Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770 - 1845 0199687080, 9780199687084

Table of contents :
Cover
Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Introduction
I History, Rhetoric, Genre
1 The History Girls: Charlotte Smith’s History of England and the Politics of Women’s Educational History
2 ‘The fanciful traditions of early nations’: History, Myth, and Orientalist Poetry in India Prior to James Mill
3 No ‘nonsense upon stilts’: James Mill’s History of British India and the Poetics of Benthamite Historiography
4 A ‘poor crotchety picture of several things’: Antiquarianism, Subjectivity, and the Novel in Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell
II Historical Space and Time
5 ‘To trace thy country’s glories to their source’: Dangerous History in Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales
6 Historicism, Temporalization, and Romantic Prophecy in Percy Shelley’s Hellas
7 Magazines, Don Juan, and the Scotch Novels: Deep and Shallow Time in the Regency
8 ‘Diamonds by which the eye is charmed’: Facets of Romantic Historiography in the Works of Richard Parkes Bonington
III Aesthetics of History
9 The Same Rehearsal of the Past: Byron and the Aesthetics of History and Culture
10 Byron, Clare, and Poetic Historiography
11 Historical Fiction and the Fractured Atlantic
12 A Bookish History of Irish Romanticism
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

R E T H I N K I N G B R I T I S H RO M A N T I C H I S TO RY, 1770 – 184 5

Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845 Edi t e d by

PORSCHA FERMANIS and

JOHN REGAN

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 © Oxford University Press 2014 The moral rights of the authors‌have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 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: 2014941522 ISBN 978–0–19–968708–4 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.

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the former Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), now the Irish Research Council (IRC), for its generous funding of this project, as well as for its contributions to a conference on ‘Romantic Historiography’ held at University College Dublin in the summer of 2010. The conference demonstrated the outstanding work being done in the field of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British and Irish historiography by historians and literary scholars, and encouraged the editors in their pursuit and commission of chapters for this volume. We would like to thank in particular James Chandler, Luke Gibbons, Karen O’Brien, Murray Pittock, Fiona Price, Mark Salber Phillips, Clifford Siskin, and other speakers for their contributions to the conference, and for their ongoing conversations and ideas on this topic. Friends and colleagues at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and University College Dublin have been similarly supportive and accommodating. Thanks must also go to the librarians of University College Dublin; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Cambridge University Library; the British Library; and the Historical Studies Library at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. At Oxford University Press, we acknowledge with gratitude the work of Jacqueline Baker and Rachel Platt. Our anonymous readers provided constructive and invaluable criticism, for which we are very grateful. Other readers and thinkers to whom we are indebted include Phillip Connell, Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, and Corinna Russell. We would also like to thank the Wallace Collection, London, for permission to reproduce selected material. Finally, the editors would like to express our profound thanks to the contributors to this volume for their professionalism, diligence, and collegiality. It has been a pleasure to work with and among you. Further acknowledgements can be found in the endnotes to individual chapters.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors

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Introduction Porscha Fermanis and John Regan

1

I .  H I S TO RY, R H E TO R I C , G E N R E 1. The History Girls: Charlotte Smith’s History of England and the Politics of Women’s Educational History Greg Kucich 2. ‘The fanciful traditions of early nations’: History, Myth, and Orientalist Poetry in India Prior to James Mill Daniel Sanjiv Roberts 3. No ‘nonsense upon stilts’: James Mill’s History of British India and the Poetics of Benthamite Historiography John Regan 4. A ‘poor crotchety picture of several things’: Antiquarianism, Subjectivity, and the Novel in Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell Porscha Fermanis

35

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I I .   H I S TO R I C A L S PA C E A N D T I M E 5. ‘To trace thy country’s glories to their source’: Dangerous History in Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales Mary-Ann Constantine 6. Historicism, Temporalization, and Romantic Prophecy in Percy Shelley’s Hellas Christopher Bundock 7. Magazines, Don Juan, and the Scotch Novels: Deep and Shallow Time in the Regency Richard Cronin 8. ‘Diamonds by which the eye is charmed’: Facets of Romantic Historiography in the Works of Richard Parkes Bonington Rosemary Mitchell

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viii Contents I I I .   A E S T H E T I C S O F H I S TO RY 9. The Same Rehearsal of the Past: Byron and the Aesthetics of History and Culture Michael O’Neill 10. Byron, Clare, and Poetic Historiography Paul Hamilton 11. Historical Fiction and the Fractured Atlantic Fiona Robertson 12. A Bookish History of Irish Romanticism Claire Connolly Bibliography Index

205 223 246 271 297 325

List of Illustrations 2.1. Vishnu’s Slumber from Thomas Maurice, The History of Hindostan (1795) 8.1. Richard Parkes Bonington, Meditation (1826), Wallace Collection 8.2. Richard Parkes Bonington, The Antiquary (1827), Wallace Collection 8.3. Richard Parkes Bonington, François I and Marguerite of Navarre (1827), Wallace Collection 8.4. Richard Parkes Bonington, A Lady Dressing her Hair (1827), Wallace Collection

57 184 186 193 196

List of Contributors Christopher Bundock is an Assistant Professor of English at huron University College. Aside from having published articles on Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and Wordsworth’s modernity in the European Romantic Review (2009 and 2010, respectively), he recently completed a doctoral thesis with Professor Tilottama Rajan at the University of Western Ontario on historiography and prophecy in the Romantic period, ‘ “Composing Darkness”: Romantic Prophecy and the Phenomenology of History’. Claire Connolly is Professor of Modern English Literature at University College Cork. Her award-winning A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Alongside numerous essays on Irish Romantic culture, she has produced scholarly editions of novels by Maria Edgeworth and (with Stephen Copely) Lady Morgan. With Joe Cleary, she is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (2005). She is currently co-director, with Professor Katie Gramich (Cardiff University) and Dr Paul O’Leary (Aberystwyth University), of the Wales–Ireland Research Network. Mary-Ann Constantine is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wales Centre for Welsh and Celtic Studies, and works on aspects of Welsh Romanticism. She is particularly interested in issues of authenticity and the interactions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, especially songs. For the last four years she has been project investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Wales and the French Revolution’. Recent works include The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (2007) and, with Paul Frame, Travels in Revolutionary France and A Journey Across America by George Cadogan Morgan and Richard Price Morgan (2012). She is currently working on a study of the Welsh Tour in the Romantic period. Richard Cronin is Research Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Oxford Brooks University. Some of his most recent publications include Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (Palgrave, 2002), The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry (Blackwell, 2002), The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Macmillan, 2000), 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads (Macmillan, 1998), Imagining India (Macmillan, 1998), Colour and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Macmillan, 1988), and Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (Macmillan, 1981). Porscha Fermanis is a Lecturer in Romantic Literature at University College Dublin. In addition to several articles on Scott, Keats, and Godwin, she is the author of John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). She is currently writing a monograph on narrative history in Britain

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and Ireland, and (with Carmen Casaliggi) A Concise History of Romanticism (Routledge, 2015). Paul Hamilton is a Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of various books on Romanticism and is currently working on a comparative study of themes in the literature, philosophy, and politics of European Romanticism. Recent publications include the second edition of Historicism (2003), Metaromanticism (2003), and Coleridge and German Philosophy (2007). Greg Kucich is a Professor at the University of Notre Dame and the Director of the London Program for the Office of International Studies. His areas of expertise include British Romanticism, historiography, and women’s writing. His Keats, Shelley and Romantic Spenserianism (1991) deals with Romantic-era concerns about originality and literary transmission by examining the various ways in which adaptations of Spenser’s works affected the development of Romantic-era poetics and politics. He has co-edited (with Jeffrey Cox) two volumes of the Pickering & Chatto Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, and he has co-edited (with Keith Hanley) a collection of articles, Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Global Formations Past and Present. He is currently writing a monograph on Romanticism and the politics of women’s historical writing. Rosemary Mitchell is an Associate Principal Lecturer in History at Leeds Trinity University College in West Yorkshire. She is the author of Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (OUP, 2000), and formerly worked as a research editor on The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), for which she has written over 140 articles. She has also published articles in the Journal of Victorian Culture, of which she is currently associate editor, and Women’s History Review. She is currently working on a monograph on gender roles and domesticity in Victorian historical cultures, as well as a project on Victorian historical comedy. She is Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, and a steering committee member for the British Association of Victorian Studies. Michael O’Neill is a Professor of English at Durham University. His books include Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (OUP, 1997) and The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (OUP, 2007). He is the editor of The Cambridge History of English Literature (CUP, 2010) and the co-editor, with Charles Mahoney, of Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell, 2007). He is a contributing editor to vol. iii of the Johns Hopkins multi-volume edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2010) and the co-editor with Zachary Leader of Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (2003). His second collection of poems, Wheel, was published by Arc in 2008. John Regan is a Research Fellow at Clare Hall College, Cambridge. His research interests include the poetics of the Romantic and late Enlightenment periods, prosody and versification, literary history, historiography, and the work of Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Hemans, and Landon. His doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Cambridge in 2009, ‘Versification, Historicity, and



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the Romantic Culture of Circumscription’, considers the intersections between versification and historicity in the long eighteenth century. Fiona Robertson is the Horace Walpole Professor of English Literature at St Mary’s University College Twickenham. Her main research interest is in British literature of the Romantic period. Prof. Robertson has published several critical and editorial studies of Walter Scott, including Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (OUP, 1994) and The Bride of Lammermoor (OUP, 1991), and is currently editing the volume on Scott in the series Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature. She has also published a collection of works by women writers of the Romantic Period (OUP, 2001), and, with Anthony Mellors, has edited selected works of Stephen Crane (OUP, 1998). Her new monograph is The United States in British Romanticism (OUP, 2015). Daniel Sanjiv Roberts is a Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast. His publications include a monograph, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument (2000), major scholarly editions of Thomas De Quincey’s Autobiographic Sketches (2003) and Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (2004), and a collection of essays edited with Robert Morrison, Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions (2008). He is currently working on an edition of Charles Johnstone’s oriental novel, The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis (1774), for the ‘Early Irish Fiction’ series from Four Courts Press.

Introduction Porscha Fermanis and John Regan It is not our purpose to intrude upon the province of history. (Walter Scott, Waverley, 1814)

What does it mean to rethink British Romantic history? And why does it need rethinking? These two questions lie at the heart of the mutual enterprise to which the various essays in this collection are committed. At its most fundamental, a rethinking of a subject involves a problematizing of past critical, methodological, and epistemological certainties, and of the theorists and commentators who are seen as constructing that subject’s history. But as Dominick LaCapra has pointed out, a rethinking of a subject can also involve a restructuring of its affiliation with other related subjects or disciplines:1 in this case, the troubled relationship between history and literature, both in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in current scholarly practice. Indeed, the so-called ‘literary’ or ‘linguistic turn’ in historical studies and the concurrent ‘historical turn’ in literary studies are often said to be modelled on a re-turn to the apparently porous boundaries between history and literature that existed prior to the mid to late nineteenth century.2 Yet if today’s literary and historical turns have illuminated a common ground for scholars discontented with the constraints of their disciplines, they have not led to the kind of radical disciplinary transformations—and in particular, to the kind of eighteenth-century generic flexibility—that their early adherents so passionately advocated. Instead historians, and increasingly literary scholars, have attacked literary New Historicism for its apparent relativism, overcontexualization, and even ahistoricism, while professional working historians have generally ignored the rhetorical approaches of Hayden White, LaCapra, and other philosophical New Historicists in favour of practising or producing history.3

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While there is no denying that history and literature departments are very different places today than they were thirty or even twenty years ago, the Althusserian textual revolution—which, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, has transformed a range of disciplines from politics to anthropology and economics to legal studies—has not had a similarly transforming effect on mainstream or conventional history, which continues to take a predominantly documentary approach to texts and sources.4 Nor have the proponents of the literary and historical turns themselves thought very critically about the ways in which their own interests and agendas might have influenced or solidified interpretations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historical writing; and indeed of the relationship between history and literature more generally. There is little doubt that the emotive historical revivification that we currently see in the New Historicist desire to ‘speak with the dead’ has been loosely adapted from the sort of imaginative engagement and emotional intensity that is said to attach to ‘Romantic history’.5 But the resurfacing of this kind of Romanticism in current historical theory and practice has tended to draw even deeper divisions between a ‘scientific’ history that follows Leopold von Ranke’s ‘objectification of the protocols of historical reconstruction’ and a ‘literary’ or ‘rhetorical’ history that models itself upon Thomas Carlyle’s ‘passionate evocation of subjective responses to the past’.6 As has been well documented, such divisions between subjective and objective approaches to the past are primarily the result of disciplinary stratification beginning in the mid to late nineteenth century.7 The concern of this volume is not so much with the construction or formation of disciplines as with the ways in which disciplinary boundaries, and in particular the opposition of scientific and rhetorical history, have subsequently resulted in the exclusion of literary texts and other aesthetic forms from the history of British history from 1770 to 1845.8 If thinkers such as LaCapra have long argued that our relationship to the past is not adequately accounted for by standard notions of objectivity and subjectivity, their insights have not radically altered the ways in which history and literature have operated as disciplines. Despite the now acknowledged connections between the rise of historicism and the rise of the historical novel, for example, the two phenomena have had predominantly parallel scholarly histories. There has likewise been little cross- or inter-disciplinary investigation into how the meaning of mutually relevant terms like ‘Romanticism’ or ‘Romantic’ might change in their respective disciplinary contexts. Ironically, historians of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Britain have tended to account for historiographical changes largely in aesthetic terms—that is, as an extension of Romantic tropes of feeling into the field of historical writing—without examining recent

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scholarly developments in the literary study of Romantic periodicity and aesthetics. That debates about the nature and meaning of Romanticism have come into such prominence in literary studies in the past thirty years is largely down to the potency of seminal 1980s New Historicist works, such as Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981) and Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983), which not only urged a turn towards historical-mindedness but also required us to reconsider the ‘datedness’ of our own inherited assumptions and categories of thought. As Fiona Robertson points out in Chapter 11 of this volume, for example, scholarly analyses of the Romantic period in Britain have long associated its beginnings with the French Revolution in 1789, ignoring the fact ‘that for the writers of Wordsworth’s immediate generation—those born in and around 1770—the actual war taking place during their childhoods was the [American] War of Independence’. A second crucial destabilizing factor has emerged from the heightened interest in Romanticisms as transnational, border, and global phenomena, providing an even greater sense of the fragility of Romantic ‘imagined communities’.9 Yet for all the vigour and value of their revisionism, there are still abiding uncertainties as to whether such historical and transnational turns have ever been adequately applied in scholarly and pedagogical practice. Recent studies reject the idea of clear-cut rival Romantic traditions in Britain, France, Germany, America, and elsewhere, but the scholarly traditions in each of these countries have proven to be profoundly different, and remarkably entrenched, in their attitudes towards the period.10 Nor has the historical turn in literary studies entirely managed to deflate the association of Romanticism with a set of transhistorical aesthetic and intellectual principles: organicism, mysticism, pantheism, the sublime, natural supernaturalism, and the like. Murray Pittock, for one, is unsettled by the durability of the term Romanticism, which he sees as ‘the doughtiest survivor, the “last of the race” if you like, of the use of the historical eras as a stalking-horse for aesthetic assumptions in literary history’.11 What, then, are we to make of a term and period dates that have undergone significant challenges but remain more durable that we might ever have imagined?12 Orrin N. C. Wang captures something of its new utility when he argues that ‘Romanticism is the period metaphor that both stabilizes and disrupts the very concept of period metaphors. The deconstruction and demystification of Romanticism is very much about the deconstruction and demystification of history, its existence as either question or calculation, trope or immanent being.’13 Wang’s acknowledgement that Romanticism is intimately linked to ways of representing and conceptualizing history in art has special relevance for this volume:

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if Romanticism can be defined as anything at all, other than a working (albeit notoriously volatile) set of period dates, in today’s de-hegemonized literary field, it is primarily as a site at which a rich, valuable revisionism of historicism (old and new) might take place. Indeed, Wang’s approach deftly points to an ongoing standoff in current literary critical thinking about the ways in which Romanticism represents the past: on the one side are those kinds of liberal humanists who promote and even reiterate the ‘aesthetic absolutism’ of the high Romantic argument; on other side are the kinds of historicists who argue that Romantic writers pre-figure their own interests in historiography and the historicity of the past. Somewhere between the two are those cultural materialists who claim to wish to avoid ‘entrapment’ within Romantic modes of apprehension and therefore tend to produce ‘critical renunciations of a Romanticism they deem dehistoricizing’.14 Despite the covert formalism of much of the criticism produced by cultural materialists and New Historicists, ‘[t]‌he moment’, as Kelvin Everest has noted, ‘never seemed quite to arrive for taking on the problem of how to work with a category of the aesthetic’.15 The concern of this volume is not only to reconcile ‘aesthetic’ and ‘historicist’ positions in literary studies by considering the ways in which we might shed new light on the relationship between style, form, and content in the historical writing of the period between 1770 and 1845, but also to integrate literary texts (and their critical history) within scholarly developments in historical studies. In particular, this collection hopes to demonstrate that the aesthetic developments associated with British literary Romanticism intersected in mutually dependent ways with concurrent experiments and innovations in historical writing; and furthermore, that these intersections forced an epistemological crisis—a deeply felt tension about the role of feeling, empathy, and imagination in historical writing—that is still resonating in historiographical debates today. Whereas so many of the accounts of the relationship between history and literature are discussed at a theoretical level, this volume hopes to illuminate the interrelationship between the two disciplines in practice by focusing on connections, borrowings, mediations, and interactions as much as on differences, boundaries, disciplinary divisions, and rejections. The volume’s primary aim is thus is to demonstrate that ‘history’ in Britain, as we know it today, arose alongside and even within the kinds of cultural practices that also transformed the literature and other art forms of the period in which Romanticism was a perceptible force. At the same time, it will also consider the ways in which the historical writing of this period—a period that preceded (even as it helped give rise to) the full professional distinction between history and literature—can provide parallels and insights that inform current reflections on the nature of historical and literary

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studies in a comparative European and American context, in particular those relating to the history and politics of historicism.16 R E T H I N K I N G N E W H I S TO R I C I S M A N D OT H E R M E T H O D O L O G I C A L I S S U E S Many of the contributors to this volume share with literary New Historicists a belief in the historical embeddedness or situatedness of texts. Yet as a whole, the essays in this collection do not identify their methodology as New Historicist in that they are not solely or even primarily concerned with the interplay between texts and contexts or with the function of historical background. Nor do they aim to situate such texts within a specific historical milieu or to use particular historical anecdotes or events as a way of drawing out wider cultural assumptions. Our difficulty with literary New Historicism is with its tendencies towards ‘overcontextualization’ and ‘over-determination’.17 Marlon Ross points to the latter problem when he claims that New Historicism turns ‘contingency, as accidental coincidence, into contingency as conditional logic’, which, as he perceptively argues, is in effect to altogether elide the historical method and its ability to ‘distinguish between what is accidental (incidental, adventitious) and what is conditional (capable of explanation and contexualization)’.18 Moreover, by extending Clifford Geetz’s method of ‘thick description’ indiscriminately, New Historicism also tends to occlude the core problem of its methodology: the grounds on which a selection of pertinent contexts has been made. Despite the claims of Marjorie Levinson, McGann, and others in Rethinking Historicism (1989) that New Historicism is defined precisely by its refusal to impose overarching narratives of progress or sequentiality onto historical uniqueness, a primary problem for New Historicism is that its historical contexts are all too often chosen in advance. Its excessive reliance on paratactic or associative organization is a related issue. The difficulty, as LaCapra describes it, is how to move beyond the glorification of bricolage or the montage of different levels of culture, whose relationships may be interesting but whose overall shape seems random, arbitrary, or tentative.19 By largely avoiding the methodology and logic of the anecdote, this collection hopes to avoid New Historicism’s stasis between particularity and totalization, and instead to take part in what James Chandler, following Jameson, has called ‘a new historicization of historicism itself ’ by examining the changing forms, standards, and structures of historical knowledge self-consciously adopted and embraced by both historians and writers of fiction in the period 1770–1845.20 The volume’s focus is therefore not just

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on historical poetics or the rhetorical dimension of historical writing in the sense that White, LaCapra, Barthes, Derrida, and other philosophical New Historicists describe, but also on what Ann Rigney has called the ‘heuristic’ role of fiction and other aesthetic forms ‘in the generation of discursive models that historians then adapted for their own purposes’.21 The point of our focus on changing generic, methodological, and representative techniques or on what has been dubbed ‘historical epistemology’ is not so much to capture the authentic voice of Romanticism and even less to uncritically reproduce the position of our Romantic predecessors, but rather to seize upon historiographical changes as and when they emerged in an attempt to reconcile (or at the very least acknowledge) the discrepancies between our own critical positions and those of the period under investigation.22 In this sense, the contributors to this collection straddle a new territory somewhere between the textualism of literary New Historicism and the history of ideas associated with philosophic New Historicism, while also attempting to engage with the kind of issues that are relevant to working historians, such as sources, documentary evidence, methodology, and historical judgement. It should by now be clear that the aim of this project is not chiefly to reject or discard the terms, taxonomies, and conceptual categories established or consolidated by current-day historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain—categories and terminology like ‘historicism’, ‘Enlightenment’, and ‘modernity’, which are indispensable for understanding the relationship between history and literature in the period— but rather to integrate newly reformulated ideas about British Romantic literature and its literary-critical concepts into the history of British history from 1770 to 1845. As Chandler has pointed out, to ‘historicize a set of practices. . . is not necessarily to debunk or discredit them’.23 Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valdez have similarly reminded us that to ‘rethink’ is ‘not just to revise, correct or alter’, but also to ‘reconsider, with all the associations of care and attentiveness and serious reflection that go with the notion of consideration’.24 Our goal, in other words, is not so much to reject the discursive structures and frameworks established by the discipline we now call ‘history’ as to demonstrate the role that literary texts played in the making, formation, or emergence of such conventions, idioms, or ‘languages’, as J. G. A Pocock calls them.25 The introduction to this collection accordingly situates its individual essays within a framework of wider historiographical debates concerning the rise of historicism and the modern historical method in order to integrate literary history—or the history of the production and reception of literary texts, genres, critical concepts, and institutions—into a wider history of British history. In so doing, it hopes to move beyond claims that literary historicism is not very

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historical and ‘especially not self-critically or self-reflexively historical’ and to engage in ‘a fresh consideration of history herself—that is, a hard look at the history of modern historicism and its conflicted relations with other critical strategies’.26 More specifically, this volume aims collectively to rethink three longstanding ‘narratives’ about the nature of British historical writing in its wider European and imperial context from 1770 to 1845. The first narrative concerns the widely held belief that the relationship between history and literature was open and porous, resulting in a period of epistemological innocence marred only by encroaching disciplinary transformations and, in particular, by the increasing professionalization of history. In adopting this line of argument, subsequent histories of history have represented Romantic history as an alternative or even minority tradition sceptical of the factual and objective nature of history, and have accordingly tended to draw a sharp distinction between Romantic and modern historical methods.27 The second narrative relates to the exclusion of literary texts from various accounts of the rise of historicism and the birth of the modern historical method. While acknowledging that the literature of the Romantic period is a particularly fertile one for examining the shift from a ‘didactic-ethical space’ to a ‘historical-analytic space’, nearly all of the important accounts of the rise of historicism dismiss literary texts (other than, occasionally, the historical novel) from their explanatory framework.28 The third narrative concerns the widespread characterization of Romantic history as a subjective and emotionally charged reaction to philosophic history and other Enlightenment modes of representing the past, thereby eliding a far more varied and complex set of Romantic historiographical agendas and representative practices based on newly expanded definitions of Romanticism and its periodicity. In rethinking these three historiographical narratives from the perspective of a recently revised Romantic literary history, the volume has no wish to subordinate history to literature by claiming that textualism obliterates all boundaries between the two disciplines. As Stephen Bann has pointed out, such a view of history is ‘misleading’, not least because it ‘completely misrepresents the historian’s own conception of the task which he is engaged upon’.29 While arguing that literary texts and other aesthetic forms have the capacity to count as historical sources and makers of historical meaning, the volume does not treat history solely as a branch of aesthetics or equate the stylistic aspects of historical writing with history as a discipline, instead seeing judgements about more or less reliable forms of history as both possible and important.30 Nor is this book intended to enact the ‘revenge’ of literature, in the sense that Linda Orr describes.31 If its methodology is more cross-disciplinary than inter-disciplinary, it

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nonetheless hopes to ask the kinds of questions that matter to historians and literary scholars alike: both groups, for example, examine the status of facts, questions of truth and reality, the importance of methodology, and the intricacies of style and rhetoric.32 Nor are questions of evidence irrelevant to the literary scholar.33 White and LaCapra have pointed to the difficulties of being an insider in only one field of knowledge and, for some readers, the selection of contributors and texts in this book might be seen as a privileging of the literary: the volume is, after all, primarily concerned with the question of how various historiographical modes, methods, rules, and conventions actually function in texts or extended uses of language (historical, fictional, or hybrids of both). But rather than attempting to foreclose the text or seeing literature as history’s ‘ghost’, ‘mirror’, ‘other’, or ‘anti-story’, haunting its attempts at disciplinary autonomy, the collection instead argues that the two genres have more concrete overlapping concerns; namely, their ongoing mutual experiments with the forms of nomos or the ways in which they order experiences of the past. R E T H I N K I N G T H E H I S TO RY O F RO M A N T I C H I S TO RY Following recent interrogations of modern history’s distinctive disciplinary claims to empirical or scientific truth by Barthes, Derrida, and others, it is often claimed that what we ‘now know’, to use Lionel Gossman’s phrase, was a commonplace in a period in which it was frequently maintained that history was a branch of rhetoric and that literature was an essential mode of historiographical practice.34 Adam Smith’s lectures on rhetoric delivered in 1763, for example, vacillate between a discussion of the respective functionalities of imaginative and historical writing, and the mutually affective potential of their formal structure, ultimately concluding that there is little difference between a historical poem and a history: ‘It is no more than this, that one is in prose, and the other in verse.’35 Although Smith goes on to make an epistemological distinction between poetry and history based on the difficulties of form—poetry ‘by reason of its difficulty of composition is relegated to a more artistic yet less utilitarian category’—he is nonetheless slow to define any distinct ontological difference between the two genres.36 Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81), Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1784), and Edward Gibbon’s An Essay on the Study of Literature (1788) all similarly attest to the idea that an exploration of the written interstices between history and literature was an essential constituent practice of late Enlightenment historiography, an idea that Walter Scott drew upon and extended in his 1806 review of Ellis and Ritson in

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the Edinburgh Review when he argued that poetic romances should be considered a viable form of historical source material: ‘[f ]‌rom the romance we learn what [our ancestors] were; from history, what they did’.37 Ina Ferris has argued that Scott was deferential towards real or general history, presenting his own work as a supplement ‘in the interstices left by official. . . standard narrative history’, but such comments in his prose writing suggest, as Yoon Sun Lee has pointed out, that his historical novels and annotated poems need to be ‘reconceptualized as more than an innocuous source of historical data or as an occasion for rhetorical self-effacement’.38 Scott’s claim for the documentary value of the historical romance is clearly (and, indeed, self-avowedly) grounded in eighteenthcentury historiographical discourses concerning the historical value of ancient verse, but his comments also suggest a shift in the relationship between history and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: if the traditional historical focus on actions and events (‘what they did’) operates at the expense of other ways of understanding and representing the past (‘what they were’), this points to a special role for literature in historical understanding—a role with important implications for the relative status and value of the two genres. Despite his denial of the role of historian in Waverley, Scott and other writers of historical fiction (and indeed of drama, verse, and other art forms) self-consciously, and sometimes even aggressively, aimed to achieve a certain status as historians by being ‘true-to-meaning’ rather than ‘true-to-actuality’.39 As Robert Mayer has demonstrated, the use of historical footnotes and appendices by Scott, Southey, Byron, Owenson, and others does much more than thematize or ‘illuminate a fictional practice that mimics historical representation’, but rather attempts to ‘embody the trope of history’ and demonstrate the capacity of the fictional text ‘to do the work of history’.40 Ferris has elsewhere pointed to the ‘back-footedness’ of history in the period as it played ‘catch-up’ with the historical novel, suggesting the ‘generic uncertainty of history writing itself, positioned somewhere between philosophy and the novel, as it sought to turn itself into a modern genre’.41 The new sense of competition and generic defensiveness she describes is perhaps most famously acknowledged in T. B. Macaulay’s 1828 essay ‘On History’, where Macaulay recognizes that Scott had not only successfully approximated the ‘representational norms’ and ‘thematic preoccupations’ of history, but had also in some ways surpassed them by bringing to light those ‘noiseless revolutions’ which, although ‘sanctioned by no treaties and recorded in no archives’, are the ‘locus in which the history of the nation was manifest’.42 In an attempt to reconcile the competing demands of history and fiction, Macaulay goes on to argue that ‘invention’ or ‘imagination’, as he variously designates the

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idea, is not to be considered non-functional or non-utilitarian for the art of writing history because it is that power which produces the illusion or effect of cohesion: No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth: but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole. He who is deficient in the art of selection, may, by showing nothing but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest falsehood.43

If there is something strangely poststructuralist in Macaulay’s vision of history as always falling short of an explanatory ideal of wholeness, it is because he pre-empts by some 150 years White’s argument that the real difference between the two genres is not between truth and untruth, but between ‘the truth of correspondence and the truth of coherence’.44 As Macaulay recognizes in his brilliant ‘diagnosis of a loss of literary innocence in history after. . . Scott’, the process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into a comprehensive totality is, in part, a literary or poetic process.45 Ironically, this kind of overt recognition of history’s affinity with other, more openly fictional, forms of writing by Macaulay, Carlyle, and others may have eventually consolidated the rift between the two genres. Gossman has described the way in which the once close relationship between literature and history in Britain as part of a mutual tradition of belles lettres became more problematic at the close of the eighteenth century, when the genre boundaries between literary and history were revisited and disciplinary categories emerged.46 Essentially, this was an unravelling of the process of alignment that had taken place between history and the novel earlier in the century: as Karen O’Brien has argued, in order for fiction to make a contribution to new kinds of historical awareness the novel had to ‘undergo a double transformation, at first distancing itself from historical kinds of narrative, and then approximating itself to the empirical norms and authoritative voice of history writing’.47 Increasingly, however, literature—or so the story goes—was identified with the Romantic poeta-theologus and was therefore associated with what Ceri Crossley has called a ‘privileged version of the real’. History, not yet fully professional, ‘redefined itself as an epistemological project’ by drawing on the model of the natural sciences.48 The more that history was viewed in empirical rather than in morally instructive terms the greater its distance seemed from literature: by the end of the nineteenth century, J. R. Seeley famously dismissed Macaulay’s insights on the literary aspects of historical writing as extravagant and misleading, and it became conventional to regard Romantic history as false and inaccurate.49

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Subsequent histories of history have also tended to draw a distinction between Romantic and modern historical methods—between, say, the ‘dilettantish’ narratives of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the scientific empiricism of the later nineteenth century. Numerous historians have located the epistemological break between a rhetorical or literary history and an analytical or scientific history in the early nineteenth century and, more particularly, in the increasing acceptance of Ranke’s archival and source-oriented methodologies.50 However, new work on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historiography, on the one hand, and poststructural critiques of scientific history, on the other, have more recently rendered this teleology deeply problematic. It is now accepted that Ranke and his predecessors, such as B. G. Niebuhr, by no means invented the critical approach towards archival source material. As Georges Lefebvre has pointed out, already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a significant move away from the rhetorical or literary concept of history to a new sensitivity towards issues of methodology and source criticism, not least, as John Pocock and Arnaldo Momigliano have shown us, in the example of Jeans Mabillon and the sixteenth-century French jurists.51 Conversely, the Rankean methodology was not without its critics in Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere. Hegel, Droysen, Nietzche, Burckhardt, and Croce all stressed the active nature of history’s interpretive function. Despite his much-vaunted objectivity, Ranke himself, as White, Jörn Rüsen, and others have pointed out, was more open to the use of local colour, narration, interiority, and moral judgement than his later reputation would suggest.52 In France, Chateaubriand’s brand of historical writing, and after him that of Guizot, Migent, and Thiers, allowed for something closer to an eighteenth-century latitude with regard to historical methodology.53 In Britain, too, historians such as Carlyle, Macaulay, Palgrave, and Froude were slow to sever the connections between history and the rhetorical tradition of belles lettres: Carlyle and Macaulay, for example, tended to find their associates in the literary and political circles of an ‘older tradition of essayists and reviewers’.54 Although the often repeated claim that Macaulay and Carlyle eschewed archival research is incorrect—both conducted primary research in libraries and archives—there was nonetheless a resistance in Britain to the kind of ‘scientizing’ that occurred in Germany. For one thing, professionalization did not significantly begin until the 1838 foundation of the British Public Record Office resulted in the training of a new professional group of archivists;55 and even then, Anglo-French conceptions of science were more like commonsense empiricism and remained distinct from those that informed the idealist German notion of Wissenschaft.56 In other words, the professionalization of history in Britain

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was uneven and was not attended by a conceptual revolution of the sort that accompanied such transformations in the sciences. The continuing relevance of popular history traditions in contemporary British historiography suggests that British historians are to this day ‘very conscious of carrying on a grand tradition, of being part of a great community, extending back to the eighteenth century and perhaps earlier’.57 To emphasize the ongoing relevance of narrative in British historical writing is not, of course, to suggest that there are no generic, analytic, or disciplinary distinctions between history and literature (either then or now). As O’Brien has reminded us, history was a well-defined and highly marketable genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, appealing to sophisticated readers who were not only aware of the boundaries between fact and fiction but also of the generic distinctions between history and literature.58 Mark Salber Phillips, too, has demonstrated that, despite the encroachment of social and sentimental discourses in genres such as memoir, biography, and the novel, real or general history in the period was still largely defined by the neo-classical rules set out in Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric.59 Indeed, it is precisely because of the strict formality of so much contemporary historical writing that Macaulay urges historians in ‘On History’ to reclaim ‘those materials which the novelist has appropriated’.60 But if claims for the openness of the boundaries between history and literature in the period have been exaggerated, the fact remains that the development of the two genres was mutual and reciprocal rather than one-sided or parallel. While literary critics have acknowledged that ‘the innovations of romantic fiction are a direct consequence of. . . [the] new reciprocity of encounter with nonfictional genres’ such as history, philosophy, antiquarianism, and science, modern historians have been far slower to accept the important role that literature played both in the development of new historical forms and in the rise of a new kind of historical consciousness: historicism.61 R E T H I N K I N G T H E R I S E O F H I S TO R I C I S M Few intellectual developments have affected us as profoundly as the new sense of historical understanding that emerged in the eighteenth century: despite subsequent attempts to repudiate or invalidate historicism as a dangerous conceptual fallacy, the legacy of its enriched sense of temporality remains in our attempt at a sympathetic understanding of the past, our general sense of the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the collective, and our continued acknowledgement of the importance of narrative for historical writing.62 Hijacked by newer forms of literary

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and philosophical historicism, the current pervasiveness and ubiquity of the term has to some extent obscured ongoing debates about older forms of historicism and its relevance for the birth of the modern historical method.63 Yet debates over the genesis or rise of historicism have generated a whole host of unresolved issues for historians and literary scholars. Following Michel Foucault, histories of rupture—such as the theories of modernity and temporality advocated by Reinhart Koselleck and Louis Althusser—see the late eighteenth century as witnessing an epistemic shift in attitudes towards time and change, and accordingly in its written forms and representational methods.64 Continuity or emergence theses, on the other hand, see the birth of historicism in the sympathetic renditions of Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon; that is, as emerging from a crisis within late Enlightenment thinking itself.65 Contemplating these various ways of describing what happened to historical writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Anthony Grafton goes so far as to conclude that ‘[t]‌he genealogy of modern history. . . falls into confusion at the crucial point when the formal and the substantive elements needed to produce a distinctively modern historical narrative were assembled in the historian’s alembic’.66 Grafton is quite right to point to the discrepancies in modern history’s self-definition, but the fracture between continuity and rupture arguments presents a similar problem for literary scholars of the period, who have equally struggled with the question of whether Romantic-era writing should be considered a revelatory rejection of eighteenth-century philosophies and methodologies or a ‘working through’ of its eighteenth-century roots.67 If it is now more fashionable to look for historical continuities rather than to focus on ruptures or turning points, in adopting a ‘long’ approach to the eighteenth century we must, as Christopher Bundock points out in Chapter 6, not only recognize its conservatism and latent Whiggish qualities, but also our own critical motivations and desires. A second unresolved issue for literary scholars relates to the place of the literary text in explanations of the rise of historicism. In the last twenty to thirty years, a number of seminal revisionist works by both literary and historical scholars have complicated our sense of what constitutes history or historical writing. Monographs such as Bann’s The Inventions of History (1990), O’Brien’s Narratives of Enlightenment (1997), Phillips’s Society and Sentiment (2000), and Rigney’s Imperfect Histories (2001), among others, have redefined and broadened popular conceptions of history as a protean mediatory mode that has for too long been truncated by narrow readings of what its ‘proper’ genres might be. If, as Phillips argues, history served as a counterpoint to help define a ‘cluster of related literatures’ such as memoir, biography, and the novel, the ‘clues to the reframing of

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historiographical practice lie in all the surrounding genres and disciplines’; that is, in the ‘minor’ genres and the margins of formal historiography rather than at its more prestigious centre.68 Despite the fact that Phillips’s study includes neither historical verse nor drama in its analysis of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historical writing, a resistance within historical circles to his idea of history as a ‘family of literatures’, which is itself subject to encroachment, development, and change, has for too long elided a key aspect of historicist thought: its critical development in genres that are more often labelled literary than historical. In France scholars have long conceded the role of literary and quasi-historical genres in the development of this new type of historical consciousness. As Crossley has pointed out, few historians or literary scholars would dispute the idea that French Romantic history, as represented by Michelet, Thierry, and others, ‘shared with literature an inescapable point of anchorage in the symbolic’.69 However, studies on the rise of historicism in Britain and Germany have been slower to acknowledge their literary roots; and accounts of the rise of the novel and other literary forms have run curiously parallel to accounts of the rise of historicism.70 Despite giving central stage to the historical novel, Georg Lukács, for example, tends to see the genre as an effect of, rather than as a contributing factor to, the more general rise of historicism in Britain and the rest of Europe.71 His attitude towards the role and place of the literary text in historiographical debates is borne out in most explanations of the rise of historicism.72 Without attempting an exhaustive intellectual history of the emergence of historicism in Britain or elsewhere, it is possible to isolate three important accounts of its genesis in a wider European and American context.73 According to the first account (advocated by Meinecke, Mannheim, and others), historicism emerged from the revolt against, and gradual historicization of, natural law philosophy in all of its incarnations. For Meinecke, historicism is an intellectual revolution that originates in late eighteenthcentury Germany with Moser, Herder, and Goethe, in which a ‘generalizing view’ is replaced by an ‘individualizing view’. While the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contributed to the development of this new view of the past, Meinecke argues that these periods remained bound to natural law and the idea of history as exemplar. Scholars operating within this predominantly German tradition accordingly see Romanticism (and Romantic historicism) as an antidote to Enlightenment naturalism or natural law philosophy, but they have nonetheless tended to overlook the literary—and, in many ways, anti-philosophical—orientation of historicism, in the main neglecting the contributions of the historical school (Niebuhr, J. G. Eichhorn, Friedrich von Savigny, Jakob Grimm, and

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Wilhelm Roscher) and the scholarly tradition as a whole, which was itself deeply influenced by literary Romanticism in its emphasis on the nation and the Volk. Even Meinecke’s orientation towards Goethe (‘We would not be where we are today without Goethe’) emphasizes Goethe’s philosophy at the expense of his literary works, in an attempt to connect foundational events or experiences in Goethe’s life with a historicist attitude.74 In an alternative and largely Anglo-American account of the rise of historicism (proposed by White, Gossman, Ankersmit, and Bann, among others), historicism grew out of the gradual substitution of rhetoric with empirical fact in historical writing or at least out of the belief that it was possible to replace rhetoric with a more scientific model paralleling that of the natural sciences. This view is the one primarily adopted by literary historians and proponents of the ‘linguistic school’, whose focus is on the history of rhetoric and literary tropes. But despite the interest of its advocates in narrativism and textuality, it, too, largely excludes literary texts from its remit. White’s now infamous argument in Metahistory (1973) may have reminded us that history gains its explanatory strength from acts of imaginative and literary construction rather than from an unmediated reflection of empirical facts, but White and most other proponents of the linguistic school pay little attention to those literary texts on which real history was itself increasingly modelled in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.75 The final argument regarding the rise of historicism (most persuasively advanced by Kelley, Pocock, and, in a more limited way, by Momigliano) places the beginnings of the development of historicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and argues that the antiquarian concern with manners and prehistory, as well as with collecting proofs, was central to the development of historicist thought and thus modern historical writing.76 Drawing on Pocock’s argument, as well as on Macaulay’s suggestion that it is the historical novel that bridges the gap between antiquarian studies and history, Chandler has recently refocused attention on the ways in which British historicism largely developed in works of historical fiction— that is, the national tale and the historical novel, drama, and poem—rather than in works of real or general history.77 Chandler’s argument is that, in adopting historicist approaches to Romantic writing, current scholars are themselves following the example of British Romantic writers, who understood the term ‘aesthetic’ as a kind of science of the subject’s perception of the external world in the widest terms, as well as a designation for art and its sense-reception.78 While this claim may seem at odds with a Kantian strain of aesthetics, in which artistic production and modes of perception are considered ‘disinterested’, ‘autonomous’, and deeply subjective, it is nonetheless congruent with the more outward-looking, ‘common sense’

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tradition of British Romantic aesthetics, which allows for cultural and, most crucially, historical senses to be at play in the moment of artistic composition and aesthetic experience.79 Following Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and others, Thomas Reid, for example, argues that ‘Beauty or deformity in an object, results from its nature or structure. To perceive the beauty therefore, we must perceive the nature or structure from which it results.’80 Unlike Kant, for whom the absence of ‘concepts’ and ‘interest’ allows a valuable ‘free play’ to occur, Reid’s theory suggests that the aesthetic sense has both an affective and a cognitive element; that is, it has both an element pertaining to an agreeable feeling that has nothing to do with the material object under contemplation and an element attaching to the properties of that object in its material context. Drawing on the work of Reid and other eighteenth-century British aestheticians, writers as diverse as Scott, Byron, Southey, Moore, and Keats all saw the science of human perception as something that included that which was debarred from Kantian aesthetics: an understanding of the art object’s place in time and space. Hence Michael O’Neill’s call in Chapter 9 for a renewed attention to the period’s ‘aesthetics of history’, which draws on the original meaning of the term aesthetic: ‘embodied in and available through art’. R E T H I N K I N G RO M A N T I C H I S TO R I C I S M Recent studies of literary Romanticism have demonstrated that some of the more explicitly meta-historical poems, plays, and novels of the period, such as Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) or Byron’s Corsair (1819), are as much about contests over modes and genres of historical representation as they are about past political and cultural upheavals or even the generation of new literary forms. There is certainly little doubt that Scott and other writers in the period, such as John Galt, Jane Porter, Jane West, and Joanna Baillie, interrogated the purpose and methodology of historical writing.81 As Greg Kucich has pointed out, Baillie, like many other women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hoped to supplement philosophic history’s ideological commitment to a universal human nature by focusing on the more historically specific gestures of female, domestic, and private life.82 When, in her ‘Introductory Discourse’ to Plays on the Passions (1797), she points to the methodology of the historian as one of illuminating the ‘grand and regular procession’ of human life, she isolates one of the primary assumptions of philosophic history: that history has a consistent and regular structure. Alert to the methodological defects of philosophic causality, Baillie goes on to argue for the importance of

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those minute and seemingly irrelevant details that do not fit into a regular or uniform plan. ‘What form of story, what mode of rehearsed speech’, she asks, ‘will communicate to us those feelings, whose irregular bursts, abrupt transitions, sudden pauses, and half-uttered suggestions, scorn all harmony of measured verse, all method and order of relation?’83 Baillie’s gender-inflected rejection of the universality of Enlightenment history in favour of irregularity, domesticity, and feeling is a trope that has reappeared in numerous scholarly versions (both literary and historical) of the ostensible shift from Enlightenment philosophic history to Romantic historicism. Nicholas Tromans, for example, has suggested that the main impulse behind the historiographical innovations of the period was ‘a rejection of Enlightenment historiography’s tendency to sweep history into a tidy teleological channel leading inexorably to the present’, coupled with the idea that history should attempt to get as close as possible to the everyday life of the past as it was experienced by contemporaries.84 There is little doubt that historical evocation and other sentimental discourses fed a growing readerly desire for a real history that could match the vividness of romance; and we have no wish to argue otherwise. But the Romantic attempt to resist teleological certainty and even occasionally historical determinism in favour of a rhetoric of evocation was not the only important historiographical development of the period, which, according to Rigney, also included the emergence of ‘a radicalized awareness of the alterity of the past’; an increasing interest in the representation of cultural and social experience; a new merging of antiquarianism and narrative history; and the rise of an emergent sense of nationalism ‘with its identity politics and interest in folk culture’.85 Scott recognizes at least one of these new forms of historiographical practice when, in the ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ to Ivanhoe (1819), he credits Joseph Strutt, Sharon Turner, and Robert Henry with initiating a newer, nationalist historiography ‘based on an antiquarian interest in individual and social experience rather than on the more abstract philosophic principles of natural law or stadial evolution’.86 Although, as Chandler has shown us, the Scottish Enlightenment principle of uneven development was at the heart of the new form of historiographical practice that the Waverley Novels initiated, Scott, Baillie, and other British Romantic writers nonetheless share with historians like Strutt and Turner a selfconscious desire to rework, remodel, and remediate circulating historical methodologies, in particular those pertaining to philosophic history.87 Yet as John Regan argues in Chapter 3, many of the period’s writers also retain various eighteenth-century historiographical models, such as stadial theory and contrariety models of historical progress and decline. As Regan goes on to demonstrate, James Mill’s History of British India (1817) is

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an Enlightenment-style history of processes and stages rather than a history of individual characters or picturesque detail even as it deploys its Enlightenment framework in new ways. Nor was the ‘scientizing’ tendency associated with professional history exclusively the domain of later nineteenth-century historians. The period’s fascination with scientific data and Malthusian-style demographics is evident not only in Mary Wollstonecraft’s idea in her An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1795) that history is a scientific laboratory that could be subjected to proof and experiment, but also in the new kind of pragmatic and inductive historical methodology most clearly demonstrated in the work of Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and to a lesser extent, William Godwin. As a whole, the contributions to this volume tend to undermine the idea of a single or unvaried Romantic approach to history—in the sense that historians have used the term to apply to Carlyle, Michelet, and others—in favour of the variety and flexibility of the period’s historical output, which, it is argued, privileges fracture as much as Hegelian organicism, scientific paradigms as much as evocative techniques, and antiquarian historical detail as much as historical conjecture and speculation. Not only does the sense of contestation that this variation implies act as a relief to teleological accounts of the birth of the modern historical method—accounts which, until relatively recently, have tended to see Ranke as almost single-handedly forging a new empirical method in historical studies that ushered in the age of professional history—but it also works against assumptions that the innovations of Romantic historiography are confined to historical revivification, sentimentalism, and other evocative rhetorical techniques. The collection’s chapters are accordingly diverse in content, scope, and argument, but they are nonetheless arranged in order to foreground certain shared concepts and themes, falling into three related categories: ‘History, Rhetoric, Genre’; ‘Historical Space and Time’; and ‘Aesthetics of History’. Part I considers the importance of questions of genre, form, and style for our understanding of the historical writing of the period, focusing primarily on the generic boundaries between history and fiction (and thus the issue of generic flexibility or instability) in both non-fictional and fictional texts. Part II deals primarily with claims that the end of the eighteenth century saw the rise of a new sort of historical understanding associated with what we now call historicism and, in particular, with questions relating to the historicization of space and time in a range of historical and para-historical genres. The final Part considers what an aesthetics of history might mean in practice, reflecting on the different ways in which literary works can act as historical sources and impart historical meaning. In particular, it considers the ways in which aesthetics can act,

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as Paul Hamilton points out in Chapter 10, as a discourse that ‘mediates between science and ethics’ rather than just as ‘sensuousness, aesthesis’ or the triumph of style over content. Greg Kucich opens Part I and the collection by showing how current-day concerns about the marginalization of women in history were anticipated by female writers of history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who not only used the genre of educational history as a means of writing women back into history but also as a way of intervening in national debates about women’s rights and political reform more generally. By linking the wrongs of the past to their persistence in the present, Kucich shows us how a wide range of women writers of educational history transformed exemplary and instructive historical frameworks into a new kind of ‘affective historicism’, modelled on the sentimentalism of Adam Smith, David Hume, and other eighteenth-century historians, but extending beyond individual character portraits into considerations of oppressed groups such as Jews, the Irish, slaves, and indigenous peoples. At the same time, Kucich argues that the writers of such histories also strove to contain the excesses of sentiment associated with traditionally female modes of writing (the sentimental novel, epistles, memoirs, etc.) in order to produce a more active, public model of political agency. Kucich thus profitably complicates the role of affect in women’s historical writing in the period by showing us how their commitment to an ‘affective core’ of history did not mean ‘retreating into a private world of affective indulgence in the past’ but precisely the opposite. Also dealing with the relationship between genre, form, and style, Daniel Roberts and John Regan offer two very different perspectives on the historiography of India in the period under consideration. Roberts looks behind the hitherto occlusive presence of Mill’s History of British India to uncover writing on India from an eighteenth-century Britain in which methods of colonial exploitation were still as yet gestatory. Outlining Mill’s precursors and late Enlightenment provenance, Roberts enables a more nuanced understanding of the role of the ‘fanciful’ in India’s native historiography, as well as considering the assimilation of Indian mythography by British poets and historians. Despite the fact that Indian mythology is often subjected to ‘European modes of thought and governance’ in texts which exhibit an ‘uneasy mix of Hindu mythological history and orthodox Enlightenment modernity’, we are nonetheless shown a pre-Mill British milieu surprisingly open to a historiography predicated on imaginative manoeuvres and mythography: the ‘fusion of myth and history was endemic to [the] coextensive literary and historical practices [of the orientalists]’. Indeed, Roberts shows us how Indian mythological narratives, with their medley of historical fact and fiction, opened up

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avenues of allegorical historical truth for writers of orientalist verse, such as William Jones and Robert Southey, by confounding and even correcting the generic expectations of European history and criticism. If Southey increasingly repudiates Hindu mythology, Roberts demonstrates that poems such as The Curse of Kehama (1810) nonetheless have their genesis in an intellectual environment more sympathetic to the convergence of myth and history than one would expect. Regan, on the other hand, shows us the extent to which Mill’s History of India dismisses imaginative licence in historical writing by adapting eighteenth-century philosophic models of history to a newly militant, pragmatic utilitarianism in which history is ‘put to work’. Using Hindu verse as his guide, Mill indicts an Indian society that is resistant to European taxonomies of historical progress because its historical, civic, scientific, and legal texts are in verse. Delivering a withering report on the verboseness of Hindu culture, Mill enshrines concision and exactness at the heart of his imagined, corrective verse-vision. Yet as Regan goes on to demonstrate, little of this concision is borne out in European and British verse in the age. The text’s trenchant excoriations of Indian verse histories therefore operate dialectically, revealing ideals which are not present in Mill’s own text, and also seem at variance with the melodrama of Romantic ‘slashing criticism’ and the hyper-annotative tendencies of verse and verse reviewing in his native Britain. These kinds of tensions between the period’s historical theory and practice are also central to Porscha Fermanis’s account of the duality at the heart of Thomas Carlyle’s historiographical agenda. In Chapter 4 she focuses on Carlyle’s apparent dismissal of antiquarianism and fiction, arguing that, far from rejecting either, Carlyle enacts in his quasi-biography of Oliver Cromwell an internal and methodological struggle between the ‘artist’ and ‘workman’, associating the artist historian with ‘new kinds of subjectivity that are primarily connected with the emergence of the novel. . . while correlating the “artisan” or “workman” with an antiquarian attention to empirical detail’. Fermanis suggests that the literary model Carlyle draws upon for his characterization of the artist historian is that of the eighteenth-century novel and especially the epistolary novels of Richardson, developing from this model a new kind of ‘cognitive’ or ‘psychological’ history that is more focused on creating or fashioning a self through the acts of writing, speaking, and reading than on explaining or interpreting events in the hermeneutic mode. At the same time, Carlyle’s methodology is highly empirical in its view that the artist must adopt the techniques of the workman in order to impersonate or inhabit the consciousness of his historical subject. Fermanis argues that the duality of Carlyle’s methodology—objective and subjective, empirical and

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speculative, documentary and imaginative—not only disrupts teleologies about the development of the modern historical method, but also points to the ambivalent relationship between history and literature in the period, suggesting that the relationship between the two is better characterized as one of adjustment rather than one of porousness or permeability. Developing Fermanis’s interest in the relationship between antiquarianism and history, Mary-Ann Constantine’s Chapter 5 on Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales (1778–83) opens Part II of the volume on historical space and time by considering the potential ‘historicity of topographical space’. In particular, she examines how the heterogeneous genre of the home tour—with its combination of local and national, public and private, and oral and written forms of history—contributed to the ‘making of the modern historical method and. . . to the convergence of narrative and antiquarian research that marks historical writing to this day’. Focusing on the ways in which Pennant extends topographical writing by William Gilpin and others by ‘mapping a historical appraisal onto physically neutral space and matter’, Constantine shows us how space, landscape, and physical phenomena can reveal ‘sites of contest and controversy which reflect. . . upon the fragile state of “Britishness” and nationhood more generally in the period’. As she goes on to outline in Pennant’s Tour, drawing from the unreflecting earth or landscape rarely results in the construction of a neutral history, evoking instead unsettling reflections on the ‘pressures of the dangerous past’ and the threat they pose to a ‘larger narrative of Britishness’. In Chapter 6, Christopher Bundock explores Reinhart Koselleck’s idea that the end of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a new and discontinuous understanding of time associated with the beginnings of modernity. Using Koselleck’s twin concepts of ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectations’, and drawing simultaneously on Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of prophecy as a prediction of the radically unexpected, Bundock reads the period’s obsession with prophecy symptomatically; that is, as indicating ‘a broad and intense discontinuity in historical experience’. Bundock’s examination of prophecy under the banner of history comes with its own intellectual baggage, for, as Louis O. Mink has pointed out, historians today ‘do not ordinarily undertake to predict the future, even at the level of incompleteness and generality at which they “explain” the past’.88 Yet as Bundock argues, prior to history’s disciplinization in the nineteenth century, the future featured just as prominently as the past as an object of historical study. Bundock goes on to suggest that Shelley’s Hellas represents a decisive displacement of prophecy (in its predictive sense) by obscuring the future’s eventual shape while

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simultaneously affirming futurity, thus undermining historical continuity and dialectical progressivism, and revealing a new and modern concept of historical futurity or how the future might form or be. In this sense, Bundock concludes that ‘Hellas says more about historicization as an activity than about history as something objectively present’, incorporating into its representation of historical experience ‘meta-historical reflections on the possibilities for writing history in the era of Romantic temporalization’. Richard Cronin also examines the concept of historical time in Chapter 7, on the important tension between substantiality and insubstantiality in the writing of the Regency period. In order to explain Walter Scott’s extraordinary popularity and the advent of a relatively new literary phenomenon (the ‘best-seller’), Cronin distinguishes between forms of print culture with historical depth (the ‘history-full’), and those with powerful, if impermanent, associations of shallowness (the ‘history-less’), arguing that the historical novel, as developed by Scott, was the genre uniquely able to meet the contradictory demands of a new readership by offering its readers an experience of deep time in the most shallow of literary forms (the novel). This discrepancy between the content and form of Scott’s novels points to a wider concern in the period with the mass circulation and marketing of print culture. We hear of Wordsworth adopting the language of ‘low and rustic life’ because this vocabulary was ‘more permanent’ than that of the ephemeral press, and Byron’s satire on this adoption: Byron seems to insist as emphatically on the continuity between poetry and the ephemeral press as Wordsworth insisted on distinguishing them.’ As Cronin goes on to point out, Byron’s view that ‘[t]‌o be modern is to recognize and even to celebrate the shallowness of time’ is belied by his attempts to situate his writing within a literary tradition that stretches back over two thousand years, as well as by the ‘plays between deep and shallow times’ in his own poems. Scott’s novels, Cronin ultimately argues, were the ‘publishing sensation of the post-Waterloo years’ because they performed the balancing act between deep and shallow time ‘more powerfully than any other writing of the period’. Rosemary Mitchell’s Chapter 8 on Richard Parkes Bonington continues the collection’s exploration of historical time by considering Bonington’s use of ‘time tropes’ or layers of time as a way of showing depth and movement in time in what is often considered a static art form: historical painting. Arguing that Bonington’s watercolours evince a fascination with both the passing and the representation of time, Mitchell demonstrates that his works tend to resist generic classification by being both historically specific and transcendental or timeless. Like Kucich, Mitchell subverts tidy expectations of Romantic historiography

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by contending that representations of history in the period are not confined to sentimental moments of ‘affective proximity’, but rather selfconsciously utilize such moments to offer complex reflections on the nature of history itself. While many of Bonington’s works are ‘[r]‌esitant to traditional public modes of historical representation’, they also offer a more radical challenge to conventional historical forms and genres by slipping between such generic and formal boundaries. By focusing on ‘optic dispersal’ or, in other words, on the provisional and speculative in Bonington’s work, Mitchell is able to demonstrate the extent to which he engages with the complex paradoxes of historical experience and representation. If Mill’s History carries out the disenchanting work of the stadial historian by reading verse as mere paraphraseable sense to be interpreted as raw historical data, chapters by Michael O’Neill and Paul Hamilton in Part III seek boldly to establish aesthetic modes of expression as rich, inadequately appreciated historical forms that are no less capable of registering historical situatedness for being recondite or for appealing to the senses as well as the intellect. In discussing exactly what is at stake in a historical poetics, Simon Jarvis argues that verse registers its historical situation in its minute techniques rather than in ostensibly explicit historical pronouncements: ‘the pressure point, the point of historical formation and action in the poem, is always that of technique, because this is where the poem gets made, the point at which the voices of the many living and dead that are the poet’s repertoire or material are selected from, cut into, distorted, twisted, and precipitated into this or that composition’.89 O’Neill and Hamilton, too, argue and illustrate that verse has little historical sense if the discrete characteristics and compositional practice of the form are discounted. As O’Neill points out in Chapter 9 in relation to Byron’s poems, ‘[w]‌hat Byron grasps about history is the ambivalence encased in the word: that it is both experiential data and a mode of narrative; both the plain unvarnished fact and the fact that there is no such thing, in poetry, as the plain unvarnished fact’. The verse by Byron and Clare discussed in these two chapters shows that literary form is no mere obscuring patina to be removed in the search for historical content or suggestion, but rather its own mode of historiographical expression. Nor should form and content be seen as two separate components of historical expression. As Hamilton so eloquently puts it in Chapter 10, ‘because consciousness of its aesthetic status is often a major part of its content, Romantic poetry can actually express. . . historical truth through a calculated shortfall in its achievement’ or, in other words, ‘through its own, aesthetic self-interrogation’. This, he argues, ‘is re-writing history with a vengeance’.

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In the subsequent chapter on the consequences of the American War of Independence for British historical writing, Fiona Robertson extends the idea of an aesthetics of history from verse to the prose fiction of the period, arguing that writers of Romantic-era fiction engaged in historiographical debates about how history could be written and understood in a time of fracture. Comparing the ahistorical formlessness of the United States with conservative or traditionalist conceptualizations of Britain, Robertson equates the reluctance of British Romantic writers to lay claim to the history of the American colonies with more recent attempts to categorize Romanticism as a distinctively European intellectual force beginning with the French Revolution. More specifically, Robertson argues that the intertextuality between the third volume of Charlotte Smith’s four-volume historical novel The Old Manor House (1793) (which deals with the Saratoga campaign) and Scott’s Waverley suggests an ‘entirely different plot-line in literary history, in which British defeats during the War of Independence. . . come back to haunt a seminal British historical novel’. Such a suggestion not only disrupts the supposedly natural history of the development of historical fiction, which has been confined to ‘a new Europe of restoration and national difference’, but also has significant implications for historical writing in the period more generally, which tends to represent American independence not just as a political break but also as a break in a narrative line. Claire Connolly closes the volume by considering the ways the Irish Romantic novel and national tale can be considered part of a family of historical literatures. Focusing on Irish book history and the materiality of the literary text she argues that Irish Romantic novels and tales copy and ‘repeatedly return to the importance and meaning of local and intimately experienced detail’. Authors such as Maria Edgeworth and John and Michael Banim are therefore ‘explicitly concerned with the extent to which their novels sought to copy from Irish culture, and are worried too about the slightness of the novel form in relation to the copiousness of that culture’. Echoing Cronin’s discussion of concerns about the shallowness and reproducibility of the novel form, Connolly demonstrates the extent to which Irish Romantic writers took an interest in the ‘processes of copying and its cultural meanings’. At the same time, she shows us how such concerns led to ‘technically ingenious attempts to add texture and tactility to the depiction of the Irish past’, partly through the appropriation of antiquarian methodologies but also through the use of facsimiles, lithography, and other developments in print culture. Connolly’s chapter demonstrates the ways in which literary texts in the period were concerned not only to accurately and minutely detail the past, but also to adduce evidence of such historical and cultural authenticity, working against

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teleological accounts of the birth of the modern historical method which see Romantic history as unconcerned with the evidentiary foundations of the past. This volume, like Connolly’s chapter, stands, above all, as a corrective to such teleologies. N OT E S 1. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1. 2. Beverley Southgate, History Meets Fiction (Harlow: Pearson, 2009), 23. As Southgate notes at 39, Frank Ankersmit also sees his position as a ‘rehabilitation’ of Romanticism in Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 10. See also Ankersmit, ‘The Origins of Postmodernist Historiography’, in Jerzy Topolski (ed.), Historiography between Modernism and Postmodernism: Contributions to the Methodology of the Historical Research (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), 107–19. 3. For critiques of literary and philosophical New Historicism, see Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987);John J. Zammito, ‘Are we Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophy of History, and “Practising Historians” ’, Journal of Modern History, 65 (1993), 783–814; and Jeffrey Folks, ‘The Dangerous Irrelevance of Recent Theory’, Modern Age, 48/2 (2006), 130–9. For critiques of literary New Historicism by literary scholars see e.g. David Simpson, ‘Literary Criticism and the Return to “History” ’, Critical Inquiry, 14 (1988), 721–47;Alan Liu, ‘The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism’, ELH 56 (1989), 721–71; and Marlon Ross, ‘Contingent Predictions: The Newest Historicism and the Question of Method’, Centennial Review, 34 (1990), 485–538. 4. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), 296–7. On this point, see LaCapra, Rethinking, 240. This is not, of course, to suggest that historians have totally ignored literary theory and criticism. See e.g. Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 5. As Chris Lorenz has pointed out, ‘[i]‌t is not accidental that many postmodernists regard Romantic historiography as the paradigm of all history writing’. See his ‘Can Histories be True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the “Metaphorical Turn” ’, History and Theory, 37 (1998), 326. 6. Stephen Bann, ‘The Sense of the Past: Image, Text, and Object in the Formation of Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989), 103–4. On the way in which this division has been deepened by narrativist accounts, see Chris Lorenz’s argument that metaphoric narrativism is an inverted form of positivism because it maintains ‘a deep conceptual

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dichotomy. . . between “objective” empirical observation and “subjective” intepretation’ (314). 7. See e.g. Ian Hesketh, ‘Writing History in Macaulay’s Shadow: J. R. Seeley, E. A. Freeman, and the Audience for Scientific History in Late Victorian Britain’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 22/2 (2011), 30–56. 8. On disciplinarity, see e.g. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (eds), This is Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and G. E. R. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Elites, Learning, and Innovation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 9. For national approaches, see e.g. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For translational approaches, see e.g. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (eds), The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Jenny Mander (ed.), Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007). More generally, see Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdes, ‘Rethinking Literary History Comparatively’, American Council of Learned Socities, Occasional Paper, 27: . 10. For an overview of different approaches to Romantic scholarship in France, Germany, and Britain, see Donald R. Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 187–90. 11. Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2. 12. See James Chandler, ‘Introduction’, in James K. Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ­ ersity Press, 2009), 8. 13. Orrin N. C. Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), ch. 2. 14. Michael John Kooy, ‘Romanticism and Coleridge’s Idea of History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60/4 (1999), 717–35. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4. On this point, see also Liu, ‘Power of Formalism’, 745–6; and Jon Klancher, ‘English Romanticism and Cultural Production’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989), 77–88. 15. Kelvin Everest, ‘Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: Historical Reading and Editorial Theory’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 306. 16. On the differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ historicism, see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Towards a Poetics of Culture’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989), 1–14 (esp. 5–12). 17. On over-contextualization, see Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 192. 18. Ross, ‘Contingent Predictions’, 492, 495.

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19. Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome McGann, and Paul Hamilton, Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 20. Chandler, England in 1819, 53. 21. Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 9–10. As Hans Kellner has pointed out, ‘[i]‌f the first stage of the linguistic turn was largely formal, aiming at a description of how historical texts work (i.e. a poetics), it has been followed by a rhetorical phase that is keenly sensitive to genre, where the expectations of an audience may be said to guide the writing of the text’. Kellner, ‘Introduction: Describing Redescriptions’, in Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (eds), A New Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5. 22. As Stephen Bann has rightly argued, a new analysis of historiogra phy and its linguistic turn cannot simply be defined as a ‘return to rhetoric’. See The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 37–40. On the term ‘historical epistemology’, see Chandler, England in 1819, 138. 23. Chandler, ‘Introduction’, Cambridge History, 12. 24. Hutcheon and Valdes, ‘Rethinking Literary History Comparatively’. 25. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Languages and their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought’, in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London: Methuen, 1972), 3–41. 26. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘Literary Criticism and the Politics of the New Historicism’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989), 214. 27. See e.g. the excellent summary of various positions in relation to this issue in Patrick Karl O’Brien, ‘An Engagement with Postmodern Foes, Literary Theorists and Friends on the Borders of History’, History in Focus (Autumn 2001): . 28. Ina Ferris, ‘Transformations of the Novel: II’, in James Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 484. 29. Bann, Inventions of History, 35. 30. As Alun Munslow has so rightly pointed out, postmodernists and New Historicists tend to ‘criticise a historical method that has never really existed’, depicting historians as far more naive than they actually are. See ‘Editorial’, Rethinking History, 1/2 (1997), 1. 31. Linda Orr, ‘The Revenge of Literature: A History of History’, New Literary History, 18 (1986), 4. See also Michael Certeau’s claim that literature is the ‘repressed other’ of history in Heterologies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 219. 32. Louis O. Mink, ‘The Autonomy of Historical Understanding’, History and Theory, 5 (1966), 24, 25.

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33. See e.g. James K. Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry D. Harootunian (eds), Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 34. Lionel Gossman, The Empire Unpossess’d: An Essay on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. xiii: ‘We now know that there are no firm boundaries separating literary from other forms of writing.’ For interrogations of scientific empiricism, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edn (1975; London: Continuum, 1989); and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). On the ways in which science has since adapted to these challenges and shifted the terms of the debate, see John H. Zammito, ‘History/ Philosophy/Science: Some Lessons for Philosophy of History’, History and Theory, 50 (2011), 390–413. 35. Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce, in The Glasgow Edition of The Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. R. H. Campbell et al., 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), iv. 117–18. 36. Michael C. Amrozowicz, ‘ “Intertainment” versus “Fact”: Form and Content in Adam Smith’s Poetics’: . 37. Walter Scott, ‘Review of Ellis & Ritson’, Edinburgh Review, 7 (Jan. 1806), 387–413. 38. Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 204–5. Yoon Sun Lee, ‘A Divided Inheritance: Scott’s Antiquarian Novel and the British Nation’, ELH 64/2 (1997), 538. 39. Rigney, Imperfect Histories, 26. 40. Chandler, England in 1819, p. xv. Robert Mayer, ‘The Illogical Status of Novelistic Discourse: Scott’s Footnotes for the Waverley Novels’, ELH 66 (1999), 911–12. 41. Ferris, ‘Transformations of the Novel’, 477. 42. On this point, see Ann Rigney, ‘Relevance, Revision, and the Fear of Long Books’, in Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (eds), A New Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 140–3, 145–6. 43. Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘On History’, Edinburgh Review, 47 (May 1828), 331–67. On this point, see Terry Otten, ‘Macaulay’s Critical Theory of Imagination and Reason’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28 (1969), 39. 44. White, Tropics, 122. On the still prevalent potency of the ‘coherence norm’ see Rigney, ‘Fear of Long Books’; and Allan Megill, ‘ “Grand Narrative” and the Discipline of History’, in Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (eds), A New Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 151–73. 45. Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7. 46. See e.g. Lionel Gossman, ‘History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification’, in Between History and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

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University Press, 1990), 229–56; and ‘History as Decipherment: Romantic Historiography and the Discovery of the Other’, New Literary History, 18 (1986), 32–57. On the importance of Gossman’s articles, see Ceri Crossley, ‘History, Nature and National Identity in France, 1800–30’, Literature and History, 10/1 (2001), 18–27. For a more ‘history-oriented’ approach to the issue, see Jacques Revel, ‘History and the Social Sciences’, in The Cambridge History of Science, vii. Modern Social Sciences, 391–404 (esp. 391–2). 47. Karen O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Paula Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2006), 389. 48. Crossley, ‘History, Nature and National Identity’, 18. 49. J. R. Seeley, ‘History and Politics I’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 40 (Aug. 1879), 291–2. 50. Orr, ‘Revenge of Literature’, 1. 51. Georges Lefebvre, La Naissance de l’historiographie moderne (Paris: Flammarion, 1971). See e.g. Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 13/3–4 (1950), 285–315; and J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, i. The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 52. See White, Metahistory, 187–8; Donald R. Kelley, Fortunes of History: Historial Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven: Yale University Press: 2003), 133; and Jörn Rüsen, ‘Rhetorics and Aesthetic of History: Leopold von Ranke’, History and Theory, 29 (1990), 190–204 (esp. 193). 53. Jonathan Kent Wright, ‘History and Historicism’, in Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (eds), The Modern Social SciencesThe Cambridge History of Science, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), vii. 123. 54. Kelley, Descent of Ideas, 169. 55. Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus, OH: Ohio State Univeristy Press, 1985), 216ff. See also Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archeologists in Victorian England 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1986). Bann, Inventions of History, 29. 56. Wright, ‘History and Historicism’, 126. 57. Kelley, Fortunes of History, 232. See also Kelley, ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Problem of Knowledge and the Concept of Discipline’, in Donald R. Kelley (ed.), History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 1–12, 13–28. 58. O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel’, 390. Cf. Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). An example of the second approach is provided by Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the porous boundaries between history and fiction more generally, see e.g. Suzanne Gearhart, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

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1984); and Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 59. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 40–2. 60. O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel’, 391. 61. Ferris, ‘Transformations of the Novel’, 477. 62. On the ‘crisis of historicism’ in the early 20th cent., see Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthney, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 63. On the term ‘historicism’ see, George Iggers, ‘Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56/1 (1995), 129–52. 64. See e.g. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 114. 65. For this view of late Enlightenment thinking, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, 10; and Duncan Forbes, ‘Natural Law and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (eds), The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 86–204. 66. Anthony Grafton, ‘The Footnote from De Thou to Ranke’, History and Theory, 33/4 (1994), 65. 67. On this point, see Mike Goode, ‘Mediating Romantic Historical Novels’, in ‘Novel Prospects: Teaching Romantic-Era Fiction: Special Issue of the Romantic Pedagogy Commons’, Romantic Circles (Aug. 2008), para. 1: . 68. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 25. 69. Crossley, ‘History, Nature and National Identity’, 26. On Germany, see Kelley, Fortunes of History, 4; and Troy R. E. Paddock, ‘Rethinking Friedrich Meinecke’s Historicism, Rethinking History’, Journal of Theory and Practice 10 (2006), 95–108. 70. See e.g. Bann, Inventions of History, 37. 71. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, tr. Hannah and Stanley Michell (London: Merlin Press, 1962). 72. See e.g. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Proofs and Possibilities: In the Margins of Natalie Zemon Davies’ The Return of Martin Guerre’, Yearkbook of Comparative and General Literaure, 37 (1988), 125. On Ginzburg and Lukács, see Chandler, England in 1819, 260–2. 73. Herbert Schaedelbach e.g. distinguishes between three sorts of ‘historismus’ in Geschichts philosophie nach Hegel: Die Problem des Historismus (Freiburg/ Munich: Karl Aller, 1974). For a timely critique of the euro-centric outlook of historicism and its complex identity politics, see the introduction to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 3–23. 74. Friedrich Meinecke, Historicism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, tr. J. E. Anderson and H. D. Schmidt (1936; London: Routledge, 1972), p. lv. Ernst Troeltsch, ‘The Idea of Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics’,

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in Otto von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500–1800, tr. E. Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), appendix 1, 211. 75. As Phillips points out, even White’s analyses of historical texts have less to do with the verbal textures and structural forms of narrative prose than with the linguistic protocols, formalized schema, and conceptual strategies that ‘pre-figure’ the historical field (Society and Sentiment, 9–10). 76. See e.g. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Origins of the Study of the Past: A Comparative Approach’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4 (1962), 209–46, and The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Momigliano tends to limit his argument to the origins of the modern historical method in ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’. 77. Chandler, England in 1819, esp. ‘Introduction’, 3–46. 78. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds), The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2. 79. See Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), esp. the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’. 80. Thomas Reid, ‘Of Taste in General’, in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh: J. Bell, 1785), 720. 81. See e.g. Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 2000). 82. Greg Kucich, ‘Joanna Baillie and the Re-staging of History and Gender’, in Thomas C. Crochnis (ed.), Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 109–29. 83. Joanna Baillie, ‘Introductory Discourse’, to Plays on the Passions (London, 1851), 2, 5, 8. On this point, see Porscha Fermanis, ‘Countering the Counterfactual: Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821) and the Paratexts of History’, Women’s Writing, 19/3 (2012), 333–50 (esp. 336). 84. Nicholas Tromans, David Wilkie, The People’s Painter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 157. 85. Rigney, Imperfect Histories, 8. As Donald Kelley reminds us in Fortunes of History, the term ‘historicism’ is itself Romantic in origin, appearing first in fragments left by Novalis and Schlegel (327). 86. Porscha Fermanis, ‘William Godwin’s History of the Commonwealth and the Psychology of Individual History’, Review of English Studies, 61 (2010), 777. 87. Chandler, England in 1819, 131. 88. Mink, ‘Autonomy’, 30. 89. Simon Jarvis, ‘For a Poetics of Verse’, PMLA 125/4 (2010), 931–5.

