Miscellaneous Writings, 28. 32 For the role of these experiences in shaping Sterne’s depiction of the beleaguered parson, Wilbur L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909), 59–63.

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arms of his beloved, Flavia. ‘Happy the Man’, he notes, ‘of choicest taste / Who sees whate’er’s above the Waist, / Much happier, what’s below it.’ Following a line whose eroticism not even Toby Shandy could have misconstrued, the poet moves on to what he terms the ‘greater theme’ of his ‘Country’s Ruin’. The site of a languorous, undisturbed bliss, these outdoors scenes also become a source of refuge from the trials of politics, thus of refreshed political possibilities. Bidding love ‘adieu’, the speaker also vows to ‘resign [his] Place’ and to give up his friends as ‘wretched Politicians’. As such, he will ‘become a Patriot too, / But neither Whig nor Tory’.33 The poem’s idyllic rural setting and promised erotic fulfilment converge with an idealized image of disinterested virtue, identified with the ‘Patriot’ side. As Pope and Swift demonstrated,34 claims to reject party labels could be a means to assert superiority over opponents and to claim a moral purity or higher truth not available within the political arena. A related stance can be discerned beneath the claim to be a ‘Patriot’ but ‘neither Whig nor Tory’. Despite these claims to reject party labels—and even the ‘wretched’ enterprise of politics as such—matters become more complicated when we take fuller account of the actual Patriot side, whose diverse elements (all too apparent in Sterne’s critiques of their incoherent practice and inchoate demands) were largely excluded from this scenario. In the face of these realities, the political basis of this ‘country’ retreat appeared liable to unravel. Amidst swirling coalitions and mounting popular demands, moreover, the prospect of living out a version of these ideals could no longer convincingly be asserted, as recognized in the interruptions that puncture this idealized poetic scene. When the ‘Cries of an insulted Land’ intrude, we glimpse the grating roar of the populist element familiar to Sterne from his own observations (associated with the ‘ringing of bells, the lighting of bonfires, and the shooting of skyrockets’ observed in his Yorkshire parish)35 that would prove hard, under any circumstances, to assimilate to this political idyll. The good life, for which these scenes are emblem and metonym, thus dissolve into confusion, this ‘country’ retreat overtaken by the realities of the political nation for which the Patriots purported to stand. With the eventual fall of Walpole in 1742, hopes sprung that a new platform might transform the government. Yet when the Patriot opposition, presided over by Pulteney, finally entered power, these tensions proved impossible to sustain, as ideals gave way to the realities of governance. Calls by these dissident Whigs to reform government (anticipated in the Epistle as the task of cleansing the ‘Augean Stables’) proved harder to implement than anticipated, and the supposed backtracking of the Patriots occasioned widespread expressions of bitter disappointment. Having reached office, Pulteney took on a new title, leading to claims that he had reneged on his earlier commitments and widespread outrage. Now promoted to Earl of Bath, Pulteney became the target for vituperative attacks. Although his switch back towards the Whig establishment might easily have been predicted, his seeming defection helped to crystallize cynical attitudes towards politics and marked the onset of a retraction of interest in the political press among 33 An epistle from Lord L—l to Lord C—d. By Mr. P---- (London: 1740). 35 Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years, 99–100.

34 See Chapter 1.

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the reading public.36 The fall of Pulteney thus marked a crucial topping point, in which attitudes towards a specific party and grouping of politicians coincided with a growing disdain towards politics as such. The response to Pulteney was not simply a localized controversy. This particularly well-publicized and widely vilified instance of ‘apostacy’ became a lasting emblem of perhaps the final possibilities for a viable opposition movement. This event coincided with the onset of a newly critical, if not altogether dismissive, attitude towards politics and political discussion that would reverberate for a long time to come, in what was, arguably, the first widespread popular expression of cynicism towards the political establishment.37 Critics and biographers have been inclined to view Sterne’s turn away from politics as a personal decision. Yet his departure from the political arena was inextricable from this larger national realization. Sterne underlined the connection in his final contribution to the political press. In July 1742, he announced his retirement from political journalism in the York Courant. Noting ‘by some late Preferments, that it may be not improper to change Sides’—in a letter itself published, tellingly, in the rival newspaper—he begged pardon for his ‘abusive’ writings.38 While he may also have been alluding to local disputes, Sterne, in pointing more obviously to the promotion of Pulteney to the peerage just two weeks previously, implied that his withdrawal from political activity was of a piece with a larger national realization.39 Sterne’s discovery that he was ‘no party-man’ was thus bound up not only with his efforts to distance himself from the ‘dirty work’ he had undertaken for his uncle but with the mounting wave of alienation from politics as such. He was not enthused by the side for which he wrote, thus unlikely to have been overly disappointed. But he may equally have recognized, more damningly, that divisions, overstated as they were, could not sustain any meaningful difference between parties—or hold out the possibility of a stance that would overcome divisions for a higher ideal. In any case, Sterne’s turn away from ‘politics’, complex and conflicted, was bound up with competing feelings and motivations.

36 The enduring weight of this event can be seen in a 1764 poem by Hugh Kelly, Elegy to the Memory of the Right Honourable William, Late Earl of Bath, which compared the late statesman to Pulteney’s tarnished example. See Robert R. Bataille, The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly: Politics, Journalism, and Theater in Late Eighteenth-Century London (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 58. James Boswell took a characteristically contrary bent, asserting to politically involved friends that same year that Pulteney was an honest man who had been blackly abused. 37 For the growth of ‘cynical’ attitudes at this moment, see Robert Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 59–60. See also Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 45, 22. There had, of course, been long-standing criticism of Walpole’s government, but this critique—despite acquiring what has come to be viewed as a timeless stripe in Swift and certain contemporaries—remained bound up with the unique corruptions of the Walpole administration. See Tone Sundt Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets: The Use of Literature as ProGovernment Propaganda, 1721–1742 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999). Only with the collapsing hopes for the Patriot ministry after the fall of Walpole, I propose, did cynicism cohere against the political establishment as such. 38 Miscellaneous Writings, 66. 39 Ian Campbell Ross notes the connection with Pulteney in Laurence Sterne: A Life, 88.

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Although intertwined with a particular set of events, as well as a larger national realization, Sterne’s experience of factious partisanship and changing attitudes towards politics looked ahead in important ways to his later authorship. That much can be seen from the form taken by a distinctive contribution to the local press. Several months prior to Sterne’s letter, a poem had appeared in the York Courant, purporting to give ‘L—Y’s Reasons for writing no more Gazetteers’ and describing the author ‘scribbl[ing]’ to ‘baffle Common Sense’, taking ‘Pains by Logick Rules / To prove myself an Ass’. The poem concludes: But now my Pen I’ve splinter’d quite, And thrown away my Ink, For ’till I see which Side will win, I’ll neither write nor think.40

We do not know who wrote these lines; as the latest in the series of anonymous squibs addressed to ‘Lorry’—which included the poem that depicted him roasting alive and compared his bowels to a wilting candle—the poem has accordingly been viewed a further attempt to lambast Sterne for his opportunism. Yet we might also want to consider a further possibility: Sterne might have written this poem himself. We know that intermediaries had placed items in the York Courant that could be traced back to his pen.41 He was already known by the nickname ‘Lorry’, which he would subsequently adopt in A Political Romance. His exculpatory letter in the same publication a few months later would make much the same admission, raising the question of how the author of the poem was so closely informed about this decision. Despite their critical thrust, these lines depart from the scabrous tone of the earlier poems, displaying greater sympathy for the circumstances that had made an ‘Ass’ of their putative author. Sterne’s possible penning of this disguised self-portrait might thus be considered a muted act of revenge on both parties, through a proto-Shandean form of self-critique.

40 W. G. Day marks the poem as ‘prescient’ given Sterne’s public withdrawal from politics later that same year. ‘Attribution Problems in Sterne’s Ecclesiastical and Secular Politickings’, 216. In Swiftly Sterneward: Essays on Laurence Sterne and his Times in Honor of Melvyn New, eds. W.  B.  Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and Robert G. Walker (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011). While Ross describes the poem as an attack by the Courant on Sterne’s ‘cynical self-interest’, Cash takes this ‘pasquinade’ more seriously as an account of his interior life, quoting the poem in full and asking: ‘What, Sterne must have wondered, was the use of politics? He might as well go back to his thatched cottage at Sutton and tend his garden.’ See Laurence Sterne: A Life, and Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years, 111. 41 See the comments by Caesar Ward in the York Courant for 8 December 1741: ‘a Letter was brought to me in Vindication of Mr Turner [. . .] in which there were some Passages I made Objections to, whereupon the Messenger went away, and return’d again with these obnoxious Passages expunged [. . .] but the same Evening [. . .] Mr Sterne came to me, and said, HE had made some Mistake in the Letter which HE had sent me that Evening’ (reproduced in Day, ‘Attribution Problems’, 213–14). Sterne’s precise role in the chains of copyists and authors behind these and other pieces reproduced in the York press remains lost to history. Yet the infrastructure was unquestionably in place for Sterne to submit anonymously an item for inclusion in Ward’s newspaper (and he might, with the aid of a further copyist, have taken some added pleasure in disguising his handwriting, given Ward’s claim to have recognized his hand in other pseudonymous submissions).

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Regardless of whether the poem was written by Sterne or dictated by his example, he unquestionably internalized its message. The letter, which he had ‘change[d] Sides’ to the rival paper to publish, acknowledged that the distinction between ‘sides’, at both local and national levels, had collapsed under its own weight. On a more personal front, the poem uncannily echoes his later remarks about being ‘tired of employing [his] brains for other people’s advantage’ in the run-up to his fame as the author of Tristram Shandy.42 While its account of ‘baffl[ing] Common Sense’ apparently resisted the pull towards the displaced agency of writing (idiosyncratic ‘scribbl[ing]’), the depersonalized ‘Logick’ of the print political marketplace ultimately prevailed, not least when we recall that Common Sense was the name of a contemporary journal. The unattributed, unattributable authorship of this poem thus becomes central to the anxiety at issue: what did ‘authorship’ even mean under these circumstances? In challenging proprietary conceptions both of political action and literary production, the poem reveals the authorial subject undergoing a profound shift.43 Combining a beleaguered stance of retreat with suggestions of rejection and refusal, the poem stages a volatile and incomplete disengagement, its author left spent, ‘splinter’d’, but not completely brain-dead. Yet this was not simply an announcement of defeat. In his subsequent career as a writer of fiction, Sterne reanimated this beleaguered condition with gusto, humour, and whimsy; he also infused his stance with a far greater sense of disaffection— beginning with exhaustion—than readers have tended to credit. Far from entirely carefree, the ‘Shandean’ attitude betrays traces throughout of this need to navigate perpetual division, at a remove from the scene of political ‘sides’. In Tristram Shandy, I will now suggest, Sterne supplied this marginal stance with renewed urgency and purpose, in the face of uncertain political horizons and brewing discontents. TA K I N G S I D E S : L AU N C H I N G T R I S T R A M S H A N DY The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy can be considered, in part, a satire on the very premise of taking sides. By returning to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Sterne recalled the epistemological confusion the philosopher had set out to remedy; he may also have registered, if only indirectly, the political division that was an important context for Locke’s late seventeenth-century treatise. Locke had argued, as a central facet of his epistemological project, for the commensurability of private ideas through the intervention of linguistic norms (an undertaking whose political dimension particularly emerged by way of his 42 Sterne to Mrs. F—, 19 November 1759. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Vols. 7–8, The Letters of Laurence Sterne, eds. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2008), 7.105. 43 As Christina Lupton has argued, the agency of print and technological mediation did not simply disenfranchise or alienate eighteenth-century writers and their readers but gave rise to myriad species of self-conscious pleasure and authorial self-deprecation. See Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). As Day notes in ‘Attribution Problems’, Sterne may have occupied the ‘purely subservient role of a copyist’, further displacing his agency as author.

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attention to ‘opinions’). Sterne rejects this solution at its root, returning us to a world in which individuals continue to talk past each other.44 The wayward opinions and confused arguments that emerge over the course of the novel also sheathe more pointed satirical attacks. Walter’s confused arguments, although not exclusive to the ‘Country’ side, locate him within the opposition Sterne had faced in his earlier political campaigning (an identification confirmed by his frequent citation of platitudes drawn from ‘Patriot’ argumentation). Despite its clear partisan bent, this satire also extended—as Edmund Burke, for one, noted in his review of the novel45—to partisan grandstanding more widely. We might equally identify its target as the incoherence that accrued to any attempt to maintain a single position over time. This critique acquired added weight, contemporary pamphlets make clear, in light of recently expanded circuits of political discussion. As Israel Mauduit lamented, in a bestselling 1760 pamphlet that was likely known to Sterne, ninetynine out of a hundred now ‘take their opinions from the papers’, and this increased circulation of opinion across spheres and between geographic locations was attributed with a corrosive effect on metropolitan political debate.46 The dogmatism of Walter’s partisan viewpoints nonetheless softened over the subsequent volumes, acquiring the guise of more minor, domesticated eccentricities. Tristram Shandy would seem ultimately to reconcile discordant elements and clashing viewpoints. This tendency towards amelioration was in turn rounded out by Uncle Toby and the increasing centrality of his foibles to the book (culminating in the attention to his ‘Amours’). We may find a parallel in the ‘tranquillity’ sought in 1770 at Drury Lane amidst an audience that could similarly not reconcile itself to Lockean premises and in the investment in literary authority advanced by David Garrick, whom Sterne repeatedly praised in Tristram Shandy for his commanding eloquence, as a means to restore harmony amidst sources of disruption and division.47 Sterne’s withdrawal from party politics to write what Curtis described as ‘one of the gayest of books’ has been seen to entail a move towards an extra-political, literary domain, in which both the domesticated activity of the novel and his own authorship reside. In the letter that accompanied the revised manuscript of his novel, Sterne noted that ‘All Locality is taken out of the Book—the Satyr general’,48 a claim seen by critics to mark the final step beyond his involvement in interpersonal disputes and localized political concerns and onto a national literary stage. With The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Sterne apparently turned his back on this earlier involvement in party activity and political satire, replacing ad hominem 44 For complementary accounts of how far the novel overcomes this condition, see John Traugott, Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’s Philosophical Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954) and John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 45 In his review for the Annual Register 3 (1760), Edmund Burke described Tristram’s father as a ‘character well imagined; and not uncommon in the world’ (in Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 106–7). 46 Considerations on the Present German War (London: 1760), 90. The Florida editors note the success of this pamphlet in their commentary to Sterne’s letter of 25 December 1760, which closely recalls Mauduit’s arguments. 47 See Chapter 1. 48 Letter to Robert Dodsley, 5 October 1759. Letters of Laurence Sterne, 7.97.

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attacks with the indulgence of peculiarity, blunting his pointed critiques with good-natured joking. Yet the inwardly turned, domestically settled focus of Tristram Shandy was not always such a foregone conclusion. Through attention to Sterne’s earliest experience as a writer, during his involvement in election campaigning for the York press, we have begun to recover a more complex picture of his ongoing entanglement within political disputes, as well as the changing contours of political discussion and activity more widely. Revisiting the origins of Tristram Shandy results in a more volatile picture of the novel’s political orientations and a less settled picture of the space Sterne carved out for his authorship. Far from his creator seeking to model containment and control—and the pursuit of a harmonizing authority like that yielded by Garrick—the ‘Shandean’ management of confusion, I will propose, steered Tristram on a far-from-assured course. Sterne obliquely tied that course to his own ill-fated political adventuring. At exactly the moment that Sterne had concluded a year of ‘abusive parleying’ at the York election, Tristram undertook a typically unexplained expedition to the land of parson Yorick’s supposed ancestry. Describing this 1741 trip to Denmark,49 Tristram recalls, he observed that nature, in that country, was ‘moderately kind’ in bestowing her favours on all its inhabitants. He contrasts this situation with ‘this unsettled island’, where ‘we are all ups and downs in this matter’.50 As all readers of the novel have noted, Tristram fails to produce his own advertised ‘Life’, but less frequently remarked upon are the ways that the book’s ‘Opinions’ are predominantly those not of Tristram but of his father. These remarks on ‘this unsettled island’ begin to open up a larger context for this omission and for the novel’s repeated failures of communication more widely. Aside from the book’s indirect reference back to Sterne’s earlier political experiences, the remarks point to the ways that he keyed Tristram’s tenuous hold on his own identity and the scrambled contents of his own mind to the disruptions of the contemporary moment, as well as the unsettled legacies summoned by Tristram’s birth date. Following the accession of George III, the partisanship of the preceding generation—as signalled in the 1741 date of these travels and present as synecdoche in the mangled political views of Walter Shandy—was subsumed within a host of further confusions, as the mounting incoherence of party labels converged with more pervasive unrest. In asking how Tristram sought to navigate the demands of the contemporary moment, in a novel that Sterne repeatedly timestamped with his own present, we can begin to develop a fuller account of how politics, as well as the desire to escape or seek relief from the trials of ‘this unsettled island’, shaped the course of his ‘Life and Opinions’. Even accounts of the novel that attend to its engagement with the wider world have preserved a clear divide between the pressures of contemporary events and the provincial, domestic realm of Sterne’s fiction. In the most fully elaborated account of the novel in relation to politics, Carol Kay takes the dedication to the elder William Pitt, viewed as a harmonizing figure, to situate the events of the novel in ‘a stable, nonpolitical realm [. . .] a leisure space for reading and writing which could never 49 The coincidence of dates is noted in Curtis, The Politicks of Laurence Sterne, 119. 50 Tristram Shandy, 1.26–7.

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be troubled by questions of power’.51 Kay valuably emphasizes the political world that the novel holds at arm’s length. This account presumes a clear divide and principle of separation between these domains, creating a distance traversable only by trope, reversible only by rhetorical sleight of hand. Yet these boundaries prove porous and precarious from the outset. From its opening invitation to Pitt to retreat with the book to the ‘country’ through to the substance of Walter’s ‘Patriot’-like disquisitions at Shandy Hall, Sterne repeatedly tied the novel back to the field of political activity; as these particular examples make clear, moreover, fuller appreciation for the evolving political terrain in the decades preceding his emergence as the author of Tristram Shandy crucially reorients how we place Sterne’s fiction in, as well as at a disaffected remove from, its political moment. By situating Sterne’s personal conclusion that he was ‘no party-man’ amidst the wider national developments with which his retreat from politics coincided, we can begin to return to view the novel’s intersection with a crucial, transitional period in national politics. The decades preceding the publication of Tristram Shandy had witnessed ‘the supersession of one party system by another’, as the existing parties fragmented into myriad new interests.52 The arguments and concerns that enter haphazardly into the political thinking of Walter Shandy directly dramatized, as I have noted, the challenges associated with managing the decline of established party identities. The political figure most closely associated with the forces that were to alter decisively the physiognomy of national politics in this complex period of transition was William Pitt himself. The ‘Great Commoner’ represented forces that had dramatically unsettled the ruling Whig elite in recent decades, serving as the rallying point for a renovated ‘Country’ opposition and the figurehead for a newly popular, middle-class politics. Rather than pointing to a brave new world of unified patriotism and imperial conquest, the broad base of ‘Patriot’ support on which Pitt had launched himself to power and the coalition on which he would base his subsequent imperial strategy were precarious entities. While the dedication to Tristram Shandy invited Pitt to retreat with his book into the country, Sterne remained acutely aware of Pitt’s connections with the same overdetermined field of divisions (the intractable political and ideological legacies with which he would also animate his portrait of Walter Shandy) that had caused him to abandon partisanship in disgust. In light of this tangled backstory, the relatively straightforward (and far from Shandean) manner in which critics have tended to approach the dedication may seem surprising. Lamb suggests that Sterne ‘sets satire aside’ to engage in an uncritical celebration of Pitt’s disinterested, ‘Patriot’ position, while in her account of the cultural work of empire Watts proposes that the dedication introduces Tristram Shandy as a window onto the imperial present.53 We need not 51 Carol Kay, Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 11. See also Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire; Lamb, ‘Sterne and Irregular Oratory’; Thomas Keymer, ‘The Literature of Whiggism and the Politics of War’, chap. 6 in Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 52 Clark, ‘The Decline of Party, 1740–1760’, The English Historical Review 93 (1978): 500. 53 See Lamb, ‘Sterne and Irregular Oratory’, 161 and Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire, 51. Forster, 117.

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press very hard on Sterne’s invitation to take his book ‘into the country’, however, to see Pitt’s position—and the plinth of national unity on which it rested—as more contingent, precarious, and internally compromised than these critics would be inclined to allow.54 As Sterne wrote to a distant friend from London following the publication of Tristram Shandy and its dedication to Pitt—in the same letter that he had described those new labels that would ‘do as well as’ Whig and Tory and wider changes of ‘looks and political reasoning’ in London coffee-houses—the new king had sought to return matters of government to ‘first principles’ and had turned politics upside down in the process. This period also witnessed a growing sense of disconnect from the previous generation of ‘Patriot’ political activity. A poem composed by Hugh Kelly, author of A Word to the Wise, following the death of politician John Barnard in 1764 carefully differentiated his support for this earlier ‘Patriot’ cause from the ‘modern herd’ who operated under that banner: those ‘mad factions of the present race, / Who wildly rage with discord’s dangerous brand’.55 As Sterne’s letter on the topsy-turvy condition of politics acutely registered, moreover, recent developments had not only created massive disruption at court but dramatically altered broader political alignments (‘we shall be soon Prussians and Anti-Prussians, Bute’s and Anti-Bute’s’, his remarks about shifting party lines elaborated)56 as the mounting popular political activity that would coalesce around Wilkes similarly began to destabilize the parties of national politics. Sterne’s quip in a later volume of Tristram Shandy—that the horse ‘Patriot is sold’57—has been seen by critics to suggest his nostalgia for the specific opposition cause of the preceding generation. Yet the remark may equally register the melancholic loss of the prospect for meaningful attachment, or self-consistency, fleetingly available during the Turner election campaign, before his commitments and the arguments posed both by the ‘Whig’ side and its ‘Patriot’ opponents collapsed upon each other. The competing approaches to foreign policy and the national interest and shifting factional allegiances that Sterne spliced together in his references to Prussian foreign policy and the Earl of Bute marked not only the beginnings of a larger crisis of partisanship that was soon to engulf the reign of the new king but the more pervasive sense of dislocation characteristic of a changed political world. Tristram Shandy made explicit parallels between this out-of-joint political world and its own fictional universe. Walter’s account of the ‘political arch’ within the 54 The fallout of the Seven Years’ War further bears out this conclusion as, in true Shandean fashion, subsequent events continued to tangle up Pitt in the past, rather than begetting the future. While Sterne could not, of course, have anticipated the ensuing collapse of Pitt’s imperial strategy when he wrote his dedication (with the bells of recent imperial victories perhaps literally ringing in his ears), he remained well aware that he was addressing a moving target. This paragraph draws on my ‘Arbitrary Government’, 601–2. 55 See Bataille, The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly, 58. 56 Sterne to Stephen Croft, 25 December 1760. Letters of Laurence Sterne, 7.177. The changes, which had posed Pitt against the Earl of Bute, the king’s controversial adviser and subsequent head of ministry—Pitt favored ongoing subsidies to Prussia, while Bute and the king sought to develop a more insular foreign policy—were only the most recent in a long series of reversals that had led to Pitt’s being widely pilloried as a flip-flopper. 57 Tristram Shandy, 1.416. Compare 1.195 and 3.211n.

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nation giving way leads directly into his claims concerning the ‘topsy-turvey’ delivery of his son, affirming that Tristram was born into the confusions not only of the Shandy household but of the wider world. In the concluding pages of the second volume, Sterne similarly has Walter enter into a disquisition on politics only to have him loop back wonderfully into an account of how these beliefs translated into the practice of midwifery. At least one contemporary reader was attuned to the ways the confused internal world of the novel related back to politics. The pamphlet of Explanatory Remarks on Sterne’s novel had ‘Mr. Profound’ point to Tristram’s father as evidence of the exemplary political reasoning available in the novel. After quoting Walter’s comments on throwing too great a ‘balance of power’ into the ‘weaker vessels of the gentry’, he asks: ‘what can he mean here [. . .] but pecuniary influence in elections, particularly in boroughs?’ and concludes by noting the wisdom of Walter’s fear that ‘the political arch was giving way’.58 The confusions internal to the world of the Shandys would ultimately dominate over these parallel concerns, as the focus of its own narrative and the preoccupations of its characters became ever more restricted in scale. As the novel’s depiction of Walter develops, the critique of his faulty reasoning narrows, from the structures of politics to eversmaller entities—including the ‘closest net-work of the cerebellum’—settling upon his micromanaging of young Tristram’s life. The continuing development of Sterne’s novel nonetheless took shape in relation to a changing political landscape. When Sterne described the changes of ‘looks and political reasoning’ in London, he tellingly invoked the same phrase he had used to describe Walter Shandy, who is deemed knowledgeable ‘in philosophy,—wise also in political reasoning’ by Tristram.59 Sterne thereby situated the recent scrambling of party identities directly in relation to the confusions of the earlier political generations with which Walter was identified. At the same time, he registered a more fundamental change, having to do with the increased scope and intensity of political discourse and conversation. Sterne accordingly launched his novel, in various respects, at a moment of political impasse, which looked back to his own involvement within an overdetermined field of political opposition but also to the contemporary situation, in which the disintegration of existing partisan identities converged with emerging sources of discontent. Turning now more directly to the development of the novel, we can ask what political itineraries ‘Shandeism’ made available—and how these competed with an ever-more-central aspect of Tristram Shandy: the emphasis on sentiment that the continuation of the novel increasingly brought to the fore. ‘ H E A RT Y L AU G H I N G S U B J E C T S ’ ? CONSIDERING SHANDEISM By the time Sterne wrote of the recent changes in London coffee-houses, he was already on a roll with Tristram Shandy. He completed the second instalment, which 58 Explanatory Remarks, 44, 46. This paragraph draws on my ‘Arbitrary Government’, 603. 59 Tristram Shandy, 1.57.

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comprised the third and fourth volumes, shortly thereafter. The continuation of the novel was dependent, ironically, upon its fictionalized author failing to keep pace with his original plans; as the novel went on, the disorganized narration of the earlier volumes became, within the novel’s recursive structure, an explicit organizing principle (as the formalist criticism of Viktor Shklovsky particularly emphasized). Duplicating and thereby underscoring narrative tricks from the earlier volumes, Tristram only gets around to writing his ‘Author’s Preface’ in the novel’s third volume, as Walter and Toby sleep peacefully in the Shandy family living room. Acknowledging his mounting loss of control over his writing, Tristram notes in volume 4: ‘I shall never overtake myself—whipp’d and driven to the last pinch, at the worst I shall have one day the start of my pen’.60 Celebrated aspects of the novelty and appeal of Tristram Shandy, these narrative innovations were further accentuated by the reception of Sterne’s novel: responses by the public shaped the work that public continued to read. These feedback loops help in particular to explain the increasing emphasis on ‘sentiment’ with which the world view of Tristram and the Shandy circle was closely identified by readers. In the concluding pages of the fourth volume, Tristram notes that, if he were to ‘chuse my kingdom’, it should be ‘a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects’: as the bilious and more saturnine passions, by creating disorders in the blood and humours, have as bad an influence, I see, upon the body politick as body natural— and as nothing but a habit of virtue can fully govern those passions, and subject them to reason—I should add to my prayer—that God would give my subjects grace to be as wise as they were merry; and then should I be the happiest monarch, and they the happiest people under heaven—61

With the related account, in the same chapter, of what Tristram terms ‘True Shandeism’,62 the movement into the realm of good-natured mirth projected in the dedication to Pitt would seem to be complete. The ‘Shandean’ spirit beloved of readers here achieved its first full expression, partly in recognition of their established appreciation for these aspects of Sterne’s fiction. Yet this was by no means a foregone conclusion. Indeed, this focus on the salving effects of sympathy and rebalancing effects of good humour may not have been central to Sterne’s original plans for the novel whatsoever. What had initially been projected as a quasiScriblerian satire with a guise of ‘local colouring’ was transformed, R. F. Brissenden proposes, in the fullest treatment of this question, as the novel and its characters took on a life of their own and Sterne continued to build from the ‘note of sentiment’ first sounded quite late in the first volume, as well as other ‘accidentally’ revealed character traits and patterns.63 Among the aspects of the novel that became increasingly 60 Tristram Shandy, 1.342. 61 Tristram Shandy, 1.402. 62 Tristram Shandy, 1.401. 63 R. F. Brissenden, ‘ “Trusting to Almighty God”: Another Look at the Composition of Tristram Shandy’, in The Winged Skull, 262. In the early volumes of the novel, Brissenden notes, the Shandy household was by no means the novel’s primary focus. There were also a number of inconsistencies in style and characterization in the earliest volumes, he observes, which devote disproportionate attention to the trials of Yorick in the local community and depict Walter and Uncle Toby in uncharacteristic ways: these latter characters are depicted with traits of sentimentality and uprightness

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central, including the self-reflexive structure and emphasis on insular sentimentality, was the growing emphasis on Uncle (whose ‘Amours’, alluded to in volume 4 as ‘the choicest morsel of my whole story’,64 become an important recurring thread of the remaining volumes). Yet hindsight has distorting clarity. These features of the novel only come to the foreground from knowing how the novel ended up. Attending equally to those elements that receded from view shows the alternative possibilities that competed with these emerging points of focus and deepening insularity. In his deferred ‘Author’s Preface’, which does not appear until partway through the third of the novel’s nine volumes, a discussion of ‘wit and judgment’ opens out into a fuller consideration of what ‘small modicums of ’em are only sent forth into this wide world, circulating here and there in one corner or another,—and in such narrow streams, and at such prodigious intervals from each other, that one would wonder how it holds out, or could be sufficient for the wants and emergencies of so many great states, and populous empires’.65 Tristram proceeds with a kind of comparative travelogue: in ‘Nova Zembla, North Lapland, and in all those cold and dreary tracts of the globe’, these qualities are reserved privately. ‘What a dismal thing would it have been to have governed a kingdom,’ the author continues, ‘to have fought a battle, or made a treaty, or run a match, or wrote a book, or got a child, or held a provincial chapter there, with so plentiful a lack of wit and judgment about us!’66 Returning to ‘this warmer and more luxuriant island’, Tristram speaks of the liberties but also the confusions endemic in Britain. We might even, he proposes, see ‘a statesman turning the political wheel, like a brute, the wrong way round—against the stream of corruption,—by heaven!—instead of with it’.67 Despite the novel’s increasingly inward-turning focus, Sterne continued to explore the interface between his fiction and the political world.68 Moreover, these continuing digs concerning the domestic arena—the ‘statesman turning the political wheel [. . .] against the stream of corruption’—together with further added references to the government turning on its hinges fleetingly foreground a political topicality that contended with the novel’s increasingly apparent itinerary. Indeed, this ‘Author’s Preface’ may even have witnessed Sterne contemplating a reboot of his earlier satirical and more explicitly ‘political’ plans for the novel. The itineraries sketched in the ‘Author’s Preface’ have various analogues in the existent novel, not least Tristram’s own earlier excursion to Denmark. The ‘Preface’ itself appears partway through the third volume, in which Tristram imagines a ‘long tour’ through Norway and Sweden, and on to the Russian Empire, before returning home again. The concluding volumes of the novel undertake their own respectively, each of which becomes more closely identified, as the novel goes on, with the other Shandy brother, while the space devoted to parson Yorick is disproportionate and may bear traces of the novel’s origins as a satire with its origins in a particular local context. 64 Tristram Shandy, 1.400–1. 65 Tristram Shandy, 1.230. 66 Tristram Shandy, 1.230. 67 Tristram Shandy, 1.230, 233. 68 Indeed, before its publication in 1761, Sterne took the trouble to add to the recently completed third volume a reference to the recent accession of George III, having Tristram proclaim, shortly after his remarks on never overtaking himself: ‘Heaven prosper the manufactures of paper under this propitious reign, which is now open’d to us,—as I trust its providence will prosper every thing else in it that is taken in hand’ (Tristram Shandy, 1.342).

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expedition to Europe, where Tristram’s sentimental encounters with French maids and other forlorn creatures look directly ahead to Yorick’s traversal of the same scenes in A Sentimental Journey. Yet these excursions, building upon the hint suggested by the 1741 date of Tristram’s excursion to Denmark, could equally have taken a more explicitly political direction. This may seem a stretch given the distance travelled, in both senses, since the original volumes. Yet among the earliest plans for the novel, John Croft, a member of Sterne’s extended circle later claimed, was one to travel Hero Tristram Shandy all over Europe and after his making his remarks on the different courts, proceed with making strictures and recollections on the different Governments of Europe and finish the work with a eulogium on the superior constitution of England and at length to return Tristram well-informed and a compleat English gentleman.69

In this account, Sterne’s novel would combine the itinerancy of A Sentimental Journey with the comparative perspective of Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller (a combination redolent of the itinerant hero of Byron’s Don Juan, originally intended to conclude, following its hapless protagonist’s travels between nations and regimes, with the hero facing the guillotine in France). Although Croft was ‘not always reliable’, the editors of the Florida edition note the echoes of this testimony in Tristram’s early promise to provide ‘a most delectable narrative’ of his Danish travels in the ‘progress of this work’.70 Aside from further points of intersection with the novel that Sterne did indeed write, such as Walter’s observations concerning the English constitution and comparisons with France, these earlier plans reveal a recurrent thread in the early stages of Tristram’s ‘Life and Opinions’ that might have resulted in a different novel altogether: one more explicitly animated throughout by political concerns at home and abroad. Tristram Shandy ultimately pursued another course. Following its excursions to France, the book concludes by turning to the ‘Amours’ of Uncle Toby: a concluding focus, as we have noted, projected much earlier on. Yet this picks up just one thread (albeit one foregrounded earlier, as already noted, as the ‘choicest morsel’ of the developing book) from among several available options. This narrowing of narrative focus was coupled with the emphatic disentanglement of the novel from politics. That much becomes clear at the outset of the novel’s ninth and final volume, which Sterne—in parallel with the first London instalment of Tristram Shandy—prefaced with a further dedication to Pitt. The dedication to the statesman, who had, by the time of publication in 1767, been elevated to Earl of Chatham, begins as follows: Having, a priori, intended to dedicate The Amours of my uncle Toby to Mr. ***—I see more reasons, a posteriori, for doing it to Lord *******. I should lament from my soul, if this exposed me to the jealousy of their Reverences; because, a posteriori, in Court-latin, signifies the kissing hands for preferment—or any thing else—in order to get it.71 69 Tristram Shandy, 3.68n.; 244n. 70 Tristram Shandy, 1.26. The Florida editors also relate this Danish excursion to the plans to send Tristram on a ‘long tour’ in the ‘Author’s Preface’. 71 Tristram Shandy, 2.733.

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Jonathan Lamb, in his eloquent discussion of the novel’s investment in that which vindicates what has already been produced, discerns a sharp contrast here with the earlier dedication. Where Sterne had first addressed Pitt, the ‘happy’ statesman, through the lens of the ‘naive valorization of the singular private life that Sterne once thought could be brought into the world without any danger of corruption or confusion’, he has now, Lamb proposes, learned to be sceptical about such appeals to virtuous isolation, whether on the part of the ‘Patriot’ politician or himself as a famous author.72 Lamb in turn relates Sterne’s putative estrangement from and scepticism towards the idealized ‘Patriot’ platform (one strand of the cynicism initiated more widely, I have suggested, by Pulteney’s defection) to his depiction of Pitt. This becomes particularly apparent, Lamb maintains, in the second dedication, where Pitt (now Chatham) appears as a politician who ‘married the language of principle to adroit interventions into practical politics’ and thus reconciled a priori arguments with reasoning from a posteriori realities.73 We may take cues from Lamb’s valuable reading to understand Pitt’s passage from the momentary hero of imperial, ‘Patriot’ politics into a fixture of the political establishment as marking a decline of political optimism, mirrored by Sterne’s recognition of his growing powers over an audience he can manipulate to his will. By the time of the second dedication, however, the novel, I would suggest, locates politics at an even greater remove: as a relatively autonomous realm, operating according to its own slippery principles. Where the opening volume suggested a more fluid understanding of politics and national political life, throwing out a reference to the 1688 Revolution in its hero’s birthdate, in a gesture at once irreverent and provokingly indeterminate, by this point the political realm is held at a bemused if not more coolly cynical distance. Politics is something apart, over there, its own thing—even as the author continues to express effusive affection for Pitt himself. As such, while granting the value of Lamb’s characterizations, we might accordingly read the dedications against the grain of the distinctions he proposes: as marking not Sterne’s deepening complicity with the operations of politics but the hardening of his political estrangement. The emphasis here on Pitt’s emplacement within a political world of behind-kissing and preferment (paralleled, as Lamb notes, by Sterne’s less-than-virtuous ascent to literary fame) indicates a pronounced divide between the political and literary realms, I would suggest, even as Pitt’s wandering through chambers of back-slapping old timers provides a parallel of sorts for Sterne’s wandering down paths of sentimental reverie.74 By contrast, the earlier dedication, as I argued previously, situated the novel less at a stable remove than at a dynamic point of intersection with contemporary politics (with the tangled backstory that bound both Sterne and Pitt’s earliest political experiences—and that already revealed the available political positions as compromised—similarly resisting such a straightforward division between the literary and political realms). 72 Lamb, ‘Sterne and Irregular Oratory’, 225. 73 Lamb, ‘Sterne and Irregular Oratory’, 228. 74 The changed political reality further cements Sterne’s distance from politics: Pitt was by this point a controversial and divisive figure, particularly on America.

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We may thus both overturn and qualify claims that the novel mirrored a condition of political stability and the related suggestion—implicit in Hume’s remarks on Tristram Shandy as the ‘best’ book in decades—that the novel retreats into an eccentric or solipsistic remove. Those characterizations may well serve as ways to describe where the novel ended up. Yet an expanded approach to the ways politics shaped and continued to inform the novel and close attention to its hybridized fictional mode disclose alternative trajectories for Sterne’s fictional project. Tristram succumbs, of course, to numerous distractions and digressions, becoming overwhelmed even in the basic task of giving an account of his life beyond the protracted circumstances of his own birth (let alone the ‘different Governments of Europe’). Yet while he may not commit to political commentary, let alone critique, this need not suggest he might not have done so as the novel continued. The agitated remove from politics apparent in Sterne’s earlier and private writings not only surfaces and occasionally troubles the surface of the text. Those energies, I would argue, also inform the novel at a more fundamental level, as returning to the poem and pamphlet with which this chapter began will make clear. That Tristram continued to be animated by the political challenges of ‘this unsettled island’ was more than apparent to the author of this work, who not only discerned a continuing political bent to Sterne’s writing but imagined Tristram entering the realm of political activity in his own right. ‘ U TO P I A ! W H E R E T H E D E V I L’ S T H AT ?’ Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, and Septennial Parliaments, I noted at the outset of this chapter, both evidenced and exploited the proximity of Sterne’s fiction to political discussion, including extra-parliamentary activity. The connections between Sterne’s fiction and politics were underscored in a separate advertisement for this work, also published in Ireland. ‘He that can make a whole Nation merry is a happy Man’, this handbill stated. ‘I am a very happy Man’, this duplicated Tristram added and proceeded to describe in this 1762 pamphlet: Let Critics snarl, and Villains frown, I care not.—Vice and Folly are lawful Game. I’ll pursue it; and hang up in Terrorem, the savage Monsters, and Beasts of Prey I hunt down. My Work should be read by every one; especially by the Patricians and Plebeians of IRELAND . . . If my Characters make galled Horses wince; . . . if, throwing out Caps with Bells, Utopian Senators take them up, put them on their jolly Nobs, and declare they fit them excellently well . . . pray, gentle Public, who is in Fault? The good Painter, or the wicked Applier?

Adding that he finds the reader ‘merry and wise’ from reading his words, the author concludes that they should run away instantly to his publisher and ask for the most recent edition of this ‘true Shandean Work’.75 No less than the original pamphlet, this handbill occupied a complex interstitial space, with respect both to the readership 75 Advertisement for Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, and Septennial Parliaments [Dublin: 1762].

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this work claimed to have carried over from Sterne’s novel and to the English polity more widely. The author betrayed intimate familiarity, moreover, with the concerns of Sterne’s novel and its recent development; indeed, the phrasing here directly recalled the account of Tristram’s ‘hearty laughing subjects’ that had recently concluded the novel’s fourth volume, as well as the opening dedication, in which Sterne had spoken of being ‘happy’ to prevent ‘one moment’s pain’ and as ‘happy’ as a minister of state. The third and fourth volumes are similarly echoed directly in the author’s claim to find his reader ‘merry and wise’ (which recalls Tristram’s desire to have subjects ‘as wise as they were merry’). Despite the repeated appeals in this ‘very comical LETTER’ to the ‘happy’ nation and readers addressed by Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, and Septennial Parliaments, the account of the pamphlet as ‘true Shandean Work; worthy the Public, worthy of me’ nonetheless demands more detailed explanation. What could a work ultimately concerned with debates over the frequency of elections have to do with the apparently whimsical and carefree attitude pursued by Tristram, surely the locus for any ‘true’ Shandean work? Debates over the conduct of elections and frequency of parliaments repeatedly confronted the political establishment during the long eighteenth century, leading to ongoing constitutional contestation. These discussions became a flashpoint for radical ‘Whig’ appeals for the general populace to have a greater role in determining their leaders, as well as ‘Tory’ ripostes like that made by Samuel Johnson in The Patriot (1770) which was ‘devoted to vilifying the false patriots’ who, in the summary of F.  P.  Lock, sought popularity by promising ‘wild constitutional reforms’ such as shorter parliaments or an extended franchise (and, more shockingly, obedience to ‘the dictates of their constituents’).76 The duration of parliaments in England had been secured by the Septennial Act of 1716, which extended the duration of an elected parliament from three to seven years (and in doing so ‘extended the supremacy of the Whigs into the next decade’).77 Among those determined not to rock the boat on this issue was Edmund Burke. ‘A triennial was near ruining; a Septennial Parliament saved your constitution’, Burke asserted in response to calls for reducing the length of parliament; this speech also assured its auditors that they had perhaps never known ‘a more flourishing period for the union of National Prosperity dignity and Liberty than the 60 of the years you have passed under that constitution of parliament’.78 The Septennial Act was originally defended, Mark Knights notes, ‘in terms that drew on anxieties about a decayed public discourse and public judgment that had been mounting over the previous forty years’.79 Among the objections to shorter parliaments were claims that more frequent elections could only make members more openly corrupt. William Hogarth depicted unsavoury 76 F. P. Lock, ‘ “To Preserve Order and Support Monarchy”: Johnson’s Political Writings’, in Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2014), 185. 77 Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History, 1688–1832 (London: Arnold, 1997), 68. 78 Quoted in David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 373. 79 Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain, 7.

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scenes of smooth-talking elite landowners soliciting votes and unscrupulous candidates plying the rowdy wider populace with free drink. As Burke noted, invoking similar scenes, ‘if every three years the exhausting Sluices of entertainments, drinkings, open houses, to say nothing of Bribery are to be periodically drawn up and renewed [. . .] private fortunes will be washed away and every [. . .] Trace of independence borne down by the torrent’.80 Sterne invoked similar talking points on the part of the Walpole government, when he had attacked the raucous demands of the ‘Patriot’ side. In Ireland, ongoing subordination to English rule introduced added tensions to the grossly inequitable electoral system. With the passage of the 1768 Octennial Act, the lifespan of the Irish parliament became eight years. Before this development, general elections in Ireland took place only on the accession of a new monarch (meaning the parliament summoned at the start of the reign of George II was still in existence upon the arrival of his successor, several decades later).81 With the general election following the accession of George III in 1760, these barely contained discontents surfaced and Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, and Septennial Parliaments emerged amidst these heated discussions. The pamphlet looked back to the recent general election when certain candidates had pledged their support for a septennial bill while others had denounced ‘the modern practice of entertainments at and before’ elections.82 As a recent pamphlet, The Case of Ireland (1762), had emphasized: ‘Factions, venality and tyrannical exercise of aristocratical power’ resulted from having a semi-permanent elite that remained effectively sealed off to the demands of their constituents. While sceptical concerning growing demands, on the part of the people, for shorter parliaments, the pamphlet condemned the ‘imperious’ response to these assertions from members of the church (remarking with a Sternean flourish of one prelate: ‘When such a man climbs to the pinnacle, shuts his bible and opens his Machiavel; let Grandees prepare to hold his Stirrup’).83 In the preface to his own account of electoral practice, ‘Tristram’ criticized the earlier pamphlet’s ‘abuse of a worthy prelate’ and ‘unfathomable’ style; his own aim was to set the record straight. As he went on to explain: ‘I publish the following Work, written by myself, that the Advocates for Septennial Parliaments may see what they are so fond of.’84 ‘Now it came to pass, that in the Reign of George the Third ’, Tristram Shandy’s Description begins, ‘there was to be a General Election of Men to sit in Parliament’. The pamphlet proceeds with a catechism-like addition: ‘For at the Death of one King,

80 Quoted in Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, 373. 81 Ian McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 2009), 304; R.  B.  McDowell, ‘Colonial Nationalism and the Winning of Parliamentary Independence, 1760–82’, chap. 8 in A New History of Ireland, vol. 4 of Eighteenth-Century Ireland, eds. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 197. 82 McDowell, ‘Colonial Nationalism and the Winning of Parliamentary Independence, 1760–82’, 197. 83 The Case of Ireland in 1762. Submitted to the Consideration of the People of that Kingdom ([Dublin]: 1762), 2, 5. 84 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, and Septennial Parliaments, [3].

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and the Ascension of another, the Custom was of old Time to do so.’85 Disdain quickly creeps into this account of the ‘exceeding great Feasts, and sumptuous Entertainments’—in which there were ‘nothing to be seen and heard but Joy and Gladness, and Music, and Dancing’. The pamphlet describes one poor man approaching one of the candidates, only to be rebuffed: ‘Hast thou a Vote, or Interest? And he answered and said, I have not a Vote or Interest. Then said the Candidate, I will then give thee no Money.’86 Further suspicion emerges with accounts of the candidates as ‘so lowly-minded, that they would shake Hands with a Cobler, embrace a Blacksmith, hung in their Arms a Tinker’ or ‘cleave to the Breast of a greasy Butcher’.87 ‘Surely, these Men are exceeding good, and know that we are all Brethren alike’, the author asserted, but ‘quickly changed my Opinion, for I found it was false’, noting that ‘many of those Men that were chosen, were Caitiffs, and of the Number of the Wicked; that instead of acting like good and wise Men, promoting the Interest of their Country, and the Good of their Electors, they did betray the one, and disregard the other’.88 An ‘exceeding corpulent’ alderman asserts that judges and other wise men might (‘by the Force of their Rhetoric’) make it appear ‘that frequent Elections in Utopia are necessary; that they are a Proof of the People’s Liberty; and that they tend to destroy Bribery and Corruption’.89 Yet septennial elections, we learn, have not yet prevailed, the hope entertained by ‘all true Lovers of their Country, that can discern her true Interest’ remaining that they never will.90 Tristram Shandy’s Description cast a jaundiced, critical eye on the electoral process. Describing the election as a ‘Custom’ of ‘old Time’, its author slyly alluded to the operative political system as an archaic rite. Claims in support of septennial elections, moreover, ‘dazzle the People’s Eyes, that they shall think black is white, and that Septennial Parliaments are for the Good of the Nation’.91 For all of its embrace of a carnivalesque atmosphere and glimpses of lucid and praiseworthy ‘good’ men, this political scene was ultimately defined by unruliness and chaos. Yet the core point remains equivocal; we remain unclear where, between criticism of 85 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, [5]. 86 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, 6–7. 87 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, 6. 88 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, 6, 10. The sympathy with more frequent elections here becomes explicit if only on the basis of sating widespread hunger: ‘after the Senate was filled, and the delicious Wine and Viands that had been bestowed on the People, were forgotten, and the Money they had received from the Candidates, was spent in Riot and Profusion, they murmured among themselves, and said; O that it was every Year as it hath been this; that we might eat, and drink, and be filled, at the Candidates cost! [. . .] if once a Year were too often for this voluptuous Living, would it might be once in Seven Years!’ (13–14). 89 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, 14–15. 90 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, 16–17. The belief (‘promoted by ‘Sophistry, and Delusion, and Error, and fine Speeches’) ‘was the Opinion of the Foolish only and the Interested; but the Wise and the Good hoped, there never would be Septennial Elections; as they knew they tended to the Propagation of Licentiousness, Luxury, and Perjury; to the Increase of Venality, Bribery, Corruption, and Party Divisions; to the Destruction of civil and religious Liberty; to the total Ruin of Manufactures and Commerce; to the weakening all moral Obligations; and to the Overthrow of Order and Government’ (16). 91 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, 15.

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infrequent elections and scepticism over their increasing frequency, our sympathies are supposed to fall. The precise object of criticism remains obscure, circling between the venal public, manipulative, self-interested candidates, and the system in which both are trapped. In the description of interactions with the lowly cobblers, for example, we remain in doubt whether scorn falls on the candidates, the clamouring mobs, or both. These ‘Inconsistencies and Contradictions’ become more pronounced as the pamphlet gradually draws out the significance of its divided setting. Following a subsequent discussion, in which we learn that the only reason the candidates stand, given the money they stand to lose, relates to their acquisition of places and preferment, the author falls into ‘a profound Sleep’. During the Bunyan-like vision that results (‘being still in a deep Sleep [. . .] I dreamed a Dream’), he wakes up in ‘a Club of venerable Men, cloathed in exceeding good Rayment’ who smoke their pipes, fill their glasses, and drink ‘Bumpers to the glorious Revolution in 1688’. Soon thereafter, ‘much Drinking made them throw off their Reserve, and they were no longer Mutes, but Orators. And they sung bawdy Catches, and told merry Tales, and hiccupp’d, while their Eyes sparkled with Joy, and every Member was in Motion, as seemed to say, Now are we truly happy.’92 From here, the men become orators, boasting about the cost of their elections. Amidst their shouts of ‘Freedom and Liberty [. . .] Patriotism and the Country Interest’ the author awakes.93 But we remain none the wiser as to where he has been or where he now finds himself. Aside from its own multifaceted satirical stance, we do not know how to place these dream scenes, which themselves took place in a version of ‘Utopia’, in relation to the more explicit parodies of actual election activity. The relationship of these scenes to contemporary politics—and their bearing in particular on keenly felt realities in Ireland—remains profoundly uncertain. The ‘Advertisement’ for the pamphlet presented some clues concerning where Tristram finally ends up, or at least the site from which he addresses us. Aside from his remarks on being himself a ‘very happy Man’, in noting that his work ‘should be read by every one’ in Ireland, ‘Tristram’ underscored the contrast between their own conduct in electioneering and the ‘Intrigues of the Members of [. . .] Utopia’. Acknowledging the hermeneutic complications introduced by this chopping-and-changing (‘Utopia! Where the Devil’s that? . . . Never mind, my good Reader’), Tristram goes on, as we have seen, to ask ‘if, throwing out Caps with Bells, Utopian Senators take them up, put them on their jolly Nobs, and declare they fit them excellently well . . . pray, gentle Public, who is in Fault? The good Painter, or the wicked Applier?’ The complications become yet more pronounced when we reflect on just who these readers are—and where they reside. While at first ‘every one’ in Ireland had been compared with the ‘Members of [. . .] Utopia’, here the ‘Utopian Senators’ become those readers who seek to apply the already allegorical, utopian scenario to their own real-life circumstances. The delights of Tristram Shandy may seem to be a world away. We might be tempted to view this pamphlet as having little in common with Sterne’s novel 92 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, 20–1. 93 Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, 23.

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beyond its whimsical self-consciousness (not to mention its forced jokes about working political ‘Members’).94 The belabouring of these features was common to Sterne’s myriad imitators. In light of the pamphlet’s rambunctious argumentation, moreover, we might be inclined to ask whether its author and that of the verses celebrating him have rather missed the point of Sterne’s novel. In the third and fourth volumes of Tristram Shandy, with which the author of this pamphlet was evidently familiar, Tristram emphasized the importance of maintaining an even temper. Sterne’s authorial avatar seemed to welcome as large a group as possible into the fold of his imaginary ‘kingdom’, moreover, with little of the confusion encountered here. As with the opening dedication, the author hoped only to make the reader, for whom Pitt taking the book into the ‘country’ was proxy, ‘happy’. Tristram’s later remarks on his ‘kingdom of hearty laughing subjects’ would appear to elaborate more fully upon this original aim. The advertisement to the pamphlet went on, by contrast, from its claim to be written by a ‘very happy’ man with a claim to making the ‘whole Nation merry’ into bombastic assertions about the dogged pursuit of ‘Vice and Folly’. The talk of hunting down, as well as hanging up, ‘Villains’ and ‘savage Monsters’ carried a sharp edge that seems quite alien to the even-tempered and inwardly harmonized world of the Shandys. As an appropriation of the ‘Shandean’ mode, this may well seem jarring, its tone off. Although Sterne also plays with the possibility of misinterpretation, his prurient jokes (those ‘noses’ that are not exactly noses) would appear to have little to do with the ‘wicked Applier’ imagined by this letter.95 Yet we need not be so hasty in concluding that this work departs entirely from Sterne’s example. Imagining a combative relationship both with the political elements depicted therein and with members of its imagined readership, the pamphlet’s complex allegory also leaves relations between utopian idealism, satirical representation, and real-world politics multiply unhinged. We might say much the same about the indeterminate space and tone of Sterne’s original novel (with the crucial exception, which we may bracket out for the time being, of its developing concern with sentiment). Despite its appeals to ‘Utopia’, the pamphlet might be said to describe what Michel Foucault terms a ‘heterotopia’. Rather than the fantastical no-place of Utopia, which was necessarily distinct from a given reality (what the previous pamphlet had flatly described as the ‘Case of Ireland’), heterotopias refract diverse realities from within a space or ‘emplacement’ understood to have a verifiable existence, in which these parallel sites are ‘represented, contested, and reversed’.96 94 The lines quoted at the beginning of this chapter—and reproduced in the second edition of the pamphlet—pick up on the bawdy humour: Your Account of Elections I’ve read with great Glee, And think it quite just, but is rather too free. So all the Men say; but the Women thus speak; ‘He can’t be too free if the Members are weak.’ (24) 95 Compare Brewer’s account of ‘application’ as the process of mobilizing the topical referentiality of a given text, in The Afterlife of Character, 25–8. 96 ‘There are [. . .] real places, actual places, places that are designed into the very institution of society, which are sorts of actually realized utopias in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and

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Foucault’s account of heterotopias provides similarly valuable purchase on the fictional space of Sterne’s novel. While not allegorical, the world of the Shandys, from Tristram’s birth date onward, pointedly incorporates scrambled elements of contemporary political reality. As Tristram’s account of his ‘kingdom of hearty laughing subjects’ makes clear, moreover, the novel projects alternative worlds onto the interior of its fictional space, from which the ‘world’ of the Shandys becomes inseparable (much as its opening dedication situated the Shandys’ world, identified with ‘the country’, in relation to the political world inhabited by William Pitt). Tristram Shandy’s Description builds upon these aspects of the novel; at the same time, the pamphlet showed how the portal, or mirror, provided by the text might be turned back outwards onto external political realities. Here, that meant Ireland, adding a further layer of complication but also exemplifying the ways that different political and fictional worlds refract one another. Although specific local tensions and the histories of colonialism made politics in Ireland especially fraught, these controversies surrounding political representation and electoral practice were also shared in some degree with the wider English polity in which Ireland was both constituent element and awkward appendage. ‘Ireland’ represented a political scene on which competing accounts of refractory populations and the limits of governance could be projected, as well as the site at which the realities of the ‘English’ constitution and its limits were most nakedly on display: at once a cracked mirror for the English polity and its conjoined twin.97 We may boil down these complicated questions, about the convergence between real and fictional spaces, the clash between imagined worlds and political realities, into a more narrowly focused issue: Tristram’s distinctive mode of authorial address. The description of Tristram, in the poetic lines that respond to the pamphlet, as a merry ‘Wag’ whose writings have banished care and dispersed ‘Gloom’ was broadly in step with the novel. By contrast, although the author of these lines ‘can now laugh, and sing’, the claim that he can also ‘pursue your good Rules / To contemn wealthy Villains’ might appear at odds with a novel which certainly seems to ‘pity poor fools’ but hardly embraces condemnation—let alone stringing up villains and monsters in the manner proposed by the pamphlet. Yet fuller scrutiny of the novel reveals otherwise. Sharp edges of this kind do indeed appear within Tristram’s original narration, including an unrestrained, devil-may-care attitude on Sterne’s part. As Tristram informs us early on in the first volume, ‘so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s high-way, and neither reversed, sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable. Because they are utterly different from all the emplacements that they reflect or refer to, I shall call these places “heterotopias,” as opposed to utopias’ (178). Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1994), 178. This is Robert Hurley’s translation of the 1967 lecture ‘Des Espace Autres’. Foucault continues: ‘I think that between utopias and these utterly different emplacements, these heterotopias, there must be a kind of mixed, intermediate experience, that would be the mirror. The mirror is a utopia after all, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up virtually behind the surface; I am over there where I am not, a kind of shadow that gives me my own visibility, that enables me to look at myself there where I am absent—a mirror utopia’ (178–9). 97 I take up these questions at greater length in Chapter 4.

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compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?’98 So far, so Shandean. But we need only turn to the following chapter to encounter a rather different assertion: I am not a wise man;—and besides am a mortal of so little consequence in the world, it is not much matter what I do [. . .] Nor does it much disturb my rest when I see such great Lords and tall Personages as hereafter follow;—such, for instance, as my Lord A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, and so on, all of a row, mounted upon their several horses [. . .] scouring and scampering it away like so many little partycolour’d devils astride a mortgage[.]99

Noting that some of these Lords act as if they ‘were resolved to break their necks’, Tristram goes on with a shocking statement: ‘So much the better—say I to myself;—for in case the worst should happen, the world will make a shift to do excellently well without them’ (though as far as the rest go, Tristram continues: ‘why,—God speed them,—e’en let them ride on without any opposition from me; for were their lordships unhorsed this very night,—’tis ten to one but that many of them would be worse mounted by one half before to-morrow morning’).100 Elsewhere in the early pages of the novel Tristram gestures to the arbitrary organization of the world, which might have born him ‘to a great title or to a great estate’, ‘but that is not my case’.101 Here, he baldly states that the political establishment might be replaced overnight, if not violently overthrown, creating a darkly ambiguous opening as the existing leadership are cast out and the world ‘make[s] a shift to do excellently well without them’. ‘ H E A RT Y L AU G H I N G ( P O L I T I C A L ) S U B J E C T S ’ ? SHANDEISM RECONSIDERED By the early nineteenth century, Sterne’s reputation had acquired an altogether different cast. An early nineteenth-century print, belonging to a recent trans-media meme addressing the ‘Miseries’ of social life, depicts four men in a library (Figure 3). A despondent seated figure and an angry counterpart railing at an unspecified upset appear flanked by two more upbeat figures, who seek to cheer them up. Evidencing their apparent failure, several books are strewn underfoot. Between volumes entitled ‘Miseries of Human Life &c.’ and ‘More Miseries’ and beneath another entitled ‘Cure for the Heart Ache’ appears a book simply entitled ‘Sterne’, this authorial imprimatur a proxy for the salving powers of fellow feeling. During less troubled times, the implicit historical argument of this print asserted, this name had wielded a galvanizing power, but its force had fallen by the wayside amidst discontent, ennui, and emerging ‘social’ problems.102 As my discussion here has 98 Tristram Shandy, 1.12. 99 Tristram Shandy, 1.13. 100 Tristram Shandy, 1.13. 101 Tristram Shandy, 1.8. For the incipient class critique here, see my ‘Arbitrary Government’, 606–7. 102 The outermost books in the print alluded to The Miseries of Human Life, or The Groans of Samuel Sensitive and Timothy Testy. With a Few Supplementary Sighs from Mrs. Testy (London: William Miller, 1806) and More Miseries!! Addressed to the Morbid, the Melancholy, and the Irritable (London:

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shown, Sterne’s writings emerged amidst their own moment of discontent and proliferating political division. By contrast with the later consolidation of Sterne’s sentimental reputation, the course of ‘true feeling’ did not run smooth in his writings, which were only gradually and haltingly brought into line with these emerging norms. Re-examining Tristram’s earlier account of his ‘kingdom of hearty laughing subjects’ with these disaffected impulses in mind confirms that this volatile mode of address continued to vie with the emerging interest in the insularity of self-reference. The development of Sterne’s fiction nonetheless brought an emphasis on sentiment and the comforts of domestic retirement increasingly into the foreground. Yet while Tristram, together with Yorick, would be assimilated to this emerging trajectory, the devil-may-care attitude and unstable mode of address adopted in the earliest volumes suggest a more vexed and unstable relationship with politics, on the part of both Tristram and his creator. Rather than the kind of all-or-nothing approach advocated by ‘Mr. Profound’ in the Explanatory Remarks—who reads the novel for its bearing on specific topical events or geopolitical controversies—a more supple understanding of the impulses that animate Tristram’s narration and the marginal space in which Sterne locates his alter ego allows us to revise existing accounts of his fiction and its bearing on the evolving relationship between literary production and the political arena. The references to ‘my good Reader’ and the ‘gentle public’ in the advertisement for Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections, and Septennial Parliaments exploited the intimate relationship Sterne established with his projected audience. As David Brewer has richly demonstrated, Sterne constructed a version of ‘clubbable’ sociability for his readership, with the ‘Tale of Slawkenbergius’, for example, representing the ‘endless hunger [. . .] for elaborate nonsense’ (expressed within what David Shields terms a ‘neutral language, free from political, religious, or class inflection’).103 At the same time, Tristram’s presiding role secured his command, Brewer maintains, naturalizing a dynamic of control and coercion between author

H.  D.  Symonds, 1806) by James Beresford and ‘Sir Fretful Murmur, Knt’. Thomas Rowlandson subsequently published a series of plates entitled ‘Miseries of Human Life’ (which alternated with ‘Miseries of Social Life’ as the title of prints in the following years). For the ‘backlash’ against sensibility in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century—including criticisms of Sterne’s reckless enthusiasms and the waning of sentiment’s star more widely—see Sarah Knott, ‘Wars of Words: Radicalism, Youth, and Reaction’, chap. 6 in Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), especially 301–2. For the shifting fate of sensibility within England during the post-1789 decades see, inter alia, Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770– 1800; Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For the critique of a sentimentalism centred around Sterne, see especially Robert Markley, ‘Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue’, in The New Eighteenth Century, eds. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987) and Thomas Keymer, ‘A Sentimental Journey and the Failure of Feeling’, in The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 103 Brewer, ‘Shandyism and the Club of True Feelers’, chap. 5 in Brewer, The Afterlife of Character.

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and reader.104 Lamb similarly comments upon the ‘tactical immobilization of the reader’s resistance’ to Sterne’s ‘seized initiatives [. . .] for local practical advantages’.105 The aggressive, combative posture adopted by the pamphlet and this separate advertisement undercuts Tristram’s polite supplication to the reader, in ways that similarly disrupt and call into question his distance from politics. These earlier volumes of the novel remind us that these competing impulses and sharper edges were constitutive features of Tristram’s original narration, with important implications both for Sterne’s political entanglements and for his fictional practice. Returning to view the political dimension of the double-faced ‘grimace’ highlighted by Tompkins might allow us to reread the views attributed to ‘Mr. Cynicus’ in one early review, for example, less as an unsympathetic attack on Sterne’s whimsical nonsense (‘I blush for you, and for the age I live in [. . .] Henceforward, let no man toil in quest of truth, or in pursuit of useful knowledge!—Let him laugh at all the sciences, without knowing any one’) than as teasing out a latently cynical streak in Sterne’s own narration with which that emerging sentimental tendency vied.106 Rather than approaching Tristram Shandy’s Description of General Elections as a piece of secondary, ephemeral commentary, then, examining this work as a kind of immanent interpretive key to Sterne’s text discloses trajectories that were already in some sense internal to the novel. Instead of presuming a stable relationship between inside and outside, together with the account of the novel as self-enclosed that might follow, we may now see how Sterne straddled and thereby interfused, or at least confused, the operations of distinct social and political worlds. The interplay between the idiosyncratic procedures of Sterne’s novel and its wider fields of operation might be framed in terms of the contrast between two seminal approaches to theorizing the novel: Viktor Shklovsky’s proposition that ‘the “content” [of Tristram Shandy] becomes reflection upon the form itself ’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the ‘novel’ more widely as having less to do with the consolidation of a particular genre of fiction, or even with fictionality per se, than with ‘an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)’.107 Tristram Shandy’s Description of 104 As Brewer notes of the novel’s emerging tendency (despite Sterne’s claims to ‘halve the matter’ between reader and narrator) to render Tristram capable of assimilating both his own and the reader’s travels to a single line of ‘true feeling’: ‘self referentiality takes on a slight edge in the context of clubbable imaginative expansion, an edge which implies that halving the matter [. . .] just means that Sterne has taken on the responsibility for providing the whole entertainment, and so whatever pleasures readers have taken in these scenes should be regarded as a gift, an opportunity to sit back and relax without risking the loss of their respective titles to true feeling’. Imagining a community in which ‘readers should feel grateful’ and presuming that ‘a modest amount of subordination to his authority may be in order’, Sterne takes on a commanding role here: ‘considering his labors and seniority, surely he is at least the primus inter pares of true feelers and so should be accorded at least as much respect as the president or founder of a club would receive’ (171). 105 ‘Sterne and Irregular Oratory’, 215. 106 ‘Animadversions of Tristram Shandy’, Grand Magazine (April 1760), in Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 65. 107 See Viktor Shklovsky, ‘A Parodying Novel’, in Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Traugott (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 73 and M.  M.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas

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General Elections was one of several contemporary works that claimed Sterne’s work as an inspiration, inspiring the lines greeting Tristram as an ‘old Friend’, very much ‘alive’ and ‘as merry a Wag as [he] us’d for to be’. As the volumes progress, however, we discern a clear shift in Sterne’s conception of the novel, which worked against these earlier impulses. The sentimental trajectory, which informed the appearance of ‘Sterne’ amidst the miserable social scene depicted in the 1806 image, ultimately predominated. Yet while he brought the novel to a clear conclusion, based upon what appears to have been an existing plan,108 Tristram Shandy also underwent decisive shifts in scope and tone. Given their awareness of where the novel ended up, critics have risked imposing a retroactive unity upon Sterne’s fictional project. But by asking how Tristram’s navigation of a world of proliferating divisions comprised both a continuation of and a departure from Sterne’s earliest experiences as a political writer, we can instead come to appreciate the alternative perspectives on politics that were opened up by Sterne’s self-factioning forms—and the alternative pathways they helped make available. If ‘God would give my subjects grace to be as wise as they were merry’, Tristram noted in a passage quoted at greater length above, ‘then should I be the happiest monarch, and they the happiest people under heaven’. Yet he also remarked, earlier in that same passage, that the ‘bilious and more saturnine passions, by creating disorders in the blood and humours, have as bad an influence, I see, upon the body politick as body natural’, and noted that ‘nothing but a habit of virtue can fully govern those passions, and subject them to reason’.109 The glance towards present-day realities here (‘I see’) together with the novel’s contemporary references—like that to the flourishing of paper manufacturers under the new reign of George III—bring this account down from the clouds or a fantastical no-place into something closer to the interstitial realm inhabited by the Irish pamphlet. Sterne here sounded not entirely dissimilar to Hume, in his remarks on the ‘Stupidity and Barbarism’ that had eroded the possibilities for authorship; he looked ahead to the early nineteenth century and the profound frustration Williams voiced in Egeria, as we saw in Chapter 1, that the failure to assimilate conflicting passions to sensibility had led instead to widespread ‘irritation’. Although Sterne’s was a somewhat more softly worded account, his conclusion may appear rather similar to these appeals to communities organized around harmonious feeling. Yet he ultimately departed from Press, 1981), 7. These respective accounts of self-organizing ‘form’ and discursively polyglot text may ultimately prove reconcilable, my account of Tristram Shandy here suggests, with each other. For the formalist suppression of Sterne’s sentimentalism—and Shklovsky’s sublimation of sentimental response into formalist technique—see Anastasia Eccles, ‘Formalism and Sentimentalism: Viktor Shklovsky and Laurence Sterne’, New Literary History 47 (2016). My account moves backwards from Sterne’s assimilation to the sentimentalism he helped inspire so as to recover the interplay between his unstable fictional point of view and an evolving field of political position-taking, while affirming his emergent singularity. Wayne Booth proposed that the ‘secret’ of Tristram Shandy’s coherence resided with Tristram himself: as a result of his distinctive manner of telling his story—and way of seeing the world—‘our relationship is more like identity than friendship’. See The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 221–40. 108 For the best-known and still compelling articulation of this view, see Booth, ‘Did Sterne Complete “Tristram Shandy”?’ Modern Philology 48 (1951). 109 Tristram Shandy, 1.402.

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these latter-day sentimentalists, this chapter has maintained, working against the grain of these appeals either to a stable, disinterested, ‘impartial’ perspective or the harmonized sentiments of a manageable body politic. His fiction, at least Tristram Shandy, kept in view the competing political frameworks, the marginal, disaffected, often sharp-edged perspectives, and the broader rough-and-tumble of politics. In contrast with the other novelists considered in this book, whose works were more tightly enmeshed within the emergent national fabric of regulatory norms and harmonious feeling, Sterne presented in his fiction an enduring model for navigating a world of proliferating divisions. The second instalment of the novel, comprising volumes 3 and 4, represented a critical hinge-point in this regard. Residual traces of an earlier political agenda coexisted with the emerging sentimental trajectory of the novel at this stage in the text’s composition. As something closer to the novel we know developed, Sterne did not pursue these or other pathways, as ‘the Shandys and the Shandy world began to live’.110 Yet in these early volumes, there remained real and pronounced possibilities that the novel would take an explicitly political, or at least less obviously inward-directed, turn. The Shandean world that readers have come to know and love, whose contours Sterne sketched in advance and rendered with continual brilliance, also promised to wind up as something else entirely. And the promise at the heart of Sterne’s fiction—to go back to the drawing board at every turn, to reimagine the basis of collective life from the ground up—equally inflected his engagement with politics. As much as Sterne allows us, with an eye to the future, to see how fiction came to model scenes of contented, domesticated retreat for the wider political nation, his fiction equally brings literary authorship into focus as a vehicle for navigating ever-proliferating divisions. As Sterne had remarked in his 1760 letter on the changes in London coffee-houses, following a discussion of responses to his bawdy jokes about noses (directly before swerving into the discussion of recent political upheaval): ‘’Tis enough if I divide the world;—at least I will rest contented with it.’111 Elsewhere in Tristram Shandy, Sterne imagined the overcoming of division between persons altogether, imagining an island in which a kind of idealized super-Habermasian communication took place through the shared vibrations of the nose. Yet as this chapter has shown, he also remained animated by political division, even as he continued to pursue more direct forms of communion.

110 Brissenden, ‘Trusting to Almighty God’. 111 Sterne to Stephen Croft, 25 December 1760. Letters of Laurence Sterne, 7.177.

3 Literary Leviathans Johnson, Boswell, and the 1790s At a crucial moment in John Trumbull’s poem McFingal (1775), a rollicking satire of colonial town square politics first published in Philadelphia, the eponymous hero implores his fellow Americans to consider two ‘English writers’. A loyalist to the British government, McFingal derides the emergent ‘Patriot’ cause as a sham. But he does not object to American disaffection with the British government per se. His problem is not that his patriotic countrymen have grown rebellious and violent but that they are not assertive or antagonistic enough. Rejecting love of country in favour of self-centred feeling, McFingal marks his distance from these emergent appeals to collective freedom and harmonious sentiment: Your boasted patriotism is scarce, And country’s love is but a farce; And after all the proofs you bring, We Tories know there’s no such thing. Our English writers of great fame Prove public virtue but a name. Hath not Dalrymple show’d in print, And Johnson too, there’s nothing in ’t? Produc’d you demonstration ample, From others of their own example, That self is still, in either faction, The only principle of action; The loadstone, whose attracting tether Keeps the politic world together? And, spite of all your double-dealing, We Tories know ’tis so, by feeling.1

Trumbull meant this speech to appear rotten with irony. Far from providing an anchoring ‘loadstone’, loyalty to Britain and its king (anchored in the ‘attracting tether’ of selfish feeling) promised not to uphold but to splinter social cohesion. The use of ‘faction’ to describe the political groupings with which self was ‘still’— both as ever and unmovingly—identified was condemnation enough. ‘Faction’ became a staple in American anti-party rhetoric, invoking the corruption and

1 John Trumbull, McFingal: A Modern Epic Poem (London: J. Almon, 1776).

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divisiveness to which competing loyalties were assumed to lead.2 The American polity instead aspired to a public sphere free from social conflict and divisive partisan sentiment, banishing erratic personalities and wayward feeling from the shared arena as a broader concern with virtue took hold.3 McFingal’s commitment to archaic royal authority over incipient American collectivity and his exorbitant concern with ‘self ’ (as well as the more obliquely defined importance of ‘feeling’) reveal these emerging republican ideals by way of their fracturing mirror image. The poem figures those forces, the British loyalists, who threatened unity. These remarks about ‘patriotism’ and ‘country’s love’ thereby emphasize the need to supply ‘public virtue’ (dismissed here as having ‘nothing in ’t’) with positive content. McFingal’s political grandstanding, identified with what ‘English writers’ have shown ‘in print’, points in turn to the need for added safeguards against factionalizing tendencies. Those streamlined forms of collective action concurrently taking shape at the Second Continental Congress would provide just such alternatives for the American polity.4 We do not need to strain to appreciate why McFingal went on to become the bestselling poem in the early United States.5 In the guise of its ‘Tory’ anti-hero, the poem looked squarely ahead to the revised social norms and sublimated ‘principle[s] of action’ that underwrote the founding of the American Republic. But this ironic declaration of independence also deserves attention on another basis. Infusing these lines with a peculiarly restless energy, inseparable from the energies of Trumbull’s own poetry, two ‘English writers’ infiltrate this scene, the latter almost certainly Samuel Johnson. Earlier the same year as Trumbull’s poem, Johnson had attacked growing American demands for self-determination in Taxation No Tyranny (1775). Johnson’s political writings had become increasingly notorious on both sides of the Atlantic, and this diatribe secured their American reputation. Benjamin Franklin had heard the pamphlet applauded in Parliament, before returning to Philadelphia in May 1775.6 A month and a half earlier, the Virginia Gazette made 2 Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 10. In both normative and practical terms, efforts to exclude partisanship from American politics were short-lived. 3 See Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in EighteenthCentury America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), especially what Warner terms the ‘principle of negativity’. For the shaping of the self around sensibility and the wider role of sympathy in ensuring social cohesion—for those not excluded from social belonging altogether—during the Revolution and post-revolutionary periods, see Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). McFingal suggests scepticism about sympathy, observing that ‘all by rote / Rais’d sympathetic hands to vote’ (6, emphasis added). 4 For the communicative protocols and modes of collective action made uniquely available by the (inter)colonial networks of North America, see William B. Warner, Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For the ‘normally impersonal’ status of print, see Warner, The Letters of the Republic. 5 For the poem’s original American publication and subsequent reception, see Christopher Grasso, ‘Print, Poetry, and Politics: John Trumbull and the Transformation of Public Discourse in Revolutionary America’, Early American Literature 30 (1995). 6 Describing the arguments made by ‘Dr. Johnson a Court Pensioner, in his Taxation No Tyranny’, Franklin noted coolly that ‘all the ministerial People recommended it’. Benjamin Franklin to Jonathan Shipley, 7 July 1775. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin: Volume 22, March 23, 1775, through October 27, 1776, ed. William  B.  Willcox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 93–8. In McFingal,

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the paranoid assertion that the ministry had such a ‘high opinion’ of Johnson that it had made orders to distribute ‘thousands of copies’ of Taxation No Tyranny ‘throughout England, Ireland, and America, gratis’.7 This notoriety extended to Johnson’s personal reputation and literary persona. Comparing him with the ‘electrical apparatus’ employed by Benjamin Franklin in his writings, the same Virginia newspaper described Johnson the following day as one ‘experienced in knocking down booksellers’ with his ‘folio dictionary of political language’.8 Johnson had memorably described America in Taxation No Tyranny as a land in which Whigs ‘multiply with the fecundity of their own rattle-snakes’.9 But viewed through the lens of American depictions, Johnson emerges as a fecund source of division in his own right, not least through the self-factioning impulses he elicits in Trumbull’s eponymous anti-hero, whose defence of ‘faction’ looks ahead to James Madison’s definition of the term in The Federalist No. 10 as ‘a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community’.10 McFingal had a life of its own in England. The original London imprint was issued by the radical Wilkite printer John Almon in the year following the first American edition. The fifth London edition of McFingal: A Modern Epic Poem in Four Cantos appeared in 1792, with a new preface and explanatory notes, which framed its American content for altogether different circumstances. The poem originally subtitled The Town-Meeting was thus doubly in need of explanation as compared to its earlier incarnations. English readers, having only highly mediated access to events in the colonies in the first place, now encountered the republished poem at a moment when the memory of the American War was fading and the French Revolution proceeding apace. Despite advertising its inclusion of ‘Explanatory Notes’ on the title page, this fifth edition of McFingal was not presented to English readers in 1792 for its antiquarian interest: ‘annotations’ had been provided only ‘to illustrat[e] the allusions to such circumstances as appeared to us to be so far local and temporary, as to run the risk of being ill understood by the generality of English Readers’.11 The editor was more inclined to point the reader towards the ‘particular beauties which must strike his attention in the course of the Poem’, and ultimately the merits of this work were to stand for themselves ‘in a country where Dalrymple and Johnson are described in a footnote as ‘Ministerial Writers’. The former was most likely Sir John Dalrymple, known, like Johnson, for his involvement with the North ministry and the recent author of a hostile response to the addresses of the First Continental Congress, Address of the People of Great-Britain to the Inhabitants of America (London: 1775). The two men, together with John Shebbeare, were frequently linked: see, for example, R.  T.  Haines Halsey, Impolitical Prints: An Exhibition of Contemporary English Cartoons Relating to the American Revolution (New York: New York Public Library, 1939), 5–6. 7 Virginia Gazette, 26 May 1775. 8 Virginia Gazette, 27 May 1775. 9 Taxation No Tyranny, in Samuel Johnson, Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 414. 10 The Federalist 10, [22 November] 1787. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/ 01-10-02-0178 11 McFingal: A Modern Epic Poem, in Four Cantos (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792), vi.

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nothing short of a high degree of poetical merit’ was sure to reward the editor’s labours.12 Following a discussion of the poem’s elevated ‘style’, majestic ‘manner’, and broader ‘design, or tendency’, the 1792 preface concluded that readers were to ‘regard the following Poem, not merely as a patriotic work, to be confined to America, but as a work of general philanthropy, highly conducive to moral virtue and universal peace’.13 The previous year had seen the publication of The Life of Johnson by James Boswell: a central work of 1790s literary culture, this chapter will propose, which similarly subordinated political content to literary ends. As much as he celebrated Johnson himself as an eminent literary figure, Boswell equally situated his monumental biography—in its own right—within the literary domain. As with the repackaging of McFingal the following year, the Life made its own appeals to harmonious national feeling. But Boswell also had other objectives in mind, apparent in his uncompromising appeals to the re-emboldened authority of ‘Church and King’. Johnson was accordingly appealed to by his biographer both as a means of anchoring this authoritarian worldview (which included an especially hard line on law and order) and securing national feeling. These respective attempts to locate both The Life of Johnson and the man himself within an increasingly restricted, quietistic understanding of the literary domain—itself assimilated to a broader emphasis on social stability and state power—smoothed away the factious energies associated with a deeper political history, not least Johnson’s sharp-edged contributions to debates over Wilkite unrest and the American Revolution. Yet these efforts to contain Johnson were less than fully effective. As a matter of personal temperament and especially of political orientation, this chapter will demonstrate, Johnson’s literary persona proved wayward, his presumptive authority altogether less settled. Neither Johnson’s existing reputation nor, ultimately, The Life of Johnson itself could sustain these appeals to harmonized sympathies and unified national authority. At the same time, this chapter will propose, in his efforts to stabilize that relationship and to harmonize these respective sources of order, Boswell looked squarely ahead to changes that underpinned the Romantic age (in tandem with broader shifts in state authority and governmental power that accompanied the transition into the nineteenth century). Johnson in the 1790s thereby occupied a tellingly divided role. He revealed the increasingly fixed distinctions between literary and political domains but also the disruptions that continued to attend the relationship between literature and politics. Returning first to the decades surrounding the American Revolution—which Boswell, no less than the 1792 editor of McFingal, was eager to hold at a distance— this chapter returns to view a different Johnson than the depiction put forward in the Life. Re-exporting the figure of Trumbull’s poem back to England in the same period returns to view the ways that Johnson’s authorship also made for a combative, even potentially subversive relationship with a ‘politic world’ in which Johnson was a latently disaffected, disgruntled, and otherwise unruly presence. Johnson had launched his writing career during the early Walpole era, as a scribbling hack 12 McFingal (1792), vi–vii.

13 McFingal (1792), vii, xi.

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writing salty, at times scabrous, political commentary and anti-government critiques in line with his then ‘Patriot’ oppositional affiliations. The disaffection towards the Walpolean government and broader disillusionment with modern life (voiced in his 1738 poem London) were ostensibly tempered over subsequent decades to become the general irascibility with basically everything for which Johnson was well known by the middle of the century. By the period that concerns this study, Johnson had nonetheless established a sturdy reputation as a figure of literary authority.14 The Life of Johnson featured various instances in which Johnson memorably brushed up against politics, not least Johnson’s famous encounters with George III and Wilkes (during the latter’s transition from his earlier radicalism to the establishment).15 For the most part, however, Boswell depicted his subject at a conspicuous remove from the discussion of politics, including the aggressively maintained distance apparent in his remarks on having his bones broken before any further political discussion. The Life of Johnson allowed its reader to assume that Johnson had dispensed with his earlier oppositional commitments, such as they were, once they had outlived their expediency, on his way to literary eminence and national fame, anchoring his authority in a literary domain and around his own ‘circle’. Boswell’s efforts to present Johnson as lodged within a literary domain, where he maintained a presiding role, have persisted. Helen Deutsch has compellingly discussed the critical tendency to treat Johnson as at once exceptional and exemplary, rehabilitating his idiosyncrasy through the fantasy of his unchanging singularity.16 Aside from downplaying Johnson’s volatility, as a kind of eccentricity or character quirk, the critical discussions to which Deutsch alludes also obscure, I contend, the ways that Johnson’s writings and wider authorial persona point to an unfixed and dynamic relationship between literary and political domains. The later sections of this chapter turn directly to The Life of Johnson—its construction, reception, and wider contexts—with a view to explaining how this narrowly literary understanding of Johnson came to be and its wider implications. In the first instance, the chapter recovers the unstable perception of Johnson’s authorial identity that was available to his contemporaries. Politics loomed large in accounts of Johnson’s authorship. He received a state pension from the early 1760s onwards (in part for his services as a ‘Political’ writer)17 and published a series of political pamphlets ranging from attacks on the frenzied domestic opposition to derision of the American colonists 14 A Defense of Mr. Kendrick’s Review of Dr. Johnson’s Shakespeare (1766) imagined him ‘placed at the head of literature, as the Roman pontiff is at the head of his church’. Quoted in Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 221. 15 In contrast with the more comprehensive and unvarnished biography of Johnson by John Hawkins, Boswell’s Life contains disproportionate detail on the post-1760 period. For an effort to pull Johnson apart from the distorting lenses of Boswell’s biography, see Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2014). 16 Loving Dr. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). I discuss the implications of this important argument for Johnson’s political identity and the literary status of Boswell’s biography at greater length later in this chapter. 17 Dustin Griffin notes Johnson’s continuing appearance, as late as 1782, as a ‘Political’ writer in Treasury records. Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 67.

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and their outrageous demands for political representation. These occasional writings were not coincidental to his developing authorial identity, whether for his readers or for Johnson himself. The collection of these pamphlets into a single volume by Johnson (published, like the first London edition of McFingal, in the auspicious year 1776) instead constituted a bold affirmation of authoritarian thinking, which superimposed the disparate occasions and targets of these works.18 The collection of the works into a single volume and the conflation of their antagonists into a single source of unrest anticipated the tactics of later counter-revolutionary representations—a question to which I return in this book’s Conclusion—where retroactively tainting all sources of disturbance as proleptic of revolution affirmed the necessity of quelling any source of potential subversion as a foregone conclusion. Johnson in turn became a powerful resource at the later moment of Britain’s rightward turn. Boswell echoed Johnson’s attacks on those ‘whose opinions are not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion’ in his own condemnation of popular disturbances, and mirrored his assertions about royal power during the American conflict (‘in sovereignty there can be no gradations’) in the robust defence of the king and his law. These questions had become newly urgent amidst the changed atmosphere attending the French Revolution. Yet the changing political fault lines of that period also led to a clash. Boswell’s efforts to claim Johnson for the counter-revolutionary turn of the early nineteenth century and to assimilate his authorship to a new literary age revealed telling strains. For all Boswell’s efforts to affirm his staunch commitment to established authority and to keep him at a remove from politics, Johnson’s unruly authorial persona and the vehemence that often drove his writings not only promised to spill over unpredictably into the political arena. They also risked implicating him with disruptive, disaffected, oppositional energies—precisely those forces, that is, which both Johnson and Boswell professed to despise. The Life of Johnson thus needed to create its subject anew, presenting Johnson as the authority over an autonomous literary sphere. Boswell’s biography constructed Johnson: both as an enabling myth for Boswell’s own evolving Tory identity and as a linchpin for the emergent Toryism of the early nineteenth century. Yet as much as Boswell succeeded in assimilating the ‘Monarch of Literature’ to a newly insulated literary domain, the ‘Literary Leviathan’ risked taking on outsized and unpredictable political significance—not least at a moment when the democratic ‘mob’ was becoming a ‘Leviathan’ all its own. T H E P RO B L E M O F AU T H O R I T Y I N T H E J O H N S O N C I RC L E The Life of Johnson moved abruptly from the Lives of the Poets (1779–81) to events in the street. ‘While Johnson was thus engaged in preparing a delightful literary entertainment for the world,’ Boswell wrote, ‘the tranquillity of the metropolis of 18 Johnson closely oversaw production of this expensive volume, requesting copies for his friends. See Johnson to Mrs Thrale, 6 May 1776. The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 2.127. The pamphlets were preceded by an uncompromising epigraph celebrating the liberty found only under a virtuous king.

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Great-Britain was unexpectedly disturbed, by the most horrid series of outrage that ever disgraced a civilized country.’19 The so-called Gordon Riots in the summer of 1780 witnessed anti-Catholic mobs terrorize the London streets in protest at recent legislation. The Life of Johnson incorporated an extended account by Johnson of the ‘universal panick’. London was eventually delivered from what Boswell termed this ‘contagion of frenzy’—remarks that echoed Johnson’s disdainful account of the popular petitioning promoted by supporters of Wilkes in The False Alarm— through what he gushingly termed the ‘magnanimity of the Sovereign himself ’.20 Boswell equally emphasized Johnson’s commitment to authority and his stated attachment to ‘the protection of the King and the law’.21 ‘The riots in London were certainly horrible,’ Boswell had written to Johnson, in a letter also reproduced in the Life, ‘but you give me no account of your own situation, during the barbarous anarchy. A description of it by Dr. Johnson would be a great painting; you might write another London, a Poem.’22 The critique of corruption and England’s decrepit condition in that 1738 poem extended to a wholesale condemnation of the Walpole regime. Boswell might have recalled the lines in which Johnson painted scenes of London falling prey to indiscriminate sources of degeneracy and distress: ‘Here Malice, Rapine, Accident, conspire / And now a Rabble rages, now a Fire’ (making the only advisable course to seek escape to ‘Some peaceful Vale’). Yet the poem he imagined Johnson writing in 1780 suggested an altogether different emphasis to his earlier Juvenalian satire: promoting the existing ministry and upholding established authority more widely, while rendering Johnson’s earlier portrait of senseless violence in an altogether more sinister light. While riots blaze in the earlier poem with as much predictability or meaning as random, accidental fires, Boswell imagined the Gordon Riots as a coordinated uprising that spelled doom to modern civilization (and thus as proleptic of the French Revolution). This proto-Arnoldian appeal to the powers of Johnson’s pen imagined him as capable of raising culture against the threat of what Boswell here terms ‘barbarous anarchy’. Yet even looking beyond the disaffection that shades his earlier poem, the notion of artist as peacekeeper was at odds with Johnson’s far from pacified political reputation. The factious authorial persona highlighted in McFingal was not only associated with brewing debates over America (on which Johnson, as we have seen, had particularly vehement views). Attacks on Johnson, particularly those that highlighted the pension he received from the king, depicted him as in thrall to the authority of the English state. Yet as some commentators went further to suggest, Johnson thus set himself at odds, in his uncompromising and vehemently stated 19 James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, eds. George Birkbeck Norman Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–64), 3.427. 20 Life of Johnson, 3.431. In a further parallel with Johnson’s scornful depiction of drunken voters in The False Alarm, Boswell wrote that this ‘mischief spread by a gradual contagion of frenzy, augmented by the quantities of fermented liquors, of which the deluded populace possessed themselves in the course of their depredations’. Life of Johnson, 3.431. Although Johnson had, as Greene and others note, witnessed popular rioting early in life, framing Johnson’s perspective on the Gordon Riots as simply another instance of mob violence obscures the extent to which recent events had upped the ante, in ways which the French Revolution raised to an altogether new pitch. 21 Life of Johnson, 3.430. 22 Life of Johnson, 3.438–9.

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views, with the national polity to whose authority and stability he was ostensibly committed. Johnson’s staunch ‘Tory’ identity promised to interfere, that is to say, with the sovereign rule that ‘Toryism’ professed to uphold, even casting him as a dangerously divisive, even self-subverting presence. Before looking to these tensions directly, it will be helpful to establish the changing conceptions of political authority during the final decades of Johnson’s life. In tandem with the rapid succession of changing government ministries, the years leading up to Johnson’s death in 1784 witnessed a mounting constitutional crisis. This culminated around a controversial bill for further regulating the East India Company and the king’s dissolution of the Fox–North ministry (the mounting storm clouds behind Johnson’s statement, discussed in the Introduction, that he would rather have his bones broken than discuss politics any further). These controversies were bound up with a perceived crisis of political authority. While some viewed the king as arrogating an excess of power, Boswell numbered himself among those disposed to favour a more authoritarian state (including within the British Empire, where men like Warren Hastings were assuming power). As his friend Alexander Dick wrote to Boswell in March 1783, ‘there seems to be at this moment while I write, a ministerial Interregnum, and paralytic influence seems to have seized the Monarchical part of the constitution, from as I apprehend, a desperation of those who should guid[e] the Helm of the inherent powers of our State and Country’; Dick went on: [I]f ever there was a time for employing a Dictator as in Old Rome, now is the time for Britain—either to charge the King with a Dictatorial power from half year to half year by the authority of Parliament; or rather to act with more similitude to our constitution, to make a Dictatorial Triumvirate; vesting the whole power of State in three persons vz. His Majesty—Mr. Burke, who should be made a Peer to represent the Peers—and Mr. William Pit [sic] to represent the Commons; and whatever they should derect [sic] or do for half a year, should be the Law; integrity in Talents being allowed, absolute power, and immediate correction of Crimes, being no longer delayed; the Affairs of the State to return to their ancient style and Government, as restored from the exercise of this Dictatorial Power.23

These remarks belong to a crucial moment of transition. The ascent of the younger William Pitt to power the following year went hand-in-hand with a transformed regime of governance.24 That authoritarian shift had pointed implications for Britain’s burgeoning global Empire. Rather than seeking to ‘catch hold of an endless Territory in North America’, Dick continued, Britain would have been better off encouraging marriages (‘as the Romans did’) and improving domestic lands, 23 Sir Alexander Dick to James Boswell, 21 March 1783. Boswell Collection, MSS 89, C980, 2–3. This was one week before Johnson’s comment about having his bones broken before any further political discussion. Dick had previously practised as a physician, as Johnson noted the following year when he asked Boswell to solicit Dick’s opinion on his illness; as he noted elsewhere in this letter, ‘you will forgive a man struggling with disease his neglect of disputes, politicks, and pamphlets’. Johnson to Boswell, 11 February 1784. 24 For a fuller discussion of the new brand of political leadership heralded by Pitt’s ascent, see Chapter 5.

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such that ‘well affected Subjects, and destressed [sic] and abused Loyalists’ would not long need to think about the ‘Wilds of America, where Savages hing [sic] over them’.25 Boswell was closely aligned with this authoritarian turn. The letter by George Dempster, quoted in Chapter  1, describing the ‘political conflagration’ in the capital (and the distractions provided by plays and hot air balloons) celebrated Boswell, following his own pamphlet on the East India Bill, as a ‘second Filmor’ [sic] after the infamous author of the seventeenth-century tract on patriarchal rule (with which John Locke famously took issue in his treatises of government). Dempster lauded Boswell as an ‘advocate of the right Divine and main pillar of that secret influence which exists in our Patriotic Brains if no where else’ and expressed his wish that this ‘secret influence’ would ‘shed its most benignant influence on your Head’. Boswell deemed this an ‘excellent Epistle’ on his ‘Toryism’.26 The French Revolution further bolstered support for the crown, in tandem with a wider outpouring of patriotic energies.27 Boswell was revealingly aligned with these rightward shifts—not least in the management of his Scottish estates, where his sentimental side coexisted with a ruthlessly authoritarian streak. Johnson was far less predictable. In partisan terms, he did not align himself with the resurgent Toryism in parliament, noting the year Pitt was elected that he was loyal neither to the Whiggish Fox nor to his upstart replacement.28 Johnson was a firm adherent of established power and social order in addition to being a vocal advocate on both fronts. Yet he also looked back to older, more rigid conceptions of sovereign authority. Despite his broad compatibility with these rightward-leaning views, Johnson aligned awkwardly with the counter-revolutionary turn (in which Boswell, as we will see, took on an active, even activist role). During the period around the American Revolution in particular, he became a political lightning rod, clashing with Dick’s proposed resettlement of ‘well affected Subjects’ and ‘abused Loyalists’ to a reconceived national polity (not least in his temperamental affinity with the himself abusive loyalist, McFingal). Johnson has maintained a critical reputation for towering authority. ‘What does “Johnsonian” mean,’ Fredric Bogel proposed in a classic essay, ‘if not “authoritative?” ’ As Bertrand Harris Bronson asserted: ‘Authority, and more authority, is what he wants, in Religion, in Morals, in Politics, in Literature.’29 This association 25 Dick went on to describe the need to improve and repopulate the ‘the deserted Hills of Britain and Ireland’ in terms that recall Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem The Deserted Village. 26 George Dempster to James Boswell, 9 January 1784. Boswell Collection, MSS 89, C950, 1. The reference to ‘secret influence’ alluded to the controversial reputation of the Earl of Bute in the early reign of George III. 27 I address this rightward shift more fully in Chapter 5. For the changing role of monarchy, see in particular Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760–1820’, Past & Present 102 (1984) and Sudipta Sen, A Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London: Routledge, 2002). 28 ‘I am for the King against Fox,’ Johnson stated, ‘but I am for Fox against Pitt.’ Life of Johnson, 4.292. 29 See Bogel, ‘Johnson and the Role of Authority’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, eds. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 190; Bertrand  H.  Bronson, Johnson Agonistes, & Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), 7. ‘The question of authority’, as Greg Clingham has shrewdly observed, ‘is a subject of almost all

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with authority had its origins during his lifetime. The identification of Johnson as the ‘Great Cham’—a reference to the ‘Sovereign of Tartary’ and a fitting title, Boswell noted, for the ‘Monarch of Literature’30—was closely related to the commanding literary role he assumed in his ‘Circle’, a term applied, with greater and lesser levels of specificity, to the grouping of writers and public figures associated with Johnson’s ‘Literary Club’. For all its attentiveness to interpersonal affairs and day-by-day developments, the notion of the ‘Circle’ has nonetheless functioned to insulate late eighteenth-century literature from politics and a period of global upheaval: we do not tend to think about the age of Johnson as the age of the American Revolution. Johnson distinguished his own period from the age of Swift, in ways that begin to explain this disjuncture. During the composition of his Lives of the Poets, Howard D. Weinbrot notes, Johnson differentiated what he termed the ‘regularity and composure of the present time’ from the ‘tumult of absurdity, and clamour of contradiction, which perplexed doctrine, disordered practice, and disturbed both publick and private quiet’ in the decades around the English civil wars and the political quarrels and virulent partisanship that continued to characterize the early eighteenth century.31 This apparent distance from violent conflict coupled with a changing understanding of literature. Describing the commonplace book compiled by the wife of an early nineteenth-century rector, David Allan notes the emphasis, in the works recommended, on conduct and the proper management of feeling. The appearance in this reading list of The Life of Johnson, together with the respective accounts by Boswell and Johnson of their Highland tours and such works as James Thomson’s Seasons and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, acknowledged the ‘increasingly canonical status’ of Boswell’s biography as an example of a work capable of ‘promoting the correct feelings and sympathies, and hence helping to remould character and personality, among those prepared to read them’.32 ‘[I]t was not merely correct texts’, Allan notes, ‘but also an appropriate personal relationship with them—and so a suitable outlook and set of attitudes informed by them—that was assumed to be constitutive of polite respectability.’33 criticism devoted to [. . .] Samuel Johnson.’ Clingham, Johnson, Writing, and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For the negotiation of authority between Johnson and Boswell, see John B. Radner, Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 30 Life of Johnson, 1.348n.5. 31 Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (life of Samuel Butler) quoted in ‘ “’Tis Well an Old Age is Out”: Johnson, Swift, and his Generation’, in Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, 58. The editor to McFingal noted that the poem had been called the ‘American Hudibras’ by some readers, alluding to Butler’s satire of the mid-seventeenth-century conflicts, but went on to note that this comparison had arisen ‘merely from the measure and from the jingle of the double rhymes’: ‘the style is uniformly far more elevated, and the manner more grave and majestic, than that of Hudibras,—but not so filled with those perpetual flashes of wit, which weary our risible faculties, without gratifying the mind with more durable impressions’ (vii). 32 David Allan, Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 182. 33 Allan, Making British Culture, 182. As Allan notes: ‘Over-stating the effects of Johnson’s Lives [of the English Poets] upon the wider population of English readers would be hard. Certainly, to judge from the immense number of people who read and referred to it, it was among the most popular and influential works of the age’ and also ‘decisively affected the attitudes and judgments of innumerable

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In placing these accounts together—of the movement beyond a period of national conflict and political volatility and of increasingly deep increasing investments in polite and pleasing literature—we bring into view a double shift: the movement of literary production away from factious political disputes, in contrast with the unavoidability of contentious politics in the age of Swift and the preceding epoch of civil war, on the one hand, and a deepening association between literature and properly regulated sentiments, in tandem with the transition into the later eighteenth century and Romantic age, on the other (recalling the tranquillizing role of literature and the steering role of literary authority in shaping proper subjects at Garrick’s Drury Lane). At the same time, this emphasis on an increasingly regimented curriculum of reading looks to a still more delimited understanding of literature, instrumentalized as a means to shape and ‘remould’ the feelings of its readers (as confirmed, for example, by what we know about the reading of Jane Austen, herself a great admirer of Johnson). The ‘Johnson Circle’ belonged, we may conclude, to a moment in which the literary realm was no longer troubled by politics. Further, its members helped to bring ‘literature’ into focus as a kind of reading that had to do with private feeling. Yet these accounts do not hold up to scrutiny. This study has already emphasized the wider political unrest during the heyday of the Johnson Circle. The distinction with the ‘age of Swift’ ought to be taken as a relative rather than an absolute divide; the Gordon Riots show not only that violence had continued to erupt but also the ways that its effects were magnified by the revolutionary atmosphere. This is not to dispute that a literary realm was beginning to take shape at a remove from politics. But the relationship between these realms appears far less settled and self-evident when we pay fuller attention, in tandem with the growing domestic and international unrest associated with the global age of revolutions, to Johnson’s developing reputation. His ‘Circle’ comprised a shifting and far from stable group that included politically engaged members and overlapped with various domains of discussion (as evidenced by the presence in its ranks of Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, and Charles James Fox). Johnson’s pugnacious expression of his views, moreover, meant that his own authority in this arena was itself considered analogous to political rule, placing the ‘literary’ club both in proximity to and at a complex analogical remove from the political arena. The emphasis on Johnson’s authority and its role in organizing his ‘Circle’ may, following Russell, be understood in part as a response, if not a more violent reaction, to the increasing emphasis on fashionable sociability organized around women, at a moment in which women were also taking on more prominent roles within and to the side of the public sphere: as a response, that is, to growing female

individuals’ (36–7). These included Mary Cornwallis, the wife of the rector of Wittersham in Kent, whose reading ‘touch[ed] such genres as poetry, novels, drama, tracts, devotional literature and memoirs’ (182). Boswell proposed a reading list for his son that contained John Locke and Isaac Watts, Joseph Addison, and other essayists on ‘life and manners’ from the reign of Queen Anne, as well as Johnson’s Idler and Rambler. The reading of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, like Austen’s own reading, aligns with these emerging canons. Fanny’s reading includes Johnson’s Idler.

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authority.34 These fault lines became apparent in an infamous 1778 exchange between Johnson and a female interlocutor. Following Johnson’s remarks on the ‘state’ having its own ‘conscience’, Mrs Knowles, confidently addressing the ‘present learned and candid company’, mocked Johnson for his fabrication of ‘so wonderous a personage!’ in a multifaceted challenge to Johnson’s authority.35 This episode, aside from its implications for shifting conceptions of authority and the literary sphere, had specific political content in its own right. The exchange aligned Johnson with a ludicrous entity: a ‘monstrous individual, or being, called a State, composed of millions of people’.36 Johnson’s rigid and archaic understanding of the ‘State’ set him at odds with evolving understandings of governmental power, particularly its colonial instantiations (and raised further questions associated with Johnson’s personalized attachment to a single unquestioned ruler).37 This identification, as we will go on to see, interacted perilously with the substance of Johnson’s ‘Tory’ political views. The dialogue with Mrs Knowles similarly casts light on contemporary understandings of the literary sphere in which Johnson was understood to operate—and over which he was imagined to preside. The reproduction of this exchange in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1791, as one of many pieces published to capitalize on the recent appearance of Boswell’s Life, proves especially telling in this regard. The prefatory remarks to this ephemeral item bring the various challenges to Johnsonian authority in this exchange together. That introduction notes that the ‘mild fortitude of modest Truth’ exhibited therein by Mrs Knowles ‘is finely contrasted with the boisterous violence of bigoted Sophistry, so long accustomed to victory over feigned or slight resistance, and, in a certain circle, to timid and implicit submission’.38 This emphasis on Johnson’s violence and ‘bigot[ry]’ had become, as we will see, a recurrent feature of attacks on the writer. Especially worth noting here are the ways that this retroactive account makes explicit reference to the Johnson ‘circle’ as analogous to a polity over which Johnson rules (and makes the ‘implicit submission’ of its members—which looks to the seventeenth-century Tory doctrine of ‘passive obedience’—an indication of their emasculation). The travesty of Johnson as a figure of authority was thus rendered complete. A modern female debate champion compared the expression of Johnson’s ideas—and, crucially, Johnson in his own person—to a creaky old Leviathan as his followers were cast as feminized subjects in thrall to their tyrannical leader.39 The great man himself was 34 Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). In the 1780s, for example, popular debating societies emerged as a forum that provided women with a structured role in contemporary debates. See Donna  T.  Andrew, ‘Popular Culture and Public Debate: London 1780’, The Historical Journal 39 (1996). 35 ‘An interesting Dialogue between the late Dr. Samuel Johnson and Mrs Knowles’, The Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle 61 (1791), 500. 36 ‘An interesting Dialogue’, 500. 37 Compare Quentin Skinner, ‘From the State of Princes to the Person of the State’, in Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2.368–74. 38 ‘An interesting Dialogue’, 500 (emphasis added). 39 For a rich discussion of how ‘passive obedience’ became intertwined with seduction/coercion across political writing and fiction, and its implications for male authority and feminized submission,

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thus cast as an absurdity, characterized by his fractured authority over a submissive gathering of followers, in an early and damning reference to the Johnson Circle. J O H N S O N ’ S E R R AT I C TO RY I S M Johnson’s combative nature played an important role in The Life of Johnson and in his wider reputation as one who ‘talked for victory’. The confrontation with Knowles apparently entailed such a challenge to Johnson’s authority that Boswell deliberately suppressed this encounter when he came to write the Life a decade later.40 Even when they did not result in bathetic failure, Johnson’s propensities for conflict presented more subtle challenges to Boswell and acquired heightened significance, as the later sections of this chapter will go on to show, in the years following the French Revolution. Fantasies of Johnson’s unchanging singularity, Deutsch has argued, have been sustained by the serial repetition of anecdote and memorialization but are ultimately belied by the radical discontinuities of Johnson’s life and writings. During the tumultuous period after the fall of the Bastille, Deutsch notes, Johnson came to represent the reassuring stability of ‘personable British authority’.41 Returning to the development of Johnson’s reputation during the preceding decades allows us to press upon this important claim, establishing a broader context for the political dimensions of Johnson’s reputation (and their transformed significance in the wake of the French Revolution). This deeper context will attune us, more particularly, to the ways that Johnson was reinvented—and to some degree, newly constructed—for the 1790s by Boswell’s monumental biography, whose original readers included Edmund Burke. The Life of Johnson, both completed and received amidst the heat of revolutionary events, was to an important and neglected degree the product of that tense political atmosphere, whose climate of suspicion inflamed the fears of unbridled unrest at play in the Gordon Riots into the more thoroughgoing paranoia (as can be seen, for example, in the proclamation issued by the Pitt government against those ‘wicked and seditious writings’ that sought ‘to excite tumult and disorder by endeavouring to raise groundless jealousies and suspicions’ in the subjects of the King ‘respecting the Laws and Happy Constitution’).42 Before turning directly to the composition and contemporary reception of the Life, delving into that work with an exchange from the late eighteenth-century period we have been considering will bring into view the more see Toni Bowers in Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 40 Boswell noted in his journal recollection that he ‘never saw this mighty Lion so chased before!’ (a remark later suppressed from The Life of Johnson). See Felicity A. Nussbaum, ‘Boswell’s Treatment of Johnson’s Temper: “A Warm West-Indian Climate” ’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 14 (1974). As Nussbaum demonstrates, Boswell rearranged and expanded his journal account in the Life, where the exchange spans several pages and concludes with Johnson voicing ‘severest terms of reproach’ against Knowles, without reproducing any of the reported conversation from the ‘Dialogue’. 41 Helen Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 15. 42 Quoted in John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–3.

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erratic political tendencies—the unruly contours of Johnson’s ‘Tory’ identity—with which Boswell had to contend as he sought to shore up Johnson’s authority. Boswell’s biography became notorious for its rendering of Johnson’s curt dismissals and exorbitantly stated views; these in turn became central to the critical and often satirical response to its subject’s combative temperament (as the reproduction of the exchange with Knowles also showed). We can begin to see how Johnson’s uncompromisingly asserted political commitments converged with these traits in an exchange from the period of the American War. In April 1781, Johnson and Boswell attended a dinner with Sir Philip Jennings Clerk, where the three men entered into a debate. As Boswell related, writing his biography a decade later, Clerk had voiced his adamant opposition to the conflict, observing that the ‘majority of the nation’ was against the ministry. Johnson disagreed, claiming that the ‘sense of the nation is with the ministry’ and that the ‘majority of those who can understand is with it; the majority of those who can only hear is against it; and as those who can only hear are more numerous than those who can understand, and Opposition is always loudest, a majority of the rabble will be for Opposition’.43 Johnson twisted the rhetoric of the ‘sense of the people’ here, granting legitimacy only to those with the ‘sense’ to uphold established power (while casting the ‘rabble’ who opposed the government, much like his attack on the Wilkites in The False Alarm, as unable to make sense of anything).44 Johnson went on to amplify the authoritarian bent of his remarks: ‘I, Sir, am against the ministry, but it is for having too little of that, of which Opposition thinks they have too much. Were I minister, if any man wagged his finger against me, he should be turned out; for that which it is in the power of Government to give at pleasure to one or to another, should be given to the supporters of Government.’45 As he set the scene for this encounter, Boswell observed that Sir Philip ‘had the appearance of a gentleman of ancient family, well advanced in life. He wore his own white hair in a bag of goodly size, a black velvet coat, with an embroidered waistcoat, and very rich laced ruffles; which Mrs. Thrale said were old fashioned, but which, for that reason, I thought the more respectable, more like a Tory’.46 Johnson reflected on Sir Philip’s political affiliation in light of his appearance. ‘Ah, Sir,’ he ruefully observed, ‘ancient ruffles and modern principles do not agree.’47 This exchange was exemplary of the ‘scenes’ Boswell constructed for the Life. In contrast with Clerk, Johnson might seem to present an altogether less conflicted figure: self-identical with his baldly stated political views. Yet while Johnson’s principles, redoubled by the vehement guise in which he voiced them, leave his own political orientation 43 Life of Johnson, 4.81. 44 For the long-standing importance of this rhetoric and its capacity to organize diverse extraparliamentary constituencies, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 45 Life of Johnson, 4.81. 46 Life of Johnson, 4.80. 47 Life of Johnson, 4.80–1. Clerk was an opposition MP. In May 1781, the month following the dinner, a motion to restore peace with America was defeated 72–106, suggesting that it was only supported by the Whig grouping (including Edmund Burke) clustered around Rockingham. See Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 219.

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beyond doubt, complications begin to emerge when we set out to establish the parameters of his ‘Tory’ identity. A great deal of ink has been spilled over Johnson’s politics.48 Certain facts remain beyond dispute, based on the available record of his statements and actions—which are all we have to go on in assessing the politics of Johnson or anyone else. In his Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson defined a ‘Tory’ as ‘One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England [. . .] opposed to a Whig.’ By the time of his death in 1784, Johnson had come to inhabit this identity with notoriously staunch pride. There can be no question, based upon this repeated self-identification and the reiteration of his views, about Johnson’s inclination towards government on authoritarian, royalist, orthodox principles, commitments he voiced in increasingly absolute, even absolutist terms.49 The changing political circumstances, together with the impossibility of determining Johnson’s underlying convictions, mean that these views were far from comprising a stable position that Johnson or his writings dependably inhabited. We only have what Johnson said and wrote, that is to say, as a guide to his political views, but both kinds of statement had an uncertain status. Indeed, the links between Johnson’s ‘political thought’ and his ‘lived experience and character’, which Nicholas Hudson has valuably sought to bring into alignment in his political biography of Johnson, were precisely what his writings and reputation threw radically into question.50 These complications are redoubled in the case of his political pamphlets. Despite F. P. Lock’s best efforts to hold Johnson’s ‘genuine’ convictions apart from sallies of ‘wit or anger’ or the adoption of personas, these became 48 For accounts of Johnson’s politics, see especially Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd edn. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, [1960] 1990); Samuel Johnson in Historical Context, eds. Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); John Cannon, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Robert Folkenflik, ‘Johnson’s Politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Howard D. Weinbrot, Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on his Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ‘The Nature of Johnson’s Conservatism’, ELH 64 (1997), and A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013); Thomas Kaminski, ‘The Nature of Johnson’s Toryism’, in The Politics of Samuel Johnson, ed. Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); F. P. Lock, ‘ “To Preserve Order and Support Monarchy”: Johnson’s Political Writings’, in Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2014). Accounts of Johnson’s politics have at times been unnecessarily confused by conflating his political beliefs with questions more properly conceived in social terms or focusing on narrowly conceived questions of dynastic allegiance. The continuing emphasis on Johnson’s ‘belief ’ in Jacobite principles and honouring of hereditary right by a small coterie of scholars remains as unhelpful as it is incoherent. It was by no means clear what a ‘belief ’ in these principles even meant by the later eighteenth century, let alone how such a claim might be substantiated. For a valuable dismissal of the frequently outlandish speculations concerning Johnson’s supposed Jacobite milieus and sympathy for a possible rebellion, see Hudson, A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson, 3, 5; compare Kaminski, ‘The Nature of Johnson’s Toryism’, 16–23, 32–9. 49 Compare John Cannon, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 133. Far from having ‘no sympathy for absolutist government’, as Cannon claims, Johnson was eager to imagine how absolutism might take on newly robust forms (including within Britain’s burgeoning Empire within India). 50 Hudson, A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson, 6.

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particularly difficult to hold apart both in these political writings and also in Johnson’s wider public reputation.51 For all the apparent fixity of his commitments, including his stated opposition in the exchange quoted here to all challenges to constituted power, Johnson became a moving target, not least given the uncompromising manner in which he stated his views. In his final decades, moreover, his reputation became inseparable from these doggedly maintained, exorbitantly stated political commitments. The implications of these excesses for thinking about Johnson’s authorship— and in turn for the figure Boswell would present in the Life—become apparent from satirical commentaries published following his death. Among the less charitable responses to Johnson’s passing, the satirical pamphlet Anecdotes of the Learned Pig (1786) presented the story of the late author’s life as the tale of a gradually fattening hog.52 As an imagined origin story for the national fame and controversial reputation of its subject, these ‘Anecdotes’ presented themselves above all as a creation myth for Johnson’s uncompromising political convictions. The ‘Learned Pig’, we are told, ‘was produced in a sty belonging to an old Tory bookseller, in Moorfields’, whose rails at that time ‘fluttered with party writings and libels of every sort’. During her pregnancy, his mother devoured ‘one whole volume of Filmer’ and ‘all Sacheverell ’s sermons’. As a youth, the piglet in turn roamed into Milton’s garden, where the whipping he incurred shaped him for later life. After his receiving the ‘royal touch’ from Queen Anne, he encountered abuse at a Whig feast. This was exaggerated but not outlandish: at least up until this point, this account concurred in large part with known facts about the life of Johnson. Queen Anne did indeed ‘touch’ her subjects for their diseases, including a young Johnson, then suffering from scrofula. His supposed early attachment to the cause of Henry Sacheverell—a High Church Tory whose 1710 sermon on the 5 November anniversary of the Glorious Revolution launched a scathing and wildly controversial attack on the legacies of 1688, prompting his trial for impeachment—led Boswell to term Johnson the ‘infant Hercules’ of Toryism. The Anecdotes of the Learned Pig shoehorned these various details into a sequential narrative, with the implication, for example, in his mother’s consumption of Filmer’s political thought, that Johnson’s encounter with Queen Anne cemented a belief in divine right. Johnson’s biography was thus brought sharply into line with a monolithic ‘Tory’ history.53 51 Lock, ‘ “To Preserve Order and Support Monarchy.” ’ 52 For a related critique of Johnson, from a member of Dissenting circles associated with Richard Price, see Joseph Towers, Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings, of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1786). For the ‘Learned Pig’ craze of the 1780s, a popular entertainment involving a pig apparently capable of spelling out words, which similarly called into question distinctions between instinct and reason, see Paul Keen, ‘The Learned Pig: Enlightening the Reading Public’, chap. 6 in Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 53 For the supposed antecedents of ‘Tory’ thinking in debates about absolutism and royal accountability reaching back to the 1640s, see James  J.  Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 48. Although Johnson was not a supporter of the deposed Stuart monarchs, he did support appeals to the unquestionable legitimacy of royal power and had been ‘strongly attached to the notion of Divine & Hereditary Right’, in the words of Hester Thrale. Quoted in Kaminski, ‘The Nature of Johnson’s Toryism’, 12. Thrale’s qualified inclusion of ‘notion’ becomes central here: Johnson had termed divine

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The pension that Johnson received from George III became a recurrent feature of opposition critiques.54 The original award, from the Bute ministry in 1762, was not made with the express intent that Johnson would write in support of the king and his ministers. The series of pro-government pamphlets that Johnson composed in the 1770s nonetheless became conflated with his continuing reception of crown patronage (with some justification, given that these works were at least in part motivated by direction from the state). The resulting attacks on Johnson cast him as dangerously in thrall to royal authority while, at the same time, radically unmoored by his extreme venality; they also touched on the sloth and self-regard that factored into earlier critiques of his literary criticism.55 These critiques were coupled, in turn, with others against the vehemence and gleeful lack of compromise with which Johnson voiced authoritarian views, those traits repeatedly singled out as his ‘bigotry’ (itself related to his erratic conduct more widely). These critiques, too, had their justification. Although his pamphlets may have provided an outlet for his core political views, these views were stated with a vehemence (especially on America, as we have seen) that even Johnson acknowledged was extreme. Against claims about the political influence of his pension, Boswell claimed that Johnson’s ‘old tory indignation would have made him write’ as he did in these writings regardless.56 Together with the fact of his pension, however, this ‘bigotry’ further cemented the perception that he was a dangerous figure. The Anecdotes followed this oppositional critique. The pamphlet went on from its account of his formative years to show the pig becoming a ‘ministerial hog’ with a pension hung around his neck and LLD impressed on his rump, dismissing the trenchant pamphlets in which Johnson supported the king’s treatment of America and condemned popular agitation at home and abroad as the pig’s ‘turds’. Anecdotes nonetheless ended on an elusive note. At the ambiguous conclusion, the slaughtered animal appears finally cut up and sold in parts ‘pro bono publico’ with the suggestion (pointing to his right ‘stuff ’. In suggesting that Johnson was capable of distinguishing his adherence to the Stuart monarchs (and in turn the Hanoverian line) from a belief in the divine right of kings, I do not so much mean to contest the ongoing discussions of Johnson’s Jacobitism as note they are beside the point. Despite his evident ironizing, Dick’s references to Boswell as a ‘second’ Filmer and ‘advocate of the right Divine’ point to the ways that what I term the ‘late Toryism’ of the early nineteenth century reconstructed unassailable sovereign authority on a transformed basis. 54 For the wider context to the award of the pension and its possible political motivations, see Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800, 65–7. Griffin makes the intriguing suggestion that Johnson, following his Dictionary, may have represented a source of national glory, offsetting rivalry with France and Bute’s supposed partiality to the Scottish. 55 As Jonathan Brody Kramnick has shown, Johnson’s reputation as an overweening critic made him at mid-century the ‘fetish object of the literary world’, who was seen to have ‘accrued to himself a charismatic power that both exceeds what is due to his particular acumen and deforms the republic of letters, a power that is like that of tyrannical prelates, monarchs, and nobles’. These critiques of his assumed majesty also included accusations that Johnson was slothful and supine. Making the English Canon, 216–17. 56 James Boswell’s Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript, 3 vols., ed. Marshall Waingrow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), H-P.i.372–73n.9 and Bruce Redford, Designing The Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 157. Johnson himself conceded that what Boswell identified as the ‘extreme coarseness of contemptuous abuse’ had risked overtaking his writing.

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supposed disrespect for Pope and Swift in his Lives of the Poets) that Johnson was ultimately motivated, beyond questions of Whig and Tory, by an ‘instinctive enmity’. While ostensibly clarifying Johnson’s political views, the Anecdotes also exposed the resulting complications for thinking about him as a writer. The genealogy presented in this pamphlet also intersected with a larger dilemma in ‘Tory’ identity. The tensions between generations claiming the identity of ‘Tories’ had become increasingly apparent, as Boswell’s account of the dinner with Clerk makes clear. By drawing a straight line between divine right monarchy and more recent loyalism in the period of the American War, the pamphlet located Johnson as the missing link between these generations. Yet the Anecdotes equally situated him at the heart of a national dilemma—one that would call, as we will see, for Toryism to be placed on a revised footing. From its own oppositional perspective, the pamphlet might seem to have claimed a robust ‘Tory’ lineage for Johnson’s views. Despite establishing, at least in principle, a solid foundation for the genesis and continuity of his political thinking, its episodic allegory nonetheless failed to reconcile the brute facts about Johnson’s politics into a cohesive whole. Instead, the pamphlet had the curious effect of making Johnson’s identity, political and otherwise, less coherent, rather than more so. Far from a process of Bildung or even the formal realism that would assemble a coherent succession of experiences within the continuity of an individual consciousness, the pamphlet presented a fragmentary picture, in which party history appears like a form of bricolage, for which the body of the pig (eventually cut into parts) becomes proxy. In a monstrous parody of the ‘it-narrative’ genre, the ‘Learned Pig’ takes on a life of its own; at the same time, his butchered carcass becomes open to all takers. In contrast with other contemporary critiques of Johnson’s reputation (in which he was depicted as an ox, mule, or ‘roast beef ’ that his various biographers had sliced up, boiled to a rag, fricasseed, and so on), Anecdotes of the Learned Pig created a surplus of significance around its subject: a hyper-embodied account of Johnson-as-pig that ranges beyond its own fabular premise into visceral, scatological extremes. The instinctively antagonistic author conjured by this work ultimately remains at a remove both from the eventual consumption of his dispersed reputation and from the role carved out for him, so to speak, by his old Tory prehistory. An apparent contradiction runs through Johnson’s life and writings like a brightly coloured thread. For a staunch advocate of stability, Johnson could be notoriously unstable. Johnson repeatedly expressed his favour for subordination and authoritarian rule. Yet he frequently appeared so erratic and violent that one seminal study attributed him with the ‘disposition’ of the ‘subverter’ with shades of ‘Radical, Iconoclast, Enemy of the Established Order’.57 These tensions were not lost on his critics. Following his pension and his controversial writings on America, Johnson became a particularly overdetermined presence within the public arena (including in the future United States). As a lightning rod for emerging debates about political authority, Johnson in turn became curiously unable to ground his own authority. This was not only ironic but productive of added complications at a moment in 57 Bronson, Johnson Agonistes, & Other Essays.

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which authority was taking new forms. Johnson found himself at a volatile intersection between literary and political domains, during a period when power was changing at all levels. Between the final decades of Johnson’s literary career and the onset of his posthumous reputation, relations between ruling authorities and subject populations were multiply called into question: from the American colonies to the burgeoning territorial empire in India, as well as within Britain and Ireland. A trenchant upholder of absolutist principles, Johnson was frequently compared to a despotic ruler in his own right (during a period in which servants of the East India Company, including Hastings, were redefining Britain’s imperial rule, so as to displace local ‘despots’ by claiming their power). For all the ways he has appeared, for admirers and critics alike, to uphold an identification between personal and political authority, then, Johnson’s writings and wider authorial persona also became a site at which that relationship was thrown into question. The French Revolution gave these questions added urgency and dramatically heightened stakes. L E V I AT H A N I N T H E 1 7 90 S : W I L D D E M O C R AT S A N D WAY WA R D P R E RO G AT I V E S The threats to political authority posed by domestic upheaval and the American rebellion in the 1760s and ’70s ultimately proved short-lived. By the time that the Gordon Riots erupted in 1780, the fears of further unrest ultimately served to prop up the existing ministry.58 In both the fulfilment and the continuation of the retroactive linkage that Johnson had made between the American crisis and Wilkite unrest in the publication of his 1776 Political Tracts—in which the earlier domestic unrest was presented as prophetic of the subsequent colonial crisis, with challenged stability at home leading by implication to outright rebellion abroad—the American Revolution in turn reinforced the need for a return to stable authority at home. This was also a period of dramatic imperial restructuring. In the decades following Johnson’s death in 1784, the British state consolidated new levels of power, as its recently expanded claims over both swathes of global territory and a diverse array of foreign subjects solidified into robust and enduring forms of authority.59 The decade following the American Revolution represented a ‘remarkable 58 See G.  H.  Guttridge, English Whiggism and the American Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 125; Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 174–5. Compare Stephen Conway, British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 158. For the ‘proto-revolutionary’ character of the Gordon Riots—in addition to their bigotry and violence—and their significance during subsequent decades, see The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, eds. Ian Haywood and John Seed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially the introduction and chap. 10, Susan Matthews, ‘Mad Misrule: The Gordon Riots and Conservative Memory’. 59 See C.  A.  Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); Gould, The Persistence of Empire; P.  J.  Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); P. J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: the United States and the British Empire after American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Maya Jasonoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

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period of transition’ as British power ‘bounced back to an astonishing extent’ from its defeat in the American colonies and ‘regrouped, expanded, and reshaped itself across the world’.60 The onset of the French Revolution further transformed the political landscape, with pointed implications for the English polity. The body politic came newly into focus, amidst these changes, as a threatening new presence in its own right. As Kevin Gilmartin has shown, emerging conceptions of the ‘democratic urban Leviathan’ in the early nineteenth century transposed what Hazlitt termed the ‘scaly finger of Mr. Hobbes’ Leviathan’ into a figure for ‘a collective public body capable, on its own terms, of promoting civic obligation and political identity’.61 This proto-democratic figure could equally be conscripted for the counter-revolutionary cause. Robert Southey’s essay on ‘Popular Disaffection’ cast the mob as a monstrous outgrowth of the body politic, which his poem on the death of George III presented as a multi-faced demon equivalent to Satan himself.62 Although Johnson died several years before the fall of the Bastille, he was seen, both by friends and by antagonists, as having anticipated the French Revolution. Based on the hostility to proto-democratic energies voiced across Johnson’s political writings and the remarks recorded and circulated by Boswell, we have good reason to believe Johnson would have responded to the unleashing of popular energies and widespread unrest with horror. Lock’s paraphrase of the 1771 pamphlet Thoughts on Falkland’s Islands helpfully ventriloquizes Johnson’s views in his political writings more widely: ‘Popular agitation should [. . .] be ignored—indeed, repressed—for it does not genuinely represent the people. Rather, it merely echoes the lessons that they have learned by rote from unscrupulous demagogues [. . . T]he remarkable degree of popular interest and participation in politics that characterizes the British system may be not, as is sometimes supposed, its strength and its glory, but its weakness, and the most probable cause of its decline. Popular discontent is mostly ill informed and unjustified.’63 In the 1790s, demands for popular sovereignty acquired increased conceptual weight and public legitimacy. The emerging counter-revolutionary movement thus needed to locate appeals to national cohesion and support for ‘Church and King’ on a newly renovated footing in the face of radical and extra-parliamentary challenges. Yet while Johnson’s own opposition to discontent was in line with a broadly conservative position—like that advanced in Southey’s appeals against ‘Popular Disaffection’—his belief in unquestioned 60 Jasonoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 11. 61 ‘Where Hobbes has been said to have turned the more democratic ideas of the parliamentarians of his day against themselves,’ Gilmartin continues, ‘Hazlitt wants to turn the argument yet again, and his democratized Leviathan—as well as his sense of a less “despotical” Hobbes—gains some credibility from recent claims that the theory of representation advanced in Leviathan actually “points the way forward to the more democratic forms of representation that were to follow.” ’ William Hazlitt: Political Essayist, 243–4, quoting David Runciman, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of Representation: Anti-Democratic or Proto-Democratic?’, in Political Representation, eds. Ian Shapiro, Susan  C.  Stokes, Elisabeth Jean Wood, and Alexander S. Kirshner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 16. 62 Malcolm Kelsall notes the parallel between Southey’s poem and ‘On the Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection’, in which Southey had made reference to the influence of ‘the Devil, whose name is Legion’, behind events including the Gordon Riots and the French Terror. See Byron’s Politics (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987), 121–2. I return to this figure in Chapter 6. 63 Lock, ‘ “To Preserve Order and Support Monarchy” ’, 184–5.