I H I S TO RY, R H E TO R I C , GENRE

1 The History Girls Charlotte Smith’s History of England and the Politics of Women’s Educational History Greg Kucich

I Alan Bennett’s transatlantic theatrical sensation, The History Boys (2004), now also released as a major film, brilliantly stages numerous controversies over the social value of history as educational practice. Some of these episodes, particularly regarding gender, bear intriguing relations to major debates about educational history by women writers of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During a practice interview for sixth form English boys at a middling northern school trying to make the improbable leap to Oxford and Cambridge, the school’s one female historian, Mrs Lintott, derides the marginalization of women in world history. ‘Can you for a moment’, she asks the room of male auditors, imagine how dispiriting it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude?. . . History’s not such a frolic for women as it is for men. Why should it be? They never got round the conference table. In 1919, for instance, they just arranged the flowers then gracefully retired. . . . History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. . . .What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.1

Lady Morgan echoed the complaints of many of her female contemporaries when she anticipated this point two centuries earlier in her ironically titled history of women’s global experience, Woman and Her Master (1840). ‘From the earliest aggregations of society’, Morgan declares, ‘man, in his shallow pride, has laboured [through the writing of history] to perpetuate [merely] the memory of his own imperfection, the story of his selfishness and his errors’.2 If female writers and readers of the Romantic era set a precedent for the profound dissatisfaction of Bennett’s female

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historian, they also formulated early models for Mrs Lintott’s corrective efforts to insert a female presence into a modified historical record through her own educational labour. Their inventive responses to questions about the ‘uses of history’ in the education of girls, as Anna Barbauld put it in her 1826 Legacy for Young Ladies, established themselves as an alternative group we might call ‘the history girls’, who developed important new possibilities for altering the structures of educational history.3 Such creative adjustments not only reinscribed a female presence in the chronicles of the past but also furthered the emerging cause of women’s rights. What made this new kind of history so particularly ‘useful’ was the strong potential for intervention in even broader national debates about the most urgent political issues of the time. Its promulgation burst out of an even more wide-ranging explosion of women’s historical writing and reading in Britain during the Romantic era, which has only now begun to receive serious attention from scholars of the period’s gendered writing and politics. Thanks to the recent work of Devoney Looser, Miriam Burstein, Mary Spongberg, and Lisa Kasmer, among others, we have come to recognize how women writers of the period developed a stunning variety of historiographical innovations—such as Catharine Macaulay’s eight-volume History of England (1763–83), Mary Hays’s Female Biography (1803), Lucy Aikin’s poetic Epistles on Women (1810), Joanna Baillie’s historical plays, Felicia Hemans’s Records of Woman (1828), Mary Shelley’s historical novels and late biographical essays, Charlotte Smith’s historical fiction, and Lady Morgan’s global history of women—to formulate one of their most salient means of political engagement: the construction of what I have termed elsewhere an alternative or feminist historiography in the service of women’s rights as well as broader types of political reform.4 Although such studies have moved us beyond the early positions of Joan Scott on women’s general ‘marginalization’ (until recently) from history writing and reading, we still remain in a somewhat early stage of investigating the vast fecundity and strategic political functions of this revisionary historical field.5 Despite the important work of Mitzi Myers, Anne Mellor, Mary Hilton, and Stephen Bygrave on the political functions of women’s educational writing, the significance of the large movement of women writers into the genre of educational history remains generally unexplored. My aim is to suggest how sustained analysis of this historiographical phenomenon can enrich our deepening awareness of the intriguing possibilities and limits for women’s discursive intervention in national politics through the reimaging of history. I trace a variety of different priorities in these historical lessons, but I concentrate on recurring experiments with the key role of affective readings of history as a discursive method for promoting women’s rights and political reform in general. My final section focuses



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on Charlotte Smith’s particularly sophisticated ‘use’ of this affective historicism in her educational History of England, which both advances and qualifies its unique value for inciting women’s participation in the national progress of liberty and political improvement.

II Jane Austen offers pithy and wickedly humorous insights into this major cultural phenomenon. Many students of Austen will remember Catherine Moreland’s memorable repudiation of conventional, masculine-biased history in Northanger Abbey (1818). ‘[H]‌istory, real solemn history’, she declares, ‘I cannot be interested in. . . . I read it a little, as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.’6 In Persuasion (1818), Austen’s more mature heroine, Anne Elliot, qualifies Captain Harville’s insinuation that ‘all histories’ prove the inferiority of women by pointing out a similar bias: ‘if you please’, she protests, ‘no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands’.7 While these episodes stand out as keen examples of Austen’s disdain for conventional history, their sensational tone has led many readers to overlook Eleanor Tilney’s retort to Catherine: ‘I am fond of history. . . . If [an historical] speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made—and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great.’ Catherine holds out for a bit, irritably astonished that historians should go ‘to so much trouble in filling great volumes. . . labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls’. Henry Tilney takes the bait and playfully turns Catherine’s extreme language back on her. ‘ “That little boys and girls should be tormented”, said Henry, “is what no one at all acquainted with human nature in a civilized state can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished historians, I must observe that. . . they are perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature time of life. I use the verb ‘to torment’, as I observed to be your own method, instead of ‘to instruct’, supposing them to be now admitted as synonymous.” ’8 Austen’s own strong desire to torment/instruct readers of history inspired her ebulliently parodic History of England, produced in 1791 when she was only 16 years old and comically illustrated by her sister, Cassandra. Specifically targeting Oliver Goldsmith’s abridged educational

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History of England (1771), which she annotated with Blakean fury, Austen mocks its political biases, its relentless catechism of dates, and, above all, its relative silence about women. She triumphantly introduces herself on the title page as ‘a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian’, and proclaims that ‘[t]‌here will be very few Dates in this History’. The content of this short manuscript effusion gleefully reveals the prejudices of the Austen sisters, as manifested in Cassandra’s drawings of a gentle, beauteous Mary Stuart and a witch-like Queen Elizabeth. More to the specific point, Austen’s narrative highlights the elision of women from educational history and reinscribes their sufferings into the historical record. ‘It is to be supposed that Henry [IV] was married, since he had certainly four sons’, Austen begins, ‘but it is not in my power to inform the Reader who was his Wife.’ She can identify the wife of Edward IV, Elizabeth Woodville, specifically to emphasize the lamentable fate of this ‘poor Woman’, confined as a widow in a convent by that iniquitous ‘Monster’, Henry VII.9 These caustic observations may only present a fragmentary early effort, but they do reveal serious concerns about the shape of history, its many wounds, and its glaring gaps. To end her narrative with the death of Charles I, for instance, can be read as Austen’s way of characterizing history as tragic rather than progressive, especially for women. She would return to these concerns again and again, with much greater complexity, throughout her novel-writing career. Such a sharp corrective response to historical writing in general and educational history in particular joins that large, variegated cultural project to feminize modes of historical understanding in the service of political reform, which itself grew out of seismic shifts and surges in mainstream historical writing and reading throughout the latter half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The tremendous rise of Clio and her female attendants during this period stemmed from deeply complex, multitudinous causes, foremost of which were: the establishment of that formidable Scottish school of historians, including Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, and Ferguson; the phenomenal character of the French Revolution—shot forth, according to Burke, as the single most astonishing event in human history, thereby creating the demand to historicize it and situate it in relation to all other great revolutions; the global expansion of empire and the concomitant need for histories of other lands and peoples; the exponential growth of commerce, industry, and a new middle-class readership eager for stories about itself, conjoined with a major shift in historiography toward social and domestic history designed precisely to interest this new market of male and female readers; the glaring absence of women in conventional history that moved Austen and so many of her female contemporaries to wrest that phallic historical pen back from men in order to write a new ‘herstory’ of their own;



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and the huge paucity of histories for children, which inspired the spread of a massive new genre, educational history. In Stephan Bann’s phrase, history thus became ‘the paradigmatic form of [all] knowledge’, with historical narrative and revisionism serving as potent discursive instruments for waging the most powerful ideological and political conflicts of the Romantic era, regarding issues as diverse as revolutionary politics, the slave trade, colonialism, and parliamentary reform, as well as women’s rights and many other urgent concerns.10 Although we are now aware that women entered this burgeoning historical field in large numbers, we still have much to learn regarding their myriad forms of engagement, particularly in relation to educational history. Little scholarly attention has focused specifically on women’s writing of educational history for girls and ‘young ladies’, despite the massive outpourings of this new genre and the substantial growth over the last decade of scholarship on children’s literature and educational writing by women, led by such figures as Mitzi Myers, Alan Richardson, James Holt McGavran, Judith Plotz, Mary Hilton, and Andrew O’Malley.11 The sustained concern in this body of work with the links between educational literature and the state of the nation suggests the great potential for political involvement through the narration of history for educational purposes. For women writers in particular, educational literature offered both a socially acceptable publishing genre for women and one of the liveliest discursive opportunities for multiple, often conflicting types of intervention in the shaping of social consciousness, national government, and foreign policy. Nina Baym has united these intersecting historical, social, and political trajectories in the American context, demonstrating the significant impact of women’s educational history writing on the formation of early American political identity.12 Applying Baym’s mode of inquiry to the British Romantic era will initiate the means for a comprehensive understanding of why and how women educational writers put history to such extensive political use. III An outgrowth from the general rise of historical narration in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, educational history arose as a rapidly expanding new genre produced by male and female authors alike, specifically designed for school and home instruction. This development stemmed from the significant increase in schools, especially for girls, during the eighteenth century, and the related outpouring of theoretical treatises on the best methods for educating girls and young ladies. Schools for

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girls had existed in England, on a limited scale, since the medieval age, and exceptional cases of female education in aristocratic circles, such as Thomas More’s daughters, occurred throughout the Renaissance. However, the ‘effective beginning of mass education’ in the eighteenth century, as Alan Richardson records, and the growing power of the commercial classes with upward social aspirations, coupled with new Enlightenment theories derived from Locke and Bacon on the social significance of education for children, produced an unprecedented surge in girls’ schools across the social spectrum—charity schools and evangelical Sunday schools for the poor; émigré schools run by refugees from the French Revolution; the ubiquitous boarding schools for daughters of families aspiring to higher social status; and special seminaries for young ladies.13 By the mid eighteenth century, over 1,300 charity schools had sprung up throughout England, and London charity schools for girls had emerged in Spitalfields, Whitechapel, East Smithfield, Holborn, and elsewhere. Hackney grew so noteworthy for its high concentration of girls’ boarding schools that the district became known generally as ‘The Ladies’ University of Female Arts’.14 Boarding schools for girls had mushroomed so widely across the country by 1792 that Clara Reeve, complaining about their extremely dubious quality, noted: ‘In every town, village, and even hamlet, there is one or more persons who take upon themselves the great and important charge of female education: over their doors may be seen in letters of gold, A Boarding School for Young Ladies.’15 Widespread dissatisfaction like Reeve’s with the quality of such boarding schools contributed to a large increase in home schooling by governesses and tutors for the daughters of middle-class families. Such a revolution in the material history of female education inspired in turn a prolific, intensely polemical rise in theoretical works on girls’ education. Particularly welcoming to women authors, this genre featured profoundly influential works by such notable female and male authors as Rousseau and Madame de Genlis in France; and in England such contending figures as James Fordyce, John Gregory, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Astell, Hester Chapone, Catharine Macaulay, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Clara Reeve, Anna Barbauld, Jane West, and many others. Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind; Addressed to a Young Lady, published in 1773, went through twenty-five editions by 1844. Janet Todd records that between 1760 and 1820 ‘almost a hundred books were published on female education which became the site of many of the. . . political discussions of the day’.16 Such volume and emphasis, given the impact on teachers and on children, who were widely viewed as the nation’s developing citizens, made educational writing one of the most important genres in which women



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could participate in national politics. Although the views of so many disparate authors vary widely, particularly regarding women’s intellectual potential and social role, a fundamental consensus underpins these works about the vital function of education in promoting the welfare of the nation. Godwin argues in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) that ‘the characters of [individuals] are determined in all their essential circumstances by education’. Wollstonecraft claims in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that female education contributes substantially to ‘the true principle of patriotism. . . [and] the moral and civil interest of mankind’. Reeve in Plans of Education (1792) concurs that female education plays an essential role in ‘promoting the good of society’.17 A substantial portion of these works actually focuses on the dire problems of female education and its current failure to enhance national welfare. Sustained criticism centres on the ubiquitous boarding schools and their obsession with superficial accomplishments—music, dancing, a smattering of French and Italian—designed to assist the daughters of class-climbing families to attract wealthy or noble husbands. The pious More and radical Wollstonecraft thus found themselves uncharacteristically united in condemning what More called ‘[t]‌his frenzy of accomplishments’ and what Wollstonecraft assailed as the compulsion of schools to turn out so many ‘alluring mistresses’ rather than ‘rational’ women.18 To illustrate the futility of this immensely popular mode of female education, More computed that a certain boarding school girl began learning music at 6 and practised four hours a day omitting Sundays all the year round, so that by the time she reached 18 she had devoted no less than 14,400 hours of her life to playing scales; and eventually she married a man who disliked music.19 Despite such widespread repudiation of what Wollstonecraft termed ‘a false system of education’, many theorists of female learning recognized positive conceptual models of girls’ schools, such as Mary Astell’s 1694 Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and well-functioning examples, such as Reeve’s notice of Mrs Scriven’s ‘Seminary of Female Education’, which opened in Middlesex in 1788.20 Moreover, numerous accomplished female writers—such as Mary Robinson, Sarah Trimmer, and Mary Russell Mitford—attended effective girls’ schools that helped launch them on their nationally influential careers. It was in the recognition of these successful models, and in related arguments for how female learning should be corrected, that educational theorists of the day, influenced by the rise of history as a paramount discipline of knowledge, came to champion historical learning as one of the most important serious subjects for girls and young ladies. Reeve flags ‘history’, for example, as one of the leading subjects in Mrs Scriven’s seminary. Wollstonecraft recommends among her top fields of learning ‘the study of

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history and politics. . . on. . . [an] extensive scale’. Chapone dedicates an entire chapter of her Letters on the Improvement of the Mind to ‘the Manner and Course of Reading History’ and instructs her ideal female reader: ‘It will be necessary for you to observe some regular plan in your historical studies, which can never be perused with advantage otherwise than in a continued series.’ ‘[A]‌woman may decline without blame many subjects of literature’, Barbauld declares, ‘but to be ignorant of history is not permitted to any of a cultivated mind.’21 This kind of overwhelming endorsement, reinforced by male educational theorists as different in outlook as Fordyce and Godwin, prompted a massive expansion in the new genre of educational history designed primarily for the rising commercial classes in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hundreds of titles published during these decades, for boys as well as girls, are located in the Bodleian Library’s Opie Collection of Children’s Literature. The list includes original works by well-known male and female writers of vastly different political orientations—such as Godwin, Smith, and Trimmer—as well as scores of British histories, European histories, classical histories, sacred histories, and universal histories produced by male and female writers little known to us today. The field had already swelled to such a point by 1806 that Smith prefaced her own History of England with an apologetic justification for augmenting the genre: ‘The Histories of England are. . . so numerous that it would seem unnecessary to compile another, especially as so many are written professedly for the schools. It appeared, however, to be desirable to produce one. . . chiefly for the perusal of young ladies.’22 Considering the special combined opportunities of historical and educational writing for women writers seeking to engage with national politics, Smith’s way of constructing her history as a ‘female text’ for author and readers tended to dominate the genre. Booming sales and multiple reprints for school and home use attended such female-oriented works as Jane Marcet’s three separate volumes of historical Conversations For the Use of Children (1842); Mrs Markham’s histories of England and France; Maria Elizabeth Budden’s multiple volumes of True Stories taken from classical and modern history; and the list goes on. Women authors brought similar levels of prodigious industry to the writing of more advanced histories, like Smith’s, specifically designed for young ladies at boarding schools, such as Louisa Capper’s A Poetical History of England, Written for the Use of the Young Ladies Educated at Rothbury-House School (1810) and Charlotte Cowley’s earlier The Ladies History of England (1780) (used, according to its subscription list, at several dozen boarding schools throughout Britain). Such educational ‘uses’ for these texts spanned a wide range of political causes promoted, from both liberal and conservative positions,



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throughout the proliferating genre: Trimmer’s A Description of a Set of Prints of English History (1801) celebrates national patriotism and Britain’s imperial ‘sovereignty of the seas’; Mrs Markham’s Historical Conversations (1836) and Elizabeth Helme’s The History of England (1804), in contrast, take European imperialism to task; Maria Budden’s True Stories, from Ancient History (1822) and Charlotte Smith’s Minor Morals [and] Historical Anecdotes (1798) condemn wars of conquest in general.23 The cause of abolition receives sustained support in Budden’s True Stories from English History (1826), Elizabeth Rowse’s Outlines of English History in Verse (1808), and Markham’s History of England (1823). The narrator, Mrs B, in Marcet’s Conversations on the History of England indicts religious fanaticism and deplores the unjust treatment of women forced into unwanted marriages to ‘old and disagreeable’ men under medieval codes of aristocratic law. ‘How shocking!’ Mrs B’s daughter, Sophy, exclaims.24 The wrongs of woman, in fact, figure largely throughout the genre, as do examples of strong women who take public action, such as Maria Callcott’s portrait in Little Arthur’s History of England (1835) of Lady Russell’s effort to save her husband from state execution. Such wide-ranging emphases collectively reinsert women into the records of the past as historical actors as well as narrators. Their fundamental engagement with national politics also provides models for young female readers to exercise in mature years a similar discursive kind of public agency. However, many of those who produced such activist lessons for young ladies still remained dissatisfied with the basic learning methods and modes of political outlook in educational history for both sexes. In reaction, they sought to cultivate not simply a particular set of social priorities but also a different underlying type of historical consciousness. Smith expresses her wish, for instance, to range beyond ‘all that should be [considered] necessary to be known’ in standard histories for girls (History of England, v). Mrs Markham determines to give the readers of her History of England ‘something more’ than what is normally provided in educational history. There are ‘some things to be learned from the History of England’, explains Callcott, that exceed the standard narrations of most histories for boys and girls.25 One adjustment entailed complicating the practice of teaching children to memorize, through tedious repetition, mere dates and names of rulers—most popularly disseminated by Richmal Mangnall’s Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the use of Young People (1798)—which is precisely the mode of historical education that Jane Austen deplores. ‘In the study of history’, More offers a representative correction: ‘[T]‌he instructor will accustom the pupil not merely to store her memory with facts and anecdotes, and to ascertain dates and epochs.’ Instead, she will

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seek, as Chapone elaborates, a ‘regular plan’ or ‘course’ that will track political developments, delve into deep human motives for historical action, and thereby enlarge the mind’s intellectual capacity—the primary goal of much educational theory by women.26 IV The other key and arguably more substantial innovation in the more sophisticated educational histories by women follows a central strategy in broader patterns of women’s historical revisionism in the Romantic era of deepening the sympathetic registers developing in later eighteenth-century historiography. This more affective view of the past, emerging throughout a wide range of experimental histories by women writers, helped to shape a new historical consciousness more open to the social wrongs of the past and more committed to righting their persistence in the present. I have argued elsewhere, extending the work of Mark Salber Phillips, that the growth of middle-class commercialism in eighteenth-century British society inspired Hume’s generation of historians, dissatisfied with the dominant plots of military strife and monarchial power struggles in conventional historiography, to place a new emphasis on commerce, industry, the arts, social relations, and domestic life and its affective components, which created an unprecedented historical interest in social life and the realm of affect welcoming to women as readers and writers of history.27 Numerous experiments by women with what Phillips calls the ‘affective possibilities’ of historical narration emerged in a wide range of genres, such as historical fiction, historical drama, biography, memoirs, and even political history. Nevertheless, a significant number of women writers found the new history much too curtailed in its explorations of affect and social life, which provoked calls like Catharine Macaulay’s when openly rivalling Hume in her own History of England, for more ‘sympathizing tenderness’ in the shaping of ‘historical knowledge’.28 Far from a withdrawal into circumscribed domestic spheres, this revisionary outlook on the past sought to infuse, as in Joanna Baillie’s theatre of social education, more sympathy and mercy into the persisting political entanglements of the present.29 This new alignment of developing trends in historical writing triggered what was arguably the most substantial political ‘use’ of women’s educational history. The stronger cultivation of interiority and affect intensified the tendency among some writers of children’s history to focus beyond mere dates and events toward a new emphasis on manners, social life, and the deeper, affective meanings of history. In thus following the larger trajectories of the new Enlightenment historiography, writers of



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these educational works dismissed, as Godwin put in his History of Rome (1809), ‘dry and repulsive details’ in order to promote ideals of ‘grand virtue’ and narrate poignant accounts of suffering designed to ‘interest the affections, and to soften the heart’.30 Yet despite this inclination towards affective history, the Godwinian model remained fixed for the most part in exemplary models of public virtue, or what he calls ‘noble sentiments and actions’.31 Just as Macaulay sought to deepen the affective registers of Enlightenment historiography, many female writers of educational history worked to push the genre further in the direction, as Smith emphasized, of ‘manners, dresses. . . arts’ (p. v), and the interior, emotional lives of historical subjects. When Wollstonecraft included historical excerpts in her collection of readings for girls, The Female Reader (1789), for instance, she singled out from Hume and Robertson only instances of affective depth: such as Queen Elizabeth’s profound exertion of mind to control her ‘tender passions’; and Mary Stuart’s ‘sufferings’ and ‘sorrow’, which excite the historical reader to ‘shed. . . tears’ of ‘commiseration’.32 In this refocusing of historical consciousness, women educators frequently narrated the past through emotive conversations between parents, usually mothers, or benevolent maternal mentors and their loving children-pupils. Marcet’s Conversations on the History of England, for example, takes the form of a sustained interchange between Mrs B and her daughter, Sophy, which is inspired by Sophy’s own reading of the mother–child conversations in Callcott’s History of England. Budden presents her True Stories from English History as the work of ‘A Mother. . . Affectionately’ delivered to ‘her Two Dear Little Nieces’. This relational format, incorporated from other types of women’s educational writings, such as Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788), provides a narrative basis for advancing a fundamental historical outlook grounded in affective sympathies for the sufferings and tribulations of individuated historical subjects, both famous and little known. Marcet’s Mrs B. points out to her young charges that ‘the more you enter into [history]. . . the more you see and feel the sufferings of the individual, both in body and mind’. She counsels pity for the grief of Charles Stuart, the Pretender, even while repudiating his misguided policies. Budden, describing herself as ‘a tenderly attached mother’, counsels her children when assessing the dubious actions of figures from classical history: ‘Surely mercy is sometimes as much the duty of man as justice’. With similar emphasis, Mrs Markham counsels her daughter, Mary, to approach the past with a guiding sympathy ‘for the sufferings of every fellow-creature’. ‘History’, Barbauld concludes in delineating its ‘uses’, should ‘draw the. . . tear of sensibility’.33 If these authors sought, on the one hand, to develop the rational minds of their ‘history girls’, they clearly aimed to complement such rational

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education with the same kind of affective consciousness that Macaulay and other female writers were promulgating in their adult forms of revisionary historicism. As with Macaulay’s project, this deepening of historical sensibility did not mean retreating into a private world of affective indulgence in the past, but just the reverse: as with Baillie’s theatre of sympathetic education, it encouraged the flow of mercy and sympathy into the tumult of public debates about persisting political wrongs in the present. Elizabeth Helme highlights this application when explaining to the daughter-pupil of her History of England that the ‘affections’ experienced in historical conversations should be extended to the good maintenance of ‘society’.34 If the realistic possibilities of this social influence seem limited by an enclosed circle of female education, the authors of these lessons for young ladies also imagined a more diversified audience. Many of their prefaces and dedications promote the appeal of their instruction to boys as well as girls, and some of their ‘conversations’, especially Mrs Markham’s, actually feature female pupils correcting the errors of male counterparts. In such expanded scenarios of education, they thus imagined ‘the history girls’ as so many present and future, to use Anne Mellor’s book title, ‘mothers of the nation’. V Perhaps the most complex example of this educational intersection between historical affect and engaged political improvement lies with Charlotte Smith’s History of England, from the Earliest Records to the Peace of Amiens. ‘The historian’, Smith remarks in summarizing the misdeeds of Henry VIII, particularly towards women, ‘sickens at the recital of this man’s inconsistency and tyranny, and turns disgusted from the record of blood’ (ii. 61). Smith found much to deplore in the records of the past, which she characterizes as ‘[t]‌he history of human misery and human crimes’ (i. 404); and she often describes historical writing as a ‘tedious’ and ‘[un]attractive’ genre (i. 1). However, like many women of her generation, she also viewed historical narration as ‘necessary’, tremendously important, and even ‘desirable’ (i. v), especially in its capacity to educate young women. She was so moved by the value of a new kind of ‘desirable’ history that she expanded the range of her educational writings in her later years to produce two volumes totalling 800 printed pages of an intellectually dense three-volume History of England, specifically designed for the use of young women at schools. It was brought out in 1806 by the radical publisher Richard Phillips as part of his broadly publicized series of ‘Elementary Books, for the Use of Schools and Young Persons’. Smith had



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broken off this project earlier when, as she explains in a preface published just several months before her death, poor health ‘aggravated by heavy family afflictions’ (i. v) forced her to turn over the third and final volume to an unnamed ‘competent. . . lady’ (i. vi), who was actually, as Gina Luria Walker has confirmed, Mary Hays. Despite that setback, the volumes made an impact among female as well as male readers, thanks partly to the affiliation with Phillips’s series and also because of Smith’s stature as a major poet and novelist (notwithstanding a certain dip in her popularity), which Phillips capitalized on by featuring her name on the title page of each volume, including the one she did not write. The two copies I have examined are each inscribed as part of the libraries of young women. One of these volumes made its way into the collection of the great nineteenthcentury editor and early promoter of women’s writings, Alexander Dyce, who published Specimens of British Poetesses in 1825. Smith clearly entered this popular field with her new History of England in the hopes of making money quickly and expediently, which shows in hasty narrations of major events, some unintended repetitions, and a conventional structuring of her narrative according to the successive reigns of monarchs from the Roman period up through the Restoration at the end of volume ii. Even when read with an eye to its female agenda, Smith’s History can still appear as a rather conventional model of historical exemplarity involving the celebration of virtues and talents in such predictably ‘illustrious’ women as Joan of Arc, Lady Jane Grey, and Queen Elizabeth. However, Smith also expends considerable time developing the kind of revisionary affective history that was changing the shape and impact of women’s educational history. She downplays wars and monarchial power struggles, for instance, just briefly touching ‘with reluctance’, as she puts it, on ‘scene[s]‌of blood and distraction’ (i. 301). In place of those sanguinary scenes, she cultivates an alternative ‘sympathetic’ emphasis on the emotional experience, and in particular the sufferings, of individuated, often female, historical subjects, such as the ‘wretched life’ of ‘indigence and misery’ endured by Jane Shore (i. 380), or the ‘incurable sorrow’ that overwhelmed Elizabeth after her fatal command to execute Essex (i. 170). Attentive to what Macaulay had called such ‘spectacles of suffering’ in the past, Smith even characterizes her history as the continuous story of so many examples of ‘public faction’ destroying ‘social and private sympathies’ (ii. 265). Smith distinctively feminizes this sympathetic historicism, representing women as ‘that sex whose generous minds know no bounds in their affections’ (i. 333). She structures her entire history as a sustained exercise in the exchange of female sympathies by presenting it in the epistolary format of a ‘Series of Letters to a Young Lady’. Such a gendered mode of

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historical sympathy accords with Smith’s recurring focus on the wrongs of woman in so many of her other writings. Yet her historical sympathies also extend to multiple types of sufferers, male and female, including many figures, like Charles I, whom she opposes on strictly political grounds. For Smith, moreover, affective history flags the injustice visited not just on individuals but on all oppressed communities, variously manifested in the plight women share with other wandering or outcast groups, such as Jews, the Irish, slaves, the poor, both Catholic and Protestant victims of religious tyranny, and indigenous peoples who are ‘expel[led] or exterminated’ by European colonial ‘pirate[s]‌and adventurer[s]’ (ii. 195). Historical empathy on this capacious level, though it may collapse important differences, moves Smith’s narrative beyond a mere lamentation for past miseries by calling out for correction of the persisting wrongs of the present. The affective quality of her wide historical scope thus expands the politics of sympathy displayed, as Jacqueline Labbe and Adriana Craciun have shown, in many of her other writings, such as the representation of displaced French émigrés in her poetic narrative The Emigrants (1793).35 Much as this ‘use’ of a feminized sympathetic historicism can engage with the politics of the present, recalling similar manoeuvres by Smith’s female contemporaries, it can also construct a plot of endless domestic suffering and paralysed victimization, which seems to elide the possibility of political redress or public agency for women. Smith’s historicism is arguably most compelling in its resistance to this slippage. Notwithstanding her deep commitment to the affective core of history, she also strives to contain excesses of sentiment in order to produce, at the same time, an activist model of political critique. Departing from the precedent of many female educational writings, she drops after the first chapter the epistolary sense of connection with the female reader of her letters, only identified as ‘MY DEAR E.’ (i. 1), turning instead throughout the rest of her two volumes to an objective style of narration. She also cuts short some of her spectacles of suffering, only devoting two paragraphs to the sensationally pathetic execution of Mary Stuart, for instance, while balancing her overall record of sorrowful women with multiple examples of active female intervention in the destiny of nations: Joan of Arc’s renowned heroism; the courageous leadership of ‘one of the most illustrious heroines in the lists of fame, the celebrated Jane de Montfort’, whose ‘political enthusiasm’ inspires her to lead a successful military resistance allied with the English against the French troops of Charles de Blois besieging Henneboone (i. 267); Queen Henrietta’s dominant influence over the mind of Charles I, animated by her superior ‘understanding [and] spirit’ (ii. 229); and the mother of King Alfred, who takes



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over his education and inspires, through her love of poetry and learning, his political ‘integrity’ (i. 27). Smith actually provides in her own substantial political commentary the most outstanding example in her History of active female engagement with national politics. For she balances her affective spectacles with sustained, highly informed analyses of the political, legal, and economic conditions of the various epochs of English history, from which she maps out a sophisticated historical teleology of particular relevance for the cause of women and other oppressed groups. She commends Alfred as an ‘illustrious monarch’, for instance, because of his indefatigable efforts to ‘frame a code of laws’ designed ‘to prevent oppression, and to cause equal justice to be every where distributed’ (i. 33). The Stuart dynasty, on the other hand, incurs powerful rebukes for its ‘infamous government[al]’ practices countenancing ‘perfidy, despotism, wanton cruelties and atrocities’ (ii. 405). In thus assessing the strengths and failings of government, Smith finds economic policy a key determinant in the welfare of the nation. The seventeenth-century civil war breaks out and wreaks such havoc primarily, she argues, because of the originating abuse of taxes imposed arbitrarily by the crown (ii. 231). In contrast, Elizabeth’s sound economic management, including her abolition of crown monopolies, produces a healthy commercial state conducive, significantly, to the well-being of women and their increasing acquisition of literary talents during an epoch to be celebrated as ‘an illustrious monument of the capacity and talents of the sex’ (ii. 172). The ‘most important of all [historical] topics’, Smith thus concludes, are not wars and Machiavellian power struggles, but rather ‘moral and political economy’, which ‘prepare the way for the human mind [male and female] to assert its dignity and freedom’ (ii. 172). In working out her own analyses of England’s developing moral and political economy, Smith discerns and vigorously promotes a core historical teleology based on the steady, though periodically interrupted, progress of civil liberties for all. Alfred’s laws established an ever developing love of freedom, she argues, which grew into a ‘sacred root’ (i. 211) with the restraint of abusive power in Magna Carta and eventually blossomed, with the ‘principles of the Reformation’, into what she calls ‘the English characteristic’ reliance on a ‘liberal and rational. . . spirit of inquiry’ (ii. 181, 178). That progressively strengthening spirit, she continues, acts to curtail superstition, injustice, and despotic power while ever expanding ‘civil liberty’ (ii. 207). Smith complicates this optimistic history of liberty, however, by tracking its recurrent disruption by religious and party extremism, as manifested in the ‘dangerous superstitions’ motivating the Catholic Gunpowder Plot (ii. 187), the ‘religious enthusiasm’ driving the European Crusades (i. 101), and the ‘effects of [party and religious]

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fanaticism’ in the torture and execution of Anne Ascue by Henry VIII’s henchmen (ii. 260). The most astute element of these critiques of fanaticism lies in Smith’s analyses of the forces that lead ameliorative revolutions catastrophically astray. The Reformation, for instance, becomes tainted by Luther’s excessive passion for ‘zealous controversy’ (ii. 14). So it went with the rise of extremist, anti-monarchial Independents during the British civil war: ‘[T]‌hus it happened in England, which from a gross superstition and a religion of ceremonials, was verging fast toward enthusiasm and a contempt for whatever was palpable to sense’ (ii. 228). Even the ‘genius of Milton’, Smith concludes, sounding intriguingly like Blake, ‘was prostituted in frantic and factious controversies’ (ii. 332). As she measures the dynamics of progress and fanatical setbacks engrained within all revolutions, Smith further suggests that excesses of passion, though always to be deplored, may be necessary to ‘the overthrows of evils of magnitude’ before the steady spirit of rational inquiry can take over and renew the forward march of liberty (ii. 328). This complex elaboration of revolutionary history points to a sophisticated way of comprehending the French Revolution, an ongoing struggle of understanding for Smith throughout the last decade of her writing career. Although her narrative does not reach the French Revolution in the History of England’s first two volumes, her teleological model, by analogy, makes France’s revolution the most recent example of a corrective movement gone disastrously, but perhaps necessarily, astray in its overall contribution to the latest jump forward of the spirit of liberty. Such an original mapping of the deep historical structures of political reform puts Smith among her age’s powerful theorists of historical teleology, such as Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Malthus, Mavor, Condorcet, and Volney. It also aligns her with Blake and anticipates the nuanced models of historical progress through contention developed by Shelley and Keats.36 This would serve as one of Smith’s most significant contributions to the intellectual and political life of her time, an achievement that particularly encouraged her female readers to champion and refine current emancipatory movements—such as abolition, parliamentary reform, poor relief, imperial restraint, and women’s rights—whatever their temporal limitations. Smith’s many warnings against extreme passion, moreover, give those readers a pragmatic guide for negotiating social experience with rational prudence. Time and again, she offers cautionary examples of young women who are misled to their peril by uncontrolled ‘affections’, such as the Countess of Essex, who brings obloquy upon herself by sacrificing all ‘principle and power of self-denial’ before the ‘dazzling. . . allurements’ of



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her perfidious seducer, Robert Carr. If Smith’s historicism pleads affectively for righting the wrongs of women and other sufferers, it also makes an even stronger intervention in current politics through the promotion of the rational female mind, and its powers to control its personal destiny and to lead the spirit of liberty over and beyond the persisting wrongs of the present. The end of Smith’s historical project also provides a warning about the limits of such interventions in women’s historical writing of the Romantic era. Hays, keen to develop her own historicism after Female Biography, took on the task of completing Smith’s third volume with an eagerness that resulted in a disproportionate excess of pages. Phillips, as publisher, refused to pay her for the excess and insisted on cutting the volume down to size, which probably expunged much of the feminist activism Hays had featured in Female Biography and ultimately made the final volume read more like the kind of standard, ‘tedious’ history Smith had originally repudiated. Moreover, despite the example of Alexander Dyce’s interest in the History, its primary circulation remained within a limited sphere of female (and particularly young female) readers. Yet if male publishing institutions thus curbed the overall impact of women’s education history of the Romantic era, its various affective and rational modes of historical inquiry still provided female readers and writers with potent discursive models for interrogating the wrongs of the past and promoting the spirit of women’s rights and civil liberty in their own day. N OT E S 1. Alan Bennett, The History Boys (London: Faber & Faber, 2004), 85. 2. Lady Morgan, Woman and Her Master, 2 vols (1840; Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1976), i. 13. 3. Anna Barbauld, ‘On the Uses of History’, A Legacy for Young Ladies (London: Longman, 1826), 117. 4. Greg Kucich, ‘Joanna Baillie and the Spectacles of Gender and History’, in Thomas Crochunis (ed.), Joanna Baillie, Gender and Performance (London: Routledge, 2003), 108–29; and‘Mary Shelley. Biographer’, in Esther Schor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 226–41. 5. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 179. 6. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Anne Ephrenpreis (1818; London: Penguin, 1985), 123. 7. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. D. W. Harding (1818; London: Penguin, 1985), 237. 8. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 123–4.

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9. Jane Austen, The History of England, ed. Deirdre LeFaye (1791; London: British Library, 1993), pp. xvi, xvii. 10. Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne, 1995), 3. 11. Mitzi Myers, ‘Introduction’, Culturing Childhood, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21/1 (1999), 157–67. Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and the Child in the Late Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003). Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). James Holt McGavran (ed.), Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999). Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Mary Hilton, Murray Styles, and Victor Watson (eds), Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing, and Childhood 1600–1900 (London: Routledge, 1997). 12. Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 13. Richardson, Literature, 3. 14. Dorothy Gardner, English Girlhood at School: A Study of Women’s Education through Twelve Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), 214, 300. 15. Clara Reeve, Plans of Education; with Remarks on the Systems of Other Writers. In a Series of Letters between Mrs. Darnford and Her Friends (London: T. Hookham, 1792), 182. 16. Janet Todd, ‘Introduction’, to Todd (ed.), Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment, 2 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), i. xix. 17. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness, ed. Isaac Krammick (1793; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 11.Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Mary Warnock (London: Dent, 1985), 3. Reeve, Plans of Education, p. vi. 18. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education; with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune (1799), in The Complete Works of Hannah More, 7 vols (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), vi. 38. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 7. 19. Gardiner, English Girlhood, 465. 20. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 7. 21. Reeve, Plans of Education, 186. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 168. Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind. Addressed to a Young Lady, 2 vols (Dublin: J. Exshaw, 1773), ii. 229. Barbauld, ‘On the Uses of History’, 117– 18, 121, 125. 22. Charlotte Smith and Mary Hays,The History of England: from the earliest records to the Peace of Amiens, in a series of letters to a young lady at school, 3 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1806), i. v, hereafter cited parenthetically in the main text. 23. Sarah Trimmer, A Description of a Set of Prints of English History, 2 vols (London: John Marshall, 1801), ii. 219.



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24. Jane Marcet, Conversations on the History of England. For the Use of Children, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1842), i. 196. 25. Mrs. Markam [Elizabeth Penrose],A History of England. . . For the Use of Young Persons (1827; London: John Murray, 1851), iii.Lady Maria Callcott, Little Arthur’s History of England, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1835), i. iv. 26. More, Strictures, 194. 27. See n. 4. 28. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 93. Catharine Macaulay, The History of England, 8 vols (London: J. Nourse, R. and J. Dodlsey, and W. Johnston, 1763–83), vi. 21, 130. 29. See Kucich, ‘Joanna Baillie’. 30. William Godwin [alias Edward Baldwin], History of Rome (London: M. J. Godwin at the Juvenile Library, 1809), p. v. Life of Lady Jane Grey, and of Lord Guildford Dudely, Her Husband (London: M. J. Godwin & Co., 1824), p. iii. 31. Godwin, History, p. iv. 32. Wollstonecraft, The Female Reader: or Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Best Writers and Disposed under Proper Heads for the Improvement of Young Women. By Mr. Creswick [pseudonym] (London: Joseph Johnson, 1789), 279, 281. 33. Marcet, Conversations. . . in Continuation, i. 83. Budden, True Stories, from Ancient History, i. 135. Markham, Historical Conversations, 67. Barbauld, ‘On the Uses of History’, 132. 34. Elizabeth Helme, The History of England, Related in Familiar Conversations, by a Father to his Children, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1804), i. 120. 35. Jacqueline Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Kari Lokke, Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence (London: Routledge, 2004). 36. See Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition and the Politics of Romantic Historiographical Invention’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 238–61, and‘ “Eternity and the Ruins of Time”: Shelley and the Construction of Cultural History’, in Stuart Curran and Betty Bennet (eds), Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 14–29.Porscha Fermanis, John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

2 ‘The fanciful traditions of early nations’ History, Myth, and Orientalist Poetry in India Prior to James Mill Daniel Sanjiv Roberts The enormous impact of James Mill’s 1817 History of British India makes it in many ways difficult to conceptualize Indian history prior to his advent.1 Mill himself, as a scholar, was assiduous in the citation of the earlier historical sources which were his primary materials, so much so that reading histories of India prior to Mill seems rather like following a Roman road in ancient times. One’s curiosity is continually defeated by always finding oneself at the same place in the end. As Javed Majeed has argued with regard to Mill’s absorption of earlier historical sources (such as his treatment of the works of the pre-eminent orientalist Sir William Jones), Mill clarified what was ambiguous and contradictory in earlier histories, and effected a resolution of Indian history which put it firmly on the path to the utilitarian forms of imperialism which characterized the Raj.2 The irresoluteness of earlier histories centred on the role apportioned to Hindu chronologies, mythologies, and legends in the modern construction of India. Mill’s intervention in Indian history consigned such materials to the realm of antiquarianism, separating verifiable history (which he dated largely from European presence in India) from what he termed, citing Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, ‘the fanciful traditions of early nations’.3 Early orientalist histories of India had broadly sought to reconcile empirical history with Indian mythological and legendary traditions, relating these in turn to Mosaic narratives of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Hindu myths and legends—as the orientalists saw them—were useful material for entering into the historical imagination of the subject nation, and might even help to rule it better. Such earlier renditions of Hindu literature (that is, prior to Mill’s History and the rise of evangelicalism within the East India Company) often provided highly favourable representations of India, leading the classical Indologist Thomas



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Trautmann to distinguish between ‘Indomania’, which he describes as ‘the early British enthusiasm for India’, and ‘Indophobia’, the widespread denigration of India which followed it.4 Owing to Mill’s hegemonic influence on Indian historiography, orientalist histories have by and large been dismissed as timeless or premodern in recent scholarship.5 Yet Mill himself, famously eschewing direct contact with India, was partially reliant on such histories, even if their methodologies did not appeal to his empiricist and utilitarian bent of mind. Furthermore, the orientalists of the Hastings circle and the East India Company, far from being misty-eyed antiquarians, were embroiled in what Huw Bowen has termed ‘the business of empire’ or its governing and commercial interests, which went hand-in-hand with linguistic and historical researches.6 The first volume of The Asiatic Researches (published Calcutta 1788; first London edition 1798), which proclaimed its dedication to ‘the history and antiquity, the arts, sciences, and literature of Asia’, contained several articles on inscriptions, royal grants, sculptural ruins, and the like (all well within the ambit of empirical history), alongside the more speculative and mythological works in the same issue such as Jones’s ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India’ and ‘On the Literature of the Hindus’, which have assumed greater significance in retrospect.7 Indeed, as we shall see, myth, poetry, and history were closely linked in these researches as orientalists turned to mythological narratives in an attempt to unlock the secrets of Indian history. A good example of the comparative methodology of the orientalists is provided by William Chambers in his article ‘On the Ruins at Mavalipuram’ in the same volume. Relating the fabulous stories of the mythological king Bali, who was reputed to have founded the ancient city of Mavalipuram or Mahabalipuram (now recognized to be a seventh-century site of the Pallavan dynasty), Chambers suggests that such stories preserve a kernel of historical truth: It is not, however, improbable, that the rest of this history may contain, like the mythology of Greece and Rome, a great deal of real matter of fact, though enveloped in dark and figurative representations. . . . Their poets seem to have been their only historians, as well as divines; and whatever they relate is wrapped up in this burlesque garb, set off, by way of ornament, with circumstances largely incredible and absurd, and all this without any date, and in no other order or method, than such as the poet’s fancy suggested, and found most convenient. Nevertheless, by comparing names and grand events, recorded by them, with those interspersed in the histories of other nations, and by calling in the assistance of ancient monuments, coins, and inscriptions, as occasion shall offer, some probable conjectures at least, if not important discoveries, may, it is hoped, be made on these interesting subjects.8

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Despite his denigration of poetic fancy, Chambers seeks to realign poetic narratives with comparative histories and empirical evidence in a manner that would yield ‘probable conjectures’ if not ‘important discoveries’ in history. The oriental narratives are characterized as ‘dark and figurative’, whereas their modern renditions in the hands of European orientalists might shed light on their obscurities, potentially turning grotesque poetry into lucid histories. As Indian historian O. P. Kejariwal has pointed out, Chambers and the orientalists of the Asiatic Society must be credited for initiating modern historical interest in Mahabalipuram, which is now recognized to be one of India’s major archaeological sites.9 The marriage of myth and history, which Mill attempted to sever with his History, was thus integral to the intellectual framework of the orientalists. This fusion of myth and history was endemic to their coextensive literary and historical practices, and informed early orientalist notions of genre and style. The consequences of Mill’s separation of history from myth have obscured the extent to which the earlier historio-mythical narratives of Indomania shaped literary representations during the period. This chapter will tease out some of the ‘fanciful’ implications of Indian history by focusing on the interrelations between early orientalist histories and pseudo-oriental English literary texts. It will examine William Jones’s Hindu chronologies, critical writings, and poetry, and Robert Southey’s pseudo-orientalist epic, The Curse of Kehama (1810), with a view to asserting the imbrication of history within their mythological and poetic forms. E A R LY O R I E N TA L I S T H I S TO R I E S O F I N D I A Perhaps the most striking feature of the earlier histories of India derived by orientalists from Brahminical sources was the antiquity assigned to the world and to humankind that the Vedic chronologies insisted upon. Far from a compressed narrative comprising hardly 6,000 years of human history from the creation (such as Archbishop Ussher had suggested in the seventeenth century when he dated the creation at precisely 4004 bc), Vedic sources of Indian history offered a far more generous timescale in which to fit the vast narratives of cosmological and human development that Enlightenment scholars were still trying to decipher. Indeed, the Hindu cosmological figures presented quite the opposite problem: each kalpa or cycle of yugas was calculated to endure for over 4.32 billion years, easily swamping the meagre figures of Christian chronology. (See Figure 2.1.) Even more problematically, the Vedic conception of time as repeating itself in vast cyclical movements failed to correspond with Enlightenment

Figure 2.1. Vishnu’s slumber during a Kalpa; the serpent Ananta represents eternity on account of its cyclical form. Thomas Maurice, The History of Hindostan (1795).

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or Christian notions of linear time in terms of progress and fulfilment. Still, the Puranic legends of a great flood seemed to correspond conveniently with the Mosaic narrative of the Bible, and early orientalists such as Jones sought to harmonize Sanskrit history with the Bible. Thus, Vedic histories promised to solve some of the great riddles of ethnographic distribution which followed from the dispersal of nations after the flood of Noah, and to explain the racial categories which western anthropologists and philosophers such as Blumenbach and Kant had begun to theorize about.10 In his 1792 dissertation ‘On the Chronology of the Hindus’, Jones advanced, albeit tentatively, the case for a synthesis of Vedic and biblical narratives: Let us compare the two Indian accounts of the Creation and Deluge with those delivered by Moses. It is not made a question in this tract, whether the first chapters of Genesis are to be understood in a literal, or merely in an allegorical sense? The only points before us are, whether the creation described by the first Menu, which the Bráhmans call that of the Lotus, be not the same with that recorded in our Scripture; and whether the story of the seventh Menu be not one and the same with that of Noah? I propose these questions, but affirm nothing; leaving others to settle their opinions, whether Adam be derived from ádim, which in Sanscrit means the first, or Menu from Nuh, the true name of the Patriarch; whether the Sacrifice at which God is believed to have descended, allude to the offerings of Abel; and, on the whole, whether the true Menu’s can mean any other persons than the great progenitor, and the Restorer of our species.11

Jones’s querulous mode of enquiry keeps open the question of his own commitment to such views while the logic of comparison forces the reader to certain evident conclusions which Jones urges on him. In fact, as his letter to Dr Ford of 5 January 1788 suggests, Jones was fully convinced of the corroborative evidences of Christianity to be found in the Vedas;12 but here he advances his case cautiously with due respect to the scepticism of critics. Jones is attempting to square Hindu chronology with biblical chronology in a fairly direct way, through narrative and etymological correspondences between the stories, but yet another interpretive possibility is opened up by the notion of allegorical rather than literal truth. Not only might one reconcile eastern and western histories, but theology and science—increasingly at loggerheads from the beginning of European Enlightenment—might also be resolved through such means.13 Such enquiries, as Trautmann has shown, resulted in a rejection of the cyclical view of Indian history, and a recalibration of Hindu chronologies in line with accepted norms of western histories by scholars such as the linguist Jones and the French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly. This recalibration was based upon the massive downsizing of Hindu calculations



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which were held to be founded on symbolic and esoteric numerological principles.14 In his second and later dissertation on Indian chronology, Jones spoke of the ‘fabling and allegorizing spirit’ of Sanskrit literature which ‘disguise[d]‌their whole system of history’;15 hence the Hindu chronologies came to be regarded as allegorical or fabular histories. The mysterious origins of Sanskrit literature in eras of such antiquity as to defy all credibility led to the conclusion by some commentators that it represented a coded and esoteric system of knowledge amounting to priestcraft. As Quintin Craufurd argued with regard to the role of the Brahmins, ‘when we consider their usual ingenuity, it leads us to imagine, that, like the ancient priests of Egypt, they have industriously wrapped up the origin of their spiritual authority in so much mystery, and thrown it back to so remote a period, with a view to shut out investigation, and render inquiry fruitless’.16 Craufurd’s view of the Brahmins reflects a long-standing suspicion on the part of many European travellers and commentators regarding the part played by the priestly role of Brahmanism in the development and regulation of modern India. Such accounts dwelt on the subjugation of the Hindu peasantry and the women of India by an alliance of the ruling classes such as the landowners and Brahmins. The evident disparity noted by orientalist scholars between the ancient wisdom of the Brahmins and the oppressed nature of the peasantry and lower castes of India led to misgivings regarding the use to which such historical knowledge was being put by the hereditarily privileged classes of society. Such concerns, too, fed naturally into the narratives of British imperial histories and literatures that were being developed at the time. Yet not all these narratives were immediately or consistently critical of Indian histories. Early orientalist accessions of Indian history uncovered evidence of a glorious Hindu mythological past together with the persistence of remarkably advanced scientific knowledge in some areas such mathematics and astronomy. In the aftermath of the French Revolution it was a particular concern of European historians to explain the apparent contentment and ‘docility’ of the common people in India—particularly the masses of lower-caste Hindus—despite their supposed subjugation to Muslim rulers and to Brahmin priests. It is important to note that not all these early versions of Indian history were in agreement with each other or even internally consistent. It is, of course, Mill’s powerful intervention that synthesizes the various versions of Indian history from orientalist sources and renders them homogeneous, strenuously questioning in the process some of their most prized claims of a glorious ancient past and a successful Hindu polity. In the heady years of the ‘orientalist renaissance’ leading up to Mill things were not so clear. While early orientalist histories of India sought

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simultaneously to reconcile Hindu antiquity with Enlightenment history and Christian orthodoxy through a revision of its chronology within the more manageable parameters of biblical history, it was apparent that the epic Indian histories encompassing mythology and narrative together with their chronologies defeated the generic expectations of European histories and interfered with the disciplinary categories which had emerged in western criticism. In the preface to his 1795 History of Hindostan, Thomas Maurice, one of Jones’s most avid disciples and posthumous popularizers, found it necessary to separate his work explicitly from the rules of historical criticism practised in the West: ‘I think it necessary. . . to enter my protest against all attempts to judge the pages of the following Work by the rules of criticism, which are applied to history in general.’ Instead, Maurice suggested that his work contained ‘rather the history of astronomical mythology, as it flourished in the great empires of Asia, than that of any particular nation on the Eastern continent’; his history went on to propose an identity between the Indian and Greek zodiacs, and argued for the greater antiquity of the Indian. Such arguments widened the scope of historiography beyond national histories and offered a glimpse of a totalizing history of mankind from earliest civilization. Maurice also extended Jones’s work to argue that independent and conclusive proofs of the biblical legends could be found in the Hindu scriptures, thus affirming Christian orthodoxy against ‘the insinuations of M. Volney and the professed infidels of the day’.17 These grandiose historical investigations were certainly open to ridicule by empirical standards of history writing—a point that Mill would seize upon mercilessly in his appraisal of the state of Indian historical researches at the commencement of his work.18 More significantly, however, the ambition and scope of the Asiatic researches of this period point to the ways in which they were troubling the disciplinary categories of Enlightenment thinking. The great Indian epic, The Mahabharata, newly acquiring translation into English in the eighteenth century by Charles Wilkins (soon to be followed by William Carey’s translation of the Ramayana), was described by Alexander Dow in his translation of Firishta’s History of Hindostan (1792) as ‘at best. . . a historical poem, in which a great deal of fable is blended with a little truth’.19 The boundaries between history writing and mythology, notably porous in ancient times, seemed to be open again to modern practitioners of oriental literature. Thus, it was no coincidence that the new history writing of India in the late eighteenth century by the likes of William Jones, Alexander Dow, Thomas Maurice, and Craufurd Quintin was accompanied by translations of Indian epics and the publication of pseudo-oriental texts such as Jones’s Hindu hymns and Southey’s 1810 epic, The Curse of Kehama.



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The extraordinary success throughout Europe of Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s poetic drama, Sacontala: Or the Enchanted Ring (1789), led to what has been described as a vogue for orientalist poetry in the magazines of the 1790s, a trend that Jones himself led with the production of his Hindu hymns and Sanskrit translations. These texts have been often analysed in terms of their oriental imagery and no doubt this imagery contributed greatly to their impact on metropolitan audiences hungry for exotic details of the burgeoning empire in India.20 Yet even more profoundly than the imagery, the oriental poetry of the 1790s offered, on account of its historical basis in Sanskrit, a corrective to the formal categories of western literature. Jones’s critical engagement with eastern literature had begun in 1772 with his ‘Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern nation’ partly inspired by Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753). Looking forward to the effect of Jones’s essay on classical notions of taste, Jones’s fellow orientalist Charles Reviczki commented: ‘I anticipate with satisfaction the mortification of all our European poets, who must blush at the poverty of their prosaic language, when they find that the oriental dialects (independently of rhyme which is of their invention) have true syllabic quantities as well as the Greek, and a greater variety of feet, and consequently the true science of metre and prosody.’21 Similarly, Jones’s famous description of Sanskrit in his third presidential address to the Asiatic Society as being ‘of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin’, challenged the presumptions of the western classical tradition of which he was a product, and advanced startling new claims for the older and better preserved classical tradition of the East.22 Perfection and copiousness are here qualities deriving from the Lockean conception of civilized languages as being both more regular in grammar and more copious in their vocabulary, a function of their historical development and civility. Not only did Jones advance such challenging theories regarding Sanskrit, he also sought to exemplify them in his translation and poetic practice, absorbing the excellence of Sanskrit literary forms into English poetry. Jones’s mock-heroic poem, ‘The Enchanted Fruit; or, the Hindu Wife’ (1784), depicts the four yugas or ages of Hindu classical belief—affording a structural parallel with the classical notion of four ages of man and recording a progressive degeneration of Hindu society from its golden Satye Yug to its present Caly Yug or age of impurity. The action of the poem is set in the Dwáper Yug or brazen age, in which, as Jones explains in a footnote, ‘Vice and Virtue were in equal proportion’.23 The poem recounts a fabled episode from the Mahabharata in which the Hindu wife Draupadi is compelled to admit a momentary impurity of thought— a minor flirtation with a learned and handsome Brahmin teacher—to

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her jealously protective husbands, the five Pandavas. Conscious of the monogamous Christian morality of his European readers, Jones offers a relativistic interpretation of the chaste polyandry exemplified by the dutiful Hindu wife, Draupadi. Each yuga depicted in the poem exemplifies a neatly differentiated standard of morality, from the perfect natural innocence of the Satye Yug to the anti-masculinist implications of the polyandrous society represented by the Dwáper Yug. The classical fable contrasts the Dwáper Yug with the present Caly Yug, which Jones informs the reader came ‘a little before’ the time when ‘Crishna disappeared from this world’, and which could be dated ‘four thousand eight hundred and eighty-four years ago, that is, according to our Chronologists, seven hundred and forty seven before the flood; and by the calculation of M. Bailly, but four hundred and fifty-four after the foundation of the Indian empire’.24 The admixture of mythical detail with precise chronological dating compatible with Christian orthodoxy is entirely characteristic of Jones’s scholarly method, blending biblical and Hindu fabular traditions with detailed mathematical calculations, as reported by the Pandits and revised by western scholars. Yet despite the arcane mixture of scholarly details, the poem is far from lacking in a modern critique of Indian society. The liberal polyandry of the Dwáper Yug, which gave Hindu women the freedom to engage in private studies with a Brahmin tutor and to keep five husbands at the same time, is contrasted with the harsh laws of the present day: Not bound by vile unnatural laws, Which curse this age from Cáley nam’d, By some base woman-hater framed. Prepost’rous that one biped vain Should drag ten house-wives in his train, And stuff them in some gaudy cage, Slaves to weak lust or potent rage! Not such the Dwáper Yug! oh then One buxom dame might wed five men.25

As a High Court judge in India—the appointment which took him to Calcutta (Kolkata)—Jones’s first interest had been in the translation of Hindu law texts as a vital step towards the government of India. His translation of Manu’s laws are an enduring contribution to Hindu family law in modern India, but its harsh strictures on women caused dismay then—as it does now with feminist and women’s rights lawyers in India.26 On the other hand, if the notion of polyandry might strike his western readers as the opposite extreme to male polygamy, Jones adduces the theory of pollination from Linnaean botany to indicate how entirely scientific and natural the idea is:



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True History, in solemn terms This Philosophic lore confirms; For India once, as now cold Tibet, A group unusual might exhibit, Of sev’ral husbands, free from strife, Link’d fairly to a single wife! Thus Botanists, with eyes acute To see prolifick dust minute, Taught by their learned northern Brahmen To class by pistil and by stamen, Produce from nature’s rich dominion Flow’rs Polyandrian Monogynian, Where embryon blossoms, fruits, and leaves Twenty prepare, and one receives.27

Jones’s ‘true history’ was challenging indeed to its early metropolitan readers, mixing ‘philosophic lore’ with Linnaean botany, Indian fabular traditions with feminist sexuality, and Hindu chronology with the Mosaic ethnology. Such was the respect accorded to his researches that his poetry was taken by and large as a true representation of the Hindu poetic tradition and granted enormous esteem amongst his literary and scholarly peers. Yet, as the ending of Jones’s poem suggests, his poetry was always a synthetic representation—an imitation in the classical sense—of Sanskrit tradition. The celebration of Indian womanhood in the figure of the Hindu wife calls forth at the end of the poem a martially indignant response from Britannia on behalf of slighted British women, whose virtues are extolled as at least the equal of their Indian counterparts: ‘What! said the Guardian of our realm, With waving crest and fiery helm, ‘What! are the fair, whose heav’nly smiles Rain glory through my cherish’d isles, Are they less virtuous or less true Than Indian dames of sooty hue?[’]28

While Jones celebrates the fabled virtues of Indian women and wives, his poem strives not to offend contemporary British women who might read his poem more satirically than intended. The obviously stylized and uneasy ending of the poem, which involves Britannia’s defeat of the monster Scandal, betrays Jones’s acute consciousness of the risks he took in recovering a mythical and idealized past taken from Indian fabular traditions.29 At a more fundamental level, however, Jones’s enterprise exposes a radical disjuncture between Hindu and European epistemology which his texts can never fully resolve. Hence, Jones’s tendentious recovery of Indian mythology in the service of Enlightenment historiography violates

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its source materials in epistemic terms, forcing a cyclical conception of mythological time into a linear mode consonant with European understanding of history.30 As the historian Romila Thapar comments pertinently of mythological time in India, ‘such a sense of time. . . can only support the philosophic notion of the world being illusory’.31 Thus, Jones’s poetic reworking of his fabular materials drags Indian mythology into modern historical consciousness, subjecting the nascent Indian nation to European modes of thought and governance. RO B E RT S O U T H E Y, T H E C U R S E O F K E H A M A The final section of this chapter will bring the context of orientalist Indomania discussed thus far to bear on one of Jones’s most significant metropolitan followers, the Lakes poet Robert Southey. Southey’s Indian epic The Curse of Kehama displays enormous erudition—particularly in the notes Southey appended to the poem—of the entire gamut of orientalist research.32 Written in twenty-four books, Southey’s epic poem recounts the fall of a tyrannical Indian ruler, Kehama, whose nearly limitless power is challenged by a simple peasant, Ladurlad, and his daughter, Kailyal. Kehama’s overweening ambition to capture the throne of Yamen and achieve mastery over heaven itself ultimately results in his own downfall, a story which parallels several mythological narratives of the Indian pantheon. Jones himself is explicitly quoted twenty-one times from a variety of his texts, including ‘The Enchanted Fruit’, the range of Hindu hymns, his translations of Manu, his translation of Śacontalā, his articles on Indian chronology, ‘On the Literature of the Hindus’, ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindus’, ‘On the Antiquity of the Indian Zodiac’, and ‘On the Orthography of Asiatick Words’. Moreover, Southey had read deeply in the Asiatic Researches, Maurice’s History of Hindostan, Craufurd’s Sketches of Hindostan (1790), Dow’s History of Hindostan, Francis Gladwin’s 1783–6 translation of Ayeen Akberi, and Mark Wilks’s Historical Sketches of South India (1810–17), not to mention a host of travel writings, translations, missionary accounts, and orientalia of every hue. Commentary on the poem has focused on the hard-line evangelical turn which Southey gave to the work following the ‘pamphlet war’ unleashed by the ‘Vellore massacre’ of 1806, in which several British officers of the 69th Foot Regiment were killed in an act of insubordination by Indian sepoys.33 The preface to The Curse which Southey added in 1810 only acted as a lens in the interpretation of the poem, magnifying its horrified depiction of Hinduism as ‘of all false religions. . . the most monstrous in its fables, and the most fatal in its effects’.34



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In this respect the poem anticipates the dismissive attitude to Indian mythology taken by Mill in his History of British India.35 Yet the entire action of the poem, based as it is on Hindu mythology, with its poetic justice dispensed by Hindu gods, bespeaks in its genesis a very different artistic intention on the part of the poet. Furthermore, Southey’s lengthy notes to the poem, quoting copiously from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Jones’s Hindu hymns, and other such texts of Indomania, undercut substantially the virulence of his preface. Although the plot of the narrative is based on Hindu mythology, it is worth recalling that the notes to the poem include several of the early historical works on India already cited. Kehama himself is loosely based on the character of Malêcheren (an overambitious king who is punished for his temerity in rivalling the splendour of Indra’s heavenly court) from William Chambers’s article ‘On the Ruins of Mavalipuram’. Southey quotes generously from Chambers’s article in the notes to his poem, associating Malêcheren with Bali, the mythical founder of the ruined city; and Kehama’s attempt to rival the powers of heaven is obviously indebted to the story of Malêcheren. However, the distinction between historical and mythological narratives was far from clear at this time, and Chambers’s article offers mythology as a dark and figurative version of modern history. Kehama, in Southey’s conception, resonates equally with modern rulers such as Tipu Sultan in Mysore and Napoleon in France, despots who figured strongly in Southey’s political imagination during the early 1800s. As we shall see, far from creating a timeless version of India, Southey’s poem draws on orientalist sources to produce a contemporaneously up-to-date and critical version of Indian polity within the framework of his mythological narrative. As we shall also find, Southey’s profoundly changing politics (from early radicalism to Tory conservatism) between his commencement of the poem in 1800 and its first publication in 1810, led to a remarkable volte face with regard to its conception of Indian mythology and history, turning Southey’s early Indomania into a violent repudiation of Hindu mythology. Early drafts of the poem titled ‘The Curse of Keradou’ dated to 1801 reveal a different opening to the poem from the sati scene, which has now become one of the most anthologized depictions of Romantic orientalism. The heroine of the poem, the dutiful daughter Kailyal (at this stage named Kalyal), is ‘bathing and sporting with her favourite crocodile’, a representation that Southey notes is to be accompanied by ‘a few softening lines on the tameability of all animals, to mellow down the strangeness of the beast’.36 Southey’s depiction of Kailyal in the midst of nature undoubtedly owes much to Kalidasa’s Śakuntalā which had been immensely popularized by Jones. From the start, Southey intended that her survival from Kehama’s punishment of casting her into a river would be achieved by her clinging to

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the image of Marriataly, one of the goddesses of the pariahs, representing a simpler, lower-caste form of Hinduism than that represented by the classical pantheon. Furthermore, Kehama’s despotism and his grandiose ambition of seizing Indra’s throne in heaven are both aspects of his impiety and political tyranny, and not necessarily a repudiation of Hindu mythology, as it later becomes in the light of his preface. Like the Mahrattas of whom Southey had read in Craufurd’s Sketches, Kehama represents a particularly modern threat to British sovereignty: ‘The measures pursued by the Mahrattas for some years, left little room to doubt that they aspired to the sovereignty of all Hindostan.’37 The degradation of Hindu polity represented by Kehama and the Brahmin priests of the poem were likely to have been intended as instances of Indian modernity rather than indicative of the essentialist and sweeping critique of Hinduism later levelled in the 1810 preface by Southey. This earlier perspective is discerned in Craufurd’s Sketches: The ancient Brahmins living in an age when the Hindoo empire flourished, cultivated science with an encouragement and success, of which their oppressed posterity cannot boast. Besides the study of sacred, moral, and metaphysical writings of their nation, a principal part of their scientific pursuits seem to have been directed to astronomy, natural philosophy, and some branches of mathematics.38

Reading Southey’s poem in the light of early orientalist conceptions of Indian mythographic history, his deployment of the entire apparatus of the Hindu cosmological order in conjunction with modern Indian polity becomes far clearer. From its early reception critics had harped upon the irony of employing a Hindu mythological framework for the action, complaining that ‘it vacates the eternal throne, not only in order to raise thither an imaginary deity, but absolutely to elevate Seeva, the adored abomination of the Hindoos’.39 For the evangelical critic John Foster, the cult of Saivism (worship of Shiva or Mahadeo) denoted precisely the kind of barbarous and phallic practice that was required to be crushed by British rule in India. Yet Shiva, the destroyer, in Hindu mythology is often the means by which divine justice is dispensed, a point Southey was well aware of in his representation of Kehama’s downfall: Then Seeva opened on the Accursed One His Eye of Anger; upon him alone the The wrath-beam fell. He shudders. . . but too late; The deed is done, The dreadful liquor works the will of Fate. Immortal he would be, Immortal he remains; but through his veins Torture at once, and immortality,



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A stream of poison doth the Amreeta run, Infinite everlasting agony. And while within the burning anguish flows, His outward body glows Like molten ore, beneath the avenging eye, Doom’d thus to live and burn eternally.40

Southey’s dispensation of divine justice in the poem distorts, in many ways, the traditional structures of Hindu mythography in which an eternal play of Suras and Asuras, gods and demons, is enacted cyclically within the cosmological order. Within such a system, death and reincarnation in a lower form, rather than eternal punishment, might be seen as the more obvious outcome of the action. As Craufurd noted of the Hindu conception of the underworld: The souls of the wicked, after being confined in Narekha, and punished according to their offences, are sent back to the world. . . and those trials, punishments, and transmigrations continue to be repeated, until they be corrected of every disposition to vice. But the Hindoos shudder at the idea of eternal punishment, as being wholly incompatible with the justice and goodness of God.41

Southey’s depiction of Padalon, the underworld kingdom of Yamen, is however more indebted to Milton’s Pandemonium than the Hindu Narekha. Southey’s representation of Hinduism is thus, basically, an ameliorating and Christianizing one. In 1802 he wrote approvingly of such a synthetic approach to Hinduism when he declared in the Annual Review that ‘Christianity itself may be represented as a cast. . . in the language of the Hindoos, the Bible must be called a shaster, and the incarnation of the Son, or word, or spirit of God, an avatar.’42 His rendition of Kehama’s downfall and the triumph of good over evil thus represents a Christianized version of Hindu mythology, with the ‘monstrosities’ and ‘deformities’ of the latter ‘kept out of sight’.43 Hence, his adaptation of Indian mythology, for all its vaunted authenticity, hauls his Indian sources into a modern western historical conception shaped by Christian eschatology. While his materials are supposedly Indian, their ‘translation’ into Southey’s poem brings them into an epistemological framework that is in keeping with Enlightenment historiography. C O N C LU S I O N The uneasy mix of Hindu mythological history and orthodox Enlightenment modernity which Southey exemplifies in his poem might be gleaned most obviously from the tension between the two main versions

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that conclude the text. While the printed versions end with both Ladurlad and Kailyal being taken into the heaven of ‘Yedillian’s Bower’, the 1809 manuscript which Southey sent his brother Captain Thomas Southey while he was on board the Dreadnought off the coast of France, retains a very different conclusion suggestive of its earlier vision: For thee Ladurlad there is yet in store One glorious task. Return to Earth, restore Justice & Peace, by Tyranny put down, Then thou shalt have thine everlasting crown And join thy best-belovd for ever more.44

Southey’s deletion of the earthly dimensions of poetic justice—a task notably assigned to the low-caste figure of the Indian peasant Ladurlad in manuscript versions of the poem—was thus transformed into an apparently transcendental vision of divine justice. Here divine justice is presumptively equated with British rule in which the Rajah’s insurgency is put down but no hint of an alternative native ruling order emerges. Whereas in the denouement of Jones’s ‘Enchanted Fruit’ the honours are shared equally between the women of India and Britannia, in Southey’s poem both Kailyal and Ladurlad are assumed into heaven, leaving earthly justice for Kehama’s kingdom, at least for the time being, in the hands of British rule. In 1811 Percy Shelley’s enthusiastic response to the poem was met by Southey’s enigmatic reply that the three statues representing wealth, royalty, and priestcraft at the denouement of the poem were ‘to be contemplated with republican feelings—but not in this age’.45 Southey’s distancing of radical sentiment reflects the growing conservatism that conflicts the poem and distorts its early intentions. Yet it would be naive to suggest that the earlier syncretic orientalism was entirely benevolent and devoid of imperial intention. The early orientalists, for all the arcane historical and mythical knowledge that they disseminated regarding India, were acutely conscious of their metropolitan readership and of the European political order in which they functioned. Jones’s poetry and his translations of legal texts and mythical histories were directed to the Enlightenment recovery of an Indian past which Britannia’s rule would restore to the nation. Southey’s version of Hindu mythology, although following in Jones’s footsteps, would turn increasingly disenchanted with India as he progressed with Kehama. While Hindu mythology offered a creative space for Europe to apprehend India in historical terms, its attempts to assimilate such incompatible narratives necessarily involved a degree of epistemic coercion on the part of the orientalists.46 Nevertheless, it should also be admitted that modern Indian history in postcolonial times remains deeply indebted to the efforts of the orientalists of the Asiatic Society and their



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followers. Southey’s unexecuted vision of Ladurlad’s rule represents a reordering of Indian society along lines approved by a heavenly order of beings that, despite its apparently radical political orientation, is in the end more English and Christian than Indian or Hindu. Orientalist poetry such as Jones’s and Southey’s has been largely detached from contemporary readings of literary Romanticism as a timeless and arcane endeavour relating to antique and distant lands; restoring a sense of history to our understanding of this body of poetry might help to reclaim its not inconsiderable significance within its cultural moment. N OT E S 1. ‘Indian history’ refers here to histories of India prior to colonial and Mughal rule. For a treatment of Mughal histories by Persian scholars, see Claire Gallien, ‘British Orientalism, Indo-Persian Historiography and the Politics of Global Knowledge’, in Simon Davies, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa (eds), India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014), 29–52. Regarding Mill’s hegemonic influence on Indian history, see Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 43–8. 2. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 3. James Mill, The History of British India, 6 vols, 3rd edn (London: Baldwin, Cradock, & Joy, 1826), i. 93. 4. Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (1997; New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2004), 63. 5. An influential 20th-cent. statement of such a view is found in Mircea Eliade, ‘Time and Eternity in Indian Thought’, in Joseph Campbell (ed.), Man and Time (New York: Bollingen Press, 1957), 173–200. For a rebuttal of Eliade’s position, see Thomas Trautmann, ‘Indian Time, European Time’, in his The Clash of the Chronologies (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2009), 25–66. See also Naheem Jabbar, Historiography and Writing Postcolonial India (London: Routledge, 2009) for a characterization of early orientalist views of India as a ‘vast field of anthropological evidence of European progress’ (55). 6. H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 7. Asiatick Researches, 1 (London, 1798). Articles of an empirically historical nature in this issue include ‘A Royal Grant Found at Mungir’, ‘An Inscription on a Pillar near Buddal’, ‘On the Ruins at Mavalipuram’, ‘An Inscription at Buddha Gayá’, ‘An Indian Grant of Land in Y.C.’, ‘Inscriptions on the Staff of Furùz Shah’, etc. 8. A similar historical methodology, though divested of Chambers’s denigration of mythological sources, is to be found in Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin, 2000), 662.

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9. O. P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 38–9. 10. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 57–61, 134. 11. William Jones, Dissertations and Miscellaneous Pieces, 2 vols (London: G. Nicolle et al., 1792), i. 290. 12. The Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols (London: J. Stockdale, 1807), ii. 133. 13. I refer here to the suppression of scientific and other forms of intellectual pursuits by state authorities in support of orthodoxy, hence in institutional terms favouring divinity over other forms of knowledge. Immanuel Kant’s response to the strife between disciplines generated by the Enlightenment is to be found in ‘Der Streit der Fakultäten’ (1798); for an English translation, see The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). 14. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 84–9. 15. Jones, Dissertations, i. 342. 16. Quintin Craufurd, Sketches chiefly relating to the history, religion, learning, and manners, of the Hindoos (London: T. Cavell, 1790), 223. 17. Thomas Maurice, The History of Hindostan, 2 vols (London: W. Bulmer & Co., 1795), i. i. 18. It should be noted, however, that Mill’s disparagement of orientalist historians (and his insistence on a fatal stasis in Indian history) on the basis of a supposedly rigorous empirical methodology is discrepant with Romantic stadial histories, which often drew on the records of antiquity to chart history in evolutionary terms. For further exploration of this tension, see Ch. 3 by John Regan. 19. Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, translated from the Persian, 3 vols, 3rd edn (London: John Murray, 1792), i. v. 20. See, for instance, Cannon Garland and Siddheshwar Pandey, ‘Sir William Jones Revisited: On his Translation of the Śakuntalā’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 96/4 (1976), 528–35. 21. Works of Sir William Jones, i. 80. 22. Works of Sir William Jones, iii. 34. 23. Works of Sir William Jones, xii. 214n. 24. Works of Sir William Jones, xiii. 216. 25. Works of Sir William Jones, xiii. 215. 26. See Burjor Avari, India: The Ancient Past. A History of the Indian Sub-Continent from c. 7000 BCE to AD 1200 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 142–3, for a recognition of and response to feminist viewpoints on the Manusmriti. 27. Works of Sir William Jones, xiii. 215–16. 28. Works of Sir William Jones, xiii. 231. 29. For an incisive analysis of Jones’s assimilation of Hindu mythology into western poetic forms, see Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 216–18. 30. Though histories such Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) might be considered cyclical in that they conceive of human history in terms of ebbs and flows, such histories are not cyclical in the same sense as Hindu cosmology which posits a repetition of the entire process of



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creation, a fundamentally incompatible view in relation to Christian conceptions of the second coming and the apocalyptic dispensation of justice. 31. Romila Thapar, Time as a Metaphor of History: Early India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6. 32. For a discussion of Southey’s accession of orientalist scholarship including the works of Sir William Jones, see The Curse of Kehama, ed. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, in Robert Southey: Poetical Works, gen. ed. Lynda Pratt (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), iv. ix–xiv; and Carol Bolton, Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 229–36. 33. Kehama, ed. Roberts, pp. ix–xiv. 34. Kehama, ed. Roberts, 3. 35. Southey, however, was no liberal; his distaste for Hindu mythology stemmed from a growing conservatism and evangelicalism in his outlook. 36. Kehama, ed. Roberts, 276. 37. Craufurd, Sketches, 391. 38. Craufurd, Sketches, 190–1. 39. John Foster, ‘Review of The Curse of Kehama, by Robert Southey’, The Eclectic Review 7 (Apr. 1811), 347. 40. Kehama, ed. Roberts, 188. 41. Craufurd, Sketches, 162. 42. Robert Southey, ‘Review of Periodical Accounts Relative to the Baptist Missionary Society’, Annual Review, 1 (Jan. 1802), 215. 43. Kehama, ed. Roberts, 4. 44. See BL MS 36485, variant transcribed in Kehama, ed. Roberts, 191. 45. Kehama, ed. Roberts, p. xviii. 46. This problem receives recognition in Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Guha protests against the ‘inadequacy of historiography’ caused by colonial histories which have ‘had the effect of replacing the indigenous narratologies of precolonial times by ones that are typically modern and Western’ (5).

3 No ‘nonsense upon stilts’ James Mill’s History of British India and the Poetics of Benthamite Historiography John Regan

I In his popular 1975 abridged edition of James Mill’s History of British India (1817), William Thomas claims that the text is ‘a “philosophical history” as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century understood the term, distilling practical lessons from the past in the form of general philosophic truths’.1 This by now received viewpoint has been developed in David McInerney’s 2009 James Mill and the Despotism of Philosophy, in which the author surveys the eighteenth-century provenance of Mill’s historical methodology but argues for the empirical basis of the text’s claims. Mill’s excoriating observations of Hindu civic incompetence are read as functions of improving, corrective motives, stemming, if not from direct experience, then from inductive inferences made from the direct experiences of others. Certainly, the History is a text whose historiographical fastidiousness was designed to carry out a certain type of didactic work: rigorous in its methods of historical enquiry and discernment, it was meant to illumine the way forward not only for ‘British India’ but for European civil society more generally. It germinated in an intellectual environment shaped by the stadialism of Enlightenment historians such as John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and William Robertson. But while Mill attended to similar questions of progress and stagnation to those that so fascinated these historians, I will argue in this chapter that he adapted the abstract didacticism of eighteenth-century philosophical history to forge a newly pragmatic ‘Benthamite’ historiography through close attention to a subject rarely considered by scholars of his famous History: the dynamics of literary history and its criticism. Instrumentalizing a depiction of poetry’s progress and stagnation for utilitarian purposes, Mill frames the development of



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Hindu verse in a stage-based historical scheme in which value-laden concepts of backwardness and progress deliver a withering report on Hindu culture. Yet despite its rigorous espousal of ‘improvement’ discourses, the sureness of Mill’s imperial utilitarianism belies a profound aporia about poetry’s influence over historical narratives of progress and decline. Mill’s Benthamite vision of the stagnation of Hindu culture—its inability to achieve the status of civil society—may have been designed with improvement in mind, but the heuristic of verse progress which Mill employs so vigorously delivers its own problematic: the History’s fervent attacks on Indian verse (and, consequently, intellectual and cultural progress) operate dialectically, revealing ideals of writing which are not borne out in Mill’s text, and which seem at variance with the melodrama of ‘slashing’ criticism and hyper-annotative tendencies of verse and verse reviewing in his native Britain. Mill explains the all-encompassing rise of a culture of ‘written-ness’ in western civilization via a stadial model of human evolution, putting the History in dialogue with circulating historiographical currents across Europe in the decades around the turn of the century. In France, Turgot’s Tableau philosophique des progrès successifs de l’esprit humain (1750) and Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795) divided the history of human progress into epochs defined by differences in society, technology, and intellectual endeavour. In Scotland, Lord Monboddo’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92) similarly introduced the idea of a universal savagery, deterritorialized and explicable with reference to the development of poetry from orality to written-ness. Lord Kames’s Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (2nd revised edition, 1758), John Millar’s Origin of Ranks (1771), and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) each participated in a discussion in which poetry was increasingly identified as an index not only to cultural but also to societal development. Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence at Glasgow University in 1763 capture a perspective which is central to the literary suggestiveness of Mill’s History: ‘Having in the preceding lectures given you an account of the principal things necessary to be observed in the writing of history, I proceed to the History of Historians. The poets were the first historians of any.’2 In historicizing the origins of poetry, Smith highlights the intertwined developments of historical record and verse, an interpretive channel promoted most influentially in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767): ‘Even the historian and the poet may find the original essays of their arts in the tale, and the song, which celebrate the wars, the loves, and the adventures of men in their rudest condition.’3 This yoking of poet and historian was common in late eighteenth-century

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historiography, and Mill utilizes it in order to illustrate the backwardness of Hindu civic life: The first literature is poetry. Poetry is the language of the passions, and men feel, before they speculate. The earliest poetry is the expression of the feelings, by which the minds of rude men are the most powerfully actuated. Before the invention of writing, men are directed also to the use of versification by the aid which it affords to the memory. As every thing of which the recollection is valuable must be handed down by tradition, whatever tends to make the tradition accurate is of corresponding importance. No contrivance to this end is comparable to verse; which preserves the ideas, by preserving the very words. In verse not only the few historical facts are preserved, to which the curiosity of a rude age attaches itself, but in verse are promulgated the maxims of religion, and the ordinances of law. Even after the noble art of writing is known, the habit of consigning to verse every idea, destined for permanency, continues, till certain new steps are effected in the intellectual career.4

Verse is a form of primitive historiography but it is also the lens through which the stages of human development can be seen most clearly; thus, it is both historical artefact and a mode of historical expression. The comparative method of much philosophical history tended towards a valorization of the primitive in distinction to a jaded commercial present stage. However, Mill’s view of primitivism in contemporary Hindu verse-culture is coloured by withering denigration: Hindu verse and culture have stultified at an earlier stage of universal development than that exhibited by Western European civil societies. The profuse, diffuse, and inconcise writing in texts such as the dramatic Śakuntalā is evidence that the Hindus even compare unfavourably to the most primitive stages of Western development: ‘completeness and precision would have been undeniable proofs of the mental perfection of the people by whom it (Sanscrit language) was used; while a great multitude of useless words and grammatical rules were the very reverse. . . [A]‌language which has too many words of one description, has too few of another, and unites in equal degree the vices of superfluity and defect’.5 Even when the widely discredited Ossian hoves into comparative view, Mill’s focus is on the ‘sterile extravagance’ of Hindu writing rather than on the extravagant claims of MacPherson or the readiness with which the unchecked Ossian artefacts were subsumed into proliferating British and European print cultures: ‘The Celtic poetry, ascribed to Ossian, and other bards, which, whatever age, more recent or more remote, controversy may assign for its date, is, beyond a doubt, the production of a people whose ideas were extremely scanty, and their manners rude, surpasses in every point of excellence, the sterile extravagance of the Hindus.’6 Mill goes even further in his dismissal of Hindu culture when he uses the stadial scheme to argue that even ‘rude’ European society and verse in antiquity is



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more ‘excellent’ than present-day Hindu poetry: ‘At a point of civilization lower than that which we ascribe to the Hindus, poetry has been produced more excellent than theirs.’7 The contemporaneity of Mill’s comparison is by no means inconsistent with other historical perspectives in the late eighteenth century. Several philosophical and stadial historians did not apply their redemptive view of primitive orality to ‘uncivilized’ present-day communities. Thomas Jefferson’s several positive historical reports of pre-industrial vigour do not extend to a valorization of the native Americans in his own time. Nor do Adam Smith or Adam Ferguson look to the rural communities of Britain and Ireland to identify examples of recuperating cultural energy or force. In other words, stadialism saw no ideological inconsistency in valorizing the primitive in antiquity and denigrating it in a post-Enlightenment world. Daniel Roberts’s chapter on Indian historiography pre-Mill in Chapter 2 shows how the History’s imposition of progressive, linear models of historical development over the vast vagaries of Hindu historical conception has a clear Enlightenment provenance: ‘The present age of the world according to the system of the Hindus, is distinguished into four grand periods, denominated yugs. . . . From the commencement, therefore, of the Satya yug, to the year 1817, is comprehended a space of 3,892,911 years, the antiquity to which this people lay claim.’8 Mill repeatedly propounds calendrical rationality and sober textual sourcing, indicating a desire to reconcile the vast cycles of Hindu history with a progressive stadialist perspective of historical development, and seeing European civil society as a kind of telos. His incredulity regarding the vast amorphousness of the Hindu yugs is of a piece with his distaste at the Hindu tendency to diverge from fact and concision in writing. Disgust over the lack of clarity in Hindu dating, and in Hindu literary matters, finds its correlative in the literal obfuscations of a ‘nasty’ Hindu society. Enthusiastically, Mill cites contemporary political agent John Scott-Waring, who describes a stereotypical Hindu ‘whose heart equals in purity the whiteness of his vest. . . Histories, composed in the closet, of the manners of extensive nations may possess every beauty; for as facts do not restrain the imagination, nor impose rules on poetic license, the fancy of the historian enjoys an uninterrupted range in the regions of fiction’.9 Filth and the imaginative predications of Hindu historiography are coextensive. The passage describes a demarcation which defines the History as a whole: there can be no reciprocity of influence or function between poetics and history in the early nineteenth century. As a key member of Jeremy Bentham’s close-knit intellectual community in the years leading up to the publication of the History, Mill’s prohibition of metrical language from public usefulness was cultivated

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in line with a germinant, militant utilitarianism. From within this community, Mill saw the essential weakness of Hindu civilization revealed in its abiding inability to rid its scientific, philosophical, and civic texts of poetry. The pervasiveness of versification in Hindu texts of science, history, lexicography, and religion was suggestive of a cultural development inimical to the encroachment of the sober prose discourses which constituted civil society. Furthermore, verse’s civic utility emphasized the essential difference between British and Hindu intellectual development: the former appreciative of historical kinesis and change, the latter bound up in a versification that denied Enlightenment tenets of linearity and progress. The pervasiveness of poetry in Hindu civic life occluded the prose that was increasingly the written form of philosophical discourse and civic reform: ‘Their laws, like those of rude nations in general, are in verse. Their sacred books, and even their books of science, are in verse; and what is more wonderful still, their very dictionaries.’10 Mill is particularly scandalized by the centrality of the Ramayan and the Mahabarat in Hindu civic life: ‘they are moreover regarded as books of religion; nay farther, as books of law;. . . the text of these poems is inserted as text of the law, in the same manner as the text of any other legal authority and standard’.11 The use of metrical language in science, lexicography, and law cannot fail to seem fascinating to us now, but to Mill, such reciprocities between art and usefulness do not operate beyond the level of crude signs. While Mill’s pejorative hyperbole contradistinguishes his cherished ideals of uncluttered utility, it also discounts the unique value of a civic poetics. There is no space in the History for attention to the extreme complexity and impressiveness of the civic poetics of Hindu culture. The History’s poverty of aesthetic interest indicates how early nineteenth-century historiography, far from showcasing the so-called ‘open boundaries’ between history and literature in a pre-professional age, could be insensitive to the mediatory forms of historical expression for the larger purpose of colonial integration and control. Phillip Connell has emphasized Mill’s interpretation of the importance of expressive modes in shaping historical validity while simultaneously pointing to the way in which his adaption of philosophical ‘improvement’ narratives has a crude formal valence: ‘Because they had been unable to utilize the development of letters and the reliable accretion of knowledge in the form of “permanent signs”, they had failed to progress beyond an essentially oral, bardic culture—resulting, as far as Mill was concerned, in a remarkable collective propensity to embellishment and distortion.’12 Stripped of the discrete characteristics of its form, poetry is asked only to signify and not to affect. Metrical language (Hindu verse most often had something approximating to metre but not rhyme) is



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the barrier prohibiting new steps being taken in the ‘intellectual career’ of Hindu society; and this prohibition is anathema to Mill. As many commentators have pointed out, Mill’s History emerged at a time in which disciplinary barriers were being erected to separate the professional historian from the literary scholar or ‘man of letters’. Certainly, the tendency from the mid nineteenth century onwards was towards the separation and demarcation of these roles, with labour being increasingly divided along historical and literary lines. Yet inadequate attention has been paid to the complex intersections between historiography and literary history (and criticism) in Mill’s text. On the one hand, Mill is overwhelmingly preoccupied with semantic characteristics: that is, paraphraseable ‘sense’ and the imputation of what he assumes to be facts or truths about the culture which has given rise to Hindu verse. He virtually ignores the fact that the mode of writing being discussed might carry textural or prosodic values resistant to the reductive paraphrastic projects of the philosophical historian. Of the Mahabarat and Ramayan, for example, he writes: ‘They are excessively prolix and insipid. They are. . . trifling and childish to a degree, which those acquainted with only European poetry can hardly conceive. [A]‌ll the vices which characterise the style of rude nations, and particularly those of Asia, they exhibit in perfection.’13 The poverty of verbal (as opposed to semantic) interest here is characteristic of British philosophical history and its tendency to efface the affective potential of verse: linguistic characteristics are read as cultural and historical signifiers, but the indictment is insensitive to these poems’ prosodic or verbal characteristics. Where the Hindu poet neglects to judiciously edit, cut, or define his ‘numberless effusions moving in thoughtless career’, he gives definition to a culture of excess that is absent from Mill’s grand conception of European verse. This poetic ideal—balanced and editorially decorous—in the History’s scheme reflects European civilization itself: ‘A happy description, or here and there the vivid conception of a striking circumstance, are not sufficient; the exact observation of nature, and the symmetry of a whole, are necessary, to designate the poetry of a cultivated people.’14 As I wish to show, this vocabulary of necessity and usefulness, this installation of verse and verse criticism within a historiography insensitive to its formal characteristics, is a hallmark of the new utilitarianism in historical writing that Mill exemplifies. Verse, literary history, and textual criticism are therefore both essential and inimical to Mill’s historiographical purpose. The idea of abundance is especially crucial for the kind of negative classification Mill attempts to apply to Hindu versification: it is, he says, the Hindu inability to limit verbiage which is the vital distinguishing characteristic of its culture and verse. Mill describes ‘numberless effusions, which

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a wild imagination throws forth, in its loose and thoughtless career’.15 In one of a series of passages in which Mill rebuffs William Jones’s claims for Hindu sophistication, he describes Hindu legal texts as ‘a disorderly compilation of loose, vague, stupid, or unintelligible quotations and maxims, selected arbitrarily from books of law, books of devotion, and books of poetry; attended with a commentary, which only adds to the mass of absurdity and darkness: a farrago, by which nothing is defined, nothing established; and from which, in the distribution of justice, no assistance beyond the materials of a gross inference, can for any purpose be derived’.16 Metrical language holds concision in abeyance and hinders the discernment of fact which must be a cornerstone of a progressive society. Mill’s denigrations are layered: Hindu verse is central to the utility of civic Hindu life, but it is also debarred from any useful, developmental purpose or role by its immanent, formal diffuseness. Thus, he emphasizes verse’s utilitarian role whilst simultaneously suggesting its social uselessness. For all its widespread use, Hindu verse is bereft of utility, and therefore it does not operate or even exist for the Benthamite Mill in any kind of purposeful way. What is the cultural logic of this rejection of poetic abundance? What kind of work is Mill doing as a proto-utilitarian historian when he circumscribes restraint and discernment at the heart of his taxonomies of cultural difference and deficiency? To some extent, the periodical culture that shaped Mill offers an explanation. Lawrence Klein has written of eighteenth-century Addisonian moralism that ‘[e]‌xcess and extremity were bad things, dangerous to moral and soteriological health, but also pernicious in politics’.17 The politeness, restraint, and moderation enshrined at the heart of Addisonian periodical culture also influenced the later Edinburgh Review culture out of which the History emerged. However heated the ‘slashing’ review culture was in early nineteenth-century Britain, something of the polite traditions of the earlier periodical publishing bears on Mill’s shunning of excess. Yet Mill’s several invectives against poetic abundance and excess also reveal an indebtedness to a strand of eighteenth-century culture quite separate from moralism and historical exemplarity. Conspicuously prescriptive, his indictments of Hindu verse draw from a rule-based poetics whose provenance can be charted through neo-classical discourse. Decorum and proportion are precisely those values which define not only earlier eighteenth-century British art and writing, taking their cue from Aristotle’s Ars Poetica and Horace’s Poetics, but which are, for Mill, integral to the definition of nascent concepts of national character. The eighteenth-century interrelation of written-ness and national character is a touchstone of an earlier poetics in which rules and the correct



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literary deportment in the pursuit of ‘harmony’ or ‘perfection’ were a project constitutive of the modern conception of nationhood.18 Mill accordingly sees the unnatural extravagance of Indian writing as shutting it out of a literary world defined by universal, natural, and ethical rules: ‘These fictions are not only more extravagant, and unnatural, less correspondent with the physical and moral laws of the universe, but are less ingenious, more monstrous, and have less of any thing that can engage the affection, awaken sympathy, or excite admiration, reverence, or terror, than the poems of any other, even the rudest people.’19 So extreme are the obfuscations of the perpetual, violent, and strained metaphorical language of the Hindus, that Mill stares blankly at the page, his own concision blunted by what he reads: ‘It is incompatible with the present purpose to speak of these poems in more than general terms.’ 20 Imperatives of restraint and politeness occlude a nuanced appreciation of a culture which, remarkably, uses metrical language as a legal or scientific mode of expression. Inheriting the eighteenth-century tendency to extrapolate from page to patriotism, the conflation of literary, national, and ethnic characteristics in the History is put to work in a series of nakedly judgemental strategies. Jan Golstein has identified a dialectic which is particularly useful for reading Mill’s History: ‘The words commonly used in any culture as negative epithets or smear words stand in dialectical relation to the most esteemed values of that culture.’21 Mill’s hyperbolic negativity operates in much the same way in relation to the perceived values and qualities of British and European social and cultural development. His scheme places almost total emphasis on the efficacy or social agency of written endeavour, and consequently on how historiography can effect a concrete elevation of humanity’s position. ‘At this first stage the literature of the Hindus has always remained. . . All their compositions, with wonderfully few exceptions, are in verse. For history they have only certain narrative poems, which depart from all resemblance to truth and nature.’22 Yet while the History places Hindu profuseness and British written temperance in contradistinction, it is crucial that we read against the grain of the text’s hyperbolic assertions to realize what it indicates about the culture from which it comes. In other words: why such an investment in written temperance in early nineteenth-century Britain? The answer comes when one views the History as a progenitor of a new socially active mode in historiography. Mill’s animus against inconcision exists along side a utilitarian prohibition of vagueness and ill-definition in post-revolutionary European politics and social organization. Mill’s vituperations against prolixity and vagueness are therefore a crucial part of a utilitarian project in which usefulness is inseparable from the character of valuable language. Throughout Bentham’s writing on judicial procedure

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and taxation, a thinking which includes or enables social improvement must necessarily be manifested in prose which eschews inconcision, verbosity, and insipidity. The gravity of socially active, improving writing demands that nothing be left out or added in superfluity: ‘Judicial formulas have too often merited the reproach which has been almost everywhere thrown upon them, of being at the same time vague and prolix—of sinning by omission and by excess.’23 More is written, less is signified and effected: this is an anxiety of substantiality. Bentham is more engaged than Mill in applying the science of Enlightenment historical didacticism in real social predicaments, but they share in a fascination with the fear that pragmatism can be deluged in a written plethora. Indeed, their social theorizing is regularly distilled to a ratio of the value of written signification to effective, improving thought: ‘It has in certain cases been thought right to proportion the number of words to the importance of the subject. To dismiss a grave matter in two or three words, it has been considered, was not to form a sufficiently high idea of it—not to treat it with a sufficient dignity. This is the error of a little mind. The most sublime thoughts are often expressed by a single word.’24 With proportion comes dignity, and true sublimity begets simple, effective writing. Bentham and Mill do not only describe effective cognition as it is or was: they describe characteristics of a better thinking for the new century, which, in its turn, prescribes a better type of written expression. Language is always axial in utilitarian value-judgement, and the dialectic of written overabundance and intellectual poverty subsumes matters as disparate as agriculture and the linguistic deportment of members of parliament. Everything comes within its orbit, with linguistic modes repeatedly indicted for insipidity or otherwise. All human endeavour is viewed through the lens of language, and even the language of utility is indicted for its usefulness: In the instrument called language, or say discourse, at any rate in all the generally known modifications of it, note on this occasion an imperfection, the inconvenient effects of which will be continually exemplifying themselves: the want of two different appellations for the designation,—one of the act, or say the operation—the other, of the result, whatever it be, of that same act or operation. The consequence is, the necessity of employing, for the designation of two ideas so widely different, one and the same word. Unfortunate indeed is the existence of this imperfection. It pervades and fills with perplexity the whole texture of the language. Every word that terminates in tion, and many of them that terminate in ment (both derived from the Latin, and common to the Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as the English,) is infected with it.

As these passages suggest, ambiguity is unequivocally undesirable. Any duality of signification within a single lexical object is ‘imperfection’.



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Where ‘texture’ is invoked, there is in fact no textural discussion, but merely one of suffixes. The objection to the use of one word to designate two stages of an action seems counterintuitive in a discussion in which succinctness is valorized. These comments on language are concurrent with the wider utilitarian conviction that the salutary political and social manifestations of enlightenment must at all times protect themselves against the nebulous, the uninterrogated, the ill-qualified.25 Attacking the French Declaration of Rights, Bentham states that ‘natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptable rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts’.26 Bentham’s vituperation against ‘natural rights’ and ‘natural law’—the latter a predicate of the former—questions the existence of these originary, foundational concepts for the new types of societies being established in France and America.27 Taking as his subjects what he reads as the two great culminative projects of Enlightenment—the French and American Revolutions—he tempers his enthusiasm with a rigid sense of that which is real and substantive, and that which is imaginary and nonsensical. One manuscript is suggestively titled ‘Pestilential nonsense unmasked; or an Anatomy of the First French Declaration of Rights’. In the year of the Revolution in France, Bentham questions the unstable predication of the American Declaration of Rights: ‘Who can help lamenting that so rational a cause should be rested upon reasons, so much fitter to beget objections than to remove them.’28 The abstract, universalizing correctiveness of philosophical history is reformed and put to work with a new, concrete feeling of purchase—a pragmatism intolerant of inconcision and vague terminology: ‘Rights are fictitious entities—the people real ones. Realities on this occasion, as on all others, realities I prefer to fictions.’29 Bentham brooks no phantoms and Mill’s historiography is shaped by a similar intolerance of that which is insubstantial and ill-defined. In these linguistically-oriented prohibitions, as in Mill’s copious use of ‘prolix’, ‘insipid’, ‘superstitious’, ‘verbose’, and many other similarly withering epithets, there is a salutation of each word’s perceived opposite. But such investments in binaries of ideal and undesirable concepts rarely result in a satisfactory realization of the ideal. This is to say, that stating an eschewal of imagination in historiography does not necessarily result in the formation of a concise, counter-imaginative historiography. The paradoxes in Mill’s History reflect what John Whale has designated the ‘epistemology of imagination’: a hotly contested public debate over the roles that imagination and passion play in systems of receiving, organizing, and mediating historical knowledge.30 If Mill followed the philosophical mode in adopting the historical idea of poetry-as-historiography,

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he necessarily registered that idea’s belatedness, its inherent ‘past-ness’. As a product of philosophical history, Mill felt that he must debar imaginative, passionate, and inconcise historical writing from an improving, reformist present. But many were troubled by this absolute prohibition of imagination and passion from the kind of political and social rationalism that Mill’s Benthamite historiography represented. In a move redolent of Wordsworth’s rejection of Godwinian political rationalism, William Hazlitt, in his ‘On Reason and Imagination’ from The Plain Speaker (1826), offered an impassioned defence of the role of imagination in historical and socially utilitarian writing: ‘I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea.’31 Godwin himself championed a history of individuals over the abstractions of philosophic history in his unpublished ‘of History and Romance’ (1797), indicating a shift from the rationalist framework of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) towards a new understanding of the value of the local and the particular: ‘The mind of man does not love abstractions. Its genuine and native taste. . . rests entirely in individualities.’32 Similarly, in the preface to his essays in the Enquirer (1797), Godwin notes that his methodology involves ‘an incessant recurrence to experiment and actual observation’, arguing that experience, rather than ‘system’, is ‘the pole-star of truth’.33 Hazlitt’s placement of the particular and the human at the heart of political discourse and historical expression runs directly counter to the sober pragmatism of the History and Mill’s other explicitly Benthamite productions, such as his Essay on Government (1820). Hazlitt takes issue with Mill specifically, accentuating the crucial question of how far one should trust to guiding principles rather than lived, observable experience, in the composition of history: One of this school of thinkers declares that he was qualified to write a better history of India from having never been there than if he had, as the last might lead to local distinctions or party-prejudices; that is to say, that he could describe a country better at second-hand than from original observation, or that from having seen no one object, place, or person, he could do ampler justice to the whole. It might be maintained, much on the same principle, that an artist would paint a better likeness of a person after he was dead, from description or different sketches of the face, than from having seen the individual living man. On the contrary, I humbly conceive that the seeing half a dozen wandering Lascars in the streets of London gives one a better idea of the soul of India, the cradle of the world, and (as it were) garden of the sun, than all the charts, records and statistical reports that can be sent over, even under the classical administration of Mr. Canning. Ex uno omnes.34



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For Hazlitt, Mill’s exclusion of passion and imagination from historical writing is a symptom of utilitarianism’s dehumanizing didacticism. Mill’s sense of historical efficacy thus effaces the sort of cultural characteristics Hazlitt wishes to carefully consider and directly experience. Hazlitt directly upbraids Mill for his assertion that a history of India can be written without any experience of the place: ‘whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India, can be expressed in writing. As soon as every thing of importance is expressed in writing, a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year, in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the longest life, by the use of his eyes and his ears, in India’.35 Mill had not visited India before writing the History, a fact that undoubtedly compromises the idea of the text as an experience-based work of empiricism. But Hazlitt’s criticism has additional implications for the value and validity of the History’s Benthamite pragmatism. Switching between a seeming purchase on the Indian past and a readiness to apply its lessons didactically to the present, such a transaction can only operate meaningfully if questions of source authenticity—of the reliability of raw materials and one’s method of understanding them—are adequately resolved. In a curious undercutting of his own maxim that history should prohibit imaginative thinking, Mill’s own approach has at all times far more to do with predetermined guiding principles than with direct experience: ‘True information is also procured with difficulty, because it is too often derived from mere practice, instead of being deduced from fixed principles.’36 This arch rationalism stands in a very curious relationship to Mill’s hyperbolic denigration of imagination in historiography: for all that ‘rationalism’ and ‘imagination’ are routinely set against each other, Mill’s rationalism is a type of imagination: it operates separate to lived experience; it is an intellectual mode which relies for its existence on the imagination of the efficacy of one’s own approach as superior to ‘mere practice’.

II Despite their collective exhortations that one should avoid unchecked abundance, Bentham and Mill share a predisposition for polemical flourish. Ironically, rhetorical floridity characterizes their new socially engaged thinking, in which comparative historiography is a critical tool for present and future social correction. As Mill discusses Hindu accounts of creation in the sacred book Menu, we again encounter the redounding critical vocabulary of the early utilitarian: ‘It is all vagueness and darkness, incoherence, inconsistency, and confusion. It is one of the most extravagant of all specimens of discourse without ideas. The fearless propensity of a rude mind

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to guess where it does not know, never exhibited itself in more fantastic and senseless forms.’37 This passage captures not one, but two myopias: not only is Mill’s sanctioning of expressive confinement entirely unconfined, his withering observations of verbosity utterly verbose, but the passage is also a striking disavowal of historical conjecture at the exact point when the phrase ‘conjectural history’ was being introduced by Dugald Stewart in his Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe (published in 1815 and again in 1821).38 Stewart states that: ‘In examining the history of mankind, as well as in examining the phenomena of the material world, when we cannot trace the process by which an event has been produced, it is often of importance to be able to show how it may have been produced by natural causes.’39 Stewart thus writes at the cusp of a new nomenclature for historical understanding, and his prose is characterized by a palpable self-consciousness: ‘To this species of philosophical investigation, which has no appropriate name in our language, I shall take the liberty of giving the title Theoretical or Conjectural History; an expression which coincides pretty nearly in its meaning with that of Natural History, as employed by Mr Hume.’40 Stewart’s claims point to a disjuncture between what Mill and Bentham sanction as desirable in written style, and the characteristics of their own prose. There is a surfeit of exhortations towards concision and good editing in the History, but Mill seems unable to limit his own encouragements towards limitation. Where his own profusions dry up, he enlists several others in buttressing roles. Abbé Dubois continues Mill’s habit of writing a great deal whilst encouraging writing less: One of the principal defects of the Hindu poets is that their descriptions are commonly too long and minute. For example, if they are describing a beautiful woman, they are never contented with drawing her likeness with a single stroke. . . . Such a mode of expression would not be strong enough for the gross comprehension of a Hindu. The poet must particularize the beauty of her eyes, her forehead, her nose, her cheeks, and must expatiate on the colour of her skin, and the manner in which she adorns every part of her body. He will describe the turn and proportion of her arms, legs, thighs, shoulders, chest, and in a word of all parts visible or invisible; with an accurate recital of the shape and form which best indicate their beauty and symmetry. He will never desist from his colouring till he has represented in detail every feature and part in the most laboured and tedious style, but at the same time with the closest resemblance.41

The forcefulness of Mill’s rhetoric belies a historical and literary world in a process of extreme renegotiation. For this reason, Mill’s florid rejections of literary profuseness retain an aporetic shadow. The dialectic of written temperance versus abundance stands in curious relation to the literary milieu of which Mill was a part. By virtue of Mill’s close connection to



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an Edinburgh Review community, which included Francis Jeffrey, Robert Southey, Thomas Moore, Walter Scott, and Walter Savage-Landor, Mill’s text reflected (and indeed shaped) the ambivalences of an early nineteenthcentury literary market in the throes of a mania for orientalist writing. These poets and critics wrangled with the question of how best to versify an oriental subject matter that was simultaneously hugely attractive and largely unpalatable to British readerships. Mill’s distaste for the profusions and unchecked distensions of Hindu verse and culture is shared by his poet contemporaries and, once again, the discussions in this area at this time operate on both historical and literary levels. Walter Savage-Landor and Robert Southey were perhaps the most vocal among those poets who held their noses as they mined the sources and reference-points of the East, attempting fully to capitalize on an orientalist boom that coincided with the absolute zenith of commercial poetry sales in Britain. There was scarcely one poet among the many writing orientalist verse who accepted unequivocally the exoticism, abundance, and unexpurgated extremism of the source verse and culture. What is fascinating is that we find these authors attempting to take up precisely the corrective, limiting, and editing work—the same discerning, judicious trimming—that Mill notes as a defining absence in Hindu verse. In response to his ‘flattering misrepresentation’ of Islamic tradition and culture in Thalaba (1801), Southey describes how the full extent of his poetic accomplishment was required in order to make palatable the monstrous mythology of Hinduism: ‘all the skill I might possess in the art of poetry was required to counterbalance the disadvantage of a mythology. . . which would appear monstrous if its deformities were not kept out of sight. . . . The spirit of the poem was Indian, but there was nothing Oriental in the style. I had learnt the language of poetry from our own great masters and the great poets of antiquity’.42 Walter Savage-Landor, author of the oriental work Gebir (1798) and translator of Arabic and Persian poetry, described ancient oriental verse as ‘that high-seasoned garbage of barbarians’. Southey, commenting on his unsuccessful oriental epics Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama (1810), noted that ‘the little of [Persian] literature that has reached us is. . . worthless’.43 Southey’s opinion comes with a suggestive qualification. The Arabian Nights ‘abound with genius’ because ‘they have lost their metaphorical rubbish in passing through the filter of a French translation’.44 These attempts to chasten the source materials of the ‘orient’ appear as editorial extensions of Mill’s ideas about the perniciousness of profusion. Mill’s ideal eradication of anti-utilitarian verbosity thus has its correlative in an orientalist poetics of editing and annotation that is at once fascinating and self-contradictory. In avowing the objective of correcting oriental subject matter through the application of rigorous concision,

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poets and editors in fact produce more and more annotative material: one abundance replaces another. The footnoting tendency underlines the fact that poets and historians looking to the East were hugely preoccupied with negotiating oriental histories—literary or otherwise. The desire to check and chasten the counterfactual excesses of subaltern or alien subject sources—literary, historical, and literary-historical—manifests itself in a widespread tendency towards the compilation of errata. Marilyn Butler has commented that ‘the “romance” element in Romanticism was checked and undercut by a self-conscious modernity or a distancing intellectuality’.45 Butler offers a lengthy list of annotated poetic and prose romances ‘with such antinarration in the form of footnotes’.46 These include Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) and Waverley Novels (1814–), Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813), and Moore’s Lallah Rookh (1817). Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Byron’s oriental tales in particular provided their readerships with a wealth of just the kind of annotation that Butler describes.47 This annotation is a means by which the older forms of poetry can be redacted into a circumspect poetics, which draws from, but does not alienate, a polite readership. It is this balance that constitutes the intellectual distancing that Butler identifies. Not everyone sanctioned the annotative turn. Francis Jeffrey baulked at the conspicuous ‘display of learning’ in Southey’s Thalaba. To Jeffrey, the poet has been ‘[s]‌crupulously correct in the citation of his authorities, as if he were the compiler of a true history, and thought his reputation would be ruined by the imputation of a single fiction. . . . There is no prodigy, accordingly, or a deception, for which he does not produce his vouchers, and generally lays before the readers the whole original passage from which his imitation has been taken’.48 Southey has assumed the role of the assiduous civil servant, tutting at the profusions and extremities of eastern fantasy as he compiles a work of sober administrative and commercial value. Southey’s Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama are anxious experimentations ‘with a new form of poetry, whose alien subject matter had to be domesticated, and whose readership was uncertain’.49 Javed Majeed notes how ‘[t]his rhetoric of authenticity and fidelity in Southey’s epics was in part indicative of the anxiety in the oriental renaissance in this period to draw “orient knowledge from its fountains pure”, for purposes of legal codification and works of fiction, purposes which were simultaneously diverse and intimately related’.50 In Mill’s History, as in this orientalist poetics, it is as though the flagrant denigration of poetry as a vehicle for historical truth is met with a need to place fact and reliable editing procedure at the heart of the redacted orient. To illumine a path towards the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, Mill saw that one must engage in circumscriptive work: demarcating pasts from



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which civil society should strive to awaken. He is entirely of his age and milieu in ascribing qualities of concision and clarity to a future that the History throws into relief. As this outline shows, we need not look to obscurities to find evidence of the rabidity with which British readers of verse demanded exactly those written characteristics prohibited by Mill: the extreme, the insipid, the verbose, and the violent. Byron’s oriental tales were being published at the same time as Mill’s History. With copious errata and footnotes, The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Giaour (1813), Lara (1814), The Siege of Corinth (1816), The Corsair (1814), and Parisina (1816) cast a doubtful light on Mill’s contrasting of European concision to Indian verbosity. This hugely saleable verse offers us a historical poetics in three crucial aspects. Each poem explores the personal histories of poor, marginal, and legally aberrant people of the Levant and the orient, debarred from partaking in civil society by virtue of their ignominious pasts. Overlaying their marginal histories are the histories of the metrical forms employed by the poet, with which Byron was far more fascinated than his letters or diaries would suggest. By employing couplets to tell the tales of the ignominious orient, Byron problematizes Mill’s contention that Europeans have an innate tendency to match semantic or thematic content with appropriate written forms. Indeed Byron’s orientalist poems are all dramas of mismatched form and content. He deliberately chooses an inappropriate poetic form for the tales of low life that his poems describe. Discussing the implications of couplet poetry in the dedication of The Corsair to Thomas Moore, Byron broaches the germane question of apt metres for apt characters and themes: ‘In the present composition I have attempted not the most difficult, but, perhaps, the best adapted measure to our language, the good old and now neglected heroic couplet:—the stanza of Spenser is perhaps too slow and dignified for narrative.’51 Pressing behind the word ‘narrative’ is the poet’s understanding of the controversy of using this dignified, stately couplet prosody in relating outlaw histories. Byron takes a primitive past setting and circumscribes it in a form that is established, highly recognizable, and culturally significant. Jeffrey wrote about the received stateliness of Byron’s chosen form that ‘it was yet to be proved that this, most ponderous and stately verse in our language, could be accommodated to the variations of a tale of passion and of pity, and to all the breaks, starts and transitions of an adventurous and dramatic narration’. Byron’s appreciation of the heroic couplet form encompasses both stateliness and a desire for a progressive vigour. And yet, for Byron, this is the suitable metrical medium for The Corsair and Lara precisely because of its associations of establishment and stability. Susan Wolfson has suggested that the complex and fluid metrical history of the heroic couplet prohibits any ‘facile mimeticism’, and by focusing on the

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heterogeneity of Byron’s metre, she explains how form can act as a force for profitable complication, calling attention instead to the way poetic form may not always sustain but may recast, or even put into question, relationships and systems of understanding taken to be stable, grounded, and culturally guaranteed. The text of The Corsair reflects this variability: some of Byron’s couplets trope constraint, and in some versions, with more subtlety than any Miltonic story of ‘vexation, hindrance, and constraint’ on poetic ‘liberty’; but in other couplets Byron contests their famed enmity to heroic verse, or keeps both operations going, or reconfigures them, or shapes critical examinations of the whole question.52

The conditional suggestiveness of Wolfson’s statement that in some couplets Byron ‘keeps both operations going, or reconfigures them, or shapes critical examinations of the whole question’ goes some way to capturing the vast metrical heterogeneity of The Corsair. Its metrical art is primarily defined by a restlessness that seems to cultivate a profound instability. The points at which these couplets feel ‘closed’ or otherwise are those at which the past life of the Popean couplet presses most clearly on its prosody. But ultimately, and as Jeffrey understands, the willed complexity of this Byronic comedy of form and content must be taken into account if the significance of this moment in verse history is to be understood. This one example speaks to a period of verse publishing in Britain, which, if Mill had chosen to apply his own method of reading from verse to social development, would surely have revealed a culture riven by processes of violent renegotiation. If verse signifies progress and its lack, the new ‘extravagance’ of the most popular poets of the day (Scott and Byron), drawing from the violent extremes of the border raids and oriental piratical adventure respectively, suggests that the certain contrasts of Mill’s utilitarian comparisons may well have been premature. Given the character of the poetry produced in his own time and country, Mill’s History strikes an odd note in the intersecting literary and historical milieu out of which it emerges. Moreover, it prohibits imaginative control over historical expression at precisely the time in which historians such as Thomas Carlyle were experimenting in fascinating ways with the role of subjectivity in historical narrative, and in which Scott’s phenomenally successful Waverley Novels were popularizing questions over how imaginative writing could vivify historical issues in a nascent nation state.

III Much of this chapter has been concerned to uncover the History’s ‘politics of style’, reading from poetry to progress (or lack thereof ) and from page to pragmatism. Simon Jarvis has contended that ‘[t]‌he formula politics of



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style, as usually wielded, empties both the terms it glues together. It diminishes politics to its least complex moment, that of wearing a badge, and then makes style be that badge’.53 In emptying Hindu verse of its aesthetic or affective potential and surveying it as material or empirical data, Mill prescribes precisely this method for interpreting the cultural logic of his own publication. While he eschews the civic verbalism which characterizes Hindu culture, one cannot help but be struck by the History’s own syntactic methods of accrual—a linguistic copiousness so fervent as to belie an attitude of apology: ‘Inflation; metaphors perpetual, and these the most violent and strained, often the most unnatural and ridiculous; obscurity; tautology; repetition; verbosity; confusion; incoherence; distinguish the Mahabarat and Ramayan.’54 These sentences accumulate descriptors, they gather hyperbole, they list withering adjectives, and eventually, they assume a compensatory aspect. Mill seeks to consign verse to historiography’s past, simultaneously acknowledging and staunching the centuriesold continuity between history and the rhythmic palpability of verse’s modes of signification.55 With such a move, he both enshrines verse as a valid field for historiographical interpretation and prohibits any possibility that the historical writing of the new century might turn its attentions to acts of verbal expression in ways other than those that are semantically or metaphorically significant. Irrespective of the vastness of the pasts being described in the History, there is the pervasive sense that this is a historical thinking almost entirely concerned with improvement in its own historical moment. For example, the History’s didactic rationalism is yoked to correction narratives, with the word ‘improvement’ used 97 times and ‘progress’ 170 times. This stridency provides the ideological underpinning to Britain’s expansionary commercial and cultural subjugations in the new century. Begun in 1806, the text took eleven years to be completed, only publishing in 1817. Even a cursory survey of Britain’s social, cultural, and commercial transformations in this period suggests why the History has merited attention as a lens through which the attitudes of its own time can be read. After Waterloo, Britain would emerge as the unequivocal imperialist power throughout the world. The years 1810–20 also witnessed the undeniable zenith of poetry sales in the country. The phenomenon was, as discussed briefly here, driven in no small part by saleable verse depictions of the subaltern people of the Levant, India, and the Far East. Majeed has noted that Southey’s poetic preoccupation with plumbing depths, with the dark reverberations of the unknown, in Thalaba thematizes the Romantic poet’s position in relation to new oriental fields of literary interest, writing a willed exoticism into acts of cultural plundering for which one need not look far for correlatives in commercial activity in the time.56

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Mill certainly does not view Hindu verse with the ambivalent eye of the opportunistic orientalist poet, but he is ambivalent about his work’s own imperialist genesis, criticizing harshly the monopoly enjoyed by own country, and the iniquities and inefficiencies imposed on India by the English and British who acquired so much of the country. The historical concatenation of commercial and cultural appropriations of Eastern territories is virtually indexed by the History, itself written by a man in the process of a remarkable rise through the ranks of that scion of imperialist commercialism: the East India Company. Soon after the text’s publication Mill would be promoted to the role of chief examiner of correspondence for the company. The History therefore carries off several acts of historical signification, charting the professional life of a powerful civil servant in India and giving a cross-section of the excoriating attitudes of the literary critic to the writing of India, as well as laying bare the nascence of utilitarian imperialism and something of the political environment into which John Stuart Mill was born. Mill’s History clearly has a powerful eighteenth-century backstory, but it signposts the future of historiography as well as its past, demonstrating the meeting of an abstract, philosophic historiography with the project of a new imperialist pragmatism. Owing to this between-ness, the History captures a wider impatience with the theorizing of the earlier eighteenthcentury histories from which it takes so much, espousing Enlightenment rationality regarding perceptions and representations of historical time but simultaneously rejecting eighteenth-century valorizations of the past. And yet while the History draws from one historical mode in order to forge another, it would be a mistake to read it as a mere interregnum in historical expression. In the sense that Mill’s ‘poetics of historiography’ is a valuerich mode of literary suggestiveness, which places poetry unambiguously in the past of historiographical expression, it is decisively modern. Much is prohibited in this historicizing move (then and now): in particular, inconcision, imaginative investment in historical writing, and the possibility that a literary text might be a viable historical source. For better or worse, Mill’s prohibition of verse from within the parameters of historiographical expression echoes throughout the new century and beyond. N OT E S 1. James Mill, The History of British India, ed. William Thomas (1818; London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. xi. 2. Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters: Delivered in the University of Glasgow by Adam Smith, Reported by a Student in 1762–63 (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1963), 100. 3. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767), 257.



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4. James Mill, The History of British India in 6 volumes, 3rd edn (London: Baldwin, Cradock, & Joy, 1826), ii. 44, hereafter referred to as the History. 5. Mill, History, ii. 82. 6. Mill, History, ii. 54. 7. Mill, History, ii. 54. Verse, once represented in Scottish conjectural histories as suitable for the faithful registration and communication of historical fact in ancient communities, is for Mill a signpost of oriental cultural immobility. Orality is antithetical to the improving, essentially circumscriptive, and litigious work of prose: ‘Until very lately, there was no civil code, that is to say, there was no description good or bad, in a permanent set of words, of almost any of the rights belonging to individuals, in any country in Europe. The whole was traditionary, the whole was oral; there was hardly any legislative writing’ (History, ii. 442). 8. Mill, History, i. 134. 9. Mill, History, i. 420. 10. Mill, History, ii. 32–9. 11. Mill, History, ii. 46. 12. Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 81. 13. Connell, Romanticism, 47. 14. Connell, Romanticism, 48. 15. Connell, Romanticism, 47–8. 16. Mill, History, v. 513. 17. Lawrence Klein ‘Joseph Addison’s Whiggism’, in ‘Cultures of Whiggism’: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005), 110. 18. On the connections between literary decorum and nationhood, see Jeffrey Barnow, ‘Britain and European Literature and Thought’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 423–44; Howard Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope (London: Yale University Press, 1975); Howard D. Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Angela Wright, Britain, France and the Import of Terror 1764–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 19. Mill, History, ii. 47. 20. Mill, History, ii. 46. 21. Jan Goldstein, ‘Eighteenth-Century Smear Words in Comparative National Context’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60 (1998), 29–49. 22. Mill, History, ii. 45. 23. Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, 11 vols (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–43), ii. 373. 24. Bentham, Works, ii. 373.

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25. Mill’s recommendation regarding the government of India in 1831 discounts the efficacy of a representative legislature, sanctioning instead the establishment of a small utilitarian council made up of ‘a person thoroughly versed in the philosophy of man and government’ (i.e. a reformist Benthamite), a lawyer, and a person with special native understanding. For all that the History instrumentalizes verse to uncover progress and stagnation, Mill has used the History as an instrument in the formation of reformist suggestion, publicly stated and with concrete ideas of improvement in mind. 26. Jeremy Bentham, ‘Anarchical Fallacies’, Works, ii. 501. 27. In Mill’s view, too, government is essential in order to ensure the proper distribution, enablement, and regulation of the resources which humanity most desires or requires to achieve happiness. Mill argued in his famous ‘Essay on Government’ in the 1820 Encyclopedia Britannica that the government of Britain in that year was operating under too limited a franchise, and that it should be reformed along Benthamite lines. In this way, government would be controlled by what Mill and the utilitarians would adjudge to be highly suitable representatives with controlling power over the executive. 28. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 311. 29. Jeremy Bentham, Memoirs and Correspondence, ed. John Bowring (London: Bowring Edition, 1838–43), 57. 30. John Whale, Imagination under Pressure 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 240. 31. William Hazlitt, ‘On Reason and Imagination’, in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things (London: Henry Burlington, 1826), 101. 32. William Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance’ (1797), in Caleb Williams or Things as They Are, ed. M. Hindle (New York: Penguin, 2005), 361. On this point, see Porscha Fermanis, John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 44–5, and ‘William Godwin’s History of the Commonwealth and the Psychology of Individual History’, Review of English Studies, 61 (2010), 773–800. 33. William Godwin, The Enquirer (London, 1797), p. vi. 34. Hazlitt, ‘On Reason and Imagination’, 117. 35. Mill, History, i. xii. 36. Mill, History, i. xx. 37. Mill, History, i. 286. 38. See Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and David Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). 39. Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D’, ed. I. S. Ross, in W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (eds), Adam Smith: Essays on Philosophical Subjects, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 293. 40. Stewart, ‘Account of the Life’, 293. 41. Mill, History, ii. 56. 42. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1876), 215.



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43. Poetical Works of Southey, 215. 44. Poetical Works of Southey, 215. 45. Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 136. 46. Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium’, 136. 47. John Regan, ‘ “[D]estined to complete a certain cycle”: Francis Jeffrey and Byron’s Orientalism’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 60 (2011), 57–76. 48. Francis Jeffrey, ‘Thalaba’, Edinburgh Review, 1 (Oct. 1802), 77. 49. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s History of British India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 51. 50. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 51. 51. George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, iii, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 149. 52. Susan J.  Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 139. 53. Simon Jarvis, ‘For a Poetics of Verse’, PMLA 125/4 (2010), 931–5. 54. Mill, History, ii. 47. 55. For further consideration of the intersections between prosody and historiography, see John Regan, ‘Ambiguous Progress and its Poetic Correlatives: Percy’s Reliques and Eighteenth-Century Philosophical History’, English Literary History 81. 2 (2014), 615–34. 56. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 51.

4 A ‘poor crotchety picture of several things’ Antiquarianism, Subjectivity, and the Novel in Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell Porscha Fermanis

I In the introduction to his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845), Thomas Carlyle invokes the persona of ‘Anti-Dryasdust’ in order to declare war on the methods, philosophy, and style of the antiquaries, vowing to rescue Cromwell’s ‘authentic utterances’ from the ‘foul Lethean quagmires’ and ‘unspeakable Historical Provinces’ (C i. 11) where they lie buried by pedants, dilettantes, and other examples of ‘prurient Stupidity’ (i. 2).1 Carlyle’s caustic dismissal of antiquarianism seems at odds with the affectionate ribaldry of a previous generation of historians such as Hume and especially Gibbon, who, notwithstanding their philosophic bent, managed to harness the empirical minutiae of antiquarianism to the narrative style of the classical historian—or at least did not consider antiquarianism to be inherently incompatible with sentimental and other rhetorical modes of representation.2 It also sits uneasily with Walter Scott’s own appropriations of Dryasdust’s antiquarian legacy: despite Scott’s occasional mockery of the antiquary, Katie Trumpener, Susan Manning, and others have now demonstrated the extent to which his novels ‘foreground. . . the retroactive antiquarian production of historical knowledge out of a myriad of experiences, records, and possible reconstructions’.3 Unlike Scott, who was keen to draw on a ‘legitimating framework of historical erudition’, Carlyle saw no need to pander to Dryasdust in Cromwell, replacing Scott’s jocular tone with a far more virulent critique:4 Cromwell’s letters and speeches are the lone beacons of ‘faint authentic twilight’ (i. 65) in the antiquarian darkness he describes, and it is only by reviving the ‘spoken’ and written



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contents of these kinds of primary, subjective, and often personal documents that he can hope to deliver a living, breathing history of the seventeenth century, in which he will ‘struggle piously, passionately, to behold, if but in glimpses, the faces of our vanished Fathers’ (i. 3).5 Much has been made of Carlyle’s desire to resurrect and revivify a living past along the lines of Scott and other writers of historical fiction. Indeed, historical evocation or resurrection has come to stand as the master-trope for ‘Romantic historiography’ more generally. But the opening of Cromwell equally draws attention to the processes of loss and decay that made such revival difficult and even impossible: Carlyle’s monstrous vision of a ‘shoreless chaos’ of ‘mouldering’ documents (C i. 2) not only intimates his fear of being permanently entombed in the netherworld of his innumerable sources, but also shows us a period of history so lost, so obscured by ‘the wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations’ (i. 2), that it reveals nothing but death and darkness.6 In many ways, Carlyle and the antiquarians share what Yoon Sun Lee has called ‘the trope of catastrophe’ rather than a Burkean narrative of historical inheritance. As Lee reminds us, ‘the existence of the antiquarian object is contingent on processes of obsolence and fragmentation as these afflict cultures, institutions, and nations’.7 Carlyle, too, draws attention to the kinds of cultural and national vacancy engendered by a neglected past as ‘chaotic whirlwinds’, ‘dark abysses’, and an ‘indiscriminate blackness’ repeatedly seek to overwhelm him during the writing of Cromwell (i. 65–6, 290, 317; ii. 141, 224). Admittedly, he makes a certain cultural capital out of this uncertainty and loss, aestheticizing degeneracy and decay even as he laments it, but he does not, unlike his philosophic predecessors, position his observations of decay within a larger narrative of progress and decline, evading a stadialist logic by emphasizing the difficulties of constructing any kind of coherent narrative out of the all too chaotic past (i. 1).8 Carlyle’s overt antipathy towards a method and philosophy that emphasizes the particular, the partial, and the fragmentary must therefore be set against his own fascination with contingent and provisional forms of knowing, in particular with what he describes in his journal article ‘On History’ (1830) as the barely decipherable ‘palimpsest’ of the past, a ‘complex Manuscript, covered over with formless inextricably-entangled unknown characters’ which ‘can be fully interpreted by no man’ (H 258–9).9 Carlyle’s attraction to the ‘dimly legible’ remnants or residue of history, so prominent in his labyrinthine descriptions of the seventeenth century in Cromwell (C i. 6–7), recalls Lionel Gossman’s characterization of the period’s historiography as a process of ‘decipherment’ or a means of ‘restoring contact with origins and reconstituting what was experienced as a fractured totality’. Gossman’s account places Romantic historical writing

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and antiquarianism both at a revealing intersection and at a curious disjuncture: like the antiquary, ‘the romantic historian had to come to terms with an especially acute sense of the uniqueness and originality of historical phenomena, and therefore of rupture and discontinuity’, and accordingly his relationship towards the matter of his inquiries was ‘subjective, affective, and—crucially—unconceptualized’ in the sense that it tended to resist abstract philosophic generalization and universal grand narratives in favour of particularities.10 At the same time, however, Gossman’s emphasis on processes of ‘reconstitution’ ultimately disallows fracture as a key component of the period’s historiographical character, replacing antiquarian discontinuity with a version of Hegelian organicism. While Gossman’s argument can be subjected to considerable scrutiny, his account nonetheless showcases the new commitment of early nineteenth-century historical writing to archival, archeological, epigraphic, and other forms of material evidence once primarily the domain of antiquarian researchers. Recent studies have certainly revised our view of Carlyle as a careless and unsystematic researcher.11 John Rosenberg, for example, has convincingly demonstrated that Carlyle took a fastidiously documentary approach to his sources in Cromwell, arguing that the text does not so much reject antiquarianism as enact the struggle between the artist and the antiquarian within Carlyle himself. Heather Henderson, too, has shown that part of Carlyle’s frustration towards ‘Dryasdust’ book clubs, publishing societies, and their editors was his ‘obvious exasperation as a professional historian trapped in the accepted publishing system and compelled to use the incompetent works of clubbable amateurs locked in mutual admiration’.12 Such conclusions echo those of contemporary reviewers, more than one of whom maintains that Cromwell is ‘carefully authenticated’ and ‘based on an extent of reading and research not unworthy of its subject’. As Leslie Stephen argued in an unsigned obituary of Carlyle in Cornhill Magazine for 1881, ‘whatever the accuracy of the colouring in his historical studies, they at least imply the most thorough going and conscientious labour. . . . It is, indeed, a subsidiary pleasure, in reading all Carlyle’s writings, to feel that the artist is always backed up by the conscientious workman’.13 Stephen draws here on Carlyle’s own distinction in ‘On History’ between the ‘artisan’ (who deals ‘mechanically with discrete phenomena’) and the ‘artist’ (who can envisage ‘a sense of the organic whole’), but, like Rosenberg and Henderson, he sees these two historiographical types as ‘mutually reinforcing’ in Carlyle’s work.14 I want to extend the arguments (old and new) that Carlyle enacts both an internal and a methodological struggle between the ‘artist’ and the ‘workman’ in Cromwell by focusing on the ways in which such distinctions play themselves out in his attitudes towards fiction and especially the



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novel. In particular, I wish to consider why Carlyle, despite his well-known antipathy towards fiction, associates the ‘artist’ historian with new kinds of subjectivity that are primarily connected with the emergence of the novel, such as the foregrounding of interiority, motive, and psychological minutiae, while correlating the ‘artisan’ or ‘workman’ with an antiquarian attention to empirical detail. I am not, therefore, so much concerned to outline particular literary influences or sources as to consider the ways in which the novel functioned as a useful heuristic model for Carlyle’s more identifiably historical and biographical writing. Ironically, this most diffident of novel readers and reviewers used prose fiction as a kind of testingground for new ideas about the role of the individual subject in history and how best to represent it. This chapter focuses on Carlyle’s awareness of the ways in which the ‘self ’, in this case the ‘Cromwellian’ self, becomes constructed through the acts of speaking, reading, and writing; and in particular with the relevance of fictional models, such as the epistolary novel, for such constructions or creations of the self. My primary argument is that Carlyle’s attempt to surpass the novel as a mode of truth-telling involved not just an appropriation of what Clara Reeve called ‘a picture of real life and manners’ in the anthropological manner of Jane West, Walter Scott, John Galt, and other historical novelists, but also a commitment to a new kind of ‘cognitive’ or ‘psychological’ history, which focuses on the intentions, desires, motives, feelings, and mental states of historical agents, and grew out of Carlyle’s admiration for eighteenth-century novelists such as Defoe and Richardson, whose work demonstrates an intensified consciousness of selfhood or the act of fashioning a self.15

II Carlyle’s essay ‘On History’ emphasizes the boundlessness, obscurity, and complexity of the ‘ever-living, ever-working Chaos of being’ (H 257), of which the historian, like the novelist, can only offer a ‘poor approximation’ (258). Both here and in Cromwell, Carlyle’s tentative faith in the historian’s mode of truth-telling is often overwhelmed by how little of the past can actually be known or understood (see e.g. C iv. 236). On the one hand, Carlyle is prepared to give history a general conceptual form when he famously identifies it with a kind of ‘biography of the social’: ‘Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men’s Lives who constitute society; History is the essence of innumerable Biographies’ (H 255). On the other hand, his emphasis remains on the individual and uniquely unknowable aspects of the past: ‘But if one Biography, nay our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible

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to us; how much more must these million, the very facts of which, to say nothing of the purpose of them, we know not, and cannot know!’ (255). Carlyle’s categorization of history as a sort of collective biography hints at the increasing reciprocity of history and biography in the early to mid nineteenth century, as well as echoing sentimentalist arguments that biography has a greater instructive value than political or philosophic history.16 But Carlyle is no sentimentalist in any easy sense of the term: his oscillation between an external conceptual system that can never quite distill its innumerable lives down to a representative essence and a life complex that can never quite attain internal unity or completeness demonstrates the extent to which he writes and understands history in what Ann Rigney has called a ‘negative key’.17 Carlyle’s reappraisal of received historiographical ideas and methodologies begins with his rejection of the great Enlightenment solution to the problem of ‘unknowability’—the idea that men are everywhere and always the same—and continues with his questioning of the assumption of omnipotence lurking behind Bolingbroke’s maxim that history is philosophy teaching by experience or example (H 255, 256): ‘Truly, if History is Philosophy teaching by Experience, the writer fitted to compose History is hitherto an unknown man. The Experience itself would require Allknowledge to record it’ (258). He instead privileges the scrutiny of individual human agents, and their unpredictable actions and intentions, over the study of ‘chains’ of causation, arguing that it is quite possible that one of the most ‘important personage[s]‌in man’s history.. [was] the nameless boor who first hammered out for himself an iron spade’ (256).18 Carlyle’s critique of historical determinism is partly an attempt to think through questions posed by Johann Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehren (1810–13), in particular the way in which human free will interacts with a causally conditioned material world, but it is also concerned with more practical, methodological problems surrounding the recording of historical truth. Echoing the terms of an earlier review article on Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends (1821) published in the New Edinburgh Review for 1821, Carlyle maintains that there is a ‘fatal discrepancy’ in causal understandings of history: while we generally regard history as a ‘Narrative’ or ‘successive’ series of events, it is really an ‘Action’ or ‘simultaneous’ group of events, related to each other not by linear or chronological time but rather by ‘breadth’, ‘depth’, ‘Passion and Mystery’ (257, 258).19 Realizing that history is not a homogeneous, linear, or sequential event, Carlyle suggests that the historian should approach it with the ‘eye of faith’ rather than with the analytical perspective of the philosopher, thereby acknowledging history’s complex multi-dimensionality and attempting to reveal its deeper, more essential truths (H 258).20 For some, Carlyle’s



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insistence on the importance of ‘intuitive, faith-centered forms of human knowledge’ is part of his nostaligic ‘affirmation of Christian faith’,21 but in focusing on the mysterious depths of the past rather than on its causal surfaces, Carlyle also attempts to reclaim for the historian those aspects of historical writing that had arguably been appropriated by novelists such as Scott and Godwin—namely, interiority, subjectivity, and lived experience—assigning to history much the same prophetic power as they ascribe to the romance or novel and maintaining conclusions about the dominance of history that they attempt to counter or circumscribe. In his unpublished essay ‘On History and Romance’ (1797), for example, Godwin anticipates Scott’s 1806 argument that ‘[f ]‌rom the romance we learn what [our ancestors] were; from history, what they did’ by arguing that the romance is ‘a bolder species of composition than history’ because it can penetrate the hearts and minds of its characters (HR 363).22 The best history is accordingly a composition into which a ‘scanty substratum of facts and dates’ ‘the writer interweaves a number of happy, ingenious and instructive inventions, blending them into one continuous and indiscernible mass’ (HR 368). But just when Godwin seems to be asserting the superiority of the historical romance over history, he returns the latter to its privileged position in the hierarchy of genres by arguing that the novel writer would need to be ‘scarcely less than divine’ (372) in order to provide a truly omniscient understanding of his characters.23 Carlyle’s rejection of linearity and causal sequence in historical writing is strikingly similar to Godwin’s own, more explicitly fiction-orientated, rendition of the methodological problems of Enlightenment historiography, and its principles of abstraction and universality. Indeed, it is specifically in relation to fiction that Carlyle eventually comes to conceptualize his argument in favour of history. The two writers share a certain scepticism towards postures of omniscience, but while Carlyle, like Godwin, concedes that the historian would have to be omniscient in order to capture the truth of the past in the philosophic sense, his scepticism towards the historian’s ability to ever record the whole or complete truth ironically leads him to a deeper appreciation of history’s relative moral and aesthetic value: in his review of John Wilson Croker’s 1831 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), for example, Carlyle supports the creative or constructive nature of biography and the importance of invoking an ‘intense pictorial power’ that can ‘excite[] the mind’ (B 62), but he nonetheless follows Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) in distinguishing the emotional impact of history from that of fictitious narratives, which he describes as ‘so many mimic Biographies’ that cannot fulfil our appetite for stories grounded in reality (B 54).24 Carlyle thus both demystifies fiction as an illusion and empowers it by pointing to the ways in which its rhetorical

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devices can heighten the historical experience for the reader. This is not really a paradoxical stance once we realize that Carlyle’s problem with fiction, as Eliot L. Gilbert has pointed out, is not primarily aesthetic but metaphysical, centred on the questions of ‘reality’ and ‘belief ’:25 ‘only in so far as Imagination, were it but momentarily, is believed, can there be any use or meaning in it, any enjoyment of it’ (B 56). For Carlyle, it is the fiction writer’s all too tenuous grasp on reality, his ‘lying’, that ultimately renders his work secondary in value to that of the historian (B 56). Carlyle’s dismissal of the ‘unreality’ of fiction has led some scholars to argue that he eventually rejected all fiction.26 But as Rodger Tarr has pointed out, Carlyle did not dismiss the novel in principle: in ‘Goethe’ (1828) he decries fashionable, sentimental, and gothic novels for their sensationalist and mercenary focus on providing entertainment, urging such novelists in ‘Diderot’ (1833) to ‘sweep their Novel-fabric into the dust-cart’ and focus on ‘what is true’ (see also B 64), but he nonetheless retains his belief in the didactic function of literature, seeing in the novel a genre that could potentially combine conviction, reality, and truth.27 Carlyle’s demand for accounts grounded in reality assumes that the primary aim of fiction is moral instruction rather than entertainment or amusement, an idea which explains his at least partial admiration for eighteenth-century novelists such as Defoe, Sterne, Fielding, Richardson, Goldsmith, and Smollett, all of whom attempted (albeit in different ways) to align their work with the instructive value of history (B 58).28 Indeed, in his ‘Essay on Burns’ (1828), Carlyle’s preference for eighteenth-century over contemporary novelists is based on their relationship to ‘reality’: first, he praises the level of concrete detail, density of social texture, and particularized description their work displays: ‘their descriptions are detailed, ample and lovingly exact’; second, he admires the earnestness, conviction, and sincerity of eighteenth-century authors: ‘Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart. . . ’; and third, he approves of their didacticism and emphasis on moral instruction.29 While Carlyle counters Fielding’s argument in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742) that the novel is the new epic form by arguing that history is now the ‘sole poetry possible’ (B 52), he also establishes in ‘On Biography’ a history or genealogy of the novel, distinguishing the eighteenth-century novel from ‘[s]‌hip-loads of Fashionable Novels’ (B 63), which he sees as an unfortunate hiatus in the novel’s ongoing commitment to realism: ‘I, for the present, will but predict that chiefly by working more and more on REALITY, and evolving more and more wisely its inexhaustible meanings. . . will this high emprise be accomplished, or approximated to’ (B 59).30



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Despite his reservations about contemporary fiction, Carlyle thus sees the novel as a prime vehicle for representing social reality, and the genre remains an important touchstone for his own criticism, theory, and practice. Indeed, as Vanessa Ryan has pointed out, his residual faith in the didactic power of realist fiction and his ‘pro-Boswellian defense of the biography as a creative form’ in ‘On Biography’ are in many ways part of a self-defence of the imaginative projection at the heart of his own Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825) and several short biographical sketches of figures such as Goethe, Heine, Burns, Novalis, and Voltaire.31 For Carlyle, Croker’s implicit denigration of the value of the exemplarity of the individual life in favour of broader historical insights and collective processes is a methodological error that impacts on the very meaning and definition of the historian’s role, which is to sympathetically project himself into the lives of individual historical actors and to visually excite the reader in order to make reality more memorable (B 62). In his Life of Schiller, for example, Carlyle adopts the sentimentalist rhetoric of novelists and biographers such as Godwin when he vows to penetrate the mind and heart of his subject, to ‘see as he saw, and feel as he felt’. In so doing, he inserts himself so thoroughly into the text that what emerges ‘is a portrait of the biographer as well as his subject’:32 Schiller’s discovery of his literary vocation is essentially a re-enactment of Carlyle’s own struggles and, unsurprisingly, Schiller also reflects Carlyle’s views of history, in particular the idea that ‘the business of history is not merely to record, but to interpret’.33 The journey into history is thus for Carlyle, as Rosenberg has so astutely argued, a ‘double journey’, ‘a descent simultaneously to the underworld of the historical past and to his own interior life’:34 ‘[e]‌ach individual takes up the Phenomenon according to his own points of vision, to the structure of his optic organs;—gives, consciously, some poor crotchety picture of several things; unconsciously some picture of himself at least’.35 By foregrounding his own subjectivity, the ‘artist’ is able to sympathize or identify with his subject in a way that goes well beyond the sentimentalism of Hume, Robertson, and other eighteenth-century historians. As Carlyle explains in a moment of self-reflection in ‘On Biography’, it is crucial for the historian ‘to see out of [his subject], to view the world altogether as he views it; so that we can theoretically construe him, and could almost practically impersonate him’ (B 51).36 At the same time, Carlyle concedes the impossibility of ever capturing the whole or complete truth of reality or the past: the ‘Phenomenon’ or ‘Transaction’ being described ‘subsists there, all the while, unaltered;. . . its entire meaning not to be compressed into any picture drawn by man’.37 Carlyle thus characterizes history both as something to be interpreted by an inquiring subject and as an objective reality outside of the self: while he accepts that the past is written

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according to a non-empirical element and even concedes Kant’s point that ‘all conclusions of the Understanding, have only a relative truth, are true only for us’, he does not maintain that history arises entirely from the imagination, remaining committed to the notion of history as an external structure of events even as he redefines that structure as a human collectivity.38 Carlyle thus tends to contrast historical reality (which he sees as empirically grounded and absolute) and historical interpretation (which he sees as an always subjective endeavour), drawing on the old opposition of epistemology and hermeneutics, which, as Chris Lorenz has pointed out, is itself ‘derived from the classical opposition between episteme and doxa’.39 Yet for all his interest in the ways in which an embedded self can interpret historical reality, Carlyle’s version of historical impersonation is modelled less on a form of hermeneutic interpretation than on empirical, experiential models of understanding the past. In order to impersonate or inhabit the consciousness of his historical subject, the ‘artist’ must adopt the techniques and methodologies of the ‘workman’, literally retracing the steps of his subject by visiting battlefields, villages, and homes, reading first-hand accounts of the times, and viewing artefacts belonging to his subjects.40 Carlyle’s desire to increase the evocative presence of scenes in the minds and imaginations of his readers is therefore intimately linked to the minute topographical and other details provided by the antiquarians he repeatedly consulted during the writing of Cromwell.41 If he found Cromwell ‘amorphous’ as a biographical subject it was not for lack of a workman-like immersion into his hero’s life and times—for example, in preparation for the writing of his text, he went to St Ives and Hinchinbrook where Cromwell had grown up, and inspected the battlefields of Naseby and Dunbar—but rather because of the methodological difficulties of narrating the interior life or ‘mental features’ of his infamous subject.42 The problem, as Carlyle quickly recognized, was both conceptual and formal. If each life story is inherently unstable and unknowable, how can the historian hope to identify and represent an integrated subject for biography, whose actions can be logically or rationally explained? And what literary-historical genre or form could adequately capture both the simultaneity of external experience and the complex inner life of an ultimately unknowable subject?