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sovereign authority was surprisingly at odds with these changing norms, as was his wider public persona. The relationship between Johnson’s staunch views and his personal dogmatism became particularly apparent, as we have seen, in his remarks on not having someone so much as wag a finger in the face of a government representative: an instance in which Johnson deliberately formulated views in the most extreme and shocking terms. These rigid, increasingly out-of-step conceptions of authority converged with the instability attributed to his wider authorial persona. Johnson’s factious tendencies and immoderate tempers—as was the case in McFingal and Anecdotes of the Learned Pig—were shown to infuse his political writings no less than records of his private conversations. These developments converge in a satirical newspaper sketch entitled ‘On Power and Prerogative’, published shortly after The Life of Johnson. Making pointed use of changing representational norms and the swirling unrest unleashed during the early 1790s, this satire tellingly elaborated existing lines of critique against Johnson and his conciliatory biographer. Interrupting a discussion of hereditary right commenced by ‘Bozzy’, Johnson proclaims that any such right was ‘done away’ by the Revolution of 1688: ‘King William had no more right to the crown than you or I, or any other man in the kingdom’, Johnson asserts, concluding that ‘a King is no King but by a fiction of law’.64 The line of James II continued to exist and therefore the crown was passed on according to a ‘principle of election’ established at the Revolution. Although Parliament had tied itself in knots, determining whether James had abdicated or forfeited his throne, that discussion (like ‘the dissertation we are on’) was ‘mere logomachy and nonsense’. As Johnson explains: ‘Sir, the voice of a nation had no more to say, than that they did not choose James should continue their King; and as to the right of the people to abridge the prerogative, they possess it by an imprescriptible principle.’ Johnson was made to recognize the de facto power claimed by William and his successors here, as well as its basis in popular resistance. As the sketch goes on, the implications of the position that Johnson had been drawn into holding became all too apparent. ‘Sir,’ Johnson continues, ‘we make Kings, we endow Kings, and we pay Kings. All power belongs to the people, to modulate, reform, as we please; and all those powers which are found publick evils ought not to exist.’ Taken aback, Boswell replies: ‘do you say, Sir, that the powers of the crown are mutable; nay, totally annihilable, if the common necessity should demand it?’ Johnson concurs, adding that the present king’s prerogative, if deployed arbitrarily, would call to be annulled and noting that ‘[w]hether the powers of the present date, delegated to Majesty, be good or bad, must be drawn from experience’ and from ‘reasonings on possible and probable cases’. The dialogue concludes by having Johnson predict that ‘there will shortly be great things done in France’ against despotic powers whose unprincipled and oppressive laws ‘must produce something’. For all its apparent distortions of Johnson’s core views—making the Tory advocate for established power a Whig or even radical supporter of popular resistance—this sketch was in line with at least some of Johnson’s stated political convictions. 64 ‘Johnson and Bozzy, On Power and Prerogative.’ Boswell Collection, P107.7.

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Johnson became ‘firmly attached to the present Royal Family’ in the reign of George III, Hester Thrale noted, tellingly adding that this was ‘not from change of Principles, but difference of Situations’ and that Johnson was ‘as zealous that this King should maintain his Prerogatives, as if he belonged to the exiled Family’.65 Johnson believed in the ‘utility of monarchical power’, Boswell similarly noted, but was far from supporting the dethroned Stuart monarchs. Johnson had conceded the necessity of the 1688 regime change, even as he remained invested in a single unquestioned source of authority. These concessions created openings in his political thought, however, which the newspaper satire cannily exploited. The recognition of contractual monarchy, amidst the political and representational shifts of the 1790s, came, in all senses, with radical associations. As the sketch continued, the implications of the position that Johnson had been drawn into holding—by accepting the de facto authority of George III and thus that of his predecessors, the first two Hanoverian kings, Queen Anne, and William of Orange and wife Mary—become all too apparent. Johnson was made to appear sympathetic not only with those challenging the foundations of the post-1688 constitutional settlement but with emerging demands for its outright dissolution. The contrast with his stated commitment to unquestioned authority and the right of government to silence all dissent could not be more pronounced. Johnson was, of course, far from adopting the approving stance towards popular resistance—and the belief that ‘[a]ll power belongs to the people’—attributed to him here. To the contrary, he had a horror of the crowd, an unmitigated repulsion for the clamouring demands of politics driven by the ‘mob’. Far from believing in the rights of the people, Johnson believed they should be ignored. The twists of the satirical knife in this sketch underscore the fundamental transitions within English political thought and culture in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes had described a polity ruled— and thereby constrained—by a single undisputable sovereign, formed through a compact for self-preservation. But in the period following the French Revolution, the body of the people had emerged as a version of the ‘Leviathan’ in its own right. Despite his suspicion of Hobbes’s supposed unorthodoxy—expressed in his disdain for such atheistic ‘Hobbists’ as David Hume—Johnson’s political thought was fundamentally Hobbesian, maintaining that ‘[i]n sovereignty there are no gradations.’66 In his repeated disdain for the ‘rabble’ (a term that appears in all four of his political tracts),67 Johnson voiced horror at the prospect of popular political agitation, most of all the prospect of rule by the people was altogether beyond the pale. Yet Johnson’s distance from increasingly prominent demands for popular sovereignty, as the author of the sketch ‘On Power and Prerogative’ recognized, could not be guaranteed. As in his account of a situation in which not one man ‘wagged 65 Quoted in Kaminski, ‘The Nature of Johnson’s Toryism’, 12. 66 Taxation No Tyranny, 423. In addition to the questionable ascription of atheism to the author of Leviathan, which contains an entire book on the ‘Christian Common-wealth’, Johnson and Hobbes were not that dissimilar in separating the realms of matter and spirit. For Johnson’s fideism in the Vanity of Human Wishes, see the essay on that poem in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Christine Gerrard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 258. 67 Lock, ‘ “To Preserve Order and Support Monarchy” ’, 183n.27.

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his finger’ against the government, Johnson vehemently upheld established authority against the rights of the people to withdraw their consent and demand accountability (rights that even Edmund Burke conceded in some measure). In his begrudging acceptance of the 1688 Revolution, the sketch suggested that Johnson had nonetheless conceded the contractual basis of governance, its foundation in the consent of the people. By carrying this view to its logical conclusion, the dialogue thereby led Johnson into a reversal of his actual views: converting a dogged adherent of established authority into an unqualified supporter of popular sovereignty, a servant of the king into a champion of the mob. This sketch also aligned with partisan attacks against Johnson that cast his support for the king as craven or rooted in rank hypocrisy. Echoing earlier critiques of his pension from George III, Johnson followed his remarks on the outbreak of unrest in France here by noting: ‘I am paid by the King [. . .] I shall make no comments on our own Constitution.’ At the same time, this satire went beyond the terms of established partisan critiques. Through its adept ventriloquism of the uncompromising vehemence and curt dismissals with which Johnson articulated his views—as these views were rendered in the ‘scenes’ of dialogue with which Boswell anchored the Life of Johnson—this sketch further implicated Johnson’s reputation as a literary figure. The obsessive, even borderline unhinged attachment that Johnson maintained to an unquestionable source of legitimate power (and which the sketch mischievously demonstrated could equally become attached to popular sovereignty) was inextricable from his literary identity. And that included his identity as an author and as a personality in his own right: what Johnson termed literary ‘character’. The fixation with undivided authority maintained in statements of his political views, that is to say, was in an uncertain relationship with his own identity as a literary writer. And this attachment to ‘prerogative’ thereby became a complex double for his own assumed ‘power’ as an author. Yet Johnson’s commitment to archaic conceptions of sovereign ‘prerogative’ not only clashed, as had been the case during preceding decades, with evolving conceptions of state power. In the wake of the French Revolution, they risked setting him more wildly at odds with the changing face of British authority. Boswell would in turn set out to ameliorate these tensions, in line with his own more careful accommodation with a changed political world. B O S W E L L’ S ‘ WA R M ’ TO RY I S M Although the period around the American War saw ‘Tory’ identity become incoherent and ineffective, these decades also saw the origins of what this study will term the ‘late Toryism’ that fully took hold in the early nineteenth century. Boswell provides a valuable guide to this shift, in ways that in turn illuminate his composition of The Life of Johnson. Boswell observed that he had ‘all Dr Johnson’s principles’ but ‘with some degree of relaxation’.68 Although he asserted that he and 68 Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Peter Levi (London: Penguin, 1984), 183.

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Johnson were ‘both Tories; both convinced of the utility of monarchical power’,69 his views nonetheless diverged from those of Johnson, most notably on the subject of America. Following the scene in 1781 where Johnson had dismissed arguments in favour of the American War, Boswell wrote that this ‘boisterous vivacity entertained us’ but added that those who could ‘understand the best were against the American war, as almost every man now is, when the question has been coolly considered’.70 In contrast with Johnson’s belief in undivided sovereignty, Boswell was amenable to reconceptualizing Britain’s Atlantic Empire as what Eliga Gould characterizes as ‘a confederation of sovereign states bound together, not by Parliament’s unlimited authority, but by allegiance to a common monarch’.71 In a letter to Burke, Boswell identified himself as a ‘warm tory’ and noted that ‘the power of the crown, which I wish to increase, would be greater when in contact with all its dominions than if “the rays of regal bounty” were to “shine” upon America through that dense and troubled body, a modern British parliament’.72 Boswell thereby looked ahead to the liberal imperialism, anchored by constitutional monarchy, that provided an ‘enduring framework for the principles and practice’ of British global rule in the century to come.73 This was, in important respects, a more malleable conception of royal power, albeit one whose authoritarian streak was pronounced (in ways fully compatible with Boswell’s sentimental views on population and land management). The Life of Johnson thus marked Boswell’s distance from the past, as occupying the vantage point from which the American Revolution could be ‘coolly considered’ and in which Toryism need not take such robust and unilateral guises. At the same time, Boswell’s malleable Toryism located him in proximity to several interlocking shifts associated with the leadership of William Pitt the younger and the conservative reaction to the French Revolution. The political uncertainty that loomed in the background to Johnson’s remarks at the end of his life (and which had created Dick’s calls for a new ‘Dictatorial Power’) issued in a full-blown constitutional crisis shortly thereafter following a dramatic intervention in ministerial politics by George III that launched Pitt to power, at the head of a resurgent Toryism.74 Two years before the publication of The Life of Johnson, at a dinner celebrating the Lord Mayor, Boswell delivered a song entitled ‘The Grocer of London’, in which he celebrated Pitt’s unifying leadership: Fell Faction be quiet, and clamour no more, Against Government, Law, and the times; Our glory in triumph, from shore sounds to shore; There’s both reason and truth in my rhymes. Let no dark suspicion our bosoms invade, And make gloomy November more dull, 69 Quoted in Kaminski, ‘The Nature of Johnson’s Toryism’, 48. 70 The Life of Johnson, 4.81. 71 The Persistence of Empire, 134. 72 Quoted in Guttridge, English Whiggism and the American Revolution, 62. 73 Jasonoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 11–13. 74 I discuss the implications of Pitt’s leadership for changing Tory conceptions of authority at greater length in Chapter 5.

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There’s a Grocer of London who watches our trade, And takes care of th’estate of John Bull.

‘The encores and acclamations with which this State Ballad was received [. . .] evinced in the strongest manner, the confidence with which his country repose in the wisdom of Mr. Pitt’, one account recorded. Boswell similarly aligned himself with the counter-revolutionary mobilization against popular radicalism in the 1790s. He claimed to have been ‘one of the earliest of the Associates at the Crown and Anchor’, the tavern at which the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers was formed. He was sent a brick from the house of Joseph Priestley, which was attacked by ‘Church and King’ mobs. Boswell, more than merely a passive onlooker in the emergent counter-revolutionary movement, also adopted something closer to an activist role. In November 1792, he ‘met with the Attorney-General in the Court of Requests, and asked him with some warmth why the fellows calling themselves the Society for Constitutional Information were not prosecuted for seditiously advertising for subscriptions to support the French in their efforts for liberty—in truth for overturning all order’.75 Earlier that month, he warmly commended his son for publishing a letter in response to attacks on Edmund Burke’s Reflections.76 The following day, he met with friends with whom he ‘talked with earnestness of the seditious exertions in Britain, founded on a wild approbation of the proceedings in France’. They agreed, he continued, in thinking ‘that it was the duty of our Government to take speedy and vigorous measures to check such sedition and not suffer it to increase and strengthen, and Windham thought that men of this way of thinking should meet prudently and concert what ought to be done’.77 In April 1794 he wrote to his son that the Court of Judiciary had done well with the ‘Seditious rogues’ and was convinced that ‘French doctrines’ had ‘very much abated’ in England—‘and no wonder’, he added in relief. The factious political atmosphere following the French Revolution—Boswell noted in the previous remarks that he ‘felt as if in the reign of Charles I’78—gave demands for emboldened authority greater currency. The increasingly tight connection between Boswell’s vehement assertion of ‘Tory’ principles and his involvement 75 Boswell: The Great Biographer, eds. Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 198. 76 Boswell: The Great Biographer, 192. In that letter, Boswell junior had taken on ‘a romantick Gentleman’ who had ‘endeavoured to show his penetration, by denouncing the Champion of Chivalry (as he calls him) as being, by his Reflections on the late Revolution in France, inimical to the interests of this country; and then proceeds—“the consequence is well known, and even to be bewailed. This nation, which had no real concern, was whirled into the vortex of French politicks.” I would ask this Gentleman what he means by “whirled into the vortex of French politicks.” Does he mean that a surprising event in a neighbouring kingdom, which had attracted the gaze of all Europe, was made an object of literary discussion? Or is it most probable he means that Paine’s answer (a work now universally and deservedly despised for the ridiculous sophistry it contains) has broached some doctrines which may be of pernicious consequences: but in my opinion, the shoals of addresses, which congratulated our Sovereign upon his well-timed Proclamation against seditious writings, under which denomination Paine’s doctrines ought to be included, clearly demonstrate what success such doctrines are likely to have.’ Boswell Collection, P22 77 Boswell: The Great Biographer, 193. 78 Boswell: The Great Biographer, 193.

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with counter-revolutionary political movements reveals how what he termed the ‘wild’ and anarchic events in France strengthened arguments for repressive authoritarianism, lodging its operations in a wider edifice of state power than monarchy per se. The convergence between counter-revolutionary mobilization—as steered by Pitt’s government, which became the watchword for repressive policies—and an enhanced emphasis on royalist-oriented authoritarianism marked the beginnings of the ‘Tory’ resurgence. Yet as much as he illuminates these shifts, helping in particular to reveal their continuity with earlier strains of absolutist thinking, Boswell was himself an inconsistent figure, whom Burke observed had ‘the art of reconciling contradictions beyond any man’.79 Boswell’s song marks the emerging alignment of Pitt (whose upstanding reputation became central to a wider conservative emphasis on duty) with ‘John Bull’ nationalism. At the same time, Boswell’s emphatic royalism, enthusiasm for authoritarian rule in the Indian subcontinent, and opposition to abolition made him an at-times awkward fit with Pitt’s middleclass identity and reformist agendas. That much became particularly apparent in Boswell’s ill-fated attempts to impress the statesman with a poem in favour of the slave trade. Boswell maintained that his Toryism was such that—rather than having the constitution be ‘beat and brush’ into a new guise—he would have it ‘grow dusty, so as at least to have the appearance of being old’. He was thereby in synchrony with a larger attempt to reconstitute ‘Tory’ authority on a revised basis. In his support for Warren Hastings, Boswell was arguably more aligned with modern ‘conservatism’ than Burke (who doggedly waged war on Hastings’ corruption); his ‘warm’ Toryism sheathed an often ruthlessly absolutist view of imperial power along with his defence of slavery. Burke’s personal idiosyncrasies and sentimental excesses made him, as Chapter 4 will show, an outlier from larger political trends and set him at odds in particular with more rigid conceptions of his conservative reputation. For very different reasons, Boswell similarly stood at odds with various facets of his age, even as he was ultimately successful in steering his way around the cultural transformations and political ferment of the Romantic age. Before looking at how Boswell wrangled the unruly figure of Johnson into shape, turning briefly to his treatment of Johnson’s engagement with Warren Hastings in the Life will illuminate the role of his own political commitments in shaping the composition of that biography, as well as its acute responsiveness to the changing political environment (and its imperial correlatives). As with the Gordon Riots, this episode provides a further illustration of the ways The Life of Johnson was inflected by its post-1789 political moment; at the same time, the account of this interaction, in which Boswell sought to present his subject and the notorious Governor-General of Bengal as kindred spirits, reveals how that work’s depiction of Johnson was shaped, if not distorted, by its author’s own authoritarian views (even as the more extreme aspects of those views were increasingly assimilated to more broadly palatable modes of national and imperial governance). In a letter to Hastings reproduced by Boswell, Johnson acknowledged that he could be of little assistance with ‘political information’, being at a remove from ‘great men’, but 79 Burke quoted in Boswell: The Great Biographer, 37.

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expressed his hope that Hastings, a famed orientalist, would find the leisure to ‘enquire into many subjects’. The Life of Johnson contains repeated instances of Johnson’s acts of kindness and patronage. Yet Hastings had come to represent the opposite of these virtues. In his famous speech attacking the East India Company, for example, Burke depicted him as an aloof tyrant. Johnson cannot so easily be kept distinct from Hastings, whom he knew and admired from an earlier acquaintance.80 Johnson had limitations to his thinking about colonial power, which intersected with the irresponsible detachment that Burke attacked in Hastings. Yet while critics have attributed Johnson with sympathies for imperialism, that characterization applies far more readily to the shaping of this account by Boswell than to the scattered contents of these exchanges themselves. Writing at the moment of Hastings’s impeachment, Boswell flew in the face of the spectacular trial then being mounted by Burke and others to score a partisan point in describing Hastings as ‘a man, the extent of whose abilities was equal to that of his power; and who, by those who are fortunate enough to know him in private life, is admired for his literature and taste, and beloved for the candour, moderation and mildness of his character’. In his unctuous praise for Hastings, Boswell anticipated the subsequent conflation of cultural stewardship and colonial paternalism (not least in accounts of governance in India as upheld by men who saw themselves as ‘statesmen guiding the destinies of an empire according to the lights of their own judgment’). While the notorious Hastings would need to be exorcised and denied a place in the ‘imperial pantheon’ for some time, P. J. Marshall notes, the ‘despotic administration’ he modelled continued to supply a durable and acceptable model of imperial rule in subsequent decades.81 Hastings was eventually recuperated in the domestic context, moreover, in tandem with the deepening of the late Toryism of the early nineteenth century. Among other ludicrous scenes, Robert Southey’s The Vision of Judgement (1820) staged an imagined rapprochement between Hastings and Burke as part of the ‘Tory’ vision of the reign of George III that attracted the ire of Lord Byron.82 Boswell’s treatment of Hastings had not only political implications but literary ones. In parallel with his efforts to have the revolutionary terror of the Gordon Riots and the literary ‘picture’ presented by Johnson balance out, culture and anarchy were here mirrored by culture and imperialism. In his book of that title, Edward W. Said discussed the ways that processes of culture often unthinkingly follow those of imperialism.83 Yet that powerful discussion presupposes the division between these realms that works of this immediate period, not least The Life of Johnson, were themselves instrumental in establishing. The shared enthusiasms between Hastings and Johnson included their exchanges of books, including The Lives of the Poets, in tandem with requests for information and administrative favours. The Life of Johnson reproduced the missive in which Johnson marked his 80 See Hudson, Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England, 213–19. Although I disagree with its implications, I am indebted to Hudson’s careful discussion of their engagement. 81 See Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, 227–8; 370. 82 See Chapter 6. 83 Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).

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distance from ‘great men’ with two further letters between him and Hastings— letters that, together, Boswell informs us, ‘form a grand group in my biographical picture’. This discussion follows directly from his extensive account of The Lives of the Poets. ‘While his reader’, Boswell wrote, continues to contemplate Johnson ‘in the splendour derived from his last and perhaps most admirable work, I introduce him with peculiar propriety as the correspondent of Warren Hastings’. Boswell was thus at the forefront of the emerging cultural logic by which an ascendant global ‘Tory’ agenda was perpetuated. Johnson’s own ‘forceful role’ in the evolution of an imperial mentality appears overstated by comparison.84 Johnson was at odds with Boswell’s efforts to assimilate him to the emergent literary domain (that came into focus, here, in tandem with the hardening of authoritarian rule), as The Life of Johnson considered as a whole makes apparent. T H E L I T E R A RY L E V I AT H A N ? W R A N G L I N G THE LIFE OF JOHNSON An ‘Ode’ written shortly after Johnson’s death in 1784 shows how quickly the unruly aspects of his political temperament and reputation were papered over. The recently deceased author appeared here not, like in McFingal, as a figure identified with ‘Faction’. Instead, Johnson appeared at the head of an angelic band of ‘Heavenly Guardians’ dispatched to prevent its triumph. Rival ‘Furies’, by contrast, discern an opening in the ascent of Johnson to heaven: Dead! dead’s the mentor of this impious age! Who now with infidels the war will wage? Or whom the bold presuming factious doom To dark oblivion and an early tomb! Smile, smile, my weaving sisters, smile; Discord shall reign throughout this isle.

These fiends vanquished, the poem concludes with a hovering pronouncement, set off in quotation marks: ‘ “Fam’d cliffs of Albion, mark this long farewell, / If faction dies, All, All, will yet be well!” ’ This injunction may either be attributed to Johnson or seen as issuing from the higher power with which he has joined.85 Johnson was imagined here as a ‘dying saint’. Yet the unity represented by his ‘bright example’ was conditional upon the erratic, unpredictable figure of Johnson himself retreating from view. Boswell sought to achieve a similarly daunting feat in his monumental biography. Examining how The Life of Johnson took shape and was received in relation to its political moment reveals how closely this work was marked by a changing political environment and by emerging conceptions of the ‘literary’ domain. Johnson stood at odds with these increasingly emphatic divisions;

84 Compare Hudson, Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England, 220. 85 An Ode on the Much Lamented Death of Dr. Samuel Johnson (London: J. Rozea, 1784).

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Boswell’s task was to patch together a figure amenable to this changed world and to hide the seams. On 29 November 1792, Boswell ‘gave a dinner, a kind of feast [. . .] upon the success’ of the first edition: ‘We drank “Church and King,” “Health and long life to the Life of Dr. Johnson,” “the pious memory of Dr. Johnson,” etc., etc.’86 This first toast echoed those increasingly rung out in support of the loyalist cause, aligning Boswell’s work directly with the counter-revolutionary movement. The Life of Johnson was sold in proximity to Burke’s Reflections and garnered early admirers, including George III (who was, Burke informed Boswell, affected with the merit of Boswell’s performance). The toasts of ‘Church and King’, ‘Health and long life to the Life of Dr. Johnson’, and ‘the pious memory of Dr. Johnson’ with which Boswell celebrated his biography helped steer this reception, braiding together Johnson’s piety with the assumed longevity of the biography—wishing ‘long life’ for the Life—and suggesting, no less than the ‘Ode’, that this rendering of Johnson could serve as totemic reminder of ‘Church and King’ sympathies, upholding both faith and authority. These hopes were nonetheless liable to being troubled by an encounter with the Life itself. As we have already seen, Johnson’s often erratic figure undermined appeals to his stable authority. The same went for his violently stated, indignant ‘Tory’ views, his dogged commitment to prerogative and absolute power (which had also led to the absurd conclusions highlighted in the dialogue with Mrs Knowles, where Johnson was mocked as the stand-in for a personified despotic state), and even his temperamental affinity with the unruly, incendiary impulses of the mob. Boswell would work to remove the sharp corners from Johnson’s views, locating them within increasingly distant and irrelevant debates, in the case of America, or chalking them up to eccentricity. At the same time, he subsumed Johnson within the more diffuse Toryism that became a necessary corrective to the recent unrest. Johnson was thus made to serve as a counterweight for the recent eruption of factious energies, a balm for the ongoing explosion of modern ills. The Life of Johnson, that is to say, sought to assimilate Johnson both to an emergent literary realm that aligned with broader national political harmony—and to an understanding of literature as having an active role in maintaining that sense of calm. Boswell’s multifaceted account of Johnson—depicting him in apparently contradictory lights, as stern, trenchant, and unforgiving yet also kind, sympathetic, and tender—captured competing aspects of his unique personality. Yet Boswell’s efforts to instrumentalize these tensions, so as to make Johnson at once a real-life individual and a kind of literary character, not to mention a national political icon, ran into difficulties. What Boswell had identified, in the context of the Political Tracts, as his ‘old Tory indignation’ promised, as we have seen, to overwhelm statements of his political views; they similarly promised to undo Boswell’s work in The Life of Johnson. Boswell sought to contain Johnson’s vehemence within a more congenial depiction of the author, assimilating him both to a version of his own ‘warm’ Toryism and to a sentimentalized literary domain. Yet precisely those 86 Boswell: The Great Biographer, 202.

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aspects of the Life that sought to affirm Johnson’s obdurate and unchanging character became, instead, those most liable to defy stable interpretation. In his vehemence and indignation, Johnson (as we have seen) risked appearing as both advocate and ambiguous proxy for an unhinged popular ‘Leviathan’. Johnson also undermined himself, subverting his own authority from within. As Frances Burney noted about Johnson’s exchanges with Sir Philip Jennings Clerk, the ‘very active and zealous’ opposition member who had prompted Johnson’s finger-wagging comment, ‘[m]en of such different principles [. . .] can not have much sympathy or cordiality in their political debates.’ Describing a ‘hot argument’ between them, however, she noted that Johnson ‘pursued him with unabating vigour and dexterity’, but having baffled him, ‘Dr. Johnson then, recollecting himself, and thinking, as he owned afterwards, that the dispute grew too serious, with a skill all his own, suddenly and unexpectedly turned it to burlesque.’87 As  W.  J.  Bate similarly remarks, the ‘exactness with which Johnson senses motives, blows them up, and then punctures them after edging them into the absurd’ were based upon an ability to undercut his self-perception (grounded in his ‘latent sense of the comic’).88 As much as Johnson was fervently animated by politics and his own assumed powers as an author, he could also quickly move to minimize the importance both of politic debates and of his own authority. Where Boswell sought to reconcile his subject’s respective faces, in line with his own political views and literary ambitions, Johnson’s authorial persona equally registered an incompatible break between the literary and the political—particularly apparent in these lurches between grandiosity and triviality—that became similarly apparent in his biographer’s efforts to hold apart but also harmonize these domains. The resulting tensions within Boswell’s biography were apparent to some of his original readers. At the conclusion to ‘On Power and Prerogative’, a flustered Boswell continues to protest against the arguments his subject had been led into making, only to have Johnson respond: ‘Sir, we have talked enough of this—so let us talk about Tom Thumb—.’ As with the staccato all-silencing replies and related aspects of Johnson’s conversation as reproduced by Boswell and recapitulated across contemporary satires, this was a quintessentially Johnsonian switch. This swing between extremes was not merely an extension of an erratic personality; it was equally a function of Boswell’s treatment of his subject, which entailed downplaying Johnson’s more malignant prejudices and vehement opinions and massaging his own curt dismissals into scenes of dialogue like those this chapter has examined.89 The final switch at the conclusion of ‘On Power and Prerogative’, 87 Life of Johnson, 4.80n. 88 Compare James Gray, ‘Autor Et Auctoritas As: Dr. Johnson’s Views on the Authority of Authorship’, which notes that Johnson ‘regarded no author as an authority’ in ways that looped back upon, at once reinforcing and undercutting, his own self-presentation. René Wellek went so far as to suggest that Johnson, ‘while holding firm to the main tenets of the tradition of neoclassical criticism, constantly reinterprets them in a spirit for which it is difficult to avoid a term he could have hated: liberal’ (quoted by Gray, 283n.23). 89 See ‘Taming Johnson’, chap. 5 in Bruce Redford, Designing The Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For the shaping of The Life of Johnson, see also Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns

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from matters of state to the story of Tom Thumb, neatly simulates the abrupt change of topic familiar from Boswell’s reproduction of Johnson’s conversation. Yet in having Johnson make this Gulliver-like swing, from his dogmatic attachment to absolute sovereignty to his endearing preoccupation with the small, low, cute, and even absurd, the sketch equally captured the sudden shift of scales and frames of reference that has made attempts to render a conclusive assessment of Johnson, within and beyond The Life of Johnson, so challenging (an uncertainty that the sketch both confirms and compounds in its implied conflation of Johnson with ‘Tom Thumb’). Boswell sought to present a ‘single dynamic image’ of his subject in The Life of Johnson.90 He thereby located Johnson within a literary domain from which little appeal to a stable evaluative framework, or outside ‘reality’, was available. At the same time, this newspaper satire, in responding directly to the construction of Boswell’s biography, reminds us that the literary domain cannot be held at a safe or stable remove from politics. As with Bronson’s account of Johnson’s disposition as that of an ‘Enemy of the Established Order’, the newspaper sketch—which looked back to such depictions of Johnson’s erratic tendencies as Anecdotes of the Learned Pig and also responded to the contemporary work of ‘Bozzy’ on the biography— revealed how much reshaping on Boswell’s part this had involved: both of Johnson’s wayward tendencies and of his volatile earlier reputation.91 By framing Johnson, explicitly and more obliquely, as the means of protecting against the threat of dissolution into chaos, Deutsch proposes, The Life of Johnson lodged the ‘conservative’ political principles of its subject within the deeper practice of conserving in which Boswell’s biography was engaged.92 But cutting against that goal were powerful challenges. Johnson’s trenchant support for George III entailed increasingly vehement assertions of that monarch’s undisputed and undivided authority, even as hereditary claims to the rightful ownership of the throne became ever more attenuated. In an analogy with Jonathan Lamb’s account of ‘the exorbitant desire to own a thing absolutely’, Johnson’s ‘Toryism’ remained animated, if not overwhelmed, by the frustrated desire to own power in absolute terms.93 Hopkins University Press, 1989), 120–1 and ‘Boswell’s Treatment of Johnson’s Temper’. For Boswell’s treatment of Johnson’s extreme views and mood swings in the published journal of the pair’s Scottish tour as compared with the Life, see Radner, ‘Rewriting the Hebrides Trip (1785)’, chap. 16 in Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship, 301–14. 90 Redford, Designing The Life of Johnson, 7, quoting Ralph W. Rader, ‘Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell’s Johnson’. 91 For the erratic functioning of his body as a challenge to more idealized visions of Johnson, see Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson. 92 ‘I mean “conservative” here in its literal sense of saving: many Johnsonians—whether humanists or postmodernists—see themselves as conserving fundamental literary values (however those values might differ from one generation to the next) through their devotion to the figure of Johnson’ (Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson, 291n.43). For Johnson’s reputation in the nineteenth century, see Katherine Turner, ‘The “Link of Transition”: Samuel Johnson and the Victorians’, in The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century, eds. Francis O’Gorman and Katherine Turner (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004). 93 As Johnson had asserted, ‘all those who think a King has a right to his crown, as a man has to his estate, which is the just opinion, would be for restoring the King who certainly has the hereditary right, could he be trusted with it’. Quoted in Kaminski, ‘The Nature of Johnson’s Toryism’, 21. Compare Johnson’s claim, quoted by Jonathan Lamb in a discussion of the ‘despotic dominion’ that

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That desire coincided and contended with the other attachments and impulses that animated Boswell’s depictions. This overweening concern with undisputed sovereignty—in sovereignty, we recall, there can ‘be no gradations’—had a parallel psychological dimension. The implied equation between individual and political sovereignty comprised an important facet of the stabilized selfhood that took hold in the aftermath of the American War and French Revolution.94 Even from a ‘purely structural point of view’, as Leo Bersani has observed, ‘classical psychology vindicates authoritarian rule’ not only in its account of human nature as in need of discipline but also in ‘its images of a self whose very irrationality is part of its coherence—a coherence which lends itself ideally to psychological and social classifications (and control)’.95 The Life of Johnson presented, in its picture of Johnson, a telling instantiation of this dynamic—but also its potential undoing. The unquestioned authority of the ‘Tory’ Johnson, despite Boswell’s efforts, constantly gave way to a more fractured picture. As much as the voicing of his political views threatened to explode, with spikes of passion that risked puncturing Boswell’s appeals to a harmonious fabric of authoritarian sympathies, his commitment to politics equally promised to collapse, not least into the defiant triviality noted by the author of the sketch with its concluding turn to Tom Thumb. ‘How much better’, Johnson stated, in a similarly resonant addition to Boswell’s published journal of their tour to Scotland, ‘is the man who does nothing.’96 For all his own erratic tendencies and the inconsistencies noted by Burke, Boswell can be assimilated far more readily to emerging changes to governance at the onset of the nineteenth century. As a self-professed ‘warm tory’, his sentimental patriotism combined with ruthless authoritarianism to align him closely with the repressive counter-revolutionary atmosphere within Britain (as well as the emerging course of the British Empire). In subsequent decades, efforts to harmonize individual subjectivity with wider sources of national unity helped effect a larger transformation that in turn reimagined power and prerogative upon a wholly new basis. In Mansfield Park, I argue in Chapter 5, Jane Austen drew upon these reinvented conceptions of authority and the wider cultural and affective logics by which they were sustained. Yet her novels also remain animated by elements that threatened to Blackstone identified with property ownership, that ‘man is [. . .] in society, not fully master of what he calls his own’. While Johnson opposed entail—the abstracted assertion of ownership across time— the shadowy analogies with his views on monarchical power risk making him an advocate of Thomas Paine in his related claim that ‘I know not whether it be not usurpation to prescribe rules to posterity’. See Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 38, 6. 94 For the emergence of the ‘modern self ’ and consolidation of a disciplined, ‘sovereign’ subject position in the face of cultural and political alterity during this period, see Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) and Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 95 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 56. In highlighting their shared conformity to a ‘pervasive cultural ideology of the self ’, Bersani establishes continuity between Neoclassicism and the procedures of nineteenth-century realist fiction. 96 Johnson and Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 176.

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disrupt even as they promised to uphold reinvented sources of state authority and the supporting fabric of national sentiments. The presence of Johnson, one of Austen’s favourite writers, can be discerned throughout her writing, but this attachment may be discerned with particular force in Sense and Sensibility with one of her most memorable minor characters. Despite his wife’s increasingly desperate attempts to describe him as ‘droll’, the eminently Johnsonian Mr Palmer is sarcastic, dismissive, divisive—and plans to stand, we learn, as a Tory in parliament.

4 Burke, Edgeworth, and Ireland’s Discontents Among a collection of character sketches of lesser-known politicians clipped from the pages of two late eighteenth-century newspapers appears a striking description of William Baker.1 When ‘a gentleman was fairly and duly returned as the representative of any body of men’, one sketch quoted Baker as stating, ‘he was then, in the sentiments he might entertain concerning any parliamentary question, or state difficulty, to be governed by no other influence but the dictates of his conviction, and ought not to be directed by any other motive whatever, not even by the injunction of his constituents’.2 In his earlier attempt to represent the City of London, Baker had lost the election, the newspaper writer noted with a palpable lack of surprise, ‘by an obstinate adherence to his principles’. As the author went on to observe, with progressively raised eyebrows, Baker’s ‘rigid perseverance’ in these ‘alien notions of refinement’ had not gone over well with the citizens of London, proving ‘neither very intelligible nor acceptable to the majority of the electors’. ‘Without attempting to decide whether this doctrine is, in all respects perfectly orthodox or no’, the sketch diplomatically continued, it was ‘very certain that the fidelity with which Mr. Baker adhered to it, was an amiable indication of a resolute and determined mind, and the sacrifice he made to it a most uncommon instance of political integrity’.3 Baker shared this unalloyed belief in his own powers of judgement with a far better-known eighteenth-century politician: Edmund Burke. Contrary to his reputation, Burke was far from sealing off the parliamentary classes from the demands of the people. Rather than nullifying Burke’s earlier receptivity to the views of the wider populace, Andrew Franta contends, the critique of corresponding societies in Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France did not ‘contradict his prior acknowledgment of the importance of public opinion’ but depended upon the idea that the successful transmission of ‘general opinion’ (the ‘vehicle and organ of legislative omnipotence’, as Burke had termed it) had been interrupted by the ‘fraudulent misrepresentations’ made by such groups as the Society for Constitutional Information and Revolution Society.4 Where Franta still sees Burke 1 ‘Parliamentary Characters’. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, MSS Vol. 109 features character sketches that appeared in the anti-ministerial Public Ledger and English Chronicle for 1779 and 1780–1 respectively. 2 MSS Vol. 109, 3 (emphasis added). 3 MSS Vol. 109, 3. 4 See Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 31, 26 (emphasis original).

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as suspicious about the status of ‘public disturbances as a legitimate part of the process of reform’, David Bromwich suggests he was not perturbed by the ‘sound of breaking glass’ (while acknowledging that democracy had ‘no attraction’).5 In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), Burke steered a middling course, sifting legitimate sources of discontent apart from noisy, prospectively violent unrest. Burke nonetheless maintained the centrality of the adjudicating role played by his own party—and, in Baker’s words, the ‘dictates of his conviction’. Burke voiced progressively sharpened fears about the forces that Samuel Johnson had described in horror as the ‘rabble’ and that Southey would subsequently term ‘popular disaffection’—not least in his infamous remarks on the ‘swinish multitude’ in his diatribe against the French Revolution. More pertinently for his longerterm parliamentary reputation, the political elite (his own grouping of the Whigs in particular) maintained a privileged role in his thinking. How, precisely, public demands were to be mediated—and how upstanding members of parliament like Burke and Baker were to channel the demands of the ‘people’—were questions that the early reign of George III and the movement around Wilkes brought to a head. Johnson’s defence of undisputable sovereign authority made him a lightning rod during the American conflict; growing extra-parliamentary discontent around archaic political structures similarly inflected the reception of Tristram Shandy, while informing Sterne’s writing more widely. The French Revolution, as we began to see with Boswell’s Life of Johnson, sent these concerns into overdrive, as the political establishment was challenged by new conceptions of popular sovereignty and the body politic. This and the following chapters move this book further into the Romantic period and show these developments taking firmer hold; at the same time, they develop an increased emphasis on literary form. The novel provided writers with unique mechanisms for representing, navigating, or otherwise managing the demands of diverse political constituencies—and what Burke had termed the ‘Present Discontents’. But while the novels by Edgeworth and Austen examined here engage quintessentially ‘Burkean’ concerns with the transmission of inherited order and conservative structures of feeling, one core aim of these chapters will be to complicate this designation, beginning with the complexities of Burke’s own thinking—and what we might term his political character. The collection of newspaper clippings that included the account of Baker’s ‘uncommon’ integrity and resolution played an incidental but pivotal role in the writing of British political history. This ‘scrap-book’ was owned by Lewis Namier, the celebrated political historian who spearheaded the writing of the History of Parliament in the mid-twentieth century. Namier made ‘extensive use’ of this source in compiling the biographies that comprised the history’s volumes for the  later eighteenth century and also drew upon this collection (given the title ‘Parliamentary Characters’ by its original compiler) for a lecture in which he argued that the ‘Tories’ and organized partisanship more generally were displaced in the 5 Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public, 31; David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 173.

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later eighteenth century by a group of ‘country gentlemen’ recognized for and defined in large part by their ‘disinterested independence’.6 Namier convincingly established that former ‘Tories’ were no longer bound to vote with the ministry, but he was less successful in establishing that these men were free to act independently of perceived partisan alignments. Sir John Hynde Cotton, to give one example from many, was described in the ‘Parliamentary Characters’ as a ‘rank Tory in principle’, who ‘gets a dinner now and then from Lord North’ and ‘is never so happy as when he can give a vote that tends to increase the influence of the Crown’, while the ‘Tory’ William Bromley Chester obtained an ‘expensive’ seat in a contested election and now found himself ‘perfectly dependent on the Minister’.7 Although not always this explicit, these biographical sketches of ministerial supporters depicted them (in ways that often closely resemble critiques of Johnson) as servile, easily bribed, unthinkingly loyal, willing to contradict themselves, affected, and, not infrequently, fat.8 By contrast, those who voted with the opposition were presented as disinterested, unbiased, and fair-minded in their judgements and generally more open, honest, and affable than their counterparts in their dispositions. Namier’s claim that the votes of ‘country gentlemen’ were determined by individual conviction thus proves doubly problematic. Far from being a sign of independence, that ‘conviction’ was particularly attached, as putting the account of Baker’s ‘uncommon’ integrity alongside the other sketches makes clear, with members of the Whig opposition. In line with his wider rejection of partisanship and the organizing role of parliamentary parties, Namier portrayed independent parliamentarians aligning with the ministry or opposition as their own judgement dictated. But in these sketches, independence was the product of already belonging to the Whig side. As fuller attention to Namier’s base of evidence reveals, conviction was not prior to but produced by and articulated within larger social, cultural, and discursive contexts, including the political culture in which these identities were formulated and the specific forms through which those identities were represented and described. Namier drew in particular detail upon the sketch of Richard Wilbraham Bootle, MP for Chester, which described him as ‘one of the most independent Members in the House’: ‘He attaches himself to no party, but is governed in the vote he gives, by the unbiased suggestions of his judgment, and the fair operation of that influence only which originates in the several arguments he hears . . .’9 The original sketch went on, however, to provide a clear partisan context for his actions: ‘If he has intimated any particular tendency, or apparent partiality to either part of the house, it has been, of late, towards the side of opposition, with whom he voted in all the great questions which were agitated in the last session of the old parliament.’10 6 See Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–1790, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 1.xv; ‘Country Gentlemen in Parliament, 1750–84’, in Namier, Personalities and Powers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 60. 7 MSS Vol. 109, 12, 9. 8 Charles Ambler, for example, is described as ‘one of the heaviest and most steady of Lord North’s phalanx’ (1, emphasis original). 9 Quoted in Namier, ‘Country Gentlemen in Parliament’, 61 (ellipsis original). 10 MSS Vol. 109, 5.

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Namier appealed to the ‘unbiased’ judgement attributed here to Bootle as evidence of his disinterested independence. Yet as the fuller sketch made clear, this was not an a priori truth about Baker and other politicians that acted in supposed ‘independence’ of partisan alignments but a retroactive attribution informed by his Whig credentials. Whigs not only showed good judgement: their being Whigs was constitutive of that judgement in the first place. As Elaine Hadley has shown, the kinds of cognition and performed selfhood associated with Liberal politics were bound up, for example, with the frame of mind presented by anonymous newspaper leaders or the types of conviction shaped at the ballot box.11 The forms of politics were thus inextricably bound up with the forms of life. During the later eighteenth century, the ‘Parliamentary Character’ attributed to Baker similarly located him within an emergent understanding of the politician’s role. At the same time, his ‘resolute and determined mind’ aligned him more directly with a political cult of conviction, in which Burke had a prominent, if vexed, role. This chapter looks to Burke, then, with a view to these larger questions about parliamentary roles and politicians’ relations with the constituencies they purported to represent. Burke’s idiosyncrasies made him a special case; the first half of the chapter examines in some detail the complications that attended his conflicted position within the English political elite—as a politically central yet socioeconomically marginal member of the Whig grouping associated with the wealthy Marquess of Rockingham. This chapter focuses in particular on Burke’s complex Anglo-Irish identity, as this was understood, not least by his critics, to animate his thinking about political affairs at home and abroad. Beyond the singularity of Burke himself, these discussions open up larger questions, about the proximity of what Burke termed the ‘Present Discontents’ in England to the deep histories of conflict and recent explosions of violence in Ireland. The early nineteenth century allows us to take up these questions in relation to an added source of complications: the aftermath of the Act of Union that followed the 1798 rebellion. The latter half of the chapter turns to Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee, whose various plot lines straddling England and Ireland converge upon a concluding tableau of stable governance that indirectly references the recent Union. As with Mansfield Park (the subject of Chapter 5), the emphasis on harmonious reconciliation between England and Ireland in The Absentee has been read in relation to ‘Burkean’ appeals to stability and challenges to revolutionary change. Yet this not only overlooks the complexities attending Burke’s political thought and reputation: it obscures and elides the deeper history of discontents and disaffected, recalcitrant impulses that animate Maria Edgeworth’s novel. Without overturning these broad characterizations of their conciliatory outcomes, we may introduce considerable complications to existing accounts of The Absentee and Mansfield Park beginning, as I show in this chapter, with a more complicated picture of Burke himself. Locating Edgeworth’s novel against a deeper history of Anglo-Irish discontents and a fuller account 11 Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). See also James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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of  Burke’s party-political career (during a period of particular interest to the Edgeworths)12 challenges conciliatory accounts of Edgeworth’s fiction that align her with the larger governmental shifts this book identifies with the transition into the nineteenth century; this approach particularly unsettles appeals to her fiction’s alignment with the impartial judgement and economically organized collective sympathies advocated by Adam Smith.13 Returning politics to view in the factious, contested, disaffected guises emphasized by this study allows us to cut against monolithic accounts of these novels, to recover altogether more uncertain and multifaceted relationships between these works and the political arena. Before proceeding to the details of Burke’s case and the histories of Anglo-Irish discontents as these pertain to the plotting of The Absentee, some broader questions are in order: about politics, the novel, and the unique contribution of female writers to thinking about the relationship between the two. WO M E N , P O L I T I C S , A N D T H E N OV E L In the History of Parliament, Namier employed the lives of individual politicians to narrate the wider political history of Britain. Yet he neglected the extent to which political history was already baked into the representations on which he drew. The larger processes and dynamics that concerned Namier—the social and political totalities that he sought to explain, in his master-plan for the History of Parliament, by narrating the biographies of individual MPs14—not only became apparent through the abstracted activity of individuals. They are also illuminated by sketches like ‘Parliamentary Characters’; the self-representations that parliamentary representatives, like Baker, provided to their constituents; and the forces dictating the construction of political identities in the first place. The relationships between the interlocking forms, in the expanded senses Hadley delineates, taken by these discourses and practices reveal principled convictions and political temperaments as inseparable from the wider political environment. As this chapter and Chapter 5 set out to demonstrate, Namier might equally have turned to the novel. Fiction allowed writers, this book ultimately argues, to cultivate oblique perspectives towards politics and uniquely removed stances with respect to the literary arena. But at the same time, novels remained at variable levels of proximity to political activity and discussion. In Harriet Guest’s valuable summary, novels participate 12 Burke emerged as a major party figure during the 1770s, a crucial decade, as Marilyn Butler notes, for the Edgeworth family. In ‘so many of her attitudes’, Butler observes, including her ‘attitude to the observation of character, Edgeworth goes back to the decade in which her father achieved intellectual maturity, the 1770s.’ Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 266. 13 For Cassidy Picken, Edgeworth’s Irish Tales represent ‘an aesthetic reconfiguration of Adam Smith’s ideas about the importance of land-rent to commercial exchange and economic development’, providing the basis for a ‘new poetics of national fiction’ that he lucidly teases apart from her work’s visions of reconciliation. ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Poetics of Rent’, ELH 83 (2016), 183. 14 See D. W. Hayton, ‘Sir Lewis Namier, Sir John Neale and the Shaping of the History of Parliament’, Parliamentary History 32 (2013).

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within debates that ‘cut across genres; they assume readers who are also immersed in periodical literature, in poetry, in histories, readers who discuss plays and parliamentary debates, who perform music, and peer into the windows of print shops’.15 This chapter and Chapter 5 attend to how novels engage, directly or otherwise, with the relationship between political representatives and the body politic; taking up the question of ‘character’, in both its political and fictional guises, I ask how these novels situate individuals amidst their political, social, and affective communities at local, national, and trans- or extra-national levels. That will entail some attention to how individual characters bear resemblances to specific historical personages.16 More specifically, it will mean attending to the broader question of how actions and conduct align with, or deviate from, the political systems and social networks in which individual characters operate. My discussion here of Edgeworth’s The Absentee asks how the protagonist of that work negotiates between his own English-formed identity and his encounters with the disorganized, even unruly scenes he witnesses in Ireland. That division stages larger questions, like those at stake in the depiction of Baker, about the relationship between political representatives and the demands of heterogeneous constituencies (while also looking to the added complications associated with spanning the respective sides of the AngloIrish divide, as Burke himself did, in both his political career and his private life). Chapter 5 focuses on England and deepens the discussion of feeling in this chapter beyond the limits and economic mobilization of social sympathies to the affective dimensions of the ‘Toryism’ organizing the national polity. The emphasis, in both these chapters, on discontents and recalcitrant impulses that resist monolithic governing structures might equally be extended outwards, calling attention to disjunctures (apparent in the problems of political representation endemic to Ireland) with implications across the wider Atlantic world and British Empire. On the one hand, then, my discussions of these novels will pay particular attention to the ways that, especially in the treatment of their male characters, their authors situate these works with respect to the political arena. The discussions of Edgeworth and Austen that follow make direct connections with Burke and his contemporaries, including attention to characters that resemble or are otherwise identified with Burke’s public persona or political thought (as well as the broader questions about channels of communication and harmonious sympathies for which 15 Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15. 16 For a study that argues for the centrality of historical details—specifically proper names—to Austen’s novels, see Janine Barchas, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Barchus draws on Donald J. Greene, ‘Jane Austen and the Peerage’, PMLA 68 (1953). These accounts draw intriguing connections between Austen’s novels and her apparent preoccupation with the family of the Wentworth line, which terminated in 1782 with the death of the Marquess of Rockingham (the long-standing and extremely wealthy patron of Edmund Burke). Greene makes the suggestive observation that, in Pride and Prejudice, the ‘quiet Tory daughter of a quiet Tory parson deliberately wants her readers to find in the arrogant possessors of the great Whig names of Fitzwilliam [successors to the Wentworth fortune] and D’Arcy a satire on an aspect of Whiggism most obnoxious to Pittite Tories’. I am less concerned here with ways these novels encode topical or historical political meanings than with how they call attention to the forms and affective structures of politics (in ways that may also have had immediate political implications).

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Burke became proxy). On the other hand, my accounts of these novelists are concerned with how they remained at a clear distance from politics. These chapters are especially concerned, like this book as a whole, with the ways their works occupied a complex remove from politics and the political arena. Both Edgeworth and Austen evidenced an acute awareness of evolving governing practices and shifting political moods. They belonged to a moment, moreover, in which their female contemporaries had begun to write ‘with a keen sense of the performance necessary to the construction of a professional identity as an “acknowledged author” ’ and when fiction by women in particular had begun to develop innovative ways of engaging political debates, even to the point of expanding their range.17 Yet they also stood apart—in ways that further align them, intriguingly, with each other: as writers estranged both from politics and from the increasingly high profile taken on by women’s writing. Edgeworth and Austen differed greatly, not least in their respective concerns with individual self-realization versus Christian fortitude.18 Yet they were also at a shared remove both from the emerging commercial marketplace for fiction and from the public sphere of political debate. This need not minimize their wider significance. Austen played a central role in shaping (increasingly rigid) conceptions of literary authorship, while the recovery of Edgeworth’s innovations to fiction have established her as one of the most important novelists of the period.19 Rather than attending to their eventual importance or influence in and beyond their moment, however, my emphasis here remains on examining their works as individual case studies: at once outliers within their own moments and more broadly representative of the estranged status of writing. My discussions here, that is to say, emphasize the ways that Austen and Edgeworth exemplified the ambiguous distance and ambivalent removes that this book identifies with the status of the literary, in the period examined by this book and beyond, as much as they set out to make these writers exemplary of women writers and the novel more widely. Another way to say this is that the primary reasons to read Austen and Edgeworth are not because they resembled other (female) writers but because they carved new pathways for literature, uniquely their own. 17 For the ‘keen sense’ of professional identity displayed by Opie, albeit ambivalently given her attraction to both political engagement and domestic retreat, see Guest, Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 152 (quoting Opie’s ‘Memoir’). By contrast, Edgeworth was worried that Professional Education (1808)— conceived and largely written by her but published in the name of her father—‘might attract criticism if it were known that a woman had so large a part in it’. Christina Edgeworth Colvin, ‘Richard Lovell Edgeworth’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 18 See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 221–2. 19 Clifford Siskin maintains that Austen’s elusive relationship to professional authorship was produced by the disciplinary invention of ‘Literature’ (a disciplinary procedure in which attention to her novels played a crucial role). See ‘What We Remember: The Case of Austen’, chap. 8 in The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). For Edgeworth’s relationship to the national tale and her influence upon (but also the eventual cooption and eclipse of her reputation by) Walter Scott, see Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

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In a revealing inscription, Edgeworth’s father located her writings at a pronounced remove from divisive political activity. ‘On this humble desk’, he noted, ‘were written all the numerous works of my daughter, Maria Edgeworth, in the common sitting-room of my family’; claiming that these works were ‘chiefly written to please me’, he added that his daughter had never ‘interfered with the opinions of  any sect or party, religious or political’.20 This claim was echoed in Practical Education, co-written by the Edgeworths, which ‘angled to appeal to readers without regard to “sect or party” ’.21 Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), author of The Wild Irish Girl (1806), had scandalized readers with her outspoken public identity and was similarly unabashed in her treatment of recent political controversies. Edgeworth by contrast was closely identified with moral conduct and the practicalities of political economy. In tandem with praise for her measured perspective on Irish questions, her works were celebrated, particularly within England, for their promotion of what would become the middle-class values of the nineteenth century and the seriousness of their ideas (leading Byron to describe her in Don Juan as a ‘walking calculation’).22 The writing of the Edgeworth family would accordingly seem to forsake the rowdy political discussion of the coffee-house for careful reading in the complete works of Adam Smith. Yet while claims about Edgeworth’s distance from factious political disputes, including her conspicuous distance from religious sectarianism,23 were valid in their broad strokes, they fail to tell the full story about her engagement with politics in her writing—not least given the ways that ‘politics’ had begun to change.24 As we saw in Chapter 1, the 20 Quoted in James Newcomer, Maria Edgeworth the Novelist, 1767–1849: A Bicentennial Study (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1967), 14. Richard Lovell Edgeworth was closely associated with networks, from the ‘Warrington Web’ to the Lunar Society, whose philosophical radicalism and Enlightenment principles helped displace the supposedly archaic political debates (for which Burke’s commitment to the post-1688 constitution became synonymous). Despite his limited involvement with the Irish House of Commons and the Volunteer movement of the later eighteenth century, ‘politics were never a major concern to a man whose primary interest was in education’. Colvin, ‘Richard Lovell Edgeworth’. He was also closely involved in emerging political-economic enterprises of manufacturing, consumer trade, and land management. 21 See Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 124–5. 22 Don Juan, 1.16.121. In Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93). At the turn of the nineteenth century, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall note in their seminal study, ‘[p]rogressive middle-class circles’ looked away from radical and Romantic alternatives, turning instead to the ‘less romantic and more practical world of Miss Edgeworth with her sound common sense and clear grasp of the practicalities of the everyday world’. See Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 160. As Claire Connolly observes, Edgeworth’s ‘reputation as an intellectual heavyweight’ earned her the scrutiny of the Edinburgh Review and periodical review culture more widely, in which ‘her morality regularly takes its place alongside nationality as an acknowledged critical criterion, the two together with gender forming a horizon of expectations’ against which her writing was measured. A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 137. 23 As Connolly notes, despite the ongoing conflation of her writings with an evangelical Protestant tradition, Edgeworth was upbraided, including by the Quarterly Review, for the absence of religion in her works. A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 137–9. 24 In her novel Patronage (1814), from which The Absentee in part derived, Edgeworth was more directly concerned with matters of state. Although critics disparaged her lack of direct knowledge, that book incorporates ministerial politics within a more panoramic overview of nineteenth-century society,

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‘political science’ presented in early nineteenth-century periodicals heralded the onset of the broader practices that Foucault termed governmentality. Edgeworth was closely aligned with this reorientation of governance around quantification and a broad ensemble of associated practices, helping in particular to foreground the role of gendered domesticity in these shifts (an emphasis anticipated in the title of Egeria, taken from the name of a nymph who advised the Roman king Numa in matters of statecraft). Lady Delacour anticipates the conflation between these developments in Edgeworth’s novel Belinda when she notes that she ‘married my lord Delacour, knowing him to be a fool’ but also ‘believing that, for this reason, I should find no trouble in governing him’.25 In ways Edgeworth’s fiction would emphasize again and again, the disciplining of the domestic or interpersonal sphere and the management of the wider population—concerns that came together, as Foucault emphasized, around ‘governing’—appear here as part of the same coeval process. We may thus already complicate the claims made both by her father and by Edgeworth herself about her estrangement from politics. Edgeworth’s attention to the domestic arena and her associations with emerging political-economic norms located her fictions at the heart of changing conceptions of political life, in ways that her father’s cloying remarks on her domestic confinement threaten to obscure. Irish history further imbued her fiction with complex political significance. Edgeworth’s fictions, as this chapter will go on to show, palpably register both recent convulsions and a deeper legacy of conquest and repression—questions that had taken on amplified significance since the 1790s and associated revolutionary ferment. The French Revolution dramatically reconfigured political horizons, particularly the affective contours of politics. Edgeworth’s association with the domestic arena thereby took on an overdetermined, complexly gendered role, particularly with a view to matters of feeling.26 The relationships between spheres in her work nonetheless remained frequently uncertain. As Belinda finds herself instructed by her guardian: ‘a young girl who has been brought up, and brought forward in the world as you have been by connexions, is bound to be guided implicitly by them in all her conduct. What should you think of a man, who, after he had been brought into parliament by a friend, would go and vote against that friend’s opinions.’ Together with Lady Delacour’s account of governing her husband, the emphasis here on the proximity of female conduct to surrounding spheres might seem to confirm that whose complex intersections between politics, emerging scenes of public and professional life, and gender Claire Connolly has discussed in ‘ “A Big Book About England?” Public and Private Meanings in Patronage’, in The Irish Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Facts and Fictions, ed. Jacqueline Belanger (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005). As Connolly notes, ‘Edgeworth’s desire to produce an account of public life that has women at its core means that the novel is driven to seek out a new structural model within which to shape relations between public and private spheres’ (64). Patronage, as its title suggests, has more to do with transitioning beyond the eighteenth century to middle-class norms rather than the continued intersections that concern me here. 25 Belinda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 37. 26 For Edgeworth’s greater concern with sensibility as compared with Morgan’s investment in sentiment, see James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 177.

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feminized, domestic conduct provide the foundation for national governance. Yet the prospective waywardness of masculine political activity (the parliamentarian who may or may not vote with the ‘opinions’ of his friend) equally introduces the potential for female waywardness: both through the unreliable partisanship that analogically threatens to infect the young Belinda’s conduct and through the instability of the analogy itself. What does it mean, after all, to expect a young untutored girl to model her own conduct on politicians whose reliability cannot be trusted in the first place?27 The same volatility attends Lady Delacour. For all the ways that she points to the home as a site of ‘governing’ subjects—in line with a capacious and supple understanding of domesticity—her own competing public and private identities establish her as an often unstable and destabilizing presence, associated in turn by the novel with still more erratic, even radical figures (including one clearly based on rabid anti-Jacobin fantasies about the gender-transgressing Mary Wollstonecraft). Ireland’s discontents would in turn foreground the role of feeling in perpetuating or ameliorating unrest, further complicating the relationships between spheres. Edgeworth was closely implicated, then, with the unstable relationship between social and political spheres, actual and fictional worlds, English governance and Irish unrest. At the conclusion of Belinda, moreover, the fourth-wall-breaking prominence taken on by Lady Delacour makes her a complex double for Edgeworth’s own elusive authorship (an indeterminacy paralleled, I will propose, in the connections between Austen’s wayward heroines and her authorial identity). None of this in itself need fundamentally revise existing conclusions about her distance from political contention. Despite her instrumental role in promoting the political science of the early nineteenth century and the broader emphasis in her writing on domestic spheres and managing populations, we might still agree with her father (notwithstanding his self-congratulatory claim that her works were ‘chiefly written to please me’) that Edgeworth’s works eschewed political division. The violent political disaffection of 1798 was an especially important context for her writing, not least for its role in precipitating the Act of Union. But Edgeworth’s writings might appear, above all, to propose ways beyond contention: by way of enlightened solutions to socioeconomic problems or through appeals to internal harmony. Chapter 5 will similarly emphasize and further elaborate upon the role of harmonious feeling in Austen’s conservatism. My aim in these chapters will not be to overturn claims about these baseline commitments to political stability and social order. Beginning with Edgeworth, I set out to emphasize the ways that both writers inevitably complicate and exceed attempts to contain the political significance of their authorship, remaining animated by political discontents and unstable disaffected energies. Although critics have recovered Edgeworth’s sophisticated interventions within wider governmental and moral shifts and her participation in other

27 Belinda, 85. For Edgeworth’s embrace of a ‘domesticity that is mobile’, ‘open to the public world’, and ‘accommodating, even welcoming, of foreign influence’, see Connolly, ‘ “A Big Book About England?” ’, 79.

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Enlightenment-era debates,28 they have risked obscuring those aspects of her writing that cut against these wider trends (including those ‘recalcitrant or inassimilable elements’, in David Lloyd’s phrase, that resisted containment both by state power and by nationalist narratives of progress).29 By attending to the disaffected elements that surface in her works as well as the more subtle clashes between governing frameworks (and the resulting representational surpluses, already apparent in these examples from Belinda), we return to view aspects of Edgeworth’s fiction that promise to exceed the careful orchestration of feeling on which both Smithian models of sympathy and Edgeworth’s carefully regulated feminism would appear to depend. When she made the cryptic instruction to ‘[l]ook for her’ in The Absentee,30 moreover, Edgeworth pointed to the elusive status of her own authorship, opening up new ways of thinking about the political status of her writing—and, together with Austen, the relationship between women, politics, and the novel more widely. Both The Absentee and Mansfield Park concern estates at complex removes from unrest at home and abroad, and both novels demonstrate commitments to the pecking orders on which the preservation of those estates depends.31 My point here is not to challenge claims about Edgeworth’s moral-reformist agenda and the placid order that presides over England in Austen, which remain valuable and convincing summaries of where these respective novels conclude. Instead, my approach here sets out to reveal aspects of these texts that work against the grain of these assessments, without necessarily contesting the broadly conservative thrust they highlight. These more oblique, subtle engagements with ‘politics’ might thereby help to expand and further reorient the emphasis on feeling, sociability, and domesticity within discussions of Romantic-era writing by women while also permitting us to locate these works against altogether different affective and political horizons. That begins with reading Burke himself against the grain, with a view to the complications for channels of political communication and the wider fabric of national feeling. My accounts of these novels do not approach the stability projected by these texts as something taken for granted, but as something they are labouring to produce, in ways their fictional procedures at times undercut or otherwise imperil. Edgeworth would seem to endorse the supplanting of eighteenth-century discontents by nineteenth-century governance: the emphasis in her fiction on dispassionate reflection, the consolations of domestic retirement, and extra-political solutions to social problems, in tandem with her emphasis on moral instruction, 28 See Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005). 29 See David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 5. 30 Quoted in Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, 457. 31 As Clara Tuite has noted, The Absentee, like Mansfield Park, employs a ‘paradigm of responsible landlordism and represents domestic relations through an idealized version of the socially hierarchical relations of the landed estate’. In The Absentee, ‘this return to the estate is contextualized as an historically entailed solution to a specific set of historical circumstances and contingencies fully registered by the text in its self-consciously nationalistic representation of the legacy of the Act of Union of 1801’, whereas in Mansfield Park, ‘Austen’s formidable powers of discretion and naturalization are such that historical contingencies barely register a ripple in the smooth surface of the text.’ Clara Tuite, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 106.

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middle-class values, and the incipient governmentality of the nineteenth century, would thereby seem to leave eighteenth-century politics behind. But in asking how mounting irritation with politics in both England and Ireland jostled together during an earlier period with more inchoate, even incendiary political energies—which intersected with but were not reducible to incipiently violent disaffection32—we can see how these various moving parts also helped to create at least the prospect of alternative conduits for political activity. The Absentee, as this chapter will go on to propose, thus leaves politics behind in an altogether different sense: by exposing the unassimilated elements and demands not encompassed within emerging principles of unity and in remaining animated by the prospect of taking the part of those with no part.33 IRELAND’S DISCONTENTS As we saw from the Dublin pamphlet on Tristram Shandy, unruly political activity in Ireland presented outside observers with a fractured mirror for the English polity. Although conquest and colonialism made Ireland its own extreme case, the Irish political arena harboured recalcitrant problems of political representation that persisted on both sides of the Irish Sea. During the latter half of the eighteenth century, politics in England and Ireland remained dominated by a narrow aristocratic elite. The majority of the population was excluded from direct participation within the political process. As such, in both places, ‘an archaic representative system, dominated by the landed interest, frustrated the political ambitions of growing and vigorous classes’, such that ‘the gap that was bound to exist between those in power, responsible for day-to-day decisions and their critics, in parliament and outside’ became ‘dangerously wide’.34 Ireland remained uniquely troubled: ‘irritation with the system’ there was ‘sharpened by the consciousness that the Irish executive was controlled by a British government’ and these inequities were deepened by the systematic exclusion of Catholics from public life. Discontents also apparent as ‘irritation’ remained proximate in Ireland to threats of incendiary, violent disaffection. There were thus complex parallels and crossings between the Irish body politic and the expanded English polity with which Ireland remained entangled.35 32 David Lloyd similarly identifies within ‘insurrectionary rural movements’ in Ireland ‘not so much an expression of “endemic Irish violence” or archaic peasant values as the record of forms of social organization and resistance inassimilable to either the legality of the British state or the political desire of nationalism’. See Anomalous States, 6. 33 I borrow the phrases ‘principles of unity’ and ‘taking the part of those with no part’ from Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 34 ‘Colonial Nationalism and the Winning of Parliamentary Independence, 1760–82’, chap. 8 in A New History of Ireland, Vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, eds. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 196–7. 35 For the figuration of the English working classes as ‘Irish’ in the nineteenth century, see Timothy Keane, ‘Narrating the Irish Famine: Chartism, the Land and Fiction’, in Defying the Law of the Land: Agrarian Radicals in Irish History, ed. Brian Casey (Dublin: The History Press, 2013).

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By decoupling Burke and Edgeworth from their respective reputations, as the upholder of the English constitution and political establishment and the similarly dependable supporter of an Anglo-Irish Union purged of radical nationalism, we return their writings to a complex intermediary zone. Reading them in dialogue with each other and with attention to these swirling Anglo-Irish ‘discontents’ especially brings into view their relationship with those disaffected elements and marginalized parties at a remove from the established political system. The final decades of the eighteenth century placed pressure on existing divisions in Ireland, as long-standing political tensions converged with the global age of revolutions. These developments also looked beyond politics altogether. As Ireland approached the end of the eighteenth century, James Livesey counter-intuitively proposes, politics was on the wane. Rather than ongoing, ‘political’ debates over the basis of community, the fundamentally tragic basis of politics was supplanted, Livesey maintains, by a concern with social harmony, as the quasi-colonial dependency of Ireland became, with Scotland, one of the founding sites of civil society: a domain in which limited legal and political recognition created a flourishing realm of social exchange, independent of state institutions. The clashes that culminated in the bloody 1798 uprising were not, in Livesey’s telling, at odds with this developing understanding of Irish society—nor, he claims, were the two sides fundamentally at odds with each other in their respective visions for the future of Ireland. Where the Union imposed following the 1798 rebellion was conceived in part as effecting a ‘cultural revolution’ that would move beyond the passions and prejudices of party politics towards social harmony, the United Irishmen similarly acknowledged that the transformation of society by commercial relations had rendered politics irrelevant. The ‘governing assumption of United Irish politics’, Livesey concludes, ‘was that once the impediments to the free expression of Irish society were removed the natural concord and self-evident common interest of all would assert themselves’; the Act of Union proceeded from related premises.36 While they disagreed, vehemently, on the means, both supporters of the Union and its protonationalist antagonists were in broad agreement on imagined ends. They were thus, ironically, two sides of the same coin. The prospects of peacefully achieving this shared goal were challenged by recent and continuing violence, as the potential for Ireland to more fully assert independence from external rule—1782 saw the granting of limited legislative autonomy—converged with revolutionary ferment. The 1790s saw the apotheosis of this reimagined Irish society: the prospect of an Ireland with an unimpeded ‘Irish’ identity. Yet the events surrounding the 1798 uprising also witnessed the permanent fracturing of the ideal Livesey describes. The subsequent Act of Union failed to quell sectarian rivalries or subdue expressions of Irish autonomy, as prospects of violent disaffection continued to rumble (and occasionally erupted, as with the rebellion of 1803). Romantic nationalism, ranging from prospects for peaceful rural existence to more defiant assertions of ‘native’ tradition, was uneasily assimilated, moreover, into a cultural domain. 36 Civil Society and Empire: Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 180. See also Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts, and Consequences of the Acts of Union, eds. Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001).

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Late eighteenth-century unrest, from the ‘Whiteboy’ disturbances to the continuing unruliness of extra-parliamentary activity, has been seen to look ahead to this later revolutionary moment. Historians of this period have increasingly stressed what Ian McBride terms the ‘vitality of popular electoral politics’ in Ireland during these earlier decades, when constitutional debates provided the occasion for genuine expressions of popular political energies.37 For the most part, however, the developments of the 1790s have largely been viewed as without real precedent and (much like the unrest surrounding Wilkes) these earlier events have largely been approached as an ephemeral and inconsequential prelude. By returning to these earlier decades, we return to view an expanded picture of Anglo-Irish discontents, beyond sharpened revolutionary fault lines and the subsuming of political contention within the social. That period also provides a more complex picture of Burke. Sunil M. Agnani has explored the multifaceted, at times contradictory picture that results from examining Burke’s political thought with respect to the British Empire in India. Rather than approaching Empire as a belated addition to or irrelevant appendage at the side of Burke’s infamous conservative response to the French Revolution, Agnani instead reads his thinking on India in conjunction with his developing responses to the revolutionary events in Europe and the wider Atlantic world (including the Caribbean).38 While emphasizing the limits of Burke’s tolerance for uprisings by the oppressed and his investment in quasifeudal governing structures—Burke pitied Indians, but did not want to see them defiantly standing up for their rights as citizens—Agnani also points to his sympathies for mistreated natives and disdain for tyranny, complicating our ability to separate out the various strands of his political thought or to render a single assessment of his political leanings, conservative, anti-imperial or otherwise. Ireland occupied a similarly contradictory role, I would suggest, in Burke’s core political thought. The bearing of Burke’s Irish background on his domestic party activity has received less attention than his concerns with the burgeoning British Empire in the east and imperial policy more widely. Not only, however, did Burke’s sympathies for Ireland infiltrate, in complex and contradictory ways, his response to political ‘discontents’ within England.39 That conflict also became manifest, I emphasize here, in the divided loyalties and unhinged sentiments that were understood to animate his political identity and its lived contours— both in the eyes of his contemporaries and by Burke himself. ‘We shall be barbarised on both sides of the water, if we do not see one another now and then’, Burke wrote in a letter to Ireland in 1773, amidst a controversy about Irish ‘absentee’ landowners (to which we will return in the latter half of this chapter). ‘We shall sink into surly, brutish Johns,’ he continued, ‘and You will degenerate into wild Irish.’40 Despite his ironic appropriation of ‘John Bull’ English nationalism and 37 Ian McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 2009), 304. 38 Agnani, Hating Empire Properly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 39 See Nathan Wallace, ‘Edmund Burke’s Anglo-Irish Double Vision in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents’, in Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities, ed. Seán Patrick Donlan (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007). 40 Burke to Sir Charles Bingham, 30 October 1773.

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dismissal of Ireland, Burke found himself caught between identities. Aside from the divisions that attended his class position within England,41 Burke has also been viewed by some critics as maintaining intense Irish sympathies.42 Yet these critiques, as I will go on to show, were also anticipated during his lifetime, in ways that have not been fully appreciated. The ‘double vision’ that Nathan Wallace has shown attended Burke’s views on Ireland (much as Agnani has shown for his views on India) not only created complications in Burke’s political thinking; these complications were understood to emerge from within—and converged uneasily with—tensions at the heart of his political identity, with implications both for Burke’s own efforts to inhabit his political role and for representations of his broader ‘character’, particularly as a writer whose advocacy for certain causes risked becoming overwhelmed by supplementary commitments and uncontrolled expressions of feeling. In August 1762, Burke received an account of a ‘small group of native Irish found living a wild or “natural” life on a remote little island off the west coast’.43 In his response, written from London, Burke compared their experience with life on the mainland: Happy and wise are these poor Natives in avoiding your great World; that they are yet unacquainted with the unfeeling Tyranny of a mungril Irish Landlord, or with the Horrors of a Munster Circuit. I have avoided this subject whenever I wrote to you; and I shall now say no more of it; because it is impossible to preserve ones Temper on the view of so detestable a scene. God save me from the power, (I shall take care to keep myself from the society) of such monsters of Inhumanity.44

These remarks on the ‘Horrors of a Munster Circuit’ alluded to the ruthless reprisals, including executions, for the recent ‘Whiteboy’ protests on farming lands.45 Associating these recent outbursts of popular violence with the ‘unfeeling Tyranny’ associated with exploitative land management, Burke implicitly depicted both as the monstrous outgrowths of the stark inequalities of property ownership (including the capacity to own property in the first place), legal status, and access to redress that went hand-in-hand with Protestant dominance of Ireland. This bleak account of conditions for the majority Catholic population contrasted starkly 41 For the most dramatic formulation of this view, see Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 42 See especially Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 43 F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1.193. The letter is lost: I quote Lock’s paraphrase. 44 Quoted in Lock, Edmund Burke, 1.193. Burke went on to describe the broken sympathies to which this situation had given rise: ‘An old acquaintance of mine at the Temple, a man formerly of integrity and good nature, had by living some years in Corke, contracted such horrible habits, that I think, whilst he talked on these late Disturbances, none but hang men could have had any pleasure in his company.’ 45 For a later engagement with the ‘Whiteboy’ disturbances, see John Banim, Crohoore of the Bill-Hook (1825) which draws a parallel between its early nineteenth-century moment and fifty years earlier. See Connolly, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 190–2.

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with life on the ‘remote little island’ off its western coast. The ‘small group of native Irish’ living a ‘wild or “natural” life’ presented a vision of the simple, rural existence that might prevail in the absence of entrenched institutions and stark power differentials. But no Ireland is an island. The detached location of this ‘remote little island’ paralleled the distance of Ireland from England, creating a double remove from Burke’s London society. Yet this island might equally be considered ‘part’ of Ireland (thus falling, in turn, under an extension of English rule—from which its isolation, as exception internal to that order, grants only temporary reprieve). The island might, equally, however, be a land of its ‘own’, an Ireland more purely ‘Irish’ than ‘Ireland’ itself, whose location on the western Atlantic seaboard might suggest a further analogy with the American colonies, whose distance from metropolitan power bloomed into eventual demands for independence. Before the transformed revolutionary horizons, with which Livesey identifies the subsuming of productive political contention within cultural and social universals, Ireland both inhabited and represented what David Lloyd terms an ‘anomalous state’. As observers at least since Jonathan Swift recognized, Ireland was at once a space apart, with native traditions and local pride, and, at the same time, the put-upon, downtrodden stepsister, subjected to the perverse—even monstrous—demands of English rule. As with Gulliver’s Travels and Burke’s own reflection on the Irish ‘Natives’ of the island-within-an-island, Ireland often functioned as a space for reflecting upon competing structures of governance, including within Edgeworth’s fiction. The titular hero of Ormond (1817) self-consciously traverses discrete ‘worlds’ within Ireland, ranging from the ‘jobbing’ politicians at Dublin Castle to the removed domain of ‘King Corny’ on an inland lake in the Irish midlands. For our purposes here, we may focus on the ways that Ireland was imagined by Edgeworth as a target for governance. With her father, she conceived of Ireland as an exemplary site for the introduction of enlightened, ‘improving’ managerial practices, including those she had assisted in implementing following the return of the Edgeworth family to Ireland. Her father rode around the family estate with the teenage Maria, ‘teaching her accounting, valuing the land, and getting to know the tenants. Long leases were no longer to be granted, nor tenancies divided; he would allow tenants to profit by their improvements and they might keep in hand a year’s rent.’46 Beginning with Castle Rackrent (1800), Edgeworth’s fiction took up the coexistence of archaic practices and tangled political legacies with enlightened modernizing practices as rich terrain for exploration. Edgeworth’s estate 46 Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his wife ‘went to Ireland to manage their estate, to educate their children, and to make some return to the country whence they drew their income’, but instead they found ‘Edgeworthstown a scene of dilapidation and waste, ill-managed by unreliable agents’. Colvin, ‘Richard Lovell Edgeworth’. For the role of ‘progressive’ principles drawn in large part from the political economy of Adam Smith and ‘sentiment and surveillance’ in the management of the Edgeworth estate, see Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 83–7 and Willa Murphy, ‘A Queen of Hearts or an Old Maid? Maria Edgeworth’s Fictions of Union’, in Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts, and Consequences of the Acts of Union, eds. Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001) . For the social function of the ‘moral rectitude’ portrayed in The Absentee, see W. J. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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fictions, as we will see later in this chapter, kept a watchful eye on longer-standing debates concerning property ownership, economic exploitation, and political violence; remaining attuned to the presence of the past within the present, the hybridized generic forms of these distinct yet interlocking fictions also allowed Edgeworth to traverse disparate political and social worlds and to implicate these characters with diverse practices of governance. The later sections of this chapter turn to those writings directly, with a view to how Edgeworth further complicated these existing models in The Absentee. By first examining some of the other responses to which the convergence between past conflict, recent violence, and modern governance gave rise—in particular, to some of the ways that writers imagined that existing discontents might be channelled or appeased—we can bring into relief the altogether more complicated, multifaceted approaches to fractured social and political sympathies that both Burke and Edgeworth developed in their writings, as well as the bearing of those writings on each other. In The State of Ireland (1798), Arthur O’Connor adopted a combative tone to address ‘The Irish Nation’. This pamphlet emphasized the extreme lack of proportion, in various senses, entailed in the rule of the majority Irish population by a narrow Protestant class. O’Connor built in particular upon a growing emphasis on quantitative argumentation at a moment when even conservative commentators had begun appealing to the numbers underpinning the inequities of Irish governance.47 In tandem with his earlier attack on the English government, O’Connor viscerally described a grotesque discrepancy: Does the produce of the lands of Ireland go to supply the fund for the employment of its People? No! your corn, your cattle, your butter, your leather, your yarn, all your superfluous produce, much more that would be superfluous if the People of Ireland were furnished with the common necessaries of life, are all exported without a return to pay the rents of Irish Landlords who do not think the country worthy of their residence, every particle of which is as utterly lost to the fund for the employment of the People of Ireland as if it had been thrown into the sea. The whole is exported, to sell the funds for the employment of the People of England; whilst the forsaken, plundered People of Ireland are left to languish in famine and misery, for want of that wealth, in the shape of wages, which the labour of their hands and the sweat of their brow had originally produced—exhaling the sap and moisture of the Irish soil to fertilize Great Britain.48

The wealth of the ‘plundered People of Ireland’ here had been wantonly consumed by the parasitic ‘People of England’ as Irish labour and resources (‘sweat’ and the ‘moisture of the Irish soil’) were transfigured into wasteful, excremental excess, all in the service of ‘fertiliz[ing] Great Britain’.49 ‘Although the property of the nonresident, and the resident, are equally protected by the Irish Government,’ O’Connor continued, ‘yet so wholly has the property of the non-residents been exempted from contributing towards its support that the beggar who consumes one penny-worth 47 I thank Claire Connolly for alerting me to this point. 48 Arthur O’Connor, The State of Ireland, ed. James Livesey (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1998), 35. 49 O’Connor, The State of Ireland, 35.

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of tobacco in the course of the year contributes more towards the maintenance of Irish government than all the non-resident landlords put together’.50 Ireland would scarcely be worse off if forced to subsidize a war, made victim of plague, or even if ‘annually ravaged by the most barbarous enemy; nay, if we were a conquered people’.51 The clear implication was that the English ‘Barbarians’ had already exacted such a toll. Following the Act of Union, an emphasis on amelioration and reconciliation took hold. In An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland (1804), William Parnell proposed ways beyond recent violence and festering disaffection, grounded in shared feeling. Authored under the guise of an ‘Irish Country Gentleman’, this pamphlet sought to catalogue the long-standing causes (a word crucially signalled in the title) of the recent conflagration, but also to emphasize alternative horizons that would avoid what Claire Connolly terms the ‘Gothic’ extremes emphasized by attention to recent violence.52 ‘We hear much of the effects of rebellions in Ireland,’ its author noted, ‘but very little of their causes; the material question, why these things are so, has been entirely disregarded [. . .] though blood has flowed profusely; still life is miserable in apprehension, still property poor in security, the Government is supported only by terror, and this so imperfectly, that the moment an enthusiastic leader is found, a rebellion is organized.’53 Advocating for a new system of administration ‘grounded on an enquiry into the causes, into all the causes of discontent in Ireland’, we should ‘not rest satisfied with adopting any single cause, which has become a sort of favourite’.54 The ‘Popular Discontents’ that had converged, at this revolutionary moment, with direct challenges to the state, had a deep history, the pamphlet proposed; these had acquired various forms, as a wider swirl of existing emotions and sharpened convictions had taken hold. The ‘absence or alienation of affection or kindly feeling’ with which the Oxford English Dictionary identifies ‘disaffection’ not only took shape here as ‘hostility’ against the government. Those feelings might instead, Parnell proposed, be driven into newly affirmative channels, including attachments to cultural nationalism in its less militant, if not more benign guises. In The Wild Irish Girl Sydney Owenson presented a related appeal for Anglo-Irish relations. Here, the ‘revolutionary’ mobilization of sentimental feeling was imagined in less incendiary terms and coupled with receptivity to changed governing practices in the wake of the Act of Union. Developing a parallel between the ways the British Legislature ‘delegate[d] English ministers to govern [. . .] Irish domains’ and his father’s management of his Irish estates from a distance, protagonist Horatio remarks upon the damaging influence of inappropriately distributed power, which 50 O’Connor, The State of Ireland, 36 (emphasis added). 51 O’Connor, The State of Ireland, 35. 52 As Connolly has noted, Parnell complained that reasonable discussion about the Union and its implications was rendered impossible in part by ‘efforts to turn 1798 into a Gothic horror story’. A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 171. 53 An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland [. . .] (London: 1805), 1–2. This later edition was printed with ‘a preface and notes, by a friend to the constitution’. 54 An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland, 2.

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‘raised’ rebellions, whose seeds this repression had sown in the first place.55 Confirming her shared belief in the need for a cathartic release from the tangled legacies of the past, Owenson cited An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland in a footnote.56 Recharacterizing the Irish, from crude barbarians to sensitive sufferers, her book proposed a new paradigm for Anglo-Irish engagement in which Horatio’s liberation of the Irish from the historically determined cycles of violence coincided with freshly renovated conceptions of the Irish character and landscape. These works emphasize reconciliation, without erasing the presence of the past. In both Owenson’s ‘national tale’ and Parnell’s pamphlet, earlier ‘discontents’ continue to reverberate, with the implication that they would not ever fully be expunged or eradicated. The putative resolutions floated in these works nonetheless leave the door open to overarching solutions that promote harmonious shared feeling, or at least a groundswell of positive feeling, as a partial solution in its own right. These outcomes are ambivalent, leaving buried sources of ill feeling liable to resurface—if only in critical accounts eager to read these works for their revolutionary agon. In any case, for all their limitations, these responses to Ireland’s discontents, whether combative or otherwise expressive of passionate demands, might appear clear improvements on the widespread repression and limited forms of redress available to preceding generations. In contrast with the efflorescence of nationalist rhetoric and cultural expression following the French Revolution, which continued even amidst the recrimination and disappointment around the Union, the preceding decades appear at once as a political backwater or subdued prelude: a period in which ‘irritation with the system’ and brewing resentment achieved only limited expression in ameliorative legislative achievements or fleeting disturbances (such as the ‘Whiteboy’ riots). Yet the altogether different configuration of the public sphere, print culture, and political agency during these pre-revolutionary decades also made room for the often more subtle, understated strategies provided by ostensibly limited channels, whether for expressing grievances or for navigating discontent. Returning to this earlier period, that is to say, allows us to cut against these later emphases on fractured ideals of natural concord or reparative solutions grounded in shared feeling. These decades, moreover, return to view alternative vehicles for navigating discontents and disaffected impulses, particularly those associated with print and first-person expression. In 1764, Edmund Burke contributed his writing talents to a ‘humble Address and Petition of the Roman Catholics of Ireland’ addressed to George III. Describing prevailing conditions for the majority Catholic population, the ‘Petition’ reminded the king of the repression suffered by the Irish and also of its heft. ‘[W]e have long groaned, not only without any act of disobedience, but even without murmur or complaint’, Burke wrote, in the voice of his Catholic brethren, reminding the monarch that the native Irish comprised a ‘numerous and very industrious part of

55 Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 31–2. 56 The Wild Irish Girl, 32n. See also 129n.

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your majesty’s subjects’.57 In contrast with this acquiescence, Burke continued, ‘there are a set of men, who, instead of exercising any honest occupation in the commonwealth, make it their employment to pry into our miserable property, to drag us into the courts, and to compel us to confess on our oaths, and under the penalties of perjury, whether we have, in many instances, acquired a property in the smallest degree’.58 The ‘humble [. . .] Petition’ held back from any firm demands: ‘let it not be considered, we earnestly beseech your majesty, as an instance of presumption or discontent, that we thus adventure to lay open to your majesty’s mercy, a very small part of our uncommon sufferings’.59 (God forbid they should be seen to complain.) While requesting some legal accommodation, Burke implored—in ‘all humility’—that ‘our principles not be estimated by the inflamed charge of controversial writers, nor our practices measured by the events of those troubled periods, when parties have run high (though these have been often misrepresented, and always cruelly exaggerated to our prejudice); but that we may be judged by our own actions, and in our own times’.60 Burke remained a firm adherent of the established constitution, and deference to the monarch and emphasis on received law here do not undermine these commitments. Despite his complaints against the treatment of the Irish—including, after the French Revolution, in statements that have appeared at odds with his pronounced opposition to reformist agendas—Burke believed the constitution was able to accommodate appeals to greater justice, even within the distant reaches of the British Empire (although only so long as that Empire, including within India, remained intact). Burke’s broader conservative repulsion against distortions of the natural order, which surfaced particularly after 1789, can be glimpsed here in his account of the perverse law that allowed even a profligate son a presumptive claim to his father’s estate upon converting from Catholicism. At the same time, he also leveraged a larger critique, emphasizing the ‘monstrous’ tyranny and distortion resulting from the existing system. The clear sympathies, which led Burke (in his letter on the ruthless reprisals for the ‘Whiteboy’ protests) to admit his difficulty reserving his ‘temper’ on Irish affairs, have led some critics to view an ongoing attachment to Ireland as continuing to inform, thereby complicating and even undermining, his commitments to the political establishment.61 We encounter some of the doublespeak with which, for some biographers, Burke undermined his stated commitments in his assertion that ‘we respect from the bottom of our hearts that legislation under which we suffer’.62 This was a familiar statement of supplication, conventional for the genre of the petition. Yet given the divided sympathies with which Burke, as we will see, became associated, both in his writings and in his ‘party’ role, as well as the immoderate ‘temper’ on Irish affairs that we have already noted, we might indeed discern a caustic irony escaping from within the hamstrung 57 The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 9, The Revolutionary War, 1794–1797, and Ireland, 429–30. This work was only published, tellingly, in the changed climate of 1778. 58 Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9.430. 59 Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9.431. 60 Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9.432. 61 See O’Brien, The Great Melody. 62 Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9.431–2.

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position in relation to the Irish establishment from which Burke wrote. My point here is not to claim evidence of Burke’s buried disaffection against the government. Rather, we may discern here a more subtle discrepancy between his avowed political commitments and the effusive, effaced, or ironized displays of feeling that infused his writing. While Burke distanced himself here from the ‘inflamed charge of controversial writers’ and events ‘when parties have run high’, he continued to participate in contentious political debates and the vibrant print culture surrounding them. His 1770 pamphlet Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents sought to navigate between his commitment to an aristocratic English elite and domestic unrest within England. Yet Burke’s developing reputation in this same period created uncertainty about the parties with which he was ultimately aligned, complicating his associated claims to represent and speak on behalf of ‘the people’ (and clashing with appeals to the anchoring role of his conviction and the good judgement demonstrated by his party). That uncertainty was in turn compounded by his entanglements with Ireland. These efforts to navigate between the English political elite and the wider populace, together with Burke’s apparent feelings of responsibility towards Ireland, fractured his party role, locating him at the juncture between various currents of feeling. B U R K E ’ S PA RT I E S In his poem Retaliation (1774), Oliver Goldsmith penned a series of brilliant satirical epitaphs for his still very much alive friends. In a poem comprising a serious of sharp and witty comparisons (David Garrick was ‘a salad’ in which ‘[o]il, vinegar, sugar, and saltiness agree’), Goldsmith most ruthlessly skewered Edmund Burke, describing him as a dish of ‘tongue, with the garnish of brains’. The poem professed at once to admire and deplore the turns taken by Burke’s life: Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such, We scarcely can praise it, or blame it too much; Who, born for the Universe, narrow’d his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.63

One reading of these closing lines would set Burke’s embroilment within partisanship over-and-above his commitment to a party of humanity: an idealized collectivity that becomes subordinated to the narrowed ‘party’ concerns of winning debates, maintaining loyalties, and vanquishing opponents.64 The portrait at the same time 63 In The Late Augustans, ed. Donald Davie (London: Heinemann, 1958), 66–7. These lines continued to resonate. Robert Southey reversed their thrust to imagine Burke in the afterlife in his poem on the death of George III: ‘Eloquent statesman and sage, who, tho’ late, broke loose from his trammels, / Giving then to mankind what party too long had diverted’ (37). Warren Hastings, in his ‘innocence’, sits happily next to his former antagonist in this revisionist treatment of the late king’s reign, whose Toryism prompted Byron to write a pointed ‘Whig’ response. A Vision of Judgement (Longman: London, 1821), 37. See Chapter 6. 64 Compare Blakely Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

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sheathes a much sharper and more subtle critique, as becomes clear when we turn the piercing clarity of this closing couplet back on the preceding lines. By placing himself within the narrowly circumscribed domain of ‘party’, Burke had first enabled his ‘genius’ to shine. Yet precisely by virtue of the public visibility attending his entry into politics, he had made himself into a divided figure. Those divisions, which Goldsmith cast as a divide between his humanitarian commitments and his political ambitions, coincided with a series of further splits, at both personal and political levels: Burke had not so much chosen the wrong side, between mankind and his party, as trapped himself amidst a series of conflicting loyalties from which there was no escape. That personal dilemma took place within a wider political context. Examining how Burke navigated the divisions within his English party role exposes divisions within the role of the politician more widely—as well as growing fissures within the wider body politic, at home and abroad. As one of the ‘Rockingham’ Whigs, Burke had aligned himself with a rich and influential man. For all his opposition credentials as the linchpin of the Whig party, the Marquess of Rockingham was also squarely a member of the one per cent that continued to dominate the political and social order of the eighteenth century. In staking out a principled defence of the constitution and its attendant ‘freedoms’ while painting the present establishment in an absolutist cast, his followers became liable for criticism in their own right, given their apparently quietist support for archaic political structures and vested wealth. Burke sought to navigate and ameliorate precisely these tensions in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, while also trumpeting his party’s claims of responsiveness to the demands of the country at large. An extended review of Burke’s 1770 pamphlet in the London Museum was not persuaded. Adopting a rhetoric whose self-evidence contrasted sharply with Burke’s nuanced deployment of first-person argumentation, the reviewer for this recently founded publication advanced a core objection to the Rockingham party line: ‘When a small number of men, either directly, that is, by the institutions of society, or indirectly, that is, by perverting an influence derived from their rank or property, secure to themselves the means of leading the legislative and executive powers of that society, these men may be said to form an aristocracy.’65 The argument against the ‘Cabal’ at the centre of government in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents was thus turned on its head. Although Burke had protested against government made by an inner circle of secretive and self-interested advisers, the elite corner of the parliamentary establishment in which he participated might be described, from only slightly greater distance, in much the same way. The London Museum countered what it deemed innate hypocrisy on the part of the author of Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents by calling attention to his wiles as a writer. Burke’s ‘studiously elegant’ style and dangerously ‘speculative opinions’ made him a ‘crafty adversary’.66 Describing how Burke steered around 65 London Museum, 2.62. While Burke had himself repudiated aristocratic government, the review counters that ‘he hath rejected in name, what he embraces in substance’ (2.60). 66 London Museum, 2.60.

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his evident hostility to the freedom of ‘the people’, this account of the ‘dexterity of this nimble statesman’ in turn led into criticism of his manipulation of oppositional rhetoric. ‘[H]e expressly says’, the author noted, quoting the pamphlet, ‘that support should be denied to government, until power was in the hands of persons who were acceptable to the people’ and went on in exasperation: ‘What people, for God’s sake? a people who are not to be trusted with an election of their representatives, lest riot, tumult, murder, should ensue. Is it not beneath the dignity of government, to expend one minute in considering, what may be acceptable to men of this kind?’67 Discerning Burke’s careful (not to mention ‘crafty’) efforts to discriminate between the ‘opinion’ of the people and the ‘sense’, or rather the vacuous chatter, associated with the wider constituencies clamouring for attention, the reviewer went on to enumerate his shortcomings. That included what the review cast as his suspicion of a tumultuous mob—but also a more targeted objection. Excluded from ‘the idea of the word people’ here are ‘the honest labourer, the industrious manufacturer and mechanic, the adventurous seaman, the farmer, the merchant’ as well as ‘the independent gentleman of that size of fortune which aspires not to nobility, and looks down upon the tawdry distinctions of Court favour’.68 The London Museum was closely associated with the wider swirl of oppositional activity around John Wilkes and this impassioned plea—‘What people, for God’s sake?’—advanced related commitments to political recognition for extra-parliamentary constituencies and disenfranchised groups. Yet this attack on Burke might equally be turned back against its source. In its enumeration of the constituencies that comprise ‘the people’, its own exclusions on the basis of emerging class lines (not to mention those of gender) become starkly apparent. Rather than agitating for a wholesale transformation of the political system, the argument advanced here by the London Museum was closer to that of later reformers whose demands were ultimately far from ‘radical’ in their implications, in seeking merely to reserve more of the pie for an emergent middle class.69 Burke’s more supple, albeit slippery, understanding of the ‘people’ proved more open to as-yetundetermined expansions. Rancière’s discussion of the ‘count’ of politics helps to explain this distinction. Rancière’s assertion that politics involves ‘taking the part’ of those who have no part entails a parallel argument, about the necessary ‘miscount’ associated with political activity. Politics consists ‘in putting into circulation beings in excess of any 67 London Museum, 2.69–70. 68 London Museum, 2.80. Compare Samuel Johnson, for whom ‘the people’ was ‘a very heterogeneous and confused mass of the wealthy and the poor, the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad’. The Patriot quoted in F. P. Lock, ‘ “To Preserve Order and Support Monarchy”: Johnson’s Political Writings’, in Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2014), 185. 69 Compare the discussion of middle-class radicalism in Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For complementary accounts of the ‘people’ and ‘middle-class’ as having strategically fluid boundaries, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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functional body count’, thereby bringing into conflict ‘two ideas of what the whole is’.70 We will return to this idea and the implications of Rancière’s related argument about the ‘distribution of the sensible’ for the competing depictions of the Irish body politic in The Absentee (and their attendant representational excesses). For the time being, we may limit our attention to the core point that politics, for Rancière, disrupts the ‘count’ of politics: in altering both which constituencies count as worthy of political representation and how they, in turn, are counted. Building upon this account of a politics in which the count should never be finalized or concluded, nor simply added to in predictable and incremental fashion, we might hazard a contrast between the limited arithmetic expansion proposed by the London Museum and the less constrained geometric potential of Burke’s pamphlet. The London Museum had sought to establish—if also to expand—the classes that were encompassed within ‘the idea of the word people’. By contrast, as Burke had stated in his own pamphlet, he had ‘nothing to do here with the abstract value of the voice of the people’. Aside from his growing suspicion of the ‘rabble’, Burke was similarly direct in saying that he was not one of those who believe the people can do no wrong, in contrast with other appeals to the ‘voice’ of this political body.71 In not making the ‘people’ coincide either with an abstracted value or ideal, or with a predetermined set of constituencies, Burke’s pamphlet was broadly in line with Rancière’s contested politics, in which the limits of the polity are not self-identical with any given formulation of the people, population, or political nation. The reviewer’s exasperated plea—‘What people, for God’s sake?’—thus cuts to key tensions, ironically undermining its own answers with an uncertainty or equivocation that captures the ways this entity always exceeds such efforts. Burke’s pamphlet, moreover, imbued this key word with a mobile significance that took on, in the pamphlet as a whole, a complex multiplier effect. This contradictory vision of the ‘people’ points to consistent fissures in Burke’s political thought where politics was organized by a tightly circumscribed members’ club that might also pose as an inclusive collective and that was responsive to an unlimited multitude (that was also, prospectively, an unhinged monster). The resulting contradictions, even in these relatively open-ended formulations, were apparent to Burke’s earliest critics. The London Museum already discerned Burke’s efforts to constrain the wider body politic and his support for a version of respectability politics. In appealing to ‘the people’ as a safeguard against absolutism, the reviewer claimed, Burke was ‘blotting out the horrid portrait he had before drawn of this bellua multorum capitum’ and had evasively substituted in its stead ‘a figure of grace dignity and respect’ (claiming its own implicit affinity with what its reviewer glossed as the ‘thoughtless, giddy, unprincipled multitude’ that Burke had travestied). These remarks, as we have noted, carried possible charges of hypocrisy all their own. This also had a stylistic and temperamental dimension. In appealing to the rational and sober judgement of its own readers—coupled with its own policing of class boundaries, most apparent in its example of the ‘independent gentleman’ 70 Politics of Literature, 41, 37.

71 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 70.

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of fortune as exemplary of unjust exclusions from political representation—the London Museum exhibited its own version of the elitism that its review identified in Burke’s pamphlet. The elusive parameters of Burke’s discussion, dismissed here as its author’s slipperiness, might equally be taken to reflect the greater openness of his pamphlet, I am suggesting, in which ‘the people’ remained at large, its relationship to ‘party’ uncertain. My point here is not to suggest that Burke necessarily advocated for a broader understanding of ‘the people’ but that the unfixed nature of this entity in his writing cut to the heart of larger conflicts in his political thought and public role. What the London Museum termed Burke’s hypocrisy, moreover, corresponded not only to a divide in his political thought, but also to a more fundamental equivocation, repeatedly singled out in accounts of his literary and oratorical performances. This claim also touched on the warring impulses that risked making Burke, not least given his often unpredictable temper, a loose cannon, even within his party role (particularly with reference to colonial affairs, including within Ireland). The distinction between the middle-class interests promoted by the London Museum and the aristocratic elite with which it identified Burke was less one of essence than one of degree. But this entailed an additional difference of temperament. For all his apparent commitment to the establishment, Burke remained a moving target, whether as a matter of political strategy or as a symptom of a personal conflict. He also presented an unstable, wayward, unfixed figure in his own right, not least in his own writing. The London Museum emphasized these features of Burke’s public persona, in a remarkably incisive critique that anticipates the conclusion reached by several more recent biographers, as the reviewer switched focus from the substance of Burke’s arguments and proceeded to relate his ‘nimble’ argumentation to his affectation of a ‘superficiality’ arising from ‘his fears of searching too deeply, lest he should be the means of dragging up truth from the bottom, and discovering to the world more than he wishes they should see’.72 We find a similarly acute, more abrasive assessment in a later article from the London Museum that not only suggested Burke was a shifty figure but highlighted the subversive effect of Burke’s writing on the ostensible position he set out to defend (and in calling attention to Burke’s excesses—even to the point of noting the ‘disgust’ they provoke—anticipated attacks on his Irish background): he possesses indeed a multitude of ideas, and a fluency of speech; but, from the petulance of his manner, and his total want of judgment, he excites a general disgust in the hearers, and materially injures the cause he is hired to defend [. . .] He is like a vessel manned with a mutinous crew, carrying little ballast but much canvas, greatly over-masted, and exposed to a tempestuous sea without rudder or compass, he is a man with whom it is dangerous to be connected.

‘Every speech he has uttered has hurt his party,’ this damning critique went on, ‘every pamphlet he has published has injured the cause.’73 For all his apparent commitment to a version of the status quo, then, Burke was seen, in this remarkable early assessment, as an unstable figure, whose wayward commitments and 72 London Museum, 2.60.

73 London Museum, 4.343.

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‘multitude of ideas’ made him analogous (particularly, once again, in his writing) to a ‘vessel manned with a mutinous crew’. The divisions between narrow elites and the wider populace that attended his English political persona coupled here with his competing motivations and an erratic temperament. These aspects of Burke’s political thought and public persona came together when the Rockingham circle—already confronted by debates over political representation in England— were met by a further set of challenges, this time from the other side of the Irish sea. The questions raised by Rockingham’s personal ties to Ireland amplified the stakes of the divisions attending Burke’s position as a prominent member of the Whig elite, as a writer promoting his parliamentary faction, and as an individual in his own right. Attending to this controversy over ‘absentee’ landlords paves the way for a fresh line of approach to Edgeworth’s novel addressing the same issue, whose London-based protagonist similarly finds himself animated, unexpectedly, by Ireland’s discontents. ABSENT FRIENDS: ‘MAJESTIC’ POLITICIANS A N D   ‘ W R E TC H E D T E N A N T S ’ Rockingham, as we have noted, was rich. In parallel with his elevated position in the English political and social elite, he was the owner of extensive properties in Ireland from which he further augmented his vast income, while continuing to live in England. In 1773, a proposal for a tax on Irish ‘absentee’ landlords (who lived outside Ireland for more than half of the year) gave rise to a vigorous debate, including attacks on the English political elite and challenges to the wider course of imperial policy. In December 1773, Rockingham issued a circular letter protesting legislation from the Irish House of Commons proposing the introduction of a tax on absent landowners, which had been sent to England for the necessary approvals. The letter was, in fact, written by Burke. As Rockingham’s publicity manager and spokesman in this cause, Burke took on further public visibility, putting together petitions and helping to draft letters representing the interests of the select group who shared Rockingham’s predicament.74 The debate around the so-called ‘absentees’, who reaped the profits of their Irish estates from overseas while leaving their management to often unscrupulous local agents, was of long standing. With some evident strain, Burke defended himself as acting in consistency with his own earlier opposition to the ‘negligence and luxuriance’ of the Irish absentees (although Goldsmith, for one, was not convinced, as the lines in Retaliation may very well register).75 The London Museum, the Public Advertiser, and other more ephemeral publications had already critiqued Burke for defending 74 Michael J. Griffin, ‘Burke, Goldsmith and the Irish Absentees’, 124. 75 See Griffin, ‘Burke, Goldsmith and the Irish Absentees’, 118–19, 120–4. As Griffin has elsewhere shown at greater length, Goldsmith and Burke were exposed at Trinity College Dublin to a potent anti-absentee discourse, which Griffin sees Goldsmith drawing upon in his famous poem The Deserted Village. See Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013). Goldsmith spent some years in school at Edgeworthstown.

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his limited parliamentary faction; they were similarly unimpressed by Rockingham’s attempt to rally support among his fellow ‘absentees’. The efforts to assemble a group of his peers to lobby against the tax led one correspondent in the Public Advertiser, after sarcastically praising the ‘majestic’ style and ‘dignified’ sentiment of the circular letter, to make demands for a compensatory ‘Essay’ to the public that would counteract these self-interested efforts to drum up wider political support. Dispensing with irony, its conclusion invited Rockingham to show himself true to some better purpose ‘than the screening yourself from a Tax which must otherwise fall upon your miserable and wretched Tenants’.76 ‘Absentees’ remained a magnet for controversy in Ireland, where the issue helped to foment radical sentiment. In An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland, Parnell noted that ‘a horde of tyrants exist in Ireland, in a class of men that are unknown in England, in the multitude of agents of absentees, small proprietors, who are the pure Irish squires, middle men who take large farms, and squeeze out a forced kind of profit by letting them in small parcels; lastly, the little farmers themselves, who exercise the same insolence they receive from their superiors, on those unfortunate beings who are placed at the extremity of the scale of degradation—the Irish Peasantry!’ Absenteeism remained a flashpoint issue well into the nineteenth century; Sydney Owenson wrote an essay on the topic in 1825. With The Absentee (1812), Edgeworth located herself within this ongoing conversation, while employing this issue as the means, we will see, of approaching the broader emphasis on reconciliation in the wake of the Act of Union. Proposing that legacies of ‘prejudice’ and ‘interest’ had made any overarching solution ‘unpalatable’ to the masses at large, An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents conjectured that ‘perhaps means may be found for securing public tranquillity, equally prompt, and more congenial to the common feelings of humanity, than the double agency of martial and civil law, which in their competition to save the body, seem likely to lop off all the members’. The Absentee indirectly summoned the recent conflicts addressed in Parnell’s pamphlet and their partial containment by the Act of Union (to which the novel alluded more directly) and presents, in its harmonious conclusion, a model for overcoming the need for harsh, punitive measures and for relaxing the cycles of exploitative inequalities and rigid legal constraints that promised to perpetuate rebellion. At the same time, the novel was in synchrony with some of the wider governmental norms with which, as we have seen, the Edgeworths and the Act of Union were closely implicated. The Absentee opens with Lord Colambre in London, where his parents’ extravagant lifestyle risks sending the family into ruin. Colambre then travels to the family’s estates in Ireland in an effort to ensure his family’s future stability. Aside from its amusing depiction of fashionable metropolitan circles and Colambre’s encounters with their provincial counterparts in Ireland, the novel has a further subplot that concerns Colambre’s love interest, Grace Nugent. Before turning to the various components of the novel’s plotting more directly, we may restrict our attention here to an important encounter that takes place in the critical middle section of the 76 S.L. to the Marquis of Rockingham, Public Advertiser, 15 December 1773.

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novel, during Colambre’s lengthy excursion to Ireland. As a counterpoint to what the Inquiry described as the ‘horde of tyrants’, Edgeworth’s novel progresses towards a conclusion that models responsible land tenantry. As he surveys his family’s abandoned estates, Colambre encounters two land agents who model alternative approaches. The showdown with the villainous ‘old Nick’—whose treatment of the tenants recalls some of the sharpest critiques of absenteeism and its malign effects— takes place in a pivotal later chapter, whose dramatic force owes something to the original conception of that aspect of the story as a play. Colambre first encounters the other land agent, the benign counterpart, described as ‘a right bred gentleman; a snug little property of his own, honesty made; with the good-will and good wishes, and respect of all’.77 His name is ‘Mr Burke’. In order to ‘please opposite parties’, we are told, Burke used no arts; but he tried to make all his neighbours live comfortably together, by making them acquainted with each other’s good qualities; by giving them opportunities of meeting sociably, and, from time to time, of doing each other little services and good offices. Fortunately, he had so much to do, he said, that he had no time for controversy. He was a plain man, made it a rule not to meddle with speculative points, and to avoid all irritating discussions: he was not to rule the country, but to live in it, and make others live as happily as he could.78

Mr Burke, said to be ‘open and unreserved in his manner and conversation’, differs sharply from ‘old Nick’ Garraghty, whose neglect and deception of the tenants dominates the subsequent part of Colambre’s journey and the latter section of the novel; the exposure of his practices and their manifest injustices will in turn compel the return of Colambre’s ‘absentee’ family from England to Ireland. The narrative role of the first agent, Mr Burke, by contrast, proves less straightforward. As counterpart to the novel’s pantomime stage villain, the Mother Goose role adopted by Mr Burke portrays him as an idealized figure, closely identified with the reformed estate management implemented at the novel’s conclusion. Yet in summoning the divided figure of Edmund Burke, beneath this otherwise unruffled portrait, Edgeworth, I want to propose, introduced a complex, jarring note at the heart of her novel that complicates the streamlined passage towards its conclusion. Accounts of the ‘Burkean’ dimensions of The Absentee have drawn attention to the rootedness of tradition and local community in Burke’s political thought, as contrasted with the discontinuity of revolutionary change.79 These discussions 77 The Absentee, 126. 78 The Absentee, 128–9. 79 See, for example, McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition, 165. Mary Jean Corbett has drawn upon Burke’s comments on Anglo-Irish governance in correspondence surrounding the 1773 controversy to argue that the novel’s ‘familial plot’ frames the consolidation of imperial governance as the naturalization of female subordination; she particularly emphasizes the sexually restrained and disenfranchised role of women in the ‘Burkean’ transmission of property and political stability. Although a suggestive account of the novel’s gender politics, the converging models of governance staged in the novel—which clash, as I will go on to show, as much as they align with Burke’s thinking—are more complex than the terms of this critique can accommodate. See Corbett, ‘Public Affections and Familial Politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and the “Common Naturalization” of Great Britain’, ELH 61 (1994).

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exemplify the tendency already discussed in this book to treat the divisions of the period following the French Revolution as normative (and the tendency to privilege those European events over their Atlantic and wider global contexts). More particularly, they obscure the diverse currents of political discontent and even protorevolutionary energies that rumbled during preceding decades. Burke’s political thought and partisan commitments located him, as we have seen, in a vexed position amidst the ‘discontents’ of the 1770s, leading to an emphasis on his divided identity and exorbitant expressions of political feeling (as well as speculation about the obscured implications of his hypocritical, conflicted motivations). These uncertainties around Burke’s party role, particularly the channels opened up by his writings, suggest alternative trajectories, I will go on to propose, for Edgeworth’s protagonist. For our current purposes, we may note the tensions between these respective visions of ‘Burke’—beginning with an obvious clash. By attending narrowly to the ‘conservative’ aspects of Burke’s political thought as these were echoed in the situation depicted in Edgeworth’s novel, critics have missed a far larger inconsistency. Mr and Mrs Burke in The Absentee certainly model values of localism and community like those advocated by the statesman whose name they share. Yet this focus elides the distinctively new forms of governance in which they are also implicated. The various ‘improvements’ with which the Burkes are identified fit awkwardly with the narrowly ‘Burkean’ construal of post-revolutionary ideology, which repudiated the reformulation of society around abstract new ideals. Burke was at odds with core aspects of Smithian economics. His attachment to archaic, hierarchical organization failed to align with the wholesale implementation of reforming practices that might follow from a more comprehensive reading of Adam Smith’s writings.80 Together with her father, Edgeworth, we have seen, actively promoted the kinds of practices associated with the good land agent: where the Burkes run a local school in which Catholic and Protestant sit side-byside, Edgeworth praised her own brother’s involvement in an equivalent institution ‘where children of all religious persuasions are instructed together and live and learn to be good and happy’ and his principle ‘never to interfere with the religious opinions of those who come to his school’.81 The clash between Burke’s views on established religion and Edgeworth’s greater ambivalence similarly make this

80 ‘Burke’s defence of a permanent landed aristocracy, and the feudal laws of primogeniture and entail, were at odds with Smith’s recognition of the profound injustices of commercial society, and his consistent opposition to corporation, whether clerical or unions of manufacturers seeking to depress the wages of their employees.’ See Richard Whatmore, ‘Burke on Political Economy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, eds. David Dwan and Christopher Insole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 81. 81 Quoted in Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 154. Canuel notes the parallel with the good agents in Edgeworth’s novels. Compare The Absentee: ‘The school was shown to him: it was just what it ought to be—neither too much nor too little had been attempted; there was neither too much interference nor too little attention [. . .] the children of protestants and catholics sitting on the same benches, learning from the same books, and speaking to one another with the same cordial familiarity.’ Mrs Burke, we learn, was an ‘unaffected, sensible woman, free from all party prejudices’ and ‘Colambre was much pleased with her, and very glad that she invited him to tea’ (128).

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connection less than straight or straightforward.82 The effect of giving the name ‘Mr Burke’ to these idealized, modern, reforming characters was thus multiply jarring—and, I would argue, deliberately so. In the cognitive dissonance that Edgeworth introduced by giving the quaintly rustic yet strikingly modern family of reforming philanthropists the name of the great stalwart of recent politics, the novel brought the joins between these competing practices of governance starkly into focus. These apparent clashes can be ameliorated. Burke believed that custom could align with commerce, in ways an aristocratic Whig platform could robustly promote.83 Burke was ‘in sympathy’, moreover, with some of the ‘key strands of Scottish Enlightenment thought’ (not least the importance of ‘sympathy’ itself ), had tolerant views on religion, perhaps having to do with his own proximity to Catholicism, and advocated for certain reformist agendas.84 Yet tensions are redoubled and reinforced when we recognize that Edgeworth lodged these connections with Burke not only at the level of governing structures but as a more farreaching question about character and temperament. Although the book casts an arch eye on immemorial tradition and nails its own colours to the mast of improvement, Smithian views and Burkean ones can be reconciled. Yet a far more fundamental division emerges at the level of personalities. In The Absentee, Mr Burke is described as open and unreserved, with ‘nothing to conceal in his character, opinions, or circumstances’ and with no time for controversy, speculatively driven or ‘irritating’ discussions. He tries his hardest to ‘please opposite parties’ and no doubt also to appease them. We may at a stretch find some parallel here with Burke’s appeals to harmonious national sentiments. But at a personal level, we do not need to peer far into his career to see how completely unlike Edmund Burke in every respect ‘Mr Burke’ turns out to be. The placid character of the good landlord in Edgeworth’s novel stood sharply at odds with Edmund Burke the politician and the man, who was, as we have seen, a far more divided, unrestrained, and even neurotic figure. A semi-closeted Irishman, moreover, Burke remained animated at both public and more personal levels by ongoing Irish tensions and repression. Goldsmith’s poem presented Burke in the early 1770s as a divided and exorbitant figure. As we will go on to see, that appeal to Burke’s representational excesses (and their embodied correlates) raises further questions about how Irishness infiltrated his political role. For our purposes here, we may simply recall that Burke was widely viewed as a volatile, conflicted, politically divided individual. When Edgeworth had ‘Burke’ resurface amidst a brave new world of agricultural, educational, and moral reform, recasting the conflicted statesman as a genial, unreserved Irish land agent—and in cross-dressed form, as his schoolmistress wife—she had her tongue, I suggest, firmly in her cheek. At the same time, she introduced unsettling, even destabilizing implications for the resolution of Colambre’s quest, as we can now see more fully by turning to The Absentee as a whole. 82 Mark Canuel cautions against reading the allusion to Burke on the grounds of religion in these terms. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830, 136. 83 See Agnani, Hating Empire Properly. 84 Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 59. See also Agnani, Hating Empire Properly.

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The Absentee weaves together various plot-lines that span England and Ireland: the profligacy of Colambre’s parents in London (including the humiliating pursuit of social recognition by Lady Clonbrony); Colambre’s travels to Ireland and his encounters with the respective agents managing his family’s estates; and the challenges to the legitimacy of his love interest, Grace Nugent, pertaining to her suspicious Irish Catholic background (based on her apparent connection with the ‘St. Omars’, a name redolent of anti-English rebellion). These plotlines eventually converge, their challenges resolved with Colambre’s marriage to Grace and his family’s return to Ireland. Edgeworth developed a hybridized fictional form for The Absentee capable of navigating between these overlapping concerns, drawing in particular on contemporary tour literature. The various perspectives on England and Ireland, which Lord Colambre acquires over the course of the novel and which he must adjudicate between so as to shape its eventual outcome, make his conscience, to which the narration provides unique access, the site at which the conflicts attendant upon these plot-lines come together. Before turning to the conclusion of The Absentee, attending briefly to Edgeworth’s earlier tale Ennui (1809) will bring into focus the clashes and incompatibilities that converge at the denouement of the later novel. Ennui in certain respects presents a more complicated picture of Ireland and a starker portrait of its discontents than the The Absentee, engaging directly with the violence of the 1798 rebellion. As critics have increasingly recognized, Edgeworth’s active engagement in Irish life—albeit from the privileged position of a member of the Protestant ‘Ascendancy’—gave her a sense of sharp tensions that can be discerned even within some of her most sprightly Irish scenes; some commentators have even detected, in the subterranean presence of violence in her fiction, latent sympathy for the cause of Irish nationalism lurking beneath her ostensible support for the Act of Union.85 More broadly, we may view the Union, to the extent Edgeworth engaged this question as such, as a proxy for other modes of reconciliation not oriented by the terms of these political, incipiently nationalist debates: as sidelining political concerns or even subsuming politics in other considerations altogether.86 Ennui depicts closely interrelated psychological and 85 For a nuanced example, see Claire Connolly’s discussion of the ‘striking echoes of contemporaneous commentary on the dispossession of the native Irish during the Cromwellian period’ in the changedat-birth plot that structures Ennui, which sees noble protagonist Lord Glenthorn turn out to be the son of his Irish nurse. That resurfacing does not take place at the level of Glenthorn’s psychology—as will be the case for the uprising of sympathies that I will show overtaking Colambre in The Absentee— but can be discerned, as Connolly shows, in the ‘presence of a deep past that is expressed within a difficult to read but vividly contemporary landscape’. See A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829, 58. 86 My emphasis here on how Edgeworth’s fiction sidelines and complements—rather than succeeds and touches up—political developments follows Claire Connolly’s valuable corrective to the ‘image of culture as striving to catch up with the Union’, which has followed from the famous proposal by Walter Scott in 1829 that Edgeworth’s fiction had done ‘more towards completing the Union, than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up’. See ‘Completing the Union? The Irish Novel and the Moment of Union’, in The Irish Act of Union, 1800: Bicentennial Essays, eds. Michael Brown, Patrick M. Geoghegan, and James Kelly (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 160; Scott quoted 157.

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governmental processes, acknowledging ‘discontents’ of various stripes but ultimately assimilating them to improved personal and political arrangements, where The Absentee presents a much less conclusive picture of what gets settled and what remains left behind. In contrast, moreover, with the first-person narration of Ennui— which replicates psychological mechanisms that themselves double for these larger processes—the third-person perspective of the later novel witnesses conspicuous non-alignment between Colambre’s encounters with the unruly scenes that confront him and his efforts to manage and make sense of his own limited perceptions. That non-alignment and excess poses a challenge in particular, I will propose, to the novel’s appeals to ‘impartial’ Smithian spectatorship, returning us to the altogether more subjective procedures for sifting discontents associated with Burke. Ennui centres on the dissolute, halfway-degenerate Earl of Glenthorn, first encountered in the enervated state signalled by the story’s title. The ‘cause of [the] discontent’ that afflicts Glenthorn, ironically, goes back to his life of languorous ease and the larger moral and pedagogical failures associated with the elite world from which Edgeworth’s father, in the preface to the series of Tales in which this work appeared, distinguished that of her readers (‘the great mass which does not move in the circles of fashion’).87 Glenthorn, who was born in Ireland, finds himself presented with an opportunity to reassert ownership over his Irish lands. In line with what he tellingly describes as his right to ‘lord over’ his English tenants, he imagines his command over this vast estate through an archaic, quasi-Gothic lens: ‘These people seemed “born for my use” [. . .] gave more the idea of vassals than of tenants, and carried my imagination centuries back to feudal times.’88 Ennui depicts his eventual discovery of the proper way of governing his estate, in turn providing the cure for his individuated discontents. Those ‘discontents’ themselves take on pointed, if indeterminate, political correlatives, including in violent rebellion. While still at his country estate in England, his home becomes ‘disagreeable’ to Glenthorn in having become a ‘large, ill regulated establishment’ dominated by ‘discontented, capricious’ domestic staff, who effectively tyrannize him.89 In Ireland, as the discontents of his tenants become more explicitly political, the relationship with his personal discontents becomes more complicated. When the 1798 rebellion breaks out, Glenthorn remains in a ‘state of apathy’ but then finds himself overtaken by a ‘[p]arty spirit’ that rouses his passions. Rather than channelling this energy into heated political activity, however, he turns this newfound animation to another purpose: party activity thus gives rise to productive activity on his estate.90 By evading partisanship and redirecting his ‘apathy’—by way of a brief detour into political feeling—he thus offsets further unrest, as his tenants perceive the absence of antipathy against the rebels as a sign of his tacit sympathy for their cause. ‘The disaffected themselves, as I afterwards found,’ he states, ‘really believed, that, as I had not begun by persecuting the poor, I must be a favourer of the rebels’ (going on to note that he had not the ‘slightest conception’ of this ‘absurd and 87 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Penguin, 1992), 145, 141. 88 Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 145, 178. 89 Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 166. 90 Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 244, 247.

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perverse mode of judging’). At this time, Glenthorn continues, citing principles of empiricism and moral sense philosophy, ‘all objects were so magnified and distorted by the mist of prejudice, that no inexperienced eye could judge of their real proportions’. Neither party ‘could believe the simple truth’, he concludes, that his earlier reluctance to act ‘arose from the habitual inertia of my mind and body’.91 Where works like Parnell’s pamphlet had alluded to earlier political tensions and appealed to groundswells of positive feeling as a means to subsume earlier discontents, Ennui ultimately looks beyond the political engagement of feeling to the kind of equipoise that keeps feeling out of the equation altogether. At a personal level, it is Glenthorn’s recovery of self-mastery, not his investment in a new cause, that reroutes the free-floating ‘ennui’ of the title. This has to do in turn with the kinds of calculation and accurate discernment that overcome distortion and prejudice. Especially important to this rehabilitation, moreover, is Glenthorn’s role in managing the productive labour of others, which provides grist to the mill of his rehabilitated psychology. These respective solutions thus converge around transformed governing procedures that quell these sources of discontent and bring their individual and collective points of origin into alignment. Glenthorn becomes by the novel’s end a responsible, enlightened land manager who implements practices on his estate, like the schoolroom associated with Mr Burke, that point to ways of transforming the governance of Ireland more widely.92 Ennui to a certain extent keeps conflict in view. Despite finding this pragmatic corrective, the inchoate ‘causes of the discontents’ with which Glenthorn was earlier afflicted—a phrase applied to his rowdy domestic staff but anticipated in the earlier reference to the ‘cause of my discontent’—have an indeterminate political resonance, apparent in the clear echo here of Burke’s pamphlet and the adaptation of its title in works by Parnell and others.93 The novel locates these ‘discontents’ in ambiguous proximity, moreover, to political rebellion and violent disaffection. Exemplary of Edgeworth’s efforts to displace the existing fault lines of political and sectarian conflict with socioeconomic productivity—in a novel that makes the Union ‘the pivot of a theoretical, visionary history, distanced from deeply divided Irish politics’94—Ennui also opens up various, competing currents of feeling alongside the apparent absence, or withdrawal, of affective investment signalled in its title. Those currents of feeling provide added context for Butler’s observation that the novel points to landowning Protestants’ inability, prior to 1798, to read the landscape for traces of unrest. Ennui presents a more direct point of contact, moreover, with the limited yet potent channels for communication that I have identified with an earlier moment of Irish political activity (and with Burke’s 91 Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 247. 92 As Sara Maurer has noted, in the wake of the ‘decrease in power for the Anglo-Irish landholders’ following Union in Ireland came a ‘centralized, state-sponsored police force and state-sponsored education system, long before either were centralized in Britain, where similar tasks were left to the supervision of local landowners’. See The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 8. 93 Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 167, 145. 94 Butler, ‘Introduction’, in Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 36.

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own divided Anglo-Irish sympathies) when Glenthorn first grapples with the demands of the Irish tenants he tellingly describes as his ‘subjects’. These demands take shape by way of petitions. Glenthorn finds himself ‘in astonishment and despair on seeing my levée crowded with a fresh succession of petitioners’ practically every time he steps outside.95 As with the ‘humble [. . .] Petition’ written by Burke for his Catholic countrymen and the petition-like appeals with which Rockingham was challenged during the absentee controversy (alongside the ‘petitions’ he himself cynically composed), these demands from below carry real force, despite their ostensibly deferential cast. In tandem with the prejudice that tellingly colours his accounts of the ‘perplexing and provoking mixture of fact and fiction, involved in language so figurative’ that meets his ‘English ears’, the swelling demands that make Glenthorn feel like ‘a state-prisoner in my own castle, by the crowds who came to do me homage, and to claim my favour and protection’ suggest the real clout submerged within these supplicatory appeals.96 The force of these demands (including his inability to countenance their ‘perplexing and provoking’ qualities) become manifest when Glenthorn, overwhelmed, finds himself giving directions ‘to have the gates kept shut’ since ‘the moment I went out, lo! at the outside of the gate, the host of besiegers were posted, and in my lawn, and along the road, and through the fields: they pursued me; and when I forbade them to speak to me when I was on horseback, the next day I found parties in ambuscade, who laid wait for me in silence’.97 In the end, these demands are managed—and measured— through the estate’s technocratic, explicitly Smithian Scottish land agent (with whom Glenthorn reaches a rapprochement on the way to the personal transformation that leads to the novel’s conclusion). Ennui does not ultimately dwell on the relay points between individual and collective sympathies, at least not in ways that promise to complicate this eventual outcome. Yet the swirling discontents that verge into sharp-edged disaffection, together with these similarly disruptive communicative channels and the unrest they portend, point to an unquiet political landscape. The hybridized mode and explicitly divided perspective of The Absentee were different. Edgeworth engaged in less totalizing fashion here with teeming discontents, in a novel that more explicitly foregrounds the divide between England and Ireland, the split between Colambre’s perspective and his own surroundings as he negotiates that divide, and the excesses that intervene within—and interfere with—these appeals to regulation and calculation. The later novel thereby plots these competing sources of and channels for politicized feeling in altogether less neatly contained ways, not least in stepping outside the first-person into a roaming third-person perspective. Less explicitly concerned with feeling (with the crucial exception, to which I will return, of the outrage that afflicts Colambre when he thinks about the possible illegitimacy of his intended bride), the novel places a great deal of emphasis on perception, leading to a repeated emphasis on the excesses that overwhelm Colambre’s capacity to render the scenes he confronts intelligible. Mark Canuel has proposed that Edgeworth’s fiction sought to overcome ingrained, 95 Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 182. 97 Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 183.