III Carlyle’s early attempts to write on the seventeenth century aimed to produce not a ‘history’ but rather a series of ‘mental portraits’ or ‘sketches of



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English character’ along the lines of Schiller’s focus on national character in A History of the Thirty Years War (1793).43 He began by taking notes for an unfinished ‘Essay on the genius & character of Milton’ and ‘a kind of Essay on the Civil Wars’ in March and April of 1822, but it was not until over twenty years later in 1842–3 that he returned to the idea of writing sketches of the seventeenth century and its actors.44 Published posthumously by his nephew Alexander Carlyle, as Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I and Charles I (1898), these sketches attempt to isolate climatic scenes from the two reigns in question, as well as experimenting with different ways of revealing the character, intentions, and motivations of individual figures such as Charles I, Jenny Geddes, and Lord Strafford. Carlyle explicitly refers to his unfinished sketches as ‘fragments’ that were ‘fished out. . . from much other Cromwellian rubbish’ but the very nature of the ‘sketch’ is itself suggestive of their graphic or visual qualities as well as their resistance to an overarching narrative or philosophic design: even the chronological order and chapter divisions later supplied by Alexander Carlyle provide little in the way of philosophic generality or narrative structure to these self-proclaimed ‘fragments’ from the wreckage of the past.45 Carlyle’s interest in the ‘Biography of great men’ in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) subsequently led him to focus his attention solely on Cromwell, but he nonetheless continued to search for a form that could adequately capture the drama and interiority towards which he strived: ‘No work I ever tried gets on worse with me than this of Cromwell. I know not for my life in what way to take it up, how to get into the heart of it, what on earth to do with it.’46 Carlyle’s comments suggest that the writing of Cromwell was in many ways a ‘personal struggle’, but he was not so much troubled by the contentious nature of his material—Carlyle’s defence of the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s usurpation of ultimate power, and even his brutality in Ireland rests almost entirely on Cromwell’s innately heroic qualities (see e.g. C ii. 88–90, 93; iii. 184)—as by its resistance to dramatic and symbolic treatment.47 As Chris Vanden Bossche has pointed out, Carlyle attempted to isolate climatic scenes that could provide a ‘structural nucleus’ for his work and even considered the idea of casting it in the form of an epic drama in twelve acts and other fictional forms including imaginary dialogues between Mrs Cromwell and Dr Sinnott, and an invocation to the ghost of Cromwell. But, apart from the ‘great scene’ of Jenny Geddes, he found that the history of the Civil Wars contained ‘no action’ and was ‘not dramatic’.48 Desperate for a new form that could capture both the kind of dramatic shape and the interiority he deemed essential to producing a lived experience of the past, Carlyle had, by the beginning of 1844,

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decided to create a sort of biography of Cromwell through his letters and speeches, thereby imbuing a traditionally objective form of writing with a new sense of subjective inwardness. While he expresses his dissatisfaction with inaccurate ‘secret’ histories written from an overtly subjective perspective such as Bishop Burnet’s History of his Own Time (1723, 1734) (C i. 239), Carlyle nonetheless repeatedly emphasizes the special value of authentic acts of original perception in creating his expressive portrait of Cromwell (see e.g. iv. 43), arguing for the inherent historical relevance of his hero’s words: ‘[e]‌ven if false, these words, authentically spoken and written by the chief actor in the business, must be of prime moment for understanding of it. These are the words this man found suitablest to represent the Things themselves, around him, and in him, of which we seek a History’ (C i. 11). Carlyle thus emphasizes the importance of letters, memoirs, diaries, and other types of eyewitness accounts in providing a fuller, more balanced mental picture (or, as he puts it elsewhere, a ‘Daguerreotype-mirror’) of the historical period under investigation, while simultaneously recognizing the potential impartiality and inaccuracy of such evidence: even the most the credible of witnesses, like Cromwell, provides only a tantalizing glimpse of something that is incomplete or partial, a ‘kind of window through which a man might see’.49 Here Carlyle once again vacillates between an empiricist picture theory of historical knowledge (in which historical narrative can be said to mirror the past in the way that photographs and other replicas can) and history’s alternative status as something non-transparent, opaque, and representative in nature. Carlyle’s ongoing interest in the obscure yet historically instructive nature of individual memory and subjective writing was, in part, a reflection of the primary sources he read over a twenty-year period, such as Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1720), Ludlow’s Memoirs (publ. 1698–9), and Milton’s prose works.50 As David Norbrook has noted, there was a heightened interest in autobiography, personal writing, and individual character portraits in the seventeenth century, emerging both from the religious introspection of Puritanism and from the vogue for memoirs and secret histories.51 However, Deidre Lynch has rightly pointed to a shift from early modern to Romantic approaches to character, with the former seeing character as generic or typological and the latter representing character as imbued with an ‘inner life with ‘ “deep” meanings’.52 Carlyle himself did much to contribute to this view, maintaining, for example, that Goethe’s characters had ‘a verisimilitude and life that separates them from all other fictions of late ages. All others, in comparison, have more or less the nature of hollow vizards, constructed from without inwards, painted like, and deceptively put in motion’.53 Here Carlyle, as critic, is actively



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seeking characters that are individual and internalized, suggesting a new Romantic emphasis on inner psychological depths rather than eighteenthcentury typology.54 Mark Salber Phillips has noted a simultaneous awareness in the early nineteenth century of the affective power of primary documents as expressive and dramatic texts, which could most effectively be arranged and edited rather than reworked into narrative as such. This was, of course, a recognizable strategy in eighteenth-century epistolary fiction and accordingly brought history and biography closer to fictional forms, especially to ‘Richardson’s desire to create “dramatic” narratives’ through familiar letters.55 If, as some critics have claimed, it was precisely at this time that epistolary fiction went out of fashion, historical writers in the early to mid nineteenth century were nonetheless, as Karen O’Brien has pointed out, undertaking new experiments in ‘expanding the ethical possibilities’ of sentimental fiction and historical biography ‘in tandem with. . . more traditional defense[s]‌of [historical] exemplarity’, originating in classical sources such as Livy and Plutarch, and culminating in Bolingbroke’s famous maxim in his Letters on the Study and Use of History (1752).56 The intense interest in letters, memoirs, and other primary documents displayed by writers of fiction in the eighteenth century thus shifted from fiction to historical writing in the early to mid nineteenth century, as historians adapted the methods and techniques of epistolary fiction for their own ends. In particular, the shift from generic to internalized conceptions of character that Lynch outlines became relevant to the representation of historical actors, as the lines between character (in the sense of a fictional person in an artistic piece) and character (in the sense of the moral or ethic status of a person) became increasingly blurred. As the nearest material record of Cromwell’s everyday experience and inner life, there is little doubt that Carlyle was attracted to the ‘letters and speeches’ format because of the access it provided to the kind of ‘unmediated’ inward feeling and spontaneous self-actualization he prized in Richardson’s novels.57 Drawing on the commonplace that letters are the most direct, sincere, and transparent form of written communication, he claims that Cromwell’s letters are the ‘fibre’ and ‘express image of the soul [they] came from’ (C iii. 231), through which ‘it becomes apparent that this Oliver was not a man of falsehoods, but a man of truths’ (i. 11). Yet Carlyle is also aware that Cromwell’s letters, as protean forms that invite reaction, dialogue, and other forms of social exchange, perform rather than simply represent his identity. The eighteenth-century epistolary novel may have been more focused on social enactments than on interiority, but novels by Richardson, Defoe, and other eighteenth-century writers nonetheless represent identity

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as an ongoing, performative process rather than a fixed, determinate state.58 While his primary aim is to disprove the notion that the Puritans were either ‘superstitious crack-brained persons, given up to enthusiasm’ or cunning and ‘skillful Maccihavels’ (i. 68; see also i. 239), Carlyle, too, wishes to show that Cromwell is ‘groping his way through a very intricate business, which grows as he gropes’ and therefore to demonstrate the dynamic nature of his character development as something produced ‘in the moment’ (iv. 253). If he deliberately chose a form that would privilege Cromwell’s voice and present ‘a monologic vision of Puritan culture’, it was because his goal was not just to emulate Boswell’s idea of the individual life as a portal to a wider social world, but also to use candid self-revelation in order to provide a ‘glimpse into the strange, seething simmering inner-man’ (C iv. 189).59 Carlyle is particularly interested in the self-fashioning or creation of Cromwell’s character through the acts of speaking, writing, and reading.60 Despite painting Cromwell as an ‘inarticulate prophet’ who prefers actions to words in On Heroes, in Cromwell Carlyle focuses on his hero’s written and spoken words, seeing the quality and accuracy of his perceptions as a function of his moral character.61 In his review of ‘Baillie the Convenator’ in the Westminster Review for 1842, Carlyle credits the importance of even fallible eyewitnesses like Baillie. But whereas Baillie’s letters are ‘like the hasty, breathless, confused talk of a man, looking face to face on that great whirl of things’, Cromwell’s letters exhibit a heroic and manly depth, the honesty of which is not to be doubted.62 Here Carlyle inverts the eighteenth-century association of heroism and a command of language, instead presenting Cromwell’s unselfconscious stylistic faults in letter-writing as the mark of his sincerity and authenticity: ‘Practical Heroes. . . do not speak in blank-verse; their trade does not altogether admit of that! Useless to look here for a Greek temple with its porticoes and entablatures, and styles’ (iv. 80–1). Cromwell’s speeches, too, are in the main extempore rather than rehearsed, suggesting both a sincerely of purpose and intent, and an ideal congruence between his public and private character. While there is a basic formal division in the text between private letters and public speeches, Carlyle points to the interconnection between the free exchange of opinion in the public sphere and the domestic space of family life when he welcomes the ‘little piece[s]‌of domesticity’, the ‘small family transactions[s]’ that peep through ‘great world-transactions’ (C i. 271; see also ii. 137), such as the marriage of a son or the birth of a child, arguing that private experience is not an ‘idle digression[s]’ or retreat from the social and political world but rather reveals ‘some little of the genius of these distracted times’ (iii. 133).



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Aware that in many of these sources Cromwell is writing (and speaking) at the crossroads of public and private expression, and exploiting the idea of a public sphere founded in the affective relations of the private, Carlyle privileges Cromwell’s unconscious disclosures over his more overt actions or statements, not only emphasizing the value of a Wordsworthian ‘wise oblivion’ in the writing of history (i. 7), but also directing the reader towards the margins, absences, silences, and gaps in Cromwell’s correspondence: ‘His words,—and still more his silences, and unconscious instincts, when you have spelt and lovingly deciphered these also out of his words,—will in several ways reward the study of an earnest man’ (i. 11).63 Indeed, Carlyle frequently embeds his own responses to Cromwell’s ‘silences’ into the text when he inserts his commentary and voice into his hero’s speeches in volumes three and four, a process that is signalled typographically by square brackets and italics. While most analyses of these interventions dwell on the temporal montages and structural parallels that Carlyle creates as he merges his present tense first-person voice with events in the past,64 he also uses the interjections to hint at his hero’s feelings or to describe revealing gestures in a series of brilliantly observed physiognomic details that serve as outer expressions of Cromwell’s inner life and character: ‘[Does not his Highness look uncommonly animated?]’ (C iv. 193–4); ‘[His Highness elevating his brows; face assuming a look of irony, of rough banter.]’ (iv. 197).65 At other times, Carlyle’s interjections provide a sense of Cromwell’s mind in process, using the first-person present tense in order to heighten the evocative immediacy and psychological closeness of the moment: ‘[There are many angry suspicious persons listening to me, and every word is liable to different misunderstandings in every different narrow head!]’ (iv. 19).66 Carlyle thus uses the ‘letters and speeches’ format to draw on the ‘personal ethos’ and character-driven focus of autobiographical and eyewitness accounts of the seventeenth century, while simultaneously gesturing towards the domesticity, intimacy, and immediacy of the epistolary novel and other fictional forms that he had previously considered for his rendition of the Cromwell story.67 Yet perhaps because of his unwelcome proximity to epistolary fiction, Carlyle is often wary of the role of sentiment in Cromwell. At times, he extorts his reader to pity those executed or abandoned to their fate (C ii. 20; iii. 155), but he also condemns a sentimental history that has ‘wept for a misguided Charles Stuart, and blubbered, in the most copious helpless manner, near two centuries now’ while being unable to release even a ‘tributary sigh’ for the death of the Leveller Corporals (ii. 125). It is certainly no coincidence that he indulges in the sentimentalist vein primarily in moments of private or domestic significance. When Cromwell’s favourite daughter Elizabeth dies, for example, Carlyle evinces

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an intimacy with, and overt sympathy for, the bereaved father, which he asks the reader to share in a mutual outpouring of emotion: Hampton Court we can fancy once more, in those July days, a house of sorrow; pale Death knocking there, as at the door of the meanest hut. ‘She had great sufferings, great exercises of spirit.’ Yes:—and in the depths of the old Centuries, we see a pale anxious Mother, anxious Husband, anxious weeping Sisters, a poor young Frances weeping anew in her weeds. ‘For the last fourteen days’ his Highness has been by her bedside at Hampton Court, unable to attend to any public business whatever. Be still, my Child; trust thou yet in God: in the waves of the Dark River, there too is He a God of help!—On the 6th day of August she lay dead; at rest forever. My young, my beautiful, my brave! She is taken from me; I am left bereaved of her. (C v. 147)

As Rosenberg points out, Carlyle is scrupulous in distinguishing between supposition and fact in such passages (‘we can fancy once more’), but he nonetheless identifies so fully with Cromwell that he becomes not editor but father and mourner himself: ‘She is taken from me; I am left bereaved of her.’68 Not only is Carlyle committed here to the kind of self-identification with his subject that is usually only tolerated in works of fiction, but he is also willing to ask the reader momentarily to suspend his or her disbelief when he ‘fancies’ or invents Cromwell’s interior life and feelings, thereby practising ‘an art that fictionalizes’ rather than one that simply recreates or resurrects in the ostensibly ‘Romantic’ historiographical mode.69 While this kind of fictionalization is relatively rare in Cromwell, and can be distinguished from those more prosaic moments in the text when Carlyle either interprets documents or provides contextual historical commentary, it is not in any real tension with his documentary bent as he interweaves quotations from documents with his own suppositions in a way that recalls Godwin’s account of the best kind of history in ‘Of History and Romance’ as a composition in which into a ‘scanty substratum of facts and dates’ ‘the writer interweaves a number of happy, ingenious and instructive inventions, blending them into one continuous and indiscernible mass’. Despite sign-posting his ‘fictions’, Carlyle is thus most ‘novelistic’ when he is closest to his documents (see also C iii. 33–4); and his most evocative passages, such as Cromwell’s death-scene and the battle-scenes at Naseby and Dunbar, are also the ones most firmly grounded in documentary detail.70 If some critics see these kinds of ‘fictive imaginings’ as speculative and unverifiable, others see them as innovative and constructive: Joseph W. Childers, for example, argues that they are precisely what brought Carlyle ‘into contact with the event he [was] interpreting’.71 Carlyle certainly believed that a general insight into human behaviour was more important than the antiquarian compiling of information (as, for the most part, did his reviewers),72 but his speculation is by no means guesswork; rather he colours his texts with what Rosemary Jann



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has called the ‘didactic use of the imagined real’ in a kind of fusion of antiquarian research and novelistic licence.73 Jann’s use of the word ‘didactic’ is felicitous here since it recalls Carlyle’s own emphasis on the didactic potential of the realist novel, and, ironically, it is on the twin principles of ‘reality’ and ‘belief’ that he relies in his most affective, speculative moments in Cromwell.

IV Despite his belief that Cromwell’s words are the ‘express image of the soul [they] came from’ (C iii. 231), Carlyle’s original goal of disappearing behind his subject—of letting Cromwell ‘do the talking’—is increasingly problematized by his interventions, comments, annotations, fictions, and other additions to his primary documents, resulting in an ongoing tension in the text between an epistemologically innocent faith in the authoritative nature of primary documents and the reconstructive work undertaken by the biographers and editors of such documents.74 A second tension in Cromwell arises from the resistance of Cromwell’s letters and speeches to editorial explanation: Carlyle’s raw documents, themselves often fragments, sometimes evince an antiquarian antagonism to connecting narratives, their faintly glowing presence simultaneously connoting absence and loss as both the building blocks of historical reconstruction and the fragmented reminders of a lost past. This is particularly true in relation to accounts of the Irish War and Cromwell’s actions in Ireland (see e.g. i. 99, 107; ii. 141); for example, while Cromwell’s letters initially shed some ‘descending liquid’ on the Irish War and provide ‘a clear and terrible view’ of these affairs (ii. 143), Carlyle quickly reverts to images of blackness, representing the whole period of the Irish War as ‘very dark and indecipherable’: ‘The History of it does not form itself into a picture; but remains only as a huge blot, an indiscriminate blackness’ (ii. 141).75 The sense of the gaps in history engendered by the Irish War is earlier made more general and explicit when Carlyle asks the reader to help himself through the ‘great dark void, from February 1641 to January 1643’ as best he may (i. 99), and appeals to the ‘imaginative reader’ to take on the editorial function by ‘spread[ing] out’ material into significance for himself (i. 107; see also i. 165). Yet Carlyle is simultaneously sceptical about his readers’ capacity to disengage from their own historical circumstances and enter into Cromwell’s world. He often dramatizes an audience who is against him or who has been turned by false accounts of Cromwell and attempts to stir in them a kind of evangelical conversion experience, albeit a Fichtean conversion based on one’s own ability to construct meaning: ‘I advise all modern readers not only to believe that Cromwell here means

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what he says; but even to try how they, each for himself in a new dialect could mean the like, or something better!—’ (C i. 206). Such addresses to the reader, and instructions for them to ‘fancy’ lost or unknowable motivations and internal feelings, demand their imaginative involvement in a way that both signals the resistance of history to meaning and reminds readers of their ‘own historical agency’.76 Cromwell thus oscillates between evocative presence and despairing absence, between positive agency and negative resistance, providing the reader with a sense of historical gaps that cannot always be bridged by historical interpretation but that might be fulfilled by the strategies and techniques of fiction, such as imaginative readerly addresses and speculative suspensions of disbelief. If historians traditionally seized on precisely these kinds of techniques as norms against which to define their own audience and identity, Phillips has rightly argued that this separation came under considerable pressure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, partly because of the ‘sentimentalist desire to endow the past with strong evocative presence’, but also because of a new interest in motive and the interior aspects of a public figure’s private life.77 It was not just that the relationship between public and private matters became more problematic as the new historiographical interest in the domain of the social emerged, nor simply that biography could serve to elucidate passions and emotional identification in the sentimentalist vein, but also because of a new interest in what I have called ‘cognitive’ or ‘psychological’ history. In order to scrutinize Cromwell’s character, Carlyle tends to favour older forms of history associated with classical and seventeenth-century historical models such as character sketches and orations, but he also revisits the kind of classical character portraits that prized motive over feeling by combining them with an approach that focuses more closely on the psychological minutiae of the novel, particularly the epistolary novel and its technique of instantaneous description and reflection. Carlyle’s willingness to borrow fictional strategies and to fictionalize or ‘fancy’ the interior life of his historical subjects points to a wider interaction between history and fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or to what O’Brien, in her survey of the development of the history market in eighteenth-century England, has called the emergence of a ‘novelized kind of history incorporating biographical elements, anecdotes, and epistolary and other fictional formats’.78 Carlyle certainly shares with novelists such as Richardson, Scott, and Godwin a desire to portray the complexity of the individual life and mind, and to capture the immediacy of lived, subjective experience. But as O’Brien points out elsewhere, these borrowings by historians from fictional forms were limited and selective, suggesting that the boundaries between history and fiction



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were never completely or even predominantly porous.79 On the one hand, Carlyle’s efforts over many years to find the best form with which to represent his contentious material and the resulting sense of generic disintegration that pervades his work points to his sense of the important, if sometimes problematic, role that fiction could play in the writing of history. On the other hand, his ongoing struggle to find the right balance between historical accuracy and historical feeling is suggestive of his profound anxiety about the relationship between history and fiction. As Vanden Bossche reminds us, while Carlyle at times impersonates his hero he also repeatedly dispels that illusion both by overtly addressing the reader and by keeping the reader’s focus on his own concerns rather than on the glossing of Cromwell’s texts.80 Carlyle’s resistance to the very devices he employs to such dramatic effect—and the apparent disconnect between his theory and practice— points to the beginnings of an increasingly strict demarcation between history and literature, signalled by the professionalization of history as a discipline. Subsequent historians were quick to dismiss Carlyle’s interest in interiority and its rhetorical modes, condemning even the most limited kinds of borrowings from fictional texts. While acknowledging that Carlyle’s Cromwell had rescued the Lord Protector from a narrow-minded party historiography focused almost entirely on constitutional issues, J. R. Seeley, for example, singles out his representation of Cromwell as an unfortunate example of the ‘false tendency’ to ‘substitute a literary for a political estimate’, arguing that a history so ‘radically unscientific’, so dependent ‘upon interesting and thrilling the reader’, was no kind of history at all.81 Other mid to late nineteenth-century historians were more accepting of Carlyle and Macaulay’s posthumous legacy as ‘men of letters’, but Seeley’s use of ‘Romantic’ history as a foil to Rankean ‘empiricism’ has coloured histories of history ever since.82 If both this characterization of Ranke and teleologies relating to the rise of the modern scientific method have been rigorously debated of late, Carlyle’s ambivalence towards archival research, his hero-worship, and his ‘literariness’ remain problematic for present-day historians, who tend to remember him either as a ‘hopelessly outdated’ Victorian sage or as a proto-postmodernist who pre-empts current concerns about the subjective origins of empirical data.83 Neither account is an accurate reflection of Carlyle’s pivotal role in the making of the modern, professional historian.84 For all his literariness, Henderson has rightly reminded us that Carlyle saw himself as a professional historian and therefore progressively redefined his discipline against antiquarianism and the prose forms of the romance and novel, even as he borrowed a number of stylistic devices from these genres. The question of how to reconcile Carlyle’s rhetorical excess with his self-understanding as

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a professional, empirical historian is one that continues to plague Carlyle scholars. It is likewise difficult to accommodate Carlyle’s open dismissal of fiction and antiquarianism with his repeated appropriation of these two, increasingly complementary, ways of reconstructing the past. In part, such difficulties arise because the duality of Carlyle’s methodology (objective/ subjective, empirical/speculative, documentary/imaginative) disrupts teleologies about the development of professional history and the modern ‘scientific’ method. If Carlyle’s reflections in ‘On Biography’ ultimately hint at the subjective basis of even objective and empirical evidence, it does not negate the fact that in practice he sees the writing of history as both a subjective and an objective task guided by the intuitive insights and sympathetic projection of the artist but also by the workman’s close attention to empirical details and documentary accuracy. While it is customary to view the relationship between Carlyle’s theory and practice as radically unstable, his work is less idiosyncratic and more a response to his changing historiographical environment than has previously been acknowledged. That he felt compelled to qualify or amend his subjective view of history by appealing to an objective phenomenon independent of the self reveals much about the way in which history in the period was ‘increasingly thought to reside outside the acts and perspectives of its agents, as. . . an entity external to them all’.85 Similarly, his shift from an instructive view of history in his review of Baillie’s Metrical Legends to a more mimetic one grounded in ‘reality’ and ‘belief’ in ‘On Biography’ was largely a reaction to the readjustment of the relationship between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ history in the early nineteenth century. If historians were distancing themselves from antiquarians at the very moment at which they were steadily appropriating their methodologies and techniques, the relationship between history and literature in the period was similarly one of ambivalence rather than unmitigated rejection or permeability.86 Carlyle’s Cromwell is merely the coda to the historiography of a period marked more by adjustment than by porousness, revealing the tensions between artist and workman, objectivity and subjectivity, fact and fiction, and history and romance that riddle the historiographical theory and practice of the early to mid nineteenth century. N OT E S 1. Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations, 5 vols (London, 1872), hereafter abbreviated in the main text as ‘C’. 2. Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 13/3–4 (1950), 285–315. 3. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 151–2.



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4. Yoon Sun Lee, ‘A Divided Inheritance: Scott’s Antiquarian Novel and the British Nation’, ELH 64/2 (1997), 538. 5. Carlyle thus attempts to distinguish himself from previous biographers of Cromwell who do little more than amass ‘a large heap of evidence and assertions, worthless and of worth’ (i. 13), which in the haphazard way of antiquarian research result not in a ‘Book’ but ‘rather an Aggregate of bewildered jottings’ (i. 14). On this point, see Susan Manning, ‘Antiquarianism, Balladry, and the Rehabilitation of Romance’, in James K. Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 2009), 49. 6. John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 140. 7. Lee, ‘A Divided Inheritance’, 545, 539. 8. Daniela Garafolo, ‘Communities in Mourning: Making Capital out of Loss in Carlyle’s Past and Present and Heroes’, Texan Studies in Literature and Language, 45/3 (2003), 293–314. 9. Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’ (1830), in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished by Thomas Carlyle, 7 vols (London, 1872), ii. 253–63, abbreviated in the main text as ‘H’. 10. Lionel Gossman, ‘History as Decipherment: Romantic Historiography and the Discovery of the Other’, New Literary History, 18/1 (1986), 23, 26. Manning, ‘Antiquarianism’, 58. 11. On Carlyle’s ‘fabrications or distortions’, see D. J. Trela, A History of Carlyle’s ‘Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches’ (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1992), 120, 81. Cf.John Morrow, Thomas Carlyle (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), 166; and Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, 140–41. 12. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, 16.Heather Henderson, ‘Carlyle and the Book Clubs: A New Approach to Publishing?’, Publishing History, 6 (1979), 46. 13. Leslie Stephen, ‘Unsigned Obituary of Thomas Carlyle’, Cornhill Magazine, 43 (Mar. 1881), 349–58, cited in Jules Paul Seigel (ed.), Thomas Carlyle: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 487–8. 14. Mark Cumming (ed.), The Carlyle Encylcopedia (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2004), 362.Rosemary Jann, ‘Changing Styles in Victorian Military History’, Clio, 11/2 (1982), 156. 15. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (London, 1785), 111. On the continuing relevance of this kind of ‘cognitive’ history, see e.g. Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natual History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 16. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 133. 17. Ann Rigney, ‘The Untenanted Places of the Past: Thomas Carlyle and the Varieties of Historical Ignorance’, History and Theory, 35/3 (1996), 342. 18. Jason B. Jones, Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 18–37.

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19. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Review of Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends’, New Edinburgh Review, 1 (Oct. 1821), 393–414. Cumming, Carlyle Encylcopedia, 362. 20. Cumming, Carlyle Encylcopedia, 362. 21. Srdjan Smajic, ‘The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story’, English Literary History, 70 (2003), 1118. 22. ‘Of History and Romance’ (1797), in Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, intro. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 359–73, hereafter abbreviated as ‘HR’ in the main text. Walter Scott, ‘Review of Ellis & Ritson’, Edinburgh Review, 7 (Jan. 1806), 388. 23. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 120. 24. Thomas Carlyle, ‘On Biography’ (1832), in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished by Thomas Carlyle, 7 vols (London, 1872), iv. 51– 66, hereafter abbreviated in the main text as ‘B’. 25. Elliot L. Gilbert, ‘Rescuing Reality: Carlyle, Froude, and Biographical Truth-Telling’, Victorian Studies, 34/3 (1991), 301. 26. See e.g. Carlisle Moore, ‘Thomas Carlyle and Fiction: 1822–34’, in H. Davies et al. (eds), Nineteenth-Century Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1940), 132. 27. Rodger L. Tarr, ‘ “Fictional High-Seriousness”: Carlyle and the Victorian Novel’, in Jerry D. James and Charles S. Fineman (eds), Lectures on Carlyle and his Era (Santa Cruz, CA: University Library, University of California, 1982), 27–44 (esp. 28–9). Thomas Carlyle, ‘Goethe’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished by Thomas Carlyle, 7 vols (London, 1872), i. 189, and ‘Diderot’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, v. 2. 28. See Karen O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britian’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 342–3. For Carlyle’s view of literature as instruction rather than amusement, see his ‘Essay on Novalis’ (1829), in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, ii. 182–229 (esp. 183). 29. ‘Essay on Burns’ (1828), in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, ii. 17, 9. See also Carlyle’s comparison of Richardson and Defoe with Homer (17). 30. Henry Fielding, The History of the Adeventures of Joseph Andrews, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies, rev. Thomas Keymer (1742; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. 31. Vanessa Ryan, ‘The Unreliable Editor: Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and the Art of Biography’, RES 54 (2003), 295. 32. Cumming, Carlyle Encylcopedia, 287. 33. Thomas Carlyle, Life of Friedrich Schiller (London, 1825), 2, 100. Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Carlyle and the Search for Authority (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 142. 34. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, 16. 35. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Parliamentary History of the French Revolution’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vi. 2. 36. For Carlyle’s use of the ‘psychologizing mode’ of Romantic hermeneutics, see Suzy Anger, Victorian Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 72. 37. Carlyle, ‘Parliamentary History, 2.



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3 8. Carlyle, ‘Essay on Novalis’, 205. 39. Chris Lorenz, ‘Can Histories be True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the “Metaphorical Turn” ’, History and Theory, 37 (1998), 321. 40. On Carlyle’s working methods as a historian, see Gavin Budge, ‘The Hero as Seer: Character, Perception and Cultural Health in Carlyle’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, Special Issue ‘Science, Technology and the Senses’, 52 (2008), para. 13: . 41. D. J. Trela, ‘Dryasdust’s Revenge: Carlyle, Cromwell and John Harland’, Bibliotheck, 27/1–3 (1991), 45–56. 42. Rigney, ‘Untenanted Places’, 349. 43. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. C. R. Anders et al., 24 vols (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970–), ii. 94, cited in The Norman and Charlottle Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle: Historical Essays, ed. Chris R. Vanden Bossche (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. xxxv. 44. Letters, ii. 70, 81, 94. 45. Carlyle’s will of 1873, cited in Alexander Carlyle, Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I and Charles I (London, 1898), p. vii. 46. Folio 95 and v, cited in Vanden Bossche, Search for Authority, 103. 47. Vanden Bossche, Search for Authority, 104. 48. Vanden Bossche, Search for Authority, 103–4. See also K. J. Fielding, ‘Carlyle and Cromwell: The Writing of History and “Dryasdust” ’, in Jerry D. James and Rita D. Bottoms (eds), Lectures on Carlyle and his Era (Santa Cruz, CA: University Library, University of California, 1985), 45–68. 49. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Baillie the Coventantor’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vi. 215. 50. Clarendon’s History, in particular, produced in Carlyle a singular ‘depth of impression’ and, most famously, an antiquarian meditation on the ‘hobnailed “shoes” ’ of ‘a genuine flesh-and-blood Rustic of the year 1651’ (B 60). 51. David Norbrook, ‘The English Revolution and English Historiography’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 242. 52. Deirdre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 6, 30, 48. 53. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Goethe’s Works’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, iv. 179. 54. Lynch dates such a focus on the inner regions of the psyche to the Shakespeare criticism of the 1770s and 1780s (Economy of Character, 133–4). Cf. Andrea Henderson, who has unsettled the depth model of Romantic interiority in Romantic Idenities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 55. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 98, 136. 56. See e.g. Dror Wharman, The Making of the Modern Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 276. On the fate of the epistolary novel, see also Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel’, 46. 57. Carlyle, ‘Essay on Burns’, 4. 58. On the letter as ‘a protean form which crystallized social relation ships’, see Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3. 59. Vanden Bossche, Search for Authority, 120. 60. Budge, ‘Hero as Seer’, para. 33. 61. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1841), 217. 62. Carlyle, ‘Baillie the Covenantor’, 224. 63. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, 18–19. See also Christine Persak, ‘Rhetoric in Praise of Silence: The Ideology of Carlyle’s Paradox’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 21 (1991), 38–52. 64. Joseph W. Childers, ‘Carlyle’s Past and Present, History, and a Question of Hermeneutics’, Clio, 13/3 (1984), 247–58. On Carlyle’s ‘stereoscopic’ timeeffects in his battle-scenes, see Jann, ‘Changing Styles’, 159–60. 65. On Carlyle’s ‘physiognomic’ history, see Michael K. Goldberg ‘Gigantic Philistines: Carlyle, Dickens, and the Visual Arts’, in Jerry D. James and Charles S. Fineman (eds), Lectures on Carlyle and his Era (Santa Cruz, CA: University Library, University of California, 1982), 31. 66. Cumming, Carlyle Encylcopedia, 24. Vanden Bossche, Search for Authority, 122. 67. O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel’, 340, and ‘History and Literature 1660– 1780’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 368. 68. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, 146. 69. C. R. Vanden Bossche, ‘Fictive Text and Transcendental Self: Carlyle’s Art of Biography’, Biography, 10 (1987), 116. See also Ann Rigney’s pragmatic definition of fictionalizing in the context of historical writing as involving a ‘suspension of disbelief ’ rather than engaging with the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘imaginary’ in ‘Semantic Slides: History and the Concept of Fiction’, in Irmline Veit-Brause and Rolf Thorstendahl (eds), History-Making: The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 1996), 32. 70. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 141. 71. Childers, ‘Carlyle’s Past and Present’, 242. Cf. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 14. 72. The anonymous writer of an unsigned obituary in the Saturday Review for 1881 argued that Cromwell’s papers received ‘a meaning and a kind of unity from Carlyle’s suggestive comments’, even going so far as to suggest that Carlyle had improved the ‘chaotic’ speeches of the Protector. ‘Unsigned Obituary of Thomas Carlyle’, Saturday Review (12 Feb. 1881), 199–30l, cited in Seigel, Thomas Carlyle: The Critical Heritage, 470. On later critics, see Vanden Bossche, Search for Authority, 122.



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73. Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), p. xii. 74. Ryan, ‘The Unreliable Editor’, 291. 75. For the way in which Carlyle presents as unrepresentable that which is ‘politically uncongenial’ to him, see Rigney, ‘Untenanted Places’, 351. 76. Jones, Lost Causes, 19, 20. 77. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 15, 27. 78. Karen O’Brien, ‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London: Continuum, 2001), 109. 79. O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel’, 399. 80. Vanden Bossche, ‘Fictive Text’, 124, 121–2. 81. J. R. Seeley, Lectures and Essays (London, 1895), 98–9, and ‘History and Politics I’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 40 (Aug. 1879), 291–2. 82. Ian Hesketh, ‘Writing History in Macaulay’s Shadow: J. R. Seeley, E. A. Freeman, and the Audience for Scientific History in Late Victorian Britain’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 22/2 (2011), 30–56. 83. Perez Zagorin, ‘Thomas Carlyle and Oliver Cromwell’, in Anthony Grafton and J. H. M. Salmon (eds), Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honour of Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 231, 233. 84. Cf. Philippa Levine’s argument that Carlyle essentially wrote himself out of the ‘history of history’ in The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 85. O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel’, 341. 86. O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel’, 173.

II H I S TO R I C A L S PA C E A N D TIME

5 ‘To trace thy country’s glories to their source’ Dangerous History in Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales Mary-Ann Constantine Among the books and papers in the Thomas Pennant collection at the National Library of Wales is a brown leather pocket-book full of jotted notes.1 These relate to one of several excursions made by Pennant in the 1770s and 1780s into parts of north Wales, and many of the comments reappear written up in his Tour in Wales, published between 1778 and 1783.2 The distance between the notes and the printed text maps the distance between the experience of a traveller on the ground (or, in this case, up a mountain) and the recollection of that experience in the study. Here is the published Pennant reaching the top of Snowdon: This space between precipice and precipice, forms a short, and no very agreeable isthmus, till we reached a verdant expanse, which gave us some respite, before we labored up another series of broken crags: after these, is a second smooth tract, which reaches almost to the summit, which, by way of pre-eminence, is styled Y Wyddfa, or The Conspicuous. It rises almost to a point, or, at best, there is but room for a circular wall of loose stones, within which travellers usually take their repast.3

The notebook, with fewer commas, makes less laborious work of the climb: Walk along a green track, afterwards another stoney steep; then a second green space; near which is a fine spring of the coolest and best water I ever tasted. The summit or conic point of Snowdon & what is called Y Wyddfa ie the lofty, or conspicuous place, is rocky, terminates almost in a point on which is formed a small circular wall of loose stones in which those who visit this mountain take their repast.4

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There is much that could be said about the differences between the two pieces, but it is typical of Pennant to write his drink at the cooling spring out of the official version. Although the Snowdon section is one of the more lyrical passages in the work, the Tour is, by and large, observational, informative, and devoid of personal anecdote. What the notebook entry does beautifully is revive the connection between place and text; it is a reminder that sources come from the ground as well as from library shelves, and that Pennant, who frequently loads his geographical itinerary with facts historical, genealogical, economic, and scientific until it seems neither he nor his readers are moving forward at all, did actually walk or ride every mile of the way. Pennant makes the same claim himself, of course, in the very first line of his ‘Advertisement’: ‘These home-travels are the first part of an account of my own country; and were actually performed in the year mentioned in the title page.’5 As we shall see, the actuality and dating of some the experiences described is at times debatable, but Pennant’s willingness to venture out into the country was celebrated at the time in a poem by the lawyer Richard Fenton:6 Whilst thy bold genius tempts thee to explore Paths yet untravelled, scenes unknown before To freshen every trace round Cambria’s coast Of all she had, and yet retains, to boast; And in thy passion for thy native soil Is lost all sense of danger and of toil. (123)

Fenton is particularly impressed by Pennant as a man of action (‘fearless’, ‘with step intrepid’), and reprises his theme almost verbatim a little further on: ‘To trace thy country’s glories to their source / What toils, what dangers have not marked thy course?’ (126). Cambria’s glories, though, as the poem makes quite clear, are not all about landscape, and neither are her sources. History looms as large in this poem as in the Tour itself: From Caradoc, triumphant in his chains Through a long series of illustrious reigns To trace the princes of the Cambrian line To count her heroes and her bards is thine. Tis thine to seek the spot where shrunk to rest The lion lies, that rag’d in Glyndwr’s breast . . . The pangs of dying freedom to recall And dignify the brave Llewellin’s fall! Or paint Bonduca, nicely quick to feel, And punish Roman violence with her steel! (125)



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Though the dangers Pennant risks ostensibly involve craggy mountains and precipitate torrents, Fenton seems, subliminally at least, to realize that this stirring roll-call of Cambrian resistance might be problematic. The poem ends with a panoptic view from Snowdon, in which the dangerous past is brought firmly under the rule of a non-confrontational, indeed a safely blended, present: Thy mountain, Pennant, sees with happier view A blended race the pride of Rome renew Sees his own Cambria straiten’d now no more Flow with returning tide round Britain’s shore Sees arms and arts respect their proper end While these improve the land, and those defend; Sees kingly pow’r with man’s best rights combin’d By laws asserted, and by laws confin’d. (128–9)

No rebels here, whatever history threatens. Fenton’s poem is not a bad reading of the Tour in Wales, focusing as it does on some of the tensions strung out across the lengthy and crowded travel narrative. In further exploring some of those tensions, this chapter aims to make the case for topographical writing in the Romantic period as an important and neglected site for the creation of modern notions of history. Not only Pennant’s very successful Tours, but scores of others penned and published in their wake, wrote the past into the landscape in ways which now seem entirely natural, but were in fact doing something new. In Wales, as in Scotland, Pennant effectively set tourist itineraries for the future; but, in linking both local and antiquarian knowledge of the past to specific sites, he also created a ‘public’ version of history which was far more widely disseminated than that being created and contested in scholarly historical narratives. The Tour in Wales—unlike the equally popular but primarily aesthetic Observations on the River Wye (1782) published at around the same time by William Gilpin—extended the genre of topographical writing by mapping a historical appraisal onto physically neutral space and matter. Landscape in Pennant becomes the occasion for historical suggestion, a continual revelation of sites of contest and controversy, which reflect (in ways that are not always fully articulated by Pennant himself ) upon the fragile state of ‘Britishness’ and nationhood more generally in the period. The popularity of the ‘home tour’ was partly a result of upheavals on the war-torn Continent, and the explosion of topographical writing in the British Isles at the end of the eighteenth century is well known and increasingly well documented.7 By 1800, according to Charles Batten, it was, as a genre, second only to novels and romances.8 And yet, as a genre, it has not been as much studied as its popularity might suggest: tours, with rare

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exceptions, can be hard work to read, and tend to be rummaged for quotations rather than considered in their own right. But it is worth asking how people at the time read them, and indeed used them, whether at home or on the roads; and it is equally worth asking what kinds of places and pasts emerge from their narratives. A key question, particularly acute in tours of the Celtic-speaking peripheries, is the extent to which native histories are revived and are either contained by or allowed to ruffle the surface of a larger narrative of Britishness; the question becomes especially pressing during a decade and more of war. Recovering sites of earlier conflict (castles from the conquest of Edward I; the power-bases of Owain Glyndŵr) risks reopening other, and potentially more dangerous, rifts. The pressures of the dangerous past (often figured as ‘Gothic’) have been interestingly explored in recent criticism, especially for fiction.9 Less well examined is the extent to which topographical writers were aware of, and tried to manage, similar dangers. One study to engage directly with the tour’s negotiation of the past in a problematic landscape is Ina Ferris’s examination of the immediately post-Union Irish tour.10 This is a genre, she argues, driven by a ‘civic concern’ to understand and help resolve the many contradictions of a new and fragile ‘United Kingdom’. Liberally inclined, nurtured in Enlightenment notions of progress and improvement, the professional and gentry classes who undertook these journeys earnestly desired more than economic or strategic union, yearning for cordiality and sentiment. And yet, as Ferris suggests, for these writers: Ireland testified as much to the failure as to the reach of British power. As they observed the barracks studding the Irish landscape or recalled the origin of picturesque ruins in the cannons of conquest, they recorded the force of an order that had refused to take. And never far in the background was the awareness of recent and perhaps future insurrection.11

Ireland in the early 1800s is a recent war-zone, and in Irish tour narratives the events of 1798 press hard. Even in Scotland, the Jacobite rebellion is not much more than a generation old. Absorbed by Tudor legislation in 1536 and 1543, Protestant, and largely loyal to the crown, late eighteenth-century Wales was certainly no political threat in the way that Ireland was. It was, nonetheless, and for the whole of the century that followed, linguistically ‘foreign’ to a far greater extent than the other Celtic countries. A significant part of the cultural revival (which would, in time, feed into a nationalist discourse of a more oppositional nature) was predicated on the Welsh language, and on complex traditional literary or oral forms difficult to access through translation. The problems inherent in writing the Welsh past in English were not lost on writers at the time, whether they were native speakers who had come late to English, or fully



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bilingual, or, like Pennant himself, from a class and an area with only residual Welsh. Pennant’s role as a mediator of non-English-language ‘British’ traditions is another important factor in considering how far tours, as a genre, represented or occluded competing national histories. Ferris goes on to explore how perceptions of the ‘Irish problem’ raised by tours would be further developed in the national tale. While fictional representations of Wales in the period do not quite fall into this distinctively uneasy category, they often derive material (local colour, characters, and plots) and absorb certain cultural tensions and contradictions, from Pennant and his kind.12 Moreover, as this chapter will demonstrate, tour-inspired versions of the Welsh past fed into portrayals of a notional ‘Wales’ in other genres, most notably—foregrounding the bardic element in Welsh historical memory—in collections of song. The home tour, with its focus on the local, the particular, and the geographically specific, was therefore an important genre for registering the period’s new historiographical interest in the merging of written and oral culture, public and private history, and objective ‘proofs’ and subjective eyewitness accounts. As Mark Salber Phillips has pointed out, genres such as the tour ‘without ever displacing the national narrative in the hierarchy of literatures, offered a variety of alternative histories whose common ground was their resistance to the assumed priority of politics’.13 At the same time, such genres, more than traditional national history, contributed to the making of the modern historical method and, in particular, to the convergence of narrative and antiquarian research that marks historical writing to this day. PENNANT IN CONTEXT Though he is now perhaps best known as a naturalist, it was as the author of various pioneering tours of the British Isles that Thomas Pennant enjoyed his widest reputation during his lifetime.14 His journey to Scotland in 1769, which began as a mission to observe and describe plants and wildlife, saw him increasingly intrigued by the social, economic, and historical aspects of the places he visited. These multiple perspectives jostle for space in his travel writing, and one of its most interesting stylistic features lies in the effects produced by the juxtaposition of different ways of seeing landscape—an example will be given in the discussion of the collision of discourses at St Winefrides Well. By the time of his Tours in Wales, however, the texts are especially dense with the materiality of the past, as his antiquarian interest in the historicity of topographical space comes to the fore. The Tours do not cover the whole of Wales, but only the six northern counties. Nor ‘do they comprise the observations of a single journey, but

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rather of three separate tours made between 1773 and 1776’.15 These observations are enriched with information from a wide network of friends and correspondents; the patterns of Pennant’s letter-writing show how intensively he mined his contacts as different projects came to the fore.16 In the Advertisement to the 1778 Tour in Wales he thanks and names those who have already provided him with ‘general information’ or ‘several historical facts’ or ‘the loan of. . . curious antiquities’ and, urging further collaboration, signals his intended progress through the remaining counties of (north) Wales. ‘I look up to my friends’, he announces, ‘for history and anecdote latent among their papers’.17 The keynote of courtesy is especially audible in the letters he sent out to the ministers and schoolteachers of the Highlands and Islands in preparation for his second Scottish tour of 1772: ‘As my sole objects are my own improvement and the true knowledge of your country, hitherto misrepresented, I have no doubt of your complying with my wishes, which are included in the following queries and requests.’18 The resulting texts, which combine different types of history (oral and local, as well as library-based and antiquarian), are interestingly multivocal—or, if you are Horace Walpole, ‘a patchwork of all sorts of shreds stiched together’.19 They can accommodate multiple viewpoints, and, importantly, they are a conduit for traditions from other languages. Both the 1772 Tour in Scotland and the later Tours in Wales contain material which has passed from Gaelic or Welsh, via this network of informants, into Pennant’s English text. Pennant thus occupies an interesting position within a late eighteenth-century culture of ‘collecting’. While his work does to some extent reflect a key historiographical tension in the age (also discussed in Porscha Fermanis’s chapter on Thomas Carlyle and Claire Connolly’s chapter on the Irish Romantic novel in this volume) between the accumulation of material detail and the construction of narrative, it does not do so developmentally, or in a biographical trajectory, from collection to explication. Such trajectories may be visible in the careers of William Stukeley, whose work on Stonehenge begins by charting data but emerges as an interface between archaeology and history; or Richard Gough, whose various accounts and catalogues of coinage and topographies in the closing decades of the eighteenth century attest to a more widespread shift from material to meaning, from antiquities to narrative answers to questions about the past. But in Pennant’s Tours the material and the topographical constantly overwhelm the narrative, and indeed threaten it. Not only does the forward progress of the reader through the landscape of Wales keep grinding to a halt under the sheer weight of information—thus wrecking the illusion of movement through space so essential to works like Gilpin’s, where the reader follows the course of the Wye, scene by picturesque scene—but, arguably, the presence of material history, of objects in the landscape whose significance is



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dependent on cultural perspective, plays havoc with very notion of ‘historical narrative’ in spite of the author’s best intentions; this is particularly evident in Pennant’s treatment of Roman antiquities, which I will discuss shortly. Paul Smethurst has recently argued that Pennant’s interest in, and openness to, distinct cultural/national practices is in fact underpinned by a broader narrative of cultural union. Thus, while establishing ‘local Scottish identity in the landscape’, Pennant also ‘probes beneath the surface, seeking elements in nature and ancient history that might cohere into a vision of British identity’.20 The very act of travel, suggests Smethurst, is undertaken in (a nice phrase) the ‘spirit of suture’, a sewing-together in the journeying back-and-forth across the borders of Wales, England, and Scotland, which ‘imaginatively reconciles the three nations of the Union, and seeks common ground through which to join, transcend or bury differences in a cohesive national vision’.21 This, I would argue, is doubtless what Pennant intended, and it is of course precisely how he himself chooses to remember his Scottish tour in his memoirs some quarter of a century later: ‘In this tour, as in all the following, I laboured earnestly to conciliate the affections of the two nations, so wickedly and studiously set at variance by evil-designing people.’22 It is not, however, quite what the Tours of either Scotland or Wales actually deliver. The Tour in Wales opens in fighting mood, declaring from the outset that its focus will be on, and from, Wales: I now speak of my native country, celebrated in our earliest history for its valour and tenacity of its liberty; for the stand it made against the Romans; for its slaughter of the legions; and for the subjection of the nation by Agricola, who did not dare to attempt his Caledonian expedition, and leave behind him so tremendous an enemy.23

Claims for Welsh spirit are even, somewhat provocatively, contrasted with the behaviour of certain ‘other nations’: The spirit which the people shewed at the beginning, did not desert them to the last. Notwithstanding they were obliged to submit to the resistless power of the Romans, they never fell a prey to the enervating charms of luxury, as the other nations of the island did. They never, with womanish invocations, requested the aid of the deserting conquerors, or sunk beneath the pressure of the new invaders; they preserved an undaunted courage amidst their native rocks, and received among them the gallant fugitives, happy in congenial souls.24

The Welsh, says Pennant, then remained independent for another four centuries (‘against the power of a kingdom more than twelve times larger than itself’) before they had ‘the glory of falling, when a divided country, beneath the arms of the most wise, and most warlike of the English monarchs’. Despite

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the even-tempered nod to Edward I (who rapidly develops as a focus for rabid nationalist antipathy in the 1790s),25 the tenor of this surprisingly belligerent opening suggests that the deep past, rather than providing common ground for a new pan-British identity, is rather more contested in Pennant’s work than Smethurst (and indeed Pennant himself) implies. Once the journey proper begins, an intermittent narrative of resistance and cultural distinctness reappears in various contexts. In the border region of Flintshire, for example, Pennant draws attention to the presence of the Welsh language, particularly as it appears in the place-names: ‘contrary to what happens to most subdued nations, our country preserved its own language’. 26 The continued double-naming of places in Welsh and English effectively creates a dual-streamed past, two different traditions of naming and existing in the landscape that are far from being as ‘blended’ as Fenton would have it: ‘The conquerors, as usual, new-named the towns, villages and hamlets: but could not cancel the antient. Thus Hawarden still is known to the Welsh by the name of Pennard Lâg, or Halawg; Mold by that of Wyddgrug; and Hope by that of Estyn; which (with the continuance of our language to this day) proves that even at that time it mixed but little with our conquerors.’27 Two further examples of Pennant’s complex engagement with the British past can be found in his treatment of the Roman occupation of Britain, and his handling of ‘native’ heroes like Llywelyn the Last or Owain Glyndŵr. Both topics have recently been explored elsewhere, but it is perfectly possible to read a similar dual narrative into much of the apparently objective discussion of artefacts, sites, and ruins by Pennant and other travel writers. Roman antiquities can be similarly troubling, both in Scotland and Wales.28 Pennant’s intriguing description of one of the way-markers from the Antonine Wall, for example, lingers on an image of Roman imperial power (a soldier on horseback) crushing the Caledonians (‘naked, and bound’) in a way which—no doubt accidently, or at best subconsciously—evokes and critiques the Unionist mission to civilize and absorb its own more recently rebellious northern subjects. The ancient lead-mining operations near Flint absorb Pennant (though, one fears, probably not all of his readers) for several dense pages, and here, too, occasional phrases give pause for thought: In a small time after the Romans had carried their arms through our islands, they began to apply with vigor to the workings of the mines. . . The miners, in the earlier times of the Romans in Britain, seem to have been the subdued natives. . . . These were to be worked, not by the conquerors, but by condemned criminals, by slaves, and Britons newly subjugated.29

Pennant’s own involvement with mining operations around Downing, and his undoubted approval of the ‘vigour’ involved in both ancient and modern extraction of useful ores and minerals, puts him naturally enough in the Roman camp.30 Yet while there is no denying his commitment to



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the idea of industrial and agricultural improvement contributing to the greater British project, he cannot seem to stop that underground narrative about subjugated peripheries half-pushing its way to the surface of his text. The treatment of later historical figures raises similar problems. The first edition of the Tour in Wales included, as part of a journey into Merionethshire, a densely researched sixty-eight-page description of the life and career of Owain Glyndŵr, with a detailed year-by-year (and virtually blow-by-blow) account of his rebellion against the English crown.31 Though this material was in later editions hived off into a more manageable appendix, Pennant’s focus on the Welsh leader has seen him credited as the writer who ‘launched Glyndŵr as a national hero’.32 As others rightly observe, this presentation may owe much to Pennant’s most important informant, the Reverend John Lloyd of Caerwys, who is a kind of eminence grise behind much of the Tours in Wales. Dafydd Johnston has recently shown, however, that the depiction of the Welsh hero, though enthusiastic, is far from one-sided; an effect, perhaps, of the variety of types of source Pennant uses, which include native Welsh poetry and local tradition as well as official historical records and the works of earlier chroniclers. Pennant is, moreover, careful to contextualize Glyndŵr’s actions in terms of personal injustice (the seizure of his lands by Lord Grey) and loyalty to the deposed Richard II, as well as to a ‘national’—that is, anti-English—Welsh cause. His readiness to accommodate different viewpoints once again produces some intriguing textual moments. Thus, within a couple of pages, we move from a measured discussion of the ensuing antiWelsh legislation, seen from the perspective of government: This was the last of many laws enacted against the Welsh on occasion of this insurrection. They were certainly very severe; yet, perhaps, no more than what any government would have directed, against a people that had submitted to conquest near a hundred and twenty years, and who were considered in no other light than that of rebellious subjects.33

to a lively portrayal of the frankly insurrectionist assemblies or cymhorthau: composed of men the most dreaded by tyrants and usurpers; of BARDS, who animated our nation, by recalling to mind the great exploits of our ancestors, their struggles for liberty, their successful contests with the Saxon and Norman race for upwards of eight centuries. 34

The singing of the bards, claims Pennant, played a direct part in the Glyndŵr insurrection, and it is precisely the historical nature of their songs (‘recalling to mind’) which inspires their listeners to action. The ‘enthusiasm’—another dangerous word—of the Welsh rebels is even given its own, classically endorsed, pedigree: ‘They rushed to battle, fearless of events, like their great ancestry, moved by the Druids songs.’

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Once again (and this sudden accession of bardic fervour has an interesting parallel in the Scottish tour), the layering of historical perspectives makes it hard not to translate forward into the eighteenth-century context, when, depending on one’s perspective, the British government (or ‘tyrants and usurpers’?) did ‘what any government would have directed’ to the rebels in Scotland. Pennant is thus, on the one hand, guilty of the same enthusiastic resurrectionism as the medieval bards—he, too, ‘shewed to them the hero Glyndwr, descended from the ancient race of our princes’, with lasting consequences for the growth of Welsh nationalism into the nineteenth century. And yet a mere decade after the publication of the Tour in Wales, he would be most anxiously preoccupied by the notion of cymhorthau, of seditious or rebellious gatherings, and of unpoliced talk of ‘tyrants’ in his very own parish. In the winter of 1792 he was proud to lead the way in setting up a Flintshire society affiliated to the Loyalist Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers, founded by John Reeves to counteract the pernicious influence of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1792).35 A particularly striking instance of Pennant’s management of competing narratives about the past is, as it happens, another water-source. The spring and shrine dedicated to St Winefride (Gwenfrewi) at Holywell (Treffynnon) is scarcely four miles from Downing, and rich in historical layers. It focuses a perennial problem for many of those writing history in eighteenth-century Wales: how to deal with the more colourful aspects of the Catholic medieval past. Pennant’s account of the site takes up several typically detailed pages in his Tour; his History of the Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell (1796) reuses the material more or less verbatim, but inserts further details, anecdotes, and observations. The shrine forms a direct— indeed, through the spring, almost living—link from the early medieval period to the present. It represents history written deep into a specific place but also shows it as continually overwritten, renewed, and updated.36 After a detailed account of Basingwerk Abbey (where the Tours’ principal artist, Moses Griffith, painted two views), Pennant takes his readers up a road ‘remarkably picturesque, along a little valley, bounded on one side by hanging woods, beneath which the stream hurries towards the sea, unless where interrupted by the frequent manufactories’.37 The source of this stream is the site of the well and chapel: ‘The spring boils with vast impetuosity out of a rock; and is formed into a beautiful polygonal well, covered with a rich arch supported by pillars.’38 There follows a description of the building with its ‘exquisite’ stone roof and various sculpted armorial badges, which Pennant painstakingly explicates. On one side of a wall, he notes, ‘was painted the tale of the tutelary saint; at present almost defaced’, while an ‘elegant niche’ stands emptied of its statue of the Virgin, ‘pulled



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down, as I have been informed, in the year 1635’. Having gestured to this partial erasure of the Catholic past, and after further discussion of the legal ownership of the chapel and spring, he declares, drily, that ‘there are two different opinions about the origin of this stream. One party makes it miraculous: the other asserts it to be owing only to natural causes’. He then gives a lively version of the story of St Winefride, who, fleeing from the unwelcome advances of neighbouring king Cradocus, was captured and decapitated by him. The head rolled down the hill into a valley previously known as ‘Sychnant’ (‘dry valley’) and ‘a spring of uncommon size burst from the place where the head rested. The moss on its sides diffused a fragrant smell. Her blood spotted the stones, which, like the flowers of Adonis, annually commemorate the fact by assuming colors unknown to them at other times’.39 St Beuno, Winefride’s uncle, ‘took up the head, carried it to the corpse, and offering up his devotions, joined it nicely to the body, which instantly re-united’. She lived on another fifteen years and after her death brought about ‘numberless miracles’. The internationally renowned tradition of pilgrimage to the well has, says Pennant, by now notably decreased. People of rank no longer attend; and pilgrims are now mostly ‘of the fair sex’ (‘the greatest number’, apparently, ‘are from Lancashire’); in the summer still ‘a few are to be seen in the water in deep devotion up to their chins for hours’.40 Given other attitudes to this type of ritual in Wales in this period, Pennant’s tone of what appears to be gentle amusement seems a mild enough response. It is followed however by an oddly straight-faced, even awkward, refutation: We, whose ancestors, between two and three centuries ago, abridged our faith to the mere contents of the Old and New Testament, and to the creed called the Apostles, do not think the belief in the above, and other legends, requisite. I refer the reader to the arguments used by the antiquary doctor Powel, in his notes on the Itinerary of Giraldus Cambrensis, and to bishop Fleetwood’s annotations on the life of the saint, for proofs against the truth of the tale: but with Protestants, and temperate Catholics, it carries with it self-confutation.41

Having poured cold water on the miracle of the saint (‘the waters are indisputably endowed with every good quality attendant on cold baths’), Pennant then goes to surprising lengths, over most of a page, to insist that miracles in general are quite unnecessary: ‘without them, a sufficient ground of trust and reliance upon the Supreme Being has long since been established. . . . We cannot want, we cannot have the mediation of poor departed mortals’.42 Pennant’s own voice, as we have seen, is often quite difficult to identify, but this feels like an unusually direct authorial intervention, and it is tempting to read the strength of this response

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as reflecting considerable unease with the Welsh Catholic past. He does not, however, seem to have been especially anti-Catholic in his dealings socially: on his Continental Tour in 1765, for example, he made a point of visiting Catholic acquaintances and religious establishments in France and Switzerland.43 With the theological issues properly contained, the voice of science takes over the discussion of the spring. First comes an explanation for the colours of the plants around the well: ‘Some eminent botanists of my acquaintance have reduced the sweet moss, and the bloody stains, to mere vegetable productions, far from being peculiar to our fountain.’ The ensuing page of discussion uses Latin species names, and cites Linnaeus and other writers to link the plants at Holywell to specimens found in Lapland and Silesia. A page or so later, the sacred spring is subjected to various tests, and ‘by the two different trials and calculations lately made for my information, is found to fling out about twenty-one tuns of water in a minute. It never freezes’.44 Its speed and force make its ‘waters of much commercial utility’, and Pennant goes on to list the many mills (copper, wire, paper, snuff, brass, and most recently, cotton) lining the banks of the stream in the little wooded valley. It was not destined to remain densely wooded for much longer: more than one critic has drawn attention to the extraordinary impact of the industrial development recorded by Pennant in his later parish history of 1796, in which the description of the well and chapel is bulwarked by many pages describing the many different factories, their companies, and the effect of the influx of hundreds of workers into the area. And it was not only the medieval spring that was put to work driving the wheels of modernity: as Paul Evans has noted, large sections of Basingwerk Abbey itself, so carefully documented by Pennant and Moses Griffith in 1773, were demolished—thus hastening the building’s journey into the picturesque—and the stones used to build several of these new mills.45 The contrast between a ‘dark’ past and an enlightened present is made sententiously explicit by later commentators on the benefits of the spring: ‘Happily the spring has been made subservient to much wiser, and more important purposes, than the superstitious uses to which it was formerly dedicated.’46 But Pennant, whatever the textual juxtapositions appear to imply, never quite goes that far. He does, however, introduce a further twist to this rather disturbing symbiosis of past and present in his description of the ‘ruins of the abbey of Molandina’ situated just below his house at Downing, which, ‘notwithstanding they are not very considerable. . . do not want their beauties’. This particular picturesque ruin, however, is swiftly revealed as a private joke, ‘a trap for antiquaries, the name derived from Mola being a deserted mill, antiquated by myself as an imposture innocente’.47



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Pennant’s view of the past is thus extraordinarily wide-ranging: this is a historiography of heterogeneity, which moves from the extant symbols of the region’s religious life, via flora and fauna, to the industrial and social present, without ever quite articulating its implicit narrative of historical progress. The multiplicity of Pennant’s sources and interests captures an interesting moment in the intersections of history and antiquarianism. Pennant’s work may be part of the age before the professional historian’s role became one of straitening and excluding the ostensibly extraneous, but it is not irrelevant to our understanding of historical theory and practice today. It speaks to the current interest in the inter-disciplinary relationship between history and geography, evident in recent histories of landscape and the history of the earth: we may, as a result, be more sympathetic readers of the tour as a genre than any it has had since its heyday.48 A F T E R L I V E S :   P E N N A N T A S T H E S O U RC E O F ‘ RO M A N T I C ’ H I S TO RY Michael Freeman’s work on tourists and travellers to Wales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals just how rapidly the practice of touring, and its associated writings, developed. His tally of published and unpublished tours shows around seventy tours per decade for 1770–9 and again for 1780–9. By the 1790s this had more than doubled (about 165 known tours), and remained around the 120 mark until the middle of the nineteenth century.49 One of the most successful tours was the Excursions in North Wales published in 1804 by the naturalist Reverend William Bingley, after tours undertaken in 1798 and 1801. Its debt to Pennant, evident from the footnotes, is also acknowledged by a detailed biographical digression, ‘Memoranda of Mr Pennant’, inserted into the journey near Downing.50 The debt is apparent enough in other ways too: though other authors are cited, and some new points made, the section on Holywell, for example, follows that in the Tour in Wales very closely, beginning with the well itself, which ‘springs with vast impetuosity from a rock’ and proceeding through the description of the exquisite Gothic chapel and the legend to the scientific explanation of the mosses, with their Linnaean names.51 There is even a brief nod to Pennant’s Protestant intervention: ‘to attribute to the intercession of a saint those things which from the common course of nature are to be accounted for, is only worthy the ages of superstition and ignorance’. Richard Warner, visiting in 1798, is also stylistically in his predecessor’s thrall: ‘The spring boiled up from the rock into a polygonal receptacle with such profusion and impetuosity as to throw out (according to the observations of Mr Pennant) twenty one tonnes of water in the

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short space of one minute!’52 Henry Skrine, in the same year, has the little stream rushing ‘with incredible impetuosity. . . . The well itself is a great curiosity, being said to throw up 21 tuns of water in a minute’.53 The tours, then, perform their own form of channelling historical information; in the echoes and the borrowings, certain orthodoxies concerning both the landscape and its human meanings can be seen crystallizing. Warner’s Second Walk Though Wales (1798), written as a series of letters to a friend, also reveals that Pennant himself has become a feature, a site to be visited on the north Welsh circuit: he describes a delightful afternoon at Downing visiting this ‘literary veteran’ in what would be the final year of his life. A few days later, indeed, he was back for more: ‘It was happily within my power to confer the same satisfaction on my companions, which I had experienced on Thursday last myself, by introducing them to Mr Pennant at breakfast the next day. His noble library, and collection of miscellaneous curiosities, pleased us extremely.’54 What Mr Pennant made of these visits is not recorded. The Welsh-speaking Ruthin artist Edward Pugh, whose epic and beautifully illustrated Cambria Depicta (published 1816) criss-crossed north Wales, was, despite their very different styles and perspectives, as complimentary about Pennant as he was scathing of most of the English travellers to the region, claiming in his preface to offer a more authentic, because native, insight into ‘a people, whose manners, habits, and propensities, have not as yet been faithfully delineated by the pen of any traveller, Mr Pennant excepted’.55 By the time of John Rhŷs’s 1883 Welsh-language edition of the Tours, Pennant has become a spokesperson, an authority for historians in both languages.56 Criticism (usually of his indigestible style) is moderate, and often immediately tempered. The Reverend Michael Tyson confided in Richard Gough in December 1779: ‘I had rather have Gilpin’s Plumb-cake than Pennant’s hard Dumplings. Strange, that neither in Scotland or Wales could he pick up a little salt and butter, to give them a relish! Yet I must own, I should be very grateful to Mr Pennant was I to travel in his route, and think he deserves every commendation for such employment of his time.’57 Pennant, whatever else his failings, is always indisputably worthy. If subsequent tours are the most obvious medium for Pennant’s shaping historical influence, they are not the only one. Perceptions of the Welsh past, and of Wales as a country with its own history, had been intriguing the wider British reading public since at least 1757, when Thomas Gray dramatized the apocryphal ‘last stand’ of the Welsh poets against the army of Edward I in his ode ‘The Bard’. Poetry in both languages continued to mediate ideas of the Welsh past, often in complex ways, and from the 1780s Pennant’s Tours provided both useful subject matter and historical gravitas. Anna Seward’s poem ‘Llangollen Vale’ (1796), as Elizabeth



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Edwards has noted, ‘reimagines a brutal medieval battle scene extensively drawn from Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Wales’, while footnotes to the text urge the reader to consult that work for more information.58 The use of notes can have some interesting effects; here, for example, Seward’s intervention brings to a deliberately ‘dim’ and indistinct scene—‘time-decay’d’, ‘glimmering’ ‘tangled’—the promise of more solid historical heft and (in the ‘engravings’) a clearer visualization of an object that seems to be slipping away: Say ivied VALLE CRUCIS*, time decay’d. Dim on the brink of Deva’s wandering floods, Your riv’d arch glimmering thro’ the tangled glade Your grey hills towering o’er your night of woods, Deep in the Vale’s recesses as you stand, And, desolately great, the rising sigh command,59 *The picturesque Ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey, one of the most striking objects in this Valley. They are particularly described by Mr. PENNANT, and there are engravings of them in his Tour.

Pennant’s appearance in footnotes could be an essay in itself; they become, for most of the subsequent century, his natural home, a signifier of his status as a source and authority on the Welsh past. And since, as with the citations on St Winefride’s Well, that authority is not always acknowledged, his reach is considerably wider than at first appears. Less well known than Seward’s ‘Llangollen Vale’ is a piece by the Denbighshire poet Robert Holland Price, which, with great energy, taps into the Pennantian narrative that so delighted Richard Fenton of doughty Welsh/British resistance to invasion: How did our naked ancestors of old, With front undaunted, firm and bravely bold, Oppose great Caesar!60

‘The Horrors of Invasion’ summons a vision of Welsh volunteers (specifically those of Chirk), animated by the stirring roll-call of history to fight against Napoleon’s French on behalf of ‘George our gracious king’. One of many detailed notes explains at some length why the Welsh struggle for liberty over the centuries now fits them ideally to fight on behalf of Britain against the French. Price does not quote Pennant directly but there are evident verbal echoes of the section (discussed in relation to Glyndŵr) on the Welsh bards: A people like the Welsh, forced into a long and unequal contest of their native rights, with few other resources than their valour, and a fond attachment to their liberties, which they preserved through various fortunes for a length of time, against all the power of imperial Rome, and withstood the

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utmost efforts of the Saxon and Norman princes to reduce them, for more than eight hundred years!61

The multi-disciplinary nature of Pennant’s Tours of both Wales and Scotland has ensured that their reception history has been varied and long-lasting: though his influence on the age as a whole is still underappreciated, historians of natural history, geology, and archaeology, for example, are also likely, within their now separate disciplines, to cite Pennant as a source. One final example of the specifically historical legacy of his work opens up further questions of particular relevance to notions of Romantic history. A distinctive feature of the period, going back at least to Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Macpherson’s Ossian (1760 onwards), and mediated by Herder and the German Romantic movement, is the idea that songs, collected from manuscript and from oral tradition, might somehow capture the essence of a people and give access to their early past. Collections of ‘national’ song thus came to play an important part in recovering/creating the distinctive cultural identities of the British Isles, as they did across Europe. A landmark eighteenth-century collection for Wales was the Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784) of Edward Jones (‘Bardd y Brenin’: he was official harpist to the king), which was extensively revised and expanded as the Bardic Museum (1802). In this volume, Jones drew attention to a notable type of Welsh singing, known as canu penillion.62 His explanatory note, though unattributed in 1784, comes verbatim from Pennant: Some vein of the antient minstrelsie is still to be met with in these mountainous countries. Numbers of persons, of both sexes, assemble, and sit around the harp, singing alternately pennylls, or stanzas of antient or modern poetry. The young people usually begin the night with dancing, and when they are tired, sit down, and assume this species of relaxation. Oftentimes, like the modern Improvisatore of Italy, they will sing extempore verses. A person conversant in this art, will produce a pennyll apposite to the last which was sung: the subjects produce a great deal of mirth; for they are sometimes jocular, at others satyrical, and many amorous. They will continue singing without intermission, and never repeat the same stanza; for that would occasion the loss of honor of being held first of the song. 63

From an ethnographical point of view this is, as ever where song is concerned, material to be handled cautiously: quite apart from the dubious promise of ‘antient minstrelsie’, the Sicilian/Italian parallel suggests certain preconceived ideas about what is being described (as some thought even at the time: ‘here we are to understand’, wrote one unconvinced reviewer, ‘that every Welsh shepherd and plowman is an improvisatore’).64 Textually speaking, it is not much better: Pennant, on the advice



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of John Lloyd who supplied him with the information, cut and shifted this section from the lengthy account of the 1568 Caerwys eisteddfod which closes the first volume of the Tour in Wales, and relocated it in the succeeding volume in the hills around Cader Idris (‘you had better leave this subject alone’, wrote Lloyd, ‘till you come to Meirionydd or Caernarvonshire or some musical country, especially as your present volume will be large enough without it’). Though the penillion singing appears, therefore, to be thoroughly part of a landscape through which Pennant actually rides—‘these mountainous countries’, ‘Continue the ride, as before, between high mountains’—this is not, in fact, a direct experience.65 From the point of view of evoking a deep British past still just about accessible in the Welsh mountains, however, it is perfect; and it is another good example of the extraordinary ubiquity of Pennant’s Tours as an authority on Welsh matters in subsequent works. Later song collections also draw freely on the Tours as a source of historical information for songs about the medieval past (many of them composed to traditional airs to suit the medievalist tastes of the drawing-room audiences for whom they were intended). Examples can readily be found in George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Welsh Airs (1809–17), and Felicia Hemans and John Parry’s A Selection of Welsh Melodies (1822).66 These collections also helped to spread a particular image of the ‘Welsh people’ and a ‘Welsh past’ to a genteel, English-speaking reading and singing public. Here, arguably, is a version of history that is safe for general consumption— distant, colourful, unthreatening. There are important differences between this kind of stage-managed history and the submerged tensions of Pennant’s own less controlled narrative: in the song collections, the Welsh past is part of a British project, safely on its way to becoming ‘heritage’. C O N C LU S I O N S There are, of course, other versions of history being created and diffused in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Wales. Among these was the extraordinary bardic vision devised by Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg), the Glamorgan poet and stonemason. His vision fed into British Romanticism in various ways, producing many striking images and stories of the Ancient British past, from the legend of the transatlantic voyage of Prince Madoc (which would be used by Southey in his epic), to conceptions of the bardic/poetic vocation detectable in the works of Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth.67 Williams, more violently than Pennant, struggled with the Catholicism of the medieval Welsh past and his solution was more radical: he posited an unbroken

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oral tradition of knowledge reaching back to the time of the patriarchs and the druids. That knowledge, mostly encoded in memorable three-line verses (trioedd), was untainted by the superstitions of ‘dark ages’ (the pseudo-history of Geoffrey of Monmouth in particular) and was, he claimed, perfectly compatible with the ‘purest’ teachings of Christianity: as a Unitarian, Williams’s sense of that purity involved a rejection of Trinitarian doctrine as well as anything redolent of Catholic belief. Working with extraordinary patience and subtlety in a kind of no-man’s land between his own imagination and genuine, if often usefully inscrutable, early medieval sources, he wove what has been called a ‘verbal spider’s web’ around the Welsh literary and historical tradition. It took most of the following century to unpick the strands.68 Williams’s brand of Romantic history took firm root in Victorian Wales through the dynamic commitment of a number of key individuals—the extremely active William Owen Pughe, for example—and through cultural institutions like the revived eisteddfod. He also shaped historical perceptions textually, through his involvement in editions of early sources (legal, historical, poetic) that mixed genuine and forged traditions: the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (1801–7, and reissued in a more affordable format in 1870) was the most influential of these.69 A fervent pacifist, Williams’s bardism, which emphasizes a more intellectual/spiritual continuity of Welsh/British identity, forms an interesting counterpoint to the historicized narrative of continual armed struggle from Caesar to Glyndŵr that plays such an important part in Pennant and his legacy. Since Katie Trumpener’s ground-breaking work on ‘bardic nationalism’, much has been done to refine the concept of historical narratives inflected by the different cultural contexts of the British Isles.70 Given his wide contemporary audience and his multi-disciplinary reach, it is clear that Pennant’s portrayal of the ‘bardic’ Welsh past would benefit from being brought into this wider discussion. ‘Pennant’ as an author is very difficult to capture. He is a useful label, a source, an authority: he copies from earlier writers; he absorbs, with and without acknowledgement, many other voices, other discourses, and indeed other languages from the British Isles. Before we can fully understand Pennant’s role as a mediator and shaper of historical narratives there is a great deal still to be done in identifying these voices, and unravelling the precise contributions to his work of the network of scholars and antiquaries from all over Britain and Europe. It is nevertheless clear that the tour, as a literary genre, shaped Romantic-era perceptions of the British past both directly and indirectly. As such, it deserves wider critical attention. Thomas Pennant’s Tours in both Wales and Scotland sent into circulation myriad productive stories, scenes, and images rooted in the peripheral



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landscapes of the British Isles. Romantic history’s debts to this ‘curious traveller’, and those who came after him, have yet to be fully recognized. N OT E S 1. National Library of Wales (hereafter NLW) MS 2532B. 2. The first part of A Tour in Wales MDCCLXXIII appeared in 1778; it was followed by the shorter ‘A Journey to Snowdon’ (1781). The latter of these was then included, with the continuation of the tour, in the Tour in Wales printed by Henry Hughes in 1783. The entire journey appeared as two volumes, printed by Benjamin White, in 1784 (this version was reprinted as facsimile by Bridge Books, Wrexham in 1991 with an introduction by R. Paul Evans). Citations in this article will be to TW plus the relevant date. 3. TW (1784), ii. 171. 4. NLW MS 2532B, 81–2. 5. TW (1784), i. i. 6. Richard Fenton, ‘To Thomas Pennant, Esq, whilst making his tours of Wales’, in Poems (London, 1790), 123–9. All references in the main text are to page numbers from this edn. I am very grateful to Rhys Jones for bringing this poem to my attention. 7. See e.g. Benjamin Colbert (ed.), Travel Writing in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Esther Moir, The Discovery of Britain: The English Tourists 1540–1840 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964); Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain 1760–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); and Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989). For the tourist experience in Wales in particular, see Hywel M. Davies, ‘Wales in English Travel Writing 1791–8: The Welsh Critique of Theophilus Jones’, Welsh History Review, 23 (2007), 65–93; W. J. Hughes, Wales and the Welsh in English Literature (Wrexham: Hughes & Son, 1924); and Miriam Griffiths, ‘Wider Empire for the Sight: Picturesque Scenery and the First Tourists’, in William Tydeman (ed.), The Welsh Connection (Llandysul: Gomer, 1986), 67–88. 8. Charles L. Batten, Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth Century Travel Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 1. 9. See e.g. James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Toni Wein, British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel 1764–1824 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). ‘Four Nations Gothic’ is developing as a rich field, although the focus has largely remained on fiction: see e.g. Jane Aaron, Welsh Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013); Jarlath Killeen, ‘Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction’, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 1 (2006): ; Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization and

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Irish Culture (Galway: Arlen House, 2004); and Murray Pittock, ‘Is there a National Gothic?’, in Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston (eds), Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution (Cardiff; University of Wales Press, 2013), 231–45. Elizabeth Edwards focuses on Anglophone Welsh poetry in ‘Iniquity, Terror and Survival: Welsh Gothic 1789–1804’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35/1 (2012), 119–33. 10. Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 1, ‘Civic Travels: The Irish Tour and the New United Kingdom’, 18–45. 11. Ferris, Romantic National Tale, 22. 12. See Andrew Davies, ‘The Reputed Nation of Inspiration: Representations of Wales in Fiction from the Romantic Period 1780–1830’ (Ph.D. diss., Cardiff, 2001); and Jane Aaron, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). 13. Mark Salber Phillips, ‘Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 57/2 (1996), 297. See alsoSociety and Sentiment: Genres on Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 14. Thomas Pennant (1726–98) was born and lived at Downing Hall, near Whiteford, Flintshire, in north-east Wales. He was educated at Oxford, and inherited the estate in 1763. In 1765, after the sudden death of his first wife, he travelled on the Continent, meeting and subsequently corresponding with many leading natural scientists and philosophers, including Voltaire, Gronovius, Pallas, and Linnaeus. His correspondence with Gilbert White formed the first part of the latter’s Natural History of Selborne (1789). Pennant published his own British Zoology in 1766–7, with many subsequent edns. 15. R. Paul Evans, ‘Thomas Pennant’s Writings on North Wales’ (MA thesis, University of Wales, Swansea, 1985), 15. 16. For a good example of this in action, see Gwyn Walters, ‘Thomas Pennant’s Map of Scotland, 1777: A Study in Sources, and an Introduction to George Paton’s Role in the History of Scottish Cartography’, Imago Mundi: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Cartography, 28/2 (1976), 121–8. 17. TW (1778), ii. 18. The Scots Magazine, 34 (Apr. 1772), 173–4. 19. Letter to William Mason, 8 Apr. 1778, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with William Mason, ed. W. S. Lewis, Grover Cronin, and Charles H. Bennet, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 28 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 381. 20. Paul Smethurst, Travel Writing and the Natural World 1768–1840 (Basing­ stoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 110. 21. Smethurst, Travel Writing, 119. 22. Thomas Pennant, A Literary Life (London, 1793), 13. As Domhnall Uilleam Stiubhart has recently noted, Pennant’s ‘evil-designing people’ doubtless included John Wilkes, whose weekly newspaper The North Briton, attacking the prime minister Lord Bute in the 1760s, contributed to a wave of populist



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anti-Scottish feeling. ‘Highland Sources for Pennant, an Indigenous Travel Literature in the C18th’, presented at Thomas Pennant Workshop held in Glasgow in Jan. 2013. I am grateful to the author for a view of this paper. 23. TW (1778), 1. 24. TW (1778), 1–2. 25. See Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature, c.1700–1800 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), 34–5. 26. TW (1778), 4. 27. TW (1778), 5. 28. Two papers given at recent workshops in Glasgow and Aberystwyth discussed these points more fully: Mary-Ann Constantine, ‘Pennant’s Heart of Darkness’ (on the Romans in Britain); and Dafydd Johnston ‘Thomas Pennant and Owain Glyndwr’. Both will appear as articles in Mary-Anne Constantine and Nigel Leask (eds), Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland and Wales (forthcoming, Anthem Press, 2015). 29. TW (1778), 51, 55. 30. ‘With the estate, I luckily found a rich mine of lead ore, which enabled me to make the great improvements I did’, The History of the Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell (1796), 4. 31. TW (1778), 301–69. 32. Prys Morgan, ‘From Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 82. 33. TW (1778), 365. 34. TW (1778), 367. 35. Hywel M. Davies, ‘Loyalism in Wales 1792–1793’, Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru/ Welsh History Review, 20/4 (2001), 687–716. For Pennant’s correspondence with Reeves see British Library MS 16922 fos. 127–8 and 157. 36. TW (1778), 28–39; A History of the Parishes, 219–33. For the site itself see Glanmor Williams, ‘St Winifred’s Well: Ffynnon Wenfrewi’, Flintshire Historical Society Journal (2003), 32–51; and David Thomas, ‘St Winifreds Well and Chapel, Holywell’, Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, 8 (1958), 15–31. See also T. W. Pritchard, St Winifride, her Holy Well and the Jesuit Mission, c. 650–1930 (Wrexham: Bridge Books, 2009). 37. TW (1778), 28. 38. TW (1778), 28–9. 39. TW (1778), 33. 40. TW (1778), 33. 41. TW (1778), 36–7. 42. TW (1778), 37. 43. Pritchard, St Winifride, 225. 44. TW (1778), 39. 45. Evans, ‘Thomas Pennant’s Writings on North Wales’, 17.

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46. Richard Warner, A Second Walk Through Wales: August and September 1798, 2nd edn (London, 1800), 205. Warner gives a very detailed account of this industrial area. 47. A History of the Parishes, 5. 48. See e.g. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995); and David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006). 49. Michael Freeman, ‘Working List of Visitors to Wales’ (unpublished work in progress: I am extremely grateful to the author for sharing this information). See also his ‘In Search of the Picturesque in Wales 1770–1830’, The Picturesque, 70 (2009), 27–40; and Robin Gard, The Observant Traveller: Diaries of Travel in England, Wales and Scotland in the County Record Offices of England and Wales (London: HMSO, 1989). 50. William Bingley, Excursions (London, 1804), 59–72: the biographical material comes, mostly verbatim, from Pennant’s own Literary Life of 1793. 51. Bingley, Excursions, 44–50. 52. Warner, A Second Walk, 203. 53. Henry Skrine, Two Successive Tours throughout the whole of Wales (London, 1798), 189. 54. Warner, A Second Walk, 222–5. 55. See John Barrell, Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763–1813: ‘A Native Artist’ (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 175 n. 23. Pugh’s Cambria Depicta has recently been reprinted by Cambridge University Press. 56. Hynafiaethau Cymreig: Teithiau Yng Nghymru, sef cyfieithiad o’r ‘Tours in Wales’ gan Thomas Pennant (Caernarfon, 1883). Translation and notes by John Rhŷs and William Trevor Parkins. 57. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols (London, 1814), viii. 657–8. 58. Elizabeth Edwards, Poetry from Wales 1789–1806 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 29. 59. Anna Seward, Llangollen Vale, with other poems (London, 1796), 10. 60. Edwards, Poetry from Wales, 203–10, 301–2. 61. Edwards, Poetry from Wales, 208. 62. Edward Jones, Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards: Preserved by Tradition and Authentic Manuscripts, from remote Antiquity (London, 1784), 30–40. 63. TW (1783), 91–2. 64. See the lengthy review of the Musical and Poetical Relics in The Monthly Review, 74 (Jan. 1786), 59. 65. NLW MS 2594E. Letter from John Lloyd to Pennant, 27 Jan. 1778, which includes an account of penillion singing (though not the one used by Pennant). See Evans, ‘Thomas Pennant’s Writings on North Wales’, 33. 66. For discussions see Marjorie E. Rycroft, ‘Haydn’s Welsh Songs: George Thomson’s Musical and Literary Sources’, Welsh Music History, 7 (2008), 92–160; and Elizabeth Edwards, ‘ “Lonely and Voiceless Your Halls Must remain”: Romantic-Era National Song and Felicia Hemen’s Welsh Melodies



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(1822)’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (forthcoming, 2014). I am grateful to the author for a preview of this paper. 67. See Prys Morgan, ‘Iolo Morganwg and Welsh Historical Traditions’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), 251–68. 68. For a succinct account of Iolo’s impact on Welsh historiography, see Marion Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers and Abandoned Sources: Edward Williams, Thomas Stephens and the Young J. E. Lloyd’, in Neil Evans and Huw Pryce (eds), Writing a Small Nation’s Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, 1850– 1950 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 67–81. I am grateful to the author for an advanced view of this article. For Iolo’s version of oral bardic tradition, see Mary-Ann Constantine, The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). 69. Mary-Ann Constantine, ‘Welsh Literary History and the Making of The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales’, in Dirk Van Hulle and Joep Leerssen (eds), Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 109–28. 70. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). There is an important literature on this subject for Scotland and Ireland, e.g. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (eds), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); David Duff and Catherine Jones (eds), Scotland and the Romantic Aesthetic (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007); and Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For Wales, besides the work on Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) already mentioned, see the important nuancing of Trumpener’s thesis by Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009).

6 Historicism, Temporalization, and Romantic Prophecy in Percy Shelley’s Hellas Christopher Bundock It is not, however, to the revolutionary orators that the Romantics will turn for lessons in style, but to the Revolution in person, to this language become History that signifies itself through declarative events. Maurice Blanchot

RO M A N T I C I S M ’ S M O D E R N I T Y Since the final decades of the eighteenth century, argues German historian Reinhart Koselleck, time has not been quite the same. Best known for his ground-breaking multi-volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1972–97)—a study of Begriffsgeschichte or the evolution of historical concepts—Koselleck presents some of the most richly suggestive reflections on historical experience in contemporary philosophical inquiry. These reflections often place special weight on chronologies or events definitive of what we now call the Romantic period. In Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1985), for example, Koselleck argues that ‘[t]‌he decade from 1789 to 1799 was experienced by the participants as the start of a future that had never yet existed’.1 This kind of conception of the final decade of the eighteenth century signals a break in what for classical and Enlightenment historians alike was an ‘additive model’ of history. Such a model, corresponding to ‘a uniform and static experience of time’, made possible the dominance of a concept such as historia magistra vitae or the notion that knowledge of the past could educate subjects on how to face the future (Futures, 240). From within this ‘prehistorical’ world where ‘nothing fundamentally new would arise, it was quite possible to draw



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conclusions from the past for the future’ (203). Koselleck’s ‘prehistorical’ temporality parallels what Mikhail Bakhtin identifies as ‘folkloric time’.2 In Bakhtin’s description of this shape of historical existence, the regularity of seasons provides a rhythm wherein time and activity are seamlessly integrated, where each day might vary in detail but nevertheless repeats a larger pattern implicitly reflecting cosmological harmony. Koselleck, however, identifies a qualitative change in historical consciousness precisely with the interruption of this regularity at the end of the eighteenth century, characterizing temporality and history in their modern senses as products of a fundamental change in the subject’s sense of temporal coherence. In this regard, Koselleck seems opposed to depictions of history as basically continuous. This is the kind of picture offered by various theories of secularization that stress the linkages between past and present, and read modernity as the extension and transformation of earlier forms of art, culture, subjectivity, and thought. As Jean-Claude Monod argues, it is ‘possible to think of secularization as a transfer. . . of schemes and models elaborated in the field of religion [such that] religion thus continues to nourish modernity without its knowledge’. From this perspective ‘modernity would live only as something consisting of a bequest and inheritance, despite the negations and illusions of auto-foundation. Modernity would then not be a new time, founded and conscious of its foundations, but would be only the moment where there is effected a change of plan, a “worlding” of Christianity’.3 ‘Pre-Romantic’ pasts—whether articulated as neo-classical, Gothic, or Enlightenment—certainly remained active and informing forces in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, either through rejection or revival. Indeed, M. H. Abrams’s seminal argument in Natural Supernaturalism (1971) posits that Romantic consciousness is produced as a phase of secularization, namely when revolution turns away from historical eschatology and becomes an internal and internalizing force.4 And yet arguments insisting on historical continuity of this sort do not really oppose a thesis like Koselleck’s, which suggests that it is necessary to read this very tension in historiography symptomatically: the various efforts to reassure culture that history is continuous— prophecy, the philosophy of history, and secularization arguments all do this in different ways—indicate precisely that the matter is a contentious one. In Romantic as much as in contemporary thought, when arguments for continuity proliferate it may be useful to investigate criticism’s own motivations and desires. For Koselleck, reading not so much against as with and beyond claims for continuity, Romanticism’s future resists predetermination in spite of—perhaps even through—the obsession with history-destroying apocalypse.

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In the midst of vast political and social revolutions across Europe in the 1780s and 1790s, the future becomes for Koselleck ‘the bearer of growing expectations’ (Futures, 243). Crucially, however, these expectations are no longer neatly assimilable to the prevailing social reality. If novelty, experienced within a world running on folkloric time, is understood merely as local variation within an overarching orderliness, Koselleck sees—in the wake of the American Revolution, in the midst of the French Revolution, and in presaging rebellion in Ireland and Greece—the emergence of a new experience of novelty that would compel western society to rearticulate its very sense of orderliness. In this transition, historical events are no longer just the content of a narrative that transcends and subsumes them but, rather, are capable of exercising a force on the form of their conceptualization. So if, as James Chandler remarks, the early nineteenth century is ‘the age of the spirit of the age—that is, the period when the normative status of the period becomes a central and self-conscious aspect of historical reflection’—this interest in establishing determinate historical categories reflects a new anxiety surrounding the notion of being historical.5 The term ‘anxiety’ is carefully chosen in this context, as the disorganization and subsequent attempt at reorganization of historical experience through more scientific means is not primarily, or only, a matter of conscious effort; the task of furnishing concepts of historical coherence to fill the void left by natural time’s evacuation begins with a need that is at least as affective as it is intellectual. This emphasis on the affective and ultimately subjective qualities of historical experience is reflected in Koselleck’s two key concepts for gauging changes in the sense of time and history: the ‘space of experience’ (denoting the limit of the ‘world’, in Heidegger’s sense) and ‘horizon of expectation’ (what subjects can anticipate given the state of their world). These are the two fields whose interaction is, for Koselleck, formative of nothing less than the ‘inner relationship between past and future,. . . without which history is neither possible nor conceivable’ (Futures, 270). The ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ are concepts produced out of a history of existential and phenomenological ideas. This is unsurprising given that Koselleck attended the University of Heidelberg from 1947 to 1953, where his studies in history were augmented by classes with Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alfred Weber, and Karl Löwith; and where he met Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt ‘through private contacts’.6 Recognizing the history of ideas within which Koselleck works—i.e. postHeideggerian phenomenology—provides a useful context for understanding this chapter’s key methodological framework: a reading of Koselleck and Gadamer’s critique of historicism’s Enlightenment methodologies together with the reflections on ‘prophecy’ outlined by Maurice Blanchot. The latter is the literary critic whose mediations on memory and forgetfulness are



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perhaps most useful for analysing Percy Shelley’s poetic figuration (and disfiguration) of historical experience in the era of ‘temporalization’, i.e. in an age where time is no longer felt to be a metaphysical constant. Gadamer’s work, on the other hand (from whence Koselleck derives concepts such as ‘experience’ and ‘horizon’), helps to expose how prophecy, understood as the idea of prediction, undergirds not only the philosophy of history but also forms of empirical historicism that tend to see themselves as decidedly secular sciences. But can prophecy simply be identified with or reduced to prediction? Blanchot offers an alternative theory. For prophecy to be meaningful, he argues, it must predict something radically unexpected. In so doing, prophecy—as distinct from other ways of relating to the future— places the actual state of being into conflict with an impossible and yet imminent historical ‘Other’. So, rather than rescuing the present from uncertainty through some kind of transcendent determination (historicism’s secret desire), prophecy may only exacerbate the crisis. For Koselleck, modernity is defined in part by the changed relationship between experience and expectation: the future shifts from designating the realm of the merely unexpected to another order of novelty altogether, one where the new cannot be counted on to conform to the mediation of the concept of the horizon. In describing historical consciousness before this alteration, Koselleck, paraphrasing Gadamer’s dialectic of experience, describes how all negativity (i.e. novelty, the unexpected) is reabsorbed as experience:7 Only the unexpected has the power to surprise, and this surprise involves a new experience. The penetration of the horizon of expectation, therefore, is creative of new experience. The gain in experience exceeds the limitation of the possible future presupposed by previous experience. The manner in which expectations are temporally exceeded thus reorders our two dimensions with respect to one another. (Futures, 275)

Insofar as the future, while perhaps improbable, is still relatable to the space of experience in such a way that experience is expanded rather than annihilated by the encounter, history retains, in its form and structure, a predictive quality. For if the relationship between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation is dynamic and constitutive of ‘a temporal difference’, this difference ‘has itself a prognostic structure’ so long as the categories maintain contact with each other (Futures, 276). It is with much the same sense of continuous aggregation that the philosophy of history works out its historiographical agenda—an agenda that amounts to a complex but ultimately unsuccessful effort to recontain modernity’s wild temporality. In his plea for philosophers to take up the task of writing history, Voltaire is perhaps the first to pose history

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as a philosophical task and, in so doing, to approach the task on putatively secular grounds. As Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze note, Voltaire, apparently subordinating theological to philosophical discourse, ‘wanted to draw principles and regularities from the contingencies of successive and simultaneous historical events, in order to render history more comprehensible on the basis of its immanent rationality’.8 Such an approach finds, specifically in the revolutionary decades (c.1770–1830) in Europe, a particularly responsive world, for this is a world deeply agitated, suspicious of bluntly theological remedies, and yet eager for some form of metaphysical comfort. Precisely because the Revolution was not the Christian apocalypse, it introduced the possibility of a world unthinkable in terms of social reality before 1789 and yet remained resolutely mundane. Hence, as J. G. Herder argued, when history ‘must find out the causes of the event’ the ‘art of inference utilized’ in the case of such invisible forces ‘is no longer history, but philosophy’.9 The popularity of philosophical concepts such as progress (or for that matter, decline) must, then, be read in this context.10 For such concepts attempt to maintain the reciprocity between experience and expectation by attaching experience to a trend or a pattern that, without claiming the power to anticipate the content of history, does claim to know its abstract, rational form. The philosophy of history thus ‘establishes the immanent foundation of history as conceivable totality and order’.11 But if Voltaire imagines this programme as a secular reoccupation of Christian historiography, the philosophy of history nonetheless continues to veer into spiritualism. Indeed, for some of its main exponents, such as Hegel, this is not contentious: in his paradigmatic Philosophy of History (1837), based on his lectures of 1830–1, he describes his historiography as ‘a true Theodicaea, the justification of God in History’.12 J. G. Droysen, Leopold von Ranke, and other nineteenth-century historians thus had once again to attempt to purge historiography of metaphysics by distancing their own methods from Hegel’s apriorism.13 But can historicism really succeed in finding a way to evaluate history according to an immanent, as opposed to a transcendent, criterion, all the while maintaining a commitment to the notion of a ‘world history’? Gadamer argues that this attempt, in its very renunciation of a guiding ideal, remains negatively determined by the philosophy of history.14 As much as materialist historicism attempts to build on Herder’s notion that historical periods—like nations and peoples—express the variety of life, with each form or period as intrinsically valuable as the next, this multiplicity remains in tension with the hierarchizing tendency imposed by the very fact of succession. As much as history as a modern social science tries to adopt an evolutionary conception of change that counts only something like ‘fitness’ in intensely local terms, it remains



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committed to making the kind of generalizations from particulars necessary for explaining change conceptually. Thus, in Karl Popper’s words, historicism, in spite of its polemical rejection of transcendence and telos, remains ‘an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their primary aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the “rhythms” or the “patterns”, the “laws” or the “trends” that underlie the evolution of history’ (Popper’s emphasis).15 In other words, it seems that prophecy—precisely what the philosophy of history and then historicism attempt to eclipse—remains quietly active in this desire to instrumentalize the past, to turn it into food for future years. There is a natural tendency to identify prophecy with this sort of prediction. As Gerhard von Rad notes of the ancient Hebrew context, prophecy is characterized in part by an ‘intensive view into the future’ (11). In the entry for ‘Prophecy’ in the third edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (1797), George Gleig asserts that ‘in its original import’ the word ‘signifies the prediction of future events’ or the declaration ‘of truths either past, present, or future’ based in ‘the immediate inspiration of God’.16 This is the synthetic view of prophecy that William Blake, in his notes on Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1797), boiled down to the formula, ‘If you go on So, the result is So.’17 What this characterization overlooks, however, is the rupture in social and historical context at the end of the eighteenth century that makes appeals to this kind of prophecy more and more pressing. As long as one lives according to a folkloric time where the future is seamlessly entailed to the past—where the horizon of expectation always surrounds the space of experience—prophecy as a distinct genre of historical determination is utterly superfluous. So, when James Franks, in 1795, diagnoses the period as infected with ‘prophecy-mania’, or when an anonymous critic of Richard Brothers wryly identifies, in that same year, a prevailing ‘age of Prophecy’, we might read these pronouncements symptomatically.18 What they indicate—somewhat paradoxically—is a broad and intense discontinuity in historical experience, since only on this basis is such a strong appeal to prophetic intercession necessary. This discontinuity is similar to what Koselleck calls ‘temporalization’ or, put simply, what emerges when his two categories—the space of experience and the horizon of expectation—lose dialectical contact with each other. What is at risk is nothing less than a common Weltanschauung based on a common historical experience. That this loss has started to some degree to take hold is confirmed by an expanded awareness of the ‘contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous, or perhaps, rather, [by] the nonsimultaneous occurring simultaneously’ (Futures, 279). Rather than one overarching temporality under which all subjects in a culture fall, when historical anticipations feel acutely their own frailty in the face of

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a radically indigestible future, time breaks into multiple trajectories with each temporality following autonomous rhythms. Alexis de Tocqueville offers a good example of what happens to the space of experience when expectation loses any commonly discernible shape; i.e. when different horizons cannot fuse but attempt—nevertheless and simultaneously—to frame experience. Following the Revolution in France, he notes that society is inhabited by people living, in a sense, in different historical periods: Although what is termed in France the Ancien Regime is still very near to us, since we live in daily intercourse with men born under its laws, that period seems already lost in the night of time. The radical revolution which separates us from it has produced the effect of ages: it has obliterated all that it has not destroyed. Few people therefore can now give an accurate answer to a simple question—How were the rural districts of France administered before 1789?19

Rather than a uniform field, the space of experience here becomes a kind of palimpsest. It is not merely that the past lingers in the present, but that completely different historical registers stand in constant tension. Instead of one horizon of expectation there are two, each irreducible to the other, that attempt but must always fail completely to encompass the space of experience. It makes sense that prophecy, even though widely repudiated in the periodical press, should enjoy something of a renaissance at the end of the eighteenth century: such prediction is the most desperate effort to generate by fiat a uniform historical experience. Yet prophecy cannot help but draw attention to the discord it putatively regulates. Indeed, for Blanchot, what marks prophecy as an interesting orientation towards history is precisely this negativity: it takes for its ‘object’ the impossibility of knowing the future. As he writes in the aptly messianic-sounding Le Livre à venir (1959): To foresee and announce some future event does not amount to much, if this future takes place in the ordinary course of events and finds expression in the regularity of language. But prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset all the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic, it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence.20

Viewed from within the abyss that Koselleck sees opened between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, the future becomes not merely improbable or unexpected but an utter impossibility. This pits the actual state of affairs or existing space of experience against something for which it cannot prepare. Without any possibility of provisionally



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construing history, we thus lose the basic operation of all hermeneutic practice, what Gadamer calls ‘prejudice’ and by which he means the subject’s place in a world of projects that are all resolvable into the authentic ground of Dasein’s being-toward-death.21 This loss can also be understood as the subtraction of consciousness’s mediation. New time, for instance, is ‘experienced, not ex post facto but directly’, resulting in a form of historiography that is ‘less a retrospective notion because it has arisen from the present, which is opening out toward the future’.22 What kind of history writing could contend with this temporalization, with a subject abandoned by precedents and so unable to experience as a positivity, let alone prepare for, the future? How could this state be represented? Shelley’s Hellas (1821) offers a fruitful case study of a response to these kinds of problems. Indeed, it is between the two different but connected elaborations of prophecy as a historical concept outlined above that Shelley’s lyrical drama hovers. On one hand, the text is deeply allusive, borrowing its literary form from classical sources and its characters from recorded history. It even puts historia magistra vitae on stage by making prediction the central task of the prophet Ahasuerus. On the other hand, the text’s content is determined by the twists, turns, and blind contingencies of the Greek Revolution. In a display of what he calls in the preface ‘newspaper erudition’, Shelley writes the drama in tandem with events as they unfold through the spring of 1821. Ultimately, this decision forces both synthesizing and detotalizing conceptions of prophecy into direct conflict, such that the story of history Hellas tells incorporates metahistorical reflections on the possibilities for writing history in the era of Romantic temporalization. H E L L A S A N D T H E T E M P O R A L I Z AT I O N O F H I S TO RY Shelley’s Hellas is at the mercy of history. Shelley relinquishes a large measure of authorial control to the unpredictable events immediately contemporary to the act of writing, namely, the Greek revolt that erupts in March 1821 against Turkish occupation. The text thus ‘grounds’ its narrative historically, but in such a way that history loses any claim to stand as the stable but occluded truth of narrative. As Michael O’Neill notes of Byron in Chapter 9, we could say that for Shelley too, ‘[h]‌istory, here, is less secret agent than unfolding panorama’. Set into the chaos of nascent revolution, the text is forced to remain faithful less to particular established facts than to the reality of indeterminacy, and must therefore entertain mutually exclusive (though co-present) possibilities reflective of the over-determined

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space of experience. Shelley’s drama consists of three scenes, book-ended and separated by visionary interludes, wherein Mahmud, the Turkish ruler residing in Constantinople, hosts various messengers who bring him news concerning the Turkish response to the Greek uprising. In an effort to gain insight concerning the fate of his empire, Mahmud sends his agent, Hassan, to retrieve Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew of medieval folklore, through whom he then solicits the ghost of Mohammed II—the famous sultan who captured Constantinople in 1453, thus ending the Byzantine empire. Just as this pattern of summoning figures who, in turn, summon other figures anticipates the rhythms of The Triumph of Life (composed 1822, published 1824)—where urgent questions are answered only by new scenes of obscure import—so Ahasuerus, when he does arrive, fails to offer useful predictions. Instead, and ironically, he confirms history’s unpredictability. In spite of the assertion that Ahasuerus’s is ‘a life of unconsumed thought which pierces / The present, and the past, and the to-come’ (147–8), he fails successfully to predict the revolt’s outcome or to translate various signs into useful, strategic capital.23 By dramatizing his impotence, the text turns him into an anti-prophet, his incessant wandering foreshadowing the tread of the ‘shape all light’ (352) in The Triumph, whose . . . feet, no less than the sweet tune To which they moved, seemed as they moved, to blot The thoughts of him who gazed on them, and soon All that was seemed as if it had been not. (382–5)

As indicated by Ahasuerus’s strange negativity, the future Mahmud and Shelley face will be unlike anything that has come before. Ahasuerus performs the displacement of prediction in several ways. For instance, a key analogy in Hellas, one that ostensibly ties time together by repeating the past in the present, actually undermines historical continuity and, subsequently, dialectical progressivism. Just as the spectre of Mohammed II is about to appear to Mahmud, Ahasuerus remarks, the Past Now stands before thee like an Incarnation Of the To-come. (852–4)

William Ulmer reads this analogy as plotting history, whereby the repetition of events stabilizes the present and anticipates the future by incarnating precedents—in this case elective ancestors—such that the past is, as it were, metaphorized, i.e. carried over into the present and future.24 However, this reading overlooks the strangeness of this particular figure. If we consider again the structure of the analogy, we see that the past is like an incarnation.



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More specifically, this incarnation is qualified as the kind of incarnation demonstrated or modelled by the ‘To-come’. What kind of incarnation can this possibly be? The ‘To-come’ is, precisely, not-yet—i.e. it is possibility as opposed to actuality, or a form of negativity that we might, following Heidegger, call ‘nullity’. In fact, if the ‘To-come’ is understood rigorously, it is that which is always to-come and thus never really an imminent arrival or presence at all. Or rather, it is only an imminent arrival, arriving without arrival. Put differently, the ‘figure’ offered to the past in this comparison is a figure of that which itself has no clear figure. To rephrase the simile, then, what it says is: the past is incarnated in the same way as the ‘to-come’ is incarnated, and is about to stand objectively before Mahmud in this form. The irony becomes evident when so phrased, as the quilting point between elements consists in their ‘shared’ absence of body, or in a common disfiguration or disincarnation. What does it mean to identify two ‘things’ that do not properly have being, namely, the past and future? How does the operation of synthesis function when the separate terms are themselves already in a kind of ontological limbo? Is there not something deeply ironic in this identity predicated on vacancy? And ultimately, what does this mean for the internal consistency of past, present, and future and, so, of history? This ironic figuration or self-cancelling prophecy operates not only rhetorically but also phenomenologically in Hellas by unravelling synthesizing forms of consciousness. For instance, the specific job that Ahasuerus is saddled with goes beyond both prediction and dream interpretation. Mahmud not only needs his troubled dreams—from which he ‘wake[s]‌ to weep’ (Triumph, 334) in the opening scene—interpreted; he also needs these dreams, in the first place, to be remembered for him. Hence Mahmud’s special interest in Ahasuerus, whom he describes as ‘A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle / Of strange and secret and forgotten things’ (133–4, my emphasis). Describing his situation Mahmud reflects, Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me As thus from sleep into the troubled day; It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea, Leaving no figure upon memory’s glass. (128–31)

Mahmud articulates a complex moment in consciousness, as he seems to have a memory of something forgotten—his soul, like Wordsworth’s, ‘Remembering how she felt, but what she felt / Remembering not’ Prelude (2.35–6). This is exceptionally odd. For what does Mahmud remember when he remembers that he has forgotten? How can he know that there is anything to be remembered at all? How can an image leave its trace on the surface of a glass? Indeed, a mirror would seem only to function so long as it remembers to forget (so to speak) whatever crosses its surface.

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With this problem we might again see Hellas anticipating the cadence of Shelley’s later poem, The Triumph of Life, where, as Paul de Man notes, ‘the movement of effacing and of forgetting becomes prominent in the text and dissolves any illusion of dialectical progress or regress’.25 The action of memory here, like the action of the simile noted, eludes its own regulating action and suspends the history it might otherwise help to shape as an object for consciousness. What Mahmud recalls when he remembers his forgotten dream cannot be separated from the very action of forgetting, of bringing back forgetfulness itself, generating what Blanchot calls ‘forgetful memory’. For Blanchot—a thinker especially useful for tracing the displacement of figuration in Shelley—one key characteristic of Romantic writing is that it experiments with ‘an entirely new mode of accomplishment’, one that affirms ‘totality, but in a form that, being all forms—that is, at the limit, being none at all—does not realize the whole, but signifies it by suspending it, even breaking it’.26 So, if ‘the task of Romanticism’ is to imagine ‘an entirely new form of accomplishment’ through fragmentation, Blanchot’s reflection on prophetic speech suggests one way that literature answers that call. As noted, prophecy in his reading is not full speech, is not the mystical merger of being and meaning in a divine Logos. It is, rather, much more like the language of exploded analogy and the experience of forgetful memory—two other forms of uncanny historiography. This is because, in the first instance, prophetic language ‘only repeats the speech confided to it, [and is] an affirmation in which by a beginning word something that has actually already been said is expressed. That is its originality. It [i.e. prophetic speech] is first, and yet there is always before it already a speech to which it answers by repeating it’ (Book, 82–3). The prophet’s ‘original’ utterance is displaced by the difference in repetition. Hence, the prophetic utterance aims to generate the impression of a totality it cannot possibly have, since this would require the elimination of the prophet’s very supplementation. Blanchot’s analysis of memory places the popular Romantic strand—typified by Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’ and similar forays into spiritual recuperation through memory—against another elaboration, a form particularly illuminating for reading Shelley’s treatment of history. In The Infinite Conversation (1993), Blanchot reverses the expected trajectories of memory and forgetting in a way that helps to describe their relationship in Hellas and other works by Shelley, especially The Triumph of Life. Blanchot argues that ‘forgetting is the primordial divinity, the venerable ancestor and first presence of what, in a later generation, will give rise to Mnemosyne, mother of



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the Muses. The essence of memory is therefore forgetting; the forgetfulness of which one must drink in order to die’ (Infinite, 315). This powerful forgetfulness is (dis)figured, somewhat unexpectedly, as an excessive brightness: like Emily in Epipsychidion (1821) or the ‘shape all light’ in The Triumph, the force resistant to figuration is here cast not as deficient but rather as overwhelming—invisible for being too visible. This is the transparency of pure visibility. As Blanchot puts it, ‘forgetting is the sun: memory gleams through reflection, reflecting forgetting and drawing from this reflection the light—amazement and clarity—of forgetting’ (315). Memory here is the temporary interruption of brightness, is the wrinkle in light caused by reflection, shading, or other variations in intensity. This reversal suggests a method for rereading Shelley’s treatment of historical memory. Just as Prometheus’s forgotten curse in Prometheus Unbound (1820) cannot, as Carol Jacobs points out, be recalled in the sense of ‘revoked’ without, at the same time, being recalled in the sense of ‘repeated’, so Mahmud’s memory of forgetfulness threatens to turn memory inside out.27 Hence, memory is dismembered in every sense of that word. Yet the result is not that the subject is abandoned by history. She is left, rather, with a very peculiar experiential residue suggesting that the oscillation between memory and forgetting, while objectively ungraspable, nevertheless contains a promise. What it promises is perhaps unclear, since it is not an object so much as the sense that consciousness can open to—or change into—novel, yet unconscious, shapes through the generosity of temporality. ‘I do not know’, writes Blanchot in Le Pas au-delà (1973), ‘but I have the feeling I’m going to have known’.28 Blanchot here suggests that if we ever come to historical knowledge it is only as a kind of future perfect knowledge as opposed to something graspable in the present—and yet that we can feel this difference. Prophetic consciousness in Shelley underscores memory’s inversion. On the surface, prophecy appears to be the most resolute form of historical ordering and discipline, one that masters contingency and time by relating to the future as if the future were already a memory. In this sense, prophecy is a kind of hyper-memory called on in precisely those moments of social and political revolution wherein consciousness loses its orientation or when the space of experience has lost its reciprocal relationship with expectation, as must happen when reduced, like Mahmud, to actually expecting the unexpected. Yet Ahasuerus’s image of prophecy proves remarkably disorienting. That is, he attempts to recuperate order through another ‘figure’ of absence. ‘Mistake me not!’, he says toward the end of the text,

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All is contained in each. Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup Is that which has been, or will be, to that Which is—the absent to the present. Thought Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion, Reason, Imagination, cannot die. (792–7)29

Presented more schematically, the passage suggests that the past and the future are to the present what Dodona’s forest is to the acorn. What complicates the analogy, however, is the implicit link between, on the one hand, time’s horizons and, on the other, the relationship of the seed to the full-grown forest. Hence, if we follow its vegetable development, then the abundance that the seed will grow into (namely, Dodona’s forests) is analogous to—is identified with—the absence of past and future. While the seed implies immanent growth, its coordination with presence and absence suggests that such growth, as a process, cannot be successfully objectified. Indeed, while the metaphor recalls The Defence of Poetry (written 1821), where Dante’s poetic language is compared to ‘the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially’ (528), it is important to notice, as Jerrold E. Hogle does, that we have here not an acorn but only its empty shell, suggesting that the very representative of presence is already curiously inane, like the sky at the end of Act III of Prometheus Unbound. 30 Once again, prophecy proves to give with one hand while it takes with the other. If Dodona’s forests—the location of Zeus’s oracle—suggest one form of prophecy, Shelley dissolves its positivity when he forces it to operate in such a strangely discordant analogy. This inversion of prophecy helps to explain why Ahasuerus is, in effect, dismissed in the same moment that he arrives at Mahmud’s court. Strangely, before Ahasuerus has a real opportunity to help Mahmud, the latter asserts: but the unborn hour, Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms, Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any Mighty or wise. I apprehend not What thou has taught me, but now perceive That thou art no interpreter of dreams; Thou dost not own that art, device, or God, Can make the future present. (752–9)

As if fulfilling Mahmud’s prophecy of the impossibility of prophecy, when Ahasuerus does finally provide commentary on the revolution and Mahmud’s dream, his words ‘cast on all things surest, brightest, best, /



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Doubt, insecurity, astonishment’ (790–1). Recalling Asia’s frustration with Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound, who responds to her passionate questions concerning the benevolence of God with the cryptic refrain, ‘He reigns’ (2.4.28), Mahmud soon turns to other agents for information he hopes will be more satisfying. E LU S I V E A L LU S I O N S A N D L I T E R A RY H I S TO RY Hellas’s continual inversion of forms of historical synthesis, as a way of remaining responsive to an unthinkable future that would only be misrepresented by any logic of entailment, is all the more striking as the text is also very clearly embedded in literary history. Shelley takes Aeschylus’s The Persians (472 bc) as his formal template for Hellas. In so doing, he generates a higher level of reflexive gesturing through citation. Just as Mahmud, in calling on Mahommed II, would ‘cite one out of the grave to tell / How what was born in blood must die’ (810–11), so does Shelley’s text appeal to specific antecedents, though on at least two different levels. On the one hand, Mahmud performs the same action as Atossa in The Persians when she calls on the ghost of her late husband, Darius. On the other hand, Shelley’s decision to echo Aeschylus’s formal technique means that Hellas, as a whole, performs another kind of solicitation of the dead. Indeed, Shelley mines The Persians for the image of prophecy that will re-emerge not only in Hellas but also, earlier, in Prometheus Unbound, producing a complex texture of historical reference in Shelley’s œuvre. That is, while Mahmud in Hellas has an obscure vision that involves a chorus of Greek women and disembodied voices—the vision he remembers forgetting—the ‘trouble in [her] heart’ (164) that disturbs Atossa’s dreams in The Persians seems to find clearer visual expression in Prometheus Unbound: Two beautifully dressed women seemed to appear to me, one decked out in Persian robes, the other in Doric clothing. In stature they were conspicuously larger than people are today, and they were faultlessly lovely; they were sisters of one race. One of them lived in her fatherland, Greece, which she had obtained by lot, the other in the land of the barbarians. A conflict between these two arose, as it seemed to me. When my son found out about it he tried to restrain and mollify them; he harnessed them both beneath his chariot and put a yolk-strap beneath their necks. One of them towered proudly in this gear, taking the reigns submissively in her mouth, but the other struggled, tore the harness from the chariot with her hands, dragged it violently along without the bridle, and smashed the yolk by the middle. My son fell out. His father Dareios stood close by, pitying him. (181–97)

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In his Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus (1795), John Flaxman includes an engraving of this dream, clearly labelling the refractory woman Ionia and the submissive woman Persia.31 Shelley seems to translate this allegorical vision of nations into Panthea and Asia. He adopts, for instance, the filial relationship between these spirits, with Asia calling Panthea her ‘sweet sister’ (2.1.14). More substantially, Asia, as the geographical quality of the name suggests, is a version of the woman ‘in Persian robes’. Panthea represents ‘the other in the Doric clothing’, or Shelley’s revision of Aeschylus’s figure of Greece as a nation partly pantheistic. The national struggle that ‘upsets’ Xerxes in The Persians is rewritten as the fall of Jupiter, borrowing but inverting the dream’s central image: rather than a single chariot toppled by ‘Greece’s’ refusal to cooperate (a political reading more directly represented in Hellas), Prometheus Unbound divides these conflicting impulses into two separate Cars of the Hours. Characteristic of Shelley’s attempt to sustain a utopian vision of revolution by compartmentalizing violence, one car, reflecting Ionia’s resistance to Xerxes, is transformed into the ‘dark chariot’ upon which Demogorgon will ride up to Jove’s throne on Olympus and carry the tyrant ‘Dizzily down’ (2.4.143; 3.2.81). Asia and Panthea are then free to ride on a second vehicle, an attractive ‘ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire’ (2.4.157). Asia and Panthea are avatars of allegorical figures encountered in The Persians and that later, in Hellas, haunt the dreams of Mahmud. Amid the immediate clash of nations in 1821, Atossa’s dream is redreamed but only after its refiguration in Prometheus Unbound, where the lingering effect of that mediation has been to dehistoricize the characters. Hence, the earlier Prometheus Unbound, as an artistic work, looks like a prophetic spirit, one invoked by Hellas after the fashion of Mahmud’s invocation of Ahasuerus. And, just as prophetic agents in Shelley’s poetry—as we have seen—often do not offer clear signs so much as make supplementary referrals, Prometheus Unbound does not so much clarify the text of Hellas in advance as present the possibility of reformulating historical elements in response to present pressures. Each work is thus another ‘waking dream’ that is ‘hastening onward’, another scene in a triumph of history that does not come to a decisive conclusion (Triumph, 42, 47). This means that, once read in terms of the series generated by Shelley’s allusive composition, Prometheus Unbound forfeits its apparently apocalyptic totalization of history. Prometheus Unbound, in other words, ‘leaves [its] stamp visibly upon the shore’ but only ‘Until the second bursts’, until Hellas again reformulates Aeschylus’s political imagery, ‘so on [the reader’s] sight / Burst a new Vision never seen before’ (Triumph, 409–11). This meta-textual relationship unbinds what might otherwise seem like the fairly strong teleology in Prometheus Unbound, one that,



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as Steven Goldsmith describes, seeks spiritual perfection by rejecting— even sacrificing—actual historical life.32 Setting the plays into the history of their composition and reading them in conversation with their classical ancestors has, however, a counterintuitive effect on Shelley’s texts. Rather than affirming the influence of the past on the future, Prometheus Unbound and Hellas become distinct and juxtaposed horizons of expectation. Merging these horizons into a stable metahistory does not seem to be possible or even desirable; rather, read serially the works represent the provisional nature of historical reflection. For as much as Shelley borrows from Prometheus Bound and The Persians, he also—as his titles indicate—reverses certain polarities: bound becomes unbound, east moves west. Rather than a simple repetition, Shelley stresses, in an extremely visible way, that his homage will also make a marked deviation from originals. In other words, the allusiveness produces a rhythm of the binding and unbinding of Prometheus: the messenger technique and the serial invocation of explanation Hellas clearly borrows, dramatizes the impotence of precedents. In a description of Byron’s poetry germane to the present discussion, O’Neill, elsewhere in this collection, notes that ‘[h]‌istory struts the stage, taking the guise of these different figures, yet, as we live it, or as we read Don Juan in particular, we are immersed in a stream of temporality, the fascination of which lies in the way in which it will not be channelled through the irrigation schemes of pre-existent conceptual typing’. Put in terms introduced earlier, we might also see this as a formal version of Blanchot’s forgetful memory. The form of literary-historical synthesis—allusion—is suspended when the materials alluded to insist on the frailty of historia magistra vitae. Rather than locking history’s action into some kind of narrative arc, allusion here has the reverse effect: the very Aeschylean motifs in Shelley’s text that suggest the lyrical drama’s place in a literary tradition simultaneously dramatize, in their particular functioning, the impossibility of deriving lessons from history for the future. Again testifying to the text’s remarkable ability to reflect on its own mechanisms, we can read Hellas’s creative relationship to its own literary-historical debts in its conflicted treatment of branding, stamping, and other similar actions of marking. For if Hellas wears its classical and political allegiance on its sleeve, so to speak, the drama suggests that determining the allegiance of various characters is substantially more complex. Hassan, for instance, gets so carried away describing the valour of the Greeks that when Mahmud chides him— ‘your heart is Greek, Hassan’ (454)—Hassan admits to a kind of temporary schizophrenia:

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It may be so: A spirit not my own wrenched me within And I have spoken words I fear and hate. (455–7)

Yet it is not merely a matter of possible reversal; rather, theological alliances refuse perfectly to square with political divisions. If for instance the Greeks are aligned with Christianity and the Turks with Islam, Ahasuerus’s peculiar fate deranges the binary connotations of the Holy Crosses—they appear as encouraging beacons to the Greeks but as ‘ominous signs’ (601) to the Turks.33 One cannot help but recall Ahasuerus’s scarred face—the mark of God’s anger—when one of the messengers relates how signs Are blazoned broadly on the noonday sky. One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun; It has rained blood, and monstrous births declare The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord. (602–5)

It is, similarly, ironic that Ahasuerus’s advice to Mahmud to ‘look on that which cannot change—the One, / Unborn and undying’ (768–9)— should recall the description of eternity a few lines earlier, within one of the interludes, that figures the continuity of history and of thought’s eternity in terms of a stamp: But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity; Her citizens, imperial spirits, Rule the present from the past, On all this world of men inherits Their seal is set. (696–703)

In the same moment as the text attempts to ensure Greece’s victory through metaphysical appeals to the timeless realm of ideas, the language of stamping, the notion of the past indelibly marking the present, is explicitly correlated with a history of violence, repression, and servitude—as if a history that entails the future to the past perpetuates a morally regressive mentality. While the Cross is supposed to signal Greek liberation, it cannot avoid also signalling ongoing slavery. In fact, the Chorus of Greek women condemning the ‘Slavery! thou frost of the world’s prime’ (676) imposed by the Turks describe bondage in terms strikingly close to Ahasuerus’s predicament: Thy [i.e. Slavery’s] touch has stamped these limbs with crime, These brows thy branding garland bear,



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But the free heart, the impassive soul Scorn thy controul! (678–81)

The Cross cannot promise Christian liberation from Islamic oppression without also recalling, in the same breath, Ahasuerus’s ongoing persecution. This skews the dualisms in the text, just as Blake does when he marries heaven and hell. Perhaps the most profound expression of this asymmetry’s proliferation comes when the play, ultimately, collapses victory into loss. While a call of ‘Victory!’ ostensibly signals the defeat of the Greeks by the Turks, this is for Mahmud, the prospective victor, also a kind of curse since it promises the sad fate illustrated by the vision of Mohammed II—‘for thy subjects thou, / Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life’ (882–3)—and a depressing repetition of violence: Spirit woe to all!— Woe to the wronged and the avenger! woe To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed! Woe to the dupe; and woe to the deceiver! Woe to the oppressed and woe to the oppressor! Woe both to those that suffer and inflict, To those who are born and those who die! (893–9)

As presaged by Ahasuerus’s ambivalent semiotics, signs of victory and signs of loss begin to lose their clear outlines and, with this, history loses one of its typical forms of organization. As Ulmer suggests, Shelley’s Hellas says more about historicization as an activity than about history as something objectively present.34 Indeed, O’Neill’s attention in this volume to ‘how the imagination conceived of history aesthetically’ and how this art ‘puts history to work in poems’ finds an exemplary instance in Hellas: for the lyrical drama seems less directly to represent its historical moment than to translate the reformative energy of political revolt into a literary form, or better, a style of composition. In this sense, then, Hellas is ‘prehistoric’ in its orientation, though in an affirmative as opposed to pejorative sense of the word. Indeed, since Shelley aims to represent not history but the unruly temporality that forms a pre-sense of the historical— something very delicate that Blanchot helps to register—he translates poetry and consciousness’s synthetic resources into dismembering forces. Active becoming can, subsequently, figure only prefiguratively, where that term designates not so much an anticipatory sign as something not-yet-figured and perhaps resolutely unfigurable. History here is unfigurable because it has become a sort of technique. The inversions dramatized within analogy, memory, and prophecy throughout Hellas do not render history unreadable by equating its claims to insight with blindness—basically de Man’s conclusion in his reading of Shelley’s Triumph of Life. Rather, Shelley elaborates on

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history’s novel temporalization by turning Keatsian negative capability—the power to sustain ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’—into a form of historical thought where consciousness resists the lure of prediction.35 This is not an anti-historical stance but rather attempts to remain faithful to the difference in experience consistent with the emergence of new time. With this, Shelley renders forward thinking or pro-metheus truly unbound—i.e. released from futures past. By explicitly obscuring the future’s eventual shape while affirming futurity as such, the text opens history to new possibilities. Hellas thus embodies what Koselleck calls the Romantic ‘temporalization (Verzeitlichung) of history, at the end of which there is the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity’ (Futures, 5). For Hellas’s displacement of prediction expresses something not about the content of the future, but about how a new concept of the future might form, a concept that embraces the negating power of temporality rather than indulging in the kind of ‘apocalyptic prophecy [that] destroys time through its fixation on the End’ (Futures, 14). N OT E S 1. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 56, hereafter referred to as Futures and cited parenthetically in the main text. 2. In ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, Bakhtin names the cyclical form of time in preindustrial culture—a ‘profoundly spatial and concrete’ (Bakhtin’s emphasis) time based on naturalistic repetition—‘folkloric time’.Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 208. Bakhtin notes that this conception of time undergoes a fundamental reorganization in the 18th cent. (217). 3. Cited in Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 5 (original emphasis). 4. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 334. 5. James K. Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 78. 6. Keith Tribe, ‘Introduction’, to Koselleck, Futures Past, p. viii. 7. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2011), 340–54. 8. Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze, ‘Introduction: On the Way to World History, Johann Gottfried Herder’, On World History: An Anthology (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 9. 9. J. G. Herder, On World History: An Anthology, ed. Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 31. 10. Jonathan Sachs argues that the Romantic fascination with reinventing classical ruins is part of a broader concern with historical decline where the notion



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of decline itself, ‘frightening as it may be, has the advantage of making an unknown future and an increasingly unfamiliar modernity recognizable because through such a process, the present and future are always experienced as a repetition of the past and hence as potentially knowable’. Sachs, ‘The Time of Decline’, ERR 22/3 (2011), 307. 11. Alder and Menze, ‘Introduction’, 9. 12. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 457. 13. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 197. 14. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 199. 15. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, 2nd edn (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 3. 16. George Gleig, ‘Prophecy’, Encyclopædia Britannica, 3rd edn (1797), p. xv. 595, 596. There is no explicit attribution of authorship for the article on ‘Prophecy’ but Gleig is a good candidate for three reasons. First, he contributed articles on topics such as Metaphysics, Miracle, History of Ethics under Moral Philosophy, Oath, Passion, Plastic Nature, Polytheism, and Prayer, among others (i, p. xv). Second, Gleig took over general editorship from Colin Macfarquhar for the final six volumes of the twenty-volume work; as such, the entry on Prophecy, which appears in the fifteenth volume, would have been at least mediated by his editorship. Finally, the 3rd edn’s entry on prophecy is quite substantial, spanning eight large pages (595–602). By contrast, in the 1st edn (1771) and the 2nd edn (1778), Prophecy is summed up in a single line—‘Prophecy. a prediction made by divine inspiration’ (iii. 514; ix. 6505). In other words, the 3rd edn does not recycle an earlier entry. 17. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 898 18. James Franks, Memoirs of pretended prophets, Who have appeared in different ages of the World, and especially in modern Times; Pointing Out, from Authentic Sources, their Blunders, and the Pernicious Consequences of their Pretensions: With An Examination of some of the most Remarkable and best attested Modern Predictions, Shewing that no inference can be Deduced From them in Favor of the Recent Existence of a Prophetic Spirit. By a Clergyman. (London: J. Johnson, 1795), p. iii. Convert [Anon.], The age of prophecy! Or, further testimony of the mission of Richard Brothers (London, 1795), 1. 19. Alexis de Tocqueville, The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789, and the Causes which Led to that Event, 3rd edn, tr. Henry Reeve (London: J. Murray, 1888), 22. 20. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, tr. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 79, hereafter referred to as Book and cited parenthetically in the main text. 21. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 274. 22. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, tr. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 120. 23. All references to Shelley are to Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002).

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2 4. William Ulmer, ‘Hellas and the Historical Uncanny’, ELH 58/3 (1991), 611–32. 25. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 98. 26. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, tr. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 353, hereafter referred to as Infinite and cited parenthetically in the main text. 27. ‘Prometheus, it seems, is as little able to empty his words of their power as he is to guarantee their fullness. And how could it be otherwise when the crucial term in question is recall? It is this word that has set the critics by the ears, creating a turmoil with regard to fixing the Titan’s exact intent. For recall, here as often in Shelley, performs with all the complexity—and none of the ordered control—of the Hegelian Aufhebung. It suggests a calling back to memory and even a more general summoning back, a restoration, a making present once again. How to reconcile this with its sense as “re-call”, to call again, a second time?’ Carol Jacobs, Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 25. 28. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, tr. Lycette Neilson (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 112. 29. See Ulmer, ‘Hellas and the Historical Uncanny’, 618–19, for his reading of this complex, layered analogy. 30. ‘In itself the eternal repository of this thought-transition is empty—the “acorn’s cup” without the seed—because the germ it receives and then sends ahead is in motion from a parent-form toward a future reincarnation. This “cup”, in other words, is constant in being no more than a drive or facilitator turning what recedes toward a different repetition of a previous form.’Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of his Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 290. 31. John Flaxman, Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus (London: J. Matthews, 1795), 29. 32. ‘In its desire for a universal language in music, Prometheus Unbound rehearses the apocalyptic narrative. . . of the final communal redemption accompanied by, or even occasioned by, the transcendence of social, historical, and linguistic differences’.Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 235. 33. Indeed, the introduction of Ahasuerus as a representative of the third major monotheistic faith, Judaism, complicates any simple opposition between Islam and Christianity in Hellas. 34. ‘Shelley devotes Hellas to historicizing the present by narratively appropriating it [i.e. the present].’ Ulmer, ‘Hellas and the Historical Uncanny’, 612. 35. John Keats: Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings and John Mee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 41–2.

7 Magazines, Don Juan, and the Scotch Novels Deep and Shallow Time in the Regency Richard Cronin Tom Nairn distinguishes between two kinds of people, the ‘history-full’ and the ‘history-less’. He has no doubt as to which category the Scots belong: ‘there was nowhere else more. . . “history-ful” than the Scotland of Sir Walter Scott’.1 It seems an obvious enough point but it has been influentially challenged by Colin Kidd. For Kidd, Scott’s novels mark a rupture with, rather than a recovery of, Scotland’s past. The novels enact in their plots the central tenets of the historical sociology that Scott had imbibed as a student at Edinburgh University. For Scott and his Enlightenment predecessors, Scottish history could offer no explanation of their own modernity, that is, of their intellectual sophistication, their enjoyment of civil and political liberties, and their economic prosperity, because these were social conditions that they could trace back no further than the Act of Union and perhaps to a still more recent point of origin in the defeat of the ’45 uprising. The earlier history of Scotland was picturesque, but it was not instrumental: it did not issue in the identity to which the Scots of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment wished to lay claim.2 Walter Scott neatly encapsulates the issue in his very first novel, Waverley (1814), in which Fergus McIvor, whose Jacobitism is represented as an attempt to preserve in the eighteenth century an obsolete feudal social system, is fondly remembered by Edward Waverley, but remembered as he appears in a painting in which Fergus and Waverley are represented ‘in their Highland dress; the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending’.3 The canvas is proudly displayed in the dining parlour of Tully-Veolan but it has become a decorative object in which Waverley’s appearance, that had once signalled his regrettable and foolish rebellion against the crown, has become a kind of fancy dress. His wearing of the plaid does not modify the civic identity that he has

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since chosen. Waverley had grown up despising his own father as a turncoat, because he had seen ‘no practicable road to independence save that of relying upon his own exertions’ and had, in consequence, abandoned the Jacobite loyalties that he had inherited and ‘entered life as an avowed Whig, and friend of the Hanover succession’.4 By the novel’s end, Edward Waverley has emerged as his father’s true son and heir. Kidd’s case seems to me entirely persuasive, except for one thing. It does nothing to explain Scott’s overwhelming popularity, and that popularity is surely the most important fact that needs to be accounted for. According to Kidd, Scott’s purpose in writing his novels was ‘to complete the Union by educating the English nation in Scottish history’.5 It may have been so, but is seems impossible to credit that the English found the lesson so fascinating as to make sense of William St Clair’s extraordinary calculation that ‘during the Romantic period, the “Author of Waverley” sold more novels than all the other novelists of the time put together’.6 A more persuasive explanation is offered by Sarah Green in her mildly amusing burlesque of 1824, Scotch Novel Reading. Green offers as Scott’s representative admirer Alice Fennel, the Cockney daughter of a retired apothecary. Alice admires the novels so much that she wears tartan and affects to speak Scots in a Scottish accent even though she has little notion of what the words she uses might mean. Alice Fennel acts in the novel as the representative of the newly expanded readership that decisively changed the character of the literary market in the first decades of the nineteenth century. That new readership made possible a new literary phenomenon, the best-seller, of which, according to Peter Garside, the very first example is Rob Roy, Scott’s fifth novel published in 1818.7 What, we need to ask, was the attraction of Walter Scott’s novels for readers such as Alice Fennel, for readers who might seem on the face of it to embody the values that Scott despised? What did the novels offer to readers who, in Scott’s withering phrase, ‘had no grandfathers’?8 The first point to make is that the novels are more sympathetic to the class to which Alice Fennel belongs than one might have expected. Redgauntlet (1824), for example, has two heroes. Darsie Latimer may be directly descended from ‘Fitz-Aldin’, ‘a valiant knight of Norman descent’, and from ‘Alberick Redgauntlet’, ‘the first of his house so termed’, who was eminent in the baronial wars, but he is paired in the novel with Allan Fairford whose father, like Scott’s, was a writer to the signet, although Fairford himself has risen to be an advocate.9 Asked by a man he takes to be a disguised priest—he later turns out to be the Pretender—whether he could ‘count kindred’ with ‘a family of birth and rank called Fairford’, he admits that his ‘father’s industry has raised his family from a low and obscure situation’, and that he has ‘no hereditary claim to distinction of any kind’ (277). Latimer



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and Fairford are not separated by the social division between them: indeed Latimer feels for Fairford a love that ‘surpasses the love of woman’ (113). It may be that the novels, by accommodating relationships like this, allow readers such as Alice Fennel to experience, if only vicariously, the flattering pleasure of just such an aristocratic embrace. Latimer lodged with Fairford’s family when they were students together in Edinburgh, so that Fairford’s father has become Latimer’s foster-parent. In the course of the novel Fairford in return is received into Latimer’s family, a process that reaches its proper conclusion at the novel’s conclusion when he marries Latimer’s sister. Allan Fairford, a man who has no grandfather, wins entry into a family that can trace itself back to the Conquest. He supplements the shallow time, to which his father’s low and obscure birth had confined him, with the deep time to which an aristocrat like Latimer can lay claim, and the novels offered their first readers a similar gift. Their Scottishness was essential to this, because, as Hazlitt noted and as Scott himself often intimates, in Scotland time could be represented spatially as well as temporally, so that to ride north from Edinburgh or to ride south into the Borders was to travel through time, to travel backwards through the centuries.10 In Scotland a novel set in the 1750s like Redgauntlet could still offer its reader an experience of deep time. But it was from the first a paradoxical experience. In several of Scott’s novels the author lingers over a distinguished library, like the library in Guy Mannering (1815), the delight of Dominie Sampson, that Colonel Mannering has inherited from his uncle, the Bishop. Scott pays it tribute in lines he borrows from a ‘modern poet’, George Crabbe: That weight of wood, with leathern coat o’erlaid; Those ample clasps, of solid metal made; The close-press’d leaves, unclosed for many an age; The dull red edging of the well-fill’d page; On the broad back the stubborn ridges roll’d Where yet the title stands in tarnish’d gold.11

Such a library is a material embodiment of the capacity of a book to outlive its author, to live a life that extends through the centuries, as will, Scott’s quotation intimates, Crabbe’s poems. It was the life that many of Scott’s reviewers confidently predicted for his novels, perhaps even the life that he anticipated for them himself. But Colonel Mannering’s library is very unlike the circulating libraries, the libraries in which most readers, readers such as Alice Fennel, would have encountered the novels, the stock of which changed every season. In Scott’s novels deep time and shallow time, like Darsie Latimer and Allan Fairford, are in surprisingly close relationship.

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One significant indication of this is that the same readership that valued Scott’s novels so highly were also devoted readers of literary magazines, the number and the circulation of which rapidly increased in the period. The two tastes seem antithetical, because, as the magazines themselves often pointed out, they occupied a very shallow time indeed: Each of our monthly appearances may be considered as a death-blow to the one which preceded it. We lay no claims to posterity; or, if we look to a longer immortality than ‘one calendar month,’ it is through the friendly instrumentality of a good bookbinder. 12

But the character of these new magazines was in reality more complex than this. The New Monthly after it was relaunched in January 1821, under the editorship of Thomas Campbell, quickly established itself as the market leader. Campbell himself, despite the large salary that Henry Colburn paid him, delegated most of his editorial duties to Cyrus Redding. His own principal contribution to the magazine, apart from occasional poems, was a series of ‘Lectures on Poetry’ of surprising dullness: ‘The subject of Greek poetry may be treated either by describing its most interesting authors in chronological succession, or by grouping them without regard to time according to their respective classes of composition.’13 It is hard to imagine any reader who might be expected to find such observations enthralling. But Colburn was an astute publisher who recognized that his magazine needed at once to acknowledge his readers’ absorption in their own historical moment and their desire to be redeemed from it. Papers such as Campbell’s ‘Lectures on Poetry’, and the many other papers that the New Monthly included on classical artefacts, the older literature of England, and similar topics, balanced the other material (designed to be bound in a separate volume) that was frankly topical; the list of bankrupts, the notices of new theatrical productions, the weather reports. In early issues of the London Magazine, a periodical clearly aimed at London’s young, middle-ranking professionals—young men who had cultural aspirations but would not have enjoyed a university education—there are papers on the early French poets, the ‘Ancient Literature of the North’, ‘Goethe on Art and Antiquity’, and the Niebelungenlied.14 The appeal of the new magazines to the new readership lay, I suspect, precisely in their dual character. As Charles Lamb put it: ‘I would not dress a set of Magazines, for instance, in full suit. The dishabille, or half-binding (with Russia backs ever), is our costume.’15 Thomas Campbell was for Colburn an ideal choice because he brought to his position as editor of a magazine the reputation that The Pleasures of Hope (1799) and Gertrude of Wyoming (1809) had earned him as one of Britain’s major poets. He was the editor of a monthly magazine and yet could claim to have contributed to the permanent literature of the nation.



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One contributor to the New Monthly observed, with a disregard for the sensitivities of his metropolitan readership that was surprisingly common in the magazine, ‘It is the want of link with the soil, of attachment to a particular spot, which gives the life of a metropolitan that ideal insignificance so happily embodied in the term Cockney.’16 One of the tasks that the New Monthly set itself was to redeem metropolitan life from its ‘ideal insignificance’ by showing how the city might offer an experience as thick and as deep as that experienced by those who inhabited the English shires. Wordsworth, Hazlitt reported, believed that city life inevitably stunted the humanity of those who lived it, but in his Elia essays Lamb had shown how London’s public and semi-public spaces (the Inns of Court, the South Sea House, Christ’s Hospital, Drury Lane) are places that can stage emotions as intense and as intimate as any that might be experienced in country churchyards.17 A series such as Henry Roscoe’s 1822 ‘Literary Recollections of London’ is designed to link metropolitan experience with the writers who have lived in the city. On his way to St James’s, for example, he cannot resist making ‘a pilgrimage to Dryden’s house, in Gerrard-street—the fifth on the left hand, in coming from Little Newport-street’.18 To walk through the city, as Roscoe describes it, is to feel oneself rooted in the nation’s literature. This is, I suspect, the context in which the extraordinary success in Britain of Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book (1819) should be understood. In his ‘Account of Himself ’, Irving (writing as Geoffrey Crayon) explains that he travelled to Europe in search of ‘storied and poetical association’, in search of places and people possessed of a historical depth that somehow made them more substantial than the people and places of America.19 Hazlitt thought, reasonably enough, that Irving was approved by the English because they found his representation of them flattering, but it may also have been the case that many of Irving’s English readers, and especially his deracinated metropolitan readers, shared his plight.20 The lives of Cockneys had in common with the lives of Americans an ideal insignificance for which Irving provides an antidote. In reading him Cockneys could discover the unexpected depth of their own everyday experience. Little Britain must have seemed a rather unprepossessing district of London until Geoffrey Crayon’s account of it, which invests it with historical depth. Even the glass panes of Irving’s lodging house windows are scrawled with ‘scraps of very indifferent gentleman-like poetry’ celebrating ‘the charms of many a beauty of Little Britain, who has long, long since bloomed, faded, and passed away’ (213). In Little Britain, the national life is maintained in the form of ‘pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, hot-cross-buns on Good Friday, and roast goose at Michaelmas’. In Little Britain, Valentine cards are sent, bonfires are lit on 5 November, girls

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are kissed under the mistletoe, roast beef and plum pudding are ‘held in superstitious veneration’, and in consequence of all this Little Britain transcends its status as one of the cheaper districts of London to become ‘the strong-hold of true John Bullism’, not only in its name but in its nature a just epitome of the whole nation (213–14). Byron’s Don Juan (1819–24) was by far the most popular poem of the day, and it might seem that Don Juan inhabits a time almost as shallow as the magazines. Wordsworth certainly thought so. Hazlitt reports that when Wordsworth was asked how long Byron’s reputation would survive his death, he replied, ‘Not three days, Sir.’21 No doubt professional jealousy sharpened Wordsworth’s tongue, but in Don Juan Byron goes out of his way to invite such responses. It is not just that he repeatedly holds up to ridicule the Wordsworthian claim that the great writer is distinguished from his less important colleagues because he appeals to the judgement of posterity rather than to his contemporary readership: That suit in Chancery,—which some persons plead In an appeal to the unborn, whom they, In the faith of their procreative creed, Baptize Posterity, or future clay,— To me seems but a dubious kind of reed To lean on for support in any way; Since odds are that posterity will know No more of them, than they of her, it row. (12.137–44)

It is just as significant that Byron repeatedly employs in the poem a diction recklessly localized both in time and place. ‘Where are the Lady Carolines and Franceses?’, he asks (11.633). Lady Caroline Lamb was a public figure. She had an affair with Byron and then published a novel about it, Glenarvon (1816): ‘Some play the devil, and then write a novel’ (Don Juan, 2.608). She even produced a ‘New Canto’ of Don Juan in 1819. But Lady Frances Webster’s only provocation seems to have been that in 1813 Byron had decided not to seduce her, even though she was ‘young, and religious, and pretty’ and married to Byron’s ‘particular friend’.22 Most of the proper names that make an appearance in the poem—Gurney (1.1512), the inventor of a system of shorthand; Ransom, Byron’s banker (15.64); and publishers such as Longman and Murray (7.204)—would have been readily identifiable by Byron’s first readers, but Byron could have had no confidence that they would remain familiar names to readers of later decades let alone later centuries, any more than he could have foretold that ‘bubble and squeak’ (15.566) would have continued a popular dish, or that ‘macassar’ (1.136) would remain a celebrated hair dressing. Wordsworth chose, he tells us, to write in the language of ‘low and rustic life’ in part because that language was ‘more permanent’ than the language



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of artificial society, and Byron’s diction seems chosen to act as a satire on the pretensions implicit in Wordsworth’s decision.23 But it was a satire that threatened to deny poetry any claim to permanent value. In fact, Byron seems to insist as emphatically on the continuity between poetry and the ephemeral press as Wordsworth insisted on distinguishing them. Poems once promised immortality to those they celebrated, but this is a role that has been usurped, Byron suggests in Don Juan, by the newspapers, where for example Lord Henry and Lady Adeline’s departure from London is recorded: A paragraph in every paper told Of their departure. Such is modern fame. ’Tis pity that it takes no further hold Than an advertisement, or much the same, When ere the ink be dry, the sound grows cold. (13.401–5)

Poems seem scarcely to take firmer hold. Even the ‘greatest living poet’ has a tenure of only a decade: the title has passed in Byron’s rendition from Scott to Byron himself, and now rests, he supposes, with George Croly (11.432–56). Poetry, it seems, is as subject to fashion as dress, so that the poets even of the recent past have proved as evanescent as the dandies: ‘Where’s Brummell? Dished. Where’s Long Pole Wellesley? Diddled.’ (11.617). Everything in these last cantos of Don Juan is subject to the law of change, and change has become increasingly, dizzyingly rapid: Where is the world of eight years past? ’Twas there— I look for it ’tis gone, a globe of glass, Cracked, shivered, vanished, scarcely gazed on, ere A silent change dissolves the glittering mass. (11.603–6)

In seven years Byron has seen changes that ‘might suffice a moderate century’ (11.652). He is sounding here the ubi sunt theme, but with a crucial difference. Previous poets had asked, where are the snows of yesteryear? They chose emblems of transience—snow, the rose, the violet—but made sure that, though the objects named were transient, their emblematic significance was permanent: snow melts, but it has always melted. Byron prefers emblems that are themselves transient. Who was ‘Long Pole Wellesley?’, the reader of the future would surely ask: Where is Lord This? And where my Lady That? The Honourable Mistresses and Misses? (11.625–6)

It is the transience of the emblems of transience that qualifies the comedy of the passage with a fragile pathos that is the more affecting because it infiltrates the very texture of the poem. This is poetry that does not pretend

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to be safely removed from the world in flux that it contemplates, but offers itself rather as a ‘glittering mass’ that is just as subject to dissolution as its subjects. To be modern, Byron seems to suggest in Don Juan, is to occupy a present that disappears almost as quickly as it can be apprehended. To be modern is to recognize and even to celebrate the shallowness of time. In Don Juan, as in newspapers and magazines, the past is rigorously subordinated to the present. Juan’s affections are buoyant, not weighed down by his former loves: Julia is not a ghostly presence at the feast he shares with Haidée. His sympathies are at once strong and short-lived. Juan feels for the highwayman that he kills, but he does not feel for long, and it is this more than any other trait that makes him close kin to the narrator: ‘But Tom’s no more—and so no more of Tom’ (11.153). When Haidée dies the narrator’s voice merges with the sound of the sea-swell as it ‘mourns o’er the beauty of the Cyclades’ (4.576), but only for a moment before swiftly passing on: But let me change this theme, which grows too sad, And lay this sheet of sorrows on the shelf; I don’t much like describing people mad, For fear of seeming rather touch’d myself— Besides I’ve no more on this head to add; And as my Muse is a capricious elf, We’ll put about, and try another tack With Juan, left half-kill’d some stanzas back. (4.585–92)

Juan may be armoured against Gulbeyaz’s advances by memories of Haidée’s ‘soft Ionian face’ (Don Juan, V. 931). ‘However strange’, Byron remarks, ‘he could not yet forget her’ (5.987), which seems tartly ironic, except that thoughts of his former love are of no avail that same night when Juan is put to bed with Dudu in the harem. As Byron was aware, Wordsworth cultivated an aesthetics of depth. His poetry invites its reader to slow contemplation of ordinary sights, an unfinished sheepfold in Michael (1800), a broken bowl in The Ruined Cottage (1797–9), and the effect of that lingering gaze will be to carry those objects ‘far into his heart’ (‘There was a Boy’ (1800), 20), or, as he puts it in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798), he offers his reader sensations that will be felt ‘along the heart’ (29), selecting a preposition that give the heart depth, makes of it a landscape through which sensations can pass, almost as the river Wye rolls through Somersetshire, flowing with a ‘sweet inland murmur’ (4). Byron’s poem seems by contrast a Globe of Glass! Cracked, shivered, vanished, scarcely gazed on, ere A silent change dissolves the glittering mass. (11.604–6)



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But Byron’s poem has throughout its length a double character. Almost whenever he speaks of it, Byron reveals the lofty opinion he has of it. In Childe Harold (1812–18), Byron had acknowledged, ‘I twine / My hopes of being remembered in my line / With my land’s language’ (4.76–8), and those hopes were still more heavily invested in Don Juan than in the earlier poem. He may cultivate a playful, sardonic relationship with his ‘epic brethren gone before’ (1.202), but Don Juan remains a poem that negotiates a place for itself within a literary tradition that stretches back more than two thousand years, and it is a poem that often obtrudes that long literary history on the reader’s attention. It is at once an epic poem and a poem that mocks epic pretensions. Byron, just as much as Washington Irving, plays between deep and shallow times. It is worth remembering that both were writers admired by Walter Scott, who once invited Irving to edit a weekly anti-Jacobin newspaper that he was planning.24 The affinity between Irving and Scott is one indication that Scott’s novels might not be so different as they seem from the ephemeral periodical publications of the day. Scott was after all a founder of the Quarterly Review, was closely associated with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and wrote for both. Walter Scott’s namesake, John Scott, maintained the conventional position in the London Magazine. The Scotch novels were the antithesis of ephemeral productions amongst which he would certainly have classed his own magazine. In comparison with Scott, all contemporary writers, even Byron, were ‘wonders of the day rather than lights for all time’.25 But that was in 1820. As the decade wore on dissenting voices became more vociferous. The Scotch novels, it was pointed out, appeared almost as regularly as magazines, and they seemed scarcely more unified. Indeed it was rumoured that the novels, like the magazines, were the work not of an individual but of a committee, ‘a few master spirits, each perfect in its part and calling’.26 Like the magazines, it began increasingly often to be hinted, Scott’s novels were better thought of as market commodities than as contributions to literature. Scott’s sales figures secured earnings that no earlier writer had approached, and won him a national celebrity that only Byron amongst his contemporaries rivalled, but those same sales figures also made it possible for Carlyle to dismiss him as a ‘Novel-manufactory’, the value of which could be estimated simply in monetary terms: ‘its £15000 a year’.27 My point is that Scott’s popularity was secured by his appeal to the new readership that I have represented in the figure of Alice Fennel, the heroine of Scotch Novel Reading, and that this readership made contradictory demands. It wanted at once to be confirmed in, and relieved from, its own modernity. The historical novel, as developed by Scott, was a genre uniquely designed to meet both demands. It offered its readers an

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experience of deep time, sometimes, as in Ivanhoe of 1819–20, very deep time, but it did so in the form of the novel, and the novel of all established literary genres had the shallowest history. Scott’s young heroes—heroes such as Edward Waverley, or Frank Osbaldistone in Rob Roy, or Roland Graeme in The Abbot—are characteristically naive, often awkward and embarrassed, and, despite their prickliness, are much given to blushing. They seem in a more direct line of descent from Evelina than from Tom Jones, and if this is granted then they take their place in a novelistic tradition the origin of which could be traced back less than fifty years to 1778.28 There is an odd discrepancy between the content of the novels and their form, which had only been established in Scott’s lifetime; and it is a discrepancy to which the novels themselves sometimes make a sly allusion. In The Antiquary (1816), for example, Jonathan Oldbuck takes the initials ‘A. D. L. L.’, which he finds engraved on a shallow vessel, as confirmation that he has located a Roman encampment—the initials, he argues, ‘may stand, without much violence, for Agricola Dicavit Libens Ludens’—only to be dumbfounded when the beggar Edie Ochiltree remembers that the letters had been carved at a wedding only twenty years before and properly interpreted read ‘Aiken Drum’s Lang Ladle’.29 The point becomes still clearer if the focus shifts from the content of Scott’s novels to their production methods. Scott quickly discovered that he could maximize his profit by stipulating in his contracts with his publishers that his books be printed by the Ballantyne brothers, in whose firm Scott himself had a controlling interest. The result was that he received profits not simply for the sale of his manuscript but from the books printed from it. The historical novel gave rise to a distinctively modern business practice, a practice that one might compare with the discovery by publishers like Henry Colburn and William Blackwood that the magazines that they set up might prove profitable ventures in themselves and at the same time generate further profit by advertising the firm’s other publications in notices masquerading as reviews. Scott’s subject matter was given to him by the deep history of Scotland, England, and, by the end of his career, much of Europe, but the novels are equally the product of the mass circulation of print that was an entirely modern phenomenon, and a phenomenon of which the novels themselves had been a principal cause. Walter Ong has made the bold claim that ‘typography was interiorized in the western psyche definitively at the moment in western history known as the Romantic Movement’.30 Walter Scott is by this account the representative novelist of the first age of print, and his most powerful tool is the Scots that his best-loved characters speak, a language that acts so powerfully to persuade his readers that the novels allow access to a culture sustained by a community of speakers that they are likely to forget that they are sharing an



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experience made possible only by a sophisticated print industry. Clearly the effect the novels give of initiating their readers into an oral culture is illusory, because in the novels Scots is not really a way of speaking but a typographical phenomenon, prized not least by English readers entirely unfamiliar with the language of Scotland or its pronunciation, readers like Alice Fennel, who finds much of what she reads incomprehensible.31 But it was an illusion that the new readership prized, and again, it is the magazines that provide the best evidence of this. The very first issue of the London Magazine carried Octavius Gilchrist’s ‘Account of John Clare, an Agricultural Labourer and Poet’, and Clare went on to become the most prolific contributor of verse to the new magazine.32 It may be that the London championed John Clare as an appropriate counterpart to James Hogg. Blackwood’s might have its Ettrick Shepherd but the London could claim as its own the Northamptonshire peasant, and the London also secured, from Blackwood’s, the services of Allan Cunningham, stonemason, neighbour of Burns, and friend of Hogg. Magazines, precisely because they were so completely a product of an urban print culture, cultivated a nostalgia for the rural, oral culture of the past. In Blackwood’s Hogg appealed to that nostalgia in his ‘Tales and Anecdotes of the Pastoral Life’ and in his ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’ series in which he presented himself as the conduit through which the folk wisdom of the Borders might be transported into the new world of print. In the London Magazine, Allan Cunningham’s contributions often served a similar purpose. The preservation in print of oral traditions represents at once an act of recovery and an act that marks a decisive rupture with the past that it purports to preserve. It is a point that James Hogg made himself, a little knowingly perhaps. He claims that his mother was displeased with Scott’s first exercise in this area, his 1802 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in which Hogg’s mother found all the Border ballads that she had held in her memory translated into print. Scott had ‘broken the charm’ of poems that were ‘made for singing and no’ for reading’. Hogg adds that his mother had been proved right, ‘for from that day to this, these songs, which were the amusement of every winter evening, have never been sung more’.33 Scott’s novels share with the Minstrelsy this double character. For Hazlitt, they are exclusively concerned with the past: ‘His is a mind brooding over antiquity—scorning “the present ignorant time” ’; ‘if you take the universe, and divide it into two parts’ Scott only knows what ‘it has been’.34 But Coleridge read Scott’s novels quite differently. For him, they represent the restless, unsatisfied pursuit of wealth and status that was the defining character of modernity. No matter the period in which the novel is set, Scott depicts ‘an age of anxiety from the crown to the hovel, from the cradle to the coffin; all is an anxious straining to maintain life, or appearances—to rise, as the only condition of not falling’. 35

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Colin Kidd may be right to argue that the double action characteristic of Scott’s novels, by which they at once recover the past and mark a rupture with it, has its origin in the Scottish historiography with which Scott became acquainted at university and that continued to organize his thinking. But it is not an explanation that does much to explain Scott’s extraordinary popularity. For that one needs to think not so much of the Scottish Enlightenment historians, of David Hume, John Millar, and William Robertson, but of Alice Fennel, the London apothecary’s daughter, the reader without a grandfather, the representative reader in the new literary market that developed in the decade after Waterloo, and that Scott addressed more successfully than any other writer. Alice Fennel values most highly those novels that can perform an odd wizardry, supplying her with the deep past that she wants in both senses of the word, the deep past that she desires because she lacks, and at the same time offering her the reassurance that her emancipation is best secured not by a knowledge of the past but by the energy with which she inhabits the present. Scott’s novels became the publishing sensation of the post-Waterloo years because they performed that wizardry more powerfully than any other writing of the period. N OT E S 1. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain (London: Verso, 1981), 144. 2. See Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity 1689–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 3. Walter Scott, Waverley, ed. Peter D. Garside (1814; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 361. 4. Scott, Waverley, 7. 5. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, 266. 6. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 221. 7. Peter Garside, The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ii. 45. 8. Walter Scott, Ronan’s Well, ed. Mark A. Weinstein (1823; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 140. 9. Walter Scott, Redgauntlet, ed. G. A. M. Wood with David Hewitt (1824; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 190. Subsequent page references are included in the text. 10. Hazlitt e.g. speaks of ‘a hundred miles to the North of the “Modern Athens” [i.e. Edinburgh] or a century back’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930–4), hereafter Hazlitt, ed. Howe, xi. 62.