96 Castle Rackrent and Ennui, 182.

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localized divisions and resentments by ‘reorganiz[ing] prejudice’ in part through political economy.98 Ennui shows such mechanisms at work and their psychological correlatives. Edgeworth’s embrace of Smithian enthusiasm for the market, Canuel proposes, does not mean she is concerned to flatten differences or to assimilate local variation into a single whole. Rather, he maintains, her fiction recognizes that ‘the sphere of economic transactions [. . .] provides a much more potent resource for patterning distinctions that might not otherwise be visible’.99 Especially valuable for approaching Ennui, this framework provides a means for understanding how that work steers both individuated and collective ‘discontents’ away from the respective extremes of irresponsible apathy and political fervour into more productive relational modes. In The Absentee, I would suggest, the question of how to negotiate between differences remains more indeterminate.100 That becomes particularly apparent as Colambre, in his interaction with the wider Irish body politic, sets out to acquire a comprehensive perspective on Ireland. Despite his efforts to adopt a version of Smith’s impartial spectatorship, complications intervene and (in contrast with Glenthorn’s successes once he dispenses with the trappings of quasifeudal command for governmental control) the messy situation Colambre confronts on the ground undermines his attempts to survey matters from above. Where Ennui has a clear stand-in for Smithian economics, the stability regained for Colambre’s family and their estate finds its proxy in the practices associated with ‘Mr Burke’. Although his character may seem to anchor the novel’s wider political and affective logics, in recalling Edmund Burke, I have suggested, his name calls attention to fundamental tensions between competing systems of governance—and more particularly, I would now add, between diverse, unsettled constituencies. The principal site at which the novel navigates between these competing demands, as I have noted, becomes the conscience of its protagonist. Lord Colambre steers his way from England to Ireland, weighing the respective sides of the conflicts on which the novel’s plot will hinge. Aside from its bearing on larger questions about spectatorship and political temperament, Colambre’s upstanding character may have a specific political analogue in the English Tory political establishment.101 More pertinently for our purposes here, the even-keeled, level-headed character that Colambre models looks ahead to Edmund Bertram in Austen’s Mansfield Park, who as I will show in Chapter 5 belongs—not least by way of the

98 Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing. That ultimately has to do with their inclusion with the ‘larger entity of Britain’ which, as an ‘expanding social and discursive entity [. . .] might even be said to maximize opportunities for disagreement or difference to emerge’ (128). 99 Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830, 129. 100 The same may apply for the question of how to assign and apportion responsibility. Compare Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830, 140–5 on the importance of responsibility in Ennui—which in turn folds Glenthorn into a more fully elaborated ‘realm of intertwined legal and economic relationships’ (145). 101 Paul Bew notes that Lord Colambre may have been based in part on Castlereagh, suggesting that the similarity with the notorious Tory politician—whom Edgeworth had witnessed debate in parliament—seems ‘too striking’ to be a coincidence. See Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny (London: Quercus, 2011), 31.

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name he partially shares with the statesman102—to both the political and affective facets of the emergent ‘late’ Toryism of the early nineteenth century. These questions of character, their local referents and abstracted significance, prove less significant to the novel in their specifics than in the disjunctures to which they call attention. The Absentee equally points, I have suggested, towards the deeper history of political discontents and fractured sympathies with which absenteeism remained entangled. Even as he seeks, from his dispassionate remove, to steer a responsible course, Colambre encounters various external—and, later, internal—sources of disturbance that promise to throw the plain sailing towards the novel’s conclusion off course. The encounter with Mr Burke, the ‘very uncommon agent’, anticipates the resolution to which he will help steer his family in their final return to Ireland, a concluding tableau in which Mr Burke and his associated management practices occupy a pivotal role. Attending more closely to the wayward course of Colambre’s experiences along the way points to some alternative trajectories. Addressed against a deeper background of political discontents—including the diverse circuits of feeling that emerged, as we have seen, around controversies over Burke’s party role and in his efforts to overcome the ‘absentee’ controversy—the encounter with ‘Mr Burke’ accordingly points to communicative channels and wayward feelings not accounted for by the novel’s overarching conclusion. The middle section of The Absentee, as I have noted, comprises an expanded travelogue, which Ina Ferris has illuminatingly discussed in terms of the novel’s rescripting of tour literature.103 We may extend Ferris’s valuable account of the uncertainties attending the space of Anglo-Irish encounter to questions of political representation. Colambre’s travels in Ireland bring him, like Swift’s Gulliver, into contact with various competing systems of governance. This section culminates, moreover, with Colambre casting off his disguise to confront the ‘bad’ land agent, old Nick, setting the stage for the disclosures, reconciliation, and restoration that follow. That conclusion, which entails Colambre weighing his family’s responsibilities to Ireland, informed by his earlier engagement with Irish scenes and people, will be set into motion by a version of Smithian spectatorship: ‘our hero’, we learn, ‘stood resolved not to indulge his own feelings, or to yield to caprice or persuasion’ as he decides upon the most equitable outcome, a version of Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’.104 His state of mind during this concluding portion of the novel, in which he weighs up the ostensible desires of his family against their overarching obligations, nevertheless remains troubled. The novel’s culminating tableau, in which the Anglicized rulers are harmoniously conjoined with their Irish subordinates, represents the product of Colambre’s dispassionate adjudication between his father and mother’s ‘ultimate happiness and respectability’ and the ‘happiness of hundreds of tenants, who depended upon them’. It also corrects the more egregious 102 Colin Jager, among others, has noted the overlap between the names of Edmund Bertram and Edmund Burke in The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2007), 135. 103 See Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 56–8. 104 The Absentee, 192.

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disparities, like those depicted in O’Connor’s pamphlet, between their profligate spending and their material effects on their Irish lands (including its ecological consequences).105 We can better appreciate what remains at stake in Colambre’s ongoing psychic disturbance not only by asking how these conflicts are eventually resolved, however, but also by instead looking backwards, to the elements of the novel that resist containment or figuration in these utilitarian terms and instead resist the terms of this ending. Two elements prove particularly illuminating. We may begin with Colambre’s marriage to his Catholic wife, Grace Nugent. Marriage often functioned in the national tale as a figure for Anglo-Irish reconciliation, and the marital union of Colambre and Grace thus gives ‘metaphorical expression’ to its political counterpart.106 At the same time, the stains of illegitimacy that surround Grace promise to trouble this outcome, introducing at least a flicker of doubt into the novel’s conclusion. As a suspected ‘St. Omar’, a name with ties to a French Jesuit college, Grace remains tainted by layered associations that look back to recent revolutionary violence and deeper legacies of conquest (as less explicitly does the name ‘Grace Nugent’).107 The novel’s conclusion may accordingly remain equivocal, given these unsettled legacies, or more absolute, in demonstrating the capacity for new governing structures to subsume earlier sources of division. Yet we might also consider a further possibility, approaching the energies magnetized by this temporary impediment to the novel’s conclusion as a reminder (and remainder) of the excesses, affective and representational, that characterize the novel’s engagement with Ireland as a whole. Rather than reading this disruption to the novel’s conclusion for its occluded political content, that is to say, we may instead reframe the questions about his Catholic bride’s legitimacy that race, with an almost Joycean insistence, through Colambre’s thoughts during these concluding chapters (‘Why! why is she a St. Omar!—illegitimate!’)108 in terms of the deeper history of discontents uncovered by this chapter: the ‘discontents’, that is to say, which encircle and promise to disrupt existing configurations of Anglo-Irish governance, as exemplified in Burke’s efforts to navigate the inchoate demands of the ‘people’ and his perceived wavering between an exclusive aristocracy and more wayward, multitudinous commitments. There was a direct connection between the question marks around Grace and the wayward feeling and representational excess that located Burke in the thick of Anglo-Irish discontents, since Burke was himself repeatedly tainted by the same slur. Accused of being a secret member of St Omer’s, the French Jesuit institution that also stands behind the suspicion of Colambre’s bride, Burke was cast as an excessively Irish figure, whose wayward attachments both undermined and exceeded his English party role, in ways that are recapitulated by the more oblique, complexly 105 The Absentee, 192. 106 Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830, 147. 107 See Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth, the United Irishmen and “More Intelligent Treason” ’, in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, eds. Heidi Kaufman and Christopher J. Fauske (Cranbury: Rosemont, 2004). See also Spencer Jackson, ‘Never Getting Home: The Unfulfilled Promise of Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee’, Studies in Romanticism 50 (2011). 108 The Absentee, 206.

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gendered and sexualized accusations of illegitimacy that interrupt the novel’s harmonious solution of the absentee problem. We find a further, more localized example of the representational—and ultimately political—surpluses that exceed the terms of the novel’s conclusion during the early phase of Colambre’s expedition. Now released from the distorted views of Ireland impressed upon him following his arrival, Colambre travels ‘incognito’ to visit his family estates. At an inn, he receives his introduction to Mr Burke as a ‘right good gentleman and a right good agent’ during a dinner conversation. This idealized depiction takes on additional contours, however, as his host repeatedly interjects with reminders that the exemplary agricultural management of the Burkes extends to components of that very dinner. Having been informed both that Mr Burke has been a good landlord but also that he and his wife have helped assemble the plate in front of him—‘There’s salad sir, if you are partial to it. Very fine lettuce. Mrs Burke sent us the plants herself ’—the host prompts a bemused Colambre to respond: ‘Your Mr Burke, I find, is apropos to porter, apropos to salad, apropos to cutlets, apropos to every thing.’109 Beyond its affectionate satire on Irish enthusiasm and hospitality, this scene typifies a more general tendency whereby scenarios encountered in the novel exceed, even overturn, established representational parameters. The competing frames of reference here, which threaten to overwhelm the subject matter of his dinner conversation with the animal and vegetable matter of that dinner itself, promise to make this ‘very uncommon agent’ inseparable from the products of his agencies. Following the realization that Nick, the bad land agent, has been a callous manager, deriding requests from his abject tenants that he write a letter to the absent landowners (‘ “Write to my lord about such a trifle—trouble him about such nonsense!” ’),110 Colambre laments the situation he views, asking ‘Is this Ireland?’ As he goes on to realize, however, these conclusions are themselves partial and the fatalistic visions they present for Irish governance not inevitable. ‘ “Let me not,” ’ Colambre comes to vow, ‘ “even to my own mind, commit the injustice of taking a speck for the whole.” ’111 This realization coincides with a personal revelation, which sees him cast off his disguise, in a confrontation inflected by an almost classical emphasis on the disclosure of truth: ‘ “Let him speak,” said lord Colambre, in a tone of authority; “let the voice of truth be heard.” ’112 Dramatically revealing himself, Colambre reverses the absence signalled in the novel’s title, including from his own self-presence to the ethical demands of his Irish dependants; this activation of personal agency and assertion of responsibility to his tenants in turn sets in motion the conclusion, which sees the symbiosis of his own happiness with that of the Irish tenants. But posing Colambre’s same question (‘Is this Ireland?’) about the earlier encounter has more equivocal consequences. In the scene in which his incipient partiality to Mr Burke becomes mingled with the components of the dinner that Burke and his wife have helped facilitate, Colambre remains within a more confused space. Mr Burke, taking over ‘the agency of the Colambre estate’, 109 The Absentee, 126 (emphasis original). 110 The Absentee, 164. 111 The Absentee, 156. 112 The Absentee, 165.

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will help pave the way for the novel’s conclusion.113 Yet by contrast with the earlier realization, prompted by the bad landlord, that he must rescue his ‘degraded’ estate through his dutiful return to his upstanding role—which he decisively sealed by ‘having first eaten a slice of his own venison’—the role of the impossibly good land agent does not prove so easily assimilated. The ‘appropriate unit of analysis for democratic theory’, Jane Bennett has argued, ‘is neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective’ but rather an ‘ontologically heterogeneous’ field, encompassing the ‘actants’ (in Latour’s term) that emerge between human and non-human systems, as well as ‘agencies’ that may belong to non-humans, comprising the ‘publics’ (and ‘problems’) around which politics revolves.114 Although Bennett remains concerned with the transformed ‘political ecologies’ of the contemporary moment, her emphasis on ‘a polity with more channels of communication between members’ (what Latour, she notes, terms ‘a more “vascularized” collective’) valuably illuminates the questions at stake in the central section of The Absentee.115 The wayward sympathies engaged by Burke in his efforts to navigate the ‘present discontents’ at home, together with the added complications introduced by his entanglement with Ireland, present us with a model for reconfiguring Colambre’s experiences, calling attention not only to other possible ‘channels of communication’ but to a more capacious and inclusive understanding of constituencies. The political consciousness that Rancière terms ‘the distribution of the perceptible’ and that ‘introduces new objects and new subjects onto the common stage’ thereby makes ‘audible as speaking beings those who were previously heard only as noisy animals’.116 As Bennett proposes, ‘Rancière’s model contains inklings of and opportunities for a more (vital) materialist theory of democracy’ that would include a ‘politics’ receptive to non-human agencies.117 Reconceptualizing Colambre’s travels, on the model of Burke’s efforts to navigate the ‘present discontents’, the novel presents glimpses of an altogether different assembly of agencies, one extending to a polymorphous partiality as open to garden vegetables as to people. These more speculative elaborations aside, Edgeworth’s novel recalls existing ways of making Ireland a scene of representational excess, but in such a way as to accentuate and complicate the political implications of what Rancière would term the distribution or partition of the perceptible. As Goldsmith could not fail to have appreciated in his portrait of Burke as a dish of ‘tongue’ with ‘a garnish of brains’, his critique also cut much closer to home. As Wilkes’s suggestion that his parliamentary oratory ‘stank of whiskey and potatoes’ more crudely reveals, Burke’s Irishness became a focal point for a long-standing identification between Ireland and orality, confusion, and excess. Irish English was ‘consistently characterized as suffering from deformity’ in such a way as to represent Irish accounts of their 113 The Absentee, 175. 114 See ‘Political Ecologies’, chap. 7 in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). For the ambiguous distinction between agents and agencies, see 151n.37. 115 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 104. 116 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 4. 117 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 106.

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‘social and political condition’ as similarly deformed.118 The summoning of Burke’s Irish background and insinuations of malign Catholic sympathies (as evidenced by his supposed relationship with the Jesuit college of St Omer’s) remained bound up with this appeal to representational excess, as evidenced in one newspaper letter that repeated the spurious ‘St Omer’ claim to describe Burke as one who had ‘suckled nonsense with his mother’s milk’. The ‘break’ of ‘any determined logic of connection between expression and its content’ that Rancière identifies as typical of democracy provides one framework for thinking about how Burke’s Irishness was seen to infiltrate his political role. This emphasis on a ‘break’ between those groups putatively represented and the excesses associated with any act of representation applies more directly still to thinking about Edgeworth’s narrative procedures. Despite his defence of the established constitution at home and abroad, Burke came into suspiciously close contact, as we have seen, with the threateningly amorphous elements that comprised those parties outside the established political system. The political excess that emerged in critiques of Burke’s obfuscation concerning the limits of ‘the People’ intersect directly with the aesthetic procedures of Edgeworth’s novel. By decoupling Colambre’s roaming perspective from the comprehensive ideal of managerial surveillance and deracinated nationality to which it aspires, we can accordingly read the novel against the terms of its own resolution. Despite his earlier determination not to ‘tak[e] a speck for the whole’ and protestation that the ‘degraded’ scenes he witnesses cannot be Ireland, Colambre’s travels also reveal the seemingly paradoxical ways that his limited, ‘partial’ vantage points work to expand his perceptual—and political—horizons in ways that disrupt the ‘count’ of politics.119 The clinical assessment by which ‘our hero [. . .] resolved not to indulge his own feelings’ at the novel’s conclusion stands at odds with the uncertainty that I have emphasized in the novel’s middle section. When Colambre weighs the ‘ultimate happiness and respectability’ against the ‘happiness of hundreds of tenants’ he provides a cue to the alternative political possibilities muffled by these appeals to harmonious reconciliation. Colambre’s utilitarian calculation paves the way for what the book here casts repeatedly as a happy ending, one undergirded by the harmonious presence of Mr Burke. An expanded approach to Ireland’s ‘discontents’ in preceding decades, I have proposed, discloses more wayward trajectories and even radical prospects for political sympathy. By focusing our attention on these more inchoate elements as guides to the politics of the novel, we can avoid the fallacy of taking its apparent resolution at face value. The subsuming of Mr Burke into that conclusion, as the culmination of his goal of ‘mak[ing] others live as happily as he could’, entails the disappearance of individuality, the containment of circuits of feeling, and the finalization—as the closure—of the count of politics. The novel’s repetition of a seemingly anodyne term (‘ultimate happiness and respectability’; ‘happiness of hundreds of tenants’; ‘live as happily as he could’) thus 118 Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 55–6. Wilkes quoted in O’Brien, Great Melody, 50. 119 See Rancière, The Politics of Literature, 37–41.

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proves telling. Happiness was a concept whose meaning had been transformed in eighteenth-century Ireland from a concern with virtuous self-fulfilment ‘to mean pursuit of rational self-interest through maintenance of one’s rights’, and as ‘happiness’ became a social rather than a political ethic, a concern with taking the part of different constituencies gave way to administering to the collective interest.120 Edgeworth’s fiction provides a potent reminder of the ways that wayward sympathies, alternative circuits for political communication, and inchoate ‘discontents’ continued to make their presence known—as was also the case, Chapter 5 will now show, with Austen amidst the still more rigid affective environment of early nineteenth-century England.

120 See Livesey, Civil Society and Empire, 61–2. See also Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

5 Austen and the Cultural Logic of Late Toryism In March 1820, Robert Peel anxiously warned of a change of ‘tone’ in England. In a long letter, he lamented the mounting demands of ‘public opinion’: ‘that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs’. Peel also noted a broader affective shift: ‘a feeling, becoming daily more general [. . .] in favour of some undefined change in the mode of governing the country’.1 That intuition was vindicated. The subsequent decade witnessed decisive social and political transformation, culminating with the 1832 Reform Bill. Rather than looking ahead to epoch-shaping constitutional reforms, thereby indulging the Whiggish impulse to view progress as inevitable, this chapter pursues the opposite tack. Looking to the fallout of the French Revolution and preceding decades of upheaval, the more pressing question becomes less how the currents of feeling Peel identified were eventually mobilized, I propose, than how they were ever contained in the first place. Rather than looking ahead to eventual Reform, that is to say, we do better to ask how the existing political order held out for as long as it did. As scholars including Linda Colley and Kevin Gilmartin have detailed, Britain experienced a dramatic rightward shift at the turn of the nineteenth century.2 Incipient in the aftermath of the American Revolution and the response to the Gordon Riots, this counter-revolution more fully took hold over subsequent decades, helping to stamp out, for good, some of the more revolutionary prospects glimpsed throughout the preceding century. This chapter builds upon existing accounts of that rightward turn by proposing a twofold intervention. By characterizing this shift as ‘Tory’, I emphasize its authoritarian cast and political underpinnings over its more diffuse governmental, moral, and religious dimensions. Second, I propose 1 Robert Peel to John Wilson Croker, 23 March 1820. The Croker Papers, ed. Louis J. Jennings, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), 1.155–6. Boyd Hilton also quotes this letter. 2 For the counter-revolutionary turn after the American Revolution, see Eliga Gould, ‘American Independence and Britain’s Counter-Revolution’, Past & Present 154 (1997), 111. For the later conservative reaction, see especially Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Threatened unrest placed conservatives on the defensive. But as Gilmartin demonstrates the counter-revolutionary press conscripted tactics initiated by their radical opponents with farreaching success.

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that what I term the late Toryism of the nineteenth century (‘late’ because manifesting the last remnants of unified ‘Church and King’ governance dating back to the seventeenth century) was maintained by a pervasive cultural logic, whose operations and contradictions this chapter sets out to elaborate.3 Taking its cue from Peel’s remarks, my discussion particularly emphasizes the role of feeling in managing or forestalling political change, joining with theorists who have asked how ‘including emotion or affect enlarge[s] the traditional ideological critique of the public sphere and rhetorical analysis of communication’ as the editors of the volume Political Emotions put the matter, making them strange bedfellows with Peel the future Conservative prime minister.4 This chapter takes up the case of Jane Austen. Although Austen’s writings as a whole betray her conservative leanings, Mansfield Park (1814) most fully reveals the affective disposition by which Toryism was maintained throughout the early nineteenth century (at least until the change of ‘tone’ that Peel identified with swirling new demands). At the same time, this chapter addresses the often elusive status of Austen’s works and authorship, working outwards from close attention to this novel to ask what alternative trajectories and even recalcitrant impulses her writings made perceptible. Determining to what extent Austen engaged with the ‘compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs’ and to what extent her novels stood at an oblique angle to, at a conscious remove from, or altogether outside what Peel described as the stuff of ‘public opinion’ remains a challenging undertaking. Recent developments, as we have seen from previous chapters, expanded, confused, and helped to confound the boundaries of political discussion. We ought to be hesitant in claiming as a result that politics was everywhere—an assertion, we may follow Rancière in noting, that risks amounting to its opposite. Yet we should similarly remain wary, I contend, about claiming that Austen’s political orientation was unclear. In testing how far Austen’s novels participated in the cultural logic of late Toryism, we can, this chapter proposes, develop a more precise account than previous criticism of where her conservative impulses reached their limits (and—perhaps—broke down). As much as this chapter joins with the editors of Political Emotions in calling attention to the role of emotion in shaping political activity and discussion, then, my account of Austen aims to put particular pressure on their account of ‘the affective scenes—not objects but clusters of actions—that open up for political analysis’ not least in recognizing that Austen’s novels were objects themselves,

3 By ‘cultural’ here, I mean to emphasize the broader frameworks of meaning and significance— what Dror Wahrman terms the ‘cultural soundbox’—in which a wide array of interconnected developments occurred (and in which ‘Toryism’, I argue, took on its coherence). See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Compare the provocative invitation to consider ‘political history as a branch of cultural history’ in Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 9. 4 Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds, ‘Introduction: Political Emotions and Public Feelings’, in Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication, eds. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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circulating within the print culture of a still formative reading nation.5 This chapter thereby seeks to reconsider, even to resolve, some fundamental questions about Austen’s political orientation, which I follow critics at least since Marilyn Butler in identifying as solidly Tory. At the same time, it poses fundamental questions from that baseline about what it means to read her fiction in ‘political’ terms in the first place. Austen’s novels, this chapter will show, were at complex removes from the currents of feeling comprising this expanded affective public sphere and the unique, even indeterminate qualities of Austen’s authorship remains central, I propose, to its ‘literary’ character. Yet this indeterminacy is precisely what makes any final political assessment of her writings so challenging. Mansfield Park provides a robust foundation from which to address these respective questions about Austen’s political orientation and literary identity. As perhaps her most ‘visibly ideological’ novel and the ‘most explicit in its [. . .] moral affirmations’ in the still unassailable assessments of Marilyn Butler and Edward Said, Mansfield Park presents the most direct indication of Austen’s personal principles and political temperament found in all of her fiction.6 Austen came of age during the period in which ‘naturally loyalist and socially conservative middle- and upper-class opinion’ in England adhered behind the younger William Pitt—while also adopting many of ‘Burke’s ideas’—as part of a ‘Tory’ family that squarely belonged within this expansive political constituency.7 Her family’s Toryism was further deepened by ties with the Anglican church, which Austen continued to follow devoutly.8 In her avowed political leanings, there can be little question that Austen was a Tory at last (or at least).9 The reconciliation between generations at 5 Staiger, Cvetkovich, and Reynolds, ‘Introduction: Political Emotions and Public Feelings’, 3–4. 6 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 219; Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 100. Marilyn Butler, discussing the novel in the anti-Jacobin tradition as a critique of education, views the novel as her most ‘visibly ideological’ with the possible exception of Sense and Sensibility; Said also describes the novel as Austen’s ‘most explicit’ in its ideological affirmations. 7 Marilyn Butler, ‘History, Politics, and Religion’, in The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey (London: Athlone Press, 1986), 196. 8 ‘Austen’s religious environment and her individual religious presumptions were drawn from the orthodox Anglicanism practiced by the Tory gentry to whom she belonged.’ Laura Mooneyham White, Austen’s Anglicanism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 39–40. Peter Knox-Shaw has challenged the emphasis on the fixity of Austen’s Anglican belief, as well as the wider emphasis—which he attributes to Butler—on her attachment to inflexible, outmoded social assumptions. Although his study valuably recovers various strands of sceptical Enlightenment thought that may have inflected Austen’s worldview, its assumed equation between appeals to Austen’s conservatism and her attachment to inflexible and outmoded standards does not pertain to the modern, reinvented Toryism I discuss here. Even this more relaxed, supple Toryism, moreover, could not encompass figures such as Joseph Priestley, David Hume, and William Godwin—names that remained anathema to the counter-revolutionary cause, in ways not apparent from Knox-Shaw’s fluid approach to intellectual genealogies. See Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 9 See also Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Vintage: 1999), 139. As will become clear, recognizing Austen’s core Toryism in the terms I outline here need not amount to a claim about her attachment to specific political factions or her sympathies for (or antipathies towards) particular individuals. For a recent discussion of Austen’s family links with prominent Whig bankers, see E. J. Clery, Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister (London: Biteback, 2017). Clery’s rich discussion provides a nuanced account of how Austen, especially in her later works, calibrated her views of society to economic disruptions, which are for the most part artificially excluded from Mansfield Park.

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the culmination of Mansfield Park was closely aligned, the first half of this chapter sets out to show, with the wider cultural logic by which the Toryism of the early nineteenth century was implemented and sustained. Examining the various institutional networks—literary, political, and religious—in which Austen embedded her fiction confirms these partisan commitments. Yet this need not suggest that Austen was subsumed within the broadly conservative placement of her fiction, any more than claim that her writing was enmeshed completely within the fabric of its political moment. As with her involvement in a host of further debates that had transformed the political landscape in recent decades, from the proper management of feeling to the propriety of conversational exchange, Austen’s engagement with the shifting currents of political activity and discussion entails considerable complications.10 As the later sections of this chapter go on to show, moreover, the uniquely literary guises taken by her interventions bring the precise extent of her political commitments into question. Before turning to those more speculative questions and asking what precisely those ‘guises’ were, this chapter establishes a baseline account of ‘late Toryism’ and the alignment of Austen’s novel with this wider cultural logic. That involves re-examining the questions, taken up in relation to Johnson’s problematic authority and Boswell’s ‘warm’ Toryism, concerning the reinvention of authoritarian governance, at home and abroad. An important line of criticism has seen Mansfield Park as critiquing or commenting upon the imperilled state of established patriarchal authority (and, at least to some degree, embracing the disruption that emerges in its absence).11 Yet politics proves challenging to fit back into this picture. Even without pressing very far, such arguments prove very hard to reconcile with what we know about Austen and her milieu. Further issues emerge, for altogether different reasons, with readings that see Austen turning towards extrapolitical values of quietude, piety, and organicism or as defending a nascent middle class. The emphasis in those otherwise valuable discussions on broader categories and specific concepts means they are liable to elide their immediate contexts: missing the political forest in which those specific trees were organized in this period.12 Mansfield Park, this chapter proposes, was far less conflicted in its avowed politics 10 Compare the discussions of Austen in Harriet Guest, Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 11 For the best-known account of the novel’s subversive tendencies, to which I return below, see Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 12 Avrom Fleishman convincingly sees the novel, with ‘Romanticism’ more widely, turning to a conservative, traditionalist, nationalistic ethos, in an organicist tradition. This otherwise compelling account nonetheless neglects the reinvented forms of authority and coercion that I argue were central to the novel’s ‘Tory’ vision. Donald Greene views the novel as approaching Tory ‘democracy’ in showing how the lower middle class make good; as Fleishman notes, however, despite its attacks on the aristocracy, the novel leaves the bourgeois unsuccessful. See Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967); Donald J. Greene, ‘Jane Austen and the Peerage’, PMLA 68 (1953). For an account more sympathetic to my own, see Clara Tuite, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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and far more invested in often archaic-seeming, authoritarian power structures than critics have tended to claim. The novel not only proves entirely compatible with Austen’s fundamental conservative impulses. Mansfield Park, I argue, provides both a generic ‘solution’ to the problem of authority that the reinvented Toryism of the early nineteenth century also arose to resolve—and something like a template for its implementation.13 Rather than casting an askance eye on patriarchal ‘Tory’ authority or turning aside to an emphasis on tradition or religion, Mansfield Park, with a quiet tenacity shared with its heroine (and you don’t have to like her), showed how such authority could be restored in a newly robust, far-reaching guise for the years to come.14 To the extent that we read the novel with a view to its political commitments, this was, I maintain, an unquestionably conservative work. Yet precisely how far such a reading ought to go—to what extent we should want to read Austen with a view to her political orientation—remains another question entirely, one that the later sections of this chapter take up in relation to the unique shape and status of literary form. ‘ T H E S C E P T E R , N OW T R A N S F E R R ’ D ’ : P OW E R A N D   P R E RO G AT I V E R E V I S I T E D When Peel voiced his concerns about the changing national ‘tone’, he chose a sympathetic addressee. John Wilson Croker was a contributor to the Quarterly Review, which appears in the reading matter perused by the Bertram and Rushworth families in the opening volume of Mansfield Park, underscoring the novel’s ties with conservative culture from the outset.15 In addition to policing national debates around political sense and literary sensibility, the publishing network surrounding this Tory periodical intersected more directly with the development of Austen’s authorship. Emma was issued with its publisher, John Murray, as was 13 Michael McKeon proposes that literary genres may provide ‘solutions’ for problems to which no other resolution exists in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 20. See also Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981). My account of ‘late Toryism’ alludes both to Jameson’s attention to the narrative and affective structures that disclose (and thereby periodize) the cultural logic of ‘late capitalism’ as well as to Elizabeth Povinelli’s more recent adoption of ‘late liberalism’ as a way of periodizing and spatializing liberal formations. 14 As J. A. Downie observes in the face of ‘radical revisionist’ readings that emphasize the novel’s critique of inherited institutions, the ‘reformative agenda underpinning the novel might indeed have been conservative in inspiration also’. ‘Rehabilitating Sir Thomas Bertram’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 50 (2010), 739–40. In a particularly rich and thorough discussion of Mansfield Park, Saree Makdisi has proposed that the novel’s general critique of the ‘outmoded forms of power and obedience tied to the landed gentry in England’ (including its apparent critique of the slave trade) masks the shift towards a new form of imperial power, associated with ‘internal self-regulation, rather than external, almost theatrical regulation’. See Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 133–5. My account reveals how these emerging conceptions of self-regulation remained knitted together—if only for the brief period considered here—with renovated versions of these older ‘forms of power and obedience’. 15 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. John Wiltshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 121.

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the second edition of Mansfield Park.16 Aside from any temperamental affinities with the periodical, Austen was directly associated with a network of authors ‘sharing broadly Tory political principles’, and this ‘ambitious, substantial, serious, wide-ranging’ novel was Austen’s ‘entry ticket’ into the ‘literary establishment’.17 Before asking whether or not she sought to use her ticket to this literary and political world, or was content to hover at its margins without incurring the full costs of admission, some attention to the ways that ‘Toryism’ was changing is in order. Given recent disturbances, Peel noted elsewhere in his correspondence with Croker, ‘this was not the time [. . .] for preaching up the anti-divine right doctrines’.18 Vocal support for the post-1688 constitution had swelled following the French Revolution, as a torrent of attacks on the political elite, aristocracy, and inherited privilege, and swirling new demands for recognition gave rise to an outpouring of ‘Church and King’ sentiment. In contrast with the popular unrest and rumbling discontents that had characterized preceding decades, the established constitution and social order not only persisted: they arguably emerged from these challenges stronger than ever. In asking what permitted Toryism to endure—indeed, thrive— during the intervening period, we must look not only to the ways that Boswell and others sought to reconstitute Tory authority on a new footing but to other more subtle and insidious developments, including the less visible ‘neo-conservative’ reaction against ‘progressive’ ideologies.19 Asking in turn where and in what ways ‘Tory’ commitments surfaced in Austen’s writing (at once a more straightforward and more elusive undertaking than with the divided figure and vigorous polemics of Johnson) allows for fresh evaluation of the importance of ‘politics’ to our thinking about her authorship more widely.

16 The editor of the Quarterly Review, William Gifford, also read Austen’s later fiction before publication. I discuss Murray’s ties with the political establishment at greater length in Chapter 6 on Byron. As will become clear, my aim in turning to Austen in this chapter is not to exemplify some larger claim about conservative literature, of which Hannah More and other contemporaries would provide far better examples. Austen remained in many ways an anomalous and altogether more interesting case. 17 Mansfield Park, xxxviii. Tory authors also published by Murray included Southey and Scott (whose review of Emma would appear in the pages of the Quarterly Review for October 1815). The depth of Austen’s ties with the network around Murray nonetheless remains debatable. Although Murray’s edition of Emma was embellished with an address to the prince regent from ‘His Royal Highness’s Dutiful and Obedient Humble Servant, The Author’, Austen’s attachment to that dedication and respect for its addressee remain dubious. The wording of the dedication was altered from Austen’s earlier suggestion (‘Dedicated by Permission to H.R.H. The Prince Regent’), and she had recently professed to ‘hate’ the prince for the treatment of his wife. Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, 247–9, 226. Austen was far from displaying equanimity towards the political establishment on a day-to-day basis and wrote satirical poems attacking Navy policy and government elites. 18 The Croker Papers, 1808–57, 50, 52. Peel alluded to the outrage unleashed by the Peterloo ‘Massacre’ the preceding year, in which government soldiers had killed members of an unarmed crowd, while accurately diagnosing the growing furore over efforts to strip Queen Caroline, wife of George IV, of her title for alleged adultery. 19 Boyd Hilton characterizes arguments against constitutional reform in these terms in Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 24–31. Hilton responds directly to J. C. D. Clark’s arguments about an enduring ancien régime in English Society, 1660–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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Alongside constitutional questions, the rightward turn of the early nineteenth century entailed an increasingly acute sense of the fractious social body (which became not only a source of unease but the target in its own right for evolving governmental techniques). The reimagining of state authority (or ‘prerogative’) was thus closely bound up with a broader emphasis on containing the myriad, contending elements of the wider political nation, encompassing both the refractory elements Southey had identified with the origins of ‘popular disaffection’ and the broader swirl of ‘right’ and ‘wrong feeling’, ‘prejudice’ and ‘newspaper paragraphs’ that Peel identified with ‘public opinion’. This concern with order extended even to those less refractory, more respectable elements of the wider population, whose conduct and character faced heightened scrutiny. The changing operations of state power, at home and abroad, were propped up in particular by a newly consolidated ‘sovereign’ subject, as conservative habits of mind were readily translated into a meaningful political force.20 Toryism was thus reinvented and sustained in the early nineteenth century in ways that extended far beyond parliament. Working in concert with the changing operations of the state, these internalized forms of control supplied the underpinnings for what Peel identified as the ‘tone’ of national life (called into question by his affective intuition of the ‘undefined change in the mode of governing the country’ portended by brewing unrest). This was thus a period dominated by conservative governance but also, as Peel noted, a broader conservative mood. Although that mood surfaced, in part, through appeals to national institutions, its dependence upon a broader base of support can be seen from a ‘Song For the Fourth of November, Being the Birth-Day of King William III’.21 An unexceptional instance of popular counter-revolutionary culture, this song from the mid-1790s reveals the cultural logic that worked to smooth over constitutional discontinuity and broader disruption, while laying broader appeals to the basis of order. After stanzas celebrating William’s 1688 voyage to reclaim the ‘invaded’ rights of ‘Freedom’ and amidst further resounding (‘Proclaim, proclaim great William’s praise! / Crown, crown his bust with victor’s bays’), the third stanza features a more pointed direction: to maintain the ‘rights he fix’d’ through each ‘mild 20 See Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). As Makdisi’s account of the repressive tendencies of middle-class radicalism in Making England Western has similarly shown, these emerging conceptions of ‘sovereign’ selfhood needed not have a conservative political orientation. From a longue durée perspective, Makdisi’s more recent proposal that conservative and radical are practically indistinguishable in emerging guises of ‘Occidentalism’ is surely correct. For the ‘productivity’ of the self-denying discipline of Fanny and Edmund in Mansfield Park—as opposed to the ‘indulgence, pleasure, luxury, excess, idleness’, and other corruptions subsequently projected onto ‘Orientals’—see Makdisi, Making England Western, 143, 141, 150. Compare Harriet Guest on the role of feminine affection in ‘marginaliz[ing] the dissolute habits of the landowner in favour of the industrious virtues of the professional middle class’ in Unbounded Attachment, 177. 21 The ‘Song For the Fourth of November’ was most likely by Manchester manufacturer and writer James Ogden: it appears bound in a volume with Ogden’s 1797 ‘Concise Narrative’ of the valiant efforts by British soldiers in battles on the continent and his rewritten version of Milton’s Paradise Regained. British Library 11643.g.42.(2.). Ogden’s commitments are apparent in the dedication to his Hudibrastic satire Sans Culotte and Jacobine (Manchester: 1800), which defended ‘Rational Liberty in Church and State’ against the ‘Wild Theories’ and ‘Treasonable Practices of Modern Levellers’.

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Brunswick’s reign’. The injunction to preserve this state of affairs is brought up to date in the fourth and final stanza: Still may the scepter, now transferr’d From William down to George the Third, By legal sway his rights assert, Thron’d in each free-born subject’s heart.

In appealing to the rights the Prince of Orange and future English king ‘fix’d’, the poem was congruent with the Burkean account of the Revolution as a one-off that called for no further innovation. Now fixed (in the sense of ‘repaired’) these rights are also ‘fix’d’ in place and not amenable to change. In yoking this conservative defence of the constitution together with support for the monarch, the poem fabricated continuity between William, the earlier Whig warrior hero, and the present Hanoverian monarchy.22 At the same time, this transmission of dynastic power extended monarchy’s sovereign authority to internalized practices of governance implanted within its subjects. With remarkable compression, the song thus discloses a conjoined logic of submission to the prerogative, constituted authority, and individual self-discipline (a conjunction Thomas Paine may have had in mind when he called to ‘dismiss all those songs and toasts which are calculated to enslave, and operate to suffocate reflection’).23 Late Toryism was concerned not only with structures of power but with personal conduct; as such, this label identifies not only an ideological but also an affective orientation. Examining the various dimensions of the wider rightward turn reveals the reinvention of state authority as closely implicated with the orchestration of individual and collective feeling. When long-term prime minister Lord Liverpool defined the ‘Tory’ constituency as ‘firm, steady, and persevering supporters of the monarchy and the established church’24 he made explicit this intertwining of institutional structures with individual temperaments. Retroactive definitions of Toryism as a common hostility to reform of the existing constitution, a shared ‘basic sentiment [. . .] which was a sense of the harmony of society’, or ‘the desire for stability’25 risk appearing somewhat wishy-washy, post facto descriptions of a wider rightward trend better described as ‘Conservative’. Yet they describe with precision the interconnected elements of a short-lived but tenacious cultural logic 22 Compare Abigail Williams, ‘Legitimacy and the Warrior King 1688–1702’, chap. 3 in Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), which notes the irony of earlier depictions in which the king’s ‘bureaucratic warmongering’ was nostalgically reimagined as military heroism (114). As this song makes clear, the appeals to stability made by late Toryism were actively shaped and emboldened by providential, ‘Whiggish’ readings of the Protestant constitution (leading to seemingly contradictory conflations, for example, of ‘Whig’ heroes and ‘Tory’ principles). Compare Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History, 1688–1832 (London: Arnold, 1997), 284–5. 23 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 208. 24 Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, 65. 25 W.  R.  Brock, Lord Liverpool and Liberal Toryism, 1820–1827 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1939), 35; William Anthony Hay, The Whig Revival, 1808–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 14.

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that sought to uphold and reinforce the national unity and stability putatively secured by the British constitution.26 The ascent of William Pitt the younger provided a linchpin in this regard. The regrouping of the Tory side around the youthful leader entailed dramatically reconfigured conceptions of power, authority, and individual agency. This altogether changed conception of ‘character’—one that Pitt and his successors, including Canning, came to exemplify—led to an altogether different ‘style’ of political activity and conduct, as well as a newly emboldened sense of stability.27 The various facets of the resulting ‘late Toryism’ become apparent by locating the changing face of the political elite in proximity to these broader concerns with authority, stability, and ‘order’: asking where, between institutions and individuals, leaders and collectives, this reinvented ‘Toryism’ was to be located and where else, in and beyond the political elite, this ‘firm, steady, and persevering’ orientation took hold. In asking, similarly, where the ‘tone’ of national life identified by Peel was located, we can in turn ask how far Austen’s novel aligned, harmonized, or clashed with this wider Tory ‘mood’. W I L L I A M P I T T A N D T H E I M P O RTA N C E O F F E E L I N G TO RY Although the changing faces of Whig statesmanship, including associated questions of individual and collective feeling, have received extensive critical discussion,28 ‘Tory’ political identity (including the importance of ‘feeling’ Tory) has been comparatively neglected. The established Tory party had been rendered defunct as a political force by the time George III ascended the throne. Yet the ensuing upheaval saw multiple and competing ‘varieties’ of Toryism brought into play.29 Rapidly changing circumstances in Britain and across the Atlantic world witnessed 26 The emphasis on ‘order’ and ‘harmony’ that I argue was crucial to how ‘Toryism’ retained its hold for a brief but crucial period in the early nineteenth century was also crucial to the subsequent consolidation of a broad-based ‘Conservative’ party (albeit without the emphasis on reinvented prerogative that was, I propose, so crucial for these earlier decades). For Peel’s efforts to assert the ‘moral authority’ of the House of Commons in the 1832–41 period—in tandem with his wider concern with ‘order’, the ‘despotism’ of the press, and the need to stand up to a clamorous populace—see Matthew Cragoe, ‘Sir Robert Peel and the “Moral Authority” of the House of Commons, 1832–41’, English Historical Review 128, no. 530 (2013). Far from having ‘dissociated himself from the political process’ after Reform, Peel—in the posthumous assessment of Lord John Russell—‘ “addressed himself to the country on behalf of those principles of which he was the most able defender” ’ and had ‘ “brought back again the various powers of the State into harmony” ’ (77). 27 See ‘Escaping Pitt’s Shadow, 1801–1807’, chap.  1 in Stephen  M.  Lee, George Canning and Liberal Toryism, 1801–1827 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008). 28 See Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Daniel O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Robert W. Jones, Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain During the War for America, 1770–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 29 Compare J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform’, in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Heather Welland reminds me that various groupings

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loyalty and allegiance to the monarch, constitution, and established regime take myriad guises; these often fraught defences of established authority, order, and tradition in turn contended with vibrant opposition. What a ‘Tory’ was during the early reign of George III, what adopting a ‘Tory’ position meant, what Tories even looked like had nonetheless become newly uncertain. The confusion that encircled the ‘Tory’ identity of Lord North at the moment of the American War and his followers was symptomatic of a larger crisis of political agency. With the early nineteenth century, this earlier moment of confusion and impasse was spectacularly overcome, as Britain experienced a decisive shift to the right. As the discussion of Boswell in Chapter 3 began to show, reclaiming the ‘Tory’ label was not incidental but central to this development.30 To understand how Toryism re-emerged in newly viable forms that connected in more than a vague sense with the Tory tradition of the long eighteenth century, we must reach beyond matters of personnel, ideology, and nomenclature narrowly conceived to examine a far broader field of developments. In particular, we must pay attention to the changed structural importance of individual agency. Transformed conceptions of political leadership and changing norms, for statesmen and otherwise, were particularly crucial to the ascent of William Pitt the younger. Aided by what Hilton terms his ‘schoolboy image’, Pitt appealed, both as a new face and as an alternative to both the tired figure of North and the debased reputation of Fox.31 Earlier the same year as the lamentable ‘Ode’ on Johnson’s death rather improbably celebrated the unruly and controversial author as the angelic vanquisher of ‘Faction’, a further poem celebrated Pitt far more plausibly as a source of unity, channelling a distinctively new combination of professionalism, patriotism, and manliness. This ‘Regular Ode’ addressed to the young statesman portrayed ‘Opprest Britannia’ in a gloomy state, her dishevelled hair and fallen sceptre declaring ‘Fell Faction’s tyrant sway’. The morality, integrity, and rectitude for which Pitt was lauded, while reflecting his upright—and notoriously uptight— personality, also helped inaugurate an altogether new style of government; Pitt duly of political ‘Tories’ were in operation throughout the post-1760 decades, from Bute to Beckford. My concern here falls on the broader reclaiming of the ‘Tory’ label and a more widely diffused ‘Toryism’. 30 Boyd Hilton, among others, has maintained that the application of ‘Tory’ to this period risks being ‘seriously misleading’, given associations, for example, with Stuart absolutism. See A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People, 50, 195–6. Such an approach, I contend, proves unnecessarily constraining. Notwithstanding the ways that Liverpool and Croker actively promoted use of ‘Tory’ as a self-description, Pittites clearly drew upon ‘neo-Tory’ strategies of argumentation and legitimation, as did the increasingly coercive and authoritarian colonial state. I thank James Vaughn for discussion on this point. 31 Following the king’s audacious deployment of his powers to crush the India Bill—thereby throwing out the Fox–North coalition—Pitt had been installed in high office, at the tender age of twenty-four. He would serve as prime minister, with one break, for the best part of two decades. In the 1784 general election, Pitt attracted significant popular support, as fears over excessive royal prerogative were overtaken by suspicion of aristocracy, corruption, and degeneracy. See Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People, 44–7, 203–5. For a detailed discussion of the distortion necessary to paint Pitt as a devout Christian, ideological warrior, and bulwark against the reform he had in fact earlier supported, see also J. J. Sack, ‘The Memory of Burke and the Memory of Pitt: English Conservatism Confronts Its Past, 1806–1829’, The Historical Journal 30, no. 3 (1987). Following his death in 1806, Pitt entered into legend, and the awkward facts of earlier support for reform, ongoing support for Catholic emancipation, and scant religiosity were airbrushed away.

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disperses the prevailing gloom in the poem, his ‘dazzling light’ dispelling discord and restoring order.32 ‘In the eighteenth century,’ W. R. Brock notes, ‘an honest politician had been, in the public eye, an extraordinary and praiseworthy exception to a general rule; in the nineteenth century the corrupt time server was singled out for reprobation because he was an isolated case and not the symbol of a class.’ Pitt’s successors, most notably Lord Liverpool, refined the image of the statesman— which also entailed acquiring the esteem of ‘the respectable middle class’—into the disciplined, denuded, and rather dull politician bequeathed to the Victorian age.33 More broadly, Pitt looked ahead to gentlemanly ideals of independent thinking, moral discipline, and self-control with long afterlives (both in the newly constituted elites of English society and in the British Empire, where these traits extended to the putative entitlement to exert control over undisciplined others).34 In his anxiety ‘about his own appetites’, Hilton observes, Pitt was ‘in tune’— ‘behaviourally and psychologically, though not doctrinally’—with the ‘spirituality of the age’.35 As the ‘Ode’ reveals, the reputation that shaped his original ascent to power, which would in turn pass into legend after his death, was not simply a matter of personality but pointed towards the wider cultural logic in which Pitt’s leadership took shape. The shift in national sentiments with which Pitt’s leadership became identified was particularly apparent in a ‘Dialogue of the Dead’ that imagined him in conversation with his father. ‘It was you, my Son,’ the elder Pitt gushes, ‘who, under Heaven, raised a spirit in the British Nation superior to the inconvenience of pressing privations, to the menaces of invasion, and the misfortunes of war. Your animating eloquence identified the interests of the mass of the People, (heretofore peevish at the smallest additional burden) with the national honor, and their formerly selfish sentiments were enlisted in the cause of established order, of the security of property, and the glory of Britain.’ The younger 32 Regular Ode; Addressed to the Right Hon. William Pitt (London, 1784). 33 Brock, Lord Liverpool and Liberal Toryism, 30–2. As Colley notes, Pitt served as a prototype for politicians from Peel through to Gladstone. See Britons (192–3, 194; see also 191–2 on the reality behind claims to uncorrupted purity). Brock’s characterization of Liverpool—‘a likeable man, modest, shy, and sometimes awkward’, with the hardly redeeming addition that ‘in conversation he does not seem to have been without the art of amusing’ (32)—captures well the transition between ages of politicians. Compare Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People, 200. For a virtuosic discussion of the ambivalently circumscribed redemption of ‘eccentricity’ within mid-Victorian liberalism, as staged by—among others—Anthony Trollope, see Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 34 See Praseeda Gopinath, ‘Manly Independent Men: (De)constructing the English Gentleman’, chap. 1 in Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities After Empire (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). 35 Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People, 191. The ‘spirituality’, or wider ‘spirit’, of Pitt’s age ultimately transcended any personal idiosyncrasies Pitt displayed. While Hilton claims that Pitt, unlike Burke, maintained a distinction between ‘public and private morality’ (60), this conclusion requires revision given the larger structural significance I attribute here to his conduct. Indeed, as the more-than-coincidental poster-boy for a private life free from interference but evacuated of content, Pitt pointed towards a far more repressively moralizing society than Burke’s Reflections. For an illuminating discussion of popular constructions of leadership in nineteenth-century politics, in which leaders became avatars for moral and ideological narratives, see ‘The Idol and the Icon: Leaders and their Popular Constituencies’, chap. 7 in James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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Pitt responds: ‘You flatter me too highly. Though the persuasion of the House of Commons fell perhaps to my share, yet the regeneration (to use a new political term) of the Commons of Britain was the effect of the writings of one who was himself regenerated, the great Edmond [sic] Burke.’36 This discussion of Pitt’s preservation, through his ‘animating eloquence’, of ‘order’ and ‘security’ against the ‘selfish sentiments’ of the masses not only drew upon his heroic self-control and dependable presence but made him the guiding ‘spirit’ for a nation preoccupied by, as well as ‘peevish’ with, its own personal discontents. The shift to Burke here may nonetheless appear surprising—all the more so for the instability that continued to haunt even his post-revolutionary reputation. Yet this representation also marks a shift, less in the evaluation of individual political actors than in wider conceptions of character. The introduction of the always uncertain figure of Burke here confirms that the contours of individual personalities, as opposed to the orchestration of individuals’ agency, were increasingly beside the point (as the collapsing of the institutional ‘regeneration’ of the House of Commons with ‘the effect of the writings of one who was himself regenerated’ makes clear).37 As the identification between Burke’s personal metamorphosis and a larger national political transformation underscores, personality and idiosyncratic agency were subsumed under—if not dissolved within—a larger process, of which Pitt was always already a constitutive element. As we saw from previous chapters, the erratic characters of Burke and Johnson threatened to align their writings, against their will, with a wayward body politic. Pitt belonged to a new generation. His streamlined ‘character’ aligned seamlessly with appeals to stable and continuous authority. As the ‘Dialogue of the Dead’ and countless additional works reveal, he was seen to have secured stability and order 36 Amusements of Solitude [. . .] Dialogue of the Dead. The 1st Earl of Chatham and William Pitt. (Clonmel: T. Gorman, 1809). As Mona Ozouf notes, ‘the word [regeneration], with its extraordinary charge of energy, crops up in the flood of brochures, broadsides, and pamphlets’ that followed the outbreak of revolution in France, whereupon ‘regeneration’ became the watchword for ‘a program without limits, at once physical, political, moral, and social, which aimed for nothing less than the creation of a “new people.” ’ See ‘Regeneration’, in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1989), 781. In its reference to this ‘new political term’, the Dialogue of the Dead ironically registers the ways such a wholesale process, cleansed of its explicit revolutionary dimension, had taken hold following the counter-revolutionary turn within Britain. 37 As part of the generation that preceded the ‘better standard of political morality which dates its prevalence from the younger Pitt’, Burke’s competing impulses had made for a very different relationship to his partisan commitments (as the reference to his having ‘regenerated’ from his earlier identification with the Rockingham Whigs would appear to suggest). See the first volume of the Select Works of Edmund Burke, 3 vols., ed. Edward John Payne (Oxford: Clarendone Press, 1874–8), 4. Burke’s views and temperament saw him accepted into the early nineteenth-century conservative tradition only with ambivalence and qualification, with points of contention including Burke’s pro-American activity in the 1770s and ’80s, his support for Irish Catholics, and his critique of the East India Company. See Sack, ‘The Memory of Burke and the Memory of Pitt’, 627. The absorption of Burke into the Tory pantheon entailed, among other distortions, the elision of his potent critique of nascent British imperialism. See Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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in England following the French Revolution, his firm, unbending character celebrated in a popular pro-Tory song by Canning as ‘The Pilot that Weathered the  Storm’.38 Burke’s identification with the ‘regeneration’ of the Commons of England—the word ‘Commons’ itself tellingly conflating the institution and the wider terrain of public life—made this alignment between national order and individual conduct explicit. Pitt’s character bolstered this emerging Toryism, looking ahead to Elaine Hadley’s account of the lived dimensions of mid-Victorian liberalism. As I will now go on to suggest, precisely such an alignment of individual conduct with collective harmony was also at stake in Mansfield Park. In passing the ‘scepter’ of authority from parents to children, the novel not only showed how ‘Tory’ authority could be secured for a further generation; Austen thereby anchored a broader appeal to national stability. Yet by embedding these dynamics within an expanded network of duties, loyalties, and affections, Austen created openings for disaffected elements liable to upset and interfere with the harmonious functioning of this wider cultural logic. That began with the wilful movements of her characters— and ultimately extended to the wayward travels of her novels themselves. M A S T E R S A N D S E RVA N T S : T H E P RO B L E M O F   AU T H O R I T Y I N M A N S F I E L D PA R K In Mansfield Park, critics have concurred, Austen was preoccupied with the question of authority (a concern that might also be said to preoccupy the world of the novel).39 Sir Thomas Bertram, representative of the Tory landed gentry, supplies a crucial node in this regard.40 The commanding sway of Sir Thomas at home, as well as over his West Indian estate, makes his ‘rule’ explicitly at issue. At the same time, his presence at Mansfield Park, as well as his crucial absences, underscores a concern with control and order that pervades the novel more widely. 38 Lee, George Canning and Liberal Toryism, 1801–1827, 29. This characterization applied, with greater imaginative licence, to political leadership more widely. In The Revolution, an epic poem describing the events of the Glorious Revolution by the same author as the ‘Song’ discussed above, William appears in the combined guise of ‘statesman’ and ‘hero’, whose most important victories are as a subsequent bulwark against ‘party’. Paralleling the ‘Song’, George III appears as ‘Another William [. . .] Firm as a rock, oppos’d to foaming waves’ who as ‘Britain’s pilot’ will ‘faction’s fury over-awe’ by the ‘force of well-establish’d law’. The connection argues for Ogden’s authorship of the ‘Song’, as do the concluding lines of the poem: ‘The scepter [. . .] Transmitted, by [William’s] prowess at the Boyne, / To the illustrious Kings of Brunswick’s line.’ [James Ogden], The Revolution (London: J. Johnson, 1790), 251. 39 By speaking in terms of Austen’s ‘preoccupation’ with—and thus the novel’s preoccupation ‘by’—the issue of authority, I invoke the questions that Anne-Lise François raises, by way of Adorno, in discussing the novel’s acquiescence to limited engagement with the given. See Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 40 For the local ‘interest’ of Sir Thomas as part of the ‘Tory landed gentry’, see Mansfield Park, 649. n11. Claudia Johnson views the novel’s concern with authority as one of the ways Mansfield Park remains ‘animated by the preoccupations of the 1790s’. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, xx–xxi, 96. For the ‘consolidation of authority’ in the novel, see Said, Culture and Imperialism, 92. See also the discussion of disrupted authority in Joseph Litvak, ‘The Infection of Acting: Theatricals and Theatricality in Mansfield Park’, chap. 1 in Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

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When Sir Thomas travels to Antigua, his children and their guests perform the racy, explicitly revolutionary play Lovers’ Vows in his absence. The threats to authority posed by waning respect for hierarchy, abandonment of convention, and the more nebulous forces of commercial modernity (represented by the interloping Crawfords and their guests) here receive close to apothegmatic expression. As the focal point for the disorder that follows from absent authority, the play creates a  kind of controlled chaos (described, in phrasing to which we will return, as ‘a general air of confusion’)41 that the remainder of the novel works to dispel and reshape. With the marriage of Fanny Price to her clergyman cousin Edmund Bertram and their return to the Mansfield estate, the novel culminates with a broad-based appeal to duty, stability, and continuity, without the suggestions of continuing unrest that arguably animate the conclusion of The Absentee. Henry and Mary Crawford, the Bertram sisters, even Edmund’s dissolute brother Tom are all pushed aside, while Fanny and Edmund, as if in a reprieve for good behaviour, are recovered from their straitened circumstances. The estate, at the conclusion of Mansfield Park, has in all senses been resettled. The prerogative yielded by the family patriarch might appear to have been set aside with the settling of the Mansfield estate for the subsequent generation, his authority subsumed into a larger edifice of calm. Yet Sir Thomas, who silently reacquires his unhindered sway over Mansfield Park, maintains a central role within this family picture. For all the apparent displacement of his authoritative role, the core fact of that authority, not only the wider emphasis on harmonious order, remains undisputed: this remains a staunchly ‘Tory’ vision. How far this re-established order extends nonetheless remains a crucial question. In the first place, we may ask how insulated this conclusion remains from the earlier forces of disruption in the novel—those forces, beginning with the theatricals, which had promised to challenge Sir Thomas’s authority. Critics have similarly called attention to the conspicuously unsettled spaces, from Fanny’s home at Portsmouth to the Antigua estate owned by Sir Thomas, which animate the edges of Mansfield Park and the novel that takes its name. These critical frames have led to apparently opposed conclusions about the novel’s politics. Austen’s conservatism on one front, it might appear natural to assume, was mirrored by her conservatism on another. Critics have also adopted the corollary view: that apparent subversion in one domain necessarily entails disruption in another. This apparent challenge to accounts of Austen’s conservatism nonetheless leads to ultimately symmetrical conclusions, and these respective efforts to hold apart what we might term the ‘intrinsic’ politics of the novel, framed by the estate and the interactions of its inhabitants, from outside arenas of activity, on the one hand, or to posit a single overarching concern, whether with maintaining authority, or its subversion, on the  other, leave us poorly equipped to make sense of the novel’s multi-pronged approach to the questions of stability and order.42 41 Mansfield Park, 199. 42 In Edward Said’s influential discussion of Austen’s novel, the estate stands at a complex remove from repressive practices at the family’s West Indian plantations (which its stability serves, implicitly

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By working through the novel’s engagement with questions of authority, command, and control in some detail, we can more precisely gauge how far ‘Tory’ authority extends and better establish its convergence with, or divergence from, wider practices of discipline and order. We may begin with Sir Thomas who, as even the wayward Mary Crawford finds herself obliged to concede, ‘keeps every body in their place’ (while also displaying the ‘fine dignified manner, which suits the head of such a house’).43 Although Austen assigns central importance to his role, the novel’s perspective on this sometimes tyrannical—and most likely slaveowning44—individual remains far from uncritical. As Claudia Johnson has maintained, in a seminal revisionist account of the novel, ‘Mansfield Park never permits paternalistic discourse completely to conceal or to mystify ugly facts about power.’45 By neglecting to control his daughters sufficiently to prevent the social disgrace that results from their scandalous conduct, Sir Thomas arguably fails to consolidate his authority even over the confined domain of Mansfield Park, let alone farther afield. In having Sir Thomas arrive home amidst the performance of Lovers’ Vows, Austen has him enter a theatrical arena in which his own performance of authority acquires heightened scrutiny, even as its actual effects are neutralized and unmoored from any fixed significance. While his authority remains physically constituted (hence the need, presumably, for his personal visit to set things straight in Antigua), his return home underscores the fact that his commanding presence and ‘dictatorial looks’ can no longer anchor the unsettled elements of the household, as his fulminating becomes merely one element within a shape-shifting representational field. Sir Thomas’s authority remains unable to ground itself and even liable to short-circuit its own operations. As Marilyn Butler notes, the ‘head of the house, upholder in the novel of family, of rank, and of the existing order, is confronted at the heart of his own terrain’—in the gesticulating Mr Yates, the social interloper who first introduced the ‘infection’ of acting to the family, who threatens to knock him down—‘by a mouthing puppet who represents a grotesque inversion of himself ’.46 Any attempt to render Sir Thomas immune to the threats presented by this ‘ranting’ young man (this epithet invoking a lineage of radical heterodoxy reaching back to the ‘Ranters’ active after the regicide of Charles I) are destined to fail precisely because the exposure of the representational field to the

or otherwise, to bolster). For Franco Moretti, by contrast, the absence of Sir Thomas in Antigua has less to do with connecting the novel obliquely or otherwise with imperial wealth than with simply dispatching him from the scene to allow the ‘plot’ of the novel—the debates and dynamics I describe here as its ‘intrinsic’ politics—to get under way. See in Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998). For an exception to the tendency to separate out these arenas, see David Bartine and Eileen Maguire, ‘Contrapuntal Critical Readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: Resolving Edward Said’s Paradox’, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 11 (2010). 43 Mansfield Park, 189. 44 Downie suggests that Sir Thomas may not necessarily have owned slaves but notes that this is likely how the Antigua connection was understood by readers. See also Said, Culture and Imperialism, 112. 45 Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 102. 46 Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 235. For the theatricals as a ‘medicinal project’ on the body politic at Mansfield Park, a purgation which proceeds over the course of the subsequent two volumes—during which theatricality comes to be internalized—see Litvak, Caught in the Act.

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seditious impulses his authority strives to contain cannot but contaminate his authority, even from within. Aside from revealing the authority of Sir Thomas as vulnerable—implicitly dependent upon physical force, unable to escape its own figurative unruliness— the undermining of the family patriarch in turn points to a more fundamental shortcoming. As Johnson shrewdly notes, ‘Sir Thomas’s gravity operates only as an external check, not as an internal inhibition, upon the behavior of his children.’47 In failing to instill in his daughters ‘that sense of duty which can alone suffice’,48 he fails (to adopt the words of the ‘Song’ on William III) to install his rule in the ‘hearts’ of his implied subjects. Yet we may recognize this omission without leaping to the assumption that Austen rejects authoritarianism more widely. Mansfield Park does not, after all, challenge the premises on which Sir Thomas claims his authority or social and political standing; the novel instead questions the ineffectual guises in which his authority appears.49 The novel works hard, moreover, to forge a pathway beyond this predicament. By examining his involvement with local and national institutional networks, which extend and anchor the influence of Sir Thomas beyond the Mansfield estate, we can develop a more comprehensive and integrated approach to the question of authority in the novel. Returning politics to the picture permits us, in particular, to appreciate better the multiple levels at which authority and hierarchy function in Mansfield Park. Elaborating this fuller picture of the novel’s networks will bring into view the joins and relay points at which this structure of authority risks breaking down, in ways that will allow us to pose more speculative questions, not least about the status of Austen’s own authorship. Sir Thomas’s status as a Member of Parliament proves crucial in this regard.50 The House of Commons, in which Sir Thomas is an active member, was itself imagined during this period as analogous with ‘a large reception room in a great country house’.51 Sir Thomas’s public role not only invites further connections with his private family life, including his legislator-like choice to burn copies of the plays when he returns home,52 but also carries crucial significance in its own right. 47 Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 97. 48 ‘Something must have been wanting within [. . .] He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting, that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers.’ Mansfield Park, 535–6. 49 As Downie similarly notes, Austen may ultimately have been concerned ‘to reinforce rather than to undermine patriarchal authority’ (‘Rehabilitating Sir Thomas Bertram’, 749, 754). His claim that Fanny appears to be principled in the ‘same way’ that Sir Thomas is principled proves less persuasive, for reasons detailed below. 50 Mr Rushworth also has a prospective career as a parliamentarian. My concern here is less with how Austen depicts specific ‘Tory’ figures (the obtuse Mr Palmer in Sense and Sensibility hardly seems a ringing endorsement) than with how she imagines an expanded Toryism, operating in concert with but not limited to the political arena, nor anchored by individual representatives. 51 Christopher Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons 1760– 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 29. Adopting this analogy, tellingly, from a biography of Pitt the younger, Reid notes that this conception of the parliamentary chamber was under threat from outside influence. 52 ‘Sir Thomas was in hopes that another day or two would suffice to wipe away every outward memento of what had been, even to the destruction of every unbound copy of “Lover’s Vows” in the

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His place in parliament requires Sir Thomas to be away from the Mansfield estate at crucial moments in his daughters’ upbringing.53 In parallel with the trip to Antigua that occasions the all-important ‘theatricals’, this less pronounced but more long-standing pattern of absence similarly informs his role in the novel. To read the failure of Sir Thomas to assert himself as a straightforward critique of ‘Toryism’ and thus as a challenge to specific contemporary power structures proves less helpful, I would suggest, than asking how his perceived inadequacies become apparent, only to be supplanted, overcome, and reintegrated. That brings us to the neglected significance of his younger son, Edmund Bertram. Instructed that he ‘ought to be in parliament’, Edmund responds, ‘I  believe I must wait till there is an especial assembly for the representation of younger sons who have little to live on.’54 Edmund nevertheless makes his presence known, in both his profession and wider conduct. As a crucial, if understated, presence in the novel, I propose, Edmund stands in and stands up for a far more expansive and powerful ‘Tory’ constituency. Certainly, Edmund does not fall among the more memorable or vexingly elusive characters in Austen’s fiction. As he himself readily admits: ‘there is not the least wit in my nature. I am a very matter of fact, plain spoken being.’55 His ‘character’, we are informed, inheres in his ‘strong good sense and uprightness of mind’ which ‘bid most fairly for utility, honour, and happiness to himself and all his connections’.56 Rather forgettable in his own right, Edmund nonetheless becomes a crucial intermediary between the archaic ‘Tory’ authority of his father and the novel’s wider concern with virtue and order. During Sir Thomas’s long trip away to Antigua (taking with him Tom, the dissolute elder brother destined, Austen sarcastically notes, to become the ‘Sir Thomas complete [. . .] in time’) we find him self-consciously installed as his father’s replacement: ‘Lady Bertram was soon astonished to find [. . .] how well Edmund could supply his place in carving, talking to the steward, writing to the attorney, settling with the servants.’57 Father and son here come to work symbiotically, softening strict paternal prerogative while expanding its scope and range of application. Edmund does nonetheless replace his father in an important respect. The account of his ‘good sense’ and upright character appears in a paragraph that alludes directly to the absence of his father. Sir Thomas is not yet away on his longer trip to Antigua at this point, however, but ‘attend[ing] his duty in Parliament’.58 We may thereby read Edmund’s house, for he was burning all that met his eye’ (Mansfield Park, 223). The ceremonial burning of political books was common (as occurred with copies of Sterne’s Political Romance, for example). As John Brewer notes in a discussion of state fears concerning ‘symbols of protest’, ‘Jacobite standards were carried by the chief hangman of Edinburgh and by chimney-sweeps, laid in the dust, and then consigned to fire’ (182). The appeals to Sir Thomas’s actual political influence in parliament are presumably overstated. 53 Mansfield Park, 23. 54 Mansfield Park, 250. 55 Mansfield Park, 10. 56 Mansfield Park, 23. 57 Mansfield Park, 39. Edmund’s acquiescence to participation in the theatricals means he fails to sustain order in the household—leaving Fanny, now the only blameless party, unable to ‘acquit his unsteadiness’ (187). Yet this simply confirms that his upstanding conduct does not constitute a bulwark against instability in itself any more than the top-down control exercised by his father. 58 Mansfield Park, 23.