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11. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed. P. D. Garside (1815; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 109. George Crabbe, The Library (London, 1781), 145–50. 12. ‘The Literary World’, New Monthly Magazine, 10 (Apr. 1824), 364–8, 368. The contributor was Sir Thomas Charles Morgan. 13. New Monthly Magazine, 4 (Jan. 1822), 193. 14. See the London Magazine, 1 (Mar. 1820), 241–4; (Apr. 1820), 391–401; (May 1820), 523–5; (June 1820), 635–40. 15. ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, London Magazine, 6 (July 1822), 33. 16. New Monthly Magazine, 2 (Nov. 1821), 449. 17. Hazlitt, ed. Howe, xii. 76. 18. New Monthly Magazine, 4 (Jan. 1822), 29–34, and 5 (Aug. 1822), 121. 19. Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, ed. Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12. Subsequent page references are included in the text. 20. Hazlitt, ed. Howe, xi. 183. 21. Hazlitt, ed. Howe, xvii. 209 n. 22. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: John Murray, 1974), iii. 122. 23. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 245. 24. See Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 2 vols (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), i. 689. 25. London Magazine, 1 (Jan. 1820), 12, and 2 (Nov. 1820), 515–16. 26. Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, 1 (June 1823), 203. The suggestion is canvassed in a review of Quentin Durward. 27. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Memoirs of the Life of Scott’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 7 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888), v. 514. 28. Ina Ferris suggests a similar lineage when she observes that a hero such as Edward Waverley is ‘best understood as a Gothic heroine in male form’ in The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 100. Fiona Wilson argues that Scott’s heroes of this kind—Frank Osbaldistone of Rob Roy is her preferred example—should be understood as male hysterics. See Fiona Wilson, ‘He’s Come Undone: Gender, Territory, and Hysteria in Rob Roy’, in Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington (eds), Romanticism’s Debatable Lands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 52–63. 29. Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt (1816; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 29–31. 30. Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution and Consciousness of Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 283. W. J. T. Mitchell usefully underwrites the pivotal nature of the cultural moment by arguing, contra Ong, that ‘Wordsworth’s claim that a poet is a man “speaking” (not writing) to men is no casual expression, but a symptom of what Derrida would call the “phonocentric” tendency of romantic poetics’. See W. J. T. Mitchell,

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Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 115. 31. Sarah Green, Scotch Novel Reading: Or, Modern Quackery. A Novel Really Founded on Facts (London: A. K. Newman, 1824), 2, 110. 32. London Magazine, 1 (Jan. 1820), 7–11. 33. James Hogg, Anecdotes of Scott, ed. Jill Rubinstein (1834; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 38. 34. Hazlitt, ed. Howe, xi. 57. 35. Written on the fly-leaf of Scott’s Peveril of the Peak, quoted from Scott: The Critical Heritage, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 183.

8 ‘Diamonds by which the eye is charmed’ Facets of Romantic Historiography in the Works of Richard Parkes Bonington Rosemary Mitchell In his 1979 guide, John Ingamells argues that the Anglo-French painter Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–28) belonged to ‘a generation more deeply conscious of time than their predecessors. . . . [The] classical idea of history as a steady and heroic calvacade was felt to be inadequate, and. . . the celebration of the present was complimented [sic] by a live but largely sentimental curiosity concerning the past’.1 While acknowledging the period’s obsession with the past and its temporality, this statement fails to represent the complexity, sophistication, and gravity of the attempts by Romantic-era artists (and indeed, their eighteenth-century predecessors) to explore, understand, and reflect upon history. Critical work on early nineteenth-century French history painting by scholars such as Beth S. Wright—and more specifically on the work of Bonington and his circle by Patrick Noon, Stephen Duffy, and Marcia Pointon—suggests that a far more sophisticated analysis of Bonington’s construction of the past is now both possible and necessary. Noon, for example, argues convincingly that we should qualify Leon Rosenthal’s assessment of Bonington as a ‘painter’s painter’, solely interested in the material process of painting and aesthetic affect, an artist without ‘the shadow of an intention, let alone a philosophical or abstract idea’.2 The sheer virtuosity of Bonington’s paintwork certainly tempts us to adopt this opinion, which owes its origin to a frequently misinterpreted comment by Eugène Delacroix, who described Bonington’s works as ‘des espèces de diamants dont l’œil est flatté et ravi, indépendamment de tout subjet et de toute imitation’.3 But, as Noon points out, Bonington’s work does not lack ‘iconographic or metaphoric interest’.4 The work of Beth Wright has allowed us to place Bonington within a broader social, cultural and historical context, including the paintings inspired by, and illustrative of, Walter Scott’s novels,

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and the images of the so-called Troubadour painters of the Restoration, who celebrated the political and social order of Ancien Régime France.5 Marcia Pointon’s scholarship, too, situates Bonington within the context of Anglo-French antiquarian and picturesque landscapists, and likewise presents him as engaging satirically with the Troubadour tradition.6 Noon nonetheless argues that we should not attempt to see a unity or coherence in Bonington’s œuvre, especially given the fact that he died so young.7 While heeding this warning, I will suggest that Bonington’s varied works—which include antiquarian townscapes, Turnersque seascapes, and works of the historical genre with Troubadour associations— often share a common, open-ended agenda: configuring and exploring the past, and our experience and representation of it. In Imperfect Histories (2001), Ann Rigney reminds us that historical representation is always ‘a project rather than. . . a product’, an attempt rather than a success at portraying the past accurately and coherently.8 That Bonington’s images fully embody this dynamic approach not only proves him to be far more seriously engaged with the representation of the past than Rosenthal has allowed, but also reminds us of the danger of too rigidly categorizing the character of Romantic historiography or, in other words, the kinds of historical representation produced in the period in which Bonington lived and worked. Bonington’s envisaging of the past features a range of so-called Romantic ‘time tropes’ which will by now be familiar to readers of this volume, at least in textual forms: picturesque decay as a site for the reimaging of past peoples; the examination of the interaction between human mortality and the context of eternity; and the exploration of localized, personalized, domestic, and other forms of micro-histories and anti-public narratives. Building on the insights of the art historians already referred to, as well as on recent scholarship on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historiography by Mark Salber Phillips and Greg Kucich, among others, I will argue that, while Bonington creates Romantic ‘moments of the heart’ in his images, he nonetheless also provides us with intersecting layers of complex, provoking, interrogatory historical representations which are in dialogue and interplay with his own works and those of other recreaters of the past. Thus Delacroix’s comparison is indeed apt, for Bonington’s images are like diamonds: multifaceted, despite their initial appearance of transparency; capable of a form of ‘optical dispersal’ in their ability to generate multiple and divergent readings; highly resistant to easy interpretation, yet simultaneously conductive, channelling a variety of modes of historical engagement. Reading Bonington’s images is necessarily an experiment in interpretation, a provisional and speculative activity that subverts tidy understandings of what ‘Romantic’ historiography might be.



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L AY E R I N G A N D L A N D S C A P I N G T I M E Bonington’s earliest works often display a fascination with the passing and representation of time. Having broken with his artistic master, the neoclassical painter Antoine-Jean Gros, Bonington spent the summer of 1821 on a sketching tour of Normandy, a province which was seen as a picturesque site of both ancient architecture and traditional customs; he returned to provincial Northern France several times subsequently. As James Roberts aptly comments in his biographical notes on Bonington, the artist ‘had a strong liking for all sorts of historical traces. He loved to study the transitions from one style to another’.9 Much of Bonington’s work from this period was accordingly in the antiquarian and topographical style exemplified in Britain by the publications of John Britton, and in France by Baron Taylor’s Voyages Pittoresques et Romantiques dans l’Ancienne France, which had began publication in 1820. Volumes such as these capitalized on the contemporary taste for domestic tourism and the antiquarian desire to record the historic architecture of the nation before it was destroyed. In France, this concern was escalated by the events of the revolutionary period, which had seen the destruction of much of France’s architectural heritage, and the context of the 1815 restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, which sought ideological validation through the reconstruction of a glorious monarchical and religious past. Bonington’s Rouen Cathedral and Quays of c.1821–2 (British Museum) exhibits explicitly his reflective layering of time: the artist presents the urban landscape as a palimpsest, where the architectural or archaeological remains of past times can be found beneath, amongst, and within modern structures.10 In the background of the painting looms Rouen’s medieval Gothic cathedral, the two western towers of which, through their differing architecture, indicate the timespan of the period of construction. In the middle ground, the houses suggest a more recent period, and a more domesticated life: smoke rises from several chimneys. In the foreground are the quays, where we see the shapes of people, and vivacious touches of red and blue brushwork: we are in the bustling present. The river, reflecting the masts of the ships as downwardly pointing fingers, echoing the towers and spire of the cathedral, reminds us simultaneously of both the immediacy and the depth of time, the long centuries of the city. Thus, the image marries compositional with chronological order and depth, producing a visual projection of human, if not geological, ‘deep time’—an idea that Richard Cronin has shown us in Chapter 7 was also central to the representation of history in Walter Scott’s novels. If this image is contextualized within Bonington’s works during his subsequent tour of Normandy, its construction of layers of time achieves an

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even greater resonance. Bonington reprised and revised this subject in a lithograph, which appeared in a collection titled Restes et Fragmens [sic] d’Architecture du Moyen Age, published in 1824. Here it went under the title of Rouen Cathèdrale de Notre Dame telle qu’elle était avant l’Incendie de 1822, a reference to the fire of September 1822 which destroyed the central flèche du clocher. It also includes the newly built quays, the construction of which had inspired several other drawings during Bonington’s tour.11 The image is thus a striking record both of destruction and construction, an attempt simultaneously to resist the depredations of time and to express its passage. A similar image is offered by the sketch of L’Église St-Sauveur, Caen (Bowood, c.1821), which was reworked to appear as a lithograph in Restes et Fragmens. Here Bonington gave a detailed representation of the medieval church façade, but included along the base of the building the ramshackle and busy dwellings and booths of contemporary Caen. The precise Gothic architectural detail contrasts with the confused, rambling line of the buildings and the figures: we have the past in one register, and the present in the other, with the exaggerated and elongated gargoyles seeming to lean over to view and link the two. As Noon points out, the drawing illustrates the ‘formal inventiveness’ of Bonington’s antiquarianism, as he excludes from it the spire which should have appeared above the apse to the right.12 He also eliminates the pinnacles which were visible along the roofline, preventing any counterbalance to the strong horizontals of the image and establishing the binary but combinative contrast of past and present so decisively. Such townscapes compel a re-examination of Bonington’s well-known seascapes, many of which were also inspired by his tours of Northern France. In comparison with the townscapes, these are expansive, Turnersque images of sea and sky. One of the most significant, A Fishmarket near Boulogne (Yale Center for British Art, 1824), counterpoises the scene of a bustling market, flanked by picturesque houses, with a view of a shining beach, with ships like ghosts in the morning mist, and the single figure of a woman carrying a heavy basket.13 From an anthropological perspective, this reflects Bonington’s fascination with the peasantry and fisherfolk of north-west France; other sketches by him certainly reflect this interest.14 He and his contemporaries regarded these communities as living heritage, repositories of the traditional life of the provinces.15 But note Bonington’s further exploration of time in the image. The pointed conjunction of the market scene with the tranquil and almost empty beach means that the viewer passes from the immediate urgency, the ‘presentness’, of the sale of the catch, which must take place while the fish are fresh, to the perspective of the sea with its connotations of eternity and the enigmatic figure of the solitary woman.16



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She becomes an Everywoman, poised against the backdrop of the timeless sea, itself an image of the struggle of existence. The same time tropes can be found in other Bonington seascapes, such as Picardy Coast with Children—Sunrise (private collection, c.1825).17 Here two children, emblematic of the dawn of life, contemplate a dead skate. Figures are apparent in the background to the right, while further off to the left a man with horses is visible. The expanse of shining sand and an open, serene sky compels once again reflections on mortality and the passage of time: the viewer is invited to philosophical reflection on the human condition within extended time and eternity, as well as contemplation of, even identification with, the remains of the dead (even a dead fish!). In the words of Mark Salber Phillips, ‘cognitive distantiation’ and ‘affective proximity’ are simultaneously encouraged,18 and the response of one contemporary viewer, Edouard Bertin, suggests the relevance of both: Sa pensée parfois triste et rêveuse l’appelait aux bords de l’Océan. . . C’était une plage humide et brillante du soleil levant, qu’il savait animer de quelques scenes de la vie des pécheurs; c’étaient des enfans [sic] se jouant sur le sables au milieu des debris d’un naufrage déjà ancien.19

RO M A N T I C I N T E R I O R I T Y:  S PA C E , S E N T I M E N T, A N D ‘ S P OT S O F T I M E ’ This kind of ‘affective proximity’ is necessarily more accentuated in Bonington’s figure paintings, where we—like his human subjects—are invited to meditate on the passage of time within historicized spaces. His late 1820s history paintings—with specific subjects, generally involving the sixteenth-century French royal family—tend to receive the most scholarly attention. But it is important to consider them alongside the much more frequent instances in Bonington’s œuvre of images of the past which lack, or seem to lack, specific historical or literary subject matter, and thus both adopt and invite a more speculative historiographical mode. Beth Wright’s exploration of French historical paintings inspired by Scott’s novels has identified a sliding scale of modes of response to these historical fictions, ranging from images which function almost independently from the text and offer a subject of universal character, to those which rely heavily on local colour in the form of antiquarian and historical detail, sometimes lacking pictorial integrity and relying heavily on the viewer’s pre-knowledge of the novel.20 This alerts us to the fact that many historical images in Bonington’s œuvre may elide simplistic categorization in terms of subject or chronological and generic classification, sliding in and out of time-frames, historiographical modes, and

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temporality itself. As Pointon reminds us, Bonington often confronts us with ‘a sequence of images that are characterised not by directness, but by opacity, elusiveness and sensuality. . . they often convey the sense that something is happening without actually appearing to communicate any specific meaning’.21 A good example of such works is Meditation (Wallace Collection; Figure 8.1), a watercolour image of 1826.22 This painting shows two unnamed women, an elderly woman who is reading, and a younger woman rapt in thought. Time is represented in a variety of ways: the old woman is undoubtedly reading her Bible, which—in conjunction with

Figure 8.1. Richard Parkes Bonington, Meditation (1826), Wallace Collection.



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the hourglass on the table (subtly echoed in the motif in the tapestry behind the younger woman)—makes a conventional allusion to human mortality. Her widow’s garb, the relative shade, and the funereal chair on which she sits reiterate this message. Ingamells has identified the sources of the two figures: while the elder woman is drawn from Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Frances Bridges, Countess of Exeter (now lost), the younger is derived from Gerard Ter Borch’s Concert: Singer and Theorbo Player (c.1657, Louvre).23 The yellow and silver tones of her dress present a light and uplifting spectacle against the black of her companion’s garb and the largely red background. However, the choice of artistic quotations here may have had more than aesthetic value: Van Dyck’s widow represents a chronological period—the 1620s and 1630s—prior to the model from Ter Borch, whose dress is of the 1650s. Can we be sure that Bonington consciously chose chronologically sequential costumes? Probably not. But we can be sure that he intends the elder woman to function as an older self, a forecast of the girl’s future state: they are widow and maid. The younger woman is lost in thought; although she looks out towards the viewer, there is no eye-contact. Her hand appears to caress her cheek, as if recalling a kiss. The viewer’s natural conclusion is that both women meditate, projecting their thoughts beyond the time-frame of the image: one thinks on death, the other on love. What are we to make of the painting’s message, if there is one? Is death the lasting reality and love a passing illusion of the young? Or is love the eternal element which marginalizes mortality? This image has an obvious association with the three versions which Bonington created of The Old Man and the Child in the following year (two are in private collections; the third is in the Wallace Collection).24 The hourglass and the Bible are once again accessories, and the chair, too, is borrowed from the girl in Meditation. As Duffy points out, the sword and the armour on the wall suggest that the old man was ‘a valiant knight in his youth’: now he contemplates the face of the child, possibly his grandchild, reflecting on the passage of time, and grasping a walking stick, which a fold in his sleeve transforms into a cross. Chiaroscuro puts half his face in light, half in shade, making him a liminal figure on the threshold of between life and death (it can hardly be coincidental that he sports a skull cap). While one hand grasps the stick, the other one hangs down limply like a dead thing. The child appears to carry a doll or a puppet, which—though obviously appropriate to his or her age—perhaps offers a mute comment on the vulnerability of humanity to the manipulations of time and history. Again, this is an intimate and very ‘present’ yet potentially timeless moment, a reflection of and on time: at the heart of the image is the figure of the little child, enclosed tenderly by his or

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her grandfather’s embrace, and engaged in a silent dialogue of youth and age, life and death. The old man reappears in The Antiquary of 1827 (Wallace Collection; Figure 8.2), and the figure of the antiquary’s servant or daughter in this image is the younger woman from Meditation.25 Here her reflection seems to be a wistful pity for her master’s/father’s disturbed mental state: once again we have the contrast of youth and age and their differing concerns. Here, however, the abstracted and obsessive gaze of the antiquary himself indicates a mode of engagement with the past which Bonington, like many of his contemporaries, chose to

Figure 8.2. Richard Parkes Bonington, The Antiquary (1827), Wallace Collection.



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critique (the link to Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), with its tragic-comic central figure, was no doubt made by both artist and viewers).26 Bonington’s portrayal of interiors in this series of images deserves further discussion.27 Among Bonington’s friends and patrons in the later 1820s was Alexandre Du Sommerard, the founder of the Musée de Cluny, a museum dedicated to the preservation of medieval and Renaissance antiquities, which was opened in the 1830s after Bonington’s death.28 An image of Sommerard in 1825 by the artist Renoux, and entitled The Antiquary, shows the collector in his study surrounded by ‘disorder’ and ‘chaos’, as Stephen Bann describes it: ‘Conjunctions are often absurd, like the miniature nude sharing a table-top with household utensils and the armour cluttering up the floor.’29 However, as Bann demonstrates, Sommerard’s museum shows a distinctly developed exhibitionary technique: ‘Not only do they [the artefacts] all come from one period, but they are disposed accordingly to a reasonable and intelligible economy’, one which creates a thematic order by, for instance, grouping together objects which one might expect to find in a bedchamber. Yet the order is a personalized and intimate one: the room which Bann analyses was known as François Premier’s room, and it was arranged as a lived-in space rather than a museum space. This kind of domestification seems to be what is taking place in the Bonington images too. Together, then, the images represent a journey from fascination with the specific literary figure of Don Quixote and his crazed and outdated chivalry; to uneasy interest in the more generic type of the antiquary and his obsession with the absurdly unrelated relics of the past; to the reconstruction of intimate, convincing, and layered living spaces of the past (where the historical accoutrements and furniture seem plausibly sequential and interrelated, items acquired naturally over time by successive members of a household); to the evocation of a moral and personal economy based on reflections on the coexistence of youth and age and the irrevocable nature of human mortality. Bonington moves from the antiquary’s jumbled study to the reconstruction of the lived-in and living space of the past—and then beyond it into the enigma of the human experience of time and eternity. Thus, he moves from interior to interiority and then finally to reflection on historical representation itself. Bonington’s ‘moments of the heart’ (as we might call them) are not unlike Wordsworth’s celebrated ‘spots of time’,30 at once intimate, ‘present’, and emotionally proximate, but also transcendental, timeless, and promising of a universal significance: historically and chronologically situated, and yet at the same time subjective, mysterious, and unspecific. They are historical representations which problematize both history and the representation of it.

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Such a ‘moment of the heart’ is portrayed in Amy Robsart and Leicester, an oil sketch of c.1827 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). The traditional identification of the subject of this image is well-founded but not definite: like other Bonington images, it slips in and out of focus as a specific literary or historical subject, perfectly illustrating the paradoxes of historical experience and representation. As a lithograph and an engraving, it earlier enjoyed two much less historically rooted titles, Le Silence Favourable and Le Doux Reproche.31 Indeed, Duffy sees this as a deliberate ploy on Bonington’s part, permitting multiple interpretations, which ensured that such images ‘were not limited by historical specificity but given an universal sentimental relevance’.32 There is no reason to dispute the traditional identification of the image with ­chapter 7 of Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821), where Amy Robsart pleads with her husband, the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth I’s favourite, for an acknowledgement of their secret marriage.33 Indeed, the existence of a painting by Henri-Joseph Fradelle of the same scene, dating from 1825 and issued as an engraving in 1827, reinforces the likelihood of the identification.34 The contrast with Fradelle’s image is instructive: showing ‘an intense interest in details of costume and décor’, Fradelle depicted the moment when Leicester, wearing the symbols of the various knightly orders to which he belongs, explains them to his bride. As Wright points out, these decorations symbolize his ambition to rule England as Elizabeth’s consort, an ambition which will cause Amy’s death. The picturesque details of costume in Fradelle’s scene mean that knowledge of the novel is essential to appreciation of the image.35 This is by no means the case with Bonington’s image: here Leicester’s decorations are not the focus of the scene, and the balance between historical and literary specificity and ‘mood’ or ‘affect’ is delicately poised. Bonington’s image—like Fradelle’s—functions within the genre of ‘secret history’, the province of court memoirs and amatory fiction of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which promised the reader a privileged aperçu into the private and often scandalous events which influenced public events and personages.36 As viewers, we stand close to the central characters, who are preoccupied with their conversation. But Bonington is not offering us a salacious glimpse at the unexpected private life of a public figure: the sketch is at once more tender and intimate, and yet also more reflective. Amy’s left hand, placed on her husband’s breast, suggests that the intimate narrative of two lovers is at the very heart of the image: indeed, this could be any pair of sixteenth-century lovers engaged in a sentimental dispute. Leicester’s right hand is depicted in the process of



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making a point, indicating a wider reality or necessity, the world of public history; his crossed legs suggest informality, but also a defensive resistance to his wife’s request. This highly sentimental narrative is a challenge to the nature of public history-writing and experience, signalled by the shift of sources for the costumes from portraiture of known historical figures to fictional scenes of timeless romance. Leicester’s wardrobe is derived from a number of historically appropriate sources, for instance, the sixteenth-century painter Clouet’s portrait of Charles IX (Louvre) and other portraits of the Clouet school. However, the ‘modest, domestic dress of his wife’, as Noon puts it, is painted in a style reminiscent of Watteau.37 Certainly, Amy’s figure bears similarity to the standing lady in Watteau’s Two Cousins (Louvre, c.1717), in which the combination of two women and one man may well have seemed relevant for Bonington in terms of the love triangle portrayed in Kenilworth. While these artistic quotations can be dismissed as the tendencies to pastiche of a young artist, they also create a deliberate contrast between Leicester, a significant historical figure rooted in the narrative of the public history of Elizabeth’s reign, and Amy, a romantic, semi-legendary figure, identified with a more timeless pastoral age of the heart. Two kinds of time, therefore, meet in this ambivalently historicized timescape: specific history and timeless romance. While problematizing a popular historiographical mode (the traditional historical narrative of high politics), Bonington continues to pose the question: what is the past, and how do we represent it? Noon reads a nearly contemporary Bonington image based on Scott, Quentin Durward at Liège (Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham, 1828), as ‘a tour-de-force of Gothicism’, which, by ‘subtle paraphrase and overt borrowing’ becomes ‘a radical form of picturemaking’ full of ‘iconoclastic wit’:38 in other words, we should not presume that Bonington’s appropriations of other artists’ images are uncomplicated and purely compositional. The complexity of Bonington’s appropriations is confirmed by a letter which Delacroix, an early friend and associate of Bonington, sent to the art critic Théophile Thoré in 1861. Delacroix recalled that: Il [Bonington] tirait parti de toutes sortes de détails qu’il avait trouvés chez des maîtres et les ajustait avec une grande adresse dans ses compositions. On y voit des figures presque entièrement prises dans des tableaux que tout le monde avait sous les yeux, et il ne s’en inquiétait nullement. Cette habitude n’ôte rien au mérite de ces ouvrages; ces details pris sur le vif, pour ainsi dire, et qu’il s’appropriait (il s’agit de costumes), augmentaient l’air de vérité de ses personnages et ne sentaient jamais le pastiche. Sur la fin de cette vie. . . il sembla atteint de tristesse, et particulièrement à cause de l’ambition qu’il se sentait de faire de la peinture en grand. Il ne fit pourtant aucune tentative, que je sache, pour agrandir notablement le cadre de ses tableaux. . . 39

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Although Delacroix’s agenda seems to be to defend Bonington from the charge of artistic plagiarism, his movement into an analysis of the dead painter’s ambitions towards the end of his life suggests a continuity between his practices of visual appropriation and his aim to create a form of history painting which was a departure from the academic tradition of high art. Resistant to traditional public modes of historical representation, Bonington seems to have been contemplating a still more overt challenge to traditional academic history painting, a yet more ambitious attempt to pursue his agenda to create a form of anti-history: personal, sentimental, and shamelessly reconstructive. Like Delacroix, we should take Bonington’s borrowings seriously and see both them and the complex interplay between some of his paintings as reflections of a sophisticated attitude to the reconstruction of the past. If the contemporary viewer accepted the painting as an image of Leicester and Amy Robsart, and therefore as illustrative of Scott’s novel, she or he would have been painfully aware that the heroine will become the victim of her husband’s political ambitions. Greg Kucich’s work on Romantic historiographies and ‘the re-engendering of historical memory’ has identified a mode of ‘private history’ or historical representation that validates individual, personal, and emotional experience as a subject of historical exploration, focusing on historical (often female) victims, and authorizing sentimental and empathetic audience responses to them.40 Bonington’s image similarly functions as just such a challenge to hegemonic public histories, a sentimentalized evocation of an intimate and romantic sub-text inviting ‘affective proximity’. However, the artist’s decision to evade historical specificity and generic categorization means that its challenge becomes all the more radical: it does not so much offer a sub-textual secret history—see how Amy Robsart suffers as a result of Leicester’s ambition!—as threaten to dissolve the relevance of text itself. Is the reality of human experience not somewhere else than in historical texts, slipping between genres, in the almost unrepresented and possibly unrepresentable emotions of anonymous and unidentifiable lovers—in the ‘moments of the heart’, rather than the motions of history? P I L L A R S O F T H E S TAT E A N D PA RO D I E S O F T I M E In 1826, Bonington visited Italy with his friend, Charles Rivet: they spent most of their time in Venice, which was the destination of the journey as far as Bonington was concerned. The experience was, quite literally, to colour Bonington’s later works, as both the quality of the light in the city



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and Venetian Renaissance painting had a significant impact on his work. French Romantic writers had already established a cultural perception of Venice as a great city of the past in decline, about to be reclaimed by the sea which surrounded her, returning human artifice to nature.41 Bonington’s response to this floating city in picturesque decay was a complex and multifaceted one, and in some images, the layering of time which appears in the Normandy images is subtly transformed. Take, for instance, the watercolour of the Colleoni monument (Louvre, c.1827). The central focus is Verrocchio’s equestrian sculpture of this famous Renaissance general, who left money in his will for its erection after his death.42 In Vasari’s account of the artist’s life, which it is very likely that Bonington had read, it is the Venetians themselves who decided to commission a statue to celebrate the general’s achievements;43 the commission resulted in a quarrel between sculptor and patrons, and Verrocchio angrily cut off the head of the horse, pointing out that while the patricians cannot revive a man whom they have executed, he could restore the missing head of the horse. Shortly after he was invited to resume work on the sculpture, Verrocchio died in Venice, leaving the statue uncompleted.44 The story may well have attracted Bonington: it contains an assertion of the superiority of art to the public narrative of high political history, and a reflection on the issue of reconstruction and resurrection, but with a sting in the tale, as the artist himself is caught out by time and unable to finish his work. Another possible spur for Bonington’s interest in the Colleoni monument is Byron’s historical drama, Marino Faliero (1820), in which the Doge, conspiring against the senate, meets with a fellow-conspirator in the square in which the statue stands.45 The play, which explores the theme of historical representation as well as that of radical rebellion against an oppressive aristocratic elite, might well have appealed to Bonington: while in Act III, scene 1, Falieri appropriates the statue as one of his ancestors, whom he attempts to resuscitate imaginatively to support his historically significant rebellion,46 Byron records somewhat ironically in his preface that Falieri was memorialized only by an ‘illegible inscription’, and that the equestrian statue did not represent one of his ancestors, but instead ‘some other now obscure warrior of a later date’.47 These twin themes of erroneous and self-interested public history-making, and the predictability of obscurity and neglect for even the most renowned of historical figures, seem echoed in Bonington’s image. Bonington may have deliberately made the statue more isolated in the centre of the piazza than it actually was. The square seems almost deserted, as the figures in it do not really interact with the monument in any way: a man toils past with a door or a plank on his back, while several couples are in conversation. Unlike the earlier scenes of Rouen and Caen, in which

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the past and present seemed in ordered engagement, the historical traces in this image seem disconnected from, and discontinuous with, the present. The statue looks histrionic and vaguely ridiculous in the midst of the mundane, everyday activities around it. Once again, this represents a challenge to the primacy of public history, an ironic comment on the contemporary neglect of the great figures of the past, combined perhaps with uneasiness about the artist’s capacity to bridge past and present. Some of the same concerns surface in Bonington’s ultimate works. The final years of Bonington’s life show him engaging most fully with the works of the Troubadour artists of the Restoration, which contributed to the promotion of a cult of monarchy in the 1820s. Pointon has argued persuasively that many of Bonington’s images from this period—such as Henri IV and the Spanish Ambassador (Wallace Collection, London: two versions, one oil exhibited c. 1827–8, one watercolour c. 1825)—are a ‘sort of inversion’ of subjects celebratory of various popular kings painted by, for instance, Ingres, Révoil, and Fleury-Richard. Pointon suggests that Bonington should be seen as ‘a humourist in a satirical vein’, stressing the ‘levels of meaning embedded in the narrative’.48 But, perhaps, there is a level of meaning beyond the parodic element she identifies. Take, for instance, one of the best-known of these images: Bonington’s François I and Marguerite of Navarre, exhibited in 1827 (Wallace Collection; Figure 8.3).49 Here the king sits in his palace at Chambord, accompanied by his humanist sister, gazing at the verses of his own composition which he has engraved on the window: ‘Souvent femme varie / Bien fol est qui s’y fie’ (‘Woman is so changeable that only a madman puts his trust in her’). Pointon argues that the scene ‘invokes situations of sexual compromise, suggestions of promiscuity and lasciviousness and undertones of incest’, remarking particularly on the way in which the attendant dog rests his muzzle in the king’s crotch.50 This is certainly an appealing reading: it is obvious that the painting has converted the more stagey and conventional composition on the same subject by Fleury-Richard (exhibited in the salons of 1804 and 1814) into a more intimate and ambiguous image. But there is more to the image than the conversion of a celebration of the Renaissance prince into a sly reflection on a royal lecher. In Fleury-Richard’s image, Marguerite and François make affectionate eye-contact, while in Bonington’s image both appear to gaze on the verses. Whereas the king appears relaxed and complacent, the expression of the princess is ambiguous and her posture is closed, with her arms folded across her chest. What is she thinking? Noon suggests that she ‘stiffly ponders an appropriate response to this assault on the constancy of her sex’.51 As Marguerite of Navarre was a celebrated humanist in her own right, and exhibited exemplary political and personal loyalty to her brother, perhaps Bonington is



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Figure 8.3. Richard Parkes Bonington, François I and Marguerite of Navarre (1827), Wallace Collection.

encouraging us to explore more radically the implications of this anecdote, to ponder over it like the princess. It was not, after all, the woman in the image who proved to be inconstant, but the womanizing king. There is clear evidence that one contemporary viewer constructed a proto-feminist critique of male misogyny from the image: Mary Shelley wrote a story based on Bonington’s second version of this subject, which appeared in The Keepsake (1830). In Shelley’s tale, tellingly entitled ‘The False Rhyme’, Marguerite argues that ‘souvent homme varie’ would make a more accurate statement, and is challenged by her brother to produce an instance of

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female constancy. This she does, demonstrating that Emilie de Lagny, a woman whose husband has been imprisoned for abandoning a fortress to an enemy, and who has apparently run away with her own page, is in fact a heroine of marital devotion: in disguise, she has exchanged places with her husband to allow him the freedom to redeem his own honour. To keep his part of the wager, the king smashes the window with its lying couplet.52 But it is not possible to assign a straightforward feminist agenda to the painting, as the artist has left the message open-ended. Shelley’s tale is, of course, wishful thinking: her example of female constancy is fictional, and so is the climatic and symbolic smashing of the window. The inscription has survived, and perhaps this is Bonington’s point: it has outlasted both king and princess, proving more constant, more enduring, than either of the two figures in the image. Is this unreliable historical record an adequate foundation on which to resurrect the past? In the face of time, is there any certainty to be found, anything which is not in flux and subject to change, anything in which to trust? Similarly, Bonington’s image of Henri III of France (Wallace Collection, 1828), which presents the Spanish ambassador, Don Juan of Austria, discovering the king surrounded by monkeys and parrots, opens itself to more than one interpretation.53 It is a subject of Bonington’s own invention and reflects an interest in this rather unappealing king in the circle of the artist’s friends and acquaintances: Delacroix, for instance, produced a scene of Henri III at the Death-bed of Marie of Cleves (private collection, 1826–7), which attempted, with indifferent success, to represent the king as a romantic hero, mourning the death of the only woman whom he truly loved.54 Bonington clearly did not intend to represent Henri III at all positively: his painting is a parodic version of the more popular subject of Henri IV discovered playing with his children by the Spanish ambassador, a subject which both Bonington and other Troubadour artists had exploited.55 Instead of the ‘Father of the People’ disporting himself with his legitimate heirs, here we have the foppish, potentially bisexual, and unhelpfully childless Henri III playing with his menagerie. Pointon indicates that the qualities associated with the animals offer a commentary on the king, who is thus seen by association as (for instance) as repetitive as a parrot.56 But she does not pursue the idea further. The monkeys who ‘perform the roles of human beings with satirical effect’ may well comment on the whole of the human species, not just this royal representative of our kind. (It is noteworthy that, in early nineteenth century, both monkeys and parrots were seen as possessing ‘physical peculiarities somewhat allied to humanity’, so figuring as symbolic substitutes for mankind.57) This painting is not just a parodic comment on the celebration of monarchs as undeserving of praise as Henri III; it extends, too, to Don Juan



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of Austria, and beyond him. In the Royal Academy catalogue for 1828, Bonington included a quotation from Alexandre Dumesnil’s Histoire de Don Juan D’Autriche (1825), in which the celebrated victor of Lepanto described his unproductive visit to the king: the quotation describes only his initial moments with the king,58 but the history goes on to recount his interview with Henri, whom he found willing to discuss only the religious devotions and luxurious fêtes of his court.59 These topics are indicated by his foppish appearance and the crucifix, and further rendered symbolically by the animals. What Dumesnil’s history reveals more fully is the fact that Don Juan’s mission was to secure a pro-Catholic alliance with the French monarchy, supporting him as governor-general of the religiously divided Low Countries.60 The image thus makes the king look ridiculous, but also challenges and subverts the role of Don Juan. Here is a military hero who has to travel to the French court in disguise and ends up sharing the king’s attention with his pets: while his diplomatic mission seems more significant than the king’s trivial pursuits, it is a sinister one which involves him in kowtowing to a feeble and unappealing monarch. Noon argues that the monkey playing with the crucifix suggests a critique of the king’s hypocrisy and lack of religious conviction, despite his ostentatious piety. But this criticism, which Duffy believes is a covert reflection on the contemporary Restoration king Charles X, includes the play-acting Catholic hero as well as the affected and posturing Catholic monarch.61 It will have naturally appealed to the British Protestant audience to which it was exhibited, but it also critiques and ridicules high politics per se. A sobering reflection on both the duplicitous and discreditable nature of public life, it represents the posturing of the whole of humanity in its self-representation through whitewashing historical narratives. Souvent l’humanité varie. . . T H E S U R FA C E O F M I R RO R S :  A FINAL REFLECTION I would like to conclude by turning to one of Bonington’s most mysterious works, the magnificent watercolour, A Lady Dressing Her Hair (1827, Wallace Collection; Figure 8.4). Visually stunning, the wonderful green dress which dominates the image tends to distract the viewer from the enigma that it presents. As Duffy points out, if the image ‘has a specific literary source, it has still be to be identified’, although he suggests both Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Keats’s The Eve of Saint Agnes (1819) as possible influences.62 Iconographically, it functions within the long-standing tradition of depictions of ladies at their toilette, which dates from at least the Renaissance. Duffy suggests also that ‘it reprises the

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Figure 8.4. Richard Parkes Bonington, A Lady Dressing her Hair (1827), Wallace Collection.

traditional vanitas theme of a beautiful woman in front of a mirror’, and remarks on the inclusion of the parrot, a symbol of lustfulness in Dutch seventeenth-century art.63 However, the watercolour has a number of features which depart from the usual characteristics of such images: for instance, there is no one in attendance on the lady, who is often assisted by a maid or a lover—seemingly offering her the opportunity for self-contemplation and interiority, and us the depiction of one of those curiously ahistorical ‘moments of the



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heart’. The claustrophobic space within links it to the early nineteenthcentury interiors, such as the study of Sommerard mentioned previously. Pointon perceptively comments that it is ‘the skeleton of a seventeenthcentury costume piece’, retaining many of the accessories of a seventeenthcentury interior, but—by ‘its denial of liberating space, the exclusion of sky, and the subordination of the figure to its environment’—disowning its debt to the paintings of Rubens, Van Dyck, and Ter Borch.64 However, the inclusion of a Holbeinesque portrait in the background gives a historical depth to the interior space, as the woman wears a costume ‘suggesting French-Flemish costume of the 1620s’.65 The image has other intriguing elements: there is a view through the window showing a stormy seascape, a striking accessory. This may reference Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (Louvre, 1818–19) and other Romantic scenes of contemporary shipwrecks, which recall ‘the traditional use of the storm-tossed boat as symbol for a distressed humanity isolated in a menacing or malignant universe’.66 Should we conclude that Bonington offers a critique of this lady who chooses to ignore the spectacle of human suffering, the high drama of public history, in favour of her own little private world? Or does he reflect on the impermanence of historical representations, as the stability and significance of this historicized space is threatened by a wild sea which suggests flux, chaos, confusion? The solitary character of the female figure may initially seem to embody interiority and self-absorption, but is she absorbed only in her outward appearance rather than some more significant meditations? Perhaps this is not Romantic subjectivity and reflection (despite the mirror), but merely a matter of arranging a hairstyle. The rich material accessories and the astonishing emerald colour of the dress encourage us, as well, to linger on the surface. Perhaps we do have the ability to reconstruct the face of the past, as the artist does in this intriguing image. But perhaps, too, Bonington interrogates our ability to make the past do anything more than reflect our own faces? N OT E S 1. John Ingamells, Richard Parkes Bonington (London: Wallace Collection, 1979), 11. 2. Leon Rosenthal, cited in Patrick Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Press, 2008), 53. 3. Eugène Delacroix to T. Thoré, 30 Nov. 1861, Correspondance Génerale d’Eugène Delacroix, ed. A. Joubin, 5 vols (Paris: Libraire Plon, 1946), iv. 286. Translated as ‘like diamonds by which the eye is charmed and delighted independently of all subjects and all imitation’, in D. Aubisson and C. E. Hughes, Richard Parkes Bonington: His Life and Works (London: John Lane, 1924), 92.

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4. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 55. 5. See, for instance, Beth S. Wright, ‘Scott’s Historical Novels and French Historical Painting, 1815–1855’, Art Bulletin, 63/2 (1981), 268–87, and her Painting and History during the French Restoration: Abandoned by the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6. Marcia Pointon, ‘ “Vous êtes roi dans votre domain”: Bonington as a Painter of Troubadour Subjects’, Burlington Magazine, 128/994 (1986), 10–17. See also Pointon, The Bonington Circle: English Watercolour and Anglo-French Landscape, 1790–1855 (Brighton: Hendon Press, 1985), and Bonington, Francia, and Wyld (London: B. T. Batsford, 1985). 7. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 54–5. As all Bonington scholars are aware, the lack of personal materials left by the artist make any readings of his work necessarily tentative and speculative. 8. Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 2. 9. James Roberts, cited in Aubisson, Bonington, 46. 10. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 110–11 (cat. no. 48). I owe the idea of the city as palimpsest to the work of Aldo Rossi: see The Architecture of the City, tr. D. Ghirardo and J. Ockman (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1984). 11. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 108–10 (cat. nos. 46 and 47). 12. Patrick Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Drawings (New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, 2011), 34–7 (cat. no. 17). 13. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 196–8 (cat. no.171). See also Patrick Noon, ‘Richard Parkes Bonington: Fish Market, Boulogne’, in P. Wilmerding (ed.), Essays in Honour of Paul Mellon, Collector and Benefactor (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1986), 238–53. 14. Noon, ‘Fish Market’, 244–5. 15. Pointon, Bonington Circle, 77–9. 16. Compare with, for instance, Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (1808–10), which similarly uses the sublime effect of apparently limitless sky and sea in juxtaposition with a tiny human figure to emphasize the brevity and fragility of human existence in the face of either ‘deep time’ or the transcendental. 17. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 224–5 (cat. no. 184). 18. See Mark Salber Phillips, ‘Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography’, PMLA 118/3 (2003), 436–49. 19. [E. Bertin?], ‘Obituary of Richard Parkes Bonington’, Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires (28 Sept. 1828), non-paginated. Noon, ‘Fish Market’, 240, provides a translation: ‘His thoughts, often sad and dreaming, beckoned him to the ocean’s shore. . . beaches, humid and brilliant with the rising sun, that he enlivened with scenes from fishermen’s lives [and] children playing in the sands amidst the debris of a storm long past.’ 20. Wright, ‘Scott’s Historical Novels’. 21. Pointon, ‘Bonington as a Painter of Troubadour Subjects’, 13.



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22. John Ingamells, The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures (London: Wallace Collection, 1985), i. 42–3 (P668). 23. Ingamells, Catalogue, i. 42–3. 24. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 406 (cat. nos. 375 and 376) for the Wallace Collection version and one of the private collection versions. 25. Stephen Duffy, Richard Parkes Bonington (London: Wallace Collection, 2003), 74 (cat. nos. 28 and 29); Ingamells, Catalogue, i. 44–5 (P672). 26. This trance-like and unsettling stare also appears in the earlier images of Don Quixote in his Study (c.1825–6), along with the dog and the armour scattered on the ground. See Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 427–8 (cat. nos. 398 and 399). Mike Goode’s Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History 1790– 1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 87–118, suggests that Scott’s The Antiquary presents the antiquary Oldbuck and the quixotic Sir Arthur Wardour as opposing examples of unhealthy relationships to the past: while Wardour ‘turns to the past on deeply political and nostalgic grounds in an effort to sustain a chivalric order of things’ which is outmoded and illusionary, Oldbuck’s fascination with the past is ‘so thoroughly detached from present concerns as to be misanthropic and even morbid’ (93). Bonington seems to share Scott’s reservations about, and amusement with both, the antiquarian and the quixotic approaches to the past. 27. See C. Wainwright, The Romantic Interior (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 28. See Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 32, for links to Du Sommerard. 29. Stephen Bann, ‘Historical Text and Historical Object: The Poetics of the Musée de Cluny’, History and Theory, 17/3 (1978), 261. See Wainwright, Romantic Interior, 11, for Renoux’s image. 30. There is a literature too extensive to list on this topic, initiated by J. Bishop, ‘Wordsworth and the “Spots of Time’’ ’, ELH 26/1 (1959), 45–61. 31. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 438 (cat. no. 406). 32. Duffy, Bonington, 58 (cat. nos. 18, 19, 20). 33. Walter Scott, Kenilworth (1821; London: Dent, 1958), 67–89. 34. Wright, ‘Scott’s Historical Novels’, 273–4. This identification is also accepted in Marjorie Kemp, ‘Scott and Delacroix, with Some Assistance from Hugo and Bonington’, in A. Bell (ed.), Scott Bicentenary Essays (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 213–27. 35. Wright, ‘Scott’s Historical Novels’, 273. 36. A useful short introduction to this genre is Judith A. Dorn, ‘Secret History’, in M. Spongberg, B. Caine, and A. Curthoys (eds), Companion to Women’s Historical Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2005), 516–25. 37. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 438. Noon points out that this distinction of costume is ‘more in keeping with Scott’s description’. See also T. Wilcox, ‘Richard Parkes Bonington. Nottingham’, Burlington Magazine, 145/1200 (2003), 240. 38. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 454–5 (cat. no. 414). Also see D. Cooper, ‘Bonington and Quentin Durward’, Burlington Magazine, 88/518 (1946), 112–17. 39. Eugène Delacroix to T. Thoré, 30 Nov. 1861, Correspondance Génerale d’Eugène Delacroix, iv. 287–8. ‘He [Bonington] turned to account all sorts of

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details, which he had noted in works by masters, adjusting them with great skill to the requirements of his composition. One saw these details taken almost entirely from pictures which everyone had before their eyes, and he was not in the least perturbed by it. . . . These details (I refer to costume), taken, so to speak, from life, and appropriated by him, gave an additional air of truth to his characters and none of the appearance of imitation. Towards the end of his life. . . he seemed to be affected by melancholy, and particularly by reason of the ambition which he cherished of going in for history painting. He did not attempt, so far as I am aware, to make any notable increase in the size of his canvases. . . ’. Tr. in Aubisson, Bonington, 93. 40. Greg Kucich, ‘Romanticism and the Re-gendering of Historical Memory’, in J. M. Labbe (ed.), Memory and Memorials, 1789–1914: Literary and Cultural Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–29. 41. Aubisson, Bonington, 69–74. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 45–7. 42. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 319 (cat no. 254). 43. For the ubiquity of Vasari’s Lives in Romantic artistic circles, see, for instance, M. Gottlieb, ‘The Painter’s Secret: Invention and Rivalry from Vasari to Balzac’, Art Bulletin, 84/3 (2002), 469–90. 44. G. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, tr. G. Bull (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 237. 45. The play clearly had currency in the artistic circles in which Bonington moved: Delacroix’s 1825–6 painting of The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero was produced while he was sharing a studio with Bonington. See L. Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 1816–1831 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), i. 98–102. I owe the suggestion of the significance of Byron’s play to Michael O’Neill. 46. Byron: Poetical Works, ed. F. Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 426–7. 47. Byron: Poetical Works, preface, 408. 48. Pointon, ‘Bonington as a Painter of Troubadour Subjects’, 14, 17. 49. Ingamells, Catalogue, i. 24–6 (P322). 50. Pointon, ‘Bonington as a Painter of Troubadour Subjects’, 17. 51. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 442 (cat. no. 408) is a copy of the untraced Salon version. 52. Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, ed. C. E. Robinson (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 117–20. 53. Ingamells, Catalogue, i. 26–8 (P323). See also Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 459–60 (cat. no. 415). 54. L. Johnson, ‘A New Delacroix: ‘Henri III at the Death-Bed of Marie de Cleves’, Burlington Magazine, 118/882 (1976), 620–3. 55. Bonington produced two versions of this subject, a watercolour in c.1825 and an oil painting in c.1827: both are in the Wallace Collection in London. See Ingamells, Catalogue, i. 34–6 and 67–8 (P351 and P733), and Duffy, Bonington, 36, 72 (cat. nos. 5 and 26). Images of the same subject had also been produced by Ingres and Revoil. 56. Pointon, ‘Bonington as a Painter of Troubadour Subjects’, 17.



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57. [Anon.], ‘Parrots. The Miscellany of Natural History’, Dublin Penny Journal, 2/83 (1 Feb. 1834), 241. 58. Noon, Bonington: Paintings, 460. Also Duffy, Bonington, 82 (cat. no. 33). 59. A. Dumesnil, Histoire de Don Juan D’Autriche (Brussels: L. J. Brohez, 1827), p. iv. 121–3. 60. Dumesnil, Histoire de Don Juan D’Autriche, p. iv. 116–20. 61. Duffy, Bonington, 82. 62. Duffy, Bonington, 62 (cat. no. 21). See also Ingamells, Catalogue, i. 50 (P679). 63. Duffy, Bonington, 62 (cat. no. 21). 64. Pointon, ‘Bonington as a Painter of Troubadour Subjects’, 13. 65. Ingamells, Catalogue, i. 50. 66. L. Eitner, ‘The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat: An Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism’, Art Bulletin, 37/4 (1955), 288. Stephen Duffy and I differ on the issue of whether Bonington actually includes a boat or not. I am most grateful to him for his illuminating and helpful comments on this chapter.

III A E S T H E T I C S O F H I S TO RY

9 The Same Rehearsal of the Past Byron and the Aesthetics of History and Culture Michael O’Neill

I Byron’s mode of representing history (and culture) suggests comparisons and contrasts with that of Shelley.1 In the work of both poets, with differing emphases, the poet negotiates between history as a body of past events, and history as the present and future streaming into being. Describing his visit with Byron in late June 1816 to Edward Gibbon’s house in Lausanne, Shelley writes elegiacally of Gibbon’s sense of loss at having finished ‘his History’ (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–88): ‘There is something grand and even touching in the regret which he expresses at the completion of his task. It was conceived amid the ruins of the Capitol.’2 The sentence marries ‘completion’ and ‘ruins’, as though the latter were in some sense the site of origin of the former, and the former had in mind always the possibility of the latter. Lurking within it is the outline of an archetypal second-generation Romantic concern: the fear that the word revolution will recover its older etymological meaning, and refer merely to an endless revolving. Shelley, one might suppose, was unflinchingly determined to resist such an endless revolving. Yet, in that he is a poet less of goals than of journeys, he can always imagine change as a failure of arrival or as a jolting return to a point of departure. History’s geometries are finely angled in his work. Prometheus Unbound (1820) closes with ‘spells’ that will ‘re-assume / An empire o’er the disentangled Doom’ (4.568–9), where the ‘empire’ is of the mind and will, seeking, once more, to subdue the ‘Doom’, the forbidding possibility that tyranny might return.3 When he offers millennial visions in Queen Mab (published 1813), they are less potent for the confidence with which they conceive of a time when ‘the human being stands adorning / This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind’ (8.198–9) than for the energy with which they enact the process of pursuing the

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goal ‘To which those restless souls that ceaselessly / Through the human universe, aspire’ (9.2–3). Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat remark rightly that the passage of which these lines are part ‘marks the high point of PBS’s millennial (Godwinian) hopes for the gradual transformation of human society into a perfect world’.4 But the lines derive their force from staying in touch, through the use of words such as ‘restless’ and ‘aspire’, with the trajectory of hoping. ‘O cease! must hate and death return?’ (1096), Shelley asks wearily at the close of Hellas (published 1822), the glad dawn of that final lyric— ‘The world’s great age begins anew’ (1060)—hurried into premature old age before the poem closes with a near-petulant but highly affecting cry that history should be abolished: ‘The world is weary of the past, / O might it die or rest at last’ (1100–1). The antecedent of ‘it’ might be the world or the past—and it is part of the poetry’s power to suggest that it does not much matter which, since the poem is always anxious to erase, supplant, and redefine. At the same time, the abolition of history as predetermining fixity opens the door to a reconception of it as potentiality; as Christopher Bundock argues in his chapter in the present volume, conceiving of Shelley’s view of history in terms derived from Maurice Blanchot: ‘Shelley aims to represent not history but the unruly temporality that forms a presense of the historical.’ That moment in Hellas is part of a career-long dialogue between Shelley and Byron that is nowhere more fascinating than in their poetic conversations about history. ‘The world’s great age begins anew’ uses a similar verse form, and arguably responds, to Byron’s ‘The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!’ (Don Juan (1821), 3.689), sung, we are told, as if to subdue its lyrical afflatus, by a ‘sad trimmer’ (649) able for the duration of the poem to ‘Agree to a short armistice with truth’ (664). It is less ‘truth’ that is on display in this lyric than exhortation and castigation. For his part, Shelley reaches into the classical past, acknowledged as myth in his poem, to envisage how ‘A brighter Hellas rears its mountains’ (1066). Byron avoids Shelley’s comparatives, his wish to surpass what was once achieved. For him, the classical past is a conscience-piercing reality: ‘The mountains look on Marathon— / And Marathon looks on the sea; / And musing there an hour alone, / I dream’d that Greece might still be free’ (3.701–4).5 Those acts of natural ‘looking’ take us from Marathon to the sea (for a split-second, we may be tricked by the shape of the phrasing into thinking that Marathon looks back at the mountains) and, along with Byron’s ‘ands’ and his assonance that perform subtle acts of linking, release his dream that ‘Greece might still be free’. Shelley’s symbolic mountains are Byron’s geo-physical realities. Both poets ironize and complicate their lyric cries; each lyric can be read as personal utterance, but both are dramatic—Shelley’s spoken by a Chorus of Greek Women, Byron’s by his



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momentarily self-rebuking Southeyesque double.6 Both lyrics are distillations of Romantic Hellenism; each is aware of its take on history as being provisional, yearning, a complex gesture of hope. On the above-mentioned visit in June 1816, Shelley noticed that ‘My companion gathered some acacia leaves to preserve in remembrance of him [Gibbon]. I refrained from doing so, fearing to outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau. . . Gibbon had a cold and unimpassioned spirit.’7 He had also, for both Byron and Shelley, a different notion of history from Rousseau. If, for Byron, Rousseau conceived of history as composing an anguished cry for justice, prompting ‘Those oracles which set the world in flame’, Gibbon was engaged in ‘Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3.763, 999).8 Gibbon is less an instructor than a stylist for Byron: the solemn sneer may sap the solemnity of an early Christianity held responsible, with barbarism, for the destruction of the Roman Empire, but Byron’s aphorism holds back from endorsing Gibbon’s alleged theme, as the poet refuses to cede authority to the historian. Paradoxically, the refusal signals his awareness that, as Carla Pomarè points out, Gibbon thought of himself as a ‘writer’ rather than a ‘professional historian’.9 In the wake of such pioneering work as Jerome J. McGann’s call to historicizing arms in The Romantic Ideology (1983), commentators on the literature of the period have thought much, over the last few decades, about ways in which history might be used to read, decode, unmask, and expose the constructions—and even the alleged distortions—of the imagination. McGann, indeed, has prompted a valuable endeavour ‘to see and understand the social and historical ground which defines’ the ‘human meanings’ of Byron’s poetry.10 But what, for the purposes of this chapter, I call an ‘aesthetics of history’ deserves renewed attention. By the phrase, I mean a mode of apprehending and depicting history through art. It is a useful near-tautology to remind ourselves that the artist is one who engages in modes of ‘perception’, and thus to uncover the original meaning of the word ‘aesthetics’: embodied in and available through art. Rather than calling Byron’s conceptions and representations of history to the bar of date and fact, my chapter invites the reader to recover a refreshed sense of how the Byronic imagination conceived of history aesthetically; how, that is, it puts history to work in poems. What Byron grasps about history is a fundamental ambivalence enshrined in the word: that history is both experiential data and a mode of narrative; it is the plain unvarnished fact and the fact that there is no such thing, in writing, as the plain unvarnished fact. Lara (1814) might have been a squalid tale of feuding barons obsessed by an honour code, but when Byron thinks about his hero, he converts external facts into

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internal psycho-drama. Lara is a poem for and from the Napoleonic era, yet it supplies no simple or egomaniacal glorification of a hero figure. Without signing up to belief in sceptical ‘non-knowing’, it is a brooding poem about how much we shall never know.11 The more Lara’s mystery deepens (a Sphinx with a riddle, he is also a figure who will never be unriddled even when facts blurt their way to the surface), the more intricately precise Byron’s writing grows, as sections 17 and 18 demonstrate: ‘In him inexplicably mix’d appeared / Much to be loved and hated, sought and feared’ (1–2). Lara and Lara are not just ‘mix’d’; they are ‘inexplicably mix’d’, asserting aesthetic autonomy yet proving to be incapable of disentanglement from suggestive involvement with history. That this entangling offers the reader vicarious pleasure is evident. Ian Dennis comments insightfully on the way in which, in Byron, the poetry takes its cue from the Rousseau who ‘modeled a practice which implied that difference, or identity, not only produced centrality, but was inseparable from it’ and who demonstrated that ‘an epoch was dawning in which there could be no identity without an encircling and at least temporarily fascinated human audience’. The present chapter is interested less in unmasking Byron’s play with forms of desire than in affirming the aesthetic yield of such play.12 Thinking about Byron’s depiction of history inevitably brings one back to the pervading fact and display of his work’s performative energy. Byron claims the right of the historian to reflect on the meaning of the past, but the value of those reflections lies in the way in which they are conveyed through poetry. In the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), the Uffizi has its attractions and ‘Calls for my spirit’s homage’ (548), yet ‘the weapon which it [that spirit] wields / Is of another temper’ (549– 50), we learn, as one of Byron’s bravura stanza enjambments has taken us elsewhere: ‘and I roam / By Thrasimene’s lake, in the defiles / Fatal to Roman rashness’ (550–2). With ferocious audacity, Byron turns the battle, during which an earthquake was disregarded, into an example of the appalling sublimity that marks the seismic shocks ‘when warring nations meet!’ (567). In so doing, he chronicles extremities of human conduct, one role of the historian assumed with gusto by the poet. For Byron, the poet as historian gains and lends ‘A being more intense’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3.47). Elsewhere history, the recorder, is a record of loss. Often, though, history’s trajectory for Byron is that traced wryly in the single line, ‘The world is all before me, or behind’ (Don Juan, 14.65). The line briefly aches with possibility, as Byron alludes to the close of Paradise Lost (1667), when our first parents embark on the tragic-comic adventure we call history, before it confirms drolly that whatever we search for we have already lost. A poetic historian who colours what he writes about with personal thought and feeling, Byron makes history subjective; he intermingles the



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public and the private. ‘The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme’ (Don Juan, 11.440) is a line that dares us to find it hubristic, even as it is as justifiable a metaphor as any for the celebrity poet. On the Palatine in Rome, as the ruined scene mirrors his own sense of desolation, Byron is equal to the parallel, outdramatizing melodrama when he cries, ‘Behold the Imperial Mount! ’tis thus the mighty falls’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4.963). And in ensuing lines he seizes the rhetorical advantage, the pentameters beating out their electrifyingly doom-laden drum-roll: There is the moral of all human tales; ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption,—barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page. . . (4.964–9)

History here is less an annalist than an apocalyptic sibyl, holding open to our view her ‘one page’, instilling a terrifying truth of recurrent futility. It is one that Baudelaire, Byron’s great heir, articulates in his own way in ‘The Voyage’ (‘Le Voyage’): ‘A savage wisdom’s drawn from voyaging. / The world, small and monotonous, / has only one true image to give us: / horror’s oasis in boredom’s desert.’13 Baudelaire’s poem avoids feeling ‘small and monotonous’ or trapping itself in ‘boredom’s desert’ because, as in Byron, the particular utterance, though faithful to a deep conviction, belongs to a poem that acknowledges that there are other forces and impulses always at work, never wholly gainsayable. These find expression, for Baudelaire, in the desperate, post-Romantic drive to ‘plunge’ ‘into the unknown, in search of something new’.14 Jerome McGann sees Baudelaire as ‘writing under Byronic signs’ by not permitting ‘Poet and reader. . . to imagine themselves saved by imagination’. Such imaginative saving is, for McGann, an example of an ‘illusion’. Yet if ‘aesthetic redemption’ is sent packing as a salvific lie by both poets, it is the imagination which redeems us from the ‘illusion’ that we can be imaginatively redeemed. For a poet, even deconstruction of the ‘aesthetic’ can only be executed through aesthetic means: a contradiction which inspires creativity and value, and lies close to the heart of this chapter’s exploration of Byron’s aesthetic response to history.15 Baudelaire’s position in ‘The Voyage’ has affinities with the Byron who takes existential and creative heart from recognizing ‘How little do we know that which we are! / How less what we may be!’ (Don Juan, 15.787–8). Those ‘Hows’ present history as the medium of an incessant process of destruction but also of creativity, of dissolutions and emergences: a process which makes

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of ages ‘foam’, and in which ‘the graves / Of Empires’ are best depicted as ‘passing waves’, but one, too, that composes an ‘eternal surge’: The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lash’d from the foam of ages; while the graves Of Empires heave but like some passing waves. (15.788–92)

If Baudelaire’s ‘The Voyage’ sees self-aware questing as an antidote to futile voyaging or total despair, Byron’s poem regards the new bubbles, ‘Lash’d from the foam of ages’, as evidence of an energy that exceeds our grasp, even as that energy ‘bears afar’ and is itself ‘[l]‌ash’d’, a verb that suggests potent agency. As so often, when a tidal current runs in Byron, complementary yet countervailing feelings about human beings spring into life. The poet in ‘To the Po. June 2nd 1819’ is drawn on by his feelings like the ‘congenial River’ (15), yet in his very consciousness of affinity, he clings on by his iambically tensed fingertips to some measure of command. ‘Thou tendest wildly to the wilder main / And I to loving one I should not love’ (19–20), lines that might prompt one to generalize that, for Byron, the personal is never simply a reflex of the historical. That is, the current of history may run ‘towards the wilder main’, but Byron presents himself as drawn, almost against his will, towards an individual. One might allegorize the lines thus: both personal desire and history as process are shaped by determining forces; but the poet’s self-awareness, caught in his figures, means that he exercises artistic control over his perceived loss of self-command. Indeed, if history rehearses the past, why not perform a part to the best of one’s ability? Borne along on the foam of ages, or, in the quoted passage about the Palatine from the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a tide of despair, Byron does not enact calm resignation so much as hectic stoicism: ‘Away with words! draw near’, he exclaims in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage across the shattered stanza break, ‘Admire, exult—despise—laugh, weep,—for here / There is such matter for all feeling:— Man! / Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear’ (4.972–5). That final line recalls the inflections of Pope’s Essay on Man (1733), but Augustan balance has gone; the ‘pendulum’ swings wildly without decorum, since ‘all feeling’ is equally legitimate. Yet the stanza form, itself sorely beset (‘Away with words!’), taken out of any Spenserian dream-world, suggests the struggle at work here not to yield to despair, and the very rejection of words unleashes the awareness that, were the cyclical risings and fallings to be true, they would lead to the creation of a Babel of words. If history is a reductive ironist, the poet is a speech-driven tragic actor. This thespian capacity was not lost on



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Byron’s contemporaries and reviewers, who sometimes intimated that the drama was hammed up. Josiah Conder saw Byron as a ‘disingenuous actor’, in Jane Stabler’s words, able to digress from meditations on Roman ruins to his own marital problems ‘like the tragic actor, who, in the very paroxysm of his mimic agonies, has his feelings perfectly at leisure for a whispered joke’.16 Yet it is such disingenuousness that establishes the authenticity peculiar to Byron, master of an idiom in which histrionics, ‘mimic agonies’, serve to suggest an empowering force of creativity as the poet affirms a capacity to fight back against what Wallace Stevens calls ‘the pressure of reality’.17 History as a single page: Byron plays with the notion that the great epic of culture could be reduced to an aphoristic formula. He is at his most devastatingly post-Johnsonian when he delivers himself of unanswerable truths that employ this image of the stark sentence inscribed indelibly on an existential page. The individual life is subject to the same erosive forces that Byron sees at work in that collective noun we call History. In some of the most affecting stanzas in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he writes at the close of the second canto, in the wake of the shock of loss: What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each lov’d one blotted from life’s page, And be alone on earth, as I am now. (98.918–21)

The ‘Last Man’ is more than a topos of the early 1820s; to this sometimes sociable poet, it presents itself as an unavoidable truth of experience. Life here is the single page, not History; but both pages have been ripped from the same ‘Book of the World’, to adapt McGann’s phrase. Their moral is both collective and individual: all human greatness and value will vanish, providing the temporary survivor with proof that, in Auden’s words, ‘Aloneness is man’s real condition’ (‘New Year Letter’, 1940).18 And yet the passage bears witness to a survivor’s sense that history salutes the work of memory, without which loss would not be felt as loss, without which Byron would not have written two stanzas earlier, ‘But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last’ (903). In a more sportive vein, though almost as touchingly, Byron composes an ubi sunt mock-lament for a Regency England that has turned to dust and lives only in his verse in Don Juan, 11.76 (and following): I look for it ’tis gone, a Globe of Glass! Cracked, shivered, vanished, scarcely gazed on, ere A silent change dissolves the glittering mass. Statesmen, chiefs, orators, queens, patriots, kings, And dandies, all are gone on the wind’s wings. (604–8)

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As these lines show, history is more than an awful potent and looming spectre pointing to the void. It is also an astonishing aggregate of criss-crossing particulars, names, individuals. It is not simply that Byron presents us, in Stephen Cheeke’s discerning phrase, with a puzzling combination of ‘dark theory and bright praxis’ in his treatment of history.19 It is that his ‘praxis’ and ‘theory’ inform one another with unpredictable results; ‘the wind’s wings’ here convey all the particulars into nothingness, but that nothingness intensifies Byron’s regard for particulars. The stanza opens out into a bitter-sweet relishing of individuals, whether hero-worshipped (Napoleon), knocked off their dandified perches (Brummell dished and Long Pole Wellesley diddled), loathed (Castlereagh), or made love to and flirted with (the Lady Carolines and Franceses). Byron concludes with a sense of having lived through distinctly interesting times: ‘Talk not of seventy years as age! in seven / I have seen more changes, down from monarchs to / The humblest individual under heaven, / Than might suffice a moderate century through’ (Don Juan, 11.649–52). Not just seen, the poem implies, but lived through, undergone. The ‘realms of rhyme’ echo and accompany the realms in time. The syntax mimics a speeding-up of the historical process; seventy or even a century is the new seven as sedate transition turns into a pell-mell stampede. Would-be saddened wisdom cannot keep its face straight: ‘I knew that nought was lasting, but now even / Change grows too changeable, without being new’ (653–4). The only thing that is constant is ‘the Whigs not getting into place’ (656). If Byron sadly sports his Buff and Blue, this is not an ordinary Whig, but a man to whom LaRochefoucauld, Montaigne, Johnson, Swift, and Ecclesiastes are equally relevant, if only and finally as provisional confirmers and points of departure.20 ‘Change grows too changeable, without being new’: there, the disillusioned final phrase shows that we cannot enlist Byron simply as the champion of process.21 History, here, is less secret agent than unfolding panorama; it illustrates the contrary truths that there is nothing new under the sun and that, as Shelley puts it, ‘Figures ever new / Rise on the bubble’ (The Triumph of Life (composed 1822), 248–9). History is both a question of stumbling with a faint lantern into a mist shot through with rainbow hues and hints of tempest, and a fascinating congeries of parti-coloured actualities. It is the froth of ‘gazettes’ ‘cloyed’ ‘with cant’, the generals, ‘Evil and good’, who ‘have had their tithe of talk’ (Don Juan, 1.3, 11), ‘Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke, / Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe’ (Don Juan, 1.9–10). But it is also an oceanic sweep. Byron likes a good list, a rhetorical device that insists on separate identities and merges them into a rhythmical flow. History struts the stage, taking the guise of these different figures, yet, as we live it, or as we read Don Juan in



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particular, we are immersed in a stream of temporality, the fascination of which lies in the way in which it will not be channelled through the irrigation schemes of pre-existent conceptual typing. Byron hears history not in a Joycean shout in a street, but in a shot in Don Juan canto 5, stanzas 33–9: ‘a fact and no poetic fable’ (258), Byron states, giving time and place and grisly, bizarrely meaningless circumstance, ‘the military commandant / Stretch’d in the street, and able scarce to pant’ (263–4), shot with ‘five slugs’ (266). The passage immerses us in the mess and chaos of events; this is history as what actually happens, not history as pattern, portent, prophecy, promise, or fulfillment. Byron knows and does not know: he knows enough to see that ‘The man was gone: in some Italian quarrel / Kill’d by five bullets from an old gun-barrel’ (271–2); ‘he knew him well’ (273), but as he ‘gazed on him’ (280) all is unanswered question. Obstinate fact refuses to unlock existential mystery. Byron seeks ‘To try if I could wrench aught out of death / Which should confirm, or shake, or make a faith’ (303–4): all three possibilities hanging before us in the line only, in the end, to be left hanging high and dry since ‘it was all a mystery. Here we are, / And there we go:—but where?’ (305–6). History is a revolving door, here leading towards unsolvable mystery and turning us back to the poem’s tale: ‘But let us to the story as before’ (312).22 The story, narrative, is what history must be—Herodotus was the father of lies, all history is narrative—but history is also event, fact, occurrence, all that prompts and yet eludes narrative.

II That dynamic re-established for the umpteenth time, the poem continues on its brilliant, wheeling, life-generating, and life-responsive way, coming as close as any poem in the language to rivalling the operations of history in its curve and flow, its sweep and brio, its trajectories of disappointment and hope, its falls and rises, its aristocratic indifference to golden means or Aristotelean norms, its magnificent expression of a creative energy that is Shakespearean in its prodigal force and power, its assertion of the riddling greatness and imperfection of the human spirit. ‘You ask for the plan of Donny Johnny’, he writes to Murray: ‘I have no plan—I had no plan—but I had or have materials.’23 That is the aesthetic of a poet ready and able to take on history, in a work whose design evades the crudity of a ‘plan’ and glories in the multifariousness of ‘materials’. Those ‘materials’ include the panorama of contemporary cultures. Byron takes the pulse of the recent past, the historical present, often in relation to geographical distance that brings out differences between the historical process in different cultures.24 With a garage in County Cork in mind, Derek

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Mahon observes, ‘Somebody somewhere thinks of this as home’ (20).25 Mahon, a near-tragic, elegant, and wittily ironic Irish poet, is one of Byron’s true heirs. His poem concludes, ‘We might be anywhere but are in one place only, / One of the milestones of earth-residence / Unique in each particular’ (43–5). Byron relishes other cultures, here that of Venice, for their unique particulars: ‘Didst ever see a gondola? For fear / You should not. I’ll describe it you exactly’ (175–6), he mockingly and yet persuasively assures us in Beppo (1818), a poem that sings with worldly delight of difference and diversity. When coffee arrives for the urbane Count and the astonishingly reincarnated Beppo, Byron remarks that it is ‘A beverage for Turks and Christians both, / Although the way they make it’s not the same’ (722–3). ‘Not the same’: people, cultures differ—and each act, each cultural event, speaks of uniqueness, and is seized upon by Byron as a spur to his inexhaustible delight in the spacious reality of a world ‘that makes England of minor importance’, to use Auden’s phrase in his ‘Dover’ (composed 1937).26 Bearing ‘the pageant of his bleeding heart’ (135) was Matthew Arnold’s unkind and brilliant account in ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ of Byron’s excursions across European culture.27 Byron can never be other than himself, even as that self, a broken mirror endlessly multiplying images of the poet (see Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3.33), twists and tacks and changes. So, in Spain, the scene of the bull-fight draws from Byron the dramatic tribute of exhilarated, sickened response. And yet the unique particular here is also the universal and personal emblem. The bull, ‘Foil’d, bleeding, breathless, furious to the last’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1.774), is a forerunner of Rilke’s torso of Apollo, inducing in the verse a murmur of subdued and intent sympathy. Rilke’s torso tells the poet and reader, ‘You must change your life’.28 Byron, too, knows that what you look at closely looks back even more closely at you. Byron’s scene instructs him, as does the dying Gladiator, in the fact that his life must be played out before thousands of watching, indifferent eyes before whom, at once light-limbed matador and ‘bull at bay’ (775), he enacts the drama of his tortured, self-dramatizing self. Cultural difference induces in his poetry a continual sense of being ‘A Stranger’ (41) whose ‘heart’ may be ‘all meridian’ (45) but whose head is coolly aware of alterity. The sense of difference is intoxicating and exasperating in ‘To the Po’, but it makes possible the love which he half-unwillingly admits into his life: ‘Oh! Time! why leave this earliest Passion strong? / To tear a heart which pants to be unmoved?’ (51–2). Here and elsewhere, Italian culture is Byron’s exilic fate and privilege; it ushers him into the peculiar realm he occupies in his poetry, fascinated and disillusioned in the same breath, gliding over and collecting the evidences of surfaces in such a way as to suggest and question the existence of depths, refashioning genres to make them a hybrid compound of English



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and European influences. A student of Alfieri and Shakespeare, he is a citizen of the world, an Englishman (and Scotsman) abroad;29 above all, he is a poet at the mercy, and superbly in manipulative control, of his mobility (Don Juan, 16/97.820). In his work ‘vivacious versatility’ (Don Juan, 16/97.818) rubs shoulders with an ‘intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life’, the abyss into which the manners and customs of different climes threaten to pour, so many endlessly braided ropes of flowing water.30 For Shelley, siding always with the sculptor against the tyrant though he does, culture is inevitably the record of barbarism as well as civilization, of Ozymandias as well as his deconstructing interpreter. For Byron, too, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, fourth canto, Venice is formerly ‘A ruler of the waters and their powers’ (2.13); it looms into alliterative and polarized view as a place with ‘A palace and a prison on each hand’ (1.2). The solecism is famous; he must have meant, on either hand. But the effect is suggestive. At some level, it is truer to Byron’s way of thinking about history and culture to suppose that there are always simultaneously palaces and prisons. In his fine analysis of how seeming error often paves the way to discovery in Byron, Gavin Hopps praises Peter Cochran’s observation that ‘the prison is a palace and the palace is a prison, and that Byron stands trapped between the two’.31 Hopps and Cochran put us in their debt by suggesting the creative possibility of apparent error, and one might add that Byron is less ‘trapped’ between, than resourcefully able to incorporate, prison and palace, even as he thrives on the expression of dissident, contrary impulses. Typically, Greece’s greatness is to be ‘Immortal, but no more’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 2.694; that the very sound in ‘more’ grows out of ‘Immortal’ suggests a continuity between the ‘sad relic of departed worth’ (693) and past immortality, even as ‘no more’ cancels the bond which holds the two Greeces together. In the case of Venice, the city’s aesthetic allure, Byron half-suggests, comes into play when its worldly potency has gone. As Drummond Bone notes, the opening of the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage has several goes at explaining how and why Venice survives.32 Stanza 3 asserts that ‘States fall, arts fade—but Nature doth not die’ (24). But stanzas 4 and 5 change tack, as though Byron realizes, in Bone’s words, ‘that what has in fact remained is not nature, but civilization—not in its political but its artistic realization—the works of Shakespeare and Otway’: 33 But unto us she hath a spell beyond Her name in story, and her long array Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond Above the dogeless city’s vanish’d sway; Ours is a trophy which will not decay With the Rialto; Shylock and the Moor,

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And Pierre, can not be swept or worn away— The keystones of the arch! though all were o’er, For us repeopled were the solitary shore. The beings of the mind are not of clay: Essentially immortal, they create And multiply in us a brighter ray And more beloved existence: that which Fate Prohibits to dull life in this our state Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied, First exiles, then replaces what we hate; Watering the heart whose early flowers have died, And with a fresher growth replenishing the void. (4.28–45)

Bone is right that the deathlessness of Nature will not quite satisfy Byron, and yet Nature is never simply Nature in Byron; in stanza 3, it is already edging towards a collectively subliminal and quasi-human awareness that is imagined as innate or natural. Two constructions opening with the conjunction ‘but’ follow the assertion that ‘arts fade’. The first is ‘but Nature doth not die’; the second is ‘But unto us she hath a spell beyond / Her name in story’ (28–9). The effect is to suggest the fineness of possibility inherent in what Bone refers to eloquently as Byron’s ‘activity of life-creation’.34 Timothy Webb notes Byron’s ‘recourse to the adversative “but” to introduce a necessary counter-argument’.35 In stanzas 3 and 4 there is a counter-argument that seems to invite a further counter-argument that is also, or, rather, a continued argument, since the second ‘But’ serves less to refute than to nuance. The direction instigated by the first ‘but’ is already tending towards that confirmed by the second, since nature’s deathlessness is also a way of ensuring we do not ‘forget how Venice once was dear’. Nature is an elegist and recorder, a fitting ally rather than an adversary of the human beings who ensure Venice’s immortality through the power of consciousness. This is to suggest that it is less ‘confusion’ (Bone’s word) that we find than sinuous, if also incipiently fractured, modulation.36 Mark Sandy suggests felicitously that ‘Through the workings of poetic memory, the personal fate of Byron’s narrator and the historical fate of Venice. . . find companionship in the mutuality of their estranged conditions.’37 Byron’s ‘companionship’ extends to the reader (‘But unto us’), caught up, as Sandy implies, in the intimacy made possible by ‘estrangement’. As we delight in the creation by artists such as Shakespeare of ‘beings of the mind’ (37), we glimpse how the historical story can yield in significance to the imagined. Byron’s conflicted achievement is to suggest that the outcome of this compensating process is at once uplifting and chilling; as history accumulates its store of losses, art asserts a capacity to survive, yet such survival is in touch with loss. The poetry’s wording and syntactical movement



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half-coalesce the city’s ‘long array / Of mighty shadows’ (29–30) with the ‘Essentially immortal’ (38) ‘beings of the mind’. Shylock and the Moor and Pierre may be ‘the keystones of the arch’, yet through that arch, the poetry suggests, pass ‘mighty shadows’. ‘Ours is a trophy which will not decay’: picked out for end-stopped emphasis, at the midway point of the Spenserian stanza, the line is affecting in its courageous facing down of the fear that ‘Ours is a trophy which will soon decay’. Its mode of existence is compensatory, ‘Watering the heart whose early flowers have died, / And with a fresher growth replenishing the void’. It is vital in thinking about the imaginative yield of Byron’s treatment of history to recognize the productive economy of ambivalence. Byron’s defence of poetry as a recompense for the ravages of historical loss is attended with doubts. The present chapter argues that his poetry acts as a self-aware act of creation, a means of replenishing the void, and that, in doing so, it shapes its own aesthetic value through and out of its alertness to its temporal provisionality, its recklessly self-sustaining, impermanent, rickety display of stoic courage and responsive inventiveness. An example occurs later in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; there Byron will assert that ‘Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, / And fevers into false creation’ (1090–1): false creation, how can we tell it from true creation? Or has false creation its own authenticity? Certainly the stanza lamenting its feverish workings is among the most beautiful in Byron, leading as it does towards discovery of that saddest locus amoenus, one much inhabited by poets from the Romantics onwards, ‘The unreach’d Paradise of our despair’ (1096).

III Romantic poets often offer a critique of their contemporary culture. As Raymond Williams argues in Culture and Society (1958), emphasis on ‘the creative imagination’ served as a necessary and humane response to ‘the aggressive individualism and the primarily economic relationships which the new [industrialised] society embodied’.38 For Williams, the kind of defence of poetry offered by Shelley in A Defence of Poetry (composed 1821; published 1840) was both good and bad: good in that art as a superior reality offered a basis for ‘an important criticism of industrialism’, bad in that it ‘tended. . . to isolate art. . . and thus to weaken the dynamic function which Shelley proposed for it’.39 But what shocks the socially liberal critic of culture stimulates the complex ethical imagination of the self-marginalizing poet that Shelley becomes in Adonais (1821) and The Triumph of Life, where, in different ways, he transmutes scorn for contemporary culture

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into the gold coin of artistic works by which that culture will be coerced into knowing itself. In The Triumph of Life Romantic desire performs its near-tragic play and ironizes itself in doing so. Like Shelley, Byron is at odds with his culture and, like Shelley, he is at odds with himself in being at odds with his culture. Shelley’s self-critique is the tragic awareness of the idealist who realizes that the world will not satisfy desire. Byron’s critique of Romanticism, the ‘wrong revolutionary poetic system—or systems’, is a critique nourished by that which its ironies would consume.40 Both poets throw into strong relief the fact that Romantic writers use poetry (in one sense the iconic form of culture) to mount a criticism of culture, where that word means, in the second of three meanings assigned it by Williams in Keywords (1976), ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group’; he distinguishes this sense from ‘a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’ and ‘a word which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’.41 Byron can be read as echoing, though with his own sardonic brilliance, the ambivalent views of human progress articulated in Scottish Enlightenment historiography.42 He anticipates Yeats in believing that civilization is at once heroic achievement and ultimate illusion. One side of Byron is brought to a satisfyingly final position by Yeats in ‘Meru’ (1933). ‘Civilisation’, writes Yeats in lines some of which Harold Bloom uses as the epigraph to his chapter on Byron in The Visionary Company (1971): is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace, By manifold illusions; but man’s life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality: Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye Rome.43

Yeats bids adieu to triple empires in a nonchalant gesture. His ambivalence towards the very cultural achievements towards which he catapults his imagination intensifies the quarrel with himself that is one of Byron’s legacies. Byronic art, like Yeatsian art, knows that it thrives on all that opposes art, the foul rag and bone shop of the heart in Yeats’s case, the need, to put the matter at its most light-hearted, to ‘giggle and make giggle’ in Byron’s, to write, in the case of Don Juan, ‘a playful satire with as little poetry as could be helped’.44 Byron’s Don Juan, wrote Goethe, ‘is a work of boundless genius, manifesting the bitterest and most savage hatred of humanity, and then again penetrated with the deepest and tenderest love for mankind’.45



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That duality has to do with what the intense critique of culture generates in Byron. Byron turns to his own poetry from the spectacle of history and culture, yet he refuses to be hoodwinked by the claims of art. Art is often a poor recompense for life in Byron. At his most aesthetically admiring, he indicates the limits of the aesthetic, in part by committing himself to further aesthetic exploration. Byron must wrest life out of the entropic tendency of art, poetry, and culture to fall into fixed forms and lifeless conceptions. He must dominate poetry by imprinting on it his personality. His is a deliberately risk-taking, impure poetry that refuses to concede that the artist has the right to retire behind his handiwork, paring his fingernails. In the English cantos of Don Juan, Byron returns, Odysseus-like, to where it all started, yet the return home brings less a glad sense of repossession (which is not to deny the proto-Joycean feat of recreation going on in the writing) than a renewed discovery that, in the end, ‘There woos no home nor hope nor life save what is here’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4.945); ‘woos’ is itself testament to the fact that even ‘what is here’ (perhaps the poem itself ) may refuse the suitor-poet, or be refused by him. What is present in the English cantos is absence, loss, a fact borne out through the stupendous feat of attempted restoration through memory. Catholic relics in Norman Abbey prompt the thought: ‘But even the faintest relics of a shrine / Of any worship, wakes some thoughts divine’ (12.487–8). Along with the figure of Aurora Raby, who ‘look’d as if she sat by Eden’s door, / And grieved for those who could return no more’ (15.359–60), this assertion hints at the search for a religious ground in relation to history and culture, but it also places such a search in perspective. It is another case of Byron fleeing from any stance in which he might possibly take refuge. Aurora may bear the likeness of an exile from Eden, but the world which she and Byron inhabit is resolutely post-lapsarian, and he is surely among those who can ‘return no more’. The narrator’s wry knowledge reminds us yet again that the poem does not want a hero; it has found one in its narratorial consciousness, a consciousness that can never assign a value higher than conditional approval. The poem’s hilarity is edged with pain. Or, as Byron himself says, in one of those moments where thought outstrips itself in his work, and lifts Don Juan into a dimension one had not realized it could inhabit: ‘And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / ’Tis that I may not weep, and if I weep, / ’Tis that our nature cannot always steep / Itself to apathy’ (4.25–8). The syntax fights the measure in a way that suggests Byron is suddenly roused to explain himself, a self-explanation that appeals to what seem like the innate discords of our nature. Here is Byron as the Pierrot figure who will beget a train of tragic-comic responses to culture and history in poets from Auden, through MacNeice and Berryman, and on to Mahon and Muldoon. Weeping dries its eyes in the presence of

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mockery; passion’s lava stays in touch with an element that is cool, under control, urbane. Responding to and fighting back against the pressure of reality, Byron’s writing is always up for another sally, another venture across the ocean of feeling, thought, manners, and existential commentary; it indomitably asserts the value of its imaginative tactics, its own makeshift aesthetics and poetics of performance. N OT E S 1. The author would like to thank Dr Paige Tovey for her assistance in preparing this chapter. He is also grateful to the organizers of the international conferences in Greece (2009) and Spain (2011) at which he gave papers developing the ideas in it. Material in the first section appears in Nic Panagopoulos and Maria Schoina (eds), The Place of Lord Byron in World History: Studies in his Life, Writings, and Influence (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2013) and is reprinted with permission. 2. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), i. 487. 3. Quoted from Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). All quotations from Shelley are taken from this edn. 4. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 3 vols to date (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000–), ii. 591. 5. Quoted from Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). All quotations from Byron, unless otherwise stated, are from this volume. 6. See Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 125–56. 7. Letters of Shelley, i. 487–8. 8. For thoughtful discussion of the complexities of Rousseau’s thinking about law, justice, sovereignty, and allied topics, see the ‘Introduction’ to Rousseau: ‘The Social Contract’ and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and tr. with intro. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. ix–xxxi. 9. See Carla Pomarè, Byron and the Discourses of History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 17, 16. 10. Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of a World’, in Neil Fraistat (ed.), Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 254–72, quoted from Byron’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Alice Levine (New York: Norton, 2010), 834. 11. For a valuable discussion of Lara as revealing that ‘knowing is always knowing not’ (a discussion inflected by the sense of the poem as Humean in emphasis), see Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 92.



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12. Ian Dennis, Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 42. Paraphrasing Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Hamilton argues that the aesthetic involves ‘play’ and that ‘Play is the mode of being produced by art, as legitimate a truth as anything defined by science’. See Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996), 88. This chapter will show that Byron’s poetry at once supports and tests this assertion in its dealings with history. For a shrewd discussion of the ‘extent Byron was engaging with, fictionalizing and critiquing histories’, see Caroline Franklin, ‘Byron and History’, in Jane Stabler (ed), Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 86. 13. Michael O’Neill, ‘The Voyage (After Baudelaire)’, PN Review, 188/35/6 (July–Aug. 2009), 30. 14. O’Neill, ‘The Voyage’, 30. 15. McGann, Byron and Romanticism, 94. 16. See Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31; Conder is quoted on this page. 17. Wallace Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951), 36. 18. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), 190. 19. Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 11. 20. For Byron’s scepticism about inveterate cynicism, see the opening of his letter to Hobhouse of 6 Apr. 1819, mocking ‘the Scriptures of Rochefoucauld’, quoted from Byron’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Levine, 736. 21. Byron’s view of literary history involved deep suspicion of his own age’s claims for itself. For a fine discussion of how Byron looked back to Johnson as an exemplar of ‘unshackling’ from cant ‘through style’, see Tony Howe, ‘Uncircumscribing Poetry: Byron, Johnson, and the Bowles Controversy’, in Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe, and Charles E. Robinson (eds), Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 209. 22. For penetrating readings of this famous passage, see Bernard Beatty, Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ (London: Croom Helm, 1985); and Timothy Webb, ‘Byron as a Man of the World’, in Joseph Cheyne and Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones (eds), L’esilio romantico: Forme di un conflitto (Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1990), 279–301. 23. Byron: Major Works, 1009. 24. See Cheeke for a fascinating geo-historical meditation on the significance, for Byron, of ‘the experience of being there on the spot’, Byron and Place, 7. 25. Quoted from Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1999), 130. 26. Auden, Collected Poems, 125. 27. ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, in Matthew Arnold, The Complete Poems, ed. Kenneth Allott, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1979), 308.

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28. Quoted from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and tr. Stephen Mitchell, intro. Robert Hass (1980; London: Picador, 1987), 61. 29. For Byron’s sense of his Scottishness, see ‘I scotch’d not killed the Scotchman in my blood’, Don Juan, 10.151. 30. Preface to Julian and Maddalo (composed 1818–19), Major Works, 212; the description is of Maddalo, Byron’s surrogate in the poem. 31. Quoted in Hopps, ‘Byron and Grammatical Freedom’, in Liberty and Poetic Licence, 177. 32. See Drummond Bone, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, Don Juan and Beppo’, in Drummond Bone (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 152–3. 33. Bone, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV’, 152. 34. Bone, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV’, 153. 35. Timothy Webb, ‘ “Unshadowing the Rialto”: Byron and the Patterns of Life’, Byron Journal, 39/1 (2011), 23. 36. Bone, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV’, 153. 37. ‘Mark Sandy, ‘Reimagining Venice and Visions of Decay in Wordsworth, the Shelleys and Thomas Mann’, in Michael O’Neill, Mark Sandy, and Sarah Wootton (eds), Venice and the Cultural Imagination: ‘This Strange Dream upon the Water’ (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 34. 38. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958; New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 42. 39. Williams, Culture and Society, 43. 40. Quoted from Byron’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Levine, 729. 41. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), 80. 42. See Porscha Fermanis, ‘The model of social evolution Keats borrows from the Scottish Enlightenment itself acknowledged that certain kinds of positive social values such as imaginative vitality, bravery and community declined as society developed’, in John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 153. 43. See Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. and enlarged edn (1961; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). Yeats is quoted fromThe Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1990). 44. Byron: Major Works, 1010. 45. Quoted from Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Byron: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 164.

10 Byron, Clare, and Poetic Historiography Paul Hamilton With regard to poetry in general I am convinced the more I think of it—that he and all of us—Scott—Southey—Wordsworth—Moore— Campbell—I—are all in the wrong—one as much as another—that we are all upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system—or systems. . . I am the more confirmed in this—by having lately gone over some of our Classics—particularly Pope. . . and I was really astonished (I ought not to have been so) and mortified—at the inevitable distance in point of sense—harmony—effect—and even Imagination Passion—& Invention—between the little Queen Anne’s Man—us of the lower Empire—depend upon it [it] is all Horace then, and Claudian now among us. . . (Byron to John Murray, 15 Sept. 1817)1

Byron’s famous discontent with the poetry of his contemporaries is an aesthetic disagreement. But it expresses itself historically. Stylistic shortfall and historical belatedness go together in his complaint. Bathos, or a false profundity actually producing lowness of style, is explained as belonging to the late antiquity of the ‘lower’ empire, whose history, from the foundation of Constantinople four hundred years after Horace, took a different course. Byron’s aesthetic disaffection is figured in his desire to switch histories, and to rejoin the Roman story again. Different histories can run at the same time; we may be forced by class to belong to one rather than another, as Marx was soon to argue; or we can choose, anachronistically, to recover ancient history for a modern political purpose, as Byron was later to do with Greece. Four years later in the third canto of Don Juan (published 1821), with Greece in mind, he playfully described how the modern, politically active poet should choose to revive stylistically a historical period critically out of kilter with his own. In France, for instance, he would write a chanson; In England, a six canto quarto tale;

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In Spain he’d make a ballad or romance on The last war—much the same in Portugal; In Germany, the Pegasus he’d prance on Would be old Goethe’s—(see what says de Staël) In Italy he’d ape the ‘Trecentisti;’ In Greece, he’d sing some sort of hymn like this t’ye: . . . The isles of Greece. . . (3.681–9)2

Angevine gloire, Elizabethan Spenserian epic, the Siglo de Oro, Dante and Petrarch’s Renaissance, Weimar classicism as championed by Mme de Staël in De l’Allemagne—all become examples of recovering a lost historical momentum through stylistic revival. In the case of his own country, heroic nationalism is less the issue. But Byron very consciously aestheticizes history to show the different historiographical options available. By aesthetics I do not mean sensuousness, aesthesis, but a kind of discourse. In Kant’s third Critique (1790), aesthetic discourse mediates between science and ethics, between discourses bearing two equally valid conceptions of ourselves. According to the first, we belong to a spatio-temporal world subject to the laws of cause and effect, while the second has us belonging to another world in which we are free agents responsible for our actions. The first conception prescribes the conditions necessary for our experience to be possible and for us to be objects of experience like any others; the second prescribes the freedom from those conditions necessary for moral action to be possible. The two conceptions appear incompatible, but in aesthetics we join both together and experience our freedom. In achieving this reconciliation, though, aesthetics can appear to have sidestepped scientific and ethical seriousness. Considerations of style have displaced those of content. Yet we need a language in which to talk about our sense of ourselves as exceeding current knowledge, and in which to describe those moments when we act on impulses beyond the current definition of duty. At these often self-defining moments, indeed, le style c’est l’homme. In the absence of literal justification with reference to scientific truth or moral obligation, we have recourse to aesthetic terminology, referring to beauty, or sublimity, or words honouring our need to use fiction to get on terms with a self-consciousness exceeding scientific and ethical explanations. But our uses of the aesthetic here are also historically inflected. Styles become passé, outmoded, kitsch, in need of renovation. More than this, writers can manipulate the artificiality of an aesthetic expression to criticize the historical viewpoint from which it was natural to use that expression. Where we cannot do this, we are subject to history in a different, inescapable manner. I want to look at Byron as an example of the first kind of writer, and Clare as an example of the second. I present Byron, then, as someone



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who can switch his style of writing poetry to make an aesthetic criticism of the historical view he wants to attack or dissociate himself from. Clare cannot do this, and therefore instead expresses entrapment within a history, the history of a class with no part in the story to come. He belongs to a history that has redacted any part for him to play within it. He does try to escape, and even on occasion by adopting Byron’s later style. But his own skill is to show that he is writing in a manner to which his interests increasingly appear redundant. Few would now argue that any writing is self-identical. But to make the principal subject of writing this unhappiness or unease with itself is a specific kind of writing, not just a characteristic of writing in general. Put another way, when Clare introduces his consciousness of his dilemma into his writing he can let us feel in his own case what it is like to be trapped in a history which is leaving you behind. Byron started writing like Pope in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809); he did not go on to write like Pope. The historical change implied by his aesthetic change is therefore not a return to the past but a move revealing the sort of historical continuum he wanted to belong to, one got at only through the character of the aesthetic he chooses to adopt. Presciently criticizing Francis Fukuyama, Marx wrote in the Grundrisse (written 1857–8), that: The assertion that free competition = the ultimate form of the development of the forces of production and hence of human freedom means nothing other than that middle-class rule is the culmination of world history—certainly an agreeable thought for the parvenus of the day before yesterday.3

History is such an interested business that it is tempting to think it has no truth at all. And then one option is to review it aesthetically instead of looking for its truth. But aesthetics, in its historical implications just outlined, has its own truth. It can go wrong, run out of steam, and disable itself as it becomes dated. Then it needs history to explain its malfunctions. But my interest here is in the reverse, corroborating case when, because consciousness of its aesthetic status is often a major part of its content, Romantic poetry can actually express such historical truth through a calculated shortfall in its achievement. This is rewriting history with a vengeance. Suspicion of the Romantic aestheticizing of history has tended to overlook Romantic exploitation of this opportunity. It happens most conspicuously in the Romantic diversification of the aesthetic in opposition to the single, monological expression of genius Romanticism ostensibly supports. My chapter argues that Byron is an example of doing this, and John Clare of suffering it. They probably are substantially on the same side, but on different sides of the same side. Already in his ‘Tales’, from 1814 onwards, Byron has begun to historicize the move from an aesthetic

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powered by individual self-expression to one whose individuality is an effect of linguistic variety. Equally this tactic uses the subtleties of aesthetic variance to explain a shift in the way in which history is understood. To insist on a single history correspondingly forces the aesthetic to belie its plural possibilities instead of making a polyphonal contribution to history’s real plurality of truths. This chapter therefore emphasizes that every historical period contains different histories of itself and that the versatility of poetry in the Romantic period is to be able to stage the competition between different histories of its own time through its own, aesthetic self-interrogation. The eponymous hero of Byron’s early verse tale, Lara (1814), is the apotheosis of the Romantic individual, a character of unfathomable origins and ineffable purposes. His own exceptional adventure is played out, however, to show that this individual is constructed out of intelligible circumstance: in fact the ultimate challenge for him is to acknowledge this construction. His terror that he may lose his uniqueness is presented as the last anxiety to be overcome by a man of extraordinary qualities, a challenge comparable to the fear of death or the unknowable. More formally understood, this dilemma is one in which poetry culminates in prose, and the imagination in memory. Lara’s aesthetic feigns philosophic failure rather than the other way round. The ‘literary absolute’ of Romantic ideology rewrites philosophical failure as symbolic success. But in Lara the critique is of the aesthetic, or rather, the point is that aesthetic shortfall can be calculated to lead us into redeeming explanations in the prosaic discourses it seemed to have been its raison d’être to transcend. Poetry’s self-transcendence here figures the switch between different histories that Byron’s own reaction to Pope urged.4 What we know or don’t know dominates character and story in Lara. Lara is an isolated figure returned to society from a self-imposed exile whose reasons remain undisclosed. Eventually he will die without the reader knowing if he committed the crime which led to Otho’s revenge on him. But by the end, Lara’s own cause has in any case disappeared, absorbed by a general rebellion of the ‘serfs’ which aligns his own till now indeterminate opposition with a common cause—as if its mystery had been transparently political all along. At the same time, though, the reader is left wondering whether there was anything more to Lara’s individualism than this eventual affiliation with serfs intent on emancipating themselves from feudalism. Their progressiveness lends to his truculence the only sense of direction it has. Certainly the narrative tries to preserve a difference between Lara and his lumpen allies. He is ‘Cut off by some mysterious fate from those / Whom birth and nature meant not for his foes’ (2.879–80). But, as these lines suggest, the ultimate mystery singling



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out Lara and alienating him from his own class is just the possibility of allegiance with the lowly. Lara’s inward detachment from ordinary purposes, his Romantic isolation, is stretched so finely that eventually it becomes nothing more than a transparency through which can then appear the intelligible actions of others. To some extent, this must reflect Byron’s own authorial anxieties. After the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had made him famous overnight in 1812, tales such as Lara established his popularity to an extraordinary degree. Yet his success, outdoing that of Scott’s poems and only capped by Scott’s novels, must have seemed to someone so keen not to appear ‘all author’ to efface its own distinction.5 Byron would eventually construct for himself an acceptable image of professionalism in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written in 1817–18 while he was starting Don Juan. But Lara certainly figures worries he shared with Coleridge about the loss of individual control consequent upon being taken up by an audience. And he anticipates by four years Peacock’s Essay on Fashionable Literature (1818), which is so full of a sense of the relativity of poetic discourse to the cultural purposes of different ages; ascriptions of inferiority to the genre of popular Romanticism just beg the critical question for Peacock. Yet Peacock only highlights the political fear of the higher class of radicals that enfranchisement doesn’t merely add to the numbers of the cultured classes, but rather takes them down. The new solidarity removes the very possibility of that finely tuned, imaginatively sympathetic gesture which had agitated in its radical cause. Lara does not yet show Byron greeting such authorial death with the new ironic art of his later manner; but his tale dramatizes the logic of professional suicide to which the democratic sympathies characterizing an exclusive literary aristocracy (Shelley is full of this fear) lead. For a time, Byron’s poetry ran two histories alongside each other. The first history, moving towards a conclusion, told the story of individualism fated to run out of a distinctive idiolect. The second drew in his ‘land’s language’ to make poetic achievement the epiphenomenon of a more Shakespearean (or Walter Scott-like) articulation of all the different registers of English. Although in the fourth canto of Childe Harold this surrender is immodestly compared to ‘the Attic Muse’ and Petrarch (‘Byron took fame by storm’, as Clare said), the personal abdication to something larger is real enough: I twine My hopes of being remembered in my line With my land’s language: if too fond and far These aspirations in their scope incline,— If my fame should be, as my fortunes are, Of hasty growth and blight, and dull Oblivion bar

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My name from out the temple where the dead Are honoured by the nations—let it be— And light the laurels on a loftier head! And be the Spartan’s epitaph on me— ‘Sparta hath many a worthier son than he.’ (4.76–86)

‘English’, as Keats was to conclude, ‘must be kept up’ by the poet who in this self-effacement before discursive authority would realize ‘the true voice of feeling’.6 And like Rousseau, Byron reaches for a Spartan touchstone when imagining such service to the commonwealth. The paradoxical reprise of the first history is repeated throughout Lara. Lara arrives ‘in sudden loneliness’ (1.43), yet in the eyes of the community to which he returns, he is expected to enjoy rights to property and to feel the obligations of ‘patrimonial fame’ (1.60). His inward misrule, it is already hinted, has produced common ‘crime’ (1.18), not a transvaluation of values matching a poet’s visionary privilege. When ‘From all communion he would start away’ (1.134), it is not into a singular dialect but to re-engage in a privileged communion in ‘the dark gallery, where his fathers frowned’ in ghostly conversation. All excesses of singularity return him to the symbolic order; all supernatural encounters are actually forms of the patriarchal grounding of that order. Early on in the poem, the discursive or institutional parameters of Lara’s excesses are established. Lara is unable to project himself beyond the public structures which are the prior conditions of identity. Although, like the narrator of Childe Harold, ‘his feelings sought / In that intenseness an escape from thought’, he must wake ‘from the wildness of that dream’ (1.121–2, 128). His subsequent silence about his excesses—the story of the poem which has to be one it does not tell—is thus not a sign of their inexpressibility but the fragile device for keeping their transgressiveness credible. Only silence about it can keep in play the referent needed to underwrite a Romantic expression beyond the reach of prosaic discourse: ‘Alas! He told not—but he did awake’ (1.129). And when he dreams in exotic languages, a grammatology as demystifying as psychoanalysis ensures translatability and so, again, publicity. Lara’s excess, his distinctive rebelliousness, threatens to equate with an unexceptional crime. The unreciprocated singularity which the poem’s manner wants for his expression tips into ordinary language. His apparently paradigmatic case for the existence of an independent aesthetic discourse collapses, including in its fall any individualized political rebellion hopeful of remaining charismatically distinct from class interest or historical circumstance. Lara’s crime and his silence about it, which the poem keeps telling us cannot be represented, is thus not full of expressive moment. As in Poe’s purloined letter, what is hidden is in front of us, in the symbolic order, not somewhere else. The poem protects the Romantic



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hero from being brought down by the likely banality of his transgression. Instead of signalling some questionable advance beyond good and evil, his action is in all probability eminently answerable to an existing law. To save the possibility that its content is not exhausted by positive legal description, the poem has to present its own aesthetic reticence as untranslatable. The historical relativity of this view, as Byron’s changes in style are going to confirm, is exposed by aesthetic nuance itself. Of all the English Romantic poets, Byron is the one who most conspicuously makes historical changes in his manner the content of his poetry. This is obvious from Beppo (written 1817, published 1818) onwards, but a version of the same argument is more discreetly present in earlier poems like Lara. In actually delaying and withholding information, Lara still pretends to be doing something other than manipulating plot; it makes as if to stage our authentic encounter with an experience which outruns ordinary powers of comprehension. Really, though, the aesthetic’s symbolic advantage over other kinds of representation uses its claims to a unique authenticity to distract us from realizing that we might be given the facts about Lara in another form. But it can only have this agency if it is more than this particular aesthetic; and it can only say this if it is a self-historicizing discourse at the same time. Lara, then, survives on the pretence that the aesthetic cannot represent his truth because to relate his story would be to do something no longer aesthetic. Aesthetic capital or principal is not for spending—but only if you see the aesthetic serving a particular historical interest. It could serve other interests, and so tell a different historical tale without effacing its purpose. As it stands, however, the aesthetic in Lara cannot represent what it is an alternative to if what it would sacrifice in the telling is what makes it aesthetic. The social dimension of the poem repeats this gambit or doxa that if we do not preserve the fiction that only in poetry can the truth be told, only in the language of a privileged imagination, we will empower and authorize a debasing democracy. Lara’s serfs ponder his secret: All was not well, they deem’d—but where the wrong? Some knew perchance—but t’were a tale too long; And such besides were too discreetly wise, To more than hint their knowledge in surmise; ‘But if they could—they could’—around the board Thus Lara’s vassals prattled of their lord. (1.149–54)

Why should the portentous language of a wild ‘surmise’ equate with the ‘prattle’ of the vassal class? The phrasing tries to convince us that the lowering would be the vassals’ responsibility not Lara’s for having committed a diminishing act deserving to be prattled about. ‘His silence

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formed a theme for other’s prate’ (1.293), but for how long can Lara’s ‘scorn’ of communication maintain his superiority to ordinary dialogue (1.307, 313)? Political and aesthetic prejudice go together. One would expect that political prejudices might be dispensable for someone who achieves a larger generosity by understanding their datedness; but the correlation with the aesthetic makes us aware of what is usually harder to see—the historical relativity of the current form of the aesthetic itself. The aesthetic does not vanish with the establishing of this correlation, but it does lose the dated claim to a uniqueness of expression and licenses the translation or delegation of its expressive privileges, its aura, elsewhere. The difficulty for the privileged radical to cede political authority is matched by the difficulty of thinking the reproduction of aesthetic achievement outside an exclusive sphere. Other versions become the ‘prate’ of those not sensitive enough to translate. The idea that their translation might provide historical timeliness for something outmoded is unthinkable. Lara, like Childe Harold, has tried everything. In his dissatisfaction, he sets up a symbolic mode which treats experiences as counters for his larger desires: ‘he ransacked all below, / And found his recompense in joy or woe, / No tame, trite medium; for his feelings sought / In that intenseness an escape from thought’ (1.119–22). Anticipating Keats, the elevation of the medium substitutes intensity for intellection. But unlike Keats’s dramatic ‘negative capability’, the ‘escape’ from thought identifies its sensation with superiority. Lara does not stoop to hide his crime but assumes ‘A seeming forgetfulness’ (1.269) evoking a silence ‘too deep for words’ (1.282), as if now recalling Wordsworthian sublimity. When he acts morally, it is ‘not because he ought, / But in some strange perversity of thought’ (1.340). He is only, that is, miming what others feel as obligation from a position sublimely free of precept and rule, just as Byron lets his language mime that of other poets. He invites descriptions construing his unsociableness as exotic, Satanic otherness: ‘He stood a stranger in this breathing world, / An erring spirit from another hurl’d’ (1.315–16). But this supernatural estrangement or playful detachment is habitually scotched by the way the poem relentlessly subjects Lara to conventional judgements: ‘this same impulse would, in tempting time, / Mislead his spirit equally to crime’ (1.343). The reader has already heard, in a gushy lyrical passage, of a night of self-sufficient beauty which Lara, in his transcendental gesture, tries to surpass in memories ‘Of skies more cloudless, moons of purer blaze’. ‘A night of beauty mock’d such breast as his’, however, and for once his mystery cannot outdo shared beauty (1.155–80). The next stanza immediately suggests the reason for this reverse, coming clean about the nature



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of this past whose aestheticization has ensured his singularity. ‘History’s pen’, we are told, ‘lies like truth, and still more truly lies’ (1.190). As in Byron’s drama Cain (1821), history is the tale told by the winners, and so a lie which accurately reflects the hegemony under which the defeated lost their voices. History stands in need of no aesthetic gloss to render its complex outmanoeuvring of monologic truth. It may convict or justify Lara, but nothing in its discursive dialogism necessarily confers favours. No wonder the night of beauty ‘mock’d’ Lara’s breast, his prettification of history’s multivalency showing up the limitations of his aesthetic of singularity. Increasingly throughout the poem, Lara’s difficulties suggest straightforward fears of detection. He is trapped in the limited aesthetic with which Byron shows us that no single history is history. The authority of Lara’s performance becomes hard to isolate. His show of superiority in an affected miming of what to others is obligatory or necessary becomes more successful the better he mimes and so the less superior he seems: With all that chilling mystery of mien, And seeming gladness to remain unseen; He had (if ’twere not nature’s boon) an art Of fixing memory on another’s heart; . . . None knew, nor how, nor why, but he entwined Himself perforce around the hearer’s mind; There he was stamp’d, in liking or in hate. . . (1.361–4, 371–3)

Whose memory? Lara’s own memory, or the other’s remembrance of him? Presumably the latter is meant, enforcing Lara’s unforgettable distinctiveness. Yet the very permeating power of Lara makes him finally undistinguishable from the hearer’s consciousness: Still there within the inmost thought he grew. You could not penetrate his soul but found, Despite your wonder to your own he wound; His presence haunted still; and from the breast He forced an unwilling interest; Vain was the struggle in that mental net, His spirit seem’d to dare you to forget. (1.377–82)

This is a parasitical possession. Perhaps the model is Geraldine in Coleridge’s Christabel, her relationship to the heroine pictured in the snake so closely wound round the dove as to match the bird’s respiration in its toils. This sympathetic, symbiotic success ends up having no substance of its own. Similarly when he makes common cause with the serfs’ rebellion against feudal oppression—‘mingling with his own the cause of all’ (1.244)—it is,

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like all revolutionary avant-gardes, effectively to extinguish his own social distinction. In both cases, the mystery of this man perfects his allegiances; his genius is in his power to assimilate himself, seemingly and without loss, to the cause of others. The poet’s surrender to his ‘land’s language’ (the drama, too, of Shelley’s poem of 1821, Adonais) works because it is a gift to us, an inheritance bequeathed, not a ghostly ventriloquism. The final demystification comes when the page, Kaled, is left to be Lara’s interpreter. He appears to go along with Lara’s mysterious self-construction, even to enhance it: ‘His memory read in such a meaning / More than Lara’s aspect unto others wore’ (1.612–13). Actually, though, Kaled knows that Lara’s superiority can be negotiated at a much lower prosaic rate than the aesthetic freedom from the obligations of conventional explanation. Now, finally, Kaled’s relationship to Lara is disenchanted. Kaled has mimed Lara’s superiority to the force of circumstance: as Lara’s servant he carries out orders ‘As if ’twas Lara’s less than his desire’ (1.562). Lara’s mystery is figured through Kaled’s erotic ambiguity, which, in its hints of femininity, tantalizingly exceeds the norms of either sex. His ‘feminine delicacy’ suggests ‘higher birth’ for a man, and his ‘latent fierceness’ something ‘More wild and high than woman’s eye betrays’ (1.579). All this beguiling elusiveness is scuppered, though, when Kaled’s relationship is clarified as straight, heterosexual love. Her devotion is orthodox. It has to be openly protected from looking banal by the narrator’s pre-emptive strikes against a questioning reader. ‘Why did she love him? Curious fool!—be still—/ Is human love the growth of human will?’ (2.1175–6). Again, this less resuscitates mystery than it repeats the poem’s collapse of Romantic singularity into common cause or shared natural process. Equally fraught are the final preservations of Lara’s secret from its prosaic disclosure as ordinary crime. Like a last confession, they are divulged in a foreign tongue he shares with Kaled, exoticized to stand for ‘some separate fate, / Whose darkness none beside should penetrate’ (2.1097–8). In fact, it is an owning-up couched as an erotic confidence—nothing unusual about that! When the tale of Lara’s murder of Ezelin is at last told, it is told by a peasant. The opposite of preserving Lara’s unique authority is achieved by delegating the task to a member of the class which will replace it. Romantic singularity is preserved less and less convincingly from demystification and reduction. History, the poem cumulatively demonstrates, can no longer be plausibly told from Lara’s point of view. H O M E L E S S AT H O M E Arguably, the character Lara arrives in Lara already displaced from another history: Lara is ‘homeless at home’, to use one of Clare’s phrases. In the



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‘Advertisement’ to Lara, Byron conceded that the reader ‘may probably regard it as a sequel to [The Corsair]’ (1814).7 The latter romance ends with the disappearance of its hero, Conrad. Lara begins with its hero’s return from adventures elsewhere. Byron happily leaves possible continuities up to the reader’s ‘determination’. At least The Corsair’s plot explains Conrad’s character, and then its dissolution, while Lara stages a will in excess of determination, an advantage we saw evanesce into the determinate characters surrounding Lara. Conrad’s departure from The Corsair can be seen as a relinquishment of an interpretable self. Of course the two stories don’t fit together in a single narrative, but it is true to say that Lara begins where The Corsair left off—with the re-emergence of a character who has stepped out of his explanatory context. And this escape from accountability is thematically prepared for by the story of Conrad. His reverses undermine him in a manner eventually reflected at the level of literary device, the reflexive level so foregrounded by the later work. The initial presentation of Conrad’s pirate company in The Corsair unproblematically maps a sublime sense of self on to imperial politics: O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, Our thoughts are boundless, and our souls are free, Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam, Survey our empire, and behold our home. (1.1–4)

The sublime here is a conventional success, not threatened by the progressive emptying of its content and transparency to other more tangible discourses which befalls the Romantic mystery of Lara. Conrad—‘That man of loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’ (1.173–4)—is explicable, Jerome McGann’s edition suggests, as allegorizing the disillusion with Regency society recorded in Byron’s journal of 1813–14. Conrad’s marriage to Medora has a Regency fragility threatened by adventure. To the extent that Conrad’s individualism claims to exceed this motive, he is criticized in the poem. His posture of charismatic antinomianism or proto-Nietzschean moral scepticism is described as mistake or misprision: ‘Doomed by his very virtues for a dupe, / He cursed those virtues as the cause of ill, / And not the traitors who betrayed him still’ (1.256–8). The poem’s Preface expresses uncomplicated disapproval of Byronic heroes: ‘I must admit Childe Harold to be a very repulsive personage’.8 The plot, in other words, tells us what to think of characters: characters do not successfully symbolize a reserve in excess of their circumstances. It is the intelligible twists in The Corsair’s plot which so erode Conrad’s self-possession that he must make himself untraceable. Lara then shows the implausibility of this afterlife. The pirates monumentalize Conrad’s dead bride, but ‘for him they raise not the recording

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stone’ (3.693). The coda leaves Lara to deal with the consequences when a history and its literary idiom have come to an end. How is Conrad eclipsed, and how is the literary history sanctioning his Romantic self-presentation marginalized? Conrad is a bad lot with one remaining virtue, that of love, ‘this loveliest one’ (1.308). He is rescued, after his abortive raid on Seyd the Pasha’s stronghold, by Gulnare, Seyd’s slave. She saves him from death by impalement, and to make good his escape, she murders Seyd. Earlier, Conrad and his pirates had rescued Gulnare and the women of the harem from their torching of Seyd’s palace. Now, though, when Gulnare returns the compliment, its symmetry troubles Conrad. He tries out a number of excuses for not escaping. First, he could not abandon his men; second, ‘by many a lawless deed’ he actually deserves Seyd’s revenge. He resents not being allowed to recognize the moral law and so, like Schiller’s Karl Moor, finally to understand his own superiority through that recognition. His sublime grace, in other words, reposes in his dignity as a member of a free community of self-legislating individuals. Gulnare’s rescue disorientates him because her action is not motivated by this universal in a number of ways. Her behaviour is immoral, feminist, and orientalist. She murders Seyd in his sleep rather than fairly in battle; she does so both to escape from feminine slavery and also because of the attraction she feels towards Conrad; these ‘fond workings of a woman’s mind’ also produce a fear in Conrad of ‘the fire that lights an Eastern heart’ (3.355). Conrad the Greek is thus given the freedom he prizes as essential to his self-esteem by a route different from idealism. To have its universal effectively delivered to him by an undeniably partial, gendered, and ethnic motive destroys its saving high-mindedness completely. To accept freedom from Gulnare is indistinguishable from imprisonment by Seyd. Yet Conrad’s sense of self has become dependent on Gulnare’s response, ‘Gulnare, the homicide!’ (3.463). She murders Seyd, but she also, by finally provoking Conrad to respond to her with a kiss, makes him thoroughly bad. He, if you like, plays Macbeth to her Medea. Love, his only virtue, has undone him: ‘His latest virtue then had joined the rest’ (3.548). He can only be forgiven by more of the feminine wilfulness that destroyed his self-regard, whether through Medora’s fondness or that ‘mother’s softness’ which overcomes him at her deathbed (3.648). At all events, this bodily dependence, like Lara’s on Kaled, tells too simple a tale. Deprived of its singularity, his existence loses its justification, its aesthetic singularity, and so disappears from the poem. At the end, the symbols lead nowhere, and are traces of nothing: the ‘sea-boat’s broken chains’ are uninformative, and this time the sea cannot restore the community of free spirits even if the pirates’ ‘hope revives’ and ‘they follow o’er the main’ (3.686). The Corsair



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can only reappear in another poem, Lara, where, from the start, his enigma is couched in a discredited expression tied to a displaced aesthetic. W H E N WO R D S R E F U S E .  .   . We have seen Byron criticize and exploit the existence of a new aesthetic in opposition to which art could find still newer content. The personal mystery of Conrad and Lara self-incriminatingly idealized the ‘stretched’ individualism of the new professionalism he loathed but which could be made to work against itself.9 The ‘author who is all paper’, aggressively despised in Beppo, is revealed to be not a self-writing autonomous unit but someone whose singularity is, properly understood, the effect of discursive variety. Byron’s own narrators are happy in this condition, ironically relishing the reserve created by their failure to coincide with any of the opinions, attitudes, or stances they assume. Their aristocratic lack of anxiety over authorial self-accreditation so important to the heroes of the ‘Tales’ paradoxically makes them better vehicles of a more democratic literariness, an aesthetic which is happy to concede lack of originality in the interests of a wider view of historical production. Fear of losing one’s sense of uniqueness is tolerable only when presented as the last anxiety to be overcome by the man of extraordinary qualities: a challenge which, like the fear of death, demands not action (which would be ridiculous, for who is immortal?) but reflection. Formally understood, though, the move is not from Romanticism to classicism, but to a more inclusive Romanticism in which, to adapt Barthes, the author’s death as a single voice is her resurrection in many voices. When Romanticism is thus understood, M. H. Abrams’s lyric paradigm of it needs replacing by drama as the Romantic signature.10 This aesthetic versatility was not historically possible for everyone. Failure to achieve it, though, is historically informative. The contrast between individual literary fates writes British history in a peculiarly illustrative way at this time. In the case of the poet John Clare, an agrarian labourer, we encounter an increasing discursive dissociation which appears personal. Clare’s madness gets expressed in his estrangement from a series of dominant aesthetics—the picturesque, Romantic individualism, and Byronic drama. Recent criticism of Clare (mostly stemming from John Barrell’s definitive study) has perhaps overvalued his escape from a hegemonic picturesque into another framework in which what would otherwise appear bizarrely egalitarian is constructed as robustly paratactic.11 When, in the poem ‘Pleasant Places’, Clare describes scenes that are ‘the picturesque. . . to me’ (10), the landscape is not painted but paints for itself:

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While painting winds to make compleat the scene In rich confusion mingles every green Waving the sketchy pencil in their hands Shading the living scenes to fairy lands[.]‌(11–14)12

The picturesque idiom is not abandoned; it is just that its authority lies elsewhere, in the object-position the subject supposedly controls. But this way of maintaining that an aesthetic is still discernible stretches credibility. Hence comes the concession that such beauty is really a kind of faëry, or a shading in which is actually a fanciful dematerialization. Or the creativity one sees reflected back from nature (when walking upon ‘Emmonsales Heath’) becomes the imagining of a pre-human, prehistorical divine fiat— the Creation Story: Creation’s steps ones wandering meets Untouched by those of man Things seem the same in those retreats As when the world began. (25–8)13

Here it is the ‘seem’ that concedes that the handing over of responsibility for the pleasing order of landscape from human art to something else is a literalism so extreme as to be the product of semblance. To give to nature the creativity Clare thinks stolen from him is to figure what he cannot do. For many, the figuration redeems the failure, but I will argue that the poetry itself says the opposite, and the painful failure is lodged literally in the obligation to figure it. When Clare’s aesthetic appears successful, the carefully judged receding planes and controlled vistas of the picturesque are displaced by a groundup view directly privileging the position from which Clare worked on and saw the land; not a position from which aesthetic proportion was imposed but one obviously subject to the contingencies of up and down, bareness and growth, low and high. Once this virtuosity is recognized, Clare’s poems of nests, animals, birds look original, his representations enhanced by the technical advantages his viewpoint let him exploit, rather than the sentimentalities of sympathy. Adorno’s famous exposition of parataxis in Hölderlin’s later poetry extols what is unsaid: the poet is responsible for what remains after language is drained of its assertive order—in the mantra from Andenken (written 1803), ‘Was aber bleibet stiften die Dichter’.14 But Clare describes what remains in order to show that independence can have its own order and need not be antinomian. By this I mean that Clare’s landscapes are only deemed those of an ‘original’ by turning special disadvantage into a general aesthetic value—an original freedom from the prevailing aesthetic rather than a falling-short of its standards. When the imposition of hierarchical power left literary page and pictorial canvas to



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assert itself in the enclosure and compartmentalization of Clare’s land, then Clare’s originality could no longer stand up on its own. He registers historical change in a strangely incoherent manner. Faëry beckons again. In the poem ‘The Fairey Rings’, the naturally occurring circles of mushrooms, in pasture safe from unscrupulous cultivation, are in the charge of an older dispensation of past superstition and present nomadic life: Here in the greensward & the old molehills Where ploughshares never come to hurt the things Antiquity hath charge of—fear instills Her footsteps—& the ancient fairey rings Shine black & fresh & round—the gipsey’s fire Left yesternight scarce leaves more proof behind Of midnight sports. . . (1–7)

Fear’s footsteps, in his suggestive use of ‘instills’ with its extra ‘l’, both keeps the unfarmed peace and lets us hear the uncanny reverberation of the fanciful imaginary required to conjure such peace. The natural phenomena become ‘shadows of things modeled long ago’ (22).15 For behind the strategy of enclosure lay an opposite deregulation. The free-market economy was what justified the division of the old commons into conspicuously separate parcels of land. To the aesthetic it replaced, its mapping would have appeared as arbitrary as had Clare’s pedestrian ramble which, equally conspicuously, it restricted. Clare cannot become a Gypsy, so displacement leaves him a peculiar kind of vagrant, one who cannot cure himself when home and homelessness have become the same thing.16 Another parataxis supplanted the apparently random order Clare poetically represented as specific to his own point of view, that of the agrarian labourer rather than of the connoisseur. The new commercial organization of the land cared nothing for traditional freedoms, and so Clare’s resistance was tempted into nostalgia and, ultimately, the madness of homeless displacement. His sense of place cannot survive the overall shifts in social and economic gear because these shifts encompass both the controls his distinctive aesthetic displaced and the deregulated alternative it espoused. Its random displaced his random. He becomes alienated from his own alienation and loses all control. He frequently falls into the hegemonic trope of nostalgia or the reconstruction of his lost location as visionary or otherworldly landscape. His erotic idiom uses the disorientation of the experience of love to figure something more generally symptomatic and disabling: O Mary sing thy songs to me Of love and beautys melody My sorrows sink beneath distress

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My deepest griefs are sorrowless So used to glooms and cares am I My fearless troubles seem as joy O Mary sing thy songs to me Of love and beauty’s melody. (1–8)17

His genuine ‘distress’ lets the clichés of love and beauty sit beside a palpable inability to articulate what he feels. We would have to turn him into Adorno’s Hölderlin to retrieve something here. How can griefs be sorrowless, unless they represent a kind of general disharmony in which they stand for the whole self ’s deprivation of the means to articulate itself? Mary’s songs may console, but her poetry and its aesthetic values displace rather than get on terms with the issue of why he suffers. That is what the sequence in the stanza implies. Or else he departs this world altogether, leaving ‘the greenwood tree’18 for another kind of self-certainty, which rhymes with an ‘eternity’ (in the iconic ‘Invite to Eternity’) that clearly is not liveable. In one late ‘Song’ he equivocates extraordinarily on ‘lives’, matching impersonal natural process with the way Mary ‘lives’ in his thought of her, and then, with a certain logical desperation, deducing personality from that living so that, impossibly, she can return his love. Just as the summer keeps the flower Which spring concealed in hoods of gold Or unripe harvest met the shower And made earth’s blessings manifold Just so my Mary lives for me A silent thought for month and years The world may live in revelry Her name my lonely quiet cheers And cheer it will what e’er may be While Mary lives to think of me. (21–30)19

These new poems have their peculiarity and value, but (as Barrell has argued) they are consistently less ‘original’. Their incoherencies sit as snugly within Romantic apocalyptic idioms as do Clare’s modifications of grammar and diction to please his publishers Taylor and Hessey. Clare’s presence in London when Byron’s death was announced prompted a response couched in an interesting mix of registers. The romance of the great poet is captured in the infectious adulation of a young girl, homage which Clare vaunts above published elegy and obituary. He just about slips himself into Byron’s place, though, to become the target of the girl’s affections himself—‘I could almost feel in love with her for the sigh she had uttered for the poet.’20 Then follows a Shelleyan transference of poetic radicalism to the social class to which the girl belongs:



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The common people felt his merits & is power & the common people of a country are the best feelings of a prophecy of futurity they are the veins & arteries that feed & quicken the heart of living frame The breathings of eternity & the soul of time are indicated in that prophecy[.]‌21

The language of ‘futurity’ and ‘eternity’ here does not signify, as it does elsewhere in Clare’s poetry, an apocalyptic escape from hegemonic expression into one of pure vision—which, I have suggested, usually indicates either exclusion from social effectiveness, or the archetypal human homelessness attributed by stock Romantic philosophy to our essential condition.22 Clare instead identifies here with his host environment and lets the prophetic register express the inevitability of social transformation led from below for the benefit of all. A few sentences further on we get the prosaic version of Byron’s effect on the lower classes: ‘I believe that his liberal principles in religion & politics did a great deal towards gaining the notice & affections of the lower orders.’23 Something is lost, though, in this reversion to the notion of reform prescribed from the top-down; we seem asked to appreciate the condescension of the noble lord commanding the loyalty of his inferiors. When the inferior class is in the vanguard, though, radical poetic energy becomes a triumph of life, the quickening of an entire society within the ‘living frame’ of a body politic, its ‘veins & arteries’. The lower orders no longer defer to the noble avant-garde but make it their weapon: the repetitive paradoxes we saw in Lara, where social solidarity was only furnished by the collapse of distinction into the forces producing it, are replaced by something presaging direct action. These moments are rare in Clare, but they show the target from which his madness distracted him. To overvalue the undoubted poetry he could make out of describing this distraction is to miss the distraction. Spectacular undermining of identity certainly has its frissons and can sound like the shocking Blake of the Pickering MS. Harold Bloom was the most influential critic to argue that Clare approached perfection as he approached Blakean apocalypse. But, again, there is such genuine pain in Clare’s work here, which we grievously underplay if we only enjoy the exciting invocation of the desolation at the expense of its reality, ‘this sad non-identity’ (14) of ‘An invite to Eternity’.24 The visionary Clare lives in an environment of the ‘vague unpersonifying things’ (90) of ‘The Flitting’, which saps rather than transfigures his consciousness. The frustration by the ‘fence of ownership’ and ‘enclosure’ of his ‘following eye’ leave ‘birds and trees and flowers without a name’ in ‘The Mores’ (8, 78, 9, 77). This allows him a negative dialectic, in which the paradisial idea becomes easier because the vanished experience of a named world can appear as Adam’s Edenic possession: it is through not having it that he can figure its value so tellingly in a world whose likenesses would corrupt it. But this poem in

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which, disturbingly, ‘joy [is] the art of true believing’ (78) is called ‘Decay’ and charts the decline of ‘poesy’. The heroic rebaptism of the uprooted soul in ‘A Vision’—‘I gave my name immortal birth / And kept my spirit with the free’ (15–16)—is literally deranged and it is straightforwardly anachronistic to think of it as a triumphant Yeatsian remaking of the self. It is a picture of his knowledge rather than a successful poetic manner when he tells us that ‘My life hath been a wreck’ (430). A different historiography is at work.25 That verdict on his life comes from his own Child Harold, and its pessimistic judgement is doubled by the prevailing nonsensical identification with the hero of Byron’s poem. Byron’s ironic doubling of authority through his superior play on stylistic convention was a sane solution to the aesthetic scepticism with which we began. Clare’s ‘Don Juan’ is similarly just clumsy enough to read like a travesty of Byron’s parody. His aesthetic failure, that is, is not redeemed by falling into another aesthetic, another level of saving irony. But the reality of the history he tells comes through as a result of the aesthetic impasse. His lived pain is very audible when understood in connection with his social displacement and with a society that has opted for an economic efficiency running roughshod over the home which gives Clare his identity. His apocalyptic turn tells that story all the better for failing to achieve Byronic insouciance or Yeatsian eternity. In ‘The Moorehen’s Nest’, Clare happily affixes the terms ‘wild romances’ and ‘picturesque’ to that roving through the countryside in which he is ‘now finding nests—then listening to a song’ (47, 50).26 Good readers of Clare have always puzzled over his merging of naive and sentimental—or spontaneity and self-consciousness—and his paradoxically unmediated enjoyment of a kind of ‘textual’ nature.27 His language is much happier when he leaves aside conventional aesthetic soubriquets and, free of conventional legitimation, he can ‘catch at little pictures passing bye’ (209). His pedestrian mode is then contentedly particular and anecdotal in its happy observations, its images of unpublished pleasures—the next seven phrases begin with the indefinite article. Different birds’ nests, which Clare delights to happen upon, especially detain the course of his following eye. His gaze settles on these aesthetically unprogrammed stabilities. ‘In every walk if I but peep I find’ (2), he says in ‘Birds Nests’, meaning on his walks not on the walk belonging to some estate.28 Or in the natural biographies of birds and animals he finds an inherent repose, not one abstracted from vitality. This reaches apotheosis in a ‘gypsey liberty’ (24, 64, 80), a kind of total wandering in which hare and fox are ‘the neighbours where we dwell / & all the guests we see’ (‘Gipsy Song’, 61–2).29 The temptation here is for the reader simply to find Clare’s homelessness exhilaratingly nomadic rather than a damaging expatriation. But, like Romantic or modernist



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apocalypse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s postmodern ideas about the nomadic, extraterritorial literature of the minority, stuttering by the conventional standards of the time, help Clare’s reader, although not conclusively. We must remember that the freedoms he enjoys are, in this context, tempered by catachresis and schizophrenic pain.30 The critical idea that Clare is outside a hegemonic aesthetic by being inside something else has many variants. I would follow Paul Chirico’s moderation of this opposition to take account of the coexistence in Clare’s poetry of writing where it seems sufficient for poetry if he inventories nature from his own point of view, and another kind of poetry—nostalgic, full of velleity, reminiscence, regret, lost love. He could write that: There is nothing but poetry about the existence of childhood real simple soul-moving poetry laughter and joy of poetry & not its philosophy & there is nothing of poetry about manhood but the reflection & remembrance of what has been[.]‌31

That Clare could resume the poetry of childhood in his maturity is the double-take he requires to be true to history by telling it in a necessarily disjointed way, so different from Wordsworthian synthesis. The deregulation behind free-market thinking justifying enclosure turns customary rights to common pasture into what ‘has been’, yes; but it also offends against the picturesque. It therefore occupies the oppositional position with which Clare has been identified. His poetry shows, in a way, say, that Wordsworth’s complaints about the encroaching railway in the final edition of his Guide to the Lakes (1835) could not, the embarrassing analogy between two kinds of speculation—that of a modern, neoliberal economic freedom and that produced by the vagrancy of a Romantic imagination freed from aesthetic regulation. In Clare’s world, everything competes for his attention on its merits; none is accorded special favour. Even the death of a badger, baited by dogs, is just something the animal does, not an event more special than his other activities—he ‘leaves his hold and cackles groans and dies’ (‘The Badger’, 52). Such power of observation need not be simple and can have its own virtuosity, as when Clare feels a scorching noon in summer, ‘a liquid blaze. . . As if crooked bits of glass / Seem’d repeatedly to pass’ (‘Noon’, 4–8). The entitlement conferred here even on moment and gleam, the minute divisions of time and space, is extraordinary. Taken together, Byron and Clare tell history in ways that show the importance of poetry as a form of historiography. Byron’s history divides in response to different interests and their respective images of the age. In exhausting the sway of one, he shows the supersession of the other. These images are therefore shown to belong to a divided self

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which poetic irony is perfectly poised to express. In fact, the ultimate weapon available to those trying to historicize otherwise inescapable social and political conditions was to dissolve their own artistic identity into its medium, to become a chapter in the history of the language in which they wrote. But what was an empowering dissolution for Byron, Keats, Shelley, and the rest of those for whom historical survival, and so becoming linguistic currency, validated personal idiom even at the expense of its personality, was not so for Clare. Byron could dramatize his dilemma in new poetic characters (Lara) and aesthetic manoeuvre (surrendering to his ‘land’s language’). Clare’s class was defeated by progress, his rural way of life taken over by capitalist opportunism. The customary practice guiding Clare’s writing of landscape bypassed aristocratic privilege but so did venture capitalism. For him, the alternative to this destructive symmetry was to be gathered up into ‘the artifice of eternity’. But this step, too, was into a literal disintegration even if its idiom naturally fell in with apocalyptic idioms suggesting to us poetic empowerment or proto-modernist acceptance that language speaks us as much as we speak language—to see Clare’s poetry as the precursor of Yeats’s ‘words alone are certain good’ (‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’, 10, 43). The right way to read Clare is to read him against this grain, to unravel the warp and the woof which was to make up the literary texture of the Romantic heritage. He knew this, and in saying so, said something Byron could not say. We hear it in a poem like the ‘Song’ in ‘Child Harold’ beginning ‘No single hour can stand for naught.’ It is much easier for us, though, to mistake Clare’s words as accessing another poetic dimension rather than to accept his insistence on the literal meaning of his hours, their historical character, the ‘aching’ his time ‘calendars’, and so the enforced rather than achieved silence history imposed on him and his like. To make silence expressive rather than repressive is precisely the temptation he sees himself as having to resist. No single hour can stand for naught No moment hand can move But calendars an aching thought Of my first lonely love Where silence doth the loudest call My secrets to betray As moonlight holds the night in thrall As suns reveal the day I hide it in the silent shades Till silence finds a tongue I make its grave where time invades Till time becomes a song. (1–12)



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It is almost impossible for us now not to find this expressive at some level. But the voice of silence is always the voice of loss, however much it seems to fall into line with some kind of recuperation: When words refuse before the crowd My Marys name to give The muse in silence sings aloud And there my love will live. (21–4)

The words refuse because she is lost. The poetry denies its audience. The value of his life has gone. The song we hear is that song, and we neglect it at the risk of missing the history, the time, that it sings. Finally, I want to argue for an illustrative connection between the difficulties and demands on the critic trying to get on terms with Clare’s dislocation, and the notorious problems facing his editors. For both, his irregularity is at once the source of poetic distinctiveness and also the source of his troubles. Not to undervalue the former, or scant the latter, is the peculiar challenge faced by his critical readers and editors. As Jonathan Bate summarized it all so well in his ‘Appendix’ on the subject in his biography of Clare, ‘the difficulties of Clare’s texts extend far beyond the question of regularization’.32 He tells the tale of how Eric Robinson justified gaining possession of the copyright for many Clare poems by claiming he did so in order to ensure that Clare was properly edited. The exclusion of other editors was peculiar enough, but as Bate pertinently asks, ‘How did Clare stumble into the bizarre position of still being “owned” nearly a century and a half after his death?’33 The bizarreness, though, is true to Clare’s doubly negative escape from normal rules of poetic engagement. His distance from the entire system of editorial authority can only be preserved by an unusual exercise of that authority. Sara Guyer helpfully probes the funny notions of authenticity behind both Robinson’s action and Bate’s query. The authentic Clare which all editors seek is a fiction, a kind of ‘prosopopoeia’ which only has a rhetorical never a literal significance. Guyer’s De Manian scepticism is a helpful tool for undermining the assumptions behind univocal declarations of what Clare’s poetry is or how one might treat him ‘justly’. But like all De Man’s criticism, it works at a level of generality neglectful of the ‘case’ of Clare, as James Chandler might have called it.34 To hear Clare speak through the editorial process he renders dysfunctional is also to outflank the definition of that failure to secure his authentic text as a failure in general rather than something historically specific. Justice, like history, is more than an authenticity befuddled by its figurations. To write au juste is a much less decisive and much more expressive business. But the twists and turns necessary to find Clare in his manuscripts and editions are those with which he has already exercised the attentive reader through the way in which he writes.

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1. The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), v. 265. 2. All references are to Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93). Line numbers are cited parenthetically in the main text. 3. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), tr. with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 652. 4. My interpretation here can be broadly understood as reversing the thesis of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s influential take on the relations between literature and philosophy. See The Literary Absolute, tr. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988). 5. Philip Martin’s analysis helps me here: ‘The distinction shared by the two poets, that of bringing the popular poem to the apex of its transitory circulation, is perhaps a dubious one, and one which also depends on the fortuitous state of social circumstances rather than on an artistic impulse to create or cater for a democratised reading public’. Byron: A Poet before his Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 20. 6. Keats, The Letters of John Keats: 1814–21, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), ii. 167. 7. Complete Poetical Works, i. 214. 8. Complete Poetical Works, i. 148. 9. ‘Stretched’ was one of the critical terms Byron contemptuously applied to Keats’s poetry in a famous piece of vitriol. Keats himself had used the word in his epigraph to Endymion (1818), adapting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17: ‘The stretched metre of an antique rhyme’. The dedication to Chatterton, who seems modern to Keats through the historical fraud of his supposedly medieval Rowley poems, further emphasizes how prominent and fraught an issue aesthetic historiography then was. 10. See M. H. Abrams, ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’ (1965), in F. W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (eds), From Sensibility to Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 527–60. 11. John Barrell, The Idea of the Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 12. John Clare, The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Anne Tibble and R. K. R. Thornton (Manchester: MidNAG and Carcanet, 1978), 415. Line numbers are cited parenthetically in the main text. 13. Clare, Midsummer Cushion, 160. 14. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Noten zur Literatur’, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970–86), xi. 457–60. 15. Midsummer Cushion, 417. 16. There is an instructive contrast here with Wordsworth’s understanding of vagrancy (not kind to Gypsies), which preserves the opposition between



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walking and residing that Clare cannot, and so can make of walking a kind of ‘walking cure’. See Celeste Langan’s fascinating discussion in ‘The Walking Cure’, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 225–72. 17. The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964), 45. 18. Later Poems of John Clare, 128. 19. Later Poems of John Clare, 58. 20. ‘The Autobiography: 1793–1824’, The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 99. 21. Clare, ‘Autobiography’, 100. 22. See Barrell, Idea of the Landscape; and Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 444–56. 23. Clare, Prose, 100. 24. Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare, ed. Geoffrey Robinson and Geoffrey Sumerfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 196–7. 25. Selected Poems and Prose, 176, 169, 183, 198. 26. Midsummer Cushion, 208. 27. See Juliet Sychrava, From Schiller to Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). In John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Paul Chirico writes of the ‘centripetal focus for a hermetic poetics’, making Clare’s inwardness with nature sound (rightly, I think) like a kind of inscape or poetic stress from within nature (170). 28. Midsummer Cushion, 489. 29. Midsummer Cushion, 325–7. 30. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, foreword Réda Bensmaïa, tr. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Langan uses Deleuze and Guattari (although only with reference to Anti-Oedipus) very astutely in Romantic Vagrancy. 31. Prose, 44–5. 32. Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003), 571. 33. Bate, John Clare, 573. 34. Sara Guyer, ‘Figuring John Clare: Romanticism Editing, and the Possibility of Justice’, Studies in Romanticism, 51/1 (2012), 6–9. Langan again is shrewd on the historical specificity of the Romantic mistaking of walking for freedom, Romantic Vagrancy (144).