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self-conscious replacement of his father in parallel with a wider pivot in national politics. This shift between generations was of a piece, that is to say, with the evolution of ‘Tory’ from a figure of prospectively despotic authority into a name for ‘firm, steady, and persevering supporters of the monarchy and the established church’ (to quote one of the retroactive accounts of Toryism cited above). In parallel with the emergence of a new generation of ‘Tory’ leaders, the ‘uprightness of mind’ attributed to the younger Bertram recalls the conduct exemplified by Pitt and shows these norms of statesmanship taking root beyond the political elite, in the conduct of one whose ‘opinions were unbending’ (as Mary notes, when she also finds herself surprisingly charmed by Edmund’s ‘sincerity, his steadiness, his integrity’).59 As acting head of household, moreover, Edmund not only takes his father’s place but effectively becomes its joint ruler. But Edmund also marks a shift in institutional context, away from his father’s presumably brittle parliamentary presence: the early account of his ‘character’ that notes his ‘uprightness’ and ‘good sense’ also reveals that Edmund ‘was to be a clergyman’.60 This choice of profession makes complete the move away from the ‘old’ Tory authority of Sir Thomas, the solitude of the estate, and local parliamentary ‘interest’. There have been important accounts of the role of religion in Mansfield Park, on which my discussion here builds.61 But to see the complementary and in some respects broader political implications of Edmund’s profession, we must look beyond questions of religion narrowly construed to consider Edmund’s profession in light of the communal focus and expansive reach associated with Austen’s vision of the Anglican church. Edmund acts in altogether different ways to his father, for whom he acts as a kind of surrogate. Yet as careful attention to the personal and institutional networks traversed by father and son makes clear, he also acts in concert with Sir Thomas, within different and wider but interlinked domains. In the first substantial depiction of Edmund, early in the same chapter that we receive the characterizations above, Fanny struggles to write a letter to her brother. Edmund intervenes to have the letter sent by his father’s parliamentary privilege (acting quite literally under Sir Thomas’s political authority), opting to include half a guinea under the cover for the aspiring sailor.62 Rather than establishing a lateral or oblique analogy with the paternal role, as certain readings of his role as a clergyman have emphasized, their shared investment in hierarchy and control reveals the pair as more closely aligned. In a key exchange at the Sotherton estate, Edmund, with the support of Fanny, emphasizes the need for masters to enforce churchgoing among their servants, prompting a barbed response from Mary Crawford. At this point ignorant concerning Edmund’s planned ordination, Austen’s unabashed anti-heroine 59 Mansfield Park, 77. 60 Mansfield Park, 23. 61 See especially Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2007). Jager establishes illuminating parallels between Fanny and Mary, who respectively part ways, in this intriguing reading, from the novel’s apparent avoidance of religion in their respective aesthetic investments in religious forms or in a more liberal individualism. I discuss the implications of the parallels between these characters and their relationship with Austen’s authorship at greater length later in this chapter. 62 Mansfield Park, 18.

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voices her scepticism concerning the virtue of an assembly orchestrated by those ‘heads of the family’ who ‘force all the poor housemaids and footmen’ to say their prayers ‘while they are inventing excuses’ for staying away themselves. Edmund challenges this Blake-like vision of compulsory marching to worship, responding that whenever ‘the master and mistress do not attend themselves’, there must be  ‘more harm than good in the custom’.63 What Johnson and others would encourage us to view as the nakedly coercive brunt of his father here adopts a comparatively benign guise. Edmund affirms the perpetuation of a hierarchy, whose equitable operation might lead to the softening of its sharper edges but not its radical dismantling. As this scene makes clear, religion remains bound up with a wider concern for social stability.64 Austen’s concern with religious matters in Mansfield Park, even when it coincided with Evangelical-led debates, was part of a larger concern with social harmony that can also be discerned in her admiration for the ‘Reason and Feeling’ associated with Evangelicals, despite her wider suspicion of the movement (and associated lack of affection for Hannah More).65 Edmund’s piety and devotion represent facets of a broader interest in social control, apparent both in his steadfast ability to stand in for his father’s authority and in his added efforts to diffuse his influence. As Sir Thomas asserts to Henry Crawford, Edmund ‘knows that human nature needs more lessons than a weekly sermon can convey, and that if he does not live among his parishioners and prove himself by constant attention their well-wisher and friend, he does very little either for their good or his own’.66 The novel’s apparent emphasis upon the church thus proves nothing less than central to the novel’s concern with authority; as closer attention to the substance of Edmund’s remarks similarly makes clear, religiosity remains subordinated to a broader emphasis on moral, pious, dutiful conduct and a transformed edifice of state authority. Edmund and Fanny accordingly emerge in turn as crucial proxies for order in the novel, grounded in religion, morality, and custom.67 From as early as the Sotherton excursion, in which Edmund defends the practice of master and servant assembling for prayer (with Fanny’s half-enraptured remarks supplying added emotional valences to her cousin’s pious choice of occupation), Austen advances a fictional 63 Mansfield Park, 100–1. 64 The term ‘religious’ is, in fact, used infrequently in the novel, perhaps due to its association with Evangelical culture; the Cambridge editors also note that Fanny is not ‘a strictly Evangelical heroine’. Mansfield Park, 711n. 65 Austen noted that she was ‘by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals’, with the crucial addition that ‘they who are so from Reason & Feeling, must be happiest & safest’. Austen to Fanny Knight, 18–20 November 1814. Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 292. 66 Mansfield Park, 288. The Evangelical movement was central to the debate about ‘residence’ taken up here by the Bertrams. In having Sir Thomas become the mouthpiece for these arguments— which also promise to offset the ‘inroads on the established church’s influence made by Methodists’— Austen assimilates them squarely to the ‘Tory’ cause. Mansfield Park, 704n.17. See also Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park, 20. 67 Fleishman sees Fanny upholding, in a manner only ‘tangentially religious’, an ideal of ‘historical community: the organic ties of national life that give England its stability and strength’. A Reading of Mansfield Park, 23.

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prescription for social stability, premised upon the conjoining of psychological and institutional order. The distribution of Edmund’s influence across a wider network bolsters the operations of ‘late’ Toryism far beyond the Mansfield estate. At the same time, Edmund continues to operate in concert with his father’s political authority, a symbiosis already apparent when he assists Fanny in writing to her brother, the inclusion of the coin mimicking his father’s paternalism and largesse but with an added spirit of charity, under the literal cover of Sir Thomas Bertram, MP. ‘ H E M U S T N OT H E A D M O B S ’ : N AT I O N A L O R D E R A N D T H E N OV E L As the inimitable Charlotte Palmer remarks of her gruffly dismissive, Tory-leaning husband running for parliament: ‘ “How charming it will be [. . .] when he is in Parliament!—won’t it? How I shall laugh! It will be so ridiculous to see all his letters directed to him with a M.P.” ’68 Although Sir Thomas similarly fails to wield considerable respect as a Member of Parliament in his own right, his authority remains, I have suggested, at the heart of Mansfield Park. This effective rule over the English estate (and related command over his Antigua plantations) coincides with his identity as a parliamentary representative. In passing power to Edmund, the novel elaborates this connection into a wider network of control. Austen hereby reanchored the father’s authority for a further generation, in ways that remain bound up with his Tory example (Edmund’s decision to live in proximity to his parishioners, for example, comes at the urging of Sir Thomas). The novel’s emphasis on an internalized conception of ‘duty’ constitutes a further extension of this authority—a version of the internalized prerogative on which, I have argued, ‘late’ Toryism depended, which tellingly conflated piety with watchful surveillance. Taking over the mantle from Sir Thomas, Edmund assimilates the volatile ‘Tory’ identity that risks undermining his father’s identity into more subdued modes of conduct and a broader field of influence. With Fanny, he will in turn preside over the changed atmosphere (or, we might now add, ‘tone’) that takes hold at the Mansfield estate. Austen accordingly allows us to see how accounts of Tories as ‘firm, steady, and persevering supporters of the monarchy and the established church’ and of Toryism as a ‘sense of the harmony of society’ or ‘the desire for stability’ were not vague generalizations but described with precision the affective and institutional networks by which state power was reimagined during this period. Indeed, Mansfield Park might appear to provide something close to a howto guide for implementing the reinvented Toryism of the early nineteenth century. This restored calm and authority nonetheless remains at a remove, leaving some important questions. To what extent does the reordering of the Bertram family at the novel’s conclusion—and restored calm, or ‘harmony’, at the Mansfield estate— bear wider significance? Does the settled, secure, and serene world of Mansfield 68 Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86.

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Park present a model for social control more widely? These have remained hotly contested issues, not least in response to Edward Said’s seminal reading of the novel. We may begin to get a handle on these questions by asking how the actions of the novel’s characters relate to (or participate within) the implementation of social order within the nation as a whole. Revisiting the terms of Claudia Johnson’s account of the novel’s challenge to conservative models of authority provides an important starting point for these questions but also points to some of their added complexities. As Johnson emphasizes, rather than having Sir Thomas ‘extend his benevolence outwards through marriage until the neighborhood and eventually the nation itself become a web of amiable relations, stable and loyal because wrought from the fabric of familial affections’, Austen turns this ‘conservative myth sour’.69 Adopting a broader perspective on Burke’s writings and partypolitical activity allows us to complicate and even challenge appeals to ‘Burkean’ views (and their supposed reinforcement, dismantling, or more subtle subversion by literary texts). As this chapter has shown, appeals to hierarchy and associated affective networks have multiple dimensions and vectors. And as the fuller account of Austen’s engagement with her political moment developed here has also begun to show, this emphasis on the inadequacy of Sir Thomas presents an altogether too monolithic picture of a novel that ultimately advances a complex and carefully elaborated defence of patriarchal authority (for which Sir Thomas himself remains an anchor). In recovering the wider institutional and affective networks by which this authority was sustained, we have seen how Austen’s novel operated in synchrony with the reinvented Toryism of the early nineteenth century. Yet Johnson’s core point, about the ‘sour[ing]’ of existing power structures and mythologies, still holds. The novel’s characters, considered at the level of their individuality—in other words, as characters—risk challenging the operations of the networks and power structures whose harmonizing influence the novel appears to endorse. That goes in particular for the novel’s female characters and will, in turn, have implications for how we think about Austen’s own authorship—even promising, at the furthest extreme, to reveal dangerously disaffected elements lurking amidst this fabric of harmonious sentiments and settled authority. Edmund certainly affirms ‘symbolically the alliance of the gentry and the Established Church’ as Fleishman and others have noted.70 He also plays an active role, as we have seen, in the wider community, distributing the influence of the Bertram family far beyond the Mansfield estate. Foreshadowed in the letter he sends under the cover of Sir Thomas’s parliamentary identity, this expanded reach becomes institutionalized in his role as a clergyman (in turn anticipating the consolidation of a further system of bourgeois power and imperial control later in the nineteenth century).71 The novel thus not only has Sir Thomas extend his ‘Tory’ 69 Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 96–7. 70 Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park, 20. 71 Describing a related synthesis of affective norms and institutional practice somewhat later in the nineteenth century, Praseeda Gopinath has noted that the church—in parallel with the university— became crucial in extending the orbit of the ‘national-cultural ideal of the gentleman cemented in the public school system’. Enduring ‘ideals of manliness were rooted in, and sowed through, the church—or

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influence outwards through, in Johnson’s terms, a ‘web of amiable relations, stable and loyal because wrought from the fabric of familial affections’ into a wider ‘fabric’ of social harmony, but does so quite strategically. In asking how far this concern with order and authority extends, we nonetheless come up against Austen’s inevitably mixed success, or even interest, in promoting such an outcome. In an exchange at Sotherton, shortly after Mary’s irreverent remarks about the poor servants forced to worship by their lazy masters, Edmund defends his commitment to serving the church and underlines the bearing of his profession on the conduct of the wider political nation. With characteristic abandon, Mary asserts that the church affords little opportunity for men ‘to distinguish themselves’, prompting Edmund to respond at length: A clergyman cannot be high in state or fashion. He must not head mobs, or set the ton in dress. But I cannot call that situation nothing, which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally—which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence. No one here can call the office nothing. If the man who holds it is so, it is by the neglect of his duty, by foregoing its just importance, and stepping out of his place to appear what he ought not to appear.72

Edmund here invokes familiarly ‘Burkean’ ideas: the interdependence of the individual and the collective, the bond between the living and the dead, in what might appear a routine expression of post-revolutionary conservative discourse; his remarks on the ‘ton’ directly implicate Henry Crawford and his sister, moreover, associated as they are with the fashionable urban world. At the same time that he outlines certain basic contours of a pious, ‘conservative’ position, befitting his plainspoken character, Edmund also describes, with precision, specific ways that ‘Tory’ thinking was placed on a transformed footing in this later period. Much as Pitt was imagined to have reanchored political leadership, Edmund stands in here for the related ways that an enlightened clergy might also similarly (and arguably more influentially) promote national unity and strength. Yet Edmund’s remark on the limits of his own ‘place’ ought also to give us pause. The conservative bent of the novel and its emphasis on hierarchical authority are here identified by Edmund with the ‘guardianship’ supplied by certain anchoring individuals and the ‘duty’ owed to their positions by all. By drawing more diffuse concerns with ‘order’ together with larger institutional networks, in which the church took on an intermediary role—that is, between the political establishment at least in the name of the church’, ultimately expanding beyond Anglicanism and established religion to encompass a wider range of Victorian spiritual and social traditions. See Scarecrows of Chivalry, 26 and 221n.3. 72 Mansfield Park, 108 (second emphasis added). The editors of the Cambridge edition note that Mary’s use of the term ‘parsons’ when disparaging the clergy in the chapel betrays her identification with ‘fashionable London “Society” ’ and quote Hannah More: ‘The ladies of ton [fashion] have certain watch-words which may be detected as indicative [. . . of ] that cold compound of irony, irreligion, selfishness and sneer’ while ‘[t]he clergy are spoken of under the contemptuous appellation of The Parsons.’ Mansfield Park, 665n.17. The editors gloss ‘office’ as ‘the position or public role of a clergyman, as distinguished from his personal character’ (668n.32).

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and society more widely—Austen revealed how, in practice, the cultural logic of late Toryism might maintain its hold. Yet she simultaneously revealed, by the same token, the fine line walked by individuals, which is also to say individual characters. Edmund himself notes that overstepping his ‘place’, even to a small degree, might entail the dereliction of his ‘duty’ (or rather the double-duty by which he dutifully promotes dutiful adherence to the established church in the nation at large). By adopting a ‘character’ that might set him even minimally at odds with his established role and given ‘place’, moreover, Edmund risks finding himself allied with inchoate constituencies and wayward forms of action radically at odds with the promotion of duty and stability. In ‘stepping out of his place to appear what he ought not to appear’, that is to say, this limited transgression would risk making him analogous with the wayward forces of fashion, whose dangers are depicted in Henry Crawford and company, and locating him in disconcerting proximity to the leaders of ‘mobs’. Austen had alluded to the horrors of crowd violence in a much remarked upon passage in Northanger Abbey (published posthumously, but conceived and first composed in the shadow of the 1790s). Catherine Morland, in parallel with her growing susceptibility to Gothic-inspired fantasies, takes a reference to ‘something shocking’ coming out of London as an allusion to the kind of violence that erupted with the Gordon Riots, thereby pointing to recently amplified fears of social collapse in the wake of the French Revolution. In fact, the reference is to a new novel. Aside from providing further evidence of Catherine’s ingenuousness, this moment also articulates playfully, even flippantly, the relationship between fiction reading and the organization of the wider political nation. As with the similarly notorious remarks, put in the mouth of Henry Tilney, about the lurid and implausible scenes of tyranny and violence imagined in Gothic fiction having no place in England,73 Austen may have winked here at fears about the incendiary potential of novel reading; she may equally have pointed to an altogether less settled relationship between the various currents of feeling elicited by fiction and the climate of fear, as well as excitement, which had accompanied recent unrest, supplying added frisson to our thinking about Austen’s own ‘political’ impulses. At the same time, the outcome of Northanger Abbey might appear to sound an overweening caution against the dangers, whether psychological or political, of giving free rein to unconstrained feeling. Whether Austen intended these gestures playfully, even mischievously, or ultimately emphasized the importance, even in this early work, of bringing such flights of fancy and fervid emotion back to earth, Mansfield Park was different. With the possible exception of Emma, the novel provides the most elaborate depiction of social hierarchy found in Austen’s fiction. Mansfield Park unquestionably features the most emphatic statement of the role of hierarchy as the basis for national authority (which is not to deny that the novel advocates for its partial 73 ‘Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians [. . .] Could [such atrocities] be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open?’ Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 145.

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restructuring). By the moment at which she composed these later novels, fears of social discontent tipping over into widespread unrest were coupled with an increasing emphasis on harmonious sympathies, including the role played by literature in both modelling and maintaining these sympathies. Mansfield Park, I have argued, not only partakes of these respective investments in stability and harmonious feeling but provides a model for how they might intersect. Yet this leaves us with the question of whether and how the novel, or indeed any novel, aligned itself with these models of governance and the wider political atmosphere. Where are we to place Austen’s novels, that is to say, within the reorganized world they imagine? And what place can we make for ‘Austen’ herself? Turning in conclusion to these more speculative questions will also allow us to reflect on the more concrete question of how we account for the disaffected impulses and more inchoate ‘political’ energies that surface within the novel: questions that converge around the fundamental division between Fanny, the novel’s understated heroine, and Mary Crawford, its unabashed female anti-hero. AU S T E N ’ S W I L F U L H E RO I N E S Whether through individual characters, or the expanded constituencies they summoned, Austen introduced elements into Mansfield Park that threatened to undermine, or exceed, the wider cultural logic of national order this chapter has outlined. Even in her depiction of such cookie-cutter conservatives as Fanny and Edmund, the novel carefully scrutinizes the implications of characters transgressing their ‘place’ (as exemplified by Edmund’s involvement in Lovers’ Vows). As much as the conclusion to the novel brings its various wayward elements back into line, we are left questioning what to make of those elements of the novel that elude these channels of control. That concern extends, in turn, to the status of Austen’s authorship—and of the novel itself. Although Mansfield Park contains some of Austen’s heaviest moralizing, including an increasingly leaden emphasis on virtue and duty, the novel recognizably belongs to the patterns established by her other fiction: she who made Northanger Abbey also made Mansfield Park. Those aspects of the novel that single out Austen’s own authorship, much like those characters that promise to transgress their ‘place’, nonetheless risk exceeding these efforts at containment. The equivocal allusions to the relationship between fiction reading and national stability in Austen’s early homage to the Gothic novel address this tension more suggestively, leaving us unsure, as they do, what to make of Austen’s own views of the novel form and the implications of these playful interjections for the status of her own fiction. Mansfield Park does not feature ironized authorial statements in quite this way. Yet the novel does in some respects provide a more concrete example of this indeterminate relationship: in Austen’s alignment with its most wayward presence, Mary Crawford. The echo between Austen’s notoriously playful remarks at the conclusion to the novel (‘I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own’) and Mary’s earlier protestation that she ‘cannot be dictated to by a watch’ presents only

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the most obvious example of this convergence. Mary looks back to Austen’s earlier experiments with both mischievous behaviour and cynical wit in Lady Susan and may recall seductively transgressive presences in her own life—namely, her adventurous, socially unrestrained relative Eliza, a charismatic and worldly figure (who may also have informed her earlier depiction of Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice).74 When Edgeworth invited her friends to ‘look for’ her in The Absentee, I suggested in the previous chapter, she pointed to the challenge of locating her own authorship amidst that novel’s many moving parts and shifting perspectives. Austen presents us with an apparently more straightforward case, at least when it comes to the novel’s avowed political orientation. Critics ranging from D. W. Harding and D. A. Miller to Claudia Johnson and Helena Kelly have proposed various ways that we may read Austen against the grain, recovering Austen’s presence in her fiction through recalcitrant traces of disavowed investments and conflicted feelings.75 In conclusion, I take cues from the more subtle formulations of these questions to ask what qualifications become necessary when we ‘look for’ Austen in Mansfield Park and what implications follow for thinking about the relationship between Austen’s fiction and politics. We find a particularly pointed formulation of this question in asking whether Austen was herself disaffected with the social and political models she ostensibly defended and even aligned, at least to some degree, with those forces the novel encourages us to view as dangerous, wayward, or wilful. Pride and Prejudice (1813) memorably features an apparent indictment of the aristocracy in its delicious portrait of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Her ladyship is not only an insufferable snob but also a figure of surveillance and control: she was, we learn, a ‘most active magistrate in her own parish’ whose ‘minutest concerns’ she receives from Mr Collins, local clergyman (and Lady Catherine’s lackey). As the narrator notes, through the eyes of Elizabeth, ‘whenever any of the cottagers were disposed to be quarrelsome, discontented or too poor, she sallied forth from the village to settle their differences, silence their complaints, and scold them into harmony and plenty’.76 Austen’s characterization of the imperious Lady Catherine—which elsewhere has her megalomaniacally predicting the weather like the deranged astronomer in Johnson’s Rasselas—takes on a social charge here, as her overbearing figure takes on an ‘active’ role in the local community. This character portrait, damning as it is, nonetheless leaves us with a challenge. For all 74 Mansfield Park, 75, 544. Lionel Trilling also notes the affinity between Mary and her author. For the Machiavellian scheming and cynical wit of Lady Susan as an antetype of Mary, see Johnson, ‘Introduction’ to Northanger Abbey. E. J. Clery discusses parallels between Mary and her adventurous, socially unrestrained relative Eliza, Comtesse de Feuillide, in Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister, 185. Clery also proposes that the depiction of Elizabeth Bennet was in part a ‘tribute’ to Liza, as well as ‘fearlessly witty women’ more widely (184). 75 See D. W. Harding, Regulated Hatred and Other Essays on Jane Austen (London: Althone Press, 1998); D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Helena Kelly, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (New York: Knopf, 2017). Miller’s attention to the impossibilities (and excesses) attending Austen’s ability to inhabit the status of invisible ‘Author’ most closely aligns with my concerns here. For the cultural and gendered assumptions attending both Harding and Miller, see Wendy Lee, ‘Resituating “Regulated Hatred”: D. W. Harding’s Jane Austen’, ELH 77 (2010). 76 Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 130.

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her apparent alignment with the sprightly, assertive figure of Elizabeth (and the more enlightened, or at least less predictably traditionalist, political leanings this might entail), Austen was also closely aligned with, to the point I have proposed of seeking to bolster, the rightward turn of the early nineteenth century. Mansfield Park presented a fully elaborated model of social control anchored around a vision of newly emboldened authority. This assertion of hierarchy, with which the workings of the wider world are eventually harmonized, took an altogether different guise than the surveillance of a despotic landowner (who ‘scolds [the poor] into harmony’) and her obsequious agent in the church. Yet these operations were no less invasive. Indeed, attending closely to the various institutional—and affective— networks in which the novel’s characters are implicated makes clear that their operations, based not only in external surveillance but also in internalized discipline, may well have been altogether more thoroughgoing and wide-ranging. In Pride and Prejudice, Marilyn Butler notes, Austen ‘might have appeared to err’ from the orthodoxies of morally ‘conservative’ fiction. But this was, Butler concludes, through a ‘fault in the execution’ in the depiction of Elizabeth, ‘not wilfully’ (and not a ‘mistake’ that Austen would ever make again). The implications of the ‘fault’ Butler identifies become apparent when we reflect on what the clashes between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine might portend politically, aligning her as they do with those social elements that are also ‘silence[d]’ and trampled over. Akin to the fractured body politic associated with the ‘discontents’ troubling the AngloIrish polity in The Absentee, this might mean detecting incipient sympathy for the ‘quarrelsome, discontented’ masses at a moment when their disaffection increasingly promised to overturn the political status quo. But as an account of Austen’s politics, this will never do. Although her novels attend to the cramped circumstances of economically precarious and socially marginalized women, Austen had little apparent sympathy for the poor beyond that which came at the end of the chains of charity and noblesse oblige (apparent in the poor baskets and visiting regimens of Emma in which charity, anchored by Mr Knightley, plays a direct role in cementing the bond between church and community).77 Elizabeth may be rebellious; but she is hardly an avatar for political rebellion. Collins represents a monstrous individual parody more than an indictment of the church. The same may apply to Austen’s depiction of the aristocracy. The organization of Mansfield Park, I have suggested, provides a well-elaborated account of the wider social and affective stability by which Toryism was reinvented. We may take that emphasis on stability (especially the novel’s snooty depiction of Portsmouth) as a baseline for thinking about Austen’s political views, even while recognizing that the other novels may look in other directions and have different points of emphasis, from the social capital associated with wealth accrued during wartime in Persuasion to the insight into financial risk and speculation in Sanditon.78 We nonetheless 77 As Sheryl Craig notes, the ‘welfare system’ was administered by clergymen and the ‘obvious incompetence of Austen’s selfish clerical characters’ may point (as, I would suggest, does the enlightened example of Edmund) to the need for reform along lines associated with Pitt the younger. See Jane Austen and the State of the Nation (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 134. 78 Clery emphasizes Austen’s increasingly nuanced views on the economy in these works.

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continue to encounter the problem focalized in Edmund’s discussion of characters stepping out of their ‘place’—not least amidst the heightened scrutiny of their conduct that makes even minor deviations appear pronounced. Colin Jager’s discussion of Mansfield Park, an argument that presents a religiously oriented counterpart to my own political focus, provides a valuable analogue for the role played by feeling in these transgressions. As Jager demonstrates, those characters in whom the novel appears to invest most religiously are those who most go against the apparent investment in post-1688 Christianity that Edmund upholds. My account here has placed greater importance on Edmund’s pivotal role in anchoring the larger restructuring of authority on which the novel depends. Yet we are still left with the question of what we are to make of the novel’s central characters, particularly its female characters, in light of this emphasis on individuals not stepping out of place—not least given that stepping out of place may be what characters have to do in order to become characters in the first place. That question becomes particularly acute in the relationship between Fanny and Mary. Fanny is often derided (together, more justifiably, with Edmund) for her lack of character. By contrast, Mary is characterized by excesses that make her attractive and compelling but that ultimately, in Jager’s nice phrasing, see her ‘banish[ed . . .] for her willfulness’.79 Fanny and Mary may be viewed to represent competing parts of Austen’s psyche, which achieve perhaps clearer symbiosis in Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse. But in requiring that we consider these competing impulses within a more fully elaborated fabric of social interaction and national sentiments, Mansfield Park forces us, in ways the other novels do not, to reflect upon their political implications—in particular, upon the wider constituencies invoked by the novel’s respective characters. We may begin to move beyond more literal questions about social, political, and religious institutions while keeping these broader questions in mind—about character and constituency, which parties the respective characters summon and with whose party Austen seems to be aligned—by returning one last time to Butler and to distinctions established in the less explicitly political portion of her reading of the novel. Butler primarily depicts Mansfield Park here in terms of the various social groupings implicated in the novel’s developing opposition between ‘bustle’ and ‘stillness’. The association of the Crawfords with a modern fashionable world of ‘bustle’—a term that also, crucially, encompasses the busy interference of Mrs Norris—finds a further, more significant, if also elusive, parallel in the ‘confusion’ at Portsmouth, where Fanny finds herself in temporary exile.80 The word ‘bustle’, as used in the novel, Butler maintains, ‘signifies a local turbulence, distracting the company from deep, lasting concerns and forcing them to focus on the material, the trivial, the everyday’.81 This religiously inflected critique nevertheless has more thoroughgoing political implications than Butler credits. ‘[B]ustle’ and its attendant ‘confusion’ become opposed to authority, order, and not only ‘tranquillity’ but also ‘propriety, regularity, harmony’ (terms

79 Jager, The Book of God, 124. 80 Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 237–8. 81 Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 238.

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invoked by Fanny as she recalls the Mansfield estate at Portsmouth).82 Everything at Portsmouth was ‘confusion and noise’, ‘tumbling about and hallooing’, ‘the abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety’.83 Despite their variation in socioeconomic position, these locations connect, for Butler, in their association with an unwholesome noisiness, which finds a counterpoint in the ‘stillness’ and ‘tranquillity’ of Fanny. The conclusion of the novel reifies this stillness as that of Mansfield Park itself. Fanny thus returns to a home of stable calm, reaffirming social hierarchy as part of what Butler elsewhere describes as the novel’s objective of ‘rearming’ the gentry.84 The political implications of these contrasts are nonetheless ultimately subordinated, or at least made secondary, in Butler’s reading to a concern with vanity, worldliness, and noisy distraction as against pious humility and restraint. Although Butler’s valuable discussion gestures broadly to the novel’s concerns with restraint and ‘order’, her account does not quite extend to the thoroughgoing ‘Tory’ identity I have claimed for the novel. We do not need to reach very far, however, to see how Mansfield Park sets out to contain ‘bustle’ and promote ‘stillness’ in terms of the late Toryism this chapter has identified. Given her careful attention to the incidences of ‘bustle’, by which she emphasizes connections between the Portsmouth episode and the corruptions of London, Butler’s comparative neglect of the theatricals might seem surprising. Sir Thomas, upon his return, encounters a ‘general air of confusion’—having encountered Mr Yates ‘almost hallooing’—in a conjunction of terms that establishes a direct connection with the later scenes at Portsmouth.85 Butler’s account of the ‘bustle’ in which the Crawfords and Mrs Norris are implicated may presuppose an obvious connection with the theatricals, which in turn becomes accentuated in the greater confinement of Portsmouth. But by elaborating more fully upon the ways these wayward social practices and constituencies are implicated within the novel’s continuing concern with authority, we can spell out more explicitly the connections between these respective disruptions of emotional, domestic, and ultimately political ‘order’. Butler’s comparison of Portsmouth with the Crawfords emphasizes Austen’s aversion to noisy classlessness, whether based upon her investments in an unostentatious wisdom or her deeper commitment to duty and virtue. But returning the Jacobin-infused ‘confusion’ of the theatricals to this picture of unwholesome ‘bustle’ reveals more forthrightly its basis in her commitment to a robust and far-reaching Toryism. After all, the theatricals are, as numerous critics have noted, attributed to the absence of Sir Thomas, and we can thereby relate all these various elements of disturbance—from the irresponsible aristocratic and commercial classes to the horrifying ‘confusion’ also experienced at Portsmouth—back to the same challenges to authority: an ‘authority’ reinvented as the corollary of an ‘order’ from which its operations cannot be unpicked, leaving the novel’s concerns with authoritarian control and with the wider social fabric inescapably intertwined. 82 Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 241. 83 Mansfield Park, 448, 441, 450 (emphasis added). 84 Marilyn Butler, ‘History, Politics, and Religion’, 206. 85 Mansfield Park, 213 (emphasis added). Sir Thomas himself alludes elsewhere to the ‘bustle and confusion of acting’.

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Yet this brings us back to the questions first raised by the wilful, rebellious conduct of Elizabeth Bennet. Where does the novel itself fit in amidst these appeals to stillness and order—and what are we to make of Austen’s possible alignment with those characters in her novels, here Mary Crawford, who are more wayward and wilful, in ways that implicate them directly with the unleashing of chaos and disorder? For all the importance the novel places upon churchgoing, conservative periodical culture along with the wider conservative ‘mood’ it serves to uphold, Austen’s own writing played an altogether more indeterminate role within these imagined circuits of feeling and structures of authority—one that comes into focus by way of a parallel established in the text itself. In a further indication of the ultimately dangerous influence for which her role in the theatricals provides an early warning, Mary challenges the efficacy of sermon-giving as a means to ‘govern’ proper conduct—and thus police social order—prompting a further exchange with Edmund: ‘How can two sermons a week [. . .] govern the conduct and fashion the manners of a large congregation for the rest of the week? One scarcely sees a clergyman out of his pulpit.’ ‘You are speaking of London, I am speaking of the nation at large.’ ‘The metropolis, I imagine, is a pretty fair sample of the rest.’ ‘Not, I should hope, of the proportion of virtue to vice throughout the kingdom. We do not look in great cities for our best morality [. . .] The manners I speak of, might rather be called conduct, perhaps, the result of good principles; the effect, in short, of those doctrines which it is their duty to teach and recommend; and it will, I believe, be every where found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.’86

Edmund counters once again, as he had in the exchange about attending church services, with an alternative theory of social stability, in which churchmen maintain a central role: rooted at the local level, away from the excesses and distractions of the city, his conduct supplies both bedrock and example for wider social harmony (‘as the clergy are [. . .] so are the rest of the nation’). These appeals are cemented with a further addition: ‘ “Certainly,” said Fanny with gentle earnestness.’87 Yet whether or not the novel itself follows through on this appeal to ‘govern the conduct and fashion the manners’ by way of sermons remains questionable, particularly when we turn our attention not only to the forces depicted within the novel but also to the forces reflected by the novel amidst the ‘great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs’ that comprised the wider affective public sphere—a question compounded by the status of Austen’s authorship. 86 Mansfield Park, 107–8. 87 Mansfield Park, 108. Fanny proves crucial to the ways the novel grounds at least its own localized appeals to stability and virtue, as they take shape in the confines of its narrative. In the third volume, we witness Edmund lead Fanny inside ‘with the kind authority of a privileged guardian’, reprising his earlier benevolent assistance to her brother earlier on in the novel (410). Yet Fanny, described as a ‘perfect model of a woman’, also appears as a solid force in her own right: ‘firm as a rock in her own principles’.

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In a letter sent to Fanny Price in the concluding volume of Mansfield Park, Mary observes that she has ‘no news’ for Fanny: ‘You have politics of course; and it would be too bad to plague you with the names of people and parties, that fill up my time.’88 Having noted earlier that ‘it is impossible to put a hundredth part of my great mind on paper’,89 Mary dashes off these remarks with characteristic abandon. Her reference to ‘politics’ nevertheless calls for fuller scrutiny. In parallel with the preceding sentence, Mary may elaborate on sending ‘no news’ and attribute this to a lack of time or inclination, not an absence of fodder. ‘You have politics of course’ here would mean ‘there is always politics’ (as in, ‘take politics’, with or without an implied ‘please!’) and one could always go on about that. This might encompass the elaboration of ‘newspaper paragraphs’ into discussion among the (male) Bertrams, Rushworths, and Crawfords: an extension of male-driven, parliamentary activity into the home, viewed as a presumably tedious undertaking that Mary, in this reading, implicitly contrasts with the ‘people and parties’ that fill up her time.90 We might nonetheless take this reference to ‘politics’, with its implied possession by Fanny, at closer to face value. Fanny need receive ‘no news’ in this reading, since she would ‘have politics’ enough of her own to deal with. It would be ‘too bad’ for Mary to plague her with the events that fill up her time, on this reading, in part because the ‘people and parties’ at Mansfield could not fail to cast Fanny’s current circumstances in a poor light but also because this might be more of the same: more, in this idiom, of the same ‘politics’. The ‘people and parties’ in which Fanny finds herself at Portsmouth, of ragtag children and deficient tea tables, hardly compare with the gatherings, exchanges, and balls at Mansfield Park (not to mention the theatrical entertainment whose staging bridges the first two volumes of the novel). The chaotic wider world for which Portsmouth serves as proxy enters, on this reading, into a complex relationship with the scenes into which Mary has inserted herself: both have in common their distance from established realms of ‘political’ activity and their role in promoting the ‘confusion’ whereby established representational protocols are exceeded and thereby become uncertain; both evade ‘authority’ in its established guises. We might even see in Mary’s assertion (‘You have politics [. . .]’) the tacit recognition that Fanny exemplifies transformed political channels, for which she, in contrast with Mary’s dangerous example, provides a powerful guiding spirit.91 What, then, for Austen herself? We may locate the novel’s author at the same remove from the chaotic scenes at Portsmouth haughtily proclaimed by its narrator. But keeping Austen’s fiction apart from the wider swirl of ‘politics’, ‘public opinion’, and associated circuits of feeling and channels of communication proves 88 Mansfield Park, 482. 89 Mansfield Park, 482. 90 Compare the earlier account of the ‘happy flow of conversation’ in which ‘there was so much to be said [. . .] of politics between Mr. Crawford and Dr. Grant’ (260–1). For a further notable (if cryptic) instance of directed political discussion, see Tom’s remarks: ‘ “A strange business this in America, Dr. Grant!—What is your opinion?—I always come to you to know what I am to think of public matters” ’ (140). 91 I thank Ben Bateman for encouraging me to consider the ways that Fanny might represent an admirable political force in her own right.

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a greater challenge for an author who, after all, wrote not sermons or conduct books but dynamic works of imaginative literature. In her determination to have her fiction circulate, gather opinions, and diffuse its influence in the world, Austen once again appears far closer to Mary. For all her apparent sympathies with Fanny, not least given what we know of her own life and political orientation, in her identity and practice as an author Austen aligned far more closely with those elements of the novel that similarly elude full containment and bypass established channels. ‘Make everybody [. . .] admire Mansfield Park’, Austen instructed a friend at a country estate; elsewhere, she spoke of ‘the praise which every now & then comes to me, through some channel or other’.92 If we wish to take seriously the suggestion, as many readers do, that Fanny does not satisfy us as the core of the novel’s attention,93 then Austen’s authorship gravitates by extension to those elements of the novel whose relationships both to ‘politics’ and to encroaching norms more widely remained in question. Looking for Austen as ‘Author’ in the novel, that is to say, locates her amidst its more disaffected parties—even extending, perhaps, to an oblique and perverse investment in the more wayward circuits opened up by Mrs Norris, whom ‘nobody else’ but Sir Thomas ‘can keep [. . .] in order’.94 Indeed, we may see in Mary’s comment that ‘the gardeners are the only people who can go where they  like’—a comment that, in its way, may equally have belonged to Fanny—qualified longing for the kind of freedom Austen was only able to achieve in her writing, if not buried sympathy for the kinds of discontented energies associated with quarrelsome villagers and other figures associated with the dark side of the landscape. Yet some restraint remains in order. Reading the novels of Jane Austen in relation to party politics has always been a challenging undertaking; recovering their entanglement with popular political disaffection risks becoming a bridge too far. ‘In Mansfield Park,’ Marilyn Butler uncontroversially observes, ‘no one talks of 92 Jane Austen to Anne Lefroy, 22 November 1814 and Fanny Knight, 18–20 November 1814. Jane Austen’s Letters, 294, 293. 93 Butler helpfully reconciles Fanny’s evidently critical importance with her questionable appeal as a heroine in structural terms: ‘If there must be identification, it is with Fanny’s role, not with her individual responses, which [. . .] are depicted with ironic detachment.’ Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 228. Harriet Guest has intriguingly suggested that the consciousness of Fanny sustains an ‘imaginative community of feeling’ in the novel, whereby the ‘narrative is able both to imply social coherence and communication, in Fanny’s imaginative apprehensions and longings, and to make the absence of that, among characters who deceive and misunderstand one another in pursuit of their diverse goals, central to the working out of the plot’. Fanny thus makes legible a parallel affective reality, whose imagined bonds, including between inanimate objects, combat self-interested individualism, preserve hierarchy and moral order, and also combat the social marginalization to which Fanny succumbs (even as the chaotic scenes at Portsmouth, as Guest notes, reveal the limits of this sympathy among the lower classes). Unbounded Attachment, 173. Daniel M. Stout compellingly reads Mansfield Park as a novel ‘ceaselessly interested in the way characters are circumscribed by and identified with (and the one because the other) the circumstances in which they happen to fall’. Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 54. Stout’s account of the novel’s investment in impersonal structure dovetails with my own emphasis on affective networks; where I place the accent on the friction between character and role, Stout’s institutionally oriented account concludes that the novel ‘has ceased to believe in the importance of individual action, the possibility that a person might make something happen’ (59). 94 Mansfield Park, 190.

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revolution’: the novel features ‘no sordid conspiracy, no drunken philosopher or cobbler preaching the overthrow of the gentry or sharing of wealth’.95 As Butler’s own discussion makes clear, Austen’s depictions of ‘low’ life at Portsmouth and the corrupt London world of the Crawfords nonetheless carry unmistakable ideological freight. My discussion here has gone still further, to suggest not only that the novel was closely aligned with the broader rightward shift historians have identified with the period following the French Revolution but also that Austen actively promoted, or at least worked to uphold, the ‘late’ Toryism of the early nineteenth century. Yet precisely by lodging the novel within this far more expansive and deep-reaching political and affective logic, we bring the spotlight onto the contradictory, uncertain status of Austen’s own writing. At the same time as seeking to bring its characters in line with a renovated emphasis on prerogative and the redistributed ‘Burkean’ hierarchy and custom sustained by broader institutional practices and expansive national networks, Austen’s fiction itself introduced considerable complications into the workings of the wider cultural logic by which this Toryism was sustained. This need not suggest any buried Jacobin tendencies on the part of Austen herself. If Mansfield Park cannot be considered a conservative novel, then no such thing as a conservative novel exists. But perhaps no such thing does exist. Whether or not Austen can, in the end, be aligned more closely with Mary Crawford and the London world in which her fiction was published, or whether its operations can finally be assimilated to the calm restored over the Mansfield estate and the quiet parishes in which she mostly lived her life, remains a vexed and ultimately unanswerable question. We can speak with greater certainty by returning to the works themselves, where ostensible political commitments entered a complex, indeterminate space. Austen was a live wire and loose cannon; the propriety and predictability that we have every reason to believe she maintained in her avowed social, religious, and political orientation were, in her fiction, at least partly suspended. To pose questions concerning the political status of her writings, for all their connection with Tory publishers and moral content, forces us to reflect, finally, on their curious status as objects for analysis, as material documents, and as entities circulating in the world that, as works of literature, had far more in common with the playful, wilful, anarchic impulses of their most uninhibited and wayward parties—far more in common, that is, with an out-of-place preacher, or even the leader of an inchoate mob—than with one of Edmund’s sermons.

95 Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 244.

6 Byron’s Opposition Looking to England in 1822 from his exile in Italy, Byron drew a clear line under his past in a letter to his friend Thomas Moore that underscored the break from his earlier identity as a celebrated member of London society: you live near the stove of society, where you are unavoidably influenced by its heat and its vapours. I did so once—and too much—and enough to give a colour to my whole future existence [. . .] I think it, as now constituted, fatal to all great original undertakings of every kind. I never courted it then, when I was young and high in blood, and one of its ‘curled darlings;’ and do you think I would do so now, when I am living in a clearer atmosphere?1

Despite coolly emphasizing his distance from the ‘stove’ that inflamed his earlier life as a celebrated member of London society, Byron gestured towards an ongoing connection with his time as one of the ‘curled darlings’. This was also the period of his fleeting engagement with Whig political circles—a break that proved harder to sustain. ‘One thing only might lead me back to it, and that is, to try once more if I could do any good in politics’, he continued the letter to Moore, ‘but not in the petty politics I see now preying upon our miserable country.’2 Following his departure from England under a cloud of scandal in 1816, Byron remained estranged, critics have tended to assume, from political activity in England, occasional attacks on political figures including Castlereagh notwithstanding. Yet despite what became his permanent exile, Byron repeatedly spoke of his intention to return to ‘take some part’ in politics back home.3 As he wryly noted, when one specific set of plans to return did not materialize, his change of heart ‘need surprize nobody’.4 Byron died two years later in Greece. Yet the contingent circumstances 1 Byron to Thomas Moore, 4 March 1822. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 9.119. 2 Byron’s Letters and Journals, 9.119. 3 England’s ‘petty politics’ remained bound up for Byron with a wider condition of European malaise. Describing locals encountered during her travels through the Swiss Alps in 1816, Mary Shelley observed: ‘Napoleon was no great favourite here & they are very indifferent about ^any government.’ The Journals of Mary Shelley, Vol. I, 1814–1822, eds. Paula R. Feldman and Diana ScottKilvert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 120 [‘any’ later authorial insertion]. The year following his letter to Moore, Byron described his satire The Age of Bronze, which details recent events and power shifts on the European continent, as on ‘politics &c. &c.’ He also echoed the claim, examined later in this chapter, that God would not ‘always be a Tory’ when he wrote in 1820, of the English-endorsed suppression of revolutionary activity and constitution-making in Italy, ‘God is not an Austrian.’ Byron to John Murray, 23 November 1820. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 7.239. 4 Byron to Douglas Kinnaird, 10 December 1819. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 6.256.

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Figure 4. ‘The Shadow of Opposition: Stat Nominis Umbra’ (1788). (Source: Lewis Walpole Library, LWL 788.03.31.04. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

surrounding the end of his life—and equally contingent circumstances behind his remaining in exile—risk obscuring the ways that England continued to focalize Byron’s poetic and political energies.5 Byron maintained an abiding attachment to (and continuing antagonism towards) the location of his early life, repeatedly stating his intentions to return to the fray. Fuller attention to Byron’s public and private writings thus complicates unidirectional accounts of his exile, revealing volatile, warring impulses that call the political status of his writing, including his own famous claim to be ‘born for opposition’, radically into question. The paths taken by his ‘future existence’ carried him far beyond the scenes of his earlier political identity. Yet the realization in his poetry of an alternative selfhood, or stance beyond the self altogether, was pulled off centre by the continued draw of politics. Byron was ultimately able to re-enter the political arena in England through another channel: his writings. By this claim, I do not mean to argue for Byron’s 5 That is not to suggest that Byron’s eventual voyage to Greece was purely accidental: Roderick Beaton argues for the long-standing concerns and increasingly coherent vision that informed Byron’s involvement in the Greek fight for independence in Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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meaningful participation in political activity, parliamentary or otherwise, nor to make the case for the political efficacy of his works.6 Rather, I contend that Byron’s authorship enabled him to trouble English politics as a figure of continued political agitation. Byron’s authorship (particularly his imagined poetic avatars) intersected, albeit often in indeterminate ways, with the shifting guises of political activity. With what ‘party’ Byron and his poetry aligned became an urgent and pointed question at a moment when ‘opposition’ was overshadowed by the rightward turn at home and abroad, on the one hand, and the restructuring associated with popular radicalism and the emergence of Reform, on the other. In asking whether and how Byron, an avowed if equivocal ‘Whig’, might have ‘take[n] some part’ back in politics through his writings—a more focused and urgent version of the questions that circulated around the authorial personas and political constituencies discussed in previous chapters—this chapter draws together the questions about political engagement that have concerned this book. By situating Byron’s general antipathy towards English society, especially its Tory leaders, alongside the more flippant, checked-out, even bemused perspective apparent in such works as Beppo and the early cantos of Don Juan, critics have seen the poet cultivating a stance of cool or casual removal. Byron’s flashes of critique and more vehement disdain for such figures as Southey and Castlereagh have been assimilated to this otherwise complacent detachment, while his continuing exile has been taken as a blanket alibi against claims for more sustained engagement. By returning to view the competing impulses that informed the composition of Byron’s later satirical writings together with the elusive status of his authorship and of his ambiguous remove from political activity, we can cast these questions in a new light. This chapter takes up The Vision of Judgment, a poem in which Byron reflected upon the transformations to political activity in and beyond his lifetime—and thereby reflected upon the course of English politics over the period spanned by this book. In addition to the culmination of a historical arc, one that he himself surveyed, Byron provides a fitting concluding case study in a further sense: as a limit (or test) case for the relationships between literary authorship and political engagement—and more particularly between partisanship and disaffection. Byron set out to write a riposte to Southey’s Vision of Judgment from a ‘Whig point of view’. In his differently spelled, politically opposite Vision of Judgment, Byron consciously tested the limits of literature and politics, with a view to the point at which one crossed into the other: where the perspective of the literary work, that is to say, intersected with points of view upon the political arena. Byron’s ‘Whig’ vision thus poses pointed questions about how partisan mindsets shape poetic worldviews and about the political status of writing itself. Byron maintained a strained attachment, the opening sections of this chapter will show, to his Whig party identity. At the same time, he marked his distance from political discussion 6 For Byron’s early poem on the ‘Frame Bill’ as an expression of Byron’s political ‘activism’—and a suggestive discussion of the agency assumed, in their circulation, by those writings themselves—see ‘ “An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill”: The Embarrassment of Industrial Culture’, chap. 2 in Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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tout court, not least in his repeated claims to be ‘sick of ’ or ‘indifferent to’ politics. Byron’s failure (or refusal) to re-engage with domestic political activity, in part the  inevitable by-product of the de facto estrangement that resulted from his exile, also reflected larger structural trends. Byron’s frustration with the available parties reflected the wider recognition that established channels for political activity, whether in his own person or as a contributor to a frustratingly stymied (or dangerously inchoate) political opposition, were no longer viable. Yet aside from the personal idiosyncrasies and larger historical trends motivating his continued exile, Byron’s retreat supplied him with new clarity about the contours of his own political attitude (and the value of having an ‘attitude’ about or towards ‘politics’ in the first place). Together with his actual and cultivated distance from England, Byron’s conflicted attachment to his Whig identity in particular located his authorship in a complex intermediary domain. Rather than taking claims for his outsider position and his appeals to detachment for granted, we ought instead to consider Byron, this chapter proposes, as a disaffected element within the English polity from which he simultaneously marked his radical estrangement. As the most literal example of an author who stood at a remove from the political arena, whose major works were written almost exclusively from outside England, Byron further allows us to test the limits of ‘English’ authorship: a designation, I suggested in the Introduction, that presupposes a degree of grounding within English national political debate and print culture but whose limits thereby remain indeterminate. By approaching Byron as at once frustrated partisan and disaffected spectator, this chapter accordingly proposes an alternative approach to the political stakes of the crisply detached point of view articulated in Byron’s late satirical poetry. In asking how the ‘Whig point of view’ with which he countered Southey’s Vision coincided with the impulse to take some part back in political activity, the chapter also asks what ‘part’ writers take in remaining detached from politics altogether, whether by adopting a stance of cultivated exile or embracing the literary imagination as ‘oppositional in its very form’.7 Exile was literal in Byron’s case. His opposition thereby coincided with his multifaceted identity as an outsider (complications that were compounded when Byron, born in Scotland, wrote to his Irish friend Moore concerning ‘our miserable country’ despite neither man being English by birth). We encounter a further analogue for thinking about the ambiguous status of Byron’s writings, as they pertain both to his exile and national identity and to broader questions concerning political detachment, this chapter proposes, in the original Cynics. The ancient Greek sect led by Diogenes—named for their declared allegiance with dogs—were at once cosmopolitan wanderers and thorny presences at the margins of the political arena. The conspicuously detached yet scandalously public Cynics provide a compelling analogue, I propose, for the inside–outside status of Byron’s writings 7 ‘Imagination’, Alex Woloch writes, in terms especially applicable to Byron’s poem, ‘necessarily takes shape against the given, and so is oppositional in its very form—a process that both endangers imaginative writing (rending it intrinsically unstable) and makes it a vehicle for dissent and critique.’ Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 256.

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and permit us to examine afresh the complex contours of his ‘cynical’ attitude. The (self-)exiled, marginal, snarling stance inhabited by the Cynics provided them new angles of entry to the polis, in an example on which Byron explicitly built. Byron’s case, this chapter proposes, might thereby help to disclose the agitation underpinning ‘cynical’ responses to politics more widely and allow us to ask whether and how disaffected parties might themselves ‘take some part’ in politics, what that part might be, and what that has to do with the part played by writing (and in particular by literary form). This chapter first details the extended impasse confronted by the Whig party, as the dominant political context for Byron’s efforts to reimagine the stance of opposition. The detached perspective of The Vision of Judgment, despite what critics have viewed as its dispassionate and even begrudgingly respectful view of the late monarch, not only created an opening onto transformed political horizons in the wake of the dead king; it also served as a placeholder, carving out a space, I will propose, from which meaningful opposition might be mounted. Where Byron’s authorial persona in Don Juan presented a more mobile, wayward, and unpredictable disaffected stance—one that Byron explicitly compared to the ancient Greek Cynics, whose caustic perspective he adopted explicitly in the political satire The Age of Bronze—the development of the late satirical masterpiece in which he rewrote Southey’s execrable Vision finally allowed Byron, I contend, to combine detachment, disdain, and ennui with the desire to shock, get in the public’s face, and bite back. At the same time, this poem newly enabled him to look beyond politics altogether. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the rumblings of parliamentary reform and associated social change heralded the transformed literary and political world of the Victorian age. The death of George III marked the end of an era. Facing the end of the 1760–1820 period, Byron sought both to re-imagine the foundations of political opposition, of attitudes towards politics, and of his own poetic vision. In looking beyond the ‘petty politics’ he saw ‘preying upon our miserable country’, he looked to changing horizons but also to continued political openings—in part by returning to the oppositional dynamism and wayward parties surveyed in the earlier chapters of this book. T H E S H A D OW O F O P P O S I T I O N : B Y RO N A N D T H E ‘ D E V I L’ S PA RT Y ’ In March 1820, John Wilson Croker wrote in puzzlement to Byron’s publisher John Murray. ‘What interest can Lord Byron have in being the poet of a party in politics or of a party in morals or of a party in religion?’ Croker asked incredulously, concluding that Byron had ‘no interest in that direction & I believe has no feeling of that kind’.8 The volatile political landscape, which had led future Conservative prime minister Robert Peel to warn Croker of the changing national ‘tone’ just

8 Byron to John Murray, 26 March 1820. The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 316–17.

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three days earlier,9 had rendered existing party identities and political alignments uncertain. Southey’s essay on ‘Popular Disaffection’ had already warned against expanded popular sovereignty, and the Poet Laureate echoed and even amplified these concerns in A Vision of Judgement (1821), his valedictory poem on the death of George III—in which Satan appeared as a monstrous, multi-faced double for the democratic polity. By associating, or at least allowing himself to have become associated, with the unsavoury elements of an increasingly restive and protean political opposition, Byron risked drawing himself into murky territory. ‘In politics he cannot be what he appears’, Croker somewhat cryptically stated, adding that ‘a man of his birth, a man of his taste, a man of his talents, a man of his habits can have nothing in common with such miserable creatures as we now call radicals’; his letter to Murray went on to single out Byron’s associations with John Cam Hobhouse and Leigh Hunt, the latter particularly infamous for his prominence in the radical cause. Byron’s poetry could, in Croker’s eyes, attract the entire reading nation, but as the ‘poet of a party’ his authorship took on altogether more disturbing implications. In the preface to his Vision of Judgement, Southey doubled down on his critique of mounting ‘Popular Disaffection’ with an attack on immorality and impiety, written with Byron squarely in its sights: his famous attack on the ‘Satanic School’ of poetry. The opprobrium targeted at Byron here and elsewhere had at least some basis in well-documented public scandals—and in the diabolical, tortured personas repeatedly projected by his works. The identification of Byron as the poet of the ‘devil’s party’ nonetheless remains highly questionable.10 Byron was far from gleefully taking up the Satanic role, which applied far more readily to the selfproclaimed atheist Percy Shelley. Attacks on Byron’s lack of piety and even his impure morality—his reputation for sexual depravity notwithstanding—were dubiously founded, as he incredulously pointed out with some frequency. Byron was similarly unsympathetic with the incipient radicalism of the early nineteenth century, sharing Croker’s perplexity with the term ‘radical’. He remained suspicious, given his disdain for the ‘rabble’, of William Cobbett and other radical figureheads but also of more gentlemanly reformers, including Sir Francis Burdett. Although he would become associated with Leigh Hunt and his circle through the formation of The Liberal (in which The Vision of Judgment would, largely through coincidence, 9 See Chapter 5. 10 As Fred Parker observes, for many European readers Byron was the ‘devil’s party poet’ and helped to popularize the idea across Europe. Marilyn Butler notes that Byron’s exile helped identify him with Satanic, guilt-ridden avatars, while for Clara Tuite the ‘anachronisms and contradictions that inform Whig liberalism’ also factored into his Satanic reputation. See Fred Parker, The Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and the Adversary (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011); Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Yet the assumption that Byron was gleefully irreligious proves particularly misleading in relation to The Vision of Judgment. The religiously motivated outrage at his poem in turn outraged Byron, who pointed out that—unlike Southey—he had kept God shrouded from view. Hobhouse rebutted accusations of Byron’s atheism in his Remarks on the Exclusion of Lord Byron’s Monument from Westminster Abbey (1844). Byron flirted with atheism, but he might be said, at one point or another, to have flirted with everything.

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first appear), his involvement with this short-lived periodical was half-hearted and hard to square with any consistent political principles (least of all any commitment to an as-yet-unformed political ‘Liberalism’).11 Byron’s rebellious, contrarian personality presented ample fodder to reinforce the infamous claim, made in a late canto of Don Juan, that he was ‘born for opposition’,12 but determining precisely what this meant in political (or literary) terms proves challenging. We have good cause to question to which party Byron would even incline. Although his critics and admirers have rarely acknowledged the fact as such, Byron remained closely connected with the Tory establishment, requesting favours from eminent Tories and expressing appreciation for celebrated icons of early nineteenth-century Toryism including Pitt and Canning. As the venue for Southey’s essay on ‘Popular Disaffection’, the Quarterly Review was the bane of the political opposition. Yet Byron had a long-standing relationship with its publisher John Murray and was an intimate of its editor, William Gifford, the ‘Government Critic’ described by Hazlitt as ‘the invisible link, that connects literature with the police’.13 Byron was, by his own description, a ‘Whig’, and he has largely been inoculated against charges of complicity (let alone sympathy) with the establishment by this repeated self-identification.14 During his youth, Byron had been closely involved with the aristocratic Whig circles at Holland House and utilized his title to speak in the House of Lords. His ongoing connection with the ‘Whig Club’ from his days at Cambridge kept him in proximity to increasingly archaic political ideals and aristocratic models of statesmanship challenged by the emergence of demands for Reform in early nineteenth century. Byron’s connection with Hobhouse, since their university days and travels in Europe and the East, proves particularly instructive in this regard. Despite his ongoing attachment to this long-standing friend—and associated nostalgia for their shared ‘Whig’ past—Byron was suspicious of Hobhouse’s mounting sympathies with calls for Reform and his radical associations. In 1820, Byron wrote some abrasive verses that mocked his friend for these connections, provoking a feud between the two men. In the sixth and seventh stanzas of this eight-verse ‘Song’, Byron recalled their shared political past: But when we at Cambridge were My boy Hobbie O, 11 For the emergence of political Liberalism, see this book’s Conclusion. 12 Don Juan, 15.22, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93). Subsequent references to the poem will be given by canto and stanza number in the main text. 13 Quoted in Kevin Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 185n.54. Murray in fact believed that ‘he subsidized [. . .] the government’ by paying its ministers for articles. See James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 23. 14 In Byron’s Politics (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987), Malcolm Kelsall located Byron in the mould of an aristocratic high Whig tradition dating back to 1688 (1–33). Michael Foot took issue with Kelsall’s claim that Byron’s life was of ‘no political significance’ and emphasized his radical streak. See The Politics of Paradise: A Vindication of Byron (London: Collins, 1988), 2. Foot and Kelsall were both half-right, I would suggest, in their characterizations of Byron, without quite going far enough in either direction: while he was even more invested in and complicit with the establishment—including the ‘Tory’ establishment—than Kelsall proposes, he went to even greater extremes in his rejection of the existing political system and available forms of opposition than Foot appreciated in his bracing but one-sided study.

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Asking how his apparent hatred for the House of Commons squared with his eagerness to canvass to the masses, the poem elsewhere had Hobhouse announce he ‘would reform the den / As member’ for the mob. Hobhouse would indeed be elected as MP for Westminster, a constituency viewed as a long-standing hotbed for populist activity (reaching back, as we have seen, to the period of Wilkes). He would have a distinguished parliamentary career lasting well into the Victorian age, coining in 1826 the still-operative designation of ‘his majesty’s opposition’. Hobhouse was far from a social leveller or populist demagogue. In their correspondence, Hobhouse appealed to the middle-class credentials of the reformers, reassuring Byron that members of the electorate had followed requests by their betters to remove their hats before speaking to the candidate.16 He failed to convince his friend, however, who had concluded his poem: ‘God save the people— damn all Kings— / So let us crown the Mobby O!’17 Byron’s disdain for the ‘rabble’ was palpable here. But when asking ‘Hobby’ why he ‘hate[d] the Whigs’ earlier in the poem, his friend’s imagined response pointed to endemic corruption reaching back to the early eighteenth century: ‘Because they want to run their rigs / As under Walpole’s Bobby O.’18 Half in the voice of Hobhouse and half in his own, this gesture towards long-standing critiques of establishment Whig corruption not only registered Byron’s distance from the radicalism and more respectable Reform movements of the early nineteenth century but also hinted at the ambivalence circulating around his own earlier ‘Whig’ identity, identifying him with the long arc of mounting disaffection towards politics traced by this book and marking his attachment to a deeper oppositional tradition. Byron’s lifetime coincided with the deepening of critical and disgruntled attitudes towards politics. The culmination of longer trends—with antecedents in the late seventeenth century through to the age of Walpole—this was accentuated by the widespread malaise following the French Revolution. Yet Byron’s disaffection was also closely bound up with a more pressing and localized development: the receding influence of the organized political opposition. While Byron may have been ‘born for opposition’, as he stated in Don Juan, a satirical image from the year 15 Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 4.87–8. The poem was sent to John Murray and reprinted in the Morning Post for 15 April 1820. For the resulting feud between Byron and Hobhouse, see Robert  E.  Zegger, John Cam Hobhouse: A Political Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 27 and Peter Cochran, ‘Newgate and My Boy Hobby-O’, chap. 11 in Byron and Hobby-O: Lord Byron’s Relationship with John Cam Hobhouse (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010). 16 Hobhouse to Byron, 31 March 1820. Byron’s Bulldog: The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron, ed. Peter W. Graham (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 287. 17 Complete Poetical Works, 4.288. 18 Complete Poetical Works, 4.287.

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of his birth already shows the Whig party on the verge of infinite regression. The 1788 print ‘The Shadow of Opposition’ (Figure 4) depicts the Whig luminaries Fox, Burke, and Sheridan poised for debate. But aside from dismissive speech bubbles (the one above Burke reads ‘Tropes [. . .] Figures [. . .] and a Long Speech’), their posturing appears replicated—as in a mirror by a plane bisecting the picture—in the parallel chamber. As the lines below assert, they thereby prove ‘the assertion true / That even Shadows have their Shadows too’. The Holland House circle, in whose midst Byron had a fleeting political career in his early twenties, viewed the Foxite Whigs as heroic forefathers. Yet the ascent of Fox’s reputation had coincided with the disintegration of the Whigs as a viable political force.19 The Whig party in subsequent decades found itself between a rock and a hard place, squeezed between the newly emboldened Tory ministry and the perceived dangers to the social order presented by popular radicalism and slowly boiling demands for Reform. Far from upholding the triumphant cause of liberty and freedom, the opposition faced a deepening impasse, which placed Byron’s party identification under increasing strain. In his 1813 lines on ‘Indifference’, Byron described the affective impasse that had resulted from the stalemate between the king, the ‘Patriots’, the political establishment, and the people. The failure of the Whigs to present viable opposition also created the larger representational problem apparent in the ‘Shadow of Opposition’ print, in which the ‘Whig’ politician was no longer a meaningful political agent but a hollowed-out, endlessly displaced figure. Byron’s literary and political formation took shape, in part, through his recalcitrant negotiation with these shadowy presences and their fugitive possibilities. The Vision of Judgment has been described as ‘one of the most concise and hilarious satires in English letters’ as well as Byron’s ‘practical illustration of what bad art and good art mean’.20 For all its delight as a satire and reflections upon aesthetic judgement—questions to which this chapter will return—the poem also dramatized a very real political predicament. Byron’s poem confronted a double challenge: that of breaking free from the self-disabling echo chamber apparent in the ‘Shadow of Opposition’ print, while determining what a more efficacious and authentic ‘Whig’ political position might look like. At the gates of heaven, we learn that, true to ‘many stories’, ‘the angels all are Tories’.21 The poem thus begins with an apparent partisan critique not only addressed at the political establishment but containing more broad-based demands for loyalism, religiosity, and pious moralism (the cultural logic on which, I argued in Chapter  5, the reinvented ‘Toryism’ of the early nineteenth century depended). The Vision of Judgment stages a trial, presided over by Satan, in which the recently deceased George III stands charged. The devil 19 See L.  G.  Mitchell, Charles James Fox and the Disintegration of the Whig Party, 1782–1794 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). 20 See Wolfson, ‘The Vision of Judgment and the Visions of “Author” ’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171 and Jerome J. McGann, Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 77. See also Andrew Rutherford, Byron, A Critical Study (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961). 21 The Vision of Judgment, 207–8, in Complete Poetical Works. Subsequent references to the poem will be given by line number in the text.

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would appear to cut a distinctive figure, defined by opposition to both the late king and his angelic support base. Yet any viable prospects for opposition are dissolved, not least by institutional protocols, when Satan, arriving under a cloud and wearing a look of scorn, encounters the archangel Michael: The spirits were in neutral space, before The gate of heaven; like eastern thresholds is The place where Death’s grand cause is argued o’er, And souls despatched to that world or to this; And therefore Michael and the other wore A civil aspect: though they did not kiss, Yet still between his Darkness and his Brightness There passed a mutual glance of great politeness. (273–80)

Satan embodies the ‘solitude, fierce pride and gloom’ typical of the Byronic hero; as an aristocratic politician, moreover, he resembles a ‘Byronic Whig’.22 Based on Romantic sympathies for the rebellion associated with Milton’s Satan, he might appear to summon a radical alternative. Yet the tradition of associating Satan with what William Godwin termed a ‘spirit of opposition’ had a parallel face, in which the devil represented the consummate corrupt politician and a bathetic figure of vanquished pride and hubris.23 Rather than asking whether Satan functions in The Vision of Judgment as a displaced mouthpiece or psychological double for Byron, we do better to ask how he reveals the limitations of the existing field of positions. Far more significant than how Satan was depicted as an individual was his role as a single component within a larger system. Satan is complicit.24 The suggestion that the ‘outs’, here the devils, are merely the former ‘ins’ adds a fiendish twist to a familiar complaint: that the angels greet their Satanic counterpart as a peer damningly underlines the oft-rehearsed observation that the two parties on offer are no better (nor, for that matter, any worse) than one another. This structural recognition turns upon a temperamental shift: the personalities of the respective parties have become interchangeable. Jonathan David Gross suggestively proposes that 22 Kelsall, Byron’s Politics, 129; Wolfson, ‘The Vision of Judgment and the Visions of “Author” ’. For an unconvincing attempt to read the poem as an allegory of specific debates and divisions during Byron’s earlier involvement in the House of Lords, see Stuart Peterfreund, ‘The Politics of “Neutral Space” in Byron’s Vision of Judgment’, Modern Language Quarterly 40 (1979). 23 See Christine Rees, Johnson’s Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The sense of bathos and personal failure can be viewed in the prints ‘Gloria Mundi, or—The Devil Addressing the Sun’ (1782; 6012) and ‘Satan Harangueing [sic] his Troops Previous to Action Vide Parad se Lost  Book 5th’ (1784; 6383), which depict Fox and his followers as Satan and the fallen angels from Paradise Lost. See also ‘Belzebub Turnd Moddeler or a Design for a Statesman’ (1784; 6430) and  especially ‘Foul Fiend [. . .] Guardian Angel of Britain Unmasking Devil’, which shows Fox’s flabby face removed to reveal the devil underneath. References are to Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, eds. Frederic George Stephens, M.  D.  George, et al., 12 vols. (London: 1870–1954). 24 As Kelsall and Wolfson emphasize, the Tory angels and devilish opposition present mirror images, even parodies of one another; Satan’s participation within the same civil protocols of ‘politeness’ as Michael—whom he may, in fact, greet as his replacement—affirms their shared political and social status, consolidating the distance of this patrician elite from an unruly mob. See Byron’s Politics, 128–30 and ‘The Vision of Judgment and the Visions of “Author” ’, 178.

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the oppositional stalemate drew Byron back to the libertine Whiggism of Fox’s generation.25 Yet this account, I contend, does not push far enough beyond the existing party system and its available personalities. For all his own personal charisma, Fox was closely associated, as noted above, with a long-standing political impasse, accentuated with the resurgence of the Tories under Pitt and further entrenched by the post-1789 break-up of the Whigs. But more importantly, Byron powerfully undermines the supposed ‘glory days’ of the Foxite Whigs—together, tellingly, with the populist posturing of the preceding generation—at a critical moment in the poem. Observing that Wilkes had turned ‘half a courtier’ before he died, Satan notes that he promised, in his sycophancy towards the king, to become ‘a whole one’. Further eroding the distinction between the respective ‘sides’ of the party system, the devil recalls a scene observed earlier in hell: ‘However, I knew what to think of it, When I beheld you in your jesting way Flitting and whispering round about the spit Where Belial, upon duty for the day, With Fox’s lard was basting William Pitt, His pupil.’ (577–82)

The syntax leaves unclear whose ‘pupil’ Pitt was here, Fox’s or Belial’s, further eroding Pitt’s elevated ‘Tory’ legacy by claiming him for the devil while binding him ever more tightly with his political antagonists, in this frankly homoerotic scene.26 Pitt’s upright (and, as we noted in Chapter  5, notoriously uptight) personal character had helped to secure his anchoring role in the ‘late Toryism’ of the early nineteenth century. The greasing up of Pitt’s ‘Tory’ stiffness here with the corporeal excesses of ‘Whig’ lasciviousness undermines those appeals to reinvented political character, collapsing any difference of person or politics that party lines might serve to uphold. The interaction between the two parties, captured in Satan’s careful political manoeuvring, has led some critics to see the ‘neutral space’ of the poem as a zone of dialectical resolution or ‘middle ground’.27 But the interaction between Wilkes, Pitt, and Fox, depicting the (literal) underbelly of systemic complicity, provides a much better illustration, I contend, of the deals with the devil and sympathies of temperament that had made these parties inextricable from one another. Given the ways in which the aristocratic and libertine faces of the Whigs are tarnished—by Satan’s dubious posturing and Wilkes’s symptomatic venality—we might even ask whether Byron, as a ‘Whig’, does align with his party in the poem. While the angels ‘all are Tories’, the lines between good and evil, heaven and hell, or even true and false prove so liable to collapse, whether instantiated in worldly or celestial terms, 25 Compare Jonathan David Gross, Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 162. 26 Gross connects Wilkes with a tradition of liberal Whig sexuality but does not address this scene. 27 For the poem’s dialectical resolution, see Parker, The Devil as Muse. In Byron’s Politics, Kelsall suggests that the attack on Southey and contrasting fear of disorder helps to ‘define the integrity of the middle ground’ which resists both extremes, while noting the ‘paradox’ that the ‘aim of resistance is to conserve the system’ (144–5).

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that any attempt to establish and give embodied form to the distinction between the respective parties appears similarly futile. Yet this need not prompt us to conclude that the poem acquiesces to equipoise, nor to view the ‘neutral space’ in which the poem takes place as somehow idealized. The desire to reach beyond all-encompassing hypocrisy and corruption (which Byron, identifying Southey as its chief promulgator, ascribed to the ‘cant and Toryism’ of the age) and the long-standing impasse faced by the Whigs compelled Byron instead to seek out an altogether different perspective. The concluding sections of this chapter will return to the question of what The Vision of Judgment set out to accomplish politically and what its ‘vision’ ultimately sought to reveal. By first examining the volatile, agitated, disaffected impulses that animate Byron’s later satirical writings more widely and his personally articulated responses to politics in this same period (including the creeping disdain towards the political arena, with which these public and private writings were in dialogue) we can establish altogether less settled ground on which to locate Byron’s poem and its apparently unruffled tone and stable perspective. To return to view the disaffected vision of Byron’s poem, that is to say, we must first ask how Byron navigated these experiences of indifference, apathy, saturation with political discussion, detachment, and feeling ‘nothing’ towards politics—and how he in turn reconciled his estrangement with a renewed attachment to taking some part back in the public arena, if not also within politics itself. B Y RO N I C , I RO N I C , D I S A F F E C T E D Despite the sharp critique and invective that intermittently flare up in his writings, Byron became increasingly difficult to pin down. Especially in his celebrated late satires it can be hard not to see any commitments, political or otherwise, melt away completely. The later cantos of Don Juan particularly revel in reversed expectations, and these contrarian impulses and their equivocal or ironized expression further undermine Byron’s infamous claim to be ‘born for opposition’. In the original context, this statement, repeatedly invoked in criticism to establish continuity between Byron’s earlier Whig commitments and later involvement with revolutionary movements abroad, falls prey to its own reversals, as the poet shrugs off both the expectations of critics and the mantle of trailblazing Shelleyan poet, resisting his own resistance. Where Croker noted that ‘[i]n politics he cannot be what he appears’, suggesting that Byron’s associates risked making his ‘politics’ appear what they were not, his  poetry presents a more fundamental challenge: that of determining in what guises ‘Byron’ appeared in the first place. We cannot locate Byron amidst the available roles in The Vision of Judgment, I have proposed, including among the devil’s party of a complicit opposition. The evasive first-person ‘speaker’ of the poem introduces another challenge, further stripping away the grounds for identifying an author with the poem’s satirical perspective: we cannot easily identify Byron with the detached, neutral vantage point cultivated by the poem, that is to say, any more than we can locate him within the field of political actors it depicts.

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Although Byron remained animated by the desire to maintain an oppositional figure, recent developments in the political landscape and the inevitable attenuation of his earlier attachments through his exile might lead us to conclude that Byron had, effectively, left political commitment behind (at least with respect to England). Such was the conclusion reached by the author of Falearo, or the Neapolitan Libertine (1823). Taking inspiration from Don Juan, this poem reversed the geographical trajectory of Byron’s work—which followed Juan across and beyond Europe, before having him arrive in England—by sending its protagonist on a haphazard jaunt from London to Ireland and onwards to the continent. Asserting his love for the ‘King’, the author of Falearo went on to make an altogether more fulsome expression of fealty: In fact, I homage decency and Order, And love the Laws,—because they are so mild; I much respect the merciful Recorder And Common Sergeant—artless as a child— Now, some may think on irony I border, And deem my pen with satire much defil’d,— But let me undeceive them in a minute, It has nor irony nor satire in it.

While some are engrossed with ‘pious devotions’—and others with ‘expounding their radical notions’—the poet of Falearo takes up ‘the quill in a moment of leisure / To write what I trust will afford you some pleasure’.28 Neither the poet of a religious party nor of a political one, the speaker here occupies a zone between pious loyalty and radical opposition that had something in common with Byron himself (whose dislike of ‘cant’ and ‘Toryism’ were matched, as we have seen, by his disdain for ‘radicalism’ and the ‘rabble’). Although the wandering continental hero and digression-prone, British-born narrator of Falearo recall Don Juan, a more immediate point of comparison was Byron’s Beppo (1817). In this short, self-contained poem, Byron had first turned ottava rima to satirical purposes, laying the groundwork for his later achievements with the form. Set in Venice during carnival, Beppo played, as Don Juan later would, with the transgressive possibilities of an exotic, foreign locale (the supposed propensity for ‘adultery’ in climates that were more ‘sultry’) and supposed contrasts with the values of the English audience. The poem’s digressions away from the Italian setting accordingly locate the ‘English’ author/narrator at a point of conjuncture between home and abroad, which Byron’s later satirical poetry would bring to further levels of refinement and complexity. Beppo makes particularly conspicuous use of this return-home-from-abroad conceit, in a lengthy digression: ‘England! with all thy faults I love thee still,’ I said at Calais, and have not forgot it; 28 Falearo, or the Neapolitan Libertine. A Poem Dedicated to Lord Byron (London: 1823). Dedicated to Byron, the author of this Byronic pastiche identified himself as a member of the ‘Satanic School’ (recalling Southey’s attack on the poet several years earlier).

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Proceeding to express his ‘like’ of taxes, steaks, and the weather (when it is not rainy), the poet of Beppo concludes: ‘And so God save the Regent, Church, and King! / Which means that I like all and every thing.’29 Falearo hews closely to the form and content of Beppo, and its preface invokes the poem’s satirical, digressive spirit directly as part of its variegated wish to please. Yet Falearo seems to miss the mark, not least in having its Byronic narrator announce himself (with no ‘irony’ in his pen) as one who ‘homage[s] decency and Order’. Drawing perhaps directly upon this passage from Beppo, the author of this meta-ironic celebration of everything, having disarmed his own capacity for irony, might seem also to have overlooked the more sharply wielded satirical point of Byron’s poetry and the oppositional commitments of its author (not least, for example, the bitter aftertaste we are inclined to register in the ‘when we’ve got it’ that follows Byron’s allusion to recent suspensions of habeas corpus). But perhaps not. We need not be so hasty in drawing a sharp distinction between these works. For all its bite and modulation of tone, Beppo ultimately reaches the same conclusion as Falearo. The panoramic mockery of all political targets in the later Byronic imitation—from the piety of Southey and the Quarterly Review to Byron, Keats, and the ‘radical notions’ of the reformers—reflects a wish only ‘to please’. Beppo might seem to be at odds with this account of poetry as depoliticized entertainment. Yet whatever pointed intent that we attribute, reflexively or otherwise, to the irony of Byron’s poem, his digressions similarly fall prey to endless internal reflexivity, leaving any potential for critique similarly undermined. As indexes of an evasive authorial persona, they suggest that no stance from which to mount criticism exists—or rather that there are a proliferation of equally inadequate critical stances. The political establishment ultimately remains intact here, after all, whether we ‘like’ it or not. This reflexivity in turn implicates the poem’s ‘English’ author, as imagined stand-in for the exiled poet. In the suppressed dedication to Don Juan, Byron’s claims that to ‘keep one creed’s a task grown quite Herculean’ scathingly targeted the Tory Southey. Yet this attack on changeableness, the repeated focus of his attacks on the Poet Laureate and other ‘apostates’, remained liable to be turned back upon Byron himself, who found himself similarly unable to escape an age in which ‘apostasy’ had grown ‘fashionable’.30 We may appear here to approach Jerome Christensen’s view that, particularly in the later London-based cantos of that poem, Byron’s ‘position’ was not to have one.31 Yet we can take on board 29 Complete Poetical Works, 4.144 (lines 369–75, 382–3). 30 Compare Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of a World’, in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 31 Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

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Christensen’s broad claim about Don Juan (and his further insights into Byron’s ambivalent, ironic approach to language as a medium for action) without concluding that Byron abandoned any hope of marking substantive differences with the status quo. To do so, we must examine the strategies through which his poetry, in order to avoid collapsing into the freeform irony of Falearo or the self-implicating attacks of Don Juan, grounded its critique upon other foundations than its author’s evasive authorial persona. The need to establish a more solid foundation for critique was bound up, I would suggest, with Byron’s renewed pursuit of a political role. Byron’s desire for a way to take some ‘part’ in political activity was thus inextricable from the capacity to take sides in his poetry. And the question of how far these political motivations intersected with his literary trajectories will in turn permit us to ask what ‘part’ was taken by his writing—whether in the political arena or from a continued oppositional remove. In September 1821, Byron concluded a remarkable exchange of letters with Murray in which he began to clear the ground with a view, I would suggest, to reimagining the oppositional stance in these interrelated terms. Receiving a further ‘parcel of trash of poetry’, Byron instructed his publisher, might provoke him into rewriting his earlier satire English Bards, Scotch Reviewers (1809), a panoramic, few-holds-barred attack on the literary establishment that had been Byron’s introduction to the public eye. In the postscript to a further letter to Murray, Byron repeated this claim about rewriting English Bards: vowing ‘some day’ to give a ‘poetical Catalogue’ of the ‘perpetual levee of politicians—parson-scribblers—& loungers’ that kept his publisher occupied,32 he confirmed that the imagined targets of the projected poem were not solely drawn from the literary arena. Although Murray was not one of the self-designated Tory booksellers, as the publisher of the pro-ministerial Quarterly Review and thus relay-point between the world of letters and the political establishment he presented a barometer of larger partisan shifts. While Murray protested that claims for his reactionary reputation were made ‘without consideration for on what occasion have I identified myself with a party’—adding that he had ‘studiously avoided every party publication & this more strenuously every year’ having connections ‘even more numerous amongst the Whigs than the Tories’33—the facts suggested otherwise to the poet. As Byron had instructed his publisher, in a letter written earlier the same year: ‘you are grown quite a minister of State—mind—if some of these days—you are not thrown out.—God will not always be a Tory’.34 Beyond its specific application to Murray, Byron here characterized Toryism in the terms outlined by the earlier chapters of this book: as a cultural force at work beyond the political establishment that 32 Byron to John Murray, 12 September 1821. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 8.207. 33 Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, 419. As the editors note, Byron seems to have had Murray’s comments on his numerous connections in mind when he subsequently wrote of the ‘perpetual levee’ of visitors, political and otherwise, which might provoke his ‘poetical Catalogue’. Murray was writing in response to Byron’s earlier query, as to whether he was the ‘Murray’ identified as a member of the Constitutional Association—the moral values organization which would, in turn, seek to prosecute The Vision of Judgment for its depiction of the late king. 34 Byron to John Murray, 2 February 1821. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 8.74.

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maintained its stranglehold upon both politics and the related domains of social, moral, and religious life. It was against that which Byron was writing, I want to suggest, in the poem whose composition coincided with these letters. Later the same year, Byron sent to his publisher the recently completed Vision of Judgment, whose depiction of heaven (in which the angels ‘all are Tories’) directly echoed his comment to Murray (‘God will not always be a Tory’). The Vision of Judgment, as we have noted, has been celebrated as a sparkling satire and self-contained masterpiece. Read in relation to the competing impulses that appear across Byron’s wider public and private writings from this period, however, The Vision of Judgment comes newly into focus: as a more deliberate engagement with both long-standing trends and pressing contemporary demands. Byron conceived of this poem, which he had set out to write from a ‘Whig point of view’, as a pointed intervention, I want to propose, within the growing partisan deadlock and political stagnation that had dominated his lifetime. At the same time, he conceived of this work as a placeholder for renewed engagement with the contemporary political situation, in which he continued to want to take (some) part. As he wrote in a follow-up letter concerning the Vision of Judgment and ‘The Irish Avatar’, a pugnacious satire of George IV’s recent visit to Ireland: ‘I just piddle a little with these trifles to keep my hand in for the New “English Bards &c.” ’35 These remarks and these poems only become fully legible when we understand Byron’s suggestion that he might return to the satirical mode of English Bards, Scotch Reviewers in tandem with a fuller re-evaluation of his literary and political horizons. As he had written in the earlier letter that promised to provide Murray with a ‘poetical Catalogue’ of his visitors: ‘If ever I do return to England (which I shan’t though) I shall write a new poem to which “English Bards[”] &c. shall be New Milk in comparison.—Your present literary world of mountebacks stands in need of such an Avatar.’36 This imagined intervention in the ‘present literary world’ was closely bound up with Byron’s desire to ‘keep [his] hand in’ politically—the desire which had recently prompted him to consider taking a ‘part’ amidst the brewing ‘violence of the political parties’. Byron’s reference to rewriting ‘English Bards &c.’ in his letter confronting Murray and the parallel suggestion of renewed political engagement allow us to now read his recently completed poem in a new light. The Vision of Judgment carved out a deliberate remove from the political arena, but so as to formulate a poetic stance from which Byron could reflect upon what role he might take amidst the present state of parties. That was a vexed question in practical terms and determining what ‘part’ Byron might have played (and what ‘Avatar’, to use his recent language, he could adopt) remains challenging as a matter of political biography. At the moment of his projected return to England in 1819, moreover, his continuing suspicion of the available parties—stymied in particular by his aristocratic suspicion of the ‘blackguard’ reformers—coincided with a personal, political, and poetic impasse. In the weeks preceding the composition of The Vision 35 Byron to John Murray, 9 October 1821. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 8.236. 36 Byron to John Murray, 12 September 1821. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 8.206–7.

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of Judgment, Byron gave instructions to Murray, in a further letter, not to send any periodicals or news: ‘no Edinburgh—Quarterly—Monthly—nor any Review— Magazine—Newspaper English or foreign of any description’. Nor did Byron want to receive any news about himself, seeking to keep his mind ‘free and unbiased’ and comparing his feelings to ‘the dead—who know nothing and feel nothing of all or aught that is said or done in their regard’.37 Far from the post-political perspective that Christensen, drawing upon the same quotation, attributes to the English cantos of Don Juan, Byron’s writings from this period reveal an unruly throng of competing motivations, including volatile expressions of indifference, antagonism, and refusal. Byron’s removal of himself from the world, evident in his instructions that Murray not send any newspapers or information of any kind, represents a version of the askesis (or work on the self ) that Michel Foucault emphasized, in his return to ancient Greece, as a means of achieving personal freedom. Yet Byron combined this conspicuous stance of self-removal with more combative impulses— a combination of fundamental estrangement and latent antagonism that, as I will go on to show, intersects with a different strand of Foucault’s account of the truth of the self—in ways that complicate, in the first instance, the stance of apparent autonomy claimed by The Vision of Judgment. The self-contained status of the poem remains crucial to thinking about its political status. In his ‘Whig’ riposte to the provocation provided by Southey’s Vision, Byron continued to perfect his usage of the ottava rima form but now with an added appreciation of the poem as formal whole (as was obviously not the case for the sprawling design of Don Juan). From the outset, The Vision of Judgment exploits, but also experiments with, the self-containment and the attendant sense of completeness afforded by this stanza form. The poem begins with a unit of fifteen stanzas, whose calls of ‘God save the king!’ present a direct point of connection with Beppo (in addition to echoing the conclusion of Byron’s more recent ‘Song’ to ‘Hobbie-O’).38 The intervening stanzas of this unmarked prologue, which concludes with a refrain of the poem’s opening line (‘Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate’), address the preceding several decades. We learn that ‘since the Gallic era “eighty-eight” ’ the angels had not been overtasked, between the ‘crowning carnage’ of Waterloo and the few years of ‘hollow peace’ (5–6, 38, 49). Satan receives praise for his claims on both Napoleon and Wellington, while the deceased king appears not as tyrant but as one who left his subjects one half ‘mad’ and the other ‘blind’. These stanzas, in their cursory treatment of recent events, represent an apparent digression from the matter more directly at hand. Yet this digression has altogether different implications to the self-reflexivity of Beppo (and its imitation, in Falearo) and similarly parts ways from the digressions-upondigressions of Don Juan. In the first place, this self-contained opening allows

37 Byron to John Murray, 24 September 1821. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 8.219, 221. 38 For the radical reappropriation of ‘God Save the King’ following 1789, including by Percy Shelley, see Alison Morgan, ‘ “God Save Our Queen!” Percy Bysshe Shelley and Radical Appropriations of the British National Anthem’, Romanticism 20 (2014).

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Byron to make a sharp historical point. As the poet reminds us, recording so much death had left even the angels tired: This by the way; ’tis not mine to record What angels shrink from: even the very devil On this occasion his own work abhorr’d, So surfeited with the infernal revel [. . .] It almost quench’d his innate thirst of evil. (41–4, 46)

By making the bloodshed of recent decades and the realm left undone behind by the deceased king simply ‘by the way’, Byron’s poem treats the recent political situation (with its ‘surfeit’ of evils) as not normative but exceptional. This realization couples with the poem’s disarmingly benign tone. The Vision of Judgment might have afforded Byron the opportunity to stage the Whigs’ imagined revenge on specific Tory policies and ministers from the late king’s realm, but the poem instead seems to develop surprising levels of sympathy for the late monarch, alongside its more sharp-edged points of criticism. Holding the contingent events and circumstances of ‘late years’ conspicuously at arm’s length, the poem strikingly eschews topicality, even as its reckoning with the late king adopts a firmly presentist stance. These apparently crossed purposes create the profound question at which the poem’s opening points us. What does it mean flatly to dismiss (and thereby more wholeheartedly reject) things as they are, all the while maintaining a gaze trained steadily at the present? How can we both acknowledge the status quo and cast the world as it is into the abyss at the same time? The implications of this seemingly contradictory stance become even more apparent as the poem continues. Except for this opening, the events of recent decades are conspicuous by their absence from a poem which purports to reckon with the reign of George III as a whole. Byron alludes to America and Ireland in the preface to the poem, ‘to say nothing of the aggression upon France’, and ultimately keeps to the promise ironically announced in this negative formulation. The omission of recent decades was not simply ‘convenient’, enabling him to bypass this temporary aberration from a familiar pattern to recover a more stable picture of Whig and Tory rivalry, as Kelsall proposes.39 The onset of the post-revolutionary war, rather than obstructing otherwise stable party lines, coincided with a larger structural and ideological transformation—one that this book has identified with the repressive, rightward turn at home and abroad—and the complexities attending the poem’s modulation of tone thus acquire a new cast once we take fuller account of these wider contexts. Byron’s poem pursues a far more radical end: to consign the entirety of the bloodshed, conflict, and political upheaval (and the attendant partisan stagnation and pious moralism) that had consumed his lifetime to oblivion. Far from representing a frivolous aside or a light-hearted—if barbed—reprisal of earlier attacks on the establishment, Byron’s poem approached the ‘Toryism’ which had tightened its grasp in recent decades as a contingent development and thereby burst the bubble of inevitability which had grown up around the established order. To develop his 39 See Byron’s Politics, 127–8.

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alternative perspective (his ‘Whig point of view’), Byron would first need to extricate himself from available formulations of the authorial role. The poem’s self-contained digressive opening makes this evacuation of self doubly explicit. This unmarked prologue (as I have termed it) concludes with a stanza in which the first-person narrator make one of a few fleeting appearances in the poem. These lines, which playfully discuss the sinful basis of wanting to be saved while others are damned, invite reading in autobiographical terms. Yet such an approach risks missing the importance the poem places upon reaching beyond the limitations of the individual, first-person perspective—and the ways that these lines, I would suggest, instead emphasize the need to escape from psychology and partisanship into a different kind of point of view altogether. Where the irony of Beppo presented an escape-hatch out of the narrator’s apparent endorsement of a ‘God save the King’ perspective—one which nevertheless failed to lead beyond the poem itself—here the submerged narratorial voice seems at risk of drowning amidst the encroaching despair and violence that have left even the devils tired: ‘God help us all! God help me too!’ (113). In the wake of George III’s death, these mutually supplanting appeals suggest, even attempts to establish some kind of ironized distance are damned by their inevitable association with the world left behind. Despite the all-encroaching despair that saturates the poem’s self-contained opening, The Vision of Judgment holds out qualified hope for redemption. This hope nonetheless requires careful differentiation from the prophetic alternatives countenanced by Byron’s Romantic contemporaries and the Manichean worldviews in operation at this moment more broadly. We glimpse some of the paths not taken in ‘Byron’s Vision of Judgment Reversed’, an accusatory response to the poet by Reverend John Stevens (which appeared in an 1827 volume that also included laudatory poems to Wellington and on the victory at Waterloo). Stevens identified Byron as the ‘champion of the serpent’s seed’ whose ‘chaos-like mind’ mirrored his Satanic inclinations and set out, in his own poem, to reverse the supposedly diabolical Byron (while also ‘re-versing’ The Vision of Judgment in ways that returned to Southey’s example).40 As we have seen, Byron’s fiendish reputation notwithstanding, his poem was for the most part conspicuously free of the pained psychology—in Stevens’ words the ‘madd’ning horror’ annoying every heart—that had first established Byron’s ‘Romantic’ reputation in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Giaour, works with which the Reverend Stevens betrays close familiarity (even summoning the exemplary image of the tortured Byronic psyche, the selfwounding scorpion). Not only does the depiction of Satan in The Vision of Judgment, as we have noted, strain the limits of our ability to identify Byron amidst the dispersed actors of his poem. The narration of the poem equally resists identification with a single ‘mind’ in the first place. After all, the opening stanzas, in 40 John Stevens, Poems. The Battle of Waterloo; Byron’s Vision of Judgment Reversed; the Victory of Aboukir; and the Portuguese Expedition (London: 1827). For Byron’s later role in a ‘distinct, populist, religious tradition’—including the critical account of his life and more conflicted evaluation of his poetry by celebrated preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon—see ‘Spurgeon, Byron, and the Contingencies of Mediation’, chap. 9 in Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

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which the appearance of a subjective perspective tellingly coincides with the wider concern to banish the entire world to the abyss, witness selfhood appear, only to will itself away. Critics have variously explicated the multiple, divided forms that self-expression takes within Byron’s works and across his career.41 The Vision of Judgment, I have suggested, encourages us, by contrast, to attend to the ways that Byron’s poetry sought to escape from the confines of psychology altogether. Although Byron set out to write a response to Southey’s poem from a ‘Whig point of view’, we cannot identify his poem, as will by now be clear, with a stable partisan position or available political role. The suggestion that he belonged to a cause was one that Byron himself was eager to repudiate, initiating the later cantos of Don Juan with the claim ‘being of no party, / I shall offend all parties’.42 But while the narrator in Don Juan repeatedly encourages us to understand the stance he develops in relation to Byron’s own identity, The Vision of Judgment also sought to step outside that identity altogether. Byron was not drawn entirely into a diabolical embrace of exile, alienation, and misanthropy. The impulse to escape an overarching situation of partisan deadlock similarly turned Byron away from the ‘buff and blue’ of the Whigs. Yet Byron’s rejection of the existing political and psychological stances available to him as an author also coincided with his imaginative effort to reimagine his ‘opposition’ on an entirely new basis. The concluding section of this chapter will ask how that opposition coincided with an understanding of literature as politically disaffected yet capable of taking a part. But that question also had a practical political dimension. Byron’s converging impulses to escape himself and to reimagine opposition also found expression, I will now suggest, in the poem’s turn to ‘Junius’: at once immaterial, anonymous shadow and insistent, partisan presence. UNSHACKLED JUNIUS The devil’s party, whether as political formation or diabolical psychology, could not provide the basis for Byron’s opposition. His wide-reaching rejection of the political situation of ‘late years’ was accompanied by a more personalized stance of detachment within his exile (apparent in the refusal to read any more from the newspapers), and that stance found analogues in the narration of The Vision of Judgment as well as the more supple and slippery authorial persona of Don Juan. Byron also looked to more concrete oppositional stances, including vehicles for actual political action. Although the ‘Shadow of Opposition’ pointed towards the stymying of political opposition, that print from 1788 (the date of Byron’s birth and the onset of the 41 For a psychoanalytic account of the ‘characteristic fragmentation and multiplication of the self ’ in Byron’s poetic narratives, including the oedipal content of The Vision of Judgment, see Peter J. Manning, Byron and his Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), 16. Compare Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 42 Don Juan, 9.26. For the superficial and contingent nature of Byron’s allusions to Whig regalia in Don Juan, see Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength.

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period he had sought to consign to oblivion in the opening of The Vision of Judgment) presented a glimpse of other, shadowy possibilities in the phrase that appeared in the place of the artist’s signature: ‘Stat Nominis Umbra’. This was the motto appended to the Letters of Junius, the collected edition of the satirical letters that galvanized public attention amidst the already electrified political atmosphere discussed in earlier chapters (and whose secret author cultivated Banksy-like anonymity). Byron similarly looked back to the political ferment of the pre-1789 period in The Vision of Judgment, following Southey in providing the vicious anonymous satirist with his own prominent role. Aside from glimpses of this more incendiary side, the appearance of Junius at the trial of the late king in Byron’s poem played more directly upon the elusiveness captured by the motto which prefaced the collected letters: The Shadow came! a tall, thin, grey-hair’d figure, That look’d as it had been a shade on earth; Quick in its motions, with an air of vigour, But nought to mark its breeding or its birth. (593–6)43

The unmarked social status of Junius sets his writings at an obvious remove from Byron, whose aristocratic background was crucial to his development as a poet and public figure. Elsewhere, however, the characterization of Junius starts to sound an awful lot like Byron. Varying ‘like a dream’, his constantly changing features, now with ‘an air of gloom, or savage mirth’, ‘now here, now there’, make him ‘a phantasmagoria in / Himself—he was so volatile and thin!’ In contrast with the aristocratic figure of the Satanic politician, Junius sometimes would seem ‘three gentlemen at once’ but at other times ‘not even one’ (626, 628, emphasis original). Aside from more direct points of connection,44 Junius allowed Byron—as a figure of psychic projection for aspects of the poet’s own idealized self-image—to imagine an escape from the elite role to which he was bound, while preserving, in a veiled and disguised form, some of its more desirable characteristics: ‘Quick in its motions, with an air of vigour, / But nought to mark its breeding or its birth’ (596).45 The appeal of Junius was closely bound up with the elusive anonymity which left even the ‘Devil himself’ ‘puzzled’ as to his true identity. This portrait of ‘the Shadow’ similarly left in doubt whether Junius was even self-identical with ‘himself ’: ‘as you gazed upon its features, they / Changed every instant—to what, none could say’ (603, 599–600). 43 Kelsall notes the connection with the motto. 44 In this emphasis on his grey hair and thinness, Junius may even present a semi-conscious self-portrait. Byron alluded to his own prematurely graying hair in Don Juan (1.213). See also Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (London: Faber, 2003), 368, 493; for his ‘anorexia’, see xii, 144, 435, 444. Christensen relates what he terms Byron’s bulimia to ‘the swings of the market’ and proposes that the ‘fully textualized’ body of the writer ‘can give no metaphorical coherence to the metaphysical concept of a biographical subject-form’ (354–6). We might equally connect Byron’s regimen of selfstarvation to an idealized self-image, which found partial expression through the vanishing authorial figure of ‘Junius’ as well as in Byron’s own accounts of himself as being ‘as thin as a skeleton’ (Byron’s Letters and Journals, 10.111–12, quoted in MacCarthy, 444). 45 Compare Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength.

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In A Vision of Judgement, Southey conflated Junius with a larger, transhistorical threat: the menace of ‘Faction’ and unshackled popular will. As he introduces the king’s villainous accusers, Wilkes and Junius, who now stand mute in contrition, Satan appears in that poem not in a speaking role but as a ‘many-headed and monstrous’ fiend. A figure for multifarious threats, the devil’s composite form thereby captured the ebbing away of oppositional demands into dangerously vacuous nonsense: a ‘confusion of turbulent voices [. . .] the watchwords of faction, / Freedom, Invaded Rights, Corruption, and War, and Oppression’.46 By portraying Satan as a threateningly polymorphous figure for the vox populi, Southey’s poem thereby marshalled an emboldened vision of royal-anchored state power against a grab bag of discontinuous causes and oppositional elements: a familiar counter-revolutionary strategy, already apparent in Johnson’s political pamphlets of the 1770s. The influence of this capacious devil’s party, in this case, spanned the entirety of the king’s reign and continued, by implication, into the present. Southey made some concessions to the progress effected by the revolutionary age. In his poem, the now contrite George Washington greets his former foe as a kindred spirit: ‘to thee I seemed as a Rebel, / Thou a tyrant to me’, and adds, ‘so strongly doth circumstances rule men / During evil days, when right and wrong are confounded.’ ‘Left to our hearts’, however, Washington concludes, ‘we were just’.47 George III in turn ascends into a pantheon of great leaders and national icons, including William of Orange and John Milton. Southey’s Vision was nonetheless exemplary of the rightward turn that accompanied the transition into the Romantic period—and all the more so for conscripting these earlier ‘Whig’ heroes. These conflations were in line with larger trends discussed in the previous chapters, from the reclaiming of 1688 for the reinvented Toryism of the early nineteenth century to revisionism around the American Revolution, which together separated out figures like Washington as misguided aberrations from Wilkes, Junius, and more inchoate sources of popular unrest. By returning to the upheaval that preceded the recent rightward turn in Britain and on the continent, Byron brought to light oppositional legacies that appeared in particularly stark relief against his poem’s passing—but damning—attention to the bloodshed in the aftermath of the French Revolution and broader condemnation of the contemporary political situation; at the same time, he infused them with a newly current sense of possibility, even the frisson of revolutionary potential. The second decade of the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of renewed interest in ‘Junius’, particularly among the Whig opposition. Alongside a new edition of the Letters themselves, which the young and politically active Byron went out of his way to purchase, their flame was carried more immediately into contemporary debates in 1812 when a letter from the supposedly resurrected author to the prince regent (which Byron, an aspiring Whig politician at this time,

46 Robert Southey, A Vision of Judgement (Longman: London, 1821), 17. 47 Southey, A Vision of Judgement, 23–4.

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may well have encountered) appeared that summer in the Independent Whig.48 Assimilating himself with the earlier ‘prophets’ who had warned of the loss of America, the resurgent ‘Junius’ lamented Tory rule at home and bloodshed abroad (sentiments echoed in the first cantos of Childe Harold and Byron’s speeches in parliament the same year) and concluded by expressing his hope to see ‘some prospect of my country’s redemption’. Yet by this point, it was too late. Despite efforts to rally the support of the regent for a Whig ministry, this fell on deaf ears as the Tories entrenched power.49 The subsequent evaporation of the Whigs’ hopes and attendant gloom were apparent throughout Byron’s poetry, from his lines on ‘Indifference’ to his continuing lamentation of the stagnant politics at home and ongoing carnage abroad. Junius nonetheless promised to reveal other possibilities. The original letters combine a fierce and trenchantly argued defence of liberty with a scathing, albeit often scattershot critique of recent actions by the ruling elite, interspersed with vicious ad hominem attacks. While frequently subtle, Junius could also be damning; in this, he was very much like Pope. Elsewhere he went further and was prone to lash out, attacking physical deformities, national traits, and private embarrassments; in this, he was more than a little like Byron. The interest of the aspiring young poet and politician in the earlier figure went far beyond mere Whig hagiography. We do not need to look very far to see the source of the appeal: ‘Admitting him to be as brave as a total absence of all feeling and reflection can make him, let us see what sort of merit he derives from the remainder of his character’, Junius began one sketch of a contemporary political figure. The initially suppressed stanzas in Don Juan on Wellington, composed by Byron during the same 1821 period in which he also completed The Vision of Judgment, show the similarly pointed workings of his satirical pen. ‘I don’t mean to reflect’, Byron wrote, before making the scathing Junius-like addition: ‘—a man so great as / You, my Lord Duke! is far above reflection’.50 Beyond similarity of temperament and principles, Byron remained attuned to the alternative possibilities which Junius made—and might continue to make— available. Susan Wolfson, in her eloquent discussion of the ‘visions of author’ in The Vision of Judgment, proposes that Junius was ‘as un-Byronic as he is un-Southeyan’ and thus enabled Byron to explore alternatives both to the shameless careerism of the Poet Laureate and to his own restricted room for manoeuvre, as a famous writer shackled to his own mythic status.51 We can expand upon her valuable account of what this ‘mysterious author-function’ made available by asking how Junius supplied Byron with added political possibilities. The elusive play with personal identity was no doubt appealing at a number of levels to Byron. Yet this 48 The letter was subsequently republished in pamphlet form as A Letter from Junius to His Royal Highness The Prince Regent as it appeared in the Independent Whig On Sunday, July 26, 1812 (London: 1812). 49 Lord Liverpool subsequently began what was to be well over a decade in office, leaving little hope of unseating the Tories from power. See William Anthony Hay, The Whig Revival, 1808–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 20; John Bew, Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny (London: Quercus, 2011), 300–5. 50 Don Juan, 9.7. 51 Wolfson, ‘The Vision of Judgment and the Visions of “Author” ’, 181–2.

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also opened up new vistas for his poetic and political identity, informed by a very different phase in the development of the partisan public sphere and the inchoate political situation discussed in previous chapters. Far from underscoring the dangers of abandoning one’s party,52 the anonymous satirist instead became a means, I would suggest, for Byron to reimagine his authorial identity and the status of his own poetry in terms not available within the existing system of parties or the emergent field of literary production. And far from accepting his containment within a restrictive Byronism, with the endless ironizing, alienation, and selfcritique to which that would inevitably tend, the appearance of Junius in The Vision of Judgment ought to be understood as Byron’s attempt to think outside both the constraints of his own psychology and his limited room for manoeuvre as an author and political actor. A critical node in the conjoined transformations of literary authorship and political agency that accompanied the transition into the Romantic age, the anonymous satirist carried complex and overdetermined significance at a moment in which Byron was torn between competing personal motivations and in a compromised role in relation to the present literary and political establishment. The continuing practical value of Junius as a political model can be seen from Hobhouse’s parallel appeal to the writer in the course of his own parliamentary campaigning and political journalism. Describing his efforts to circulate an anonymous, scathing letter attacking Canning, composed in an effort to galvanize opposition to the current parliamentary elite among moderate and radical reformers like himself, Hobhouse compared this missive to a letter by Junius in his private journal.53 Without a determined point of origin, ‘Junius’ skated the edges of emergent ‘author-functions’, as Wolfson describes, but with real political implications. Not the least among these was his capacity to elude the legal apparatus that had, in the contemporary case of John Wilkes, brutally reversed anonymous textual circulation in the guise of ‘general warrants’ that tracked libellous works back to their physical point of origin. Alongside his continuing political appropriation, moreover, the true identity of ‘Junius’ remained a point of debate well into the nineteenth century. As he set the scene for his appearance at the king’s trial in The Vision of Judgment, Byron summoned this ongoing controversy, only to make his own striking intervention: I’ve an hypothesis—’tis quite my own; I never let it out till now, for fear Of doing people harm about the throne, And injuring some minister or peer On whom the stigma might perhaps be blown; It is—my gentle public, lend thine ear! ’Tis, that what Junius we are wont to call, Was really, truly, nobody at all. (633–40, emphasis original) 52 Compare Gross, Byron: The Erotic Liberal and Kelsall, Byron’s Politics, 139–40. 53 Hobhouse noted to Byron that the circulation of this attack had made a ‘monstrous noise’ during the current political session, while silently leaving his own authorship unstated. Hobhouse to Byron, 5 June 1818. Byron’s Bulldog, 232.

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The faux-revelation is carefully staged. Alluding to the potential damage to those at the centre of power, Byron draws the reader into the domain of court-based intrigue and secret history. Gathering his ‘gentle public’ closer, he then lets out his scandalous hypothesis to the larger reading nation. As The Vision of Judgment makes clear, Byron followed the ‘Junius’ authorship controversies in some detail, as we might expect from someone formerly so embedded within the Whig world and in proximity to its fading luminaries. By invoking the rarefied annex to the public sphere that had occupied itself with the identity of Junius, only to puncture its expectations, Byron further undermined his ironic assumption of its purported authority. With the re-emergence of a first-person speaker here, the elusive foundations of the poem’s own enunciation bring its own origins and ends similarly into question. The revelation that Junius was ‘nobody at all’ in turn prompts a further reflection, as Byron’s briefly resurfacing first-person narrator identifies the disappearance of the author as a function of the contemporary print marketplace: I don’t see wherefore letters should not be Written without hands, since we daily view Them written without heads; and books, we see, Are fill’d as well without the latter too: And really till we fix on somebody For certain sure to claim them as his due, Their author, like the Niger’s mouth, will bother The world to say if there be mouth or author. (641–8, emphasis original)

The headless letters here act, by synecdoche, to summon the larger publishing world; perhaps most directly in view here are the periodicals and ‘daily view[ed]’ papers that Byron had recently instructed Murray to desist sending (‘no Edinburgh— Quarterly—Monthly—nor any Review—Magazine—Newspaper English or foreign of any description’) and that featured pseudonymous correspondence including, in the case of the Edinburgh Review, deliberately anonymized articles. The vanishing prospects here for any author to stand above the implied decapitation of judgement or torrent of inanity extends, in turn, to the wider book trade, creating a damning picture of the entire world of ‘letters’. While Byron continued to invest in this ability to manipulate the literary marketplace (‘my gentle public [. . .]’), this was with the larger end in mind, I have suggested, of escaping altogether from the various personas and identities in which he elsewhere delighted.54 At the same time, this gesture, in its conspicuous distance, was in line with the wish, expressed in his letter to Murray, to keep his feelings ‘like the dead’ and his mind ‘free and unbiased’.

54 As Wolfson has noted, Byron’s fame rendered the pretence of anonymity to some extent merely that. See the extended discussion of Junius’s pseudonymity in ‘Byron’s Ghosting Authority’, ELH 76 (2009), 776–7. Rather than asking whether Byron could actually evade identification, we might instead ask what was at stake in this fantasy, especially as an imagined return to the potential of English Bards (at the moment before the proliferation of that satire in new editions became evidence of Byron’s inability to escape his reputation).

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The return to ‘Junius’ in the Vision of Judgment—together with the contemporary promise to rewrite English Bards—give us glimpses of Byron’s desire to take an active, antagonistic role within political activity, including but not limited to an expanded public sphere. Byron’s desire to abstract his poetry altogether from the larger marketplace of print and associated political discussion also coupled with the higher ends, to which this chapter will return in closing, of looking beyond politics altogether. But in his writings of this period these efforts to look above and beyond coincided more directly with combative political impulses. Those impulses can be discerned, I have suggested, beneath the crisp ironies and pointed detachment of The Vision of Judgment, not least as underpinning the efforts to consign the world of recent decades surveyed in the self-contained ‘prologue’ to that poem to oblivion. They may also be viewed in the continuing development of Don Juan, albeit with less frequency and within a greater sense of free play. In the later cantos of that poem, as well as the wider correspondence and occasional satires with which its composition coincided, Byron was clearly animated by the desire to ‘cut up’ his antagonists in tandem with his ongoing impulse to ‘take some part’ in political activity. He meant to get in the face of the public, that is to say, even as he remained, as with Beppo, at a explicit remove from his English readership.55 We find an important precursor for Byron’s simultaneous attachments both to a conspicuous exile and a combative relationship with the public realm by returning to the original ‘Cynics’. Byron drew upon his knowledge of Diogenes and company at crucial moments in his developing career, in ways that illuminate his self-conception as a poet and satirist.56 Attention to the ancient Greek sect will allow us to build upon our existing attention to the volatile estrangement evident across Byron’s private and public writings to cast his distinctive brand of cynicism in a new light—and to ask, in conclusion, what kinds of truth Byron ultimately sought to make available through his poetry. B Y RO N ’ S C Y N I C I S M In The Vision of Judgment, Byron’s cultivation of an estranged stance towards the political arena received crisp but also damning expression, as detachment from the political scene surveyed therein coincided with the desire to consign the political world of his lifetime to oblivion. In his correspondence with Murray, Byron aligned the poem with his combative early satire English Bards (as well as his scabrous recent attack on the prince regent in ‘The Irish Avatar’) in ways, I have proposed, that inflected the appearance of the anonymous satirist Junius in the poem with 55 As Jerome McGann has shown, with Don Juan, Byron moved beyond the ‘Juvenalian vigor, even recklessness’ of English Bards, Scotch Reviewers, and its his early satire on the literary establishment. See McGann, Don Juan in Context, 6–7, 68–73, 81. As McGann also notes, despite Byron’s later repudiation of its ‘invective’, that poem’s satire itself ‘is generally not impassioned’ but ultimately ‘aloof ’ (Complete Poetical Works, 2.398). 56 I have discussed these connections at greater length in my ‘Byron the Cynic’, in Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry, eds. Roderick Beaton and Christine Kenyon Jones (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2016).

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political potential. The indifference and bemused disengagement that critics have located in the poem thus give way to sharper edges and unsettled political impulses. We may now expand our attention beyond this parting vision of the reign of George III to the diverse personas and shifting attitudes that emerge across Byron’s writings more widely in this period, not least as he entered more deeply into the composition of Don Juan. ‘Indifference’, as we saw from the lines in Byron’s 1813 letter to Lady Melbourne, remained central to Byron’s at once generalized and more pointedly individual responses to politics; this was a condition that he associated from early on in his life, moreover, with a condition of physical estrangement.57 His exile conflated these conditions and cleared space for the more total affective detachment he described as feeling ‘like the dead’. Yet we might equally construe his related demand to receive no newspapers as one of active refusal: not only a stance of ascetic removal but a more violently antagonistic, disaffected attitude. Disaffection for Byron remained on the same range of meaning spanned by the word itself, in which withdrawal couples with charged contact, if only back with itself: a version of the self-wounding scorpion. Byron’s famed ‘cynicism’ particularly benefits from reframing in these self-conflicted terms. From his dandified public personas to his dark-souled poetic heroes, Byron remained the poster child for cynicism well into the Victorian age.58 Reconsidering the volatile relationship with the political arena entailed by Byron’s cynical stance, along with his related expressions of a similarly indeterminate ‘indifference’, thus allows for a fuller reconsideration of his disaffected attitudes towards politics and his visions of the world at large. Byron baldly stated the political attitudes that reinforced his cynical reputation when he noted, in remarks we have already encountered, that he had ‘simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments’ and added—with an appeal to the ‘blessing of indifference’—that what he characterized as the ‘shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable’ would see ‘the first moment of an universal republic [. . .] convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism’.59 From their pessimism about the capacity for political institutions to improve the human lot down to the very phrasing of the claim that any given political regime would prove ‘no better, nor worse’ than any other, these remarks articulated a now familiar cynical stance, one that would receive expression throughout his literary career and achieve an apotheosis of sorts in the ‘epic cynicism’ of Don Juan.60 We may bring the other faces of his ‘cynical’ attitude into view, including its more unsettled, antagonistic contours, by turning to ancient Greece. 57 See Byron’s remarks to his mother on 25 June 1811: ‘I have just been two years [. . .] absent from England, and I return to it with much the same feelings which prevailed on my departure, viz. indifference’ (Byron’s Letters and Journals, 2.51). 58 See Helen Small, ‘George Eliot and the Cosmopolitan Cynic’, Victorian Studies 55 (2012), 85, 91. For Byron’s wider reputation in the period, see Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 59 Journal entry for 16 January 1814. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 3.242. ‘The fact is’, Byron continued, ‘riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.’ 60 See Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 6.

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Recent scholarship has unearthed the legacies of the original Cynics, the Greek sect led by Diogenes, as their influence has filtered into Western modernity. With a name originating in the Greek root ‘kyn-’, meaning ‘dog’, the Cynics were known for their ‘shameless’ conduct, which included living in tubs and masturbating in public (including within the privileged space of the agora).61 Committed to an existence stripped down to essentials and to aggressively frank statements, their distinctive way of living—in a version of the askesis that Foucault, who devoted part of his final lecture course to the Cynics, also located in ancient Greece— manifested itself in the consistent practice of self-sufficiency, poverty, and free or frank speech (parrhēsia). Modern cynicism has appeared to have few points of contact with the ancient sect, creating a stark contrast between nihilistic or disillusioned modern-day ‘cynicism’ and the Cynics, ‘a rather dirty lot’, who as ‘both jesters and street preachers’ were ‘committed tooth and nail to jolting their contemporaries into self-reflection’.62 This proves rather too extreme as a characterization for Byron’s own poetry, which was rarely so consistently caustic and remained coloured by the cool distance and self-ironizing tendencies we have noted. Examining the poet in relation to the antagonistic, scandalous, snarling conduct attributed to Diogenes and his followers—as well as the practices of what Foucault would term the ‘care of the self ’ or ‘arts of living’ associated with their rebelliousness and flouting of convention—nonetheless reveals obscured dimensions to his own cynical remove from the political arena as well as crucial continuities and unexpected connections between the ancient Cynics and the type of cynicism that remains familiar down to the present (not least the ‘bite’ that lurks within even the most seemingly disengaged cynical attitudes). Diogenes famously walked the streets of Athens with a lantern looking for an ‘honest man’. Byron recalled this anecdote in Canto 11 of Don Juan, where he remarked that London was ‘so well lit’ that if Diogenes Could recommence to hunt his honest man, And found him not amidst the various progenies Of this enormous city’s spreading spawn, ’Twere not for want of lamps to aid his dodging his Yet undiscover’d treasure63

61 See John L. Moles, ‘The Cynics’, in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, eds. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 417. The etymology of the name has alternatively been explained with reference to Cynosarges, a gymnasium for non-Athenians (whose name may also allude to ‘dog’). 62 Lousia Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 134, 1. See also David Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). Despite points of intersection with the ancient Cynics, particularly during the Renaissance and long eighteenth century, modern ‘cynicism’ emerges as an altogether different animal, Shea notes, connected only to these raggedy precursors by way of what she terms a ‘vague and uncertain relationship’. Although concerned with changes in usage—especially between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—Mazella seeks to account for changes ‘within’ cynicism, rather than competing practices under this heading (14–16). 63 Don Juan, 11.218–21.

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For both Diogenes and Byron, albeit with differing levels of irony, this ‘hunt’ constituted a polemical gesture. The Cynics were notorious for their radical and fearless pursuit of the truth and in particular for speaking the ‘truth to power’. Diogenes famously told Alexander the Great to get out of his light. In his late satire The Age of Bronze (1822), which presented a panoramic survey of the repressive governance and growing malaise that had overtaken Europe, Byron alluded to this story, while embracing the Cynic role directly: I am Diogenes, though Russ and Hun Stand between mine and many a myriad’s sun; But were I not Diogenes, I’d wander Rather a worm than such an Alexander! Be slaves who will, the Cynic shall be free; His tub hath tougher walls than Sinopè; Still will he hold his lanthorn up to scan The face of monarchs for an ‘honest man’.64

Aside from these direct lines of influence, Byron also intersected with ‘Cynic’ practice more directly: in the very stuff, we might say, of his life. Beginning with the fact of his exile from England, we can recover important connections with the Cynics, less with respect to the life lived according to ‘nature’ than with the condition of having ‘no attachments’.65 We encounter a further connection to the Cynics in the relentless antagonism towards social convention for which the ancient sect was also known. Diogenes had launched attacks on a wide range of targets: ‘all forms of convention, marriage, family, politics, the city, all social, sexual and racial distinctions, worldly reputation, wealth, power and authority, literature, music, and all forms of intellectual speculation; and upon their human representatives’. His attacks were ‘generally witty, the wit often savage, often vulgar, often paradoxical, sometimes utilizing literary parody and allusion’.66 The Cynics present a polyvalent analogue for Byron’s relationship with politics. Their complex engagement with the polis was marked by their disengagement from, even as they registered antagonism towards, the scene of political activity. But this was also, crucially, coupled with their simultaneous adoption of a conspicuous public role. To the extent that they decoupled or otherwise detached themselves from a given polis, we might view the Cynics as outside politics. Yet at the same time, they continued to inhabit and interact with their social worlds, often with an aggressive assertiveness, thereby occupying a uniquely unsettled position with respect both to the wider social body and to the parameters of politics. The Cynics were at once insiders and outsiders, as becomes especially 64 The Age of Bronze, 476–83. McGann identifies this passage as the ‘centre’ of the poem. 65 Although Michel Foucault, in his late lectures on the Cynics, emphasized their commitment to living a life according to nature, he also identified this deprivation that left the Cynic with ‘sandals or bare feet’ and a ‘long beard’ with the condition of having ‘no attachments’. See The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–4, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 170. Foucault located the Cynics in continuity, albeit in extreme guise, with the ancient practices he had earlier discussed as the care of the self. 66 Moles, ‘The Cynics’, 419.

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apparent when we reflect on the public nature of their conduct.67 While Diogenes lived in a barrel, as a mark of his self-exclusion, this ‘tub’ was squarely located within the public square. The insistent publicity of the Cynics thus coincided with their conspicuous detachment, at once from social norms and political life, making them both a rebellious internal element and disdainful marginal figures at one and the same time. The uncertain and shifting relationship with England’s political arena and public sphere over Byron’s poetic career casts him in a version of this ‘Cynic’ role. Indeed, in The Age of Bronze, as we have seen, he explicitly identified with Diogenes (associating his poetry with his ‘tub’). The antagonism and ambiguous insideoutside status of the Cynics accordingly sets familiar accounts of Byron’s ‘cynical’ disengagement and disdain into sharp relief. The complexities created by the already unstable, marginal social role of the Cynics, as well as their conspicuous presence in (or around) the public arena, proliferate when we extend our attention from the Greek polis and agora to modern politics and the print public sphere. At the margins, on a strange pedestal (in the inverted guise of Diogenes’s ‘tub’), or as a scandalous centre of attention and variously travelling between, away from, and back to one polity after another, the Cynics occupied an especially elusive position. For all their embrace of an exilic condition, they remained an antagonistic presence: promising, or threatening, to re-enter the public arena—where they had not already scandalously breached its bounds—and to return from exile ‘to announce the truth, to announce the true things without’.68 Byron allows us to both clarify and further test the limits and political implications of the Cynic role, transposed to the ambiguous realm of authorship. In his embrace, deliberate or otherwise, of scandal and exile, and in his broader cultivation of detachment, Byron reveals the ambiguities embraced by the Cynics in action (along with the added complexity and richness that emerges by extending these questions to a political world more closely resembling our own). Approaching Byron as ‘Cynic’ thereby helps to reveal additional contours, as well as contradictions, within the ‘cynicism’ that remains familiar to us, not least in revealing how the stance of detachment from politics might, however paradoxically, enable its own pointed returns to the scene of the political. In an added connection with the dogs from which their name supposedly derived, the Cynics were notable satirists, associated with ‘biting’ critique. Byron can allow us to see with particular clarity the ‘bite’ that remains a critical, often neglected aspect of the cynical stance. Returning to Byron’s final writings, with attention to the reprise of his earlier satirical tendencies, allows us to discern this 67 As Foucault emphasized in his turn to the Cynics as exemplary of the ‘truth of the subject’, their ‘very particular form of life’ placed them ‘on the fringe of institutions, laws, and recognized social groups: the Cynic is someone truly on the fringes of society who moves around society itself without being acceptable or taken in. The Cynic is driven out; he wanders.’ In tandem with their ‘very public, visible, spectacular, provocative, sometimes scandalous way of life’, Foucault also saw the Cynics as engaging in a form of critical ‘preaching’. Courage of Truth, 201; Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 119. 68 Foucault, Courage of Truth, 167, paraphrasing Epictetus.

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pointed and aggressive ‘Cynic’ stance even amidst some of Byron’s most seemingly distanced, dispassionate commentaries on the domestic political arena. That his battle with the British literary and political establishment continued to shape his poetry remains beyond question. While his later works contained familiar expressions of disdain, refusal, and negation with respect to politics, however, they also coincided, as we have seen, with Byron’s plans to return to an active role in politics within England. By returning to England, if only by way of his poetic ‘Avatar’, Byron not only fulfilled the Cynic role described by Epictetus as ‘the office of spy [. . .] sent ahead as a scout, in advance of humanity, to determine what may be favorable or hostile to man in the things of the world’.69 He also reimagined the political implications of a stance that might otherwise appear as complacent detachment or malicious lashing out. This stance represents its own form of politics, one with dim but crucial echoes in present-day cynicism. In important respects, moreover, the Cynic represents the true figure of freedom.70 While Byron had embraced this mantle in The Age of Bronze (‘Be slaves who will, the Cynic shall be free’), he realized this role most fully, I would argue, in the inimitable roughand-tumble of Don Juan. When Byron wrote, ‘I wish men to be free / As much from mobs as kings—from you as me’,71 he recognized prescriptive moralizing as its own form of tyranny. Yet even as he expressed this desire to ‘free’ the reader, Byron continued to make his demanding, haranguing, critiquing presence known, together with glimpses of the agitation for genuine political change that would ultimately carry him to other shores. Returning to the poetry ultimately presents us not with liberalism, dandyism, or even cynicism in its coolly detached guise. Instead, fuller attention to the volatile political and poetic stance Byron came to occupy in his later satirical poetry reveals the snarl and snap by which the original Cynics sought to shock their contemporaries, together with glimpses of the transformed political openings this might help make available. ‘All men are intrinsical rascals’, Byron had written to Murray—in the same series of letters that had accompanied The Vision of Judgment and ‘The Irish Avatar’—‘I am only sorry that not being a dog I can’t bite them.’72 Don Juan provides irregular instances of this sharp, biting edge, which found fuller expression in contemporary satires, both written and imagined. This impulse, I would suggest, may be seen not only to undergird the cool detachment of The Vision of Judgment and to animate the desire for the political at stake in that poem’s pursuit of a ‘Whig point of view’. At the 69 Paraphrased by Foucault, Courage of Truth, 167. 70 In verbally attacking the polis, from specific political institutions down to worldly power as such, the Cynic was ‘not thereby eschewing action’, Moles maintains; instead, he sought ‘to persuade others (both rulers and ruled) to reject worldly power in just the same way as he himself does’. The ‘strength’ of the Cynic was ‘moral, not military’; his ‘virility’ derived from ‘personal toughness, not from the false machismo of armed might’. The Cynic resisted ‘the attacks of kings and tyrants on his personal freedom, but not to the point of violence’, and claimed, in the last analysis, ‘to be free even when enslaved’. Moles, ‘The Cynics’, 431. At the same time, the Cynic ‘has no interest in freedom as a political institution, since such “freedom” gives him rights which he does not want and imposes obligations which he must reject’ (431). 71 Don Juan, 9.199–200. 72 Byron to John Murray, 20 October 1821. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 8.245.

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same time, that poem sought to look beyond politics altogether, in pursuit of a truth not available in political—or, for that matter, worldly—affairs but which nonetheless remained in proximity, as I will now suggest in closing, to a vision of the truth in politics. T H E T RU T H I N P O L I T I C S The aggressively pared-down, irreducibly embodied truth that Foucault associated with the Cynics was not the only—or even the primary—truth to which Byron was drawn. Byron’s continuing attachment to Neoclassical and Augustan aesthetic models, for one thing, pointed to other sources of the truth, including the truth in politics. Don Juan ultimately proves less bitter than the biting Cynics, at a fluctuating remove and in a variable mood that undermine any final conclusion, about the poet or the world he surveys.73 Related qualifications attend any final reckoning with The Vision of Judgment. Despite his opposition or resistance to existing governing structures and political groupings, on the one hand, and to revolutionary causes and popular radicalism, on the other, Byron arguably remained open to politics as an unanticipated event which promised to make truth available, in ways not otherwise conceivable by way of the existing parties or through given, named alternatives. Byron nonetheless continued to be drawn, despite his rebellious streak, to an idealized purity, even as he remained suspicious of the unequivocal promise of a transcendent oneness or dubious universalism. Byron’s opposition to construing worldly affairs in the name of some hypothetical singularity took multiple tacks: making God a ‘Tory’, in the case of institutional religion and its political and moral weaponization; making God an ‘Austrian’, in the case of hegemonic European powers exerting imperial control; demolishing social distinction in the name of the people (or ‘rabble’), in the case of populist demagoguery and radical movements; or the Promethean resistance to settled power that made him amenable to later abolitionist readers.74 Yet not all forms of unity were similarly tainted. We find one prospect for rehabilitation in Byron’s vindication of Pope as the ‘most perfect’ of poets and ‘purest of moralists’.75 The Vision of Judgment 73 I thank the reader for the Press for inviting this qualification. 74 For Byron’s political afterlives in the wider Atlantic world, see ‘Byronic Abolitionism’, chap. 8 in Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 75 Byron associated Pope with a version of the ‘party of humanity’ characterized by Blakey Vermeule as a perhaps impossibly idealized collectivity that hovered seemingly within reach for a cluster of important eighteenth-century writers and thinkers (and which found a crucial outlet and vehicle for authors including Pope and Johnson in the ‘moralizing power of the aesthetic’). See The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Writing to Hobhouse in 1820, Byron drew upon Goldsmith’s account of Burke in noting: ‘You will see that I have taken up the Pope question (in prose) with a high hand, and you (when you can spare yourself from Party to Mankind) must help me.’ Byron’s Letters and Journals, 7.63. Although the Pope affair did, in certain respects, take on a partisan cast, the controversy also clarifies what was at stake for Byron in turning aside from politics altogether. As shown in the conclusion to the letter to Hobhouse—where Byron remarks that politics had ‘cut up’ all useful friendships—fractious

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presents a damning picture of the consequences when terrestrial and celestial realms become intertwined. The all-too-human limitations of earthly perspective that the poem makes audible within its appropriated title—which in removing a letter from The Vision of Judgement turns Southey’s propensity to judge back against him, reclaiming the faculty of judgment for better political ends, if not an altogether higher purpose—takes on particular prominence in its closing stanza: As for the rest, to come to the conclusion Of this true dream, the telescope is gone Which kept my optics free from all delusion, And show’d me what I in my turn have shown.

(841–4)

Dispensing with the ‘telescope’ that provides a metonym for his larger poetical apparatus, Byron might seem to dissolve any pretensions his ‘Vision’ had to live up to its weighty precedents, from classical epic to more recent imaginative vistas.76 Yet the conclusion of this ‘true dream’ need not simply indicate the poem’s ironic dismissal of the potential for redemption or the closure of visionary possibilities whether prophetic or aesthetic. Rather than divergent and clashing perspectives, The Vision of Judgment consciously puts forward competing systems of representation. The double vision that results from these internally coherent yet ultimately incompatible systems finds one analogue, appropriately enough, in the Kantian faculty of judgment, which hinges, in the summary of Frances Ferguson, upon ‘two distinct but converging systems’ or modes of apprehension ‘that enable alternative forms of the functions they represent’.77 The poem need not, by analogy, put forward perspectives we must choose between, either a heavenly, celestial realm or the debased realm of earthly politics, or encourage us to collapse the two (as Southey did—ludicrously, not to mention dangerously—in viewing God and the angels as ‘Tories’). Keeping these respective alternatives in mind equips us to see that the truth of this ‘true dream’ has less to do with its content than with its form. ‘Junius’ provided one way of thinking about the form of the poem in relation to the field of political activity; the materialized yet immaterial figure of ‘Junius’ was the exception that proves the rule, at once part of the given political scene yet irreducible to its existing elements, an invisible trace of the prospective event of politics organized around parties yet to come (the first Whig, Byron was fond of quoting Johnson as stating, was the devil). Yet aside from the ways that the poem’s ‘Whig point of view’ betrays the desire for some new ways to take some part in politics—desires whose affective and practical dimensions converge, I have suggested, upon the anonymous satirist— the poem as a whole equally advances the prospect that its truth might inhere in political activity was of a piece with a larger cultural breakdown: both homologous with and a subset of the larger ethical failure evidenced in the failure to appreciate Pope. 76 For the epic and biblical precedents for Byron’s ‘true dream’ and its possible relation to Shelley’s Adonais, see Peter Cochran, ‘One Ton per Square Foot: The Antecedents of The Vision of Judgment’, in Byron: Heritage and Legacy, ed. Cheryl A. Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 77 Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 27.

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the form of the ‘Vision’ itself. The perspective that Byron developed, by this reading, was at once proximate to the ‘parties’ of politics (including spectral partisan legacies and future political openings or events) and fundamentally detached from them, at once of the existing political world and radically apart from it. The ‘Whig point of view’ from which Byron sought to correct Southey’s ‘nightmare’ vision remained interpenetrated, moreover, by a truth altogether beyond worldly realities. That much becomes apparent in the change from the original reading of the penultimate line in the stanza quoted above: the change from ‘opinions’ to ‘optics’ replaces the strictly social, empirical domain summoned by the original manuscript reading—‘kept my opinions free from all delusion’— with the dual-facing ‘optics’ and, in thereby fracturing the faculty of seeing from within, creates an internal break within ‘vision’ itself.78 The Vision of Judgment reminds us, Jerome McGann observes, that ‘Byron’s most thorough explanation of his attitudes [. . .] was made in his poetry.’79 That concern with ‘his own poetic position’ extended, my discussion here has proposed, to interrogating what taking or adopting a ‘position’ meant: not only what the right attitudes and beliefs to hold were, but what ‘attitude’ and ‘belief ’ were in the first place, and, thereby, what other kinds of belief might become available and what it would mean to step outside the need to adopt an attitude (or have ‘opinions’) and instead simply see things as they are—to keep one’s ‘optics free from all delusion’. Byron’s reference to the truth-enabling ‘telescope’ that he equates with his wider poetic apparatus might recall his own taking Wordsworth to task for his bogus appeals to the imagination in the Lyrical Ballads and for the strained verisimilitude in particular of ‘The Thorn’, whose narrator wields a telescope of his own.80 Don Juan, by contrast, dispenses with the ‘true’, McGann proposes, ‘in favor of clarifying the truth of the world’. The ‘truth of the Imagination’, in Don Juan, was ‘not poetical imagining but actual fact—realities of time, place, circumstance’.81 The Vision of Judgment brings yet further orders of ‘truth’ into the picture, forcing our self-consciousness about the constitutive elements of perspective while keeping those questions squarely trained, as McGann proposes, upon political realities. 78 Woloch makes a related argument concerning Orwell’s non-fiction prose: ‘what is required [. . .] is not further, more refined empirical observation—further instruments that would give us more detailed, precise, or textured accounts of the nearby world—but, on the contrary, a reflective awareness of our act of seeing itself. Only reflection or introspection would allow us to see these things that are, in this sense, right under our noses and, by forcing an awareness of our own means of comprehending—or of the position from which we comprehend—will also make it possible to glimpse what has been excluded from our “own small circle” of thinking.’ Or Orwell, 280. 79 McGann, Don Juan in Context, 159. 80 Byron mocked Wordsworth’s note to ‘The Thorn’ in his prose preface to Don Juan. E. P. Thompson indicted Wordsworth’s ‘apostasy’ in his own Byronic terms as a failing at once political and personal, affective and aesthetic: ‘This driving back into interior faith, this preoccupation with trying to “hold” and to meditate upon past states of feeling, is surely the clue not only to the increasingly self-preoccupied tone of Wordsworth’s life, and style of life, as the Lake Poet, but also to the increasing failure of observation even in his nature poetry.’ ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York: Norton, 1997), 65–6. The mutilation of self and relapsing into received patterns of feeling and thought that Thompson identifies with the abandonment of political commitment here takes shape as a literal failing of—poetic—vision. 81 McGann, Don Juan in Context, 163.

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The Vision of Judgment was Byron’s most fully realized and enduring statement of the potential for his art to see through, in both senses, existing realities. We do not awake from Byron’s dream-vision to find it truth, nor does the poem (described by Byron as a way-station on a renewed campaign of literary and political engagement) present anything more than a placeholder, perhaps not even that, for the kinds of future vistas that might follow from consigning the political world left behind by George III to oblivion. Yet by staging as a question whether the ‘truth’ of poetry might ever coincide with a vision of the truth in politics, the poem returns us to earth asking anew what the imagination might enable us to see, what openings for action might become available, as perspectives shaped by literary form cross back into the realm of political activity.

Conclusion In George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866), the patron of a tavern (born in 1760, ‘the year when good old King George came to the throne’) makes a familiar complaint. ‘ “I believe this country has seen its best days—I do indeed” ’, this Tory landowner laments. With the passage of the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Bill, he concludes, ‘ “it was all over with us” ’.1 Following the Duke of Wellington’s refusal to consider further amendments to the British constitution after the passage of that measure, agitation for political reforms and social change acquired irreversible momentum. The Reform Act of 1832 initiated dramatic changes, including a modernized electoral system and the disintegration of the established political class.2 ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ were not only displaced, in turn, by ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’; these political groupings coincided with reconfigured understandings of the wider political nation. For all of the tavern patron’s concern with musty old political divides, the political events that inform the action of Eliot’s novel (which takes place, like Middlemarch, in the years of Reform directly prior to the onset of the Victorian age) pertain as much to changing social structures and governing practices as to the dismantling of long-standing partisan identities and the decline of an ancien régime. The terminal date for this study thus marks a crucial tipping point in two respects. The overthrow of the Tory government in 1830 effected a decisive break with post-1688 politics, including an irreparable breach with the Tory principles of preceding centuries (as the mantle of Toryism was taken over by an emergent Conservatism).3 At the same time, conceptions of the people and political nation 1 George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, ed. Fred C. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 178–9. For the developments that placed Toryism on its last legs, see Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); William Thomas, ‘Croker, Peel, and Party Loyalty’, chap. 4 in The Quarrel of Macaulay and Croker: Politics and History in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Stephen M. Lee, ‘Canning, the Failure of Liberal Toryism and the Collapse of the Tory Party, 1824–1827’, chap. 6 in George Canning and Liberal Toryism, 1801–1827 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008). 2 For a thoughtful discussion of countervailing trends in the 1820s and eventual Reform as more ‘Georgian farewell than Victorian halloo’, see Lawrence Poston, ‘1832’, in A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 6–8. For the ‘modernization’ associated with Reform, as well as its shortcomings, see J.  A.  Phillips and C. Wetherell, ‘The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England’, American History Review 100 (1995). 3 For Croker’s political use of ‘Conservative’ in 1830, see Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical, eds. William Baker and Kenneth Womack (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000), 68n.1, which cites the Quarterly Review from 1 January 1830. Southey and Peel have also been attributed with early uses of the term—and helped advance coherently ‘conservative’ positions, as did wider social and religious reform movements.

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had begun to undergo dramatic transformation, initiating a decisive shift towards liberal individualism and mass politics.4 The 1820s had witnessed mounting debates over Catholic relief and the franchise, the growth of utilitarianism and middle-class radicalism, the ‘first clear realization of an extensive middle-class market’ for fiction, and the death of Byron.5 As the consequence of both recent revolutionary challenges and long-standing social pressures, this decade saw the final dissolution of political structures dating back to the later seventeenth century and ushered in the transformed political and literary worlds of the Victorian age. Those shifts had obvious consequences for available political roles, and the altered partisan identities and political mindsets associated with these brewing changes are amply on display in Eliot’s novel. Although born into a Tory family, the novel’s aristocratic anti-hero, Harold Transome, takes a more sanguine approach than the tavern’s grumbling landowner to the new political landscape. For Harold, ‘anything really worthy to be called British Toryism’ was now entirely ‘extinct’, while the ‘Whiggery’ whose appeals to the ‘rights of man stop[ped] short at tenpound householders’ (an effort to limit the franchise, which he characterizes as a ‘policy of pacifying a wild beast with a bite’) had become a ‘ridiculous monstrosity’. Harold concludes that ‘nothing was left to men of sense and good family but to retard the national ruin’ by declaring themselves supporters of the Radical cause. ‘ “If the mob can’t be turned back,” ’ he reasons, ‘ “a man of family must try and head the mob.” ’6 Felix Holt, a more socially reserved (and romantically intriguing) figure, achieves precarious reconciliation with emergent democratic demands, working from a dispassionate remove to steer and contain their possible excesses. The distance from the ‘mob’ maintained by ‘The Radical’ of the novel’s subtitle was shared with his creator. Eliot had her own ambivalence about the expanded franchise, as evidenced by an ‘Address to the Working People’ she wrote for Blackwood’s Magazine (under the name ‘Felix Holt’). Eliot here voiced scepticism about whether the people could be trusted with their own political decision-making. Eliot’s ‘Address’ and its fictional analogue in the plot of Felix Holt make clear that concerns about the expanded electorate and the need to contain the excesses of mass politics (degraded discourse, rowdy gatherings, hissing crowds) were never far away in these discussions of the changing political landscape, which could easily verge on outright suspicion about participatory democracy. These, of course, are enduring tensions at the heart of the normative notion of the ‘liberal’ subject. Despite her shift towards the conservative end of the political spectrum, evidenced in her move to Blackwood as the novel’s publishing 4 See James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For the increasingly explicit ‘Occidentalism’—the normative sovereign selfhood and social discipline attributed to ‘Western’ culture—that accompanied these developments, see Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 5 See Poston, ‘1832’ and Peter Garside, ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era’ quoted in Claire Connolly, ‘Completing the Union? The Irish Novel and the Moment of Union’, in The Irish Act of Union, 1800: Bicentennial Essays, eds. Michael Brown, Patrick  M.  Geoghegan, and James Kelly (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 158. 6 Eliot, Felix Holt, 31.

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house, Eliot has remained central to the liberal literary tradition. ‘Liberal’ was an anachronistic projection from Eliot’s mid-Victorian moment, but it is used freely— or, as it were, liberally—in Felix Holt to convey shifting fault lines in the 1820s and ’30s. The remaking of existing political organization, including the eventual formation of the ‘Liberal’ party, in turn brought debates about the balance between open-mindedness, even-handedness, and social responsibility to the fore of political discussion.7 Elaine Hadley and Amanda Anderson have provided valuable accounts of liberal subjectivity, drawing questions specific to Victorian studies together with wider concerns about the legacies of nineteenth-century political thought.8 Their discussions are particularly attentive, that is to say, both to the specific Victorian political practices associated with ‘Liberal’ as a term and to broader conceptions of the ‘liberal’ subject as these have circulated within recent critical discussions about enduring social and political formations. Hadley attends to the ways that inhabiting liberal ideals (and its forms of thought) contorted individuals away from richer modes of social engagement, leaving a rather thin subject behind; her analyses, in Anderson’s helpful characterization, ‘settle most strenuously on challenges internal to the subjective ideals of liberalism’ (frequently presented as ‘afflicting’ individuals with ‘forms of ambivalence or unease’).9 Anderson characterizes her own analysis, by contrast, as setting out ‘to reconstruct how writers sought to give theoretical and literary form to what they actively and reflectively embraced as constitutive challenges’.10 ‘Liberalism’ remains a vexed term—I would go so far as to say an unhelpful one—during the period that has concerned the present study. Anderson’s characterization of the liberal mindset nonetheless permits us to see how the divided perspectives and the uncertain political removes examined by this book depart from Anderson’s more appreciative and recuperative account of liberal subjectivity. Eliot’s novels show how ‘liberal’ mindsets and political orientations may be superimposed upon and thereby rendered relevant to developments of the earlier period of Whigs and Tories. Felix Holt nonetheless departs starkly from the texts and critical approaches to them that have guided the present study. For one thing, the adoption of a ‘liberal’ mindset allows Eliot to bracket out the messier, less readily organized aspects of political activity, so as to not implicate her own authorial 7 ‘Liberalism’ only came into its own after the passage of the Reform Bill and ‘Liberal’ accordingly has limited usefulness as a political label during the pre-1832 period beyond signalling broad sympathies for limited constitutional reform, religious toleration, and individual rights. These sympathies were often sharply curtailed—as evidenced in Boswell’s claim to a ‘liberal’ orientation, despite his embrace of counter-revolutionary policies. Liberalism was, at any rate, variously compatible with repressive and authoritarian agendas, not least in the imperial arena. ‘Liberal’ has more direct application during this period to movements abroad (and their sympathizers at home, as evidenced in the title of Leigh Hunt’s The Liberal ). The relationships between Whiggism and ‘Liberal’ movements abroad were complex and multifaceted—as were relations between the respective liberales themselves. See Kathryn Chittick, Language of Whiggism: Liberty and Patriotism, 1802–1830 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010). 8 Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 9 Anderson, Bleak Liberalism, 15. 10 Anderson, Bleak Liberalism, 15.

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perspective or her fictional narrator (and her journalistic avatar) in their confusions.11 Eliot, much like Anderson, posits a properly political subject and demarcates the bounds of the polity which they engage, even while pointing to the ways that relationship remains characterized by distance, strain, complexity, and so forth. For all their apparent synchrony with these shifts, including their investments in the affective underpinnings of appeals to stability, even the conservative-leaning authors examined by this study remained animated by discordant elements. When located in the expanded period of unrest addressed by this book, moreover, these writers (alongside those with more avowedly radical, rebellious, or otherwise unpredictable sympathies) appeared at least as close to the disaffected parties at the margins of the English polity as they were aligned with these shifts or assimilable to emerging norms. Aided in part by Hadley’s attention to the fissures between the forms of liberal political cognition and practical engagement with an untidily organized body politic, this book has been alert to a more unsettled account of the interaction between literary forms and what Anderson and others would term the forms of politics. ‘Form’ as I have used the term here calls attention both to those works’ departure from normative affective and perspectival modes and to the often ambiguous distance of their authors from the political arena. That political arena was itself unsettled: its parties aligned neither with established political structures nor with a stable political nation. The developments addressed in the previous chapters nonetheless helped to lay the groundwork for the liberal mindsets and reconfigured sympathies of the later nineteenth century, as well as for the conceptions of governance and social stability by which they were bolstered. The emergence of regulatory, disciplinary norms and wider governmental shifts—together with attendant appeals to harmonious sentiments and national feeling—looked squarely ahead to the Victorian period. In an 1821 Quarterly Review article, Austen’s Mansfield Park was attributed, in terms befitting a sermon, with a crucial role in securing political stability and wide-reaching moral discipline. In this way, discord began to soften into shared sentiment through the increased coordination between the literary and political realms. That coordination might also be cast as increased separation. As Croker noted to Murray in 1820, the wide appeal of Byron’s poetry (presuming its author was willing to relinquish any investment in drawing his readers into a ‘party’) could safely attract the entire reading nation.12 Rather than Byron having an ‘interest’ in 11 For the racist and imperialist practices with which nineteenth-century liberalism was complicit— in ways that implicate the enduring form of the liberal subject in which certain recent accounts of liberalism remain invested—see Nathan Hensley, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 12 I allude here to William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); compare Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8–9. The ways that authors conceived of their writings (or were themselves imagined by their critics) as organizing readers into ‘parties’ all their own are valuably theorized, at a further level of abstraction from material realities, by Franta’s argument that the Romantic period saw ‘not only the origin of our modern conception of the public as a collection of interest groups competing for representation, but also the idea of literature’s importance for creating groups that cannot readily be identified in terms of shared interests or identities’ (14).

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or ‘feeling’ for attracting or otherwise influencing his readers, they remained drawn to the poet, in this account, by the ‘beauties’ his writings provided. This letter from the writer responsible for a seminal early Victorian edition of The Life of Johnson to the editor of the conservative Quarterly Review imagined the coming age, however unrealistically, as one defined by a kind of equipoise between aesthetic sympathies, moral instruction, and the political loyalties sustained by literature, the wider public sphere, and the institutions of church and state. Croker registered particular bafflement that Byron would, through misguided desires for a more delimited following, undermine his own appeal as a universally admired poet. Yet Croker also returned political questions to centre stage when he noted that he could not understand why Byron would wish to ‘throw away the suffrages (you see the times infect my dialect) of more than half the nation’.13 This reference to parliamentary suffrage—soon to be expanded by the Reform Bill, in ways that would dissolve ‘Toryism’—connected Byron’s literary reputation back with what Croker elsewhere in this same letter described as his political ‘figure’. With the language of electoral suffrage that inadvertently ‘infect[s]’ this discussion, Croker framed the relationship between Byron and his poetic followers in political, explicitly parliamentary terms.14 But the implications here were far from immediately ‘political’. Although Byron certainly moved and even animated his readers, in Croker’s account this resulted from nothing more specific—or more categorical— than the diffuse ‘beauties’ his writings provided. Rather than a more programmatic aesthetic theory, Croker posited a minimal pact between Byron and his readership, whereby his readers tacitly surrendered their control: agreeing to respond with an agreed-upon mode of response, in a version of the aesthetic ‘social contract’ that Frances Ferguson has identified with the Burkean account of the beautiful.15 A Tory grandee and frequent contributor to the Quarterly Review (whose review of Keats’s Endymion in that publication would later be held responsible for the poet’s death by an incandescent Percy Shelley), Croker believed that literary and political domains ought to remain harmoniously aligned but ultimately distinct from each other. The Victorian age would see an altogether reconfigured print marketplace take hold—as evidenced by the shifting reputations of Byron and Keats or, for that matter, Johnson and Austen. Whether the literary arena remained liable to disruption by factious histories and disaffected responses hereafter remains highly debatable. In any case, the political divisions that animated Victorian authors and 13 Croker to John Murray, 26 March 1820. The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 316. Compare William Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age (1825): ‘Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott are among writers now living the two, who would carry away a majority of suffrages as the greatest geniuses of the age.’ Quoted in Kevin Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 6. 14 For William Hazlitt’s (characteristically conflicted) discussions of enfranchisement within aesthetic, as opposed to and in comparison with political, domains, see Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist, 310–12. While he continued to wrestle with the hierarchical and levelling tendencies of verbal and visual arts, Hazlitt identified the theatre as a site at which a ‘system of universal suffrage and open competition among the candidates’ was already in operation (quoted 312). 15 See Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 30–1.

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the political worlds with which they interacted were indisputably contained—and their factionalizing potential more explicitly subsumed—within monumental new ideals.16 In addition to separating the literary and political domains, the transitional period of the 1820s and ’30s also began to augur equipoise by papering over prior political upheavals. That not only entailed consigning the acknowledged unrest around the French Revolution to a closed past but also more explicitly forgetting the post-1760 period. The neglect of these decades amounted, at least in places, to the strategic erasure of the unrest associated with the later eighteenth century (such that the literary-historical tendency to overlook the upheaval of these earlier decades in accounts of the 1760–1830 period may be traced to this period). We find a telling instance of this erasure in an early nineteenth-century article published in the Edinburgh Review. The turn of the century witnessed a version of two-party politics take renewed hold in Britain, together with an appropriately partisan atmosphere.17 Accounting for the ‘State of Parties’, an article in the Edinburgh Review compared this contemporary ‘spirit of contention’ with the relative absence of conflict several decades earlier, when minor disturbances had created only a limited frisson of unrest: The partizans of Mr. Wilkes, and the partizans of Lord Bute, formed but a very inconsiderable part of the population. If they had divided the whole nation among them, the little breaches of the peace and of the law at Westminster, would have been changed into civil war and mutual proscriptions; and the constitution of the country might have perished in the conflict. In those times, therefore, the advocates of arbitrary power and of popular license were restrained, not merely by the constitutional principles of so many men of weight and authority, but by the absolute neutrality and indifference of the great body of the people.18

Beyond merely sidelining the unrest of these earlier decades in favour of the French Revolution, this article effectively wrote the upheaval of these decades out of history. In its claims about a period in which the ‘great body of the people’ viewed events with ‘neutrality and indifference’—while the ‘constitutional principles’ of great men served to anchor the polity, against the pull of authoritarian tendencies or popular demands—this account was not only incomplete and overstated but deliberately, even staggeringly, misleading, fantastical, and just plain wrong. At the same time, its appeal to the excesses of its own partisan moment betrays the formation, even amidst increasing polarization, of an increasingly rarefied, depoliticized 16 For the Victorian monumentalizing of writers including Byron—and the inclusion of the sections of Don Juan favoured by Croker in anthologies over the more explicitly political later cantos—see Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 17 As Richard Cronin has shown, the growth of literary magazines in the 1820s, in tandem with a flourishing periodical press, took place amidst continuing partisan contention and (sometimes physically violent) conflict between literary factions. Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 18 Francis Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846), 3.261.

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‘literary’ domain.19 In describing the activity of the limited ‘partizans’ of earlier decades, the author of the ‘State of Parties’ article noted that they fought on, ‘like champions in a ring of impartial spectators’, and the multitude who looked on, and thinking it ‘sport’, had ‘little other interest than to see that each had fair play’. This was a better account, in fact, of the stated aims of the Edinburgh Review itself, which built upon its Scottish Enlightenment heritage in emphasizing its clear judgement and capacity to stand above the fray. Rather than characterizing a fantasied age of national equipoise, this appeal to the ‘absolute neutrality and indifference’ of the main body of the people suggests the periodical’s own investments in an idealized and harmonized conception of the political nation grounded in the thought of Adam Smith and his milieu (as the reference here to ‘impartial spectators’ confirms). The novels of Walter Scott present a further case in point.20 Scott’s novels were notable for foregrounding the real threats that followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the ‘Pretender’ to the Stuart line, had presented to the post-1688 settlement. For all their romance and deliberate archaism, the vivid depictions of these ‘Jacobite’ challenges to the status quo in the Waverley novels returned to view the conflict and dissension that challenged an apparently settled political situation. Yet for Scott, such romanticized (in some cases, explicitly fictionalized) Jacobitism only temporarily ruffled the inevitable course of social progress—as exemplified in the visions of political reconciliation and accompanying socioeconomic development his novels were ultimately concerned to put forward.21 Moreover, Scott’s fictions also functioned more directly, in part through their narrow focus on Jacobitism, to obscure and elide the political developments this book has returned to view (including their concrete challenges to the political status quo and more inchoate revolutionary potential). That included his novels’ very deliberate suppression of the myriad sources of political discontent during the 1760s and ’70s, the historical period from which both Rob Roy (1818) and Redgauntlet (1824) are narrated. In Redgauntlet, which revolves around an explicitly counterfactual plot for a third Jacobite uprising during the reign of the new king, Scott has one of his narrators describe ‘the present state of the nation, or at least of some discontented provinces’ as ‘agitated by a variety of causes, but particularly by the unpopularity of the present administration’—an apparent allusion to the ministry of the Earl of Bute. Introducing the novel’s fictional Jacobite conspirators, the novel notes that this 19 For the seminal account of this development, see Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). See also Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996). 20 For Scott’s relationship with the Scottish Enlightenment and the periodical culture exemplified by the Edinburgh Review, see Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 21 See Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962); Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). I follow these critics in locating this conciliatory narrative of social progress as the ideological grid underpinning Scott’s fiction.

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existing unrest seemed ‘to this species of agitators [. . .] a favourable period for recommencing their intrigues’. So far, so disaffected. Yet in having these very real sources of unrest mix together with this imagined plot (characterized as the ‘disaffection of such persons [. . .] too unimportant to excite the attention of government’), Scott’s novel, much like the Edinburgh Review ‘State of Parties’ article, cast the unrest around Wilkes and his followers as scattered and fleeting, neutralizing and more deliberately erasing its destabilizing potential. For contemporaries, across England and beyond, this book has shown the ‘Present Discontents’ created real political uncertainty (that could not be held apart, crucially, from the mounting unrest in the American colonies). Yet in Scott’s novel these challenges to the established government—and to the social stability that these newly rationalized modes of governance underpinned—were rendered as ephemeral, even spectral, or flattened into minor fluctuations in the line of progress. No more consequential than his outlandishly fantastical tableau of the ‘Pretender’ and his elderly followers plotting to overthrow the king, these frissons of unrest similarly amounted to a counter-historical mirage or fictional flash in the pan.22 We find a third, final example of this airbrushing out of widespread unrest in the 1823 Beauties and Maxims of Junius. Here, elision extended to outright erasure of the past. The entry on the ‘Glorious Majesty of the British Constitution’ from this collection of quotations observed that the ‘storms and tempests that, in modern times, have shaken the political world to it’s [sic] centre, have been wide and tremendous in their operation; but they have, for the most part discharged their fury at a distance. The constitutions of other countries have been swept away by the whirlwind; but that of England still towers, like the pyramids of Egypt, a wonderful and immortal fabric, overshadowing the desart [sic] that surrounds it, and defying the violence of it’s [sic] hurricanes.’23 This entry in the Beauties and Maxims ended here, having alluded to Britain’s triumphant preservation of its constitutional order in the face of the French Revolution and its ‘storms and tempests’. Yet the original source for this quotation went on from this celebration of early nineteenth-century constitutional stability to draw a stark contrast with the situation four decades earlier. During the 1769–72 period of the original Junius letters, the introduction to the 1812 edition continued, the constitution was 22 Sir Walter Scott, Redgauntlet, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 206–7. In Rob Roy (1818), Scott imagined the 1760s as a way-station between the ‘Rage of Parties’ under Queen Anne and the commercial prosperity of the early nineteenth century, with the former treated as an exception to an otherwise flattened political landscape, rather than an extreme moment of polarization within the ongoing partisan disputes and political conflict of the long eighteenth century as a whole. 23 Despite apparent differences, the Beauties and Maxims may be considered the mirror image of Southey’s broadly contemporaneous Vision of Judgement. While that poem vilified rather than celebrating Junius—even as it rehabilitated earlier rebellious upholders of liberty like Milton—its elision of earlier decades of unrest as part of a larger counter-revolutionary campaign against political opposition was of a piece, I would propose, with these parallel efforts to uphold the British constitution. In seeking to paint Junius either as the upholder of the constitution or as a harbinger of its threatened dissolution, these respective works reflect the narrowed scope of debate characteristic of the rightward turn which Britain had taken in recent decades and advocated forms of stability that were structurally homologous.

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‘attacked, and trembled to its foundation’ as a ‘series of unsuccessful ministries [. . .] a succession of weak and obsequious parliaments, and an arbitrary, though able chief justice [. . .] fatally concurred to confound the relative powers of the state, and equally to unhinge the happiness of the crown and of the people [. . .] to excite universal contempt abroad, and universal discord at home’. Among those who owned a copy of this 1812 edition of the Letters of Junius was a young Lord Byron, who thereby encountered this comparison between the recent historical moment and these decades of ‘universal discord’ in its unexpurgated form, perhaps shaping his recognition that these decades had, in certain important respects, witnessed more propitious openings for acerbic political commentary than his own lifetime, if not also better vehicles for oppositional activity.24 Where the Beauties and Maxims of Junius projected an image of England as enduring and stable, the original ‘Junius’ letters belonged to an altogether different moment in national politics and print culture (as evidenced in repeated speculations that their unknown author was Burke—and that Junius was ‘Irish’). Literary authorship took on a newly uncertain status beginning in that same post-1760 period, this book has argued, in ways that have been neglected within existing accounts of the transition between the eighteenth century and the Romantic age. As evidenced by the Beauties and Maxims and also by the examples of Scott and the Edinburgh Review ‘State of Parties’ article, this dynamic political moment was also more deliberately and strategically obscured. This study has sought to open up a fuller account of the period between 1760 and 1830, recovering neglected continuities across this period of upheaval and complicating stark divisions between revolutionary unrest and presumptive stability with attention to multiple, continuing causes of discontent and to the shifting lines around and between the parties of politics and the space of the literary. Proliferating lines of division meant that, if only at the level of personal psychology, a stable relationship to party identities was not ultimately available for writers over this period. Yet precisely in their failure to work neatly within the limits of either individual political roles or the established parties of political activity, writers helped to transform horizons, political and otherwise, for literary authorship. Rather than positing an autonomous literary or artistic domain, or even the aspiration to that end, this book has emphasized an account of authorship as in the thick or at the margins of a messy political world (whether the authors in question liked this fact or not). Literature thereby helped, directly or otherwise, to introduce alternative possibilities into the political arena, if only as a reimagined role for literary authorship itself. The Romantic age 24 Byron to John Murray, 22 November 1812. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 12 vols., ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 2.250 (‘Pray secure me a copy of Woodfall’s new Junius’). Marchand notes that a copy of this edition was among Byron’s books sold at auction in 1816. In the essay published as ‘The Periodical Press’, William Hazlitt had the ‘ghos[t] of Junius’ confirm the passing of ‘the war of political pamphlets’ as the ‘personal and individual obloquy’ associated with pamphlets—or here satirical newspaper correspondence—entered more directly into periodical criticism. Quoted in Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist, 168. Hazlitt nonetheless maintained that the periodical press continued as ‘the engine of party-spirit and personal invective’, observing that the ‘stock of malice and prejudice in the world is much the same, though it has found a more classical and agreeable vehicle to vent itself [with]’.

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further transformed the political horizons of literary production, prompting writers to imagine altogether new forms for political activity and to anticipate the emergence of new audiences. Yet even as a relatively autonomous domain of literature and a changed political nation came into focus, authors remained at an uncertain remove both from the shifting parties of political activity and from those disaffected elements on the shores of politics. Alongside the idealized horizons of the Romantic age, efforts to transcend material conditions or to subsume messy political realities into regulatory ideals were never too far away. The passage between the eighteenth century and the Romantic age coincided with dramatic changes both to the practice of government and to the representation of politics and the political nation, as these shifting party lines—and some of the more inchoate political possibilities this book has recovered—were subsumed within larger changes. There were clear costs associated with surpassing the factious division and widespread upheaval of the earlier period, from the supplanting of a contentiously unfinished (or tragically impossible) understanding of politics with idealized social and political unity to the consolidation of a relatively autonomous realm of literary production. These developments converged to insulate literary works from a world of political division and to locate authors at a more pronounced remove from politics. Whether literature since the Romantic age has retained the potential to make combative returns to the political realm, the relationship between literature and politics has unquestionably settled down. These were developments that the authors and works examined here were themselves concerned to reflect upon, even as they entered into a more fully realized literary realm. That realm was in part an indeterminate one, I have argued, whose distance from the realm of political activity could not be assumed. Such indeterminacy may ultimately help to explain what we mean by the ‘literary’ during the period spanning the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century down to the twilight years of Romanticism: a capacity for endless reversals of commitment and selffactioning subdivision of the kind that William Blake had in mind when he wrote that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it.

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Index 1688 Revolution 4–5, 9–10, 18–19, 21–2, 21n.47, 36–8, 46–7, 46n.7, 47n.8, 51–5, 52nn.18,20, 53n.21, 59–63, 64n.61, 66–7, 86–7, 89–90, 96–7, 110, 114–15, 143–5, 201–4, 209n.38, 250, 264–5 Anniversary of 4–5, 19–20, 57n.37, 138 Post-1789 views of 9–10, 18–19, 27–8, 30n.73, 51–2 1763 Cider Excise 16–18, 63, 65–8, 65n.66 1765 Stamp Act 65–8, 65n.66 1798 Ireland Uprising 10–11, 41–2, 159–60, 165–6, 168, 173n.52, 186–9

Political views of 13–14, 16–18, 41–2, 198–205, 199nn.8–9, 200n.12, 202n.17, 212, 212n.49, 216–20, 222–8 Works Emma 201–2, 202n.17, 219–20, 222–4 Lady Susan 220–1, 221n.74 Mansfield Park 13n.22, 35–8, 40–2, 75–6, 135–6, 154–5, 198–202, 204, 206n.31, 227–8 Northanger Abbey 219–21, 219n.73 Pride and Prejudice 202n.16, 220–3 Sense and Sensibility 154–5, 199n.6, 212n.50, 216

Abolition 15n.28, 16n.31, 147–8, 260–1 Absenteeism 41–2, 169–70, 180–3, 181n.75, 188–91, 193 1773 Controversy 41–2, 169–70, 180–2, 183n.79, 188–91 see also: Sydney Owenson; Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee Act of Union, The 28–9, 159–60, 165–6, 166n.31, 168, 173–4, 182, 186–7, 186n.86, 201–2 Addison, Joseph 70–1, 132n.33 Adorno, Theodor W. 209n.39 Agnani, Sunil M. 169–70 Age of Revolutions 18–20, 18n.40, 19n.41, 65–6, 133, 204–5, 250 see also: British Empire, American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution Allan, David 131–2, 132n.33 Ahmed, Sara 27–8, 30–1, 31n.75 Almon, John 77–8, 77n.113, 125–6 American colonies: 16–20, 20n.43, 22n.50, 24n.56, 38–9, 62–4, 64n.61, 65n.66, 66–8, 66n.67, 67n.71, 124–5, 127–30, 136n.47, 140–2, 145–6, 208–9, 246, 270–1 see also United States of America American Revolution 16–18, 18n.40, 20n.43, 21–2, 27–8, 36–8, 62–3, 65–6, 67n.71, 124n.3, 126–7, 131–2, 141–2, 145–6, 197–8, 197n.2, 250 Anderson, Amanda 265–7 Anne, Queen 52n.20, 55–7, 57n.37, 59n.42, 70–1, 132n.33, 138, 143–4, 271n.22 Austen, Jane 2–5, 13–14, 13n.22, 16–18, 18n.38, 35–8, 40–2, 75–6, 132n.33, 133, 154–5, 157, 161–2, 161n.16, 162n.19, 165–7, 166n.31, 190–1, 197–205, 199nn.8–9, 200n.10, 202n.17, 208–28, 212nn.49–50, 214n.61, 215n.65, 267–9

Bailyn, Bernard 64n.61 Baker, William 156–61 Bakhtin, Mikhail 31–3, 120–1 Barber, Francis 16n.31 Barrell, John 19n.41 Bate, W. J. 151–2 Beaton, Roderick 230n.5 Bennett, Jane 28–9, 194 Bentham, Jeremy 19–20 Berlant, Lauren 7–8, 23–4, 74–5 Bersani, Leo 154–5, 154n.95 Bew, Paul 190n.101 Bhabha, Homi 29n.71 Bogel, Frederic 131–2 Booth, Wayne 90–1, 120n.107 Bootle, Richard Wilbraham 158–9 Boswell, James 1–3, 39–40, 50–1, 79–80, 99n.36, 126–32, 129n.20, 130n.23, 131n.29, 132n.33, 135–40, 135n.40, 138n.53, 139n.56, 142–55, 147n.76, 152n.89, 201–2, 205–6 Political views of 130–1, 145–50 On slavery 16n.31, 147–8 Works The Life of Johnson 1–3, 31–3, 39–40, 40n.95, 51, 126–32, 129n.20, 131nn.28–9, 134–40, 135n.40, 143, 145–5, 152n.89, 153n.92, 157, 267–8 Bowers, Toni 134n.39 Brewer, David 89–90, 116n.95, 119–20, 120n.104 Brewer, John 63–4, 66–7, 67n.71, 212n.52 Brinton, Crane 63–4 Brissenden, Robert F. 107–8, 107n.63 British Empire 1–2, 16–18, 16n.31, 38n.93, 79–80, 105, 130–1, 137n.49, 140–1, 145–6, 148–9, 154–5, 161–2, 169–70, 175–6, 206–7

292

Index

British Empire (cont.) see also: American colonies, American Revolution, Ireland, Abolition Brock, W. R. 206–7, 207n.33 Bromwich, David 156–7 Burdett, Sir Francis 86, 234–5 Burke, Edmund 38n.93, 39–42 And Rockingham Whigs 136n.47, 159–60, 161n.16, 169n.37, 177, 180–2, 188–9 On Septennial Act 112–13 Works Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 15–16, 197–8 Burney, Frances 151–2 Bute, Earl of (John Stuart) 46, 62–5, 62n.53, 64n.61, 67–9, 105, 105n.56, 131n.26, 139–40, 139n.54, 205n.29, 269–71 Butler, Marilyn 18–24, 23n.54, 30–1, 59–60, 198–200, 199nn.6, 8, 200n.12, 211–12, 222–4, 227–8, 227n.93, 234n.10 Byron, George Gordon Noel 1–4, 6–7, 8n.17, 11–15, 13n.25, 16n.31, 23–4, 25n.60, 31–9, 33n.81, 34n.83, 38n.93, 42–3, 46–9, 109, 148–9, 163–4, 176n.63, 229–65, 229n.3, 230n.5, 231n.6, 232n.7, 234n.10, 235n.14, 236n.15, 241n.28, 243n.33, 247n.40, 248nn.41–2, 249n.44, 252n.53, 253n.54, 254nn.55–6, 255nn.57, 59, 260n.74, 261n.76, 262n.80, 267–9, 269n.16, 271–2, 272n.24 Works Beppo 230–1, 241–3, 245–7, 254 Don Juan 1–2, 34–5, 42, 46, 109, 163–4, 230–7, 240–8, 248n.42, 249n.44, 250–1, 254–63, 254n.55, 262n.80, 269n.16 ‘[Politics in 1813]’ 1–3, 23–4, 33–4, 236–7, 250–1, 254–5 Vision of Judgment 14n.26, 34–5, 42, 46, 148–9, 231–40, 232n.7, 234n.10, 236n.15, 238n.24, 239n.27, 243n.33, 244–55, 248n.41, 258–63, 271n.23 The Age of Bronze 229n.3, 257–60 Canning, George 204–5, 208–9, 234–5, 251–2 Canuel, Mark 184n.81, 185n.82, 189–90, 190nn.98, 100 Carlyle, Alexander 62n.53 Cash, Arthur H. 100n.40 Catholicism 27–8, 94n.20, 128–30, 170–1, 174–6, 183–9, 192–5, 264–5 Chandler, James 78–9, 91n.9 Chester, William Bromley 157–8 Christensen, Jerome 242–5, 249n.44 Churchill, Charles 34–5 Cider Excise: see 1763 Cider Excise Clerk, Sir Philip Jennings 136–7, 140, 151–2 Clery, E. J. 221n.74, 222n.78

Clingham, Greg 148n.79 Cobbett, William 30n.73, 234–5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 23nn.53–4 Collins, William 21–2 Connolly, Claire 163nn.22–4, 173–4, 173n.52, 186nn.85–6 Corbett, Mary Jean 183n.79 Cormack, Bradin 35–6 Cornwallis, Mary 132n.33 Cotton, Sir John Hynde 157–8 Cowper, William 23–4, 23n.55, 24n.57, 50–1 Craig, Sheryl 222n.77 Croft, John 108–9 Cronin, Richard 269n.17 Croker, John Wilson 201–2, 206n.30, 233–5, 240, 264n.3, 267–9, 268n.13, 269n.16 Curtis, Lewis Perry 92, 102–3 Cynicism 4–5 As always increasing 6n.10 And critique 8n.17 As feature of modernity 8n.17 And Greek Cynics 255–8, 257n.65, 259n.70 And political life 3–4 And political depression 7–8 And scepticism 3–4, 4n.7 Davidoff, Leonore 163n.22 Day, W. G. 100n.40, 101n.43 Dempster, George 50–1, 131 Derrida, Jacques 13–14 Deutsch, Helen 127–8, 135–6, 153, 153n.92 Dick, Alexander 129n.21, 130–1, 131n.25, 138n.53, 146 Disaffection 15–16, 25–6, 26n.63, 49–52, 86–7, 130n.23, 141–3, 142n.62, 233–5, 254–5 And disinterest 9–15 History of term 9–12 And rebellion 10–11, 10n.20, 15–16 see also cynicism Disinterest And aesthetics 13–14, 13n.25, 14n.26 And disaffection 9–15 Dissent 15–16, 15n.28, 21, 34–5, 46–7, 55–6, 55n.34, 80n.121, 138n.52, 143–4, 232n.7 Divorce 9–10 Downie, J. A. 201n.14, 211n.44, 212n.49 East India Company, The 130–1, 140–1, 148–9, 169n.37 Edgeworth, Maria 2–3, 16–18, 18n.38, 35–6, 38n.93, 40–2, 79–80, 157, 159–68, 160nn.12, 13, 163nn.22–4, 164n.26, 166n.31, 183–90, 186n.86, 190n.101, 194–5, 220–1 Political views of 163–4, 186–7 Works Belinda 163–6

Index Castle Rackrent 171–2 Ennui 186–91, 186n.85, 190n.100 The Absentee 40–2, 159–61, 163n.24, 165–7, 166n.31, 171–2, 171n.46, 178–9, 182–7, 184n.81, 186n.85, 189–96, 204, 220–3 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 160n.12, 162n.17, 163–6, 163n.20, 164n.26, 171–2, 171n.46, 183–5, 187–8 Eliot, George (Marian Evans) 264–7 Blackwoods Magazine 265–6 Political views of 265–7 And liberalism 265–7 Works Felix Holt 264–7 Middlemarch 264–5 Elections 20n.46, 65–8, 86, 88, 92, 92–3, 93–7, 96n.29, 102–3, 105–6, 111–15, 114nn.88, 90, 116n.94, 143, 156–8, 177–8, 206n.31 Evangelicalism 23n.55, 163n.23, 207n.35, 215–16, 215nn.64–6 Fairclough, Mary 65n.65, 67n.73, 69n.79 Falearo, or the Neapolitan Libertine 241–3, 241n.28, 245–6 Ferguson, Frances 261–2, 268–9 Fleishman, Avrom 200n.12, 217–18 Foot, Michael 235n.14 Foster, Michael 81n.127 Foucault, Michel 34–5, 34n.83, 77–80, 116n.96, 163–4, 244–5 On governmentality 31n.77, 61–2, 78–9, 163–4 On heterotopia 116–17, 116n.96 On Greek Cynics 34n.83, 42, 244–5, 257n.65, 258n.67, 260–1 On Robert Walpole 78–9 François, Anne-Lise 8n.16, 13–14, 209n.39 Franklin, Benjamin 38–9, 67–8, 124–5, 124n.6 Franta, Andrew 5–6, 156–7, 267n.12 Freeman, Lisa 70–1 French Revolution 3–4, 6–7, 10–12, 15n.28, 18–22, 19n.41, 22n.51, 27–8, 30n.73, 36–40, 51–3, 66–7, 66n.70, 69–70, 79–81, 83, 85–6, 125–31, 129n.20, 135–6, 140–8, 153n.92, 154–5, 157, 164–5, 169–70, 174–5, 183–5, 197–8, 201–2, 208–9, 219–20, 227–8, 236–7, 250, 269–72 1688 Revolution and 9–10, 201–4 Literary studies and 18–19, 148–9, 214–15 Governmental shifts and political realignments following 6–7 see also Age of Revolutions Garrick, David 38n.92, 71, 75–8, 101–3, 133, 176, 215–16

293

George I 18–19, 56–7, 57n.37 George III 39–40, 42–3, 60–4, 72n.90, 74–5, 84–5, 89n.6, 103 Gifford, William 34–5, 202n.16, 234–5 Gilmartin, Kevin 30–1, 31n.75, 37n.87, 141–2, 142n.61, 156–7, 197n.2 Gladstone, William Ewart 167n.33 Goldsmith, Oliver 30–1, 109, 131n.25, 133, 176–7, 181–2, 181n.75, 185, 194–5, 260n.75 Works Retaliation 176, 181–2 The Traveller 109 Godwin, William 79–80, 199n.8, 238 Gopinath, Praseeda 179n.71 Gordon Riots 16–18, 66–7, 128–30, 129n.20, 133, 141–2, 141n.58, 142n.62, 148–50, 197–8, 219–20 Gothic 63, 64n.61, 173–4, 173n.52, 187–8, 219–21 Gould, Eliga 145–6 Governance 4, 6–7, 16–18, 28–9, 31n.77, 35–6, 41–3, 46, 48, 51–2, 56–9, 61–2, 66–7, 78–80, 86–7, 98–9, 116–17, 130–1, 144–5, 148–9, 154–5, 159–60, 163–7, 171–2, 183–5, 183n.79, 187–8, 190–4, 197–8, 200–1, 203–4, 219–20, 257, 267–8, 270–1 And ‘governmentality’ 61–2, 163–4, 166–7 And liberalism 4, 42–3, 48, 86–7, 201n.13, 207n.33, 208–9, 234–5, 235n.11, 258–60, 265–6, 266n.7, 267n.11 Gray, James 152n.88 Greene, Donald 129n.20, 161n.16, 200n.12 Grenville, George 65n.66, 67–70 Gross, Jonathan David 238–9, 239n.26 Guest, Harriet 16–18, 18n.37, 160–1, 163n.20, 227n.93 Gunn, J. A. W. 80–1, 80n.121, 81n.127 Habermas, Jürgen 2n.5, 121–2 Hadley, Elaine 158–61, 170–1, 265–7 Haitian Revolution 16n.31 Hall, Catherine 163n.22 Haller, M. A. 81n.127 Harding, D. W. 220–1 Hastings, Warren 130, 140–1, 147–50, 176n.63 Hayley, William 23n.55 Hazlitt, William 23n.54, 30–1, 30n.73, 37n.87, 52n.18, 141–2, 234–5, 268nn.13–14, 272n.24 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 81n.127 Herder, Johann Gottfried 81n.127 Hilton, Boyd 33n.81, 197n.1, 202n.19, 206–8, 206n.30, 207n.35 Hobbes, Thomas 14n.26, 80–1, 83–4, 142n.61, 144–5, 144n.66 Hobhouse, John Cam 233–6, 234n.10, 236n.15, 251–2, 252n.53, 260n.75

294

Index

Hogarth, William 112–13 Howes, Alan B. 38n.92 Hume, David 13–14, 38–9, 38n.93, 47n.8, 61–3, 61n.49, 62n.53, 68–9, 78–9, 88–9, 110–11, 121–2, 144–5, 199n.8 Hunt, Leigh 23n.53, 233–5 Ireland 4n.7, 27–9, 38n.93, 47n.8, 94n.20, 111–17, 131n.25, 156–6, 242–3 see also 1798 Ireland Uprising, Absenteeism, The Act of Union, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson Irritability Political 46–7, 56n.35, 66–7, 83–4, 121–2, 166–8, 174 Physiological 81, 81n.127, 83–4 Jacobitism 9–10, 21–2, 52–7, 53n.22, 56n.35, 137n.48, 138n.53, 212n.52, 270–1 Jager, Colin 191n.102, 214n.61, 222–4 Jameson, Frederic 201n.13 Jefferson, Thomas 38–9 Johnson, Claudia 209n.40, 211–12, 216–17, 220–1 Johnson, Samuel 1–3, 36–40, 38n.92, 42, 50–2, 60–3, 65–6, 65n.65, 72n.87, 112–13, 123 Political views of 3–4, 6–7, 39–40, 42, 51–2, 55n.31, 65–6, 112–13, 124–31, 133–46, 151–2 Posthumous reputation of 130, 142–3, 150–1, 153n.92, 206–7 Works Political pamphlets: Taxation No Tyranny, etc. 124–5, 124n.6, 144–5 Lives of the Poets 128–32, 132n.31, 139–40, 149–50 Kant, Immanuel 13–14, 34n.83, 261–2 Kay, Carol 103–4 Keats, John 6n.12, 242–3, 268–9 Kelly, Helena 220–1 Kelly, Hugh 71–3, 72n.90, 76–8, 77n.111, 99n.36, 105 Works False Delicacy 71 A Word to the Wise 36–8, 70–8, 72n.87, 76n.106, 105 Kelsall, Malcolm 142n.62, 235n.14, 238n.24, 239n.27, 246, 249n.43 Keymer, Tom 90–1, 91n.9 Knights, Mark 20n.46, 52n.19, 95–6, 95n.25, 112–13 Knox-Shaw, Peter 199n.8 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody 35n.84, 139n.55 Lamb, Charles 30–1, 30n.74 Lamb, Jonathan 104–5, 110–11, 119–20, 153, 153n.93

Latour, Bruno 194 Leavis, Frank R. 31–3, 32n.78 Lee, Arthur 66n.67 Lee, Richard Henry 66n.67 Liberalism: see governance Liverpool, Lord 204–7, 206n.30, 207n.33, 251n.49 Livesey, James 168, 171–2 Lloyd, David 8n.16, 165–6, 167n.32, 171–2 Lock, F. P. 52n.20, 112–13, 137–8, 142–3 Locke, John 75–6, 101–2, 131, 132n.33 London Museum (periodical) 77–8, 77n.113, 177–82 Lupton, Christina 101n.43 Lye, Francis Works The Beauties and Maxims of Junius 271–3, 271n.23 Mackenzie, Henry 131–2 Macpherson, James 61–2 Madison, James 124–5 Maier, Pauline 19–20 Makdisi, Saree 87n.147, 201n.14, 203n.20 Marshall, P. J. 148–9 Mauduit, Israel 101–2, 102n.46 Maurer, Sara 188n.92 Mazella, David 8n.16, 256n.62 McKeon, Michael 201n.13 McBride, Ian 169–70 McGann, Jerome 33n.80, 254n.55, 257n.64, 262–3 Menely, Tobias 23n.55, 28n.68 Michael, Timothy 40n.95 Miller, D. A. 220–1, 221n.75 Milton, John 9–10, 81–2, 203n.21, 238, 250, 271n.23, 273 Montagu, Elizabeth 62–3 Moore, Thomas 229–30, 232–3 More, Hannah 202n.16, 215–16, 218n.72 Moretti, Franco 210n.42 Murray, John 201–2, 202nn.16–17, 233–5, 235n.13, 236n.15, 243–5, 243n.33, 253–5, 258–60, 267–8 Namier, Lewis 48–9, 64n.61, 157–61 Nersessian, Anahid 35n.84 Nussbaum, Felicity A. 135n.40 O’Connor, Arthur 172–3, 191–2 Ogden, James 203n.21, 209n.38 O’Quinn, Daniel 5n.9, 16–18, 70–1, 71n.83 Orwell, George 13–14, 26n.61, 58n.40, 262n.78 Otway, Thomas 72n.87 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) 163–4, 173–4, 182 Works The Wild Irish Girl 163–4, 173–4 Ozouf, Mona 208n.36

Index Paine, Tom 19–20, 20n.45, 147n.76, 153n.93, 204 Panagia, Davide 27n.66, 29n.70 Parker, Fred 234n.10 Parnell, William 173–4, 173n.52, 182, 187–9 Parry, Kyle 67n.73 Parties Fluidity of term in period 48–9, 69–70 Historiographical debates about 48–9, 48n.10 see also Patriots, Toryism, Whig party ideology Patriots 23–4 And Country Party 59–60 As political label 21–2, 22nn.50–1, 33–4, 44–7, 50–1, 59n.43, 60–3, 65n.65, 96–9, 99n.37, 101–5, 110, 112–13, 115, 123, 126–7, 131, 154–5, 170, 172 American 21–2, 22n.50, 123–6 Peel, Robert 197–9, 201–5, 202n.18, 205n.26, 207n.33, 233–4, 264n.3 Pelham, Thomas 82–6, 82n.134 Picken, Cassidy 160n.13 Pitt, William, first earl of Chatham [Pitt the Elder] 23–4, 38–9, 92–3, 103–5, 105n.54, 105n.56, 107–11, 110n.74, 115–17, 207–8 Pitt, William [Pitt the Younger] 46, 50–1, 130–1, 131n.28, 135–6, 146–8, 199–200, 202n.16, 204–9, 206n.31, 207nn.33, 35, 208n.37, 213–14, 218–19, 222n.77, 234–5, 238–40 Plumb, J. H. 21n.47 Poovey, Mary 27n.67 Pope, Alexander 9–10, 23–4, 23n.54, 58–60, 59n.43, 97n.30, 98, 139–40 Povinelli, Elizabeth 201n.13 Priestley, Joseph 147, 199n.8 Protestantism 54n.28, 96–7, 163nn.22–3, 170–2, 183–9, 184n.81 Public Advertiser (periodical) 181–2 Pulteney, William 97–9, 99n.36, 110 Rajan, Tilottama 81n.127 Rancière, Jacques 3–4, 24n.57, 25–30, 27nn.66–7, 28n.68, 29n.70, 35–6, 41–2, 75–6, 77n.109, 178–9, 198–9 On ‘dissensus’ 26n.63 On distribution of the sensible 27–8, 27n.66, 178–9, 194 On parties/‘taking the part’ 167n.33 On the ‘political’ 3–4, 24–9, 26n.63, 27n.66, 28n.68, 77n.109, 133–4, 178–9, 194, 199–200 On social body 27–8, 27n.67 Reform 4, 19–20, 20n.46, 23n.54, 36–8, 37n.87, 46nn.4, 7, 51–2, 66–7, 66n.70, 79–83, 86–7, 98–9, 143, 185, 197–8, 202n.19, 204–5, 205n.26, 206n.31, 222n.77, 230–3, 235–7, 264–5, 264nn.2–3, 266n.7, 268–9

295

Reform Act (1832): See Reform Reid, Christopher 23n.55, 212n.51 Ribot, Théodule Armand 81n.127 Rogers, Pat 92–3 Russell, Gillian 16–20, 18n.38, 71n.83, 77–8, 133–4 Said, Edward W. 57n.38, 149–50, 199–200, 199n.6, 210n.42, 216–17 Sancho, Ignatius 16n.31 Scotland 38n.93, 154–5, 168, 232–3 Scott, Sir Walter 61n.49, 162n.19, 186n.86, 202n.17, 268n.13, 270–3, 270n.21, 271n.22 Works Redgauntlet 270–1 Rob Roy 270–1, 271n.22 Sensibility 3–4, 6–7, 18n.37, 23n.55, 28–9, 48, 77n.111, 81, 81n.127, 83–4, 118n.102, 121–2, 124n.3, 164n.26, 201–2 Seven Years’ War 5n.9, 18n.40, 70–1, 89–90, 105n.54 Shea, Louisa 8n.17, 256n.62 Shelburne, Lord 84–5, 85n.142 Shelley, Mary 229n.3 Shelley, Percy 5–6, 234–5, 245n.38, 268–9 Works Adonais 261n.76 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 30n.74, 236–7 Shields, David 119–20 Shklovsky, Viktor 31–3, 90–1, 106–7, 120–1, 120n.107 Siskin, Clifford 18n.38, 162n.19 Smith, Adam 13–14, 78–9, 80n.121, 159–60, 160n.13, 163–4, 171n.46, 183–92, 184n.80, 269–70 Smollett, Tobias 38n.92, 42, 61–2, 64–5 Spurgeon, Charles Haddon 247n.40 Stamp Act: see 1765 Stamp Act Steele, Richard 70–1 Sterne, Jaques (uncle of Laurence) 93, 93n.17 Sterne, Laurence 2–6, 5n.8, 12, 16n.31, 17n.36, 30–3, 35–40, 38n.93, 42, 60–3, 82–3, 70–1, 86–122, 157, 212n.52 Political views of 94n.20, 96–7 Early party journalism 90–3, 90n.8, 99 Works The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy 4–5, 5n.9, 9–10, 12, 21, 23–4, 31–9, 60–2, 68–9, 88–92, 88n.3, 90n.8, 91n.9, 101–22, 102n.44, 107n.63, 108n.68, 120n.107, 157, 167–8 1688 Revolution and 4–5, 89–90, 96–7, 110, 114–15 A Political Romance 4–5, 90n.8, 91n.9, 92, 100, 212n.52 A Sentimental Journey 88–9, 91n.9, 108–9

296

Index

Sterne, Jaques (cont.) RESPONSES Explanatory Remarks (1760) 5n.9, 12, 89–90, 90n.8, 105–6, 118–19 Sterne’s possible authorship of 89–90, 90n.8 ‘Lorry’ Poems 94–5, 100 Sterne’s possible authorship of 100 Tristram Shandy’s Description… 88–90, 111–21, 114n.90 And sentiment 12, 16n.31, 38–9, 88–91, 105–11, 107n.63, 116–22, 118n.102, 120n.107 Shandeism 105–8, 118–19 Stevens, Reverend John 247–8 Stout, Daniel M. 227n.93 Swift, Jonathan 4–5, 9–10, 23n.54, 25–6, 32n.78, 36–8, 46–7, 47n.8, 49–50, 49n.12, 56–61, 56n.35, 57nn.37–8, 58n.39, 60n.46, 81–2, 97n.30, 98, 99n.37, 139–40, 171–2, 191–2 And Alexander Pope 9–10, 23–4, 23n.54, 58–60, 59n.43, 97n.30, 98, 139–40 Works Gulliver’s Travels 9–10, 56–61, 209–10, A Tale of a Tub 4–5 Tate, Nahum 36–8, 46–7, 54–7, 54n.28, 55n.34, 60–1, 83–4, 97–8 Thelwall, John 23n.53 Thompson, E. P. 67n.71, 262n.80 Thomson, James 21–2, 131–2 Toryism 1–2, 30–1, 39–42, 46, 56n.35, 86–7, 127–31, 138, 138n.53, 140, 145–9, 151, 153, 160–1, 176n.63, 190–1, 195–206, 198n.3, 199nn.8–9, 201n.13, 204n.22, 205nn.26, 29, 208–9, 212–19, 212n.50, 222–4, 227–8, 234–5, 237–41, 243–4, 246–7, 250, 264–5, 264n.1, 268–9 Trollope, Anthony 167n.33 Trumbull, John Works McFingal 123–8, 124n.3, 131, 132n.31, 142–3, 150

Trump, Donald J. 55n.33 Tuite, Clara 166n.31, 234n.10 Turner, Cholmley 93–7, 96n.28, 100n.41, 105 United States of America 8n.17, 118n.102, 124–5, 140–1 Vermeule, Blakey 6–7, 260n.75 Wahrman, Dror 154n.94, 198n.3 Wallace, Nathan 169–70 Ward, Caesar 100n.41 Warner, Michael 124n.3, 167n.33 Watts, Carol 104–5 Watts, Isaac 132n.33 Weil, Rachel 9–10, 52–3, 53nn.24–5 Weinbrot, Howard D. 131–2 Wellek, René 152n.88 Whig party ideology 44–6, 158–9, 236–7, 265, 266n.7 Wilkes, John 15n.28, 16–20, 38n.92, 63–9, 65nn.64, 66, 66n.67, 66n.70, 67n.73, 68n.74, 73, 86, 105, 126–30, 142–3, 150, 157, 169–70, 177–8, 236, 238–40, 239n.26, 250, 252, 269–71 William III 9–10, 44–7, 52–5, 57n.37, 96–7, 143–4, 212, 250 Williams, Abigail 204n.22 Williams, David 79–81, 80n.121 Works Egeria 36–8, 48, 79–86, 121–2, 204 Wilson, Kathleen 20n.46, 49, 95–6, 95n.25 Wolfson, Susan 238n.24, 251–2, 253n.54 Wollstonecraft, Mary 3–4, 164–5 Woloch, Alex 8n.17, 13–16, 26n.61, 30n.73, 232n.7, 262n.78 Wordsworth, William 23n.54, 40n.95, 60–1, 77–8, 262–3, 262n.80 Yurchak, Alexei 25n.60 Zegger, Robert E. 19n.42, 66n.70,