11 Historical Fiction and the Fractured Atlantic Fiona Robertson What time the thirteen Governors that England sent convene In Bernard’s house, the flames covered the land. They rouse, they cry, Shaking their mental chains they rush in fury to the sea To quench their anguish; at the feet of Washington down fallen, They grovel on the sand and writhing lie, while all The British soldiers through the thirteen states sent up a howl Of anguish, threw their swords and muskets to the earth and ran From their encampments and dark castles, seeking where to hide From the grim flames and from the visions of Orc; . . . (William Blake, America: A Prophecy)1

One of the strangest details in Blake’s America (1793) is the architectural archaism of the ‘dark castles’ occupied by the British army. In resetting the American War of Independence in an older landscape of aristocratic and military struggle, Blake skews his poem’s historical specificity and his own role as visionary or ‘prophetic’ historian—though this detail is easy to overlook in a narrative of America’s formal and conceptual concentration, and diffuseness. The imagined ‘dark castles’ anticipate the disconcerting elision of ‘America’ from America at the end of the poem, when the narrative of revolution recrosses the Atlantic to France, and older architectural forms take on their traditional, highly politicized, implications in European revolutionary discourse.2 A unique form of historical narrative—cyclical but also, paradoxically, millenarian—Blake’s America represents an elaborate ongoing struggle between linear and particularized history (the war, Washington, Warren, Paine) and cyclical and universalized history (the incarnation and its repetitions, especially in the liberation of Orc, which heralds a new age of revolution across the globe). These two



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historical forms meet, or collide, in the American War but are also fractured (in Blake’s language, ‘rent apart’) by that war.3 To use a detail from Blake to introduce an argument about Romantic historiography may seem, in itself, to distort the terms of debate; and certainly Blake’s style of historical narrative could never be taken to typify the intellectual movements of his time. However, the contradictions of Blake’s America bring into focus the oddity of the historiographical analysis this chapter seeks to identify. America’s oblique, antithetical historical narrative is as it is not only because it is by Blake, I propose, but also because it engages with the great rupture in Britain’s body politic in the late eighteenth century—the revolutionary war in America. This chapter argues that the fracture in Britain’s colonial history realized in the American War had serious, so far largely unmapped, consequences for British historical writing; and traces these consequences in the historical fiction of the period. The American War of Independence, and the radical break it represented for British writers and thinkers, challenged not only established modes of British political and social thought, and literary expression, but also the formal qualities of historical narrative—that is, the structure of story, historiographical perspective and voice, linearity and progression. Defined by many at the time in terms of its supposed lack of history, the United States constituted a new and dangerous form of the fictive—self-fashioned, projected, formless. In contrast, Britain was increasingly conceptualized in terms of the historical, rather than the modern. In early American histories of the United States this constituted the conceptual underpinning of what Karen O’Brien has called the ‘delayed Americanisation’ of historical narrative;4 while in British histories, both traditional and fictional, the form of history becomes as if naturally conservative or traditionalist—not by any means a characteristic of history-writing per se. The central texts considered in this chapter are prose fictions: Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793), Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), and Scott’s less well-known late short story ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ (1828). The argument bringing them together crosses several different traditional divisions: between types of fiction seen to take historicity more or less ‘seriously’; between English and Scottish fiction; between fiction by women and by men in which, as Ina Ferris has suggested, Scott came to compensate for the perceived shortcomings of a female literary genre;5 and between two civil wars, the American War of Independence and the Jacobite uprising of 1745–6. The wider context of this argument is the persistent intransigence in British writing of the post-1776 period in dealing with the subject matter of American history—both the history of the British colonies in North America and the emerging history of the new United States, in itself a priority subject in the early decades of the United States, a matter of urgent

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self-definition.6 How can history be written—and what are the pressures on historiography in theory and in practice—in a time of fracture? How does fracture itself, formally and imaginatively, become the precondition of historiography, not implicitly (as it arguably always has been), but instead at the heart of Romantic historiography, in loss and disconnection? 1.   F R A C T U R E D H I S TO R I E S When Britain’s thirteen American colonies declared independence, they challenged not only a political system of governance but also an intellectual system ruled by precedent and received authority. Implicitly but inescapably, to hold truths to be self-evident is to declare them impervious to refutations based on comparative analysis, including historical analysis. Among the many changes which American independence produced—changes in the shape of the emerging nation, its politics, peoples, territories; and in the shape of the rest of the world, as established nations redefined themselves in a new world order—was a subtle but potent challenge to historiography. The conundrum of how, in these circumstances, to write history registered immediately in Britain in William Robertson’s History of America (1777; parts 9 and 10 published posthumously, 1796), a work ‘left in a state of permanently suspended animation’, as I have argued elsewhere.7 It continued in the marked paucity of British treatments of North American history in novels, plays, poems, and more formal historical narratives of the period 1776–1826; and, also, in subsequent cultural and literary histories, to the lack of attention paid to those few works which lingered over the American past. Robert Southey’s unfinished long narrative poem Oliver Newman: A New-England Tale was a rare venture into seventeenth-century American colonial history, and unread outside his immediate circle until its posthumous publication in 1845—a stark contrast to the prominence, in his own time and in modern critical analysis, of his treatments of South America. Thomas Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming: A Pennsylvanian Tale (1809)—set against the backdrop of the ‘Wyoming Massacre’ of 1778—was the most important and influential historical imagining of the American colonies in the period, though it is now marginal to most histories of Romantic poetics.8 British writers seem simply to have been reluctant to lay claim, in narrative form, to the history of the American colonies, because this history was so strongly felt—on both sides of the Atlantic—to be the property of the new United States. In our own received versions of literary and historical tradition—on both sides of the Atlantic—it has become natural to set aside American history as something properly part of a new intellectual tradition, and no



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longer important in European historical practice. Georg Lukács’s seminal account of the rise of historical fiction, most influentially, placed historical fiction firmly in a European context of French revolutionary unrest and national self-definition.9 As in so many Romantic-era narratives, and indeed in most modern historical narratives of the period, the shaping intellectual force has come to be regarded as distinctively European. However, for British writers, a more fundamental challenge to national identity and national story had taken place over a decade before revolutionary unrest in France. The United States was (and is) routinely posited as a political precursor to events in France, although there was little ideological continuity between the two struggles. In consequence, Atlantic fracture separated not only Britain from the former colonies, but also the story of American independence from later European stories. The United States may have been theorized as independent of history, but it incorporated historical precedent to its identity from the start, at first in architectural and rhetorical allusions to classical republicanism, and increasingly in literary and historical works devoted to the realization and dissemination of an ‘American’ past. As the United States concentrated on establishing its own history, European writers tactfully withdrew their gaze—this, at least, is what we have come to expect, and to regard as fitting. In fact, what happened was more complicated, and far more interesting, aesthetically and historiographically. If we are prepared to set aside the assumptions of traditional, national histories of history-telling, and to look instead at particular pieces of British historical fiction, we can begin to see the consequences of Atlantic fracture in the ways in which history involving the United States could be imagined, and written, in the decades following independence. The fracture between the historical traditions of Britain and the United States is very clearly marked in the traditions established within literary history. Scholarly analyses of the Romantic period have long associated the politicized metaphors of the ‘dawn’ of which Wordsworth writes in The Prelude with the French Revolution—an essential association, in fact, if an identifiable literary ‘period’ is to ‘begin’ somewhere, preferably in France in 1789. In keeping with Wordsworth’s emphasis on the formative impressions of childhood, however, it is notable that for the writers of Wordsworth’s immediate generation—those born in and around 1770—the actual war taking place during their childhoods was the War of Independence. The most important historical writer of the nineteenth century, Walter Scott, later enshrined in tradition the Scottishness of his formative years, but the ‘Memoirs’ he began at Ashestiel in April 1808 (when he was 36—a few years older than the Wordsworth of the 1805 Prelude) reveal the significance of events in the American colonies in

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helping to shape a child’s historical imagination. Among Scott’s recollections of his time at his grandparents’ farm in the Borders are hints of his developing political ideas: This was during the heat of the American war, and I remember being as anxious on my uncle’s weekly visits (for we heard news at no other time) to hear of the defeat of Washington as if I had had some deep and personal cause of antipathy to him. I know not how this was combined with a very strong prejudice in favour of the Stuart family which I had originally imbibed from the songs and tales of the Jacobites.10

Here, what Scott would later acknowledge to be his emotional Jacobitism is entangled with events in the War of Independence—and, just as revealingly, kept separate from them (‘I know not how this was combined with’). He presents the conjunction as entirely personal and mildly puzzling— oddly so, since his two conservative inclinations are in fact very easy to reconcile. A later anecdote, however, clarifies Scott’s instinctive resistance to aligning events in colonial America with those of the ’45. When Scott was 6, and visiting Preston-Pans (site of the definitive Jacobite victory), he befriended a military veteran, Captain Delgatty, who told him tales of old campaigns, and with whom he discussed current action in the American colonies. One passage from the Ashestiel ‘Memoirs’ recalls hostilities in the autumn of 1777: Sometimes our conversation turned on the American war which was then raging. It was about the time of Burgoyne’s unfortunate expedition, to which my Captain and I augured different conclusions. Somebody had shewed me a map of North America and struck with the rugged appearance of the country and the quantity of lakes, I expressed some doubts on the subject of the General’s arriving safely at the end of his journey, which were very indignantly refuted by the Captain. The news of the Saratoga disaster, while it gave me a little triumph, rather shook my intimacy with the veteran.11

For all his earlier antipathy to Washington, and in defiance of his own declared political affiliations, the young Scott is, here, intellectually at least, on the side of the Americans and the new, defining himself in opposition to ‘the veteran’. Furthermore, the trouncing of an army of occupation by an indigenous force, working as if in collaboration with the ‘rugged’ country—the story of Saratoga as it seemed to Scott, and the story of the 1745 Jacobite campaign as far as Carlisle—is politically and emotionally contradictory when mapped onto Scott’s two great boyhood antipathies to George Washington and the Duke of Cumberland. ‘I know not how this was combined with’ quietly acknowledges the emotional schism of Scott’s politics: the loyalty which, as William Hazlitt asserted in his essay on Scott in The Spirit of the Age (1825), was founded on ‘would-be treason’.12



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There are complex narratives at work here, but also one simple and striking connection. Despite his claim not to know how these things came to be combined, Scott’s early Jacobite loyalties were bound up with his desire to see the British army hold the American colonies. The connection feels odd, and improbable, which is why it deserves more careful attention. That no account of the formation of Britain’s most important historical novelist should have lingered over the impact of news from the American campaigns is a clear signal of the felt separation between British and a new ‘American’ history. Scott himself registers the fracture, in 1808; that is, during his ‘public’ years as a poet, six years before the publication, anonymously, of Waverley. At this stage in his life, Scott had not engaged, in writing, with the topic which first marked his career as a novelist—Jacobite history. He had no reason to pay particular attention in the ‘Memoirs’ to the formation of his views on the ’45. Instead, he interweaves his early Stuart sympathies with his reactions to the immediate military struggle of his childhood, the war in the American colonies; and he recalls poring over one campaign in particular, the campaign of Saratoga. No account of the formation of Scott’s ideas, however, has noticed him do this, or reflected on the wider implications of the formation of a historical consciousness in this specific historical context. As in the case of Blake’s ‘dark castles’, the apparent incongruity leads to a different kind of narrative; in Scott’s case, to a reconsideration of a particular battle and its resonances many years later. Before turning to the Saratoga campaign as refracted in British Romantic histories, it is necessary briefly to clarify the force of ‘fracture’ in the present argument. In recent transatlantic intellectual history, the preferred term has been ‘fragmentation’, exemplified in Susan Manning’s incisive account of fragmentation and union as an ‘ “American” structure of thinking [which] is also characteristic of the writing of the Scottish Enlightenment’ and its ‘revolutionary rethinking of historiography’.13 ‘Fragmentation’, however—as Manning’s argument shows—implies something potentially unified, but disassembled. ‘Fracture’ is altogether more jarring. Alexander Regier differentiates the two terms as follows: ‘Fracture describes a break that is located on a structural level. It is not a process, and does not encompass a temporal element in that sense. It might be historically or genealogically located, but that is not its deciding feature.’14 So defined, fracture is a far more serious problem for historical narrative. Fracture is not ongoing, not ‘temporal’, though it may be historically locatable. The term is strikingly apposite to Blake’s America, and to the difference between being turned around or returned (‘revolution’) and being ‘rent apart’. The British fictions this chapter now addresses—historical narratives, and literary histories placing those narratives—treat the formation of the United

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States not as a fragmented part of British history, but instead as something fractured from it. 2.   C H A R L OT T E S M I T H ’ S B U RG OY N E D RO M A N C E According to Northrop Frye, modern romance is ‘kidnapped’ romance.15 In Charlotte Smith’s four-volume historical novel The Old Manor House, romance can more accurately be described as ‘burgoyned’, a word (meaning to be captured, to be taken prisoner) which entered the language as a result of the most ignominious British defeat of the War of Independence. In its local detail, its narrative structure, and its own subsequent literary fortunes as a work of historical fiction, The Old Manor House comes, strangely, to replicate a story which it apparently relegates to its margins. The story of the Saratoga campaign takes up the third volume of Smith’s novel, which is set in the years 1776–8 and tells of the social and romantic frustrations of a hero with the romantically over-determined name of Orlando, his military service in North America, and his successful restoration to family and property on his return to Britain. As his name suggests, and as volume one’s epigraph from the opening stanza of canto 21 of Orlando Furioso (1516) underlines, Orlando is a representative of traditional romance. The chief of Charlemagne’s paladins, the perfect knight of Ariosto and Boiardo, and the hero of As You Like It (1623) all shape readers’ expectations of him. Even before he joins his regiment in Britain, Orlando has begun to realize the injustice of the British cause in the American colonies, and he feels this increasingly strongly as he travels to join Burgoyne’s army. He soon becomes convinced that the cause in which he is contracted to fight proves that the will of the people is not the central principle of British politics, for, as Orlando reflects, it is ‘carried on against a part of their own body, and in direct contradiction of the rights universally claimed, was not only pursued at a ruinous expence, but in absolute contradiction to the wishes of the people who were taxed to support it’.16 The economic contexts of the American War, and the pressures within British society it creates, are dealt with more briefly, but they make it clear that Smith sets the struggle for the American colonies in the context of speculation, colonial greed, and the erosion of older hierarchies of wealth. The War of Independence, that is, is part of a wider socio-economic and politically charged argument. Smith’s narrative is full of details which, for contemporary readers, would have created inescapable political echoes: the example which Loraine Fletcher gives, of the housekeeper’s speech recalling the warping wainscot of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in



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France (1790), is especially ‘mischievous’, as she states, in being so tightly woven into domestic particularity.17 Rewriting and challenging Burkean conservatism is as much a matter of pace and style as of character or plot. As Fletcher notes, ‘Apart from the American section, this is a static book’; while Barbara Tarling, also emphasizing Smith’s dialogue with Burke, notes the ‘abruptness’ and ‘distinctly transitional quality’ of the American section.18 The novel is relevant to the political situation of the early 1790s, caught in the uncertainty of that time; but it is set a decade and a half earlier, opening in 1776. The significance of the American section is greater, and also more difficult, than critics have allowed. Fletcher rightly places it not ‘as a digression but as part of the political focus’;19 but the suggestion is, here and in other analyses, that the American material allows for a historical perspective of, and contemplative distance from, events unfolding in France during Smith’s composition (summer and autumn 1792), with the clear implication that Smith is not thinking about the United States, but about France. Superficially, this is easily supported by casual inaccuracies in Smith’s treatment of the flora and fauna of her North American terrain in the novel; and by the assumption that, as a woman, she could have had little understanding of, or interest in, the military manoeuvres in which she involves Orlando.20 Critical consensus suggests that volume three was designed merely to appeal to readers’ curiosity about American subjects. Certainly it gave Smith the opportunity to include extensive descriptions of natural history and native peoples, especially the Iroquois, among whom Orlando spends several months in a miniature captivity-narrative. However, The Old Manor House follows the course of the Saratoga campaign closely, credibly intertwining Orlando’s story with the military movements of the later months of 1777. Smith’s stated main source of information about the campaign and about the war was David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution (1789), from which she quotes in explanatory and polemical notes, and which she recommends to her British public as salutary reading. She was, however, 28 at the time of Saratoga, and unlikely to have relied entirely on Ramsay’s views, published twelve years later: rather, she uses them to articulate a corrective American perspective. After being confined to his sickroom with fever in New York, Orlando marches with a group of 250 men to join the northern army of Burgoyne as it moves from Canada to Albany. Smith’s details are fictitious, but convincing as part of this particular military sequence. The movements of the various smaller parties of troops in which Orlando travels, for example, are appropriate to the preamble to Saratoga. Burgoyne repeatedly requested extra troops and supplies from Clinton in New York, hence the disappointment when Orlando’s small party eventually joins the army. This was also

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the campaign in which the special conditions of fighting in the North American terrain became clear, which gives extra point to Smith’s inclination to linger over the effects of war on the land and its peoples. In terms of the political argument of The Old Manor House, the Saratoga campaign was a conscious and resonant choice in 1793. For British observers, the mismanagement which led to Saratoga produced the most embarrassing defeat of the war. Smith chose precisely the campaign which would have made the justice of the American cause inescapable for the novel’s first readers. In 1778, partly encouraged by events at Saratoga, France entered the war in support of the Americans, which would have complicated the sympathies Smith wanted to arouse, especially in 1793 at the outbreak of a new war between Britain and France. Saratoga stands for the British failure to coordinate the movements of armies, arrogance in underestimating the enemy, and for the fatal continuation of ‘Euro-centric military thinking’, as Jeremy Black has described it, in which ‘New World geography, recruitment and logistics’ had resulted in ‘a war without fronts’.21 Saratoga was an iconic surrender and a pointed choice of topic. It is appropriate to Smith’s understated but assured grasp of this particular campaign, also, that Orlando Somerive should become a burgoyned hero, and a burgoyned representative of old European romance. His party is intercepted on its way to join Burgoyne’s army by ‘red warriors’ whose involvement in the British cause Orlando, conventionally, regards as the greatest stain on its honour.22 In a long footnote, Smith quotes from Ramsay’s History, endorsing Ramsay’s condemnation of Britain’s alliance with American Indian peoples, and refers her readers to the stories of the forts of Kingston and Wilkesborough in the settlement of Wyoming on the Susquehanna (later to be the subject of Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming). She concludes that however appalled her readers might be by reports of violence in revolutionary France, far more terrible crimes had characterized Britain’s allies in the struggle to retain the American colonies; that readers ‘should own, that there are savages of all countries—even of our own!’23 One of the younger ‘red warriors’, known as the Wolf-hunter, is distinguished by ‘his more open countenance—his more gentle manners’ and his sympathy for the plight of captured women.24 He becomes what Smith calls Orlando’s ‘generous protector’, but their friendship is evoked for Smith’s readers in terms which preserve Orlando’s ‘natural’ superiority. Tim Fulford argues that the bond between them is part of Smith’s unconvincing solution to the taint of violence and guilt marring the British ruling classes, ‘a sentimental re-education’; while Angela Keane describes the Wolf-hunter as a stereotype that ‘mediates British culpability’.25 It was not unusual for eighteenth-century British fictions to include miniature captivity-narratives set in North America, or for these to



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involve, however unconvincingly, forms of re-education. Tobias Smollett’s last novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)—probably now the most frequently cited concentration of stereotypes of American Indian culture—describes Lieutenant Obadiah Lismahago’s capture and marriage among the Miamis, and also presents its North American materials in notably excursive form and emphatically in the past tense. Lismahago, proceeding rather than progressing from the barbarisms and desires of ‘the squaw Squinkinacoosta’ to those of Tabitha Bramble, is firmly reattached to the family circles of Britain, never returning to North America or to the people of whom his son is now chief.26 Some details in Lismahago’s story parallel Orlando’s experiences in the Saratago campaign; though Smith carefully excises from her account of the Wolf-hunter and his tribe any reference to the women of this tribe, and any hint of sexual adventure. (In turn, some details in the Edinburgh sections of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker are echoed in Scott’s Waverley—notably the lodgings of Mrs Lockhart and the name of the young laird of Ballymawhawple, echoed in Waverley’s Mrs Flockhart and the laird of Balmawhapple.27) Furthermore, as Christopher Flynn has analysed, novels set in the War of Independence had a market among the late eighteenth-century reading public, and it is possible to chart through these novels changing British perspectives on America and Americans.28 The importance of The Old Manor House in particular in this tradition is twofold. First, Smith’s tale of Orlando’s months in North America is a markedly self-contained and largely, afterwards, forgotten part of his story. Second, the combination of lost colonies and military humiliation with the story of an old house and those who are to inherit it proved subtly influential and adaptable. After eventually joining Burgoyne’s army, Orlando leads a group of six men on a perilous journey to New York. Most of his party are killed and scalped during an ambush by Indians disgruntled with their treatment by the British, but Orlando is spared through the intervention of the Wolf-hunter. Even so, he fears himself doomed ‘to drag on a wretched existence among the savage tribes of the American wilderness, and cut off from all communication with his country’.29 Dressed as a warrior, and with his hair shorn Iroquois-style, Orlando looks on as his captors murder and seize women and children left defenceless in the wake of the war. News of the battle of Saratoga encourages the band to plunder further, and then, with Orlando still in his ambivalent position as captive and accomplice, they pass the winter in an Iroquois encampment. Throughout these scenes, the Iroquois (all, in Smith’s narrative, men) are unequivocably described as ‘barbarians’, and Orlando calls these months ‘a living death’.30 His only form of consolation is to write letters and a journal, without a hope of their being read, until the arrival of two French Canadians brings him the

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comfort of hearing ‘a European language’.31 In spring, Orlando accompanies them to Quebec to sell furs, pausing to admire the scenery of the St Lawrence and its ‘savannahs’. The third volume closes with Orlando’s sonnet to the night hawk known as the Whip poor Will (included in later collections of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, 1749–1806). Orlando responds to his captors’ beliefs about the bird’s cry, but only through the conventions of European poetic form. With the opening of volume four, Orlando’s North American adventures are briskly curtailed. In Quebec he is ‘restored to the appearance of an Englishman’ and takes leave of his ‘Iroquois protector, with a thousand protestations of gratitude for all the services he had rendered him, and promised to remit him a present of such articles as were most acceptable, to Quebec, as soon as he returned to England’.32 In terms of the narrative of The Old Manor House as a whole, this fracture is absolute. Orlando retains no marks of sympathy or identification with those among whom he has lived for so many months; while the Wolf-hunter, initially marked by a degree of delicacy towards the women of his enemy, evinces no other sign of emotional range and is left in effect awaiting the promised shipment of his material reward. The narrative simply never mentions him again. Orlando’s ‘sentimental re-education’ seems mainly to have taught him what he is not. So, when his ship is captured by the French, Orlando reflects that ‘in every Frenchman he saw, not a natural enemy, but a brother’.33 Smith suggests no connection between the failures of British society and the alternative relationships Orlando discovers in the American wilds. Instead, the narrative escapes them in Orlando’s own preferred style—by emphasizing the salvations offered by writing. Volume four of The Old Manor House is increasingly dominated by questions of proof, legality, and with documents of various kinds, in self-conscious excess of the requirements of the resolution of the love-plot (since Orlando and Monimia are married long before the ending of the novel). The diversionary tactics of Smith’s narrative return to the ancient house itself. Usurped, deserted, plundered during Orlando’s absence from it, the house contains for those interested in such a narrative the hidden authority which will restore the fortunes of the central characters; but it has also been contextualized and miniaturized by the American narrative of volume three. In imaginative effect, the narrative of volume three is simply overlaid by the narrative of volume four. The two are never integrated. Indeed, the imaginative logic seems to be to drive them further apart, defining North America as the land of aggression, capture, and alienation; and Britain as a self-parody of fraudulent legalities and undeclared class war. What is striking, historiographically, is the flatness of Smith’s disinclination to connect. As I have shown, the military components of her



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engagement with the Saratoga campaign are not, as has sometimes been thought, casual or thin. Instead, Saratoga is the irony at the centre of the novel, driving its reflections on the state of Britain and Britain’s new war in 1793, while remaining structurally detachable, contained in a third volume apparently drafted in from an entirely different, and disconnected, narrative domain. The narrative of this chapter moves next to a different kind of disconnected fiction, a work which seems to have nothing whatsover to do with Smith’s burgoyned hero, Orlando, or with any war in America. Scott’s Ashestiel ‘Memoirs’ have revealed the significance of the War of Independence in shaping his early political ideas, even his ideas about the Jacobite cause. Bringing these different national conflicts together seems now as counterintuitive as bringing together the historical styles of Charlotte Smith and Walter Scott. These are both, however, fractures created by subsequent historical and literary-historical analysis. If, as I have suggested, fracture, formally and imaginatively, is key to new developments in historiography during the Romantic period in Britain, how might this affect our understanding of the novelist regarded throughout the nineteenth century as the inventor of historical fiction, and incontrovertibly the most important influence on its subsequent development? 3.   WA LT E R S C OT T ’ S R E S TO R AT I O N P RO J E C T S Volume three of The Old Manor House is interesting in terms of what it describes, but even more interesting in its careful segregations, ethnic and structural. Cut off even from the subsequent development of Smith’s plot, the American episode would appear to have no connection whatsoever with Scott’s first novel, Waverley, set during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–6 and characterized by a range and detail of historical command far in excess of Smith’s treatment of Saratoga. That does not mean, however, that Scott did not learn from Smith; or that the rescue and inheritance of the estate at the end of The Old Manor House do not resonate in Scott’s own fictions of restoration. The name of Scott’s young hero, said in c­ hapter 1 to be an ‘unmarked’ name, echoes that of Waverly, a man of ‘uncommon indecision of mind’ in Smith’s earlier novel Desmond (1792);34 and Scott was a careful reader of Smith’s fiction. In his essay on Smith, later grouped with other biographical sketches in his Miscellaneous Prose Works (1834–6), he refers to her works as ‘deeply impressed on our memory’, and describes The Old Manor House as the most important of them, praising ‘especially the first part of the story, where the scene lies about the ancient mansion and its vicinity’.35 Ostensibly, however, The Old Manor House played no part in the composition or genealogy of his first novel, at the end of which ‘A

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Postscript, which should have been a Preface’ highlights his debt to Maria Edgeworth’s national tale, Castle Rackrent (1800), and dedicates the novel to a Scottish novelist of the generation before his own, Henry Mackenzie. These choices, in different ways, align Waverley with national fictions of tradition and consolidation. In the light of this chapter’s attention to fractured narratives, historical and literary-historical, however, it is worth thinking again about the literary debts of Waverley, as well as about modern critical assumptions about where they should be found. Several of the elements critics have emphasized in The Old Manor House are reprised in Waverley. These include the emblematic significance of the old house and of those who eventually inherit it, the echoes of romance-characters, situations, and plots, and the self-consciously fictional ending. There are structural links, and some similarities of detail, between the two aunts called ‘Mrs’ by courtesy, Grace Rayland and Rachel Waverley. Waverley’s Aunt Rachel, like Orlando’s Mrs Rayland, for example, sublimates any fears for his safety in the sentimental recollection of glorious ancestral battles.36 Altogether stranger, Orlando’s American adventures can be recognized as a template for the experiences of Scott’s young English officer, dispatched to fight a civil war on what he quickly feels to be the wrong side. When Scott came to fictionalize the ’45, he may also have been remembering the contentious campaign he disputed with Captain Delgatty—Burgoyne’s Saratoga. Orlando and Waverley are both men of sensibility caught up in battle-scenes, and are reported (rather than seen) to perform feats of bravery which are applauded by those in high command. Like Orlando, Waverley is captured, transported helpless across unknown terrain, and dressed in an alien garb. Also like Orlando, Waverley is engaged in a civil war in which one side has made use of what it perceives to be the savage energies of an indigenous people. Unlike Orlando, however, Waverley permanently retains the marks of his Highland career as part of his identity. Orlando maintains a secure sense of self during the months of his captivity, even when he adopts Iroquois styles. He learns linguistic and hunting skills which his unshaken belief in the savagery of his captors renders irrelevant on his return to white society; and his bond with the Wolf-hunter is circumscribed by ethnic difference. Waverley’s friendship with Fergus MacIvor is developed in more detail (ethnicity not being an issue), and Scott sets up a more integrated fiction of restoration in having Waverley take on, after Fergus’s execution, the role of ‘Friend of the Sons of Ivor’: ‘remember,’ as Fergus enjoins him, ‘you have worn their tartan, and are an adopted son of their race’.37 The most significant divergence between the resolutions of The Old Manor House and Waverley is the degree to which political and national conflict are found to be resolvable within a characteristic British–American



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plot of this period: the story of family conflict and reconciliation.38 Scott represents the end of civil war by the marriage of Edward Waverley and Rose Bradwardine, and by the restoration of the Bradwardine estate, but there is no pretence that this is a resolution commensurate with the loss and destruction of the ’45. Edward and Rose settle on his ancestral estate, but the fantasy of the restored house, the house which is remade as legible, is permanently displaced onto the Bradwardine family seat, Tullyveolan, complete with its restored bear-fountains and the ‘large and animated painting’ of Edward Waverley’s and Fergus MacIvor’s Highland exploits.39 What seems to linger in Scott’s mind from The Old Manor House, and what distinguishes Smith’s novel from other works which make their North American sections essentially excursionary as opposed to emigrant—such as Humphry Clinker, or book 3 of Wordsworth’s Excursion (publ. 1814)— is The Old Manor House’s elaborately textual and legalistic rebuff to the excursionary venture; the limits of its sympathy; the ways in which it explores notions of connective memory in a highly self-consciously textual fashion. As a result, the ending of Waverley emphasizes fracture—in memory, sensibility, social change, even in its ‘Postscript, which should have been a Preface’—in the midst of a highly self-conscious fantasy of restoration (the restored estate and mended house of Tullyveolan; the magically restored young heir of Waverley-Honour). Scott’s fictions, in different genres, often allude to stories from across the Atlantic; and Waverley is positioned, in his writing career, between his poetical romance Rokeby (1813), which features South American treasure and tales of American Indian adventures, and his second novel, Guy Mannering (1815), which is set during the time of the War of Independence and makes several brief references to the War as part of the economic and social context of its western-Scottish tale. American Indian traditions are alluded to throughout his writings.40 As far as Waverley is concerned, nothing could seem less relevant to a story of the ’45 than the history of the creation of the United States. Such a suggestion disrupts, too, the supposedly natural history of the development of historical fiction. The new history of the United States of America can have, it is assumed, no natural part to play in the seismic reordering, in a new Europe of restoration and national difference, of British narratives of its past. It might, however, have an unnatural part to play. Just as Scott’s memories of his early Jacobite sympathies, as recorded in the Ashestiel ‘Memoirs’, have been sifted from their American context, so have the restored estate and the legal plot of Waverley become separated, in literary history, from altogether less satisfying historical accounts of the aftermath of civil war. In the same way, too, the imprint of The Old Manor House has been lost from one of Scott’s oddest, and most marginal, short stories, ‘The Tapestried Chamber, or The

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Lady in the Sacque’, in which another solider returns from a disastrous British military campaign in the War of Independence to a house of dark secrets in England. Everything about the publication and reception history of ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ seems to mark out this tale as ephemeral and incidental. Scott first intended to publish it in Chronicles of the Canongate (an interlinked series of tales and, even for Scott, a complicated mix of narrative levels and voices, published in two series in 1827–8), but his publishers thought it unsuitable. In January 1828 Scott rejected the proposal that he should become the editor of the new literary annual The Keepsake, but promised instead to supply the occasional ‘trifle’. ‘The Tapestried Chamber’, with two other tales, duly appeared in The Keepsake for 1829.41 In his introduction to the story, Scott simultaneously locates it in personal memory and distances himself from its origins, describing it as entirely faithful to a story he had heard Anna Seward tell over twenty years earlier. The author, Scott states, ‘has studiously avoided any attempt at ornament which might interfere with the simplicity of the tale’.42 He deflects narratorial responsibility onto Seward, describing the tale’s protagonist, for example, as ‘a general officer, to whom Miss Seward gave the name of Browne, but merely, as I understood, to save the inconvenience of introducing a nameless agent in the narrative’.43 A name given ‘merely’ to avoid ‘inconvenience’ in the telling hardly suggests that the historical detail of the work is pressingly relevant to its purpose or meaning. ‘Browne’, as he thus may or may not have been called, is in this story a general in Lord Cornwallis’s army, which surrendered after the siege of Yorktown by Washington’s troops in October 1781, four years after Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga. After Yorktown, Browne returns to England and embarks on a tour through ‘the western counties’. Here he comes across a town ‘peculiarly English’ where he is intrigued by the prospect of a castle which dates from the Wars of the Roses but which has been embellished at different periods of its history, particularly during the Elizabethan and Jacobean years. (Its description, like that of several other castles in the French Revolution debate, recalls Blackstone’s characterization of the British consitution in his Commentaries of 1768: ‘We inhabit an old gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant.’44) Enquiries reveal that this picturesque composite of English history has recently been inherited by Browne’s ‘fag at Eton’, Lord Woodville, who invites Browne to join the party of guests he has invited to celebrate this inheritance. Browne tells stories of the American campaign, describes his experience of sleeping in an old tobacco-cask (‘like Diogenes’) ‘when I was in the Bush, as the Virginians call it’;45 while Lord Woodville hopes that his shooting skills have improved during his time ‘amongst the



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Indians of the back settlements’.46 These stories, and the social context of ‘The Tapestried Chamber’, are exclusively masculine, with an emphasis on the ‘manly pursuits’ of field sports. The repressed female presences of the castle return, however. Soon after retiring to bed, Browne sees before him ‘the figure of a little woman’ dressed in a silk sacque (a loose, ambiguously informal gown) after the fashion of her grandmother’s day. She turns to him a face ‘which wore the fixed features of a corpse’ and ‘the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions’; then joins him on the bed, ‘and squatted herself down upon it’ in a posture which mimics his. At this point, Browne loses consciousness: ‘I sank back in a swoon, as very a victim to panic terror as ever was a village girl, or a child of ten years old.’47 Underlining the General’s ordeal is a disrupted architectural and decorative pattern; for it is usually Gothic heroines who are threatened in unsafe bedchambers, and the female body which is figured by the enclosed but insecurely private space. The episode also breaks a general convention in Scott’s writing, that threatening and sexually ambivalent women are tall, with commanding features.48 This ‘little woman’ is grotesquely playful, at once antiqued and infantile. The next day, Browne recognizes her face among the family portraits in Lord Woodville’s gallery, and is told that she committed crimes of ‘incest, and unnatural murder’ in the tapestried chamber, which Lord Woodville subsequently orders to be ‘unmantled, and the door built up’.49 The fears suggested by this story are predominantly sexual. There are echoes of legends of Spectre Brides, Loathly Ladies, the Bleeding Nun from Scott’s friend Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796), and (reversing the gender roles) Fuseli’s painting ‘The Nightmare’ of 1781. The detail that General Browne has recently returned from Yorktown and can contrast the luxuries of his apartment with the privations of the campaign in Virginia seems entirely incidental, except in so far as it attests to his courage—a component of the story, as Scott insists, as told by Seward (who had many friends and acquaintances who were involved in the War of Independence, including the subject of her Monody on the Death of Major André, 1781). Although they may well have been part of Seward’s oral story, however, the details of Yorktown and the wilds of Virginia were deliberately included in ‘The Tapestried Chamber’, and the American context of Scott’s version must be recognized as an important component of the story in the political climate of the years preceding the first Reform Act of 1832. We can ascertain this because there is at least one other closely similar story, published in a context Scott knew well, the anonymous ‘Story of an Apparition’, which appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1818. ‘Story of an Apparition’ is said to be based on the tale of a ‘friend’, perhaps Seward, though she is not named; but the differences between it

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and ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ are significant. ‘Story of an Apparition’ is set in 1737, half a century earlier than ‘towards the end of the American war’, and the ghost appears not in the dress of the late seventeenth century but in one of ‘three centuries ago’.50 In ‘The Tapestried Chamber’, General Browne describes the apparition in his own words; ‘Story of an Apparition’ is a third-person narrative. ‘Story of an Apparition’ includes literary references, particularly to Ann Radcliffe; and the company has spent the evening telling ghost stories, not hearing tales of the American War. It is a mixed company, with women, who speak. The chamber is isolated from the rest of the house, and it has a door which does not close properly. The ghost is not an old lady: her age is not mentioned, even when her portrait is viewed. ‘Colonel D.’ is simply visiting a friend in the north (rather than the west) of England. No detailed account of the house is given, and the Colonel’s friend has not recently inherited it. The horror is implicitly sexual and its duration, and nature, remain curiously indeterminate: ‘The approach of such a face near his own, was more than Colonel D—could support; and when he rose next morning from a feverish and troubled sleep, he could not recollect how or when the accursed spectre had departed.’51 The spectre is not a mimic, however; and the tale is contextualized not in terms of architectural style or decoration, but in terms of sociable conversation and literary discussion. As a whole, ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ is more immediately threatening than the 1818 ‘Story of an Apparition’: the action is drawn temporally closer; the setting is made stereotypically English; the climactic narrative of horror becomes firstinstead of third-person. The concentration on architectural accretion and renewal suggests that, in the years of intensive debate on electoral reform, Lord Woodville’s castle has taken on some Burkean allegories of architecture; while the spectre suggests both female mimicry and the threat to the present from the crimes of the past, which cannot be obliterated by modern refurbishment. The similarities between the experiences described in ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ and ‘Story of an Apparition’ led Coleman Parsons to ascribe the 1818 story to Scott. Graham Tulloch and Judy King, however, have convincingly countered Parsons’s case and have established the alternative possibility that Scott may have been the oral source, perhaps the intermediary between Anna Seward and the author of ‘Story of an Apparition’.52 They suggest Washington Irving as a possible author of ‘Story of an Apparition’, though they acknowledge difficulties in establishing such an attribution, including the absence of any reference to a story for Blackwood’s in Irving’s correspondence for July–September 1817. In Tales of a Traveller— of which Scott owned a first edition—Irving later published a version of the same story, ‘The Adventure of My Uncle’, written in Paris and set in



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France, and in which the ghost ‘returns as the victim rather than as the perpetrator of a sexual crime’.53 Tulloch and King thus argue that ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ is ‘an amplified and more literary version’ of ‘Story of an Apparition’, and that Scott may, in writing it, have drawn on ‘The Adventure of My Uncle’. As they point out, anachronisms in intellectual history show that Scott embellished Seward’s tale; as they also emphasize, ghost stories are by their nature prone to embellishment. What scholarship on ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ and its associate tales has not so far considered is the specific context of the War of Independence. Sir Walter Farquhar’s experiences at the castle of Berry Pomeroy in Devon might well, as Tulloch and King suggest, have informed Seward’s narrative; and this would fit in with the setting in a castle in ‘the west’. Farquhar, however, was not returning from Yorktown. The American context of the tale in Scott’s version remains unexplained; unless, that is, it was either a detail in Seward’s account or a detail suggested by Seward’s published work on Major André and the War of Independence. By specifying Yorktown, Scott reintroduces to British political debate ‘the impolitic and ill-fated controversy’ of the American campaign.54 Browne himself appears prematurely marked by the misadventure of Yorktown. If Lord Woodville has been his fag at Eton and friend at Oxford, there can be no more than a few years’ difference in their ages; but Browne seems like a much older figure, returning to an archetypal English scene haunted by a family crime. During Browne’s military service, a younger man has come into a fine inheritance, only to find that his attempts to improve his ancestral home have failed to excise the spectral repetitions of ‘incest, and unnatural murder’—that is, incest and either parricide or (as is suggested by the echo of the ghost of Hamlet’s father) fratricide. This conflict has been kept within the family, and cannot be resolved, only crudely blocked off from the domestic present day. One detail in the difference between ‘Story of an Apparition’ and ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ is especially intriguing in this context. Scott’s unsettlingly childlike crone is a mimic. By 1828, the supposed mimic-status of the ‘infant’ United States was tired fare in a protracted cultural war;55 but Scott combines it with a parody of his own tale’s provenance, in the story-telling of Anna Seward in particular and female oral narrative more generally. In terms of the historical record, Browne’s testimony reverses Woodville’s attempts at reintegration: the portrait is removed from the family gallery, and the chamber accepted as irreclaimable. The defeated ending of ‘The Tapestried Chamber’, and the tale’s aggressive, earned inconsequentiality, suggest narratives to come in the literary histories of both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter has considered disintegrated historical fictions, and the imaginative relationships between them, in a time of anxious segregation,

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which has become, in our own intellectual time, a period of reasserted connections. In the decades immediately following American independence, I have argued, British ways of writing historically changed, not only because Britain had been fundamentally, and lastingly, reconfigured as historical, but also because the creation of separate national histories altered what writers felt they could say about a newly ‘American’ past. In earlier eighteenth-century European accounts of the science, and the history, of ‘man’, examples from the Americas had been part of an integrated narrative, a narrative which reasserted an authoritative centre from which a future would develop. For decades following the end of the War of Independence, in contrast, historical writing ostensibly swerved from the subject of North America, most markedly in Britain and in the new forms of historical fiction represented by the poems and novels of Scott. In fact, as the examples drawn from Blake, Robertson, Smith, and Scott in this chapter demonstrate, a wider shift in historical consciousness may be traced through changes in historical method and narrative emphasis. Robertson suspended plans for an integrated (what we would now call a ‘hemispheric’) history of America, recognizing it as unwritable in the historical moment of 1776–7. The History of America rendered a political break as also a break in a narrative line, positioning history itself as a topic over which Britain had lost jurisdiction. In 1793, Blake’s America extended a historical subject ‘rent apart’ into a formally and mythographically disparate art-work of layered rather than linear history. Also in 1793, Charlotte Smith included a lengthy sequence of American adventures in The Old Manor House, but at the same time separated this sequence from the rest of her tale. In this novel, separation is partly structural, and partly imaginative, in that Orlando’s adventures in North America form no part of his subsequent development or of his social role (a role which is markedly integrative, reuniting house, family, and lines of inheritance). In the case of Waverley, published twenty years later, British history is written over the template provided by Smith’s narrative of the Saratoga campaign, reuniting Scott’s childhood memories of the American War and the Jacobite cause. So Scottish and so historically specific does Waverley seem to most readers that it appears inconceivable to read it in the context of an altogether different, American, past; but Saratoga, as Scott’s ‘Memoirs’ show, was strangely linked for him to the Stuart cause. In ‘The Tapestried Chamber’, fourteen years after Waverley, the return from British defeat at Yorktown is potentially part of the context of a manifestation of a guilty and again ‘unnatural’ secret at the heart of another ancestral house, but instead of making this detail directly relevant to the implications of the story, Scott chooses to account for it as part of an ‘original’ story, something separate from his own artistic choice. In recalling an old story told by ‘Miss Seward’, however, Scott is also revising a different story by ‘Mrs Smith’.



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The chapter has also addressed fractures in a different historiography, that of received literary tradition. Smith’s descendants and inheritors in literary history are usually taken to be domestic tales, Gothic fictions, women’s fiction, and country-house allegories of nation and inheritance from Mansfield Park (1814) to Howards End (1910) and beyond.56 The intertextuality of The Old Manor House and Waverley suggests an entirely different plot-line in literary history, in which British defeats during the War of Independence, recorded in Scott’s Ashestiel ‘Memoirs’ as foundational childhood experiences, come back to haunt a seminal British historical novel. Waverley is at the start of a sweeping and world-changing movement in the story of prose fiction—the wide popularity of the historical novel and the rise of a new type of historical consciousness—but it is also a partial recollection and an imaginative swerve from the absorbing far-off battles of Scott’s childhood, read aloud from newspapers and dispatches and circulated at second- and third-hand, not read about in books. ‘Starting’ the Romantic period with the French Revolution, as many histories of literature and ideas have done, overlooks the ways in which, as in Blake’s America, that revolution was already, for British observers, secondary both to Britain’s ‘Glorious’ Revolution a century earlier and to the less than glorious modern story of the loss of the American colonies. N OT E S 1. Plate 13, lines 142–50, in Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson and David V. Erdman (London: Longman, 1971), 200–1. 2. See the terms set byEdmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 121–2, 271– 3, 279–81. Analyses of the castle motif in revolutionary discourse of the period includeRonald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1798–1830) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), esp. 219–25;E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 125–8;Frances A. Chui, ‘Faulty Towers: Reform, Radicalism and the Gothic Castle, 1760–1800’, Romanticism on the Net, 44 (2006);and Tom Duggett, Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form, 2nd edn (2010; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), esp. ch. 1. 3. See ‘Ahania, rent apart’ in Milton, Book the First, Plate 19, line 41, in Blake: Complete Poems, 514; also ‘America closed apart’ in Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion, second chapter, Plate 38, line 69, in Blake: Complete Poems, 703. For discussions of Blake and history, see Tilottama Rajan, ‘(Dis) figuring the System: Vision, History, and Trauma in Blake’s Lambeth Books’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 58/3–4 (1997), 383–411;Michael Ferber, ‘Blake’s America and the Birth of Revolution’, in Stephen C. Behrendt (ed.), History and Myth: Essays in English Romantic Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 73–99;John Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William

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Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);David Aers, ‘Representations of Revolution: From The French Revolution to The Four Zoas’, in Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault (eds), Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1984), 244–70; and Steven Goldsmith, ‘ “Cracked Across”: Blake, Milton, and the Noise of History’, Studies in Romanticism, 51/3 (2012), 305–42. 4. Karen O’Brien, ‘The Delayed Americanisation of American History’, Early American Literature, 29 (1994), 1–18. 5. Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 3. 6. On the move to history in the early decades of the United States, see Robert Clark, History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction, 1823–52 (London: Macmillan, 1984); George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Philip Gould, Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). David Armitage surveys the importance of the Americas for British historical writing in ‘The New World and British Historical Thought: From Richard Hakluyt to William Robertson’, in Karen Ordahl Kupperman (ed.), America in European Consciousness, 1493– 1750 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 52–75. 7. Fiona Robertson, ‘British Romantic Columbiads’, Symbiosis, 2 (1998), 1. On the writing context of the History of America, see Jeffrey R. Smitten, ‘Moderatism and History: William Robertson’s Unfinished History of British America’, in Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (eds), Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 163–79; and Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 151–66, esp. 61–3. 8. See Tim Fulford’s edn of Oliver Newman in Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works 1811–1838, gen. eds. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), and his discussion of Gertrude of Wyoming in Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756– 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 11. Oliver Newman and Gertrude of Wyoming are discussed in Fiona Robertson’s forthcoming The United States in British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), chs. 4 and 5. 9. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, tr. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1937; London: Merlin Press, 1962), esp. 15–29. 10. Scott on Himself: A Selection of the Autobiographical Writings of Sir Walter Scott, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 12–13. Events recalled in this section of the ‘Memoirs’ relate to 1776–7. 11. Scott on Himself, 17. 12. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, Centenary Edition, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–40), xi. 65. 13. Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 2, 15.



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14. Alexander Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 7. 15. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 29–30. 16. Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House, introd. Janet Todd (London: Pandora-Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 347. See the earlier conversation with Orlando’s mother, which emphasizes Smith’s awareness that the colonists are not ‘rebellious exiles’ but ‘men of [Britain’s] own country’ (240); and Orlando’s internalization of this view during his Atlantic crossing (336). 17. Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 164. For details of the financial and speculative implications of colonialism in Smith’s novel, see Old Manor House, 10, 33, 433. For the political implications of landscape, see esp. Old Manor House, 346, which includes the detail that ‘What Orlando had often seen cherished in English gardens as beautiful shrubs, here rose into plants of such majestic size and foliage as made the British oak poor in comparison’, an implicit dwarfing of the symbol of British politics; and 453, where Orlando recalls the American spring producing ‘a more brilliant variety of flowers than art can collect in the most cultivated European garden’. Dale Townshend comments on ‘improvement’ and the novel’s ending in ‘Improvement and Repair: Architecture, Romance and the Politics of Gothic, 1790–1817’, Literature Compass, 8 (2011), 736. 18. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 168; Barbara Tarling, ‘ “The Slight Skirmishing of a Novel Writer”: Charlotte Smith and the American War of Independence’, in Jacqueline M. Labbe (ed.), Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 71–86, esp. 77–84. 19. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 173. 20. Most influentially argued by Florence May Anna Hilbish, ‘Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist (1749–1806)’ (unpubl. Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1941); reconsidered byErik Simpson, Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), ch. 2. Jacqueline M. Labbe notes in her edn of The Old Manor House (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002) that Smith’s turn back to the War of Independence can be read ‘as a way of disguising her critical stance on the British Government’s actions towards France’ (581); Tarling notes that representations of the war function in several novels by Smith ‘as both overt and covert sites for the discussion of events in France’ (71). 21. Jeremy Black, War for America: The Fight for Independence 1775–1783 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1991), 121. 22. Old Manor House, 348–50. 23. Old Manor House, 349. Fletcher comments at 174: ‘She evidently thought the story too hideous for anything other than a footnote reference.’ 24. Old Manor House, 350. ‘The secret sympathy between generous minds seems to exist through the whole human kind; for this young warrior became soon

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26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

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as much attached to Orlando as his nature allowed him to be to any body’, Smith continues, notably without detailing Orlando’s side of this ‘sympathy’. Fulford, Romantic Indians, 104–6. In contrast to Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, Fulford argues that ‘Smith’s Indians are a rhetorical stopgap for a situation that her genre—the popular romance—has no room to rectify’ (106). Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 98. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Lewis M. Knapp, rev. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 89, 192–7, 267. Humphry Clinker, 219, 225; and Waverley, ed. P. D. Garside, vol. i of The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, 30 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), i. 215, 46. Christopher Flynn, Americans in British Literature, 1770–1832: A Breed Apart (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 2: ‘The American Revolution made English writers come to terms with the loss of what had seemed the next stage of their history.’ Flynn refers to The Old Manor House in a wider discussion of ‘English Novels on the American Revolution’, commenting on Smith’s ‘sexualized view of Britain as a masculine, rapacious figure’ (16). Jacqueline M. Labbe comments on Orlando’s ‘feminized position of distress’ with reference to the ‘Whip poor Will’ sonnet in Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 105. Old Manor House, 367. This capture is overshadowed, for Orlando, by anxiety about Monimia’s perils in England, of which he has heard in a long letter interrupting his American experiences (353–64). Old Manor House, 369. Old Manor House, 370. Old Manor House, 377–8. Old Manor House, 378. Erik Simpson argues, in contrast, that Orlando’s ‘voyage away from and back to England has transformed him and his relation to his homeland’ (Mercenaries, 72); and reads his relationship with the Wolf-hunter (78–80). Romance journeys traditionally alter the hero’s perspective on return, which is why, in my reading, it is so revealing that the American section of The Old Manor House falls short of being formative psychologically or socio-politically. Desmond: A Novel, in Three Volumes (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792), i. 6. In Desmond, the War of Independence is described as more ferocious than Britain’s war with France after 1793: Desmond, i. 151–5, iii. 90–1. On the name of Scott’s hero, see Wilbur L. Cross, ‘An Earlier Waverley’, Modern Language Notes, 17 (1902), 44–5, and Peter Garside, ‘The Baron’s Books: Waverley as Bibliomanical Romance’, Romanticism, 14/3 (2008), 251. The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., ed. J. G. Lockhart, 28 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1834–6), iv. 63. For the essay as a whole, see pages 20–70 (20–58 being a biographical account by Smith’s sister Mrs Dorset). On Scott and Smith, see Marshall Brown, ‘Poetry and the Novel’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds), The Cambridge Guide to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 107–28.



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36. Waverley, 17–18, 24; and Old Manor House, 219–20. Scott praised the characterization of Grace Rayland (‘without a rival; a Queen Elizabeth in private life’) in his essay on Smith (Miscellaneous Prose Works, iv. 63). 37. Waverley, 347. 38. For the power of familial and physical metaphors, and their resonances when interpreted in the language offered by psychoanalysis, see Chris Prentice, ‘Some Problems of Response to Empire in Settler Post-Colonial Societies’, in Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (eds), De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 45–58. The parent and child motif was widely commented on and has important ramifications in political representation as affective bond: see e.g. John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 54;Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Stephen Fender, Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 16: ‘The organic model of an individual’s adolescent growth—the irresistible, irreversible process by which Paine naturalised the Revolution and countless emigrants proclaimed their assimilation to their adoptive country—was and remains a powerful enabler of both individuals and societies.’ 39. Waverley, 361. 40. See Fulford, Romantic Indians, 7–12; and Andrew Hook, From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Literary and Cultural History (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999). 41. Walter Scott, The Shorter Fiction, ed. Graham Tulloch and Judy King, vol. xxiv of The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, 30 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), xxiv. 196. 42. Scott, The Shorter Fiction, 96. 43. Scott, The Shorter Fiction, 77. 44. Scott, The Shorter Fiction, 80. See William Blackstone on ‘the noble monuments of antient simplicity, and the more curious refinements of modern life’ in ‘this noble pile’ of law, in Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769, 4 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), iv. 436. The constitutional potential of old houses, clearest, in historical fiction, in The Old Manor House, also derives from the first Gothic usurpation-tale, The Castle of Otranto (1764); and the passage from Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, which is cited in support of the house-as-nation idea is indebted to Walpole. Of ‘the idea of a liberal descent’, Burke writes: ‘It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences and titles.’ Reflections, 121. 45. Scott, The Shorter Fiction, 79. 46. Scott, The Shorter Fiction, 79. 47. Scott, The Shorter Fiction, 84, 85. It is not clear exactly what this position is. Browne has, at first, ‘started up in bed, and sat upright, supporting myself on

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my palms’, but this may not be ‘the same attitude which I had assumed in the extremity of my terror’ (85). The presence of the ghost in itself hardly seems to account for Browne’s reluctance to give the particulars of the experience, which he tells Woodville is ‘of a nature so peculiar and so unpleasant’ (83), though his ‘shame’ is that of ‘a man and a soldier’ (85). 48. See particularly Blanche in The Lady of the Lake (1810), Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering (1815), Helen MacGregor in Rob Roy (1818), Madge Wildfire in The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), Magdalen Græme in The Abbot (1820), and Ulla Troil in The Pirate (1822). 49. Shorter Fiction, 88. Tulloch and King note that this is the OED’s only record of ‘unmantled’, meaning ‘to have its furnishings removed’ (256). This is true if the term is taken to mean the furnishings of a room, a rare use of which ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ is indeed the earliest recorded example. Scott seems to be playing on the earlier and customary sense of ‘to take off one’s mantle’, i.e. a garment; at least, the transfer from clothing to room-furnishings is resonant in this story. 50. ‘Story of an Apparition’ is quoted in full in The Shorter Fiction, 196–9. 51. Scott, The Shorter Fiction, 198. 52. C. O. Parsons, ‘Scott’s Prior Version of “The Tapestried Chamber” ’, Notes and Queries, 107 (1962), 417–20. See Tulloch and King’s ‘Historical Note’ to ‘The Tapestried Chamber’, The Shorter Fiction, 196–205. 53. Scott, The Shorter Fiction, 202. 54. Scott, The Shorter Fiction, 77, where it is clear that ‘the impolitic and ill-fated controversy’ can apply to the American War in general as well as to its military conclusion at Yorktown. 55. See further, Robertson, United States in British Romanticism, ch. 6. 56. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 163–5.

12 A Bookish History of Irish Romanticism Claire Connolly Irish Romantic novels repeatedly return to the importance and meaning of local and intimately experienced detail. Following closely in the footsteps of Edmund Burke’s defence of a politics founded on a specific, just, and timely engagement with a properly apprehended past, these novels realize, in a variety of registers, a set of affective attachments to the local, the material, and the ordinary. I have argued elsewhere that the politics of such novels resides not in one or other ideological or confessional standpoints but rather in their openness to the divided world that they represent.1 Even as they occupy themselves with histories of everyday life, Irish Romantic novels remain self-consciously absorbed with the complex historical and material processes whereby Irish life is realized within Anglophone print culture. In their concern with the materiality of historical detail and in their fidelity to their source material, these novels are closely linked with the emerging ambitions of historicist scholarship. They share with the evolving historical sciences a specific interest in the evidentiary foundations of the past and occupy, as Joep Leerssen remarks of the texts of Irish Romanticism more generally, ‘an ambiguous position’ between history and literature.2 In this, as in much else, novels share common ground with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antiquarianism. Novels and antiquarian collections both imagine an overflowing cultural bounty that is stored within manuscript and print media, and concern themselves with questions of collection, copying, collation, and transmission. Clare O’Halloran argues that, from the 1790s through to the 1830s, Irish novels absorb the energies of antiquarian modes of history.3 Her account of the emergence of new conceptions of Irish popular culture within Irish Romantic fiction demonstrates a key linkage between the creative work of imaginative writers and the collecting impulses of scholars and antiquarians. In terms of the material history of collection, the early years of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of ‘the great push towards

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gathering in the manuscript refugees of Gaelic culture and civilisation’, led by the Royal Irish Academy and animated by concerns about the fading away of the tradition of Irish manuscript production.4 Anglophone fiction expresses a similar urge to record a living culture that is thought to be passing: the very sense of passing and prospective loss gives Irish Romantic novels a plangently historical dimension, even when their topic is the quotidian or everyday life. In both cases, the diagnosis of loss propels significant cultural energies, and the relationship between cultural loss and ingenious acts of retrieval and energetic revivalism constitutes a central dynamic of Irish Romanticism. This chapter considers Irish Romantic fiction in terms of what Leerssen describes as ‘questions of cultural transmission, tradition and translation, processes of appropriation and adaption’.5 If history itself might be thought of as ‘fundamentally a literature of mediation’,6 then the study of Irish Romantic books affords a richly rewarding perspective on the processes by which the past is remade via acts of representation at once material and virtual. If we begin with one of the best-known examples of Irish Romantic fiction, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), we can track the many acts of transmission and transcription from which this first ‘national tale’ emerged. Owenson’s correspondence with her publisher Richard Phillips debates possible models for her book about Ireland: he regrets that she has ‘assumed the novel form’ and suggests an epistolary essay along the lines of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters (1725), while also assuming her familiarity with travel books about Ireland by John Carr and Daniel Augustus Beaufort: I assure you that you have a power of writing, a fancy, an imagination, and a degree of enthusiasm which will enable you to produce an immortal work, if you will labour it sufficiently. Write only one side of your paper and retain a broad margin. Your power of improving your first draught will thus be greatly increased; and a second copy, made in the same way, with the same power of correcting, will enable you to make a third copy, which will be another monument of Irish genius.7

What is remarkable within the text of The Wild Irish Girl is the extent to which the labour of writing can be seen to shape the texture of Owenson’s prose. Rather than fabricating footnotes and inventing sources, as an earlier generation of critics assumed, more recent editorial work on Owenson’s novel shows how many of her notes and discursive passages are copied directly from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books about Ireland.8 It is worth pausing here on the special role of footnotes in the Irish Romantic novel. Novels which themselves were for a long time considered ‘as imitative footnotes to a broadly English culture’9 made a special art of



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the use of paratextual material, often gathering quantities of extra material which explain aspects of history, landscape, song, and story at the end of a printed page of narrative prose, usually presented in smaller print. Such notes are frequently analysed as ‘devices of alienation’, serving to remind readers of their distance from a world in which the main thrust of the fiction makes them comfortable and welcome.10 Yet footnotes might instead be seen to offer a mediated form of intimacy, bringing readers into proximity with a palpable community of knowledge, derived from an array of sources and preserved in print.11 The novelists discussed here, Maria Edgeworth and John and Michael Banim, are explicitly concerned with the extent to which their novels sought to copy from Irish culture, and worry also about the slightness of the novel form in relation to the copiousness of that culture. Their interest in the culture of the copy extends to technically ingenious attempts to add texture and tactility to the depiction of the Irish past: these link to the work of the Irish antiquarian and lithographer, Thomas Crofton Croker, addressed in the chapter’s final section. Part of my project here is to mobilize the bookish concept of the copy in order to focus our attention on the novels of Irish Romanticism as books: as medial experiments, alongside others, in finding ways of giving graphic form to the sights, sounds, and sensations of nineteenth-century Ireland. In this way, Irish Romantic novels can be thought of as mediated histories of everyday life in a way that more conventional historical texts cannot. I R I S H RO M A N T I C I S M A N D B O O K H I S TO RY Catherine Gallagher credits the novels of Walter Scott as having ‘set a representational pattern through which the wholeness of a culture was associated with the boundedness of the book describing it’.12 Irish novels, too, might be thought of as limiting and restricting the culture they seek to represent by assuming an implicitly historical perspective on what is a living culture. Luke Gibbons has influentially imagined Irish Romanticism as issuing in compelling writing of defeat: ‘on a collision course with Britishness and the ideology of empire’, as he puts it.13 For Gibbons and other critics writing in a postcolonial mode, this Celtic culture of valiant defeat is always on the verge of escaping its own mediation in print. This has led to a curious and oft-repeated account of these novels as failed fictions: novels that are ‘of interest precisely because of their failure as novels’, as Derek Hand puts it.14 Gibbons concludes his discussion of Irish Romanticism by invoking Charles Robert Maturin’s 1812 novel The Milesian Chief and its compelling representation of the carnage of conflict: of the scene

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analysed, Gibbons remarks that ‘the romantic hero may have been in the grave but it was far from clear that romantic Ireland was dead and gone, or safely interred in the pages of the literary canon’.15 The Milesian Chief earned Maturin ‘the vast sum of £80’.16 The novel was printed in three volumes for Henry Colburn in 1812 with a ‘Dedication to the Quarterly Reviewers’, reprinted almost immediately afterwards in Philadelphia, and translated into French in 1828. Gibbons’s other chief example of this compelling culture of defeat—Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies—presents us with one of the most complex cases in Irish Romantic book history. The Melodies were serially published over a thirty-year period, illustrated by Daniel Maclise, regularly sung, performed, and adapted. Stunningly successful in terms of sales, and subject to a several legal cases, as texts, they continue to challenge critics with their complex mix of sound, song, image, print, and performance. The suggestions of critics such as Gibbons and Hand (themselves echoing comments by Seamus Deane and Terry Eagleton) that the pages of the literary canon fail to properly contain the hectic world of early nineteenth-century Ireland resonate with Tom Dunne’s understanding of Romantic Ireland in terms of new political and cultural impulses which were absorbed into pre-existing colonial patterns. Such static accounts of the relationship between text and context have produced highly stable and repeatable political diagnoses of Irish fiction as trapped within colonial history and problematically aligned with the politics of Union. If we understand these impulses and patterns in material terms, however, we can begin to see a more fluid and changing cultural world within which books move and change meaning. My discussion here takes the following set of questions phrased by Andrew Piper and applies them to the politically charged context of Irish Romantic culture: What did it mean to reimagine a literary work residing not in a single book but as part of an interrelated bibliographic network? What was the cultural status of the copy and how did it relate to the larger reformulation of notions like novelty and innovation? What did it meant to reprocess an existing yet largely forgotten cultural heritage from one medium to another? How was one to contend with the growing availability of writing, where such availability was increasingly understood to be a problem? Finally, what did it mean to reimagine creativity as an act of intermedial making, as a facility with various modes of communication simultaneously?17

Few accounts of Irish Romanticism take cognizance of its mediations via print. At the same time, however, we are all too familiar with some of the difficult material facts surrounding the production and reception of such texts. The histories of the Irish novel and the British publishing industry are



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closely intertwined for this period. Many of the Irish novelists either lived in London or spent long periods there, while British publishers account for the vast majority of Irish novels published. Yet if we can cast off our embarrassment about the tainted nature of national tales that are less than fully national, we can pay more attention to the fascinating splits and divisions within Irish Romantic print culture, and begin to notice how—perhaps even because of these very divisions and splits—copying comes into view as a distinct cultural phenomenon, rather than as an unfortunately secondary aspect of an Irish culture too closely bound to the London market. It is helpful here to address the situation of the early nineteenth-century Irish book trade. The Act of Union in 1801 meant, among other things, the extension of the Copyright Act of 1709 to Ireland in 1801, all but killing off an Irish publishing industry that was reliant on markets for cheap reprints in Ireland, Britain, the American colonies, and the West Indies. Scholars such as Mary Pollard and James Raven have helped us to gauge the quantity of London published novels which were reprinted in Dublin in the later decades of the eighteenth century and have shown us a pre-Union Dublin book trade that was characterized by reprints: because they were effectively piracies once they left Ireland, the Irish book trade consisted of publishers that were copy shops and whose business can seem, as Pollard puts it, ‘a pale and inferior reflection of that of London’.18 After 1801, reprints became ‘extremely rare’.19 Many Dublin booksellers emigrated to the eastern US after 1798 and again in the immediate aftermath of the Union. Yet the transatlantic trade, which had been a contraband one until American markets opened up 1778 and 1780, was once more to become an important source of reprints, collections, anthologies, and adaptations. Maria Edgeworth notes this as early as 1822: ‘every English book of celebrity is reprinted in America with wonderful celerity’.20 This story is an often-told one and has been refined in important ways in recent years. But the wider question of a separate Irish readership for the Irish novel remains elusive, while increasingly close political and cultural connections between Britain and Ireland in the aftermath of the Act of Union challenge any attempt to disaggregate an Irish aspect to the overall picture of the novel in this period. The mixed British and Irish readership for Irish national tales belongs to a period itself characterized not only by closer political union but also by improved infrastructural links between the islands and a high degree of mobility for groups including migrant labourers, the military, members of the legal and medical professions, and authors themselves. A fuller sense of this complex readership is emerging from the work of scholars such as Toby Barnard, Maire Kennedy, and Rolf Loeber, but my purpose here is to focus our attentions on the books

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themselves: their fate on the busy London market, especially in the period in which the Irish novel becomes a recognizable commodity as fictions of Irish life are bought and sold. The novels of Irish Romanticism were almost all published in the period in which we can begin to talk about publishing proper: the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Adrian Johns argues, is when we see the usage of ‘the term, “publishing”,. . . to denote a discrete and stable commercial practice’. (Johns points out that the earliest usage given by the OED is attributed to Scott, ‘a provenance that is almost too appropriate’.21) The idea of the copy, as we understand it today, itself also emerges from this moment: the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century idea of the copy was in part produced by the dramatic expansion in printed books in Europe and North America. A literary work does not exist merely as a single book but rather as something that acquires identity via its existence as part of a bibliographic network. The matter is not straightforward, however. William St Clair, for example, instructs us not to speak of copies proper until stereotyping, because moveable type and the hand press basically meant more texts rather than more copies of existing texts (for practical reasons, ‘forms could rarely be left standing from impression to impression’).22 Books were still more borrowed than bought during the early decades of the nineteenth century, which meant that publishers paid well for copyright while fostering ‘a cult of exclusivity’.23 Changes in technology (the steam-driven rotary press, the development of stereotype plates, and mechanized paper production) finally began to make a difference and contributed to the increasing willingness of publishers in the 1830s to produce collected and serial editions of fiction.24 On the other hand, the idea of the copy operates powerfully in cultural terms in the Romantic period. As Piper puts it, a number of writers and artists begin to think seriously about ‘the imaginative possibility that something stayed the same’.25 The debates here are generative and allow us to track one of the most compelling paradoxes of the Romantic book: that the book is what makes ‘ideas more stable, repeatable, sequential, national, and. . . individual’; while at the same time, the real world of books defies boundedness and regularity by being many, secondary, and imperfect, always receding against ‘the elaborate bibliographical horizon in which novels proliferated and circulated’.26 Piper is very good on this paradoxical relationship between the ideal of books as uniform, bounded, and countable, and the reality of books as frangible, numerous things whose very proliferation threatens to overwhelm their readers. From this paradox flow others, with the division between original and copy always under threat.



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COMPLIMENTS, COPIES, AND M A R I A E D G E WO RT H This section addresses, via the case of Maria Edgeworth, the difficulties of getting copies of books; the problems of being copied and of making good copies; and the relationship between modest and more highly charged kinds of copying in the context of a developing realist aesthetic. Among the Irish novelists of the period under consideration, Maria Edgeworth stands out for the depth of her fictional commitment to a historicized version of everyday life. What Ina Ferris calls ‘the question of how it is people live in everyday historical time’27 was posed repeatedly by Edgeworth, and became for her closely associated with the aesthetic achievements of her contemporary, Walter Scott. In 1814, Edgeworth addressed a letter to the ‘Author of Waverley’, in which she depicts a domestic scene of reading located within the communicative contexts of Irish Romanticism. Expressing her admiration for Scott’s novel and its ability to establish incident and impact by degree, Edgeworth’s letter builds towards a comparison with Shakespeare and the curiously negative compliment with which she concludes: there is nothing volatile or shocking or improbable in this novel’s imitation of nature and of character, and it is all the more engaging for this reason. To the Author of Waverley. Edgeworthstown, Oct. 23, 1814. Aut Scotus, Aut Diabolus! We have this moment finished Waverley. It was read aloud to this large family, and I wish the author could have witnessed the impression it made—the strong hold it seized of the feelings both of young and old—the admiration raised by the beautiful descriptions of nature—by the new and bold delineations of character—the perfect manner in which character is ever sustained in every change of situation from first to last, without effort, without the affectation of making the persons speak in character—the ingenuity with which the each person introduced in the drama is made useful and necessary to the end—the admirable art with which the story is constructed and with which the author keeps his own secrets till the proper moment when they should be revealed, whilst in the meantime, with the skill of Shakespear, the mind is prepared by unseen degrees for all the changes of feeling and fortune, so that nothing, however extraordinary, shocks us as improbable: and the interest is kept up to the last moment.28

The passage is often read for its depiction of the transfer of novelistic power and cultural legitimacy from the successful Irish woman writer of national tales to the Scottish man of letters and inaugurator of the genre of historical fiction. In such a reading, Edgeworth is on her way to becoming

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the secondary figure so often found in twentieth-century literary histories. This secondariness belongs more generally to a diagnosis of Irish Romanticism as trapped in the shadows of British power: Tom Dunne, for example, influentially argues that ‘[t]‌here was no “Romantic” era in early nineteenth-century Ireland, only Romantic impulses which were absorbed into already established patterns of response to the colonial experience’.29 Yet following the opening paragraph of this long letter, Edgeworth goes on to appraise Scott’s novel in cooler terms. The negatives with which the letter opens take on a more critical edge, as she remarks unfavourably on Waverley’s imitativeness of Henry Fielding and its overdoing of picturesque Highland effects. Edgeworth declares herself unhappy that the ‘Author of Waverley’ ‘should for a moment stoop to imitation’: she finds the addresses to the reader in Waverley too like Fielding, and says ‘for that reason we cannot bear them, we cannot bear that an author of such high powers, of such original genius, should for a moment stoop to imitation’.30 A distinction begins to emerge, developed in this chapter, between good and bad kinds of imitation: the humble and authentic copying from the life that marks the overall tenor of Scott’s novel and the Romantic-era novel more generally, and the problematic imitation of another author, one whose writing is, moreover, associated with highly charged fictional effects. This distinction is by no means an absolute one, but rather expresses a set of observations that emerge in culturally specific ways from the print culture of Irish Romanticism. To temper the criticism, Edgeworth goes on to remark that her account will have been marked by the broken rhythms of her reading, and the difficulty of obtaining copies of Waverley at her home in Edgeworthstown, in the Irish midlands. Hers is a reading, she insists, marked by the very particular circumstances of the book trade between Britain and Ireland, and between Dublin and the countryside: I tell you without order the great and little strokes of humour and pathos just as I recollect, or am reminded of them at this moment by my companions. The fact is that we have had the volumes—only during the time we could read them, and as fast as we could read—lent to us as a great favour by one who was happy enough to have secured a copy before the first and second editions were sold in Dublin. When we applied, not a copy could be had; we expect one in the course of next week, but we resolved to write to the author without waiting for a second perusal. Judging by our own feeling as authors, we guess that he would rather now our genuine first thoughts, than wait for cool second thoughts, or have a regular eulogium or criticism put in the most lucid manner, and given in the finest sentences that ever were rounded.31

Edgeworth’s comments thus draw our attention to material issues: here we see an Irish writer at a distance from the London market on which her own books depend, making her address to a clever Scottish lawyer located



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in a city with a vibrant cultural market. These differences are constitutive of the differences between Irish and Scottish culture in the Romantic period. Ian Duncan argues that in Scotland ‘culture supplied the terms of a Scottish national identity that flourished within the cosmopolitan or imperial framework of civil society’.32 Ireland, by contrast, wracked by rebellion, famine, and unrest, and still suffering religious intolerance until 1829, is ill equipped to provide the kind of progressive, commercial, and entrepreneurial context required for literature—as it was coming to be understood—to flourish.33 Such divisions can, however, be interrogated. Ten days before the letter to the ‘Author of Waverley’, Edgeworth had written to her stepmother, Frances Beaufort, with cheerful remarks about a visit to Admiral Pakenham’s nearby home: ‘We went to Coolure and had a pleasant day. Waverley was in everybody’s hands. The Admiral does not like it: the hero, he says, is such a shuffling fellow.’34 And even Edgeworth’s sense of being at a disabling distance from the main marketplace for books is not a eternal truth but rather one closely bound up with changing technologies of communication—she herself writes very engagingly, for instance, in 1821, of changes to reading brought about by the new steam ships, which were sailing on the Irish Sea from the start of this year. Another letter to her stepmother carefully plots a simultaneous reading of Scott’s recently published novel The Pirate (1822). Maria Edgeworth was visiting London at this time, and her idea is that the Edgeworthstown and London branches of the family can all read the brand new book at the same time: ‘Thanks to the printing press—the mail coach and the steam packet beyond the gifts of fairies we can all see and hear what each other are doing and do and read the same things nearly at the same time.’35 To aid in the process, she sent home to Edgeworthstown a drawing of the ground plan of the reading arrangements in their London drawing room. Despite these many interesting ambiguities and tensions, some basic facts about patterns of Irish reading and reception may be gleaned from Edgeworth’s correspondence. Edgeworth regularly attests to the problem of getting copies of recent London publications in her correspondence: to her friend Lady Romilly she remarks, ‘Oh the heart is sick with hoping and hoping before books reach Ireland—’.36 While Scott’s control of the publication of his novels was to become a key to his success, Edgeworth suffered many practical problems in relation to her own writing, caused by distance from, and dependence on, the London market. There are, for example, several references in her correspondence to pretenders to her name: in the preface to volume 4 of the 1812 series of Tales of Fashionable Life, the Edgeworths include a list ‘of all the Works written by Mr. and Miss Edgeworth / Published only by J. Johnson and Co. St. Paul’s

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Church-Yard’. Yet in January of 1814, the year in which Waverley was published, Edgeworth received a box of books from her publisher Rowland Hunter with French translations of her tales alongside ‘two works surreptitiously printed in England under our name, and which are no better than they should be’.37 By 1842, Edgeworth was happy to agree to sign her name to John Murray’s petition in favour of Lord Mahon’s Copyright Bill. Another early instance of Edgeworth as victim of copying is reported in an 1816 letter to John Murray concerning Scott and pretenders to Waverley authorship. Here, Edgeworth reminds Murray of: a singular circumstance that happened about Castle Rackrent—No name was to the first edition—An officer in the Buckinghamshire militia actually took the trouble to copy from the printed book and make an Ms of it and caused himself to be surprised one morning with the Ms. on the table and then acknowledged himself to be the author! How could anyone think it worth while to do such a thing?38

There is an irony here in that Castle Rackrent (1800) began life in an act of copying: Edgeworth took notes on the speech of the family steward, John Langan, and transferred these into print without, it seems, much further thought for their source. There is a point (difficult to locate, but around 1814) in Edgeworth’s career at which her reputation for admirable commitment to social reality became shadowed by criticisms of her uncanny and, some critics suggested, socially improper skill at copying from life. Following the publication of Patronage in 1814, Sydney Smith, otherwise an admirer of her work, wrote to a friend saying: ‘If she has put in her novels people who fed her and her odious father she is not trustworthy.’39 One of Edgeworth’s own letters, written from Edgeworthstown in 1816, records a rumour that she has heard about herself from a Mr Ward, recently arrived in Ireland: ‘He told me that he had heard in London that I had a sort of Memoria Technica, by which I could remember everything that was said in conversation, and by certain motions of my fingers could, while people were talking to me, note down all the ridiculous points!!’40 Edgeworth’s correspondence yields further rich evidence of her interest in both processes of copying and its cultural meanings. A letter of 1819 recounts a conversation with James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, about the stereotype printing of banknotes, and the technical difficulties of preventing forgery and copying. The immediate context is the report of a House of Commons appointed Commission Inquiry into the increase in banknote forgeries, related in 1819 to agitation for the reduction in use of paper currency. She learns from Watt that technologies of reproduction keep alarming pace with the capacities of creativity:



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We went to see dear old Mr Watt—84 and in perfect possession of eyes ears, and all his comprehensive understanding and warm heart—his eye as penetrating as ever. . . . So many recollections painful and pleasurable crowded and pressed upon my heart during this half hour I had much ado to talk but I did and so did he—forgeries on bank notes—no way he can invent of avoiding such but by an inspecting clerk and office in every country town. Talked over committee report—paper-marks—vain— Tilloch—I have no great opinion of his abilities—Bramah—yes—he is a clever man—But set this down for truth—no man is so ingenious but what another can be found equally ingenious—What one can invent another can detect and imitate. I mentioned my fathers scheme of employing first rate engravers—above imitation. But there are 500 now in England and Scotland—first rate and equal as far as any talents they could shew in the compass of a Bank note.41

Tilloch had invented and patented the process of stereotyping, and from the 1790s was trying to interest government in its use in the prevention of forgeries. Paradoxes of copying continue to build, as the same letter remarks on the singularity of the elderly Watt himself: Edgeworth is delighted to be promised an original engraving of his head by his wife, while she notes too that Chantrey has made a bust of him. Edgeworth’s particular interest in sculpture, and Watt’s work on a machine that would allow sculptures to be copied (a forerunner of 3D printing, Andrew Prescott suggests),42 further reminds us that Edgeworth’s interest in the mechanics of copying tracks the full range of mimetic possibilities, from the idea of copying as imitation, to what Michael Taussig calls ‘a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived’.43 COPIES AND DOUBLES Alongside Edgeworth’s technical interests in the mechanics of copying, the Romantic period in Ireland witnesses a tranche of bibliographically oriented novels, or bookish books: novels that capture within themselves the splits and divisions of the worlds in which Irish books move. John and Michael Banim are especially notable in this regard: they regularly use metaphors drawn from print culture (e.g. facsimile, copy, type, cliché) in their depiction of the complexity of Irish culture: in their novel Crohoore of the Bill-Hook (1825), the tithe proctor Peery Clancy is described as only one of many ‘living fac-similes’ of a frightful political system: ‘the Bastille may have been torn down in one country and, the Inquisition abolished in another; but the Irish tithe-proctor of this day, and the Irish tithe-proctor of fifty years ago, are individuals of one and the same species’.44

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The Irish novel flourished in a period of dramatic expansion for printed books in Europe and North America. The same period saw the rise of what Piper calls ‘bibliographically oriented individuals’: ‘authors. . . editors, translators, booksellers, printers, librarians, critics and bibliographers’.45 As the Irish Romantic book studies itself, questions of reproduction and copying emerge alongside psychological plots of doubling. Maria Edgeworth’s novel Helen (1834) is markedly concerned with the practice of copying in both private and public domains. Several of the main characters suffer because their correspondence is copied by others. The heroine, Helen, pretends that some letters are copied from her private correspondence in order to protect the reputation of her married friend Cecilia, and faces a sacrifice of her personal happiness as a result. Cecilia’s mother, Lady Davenant, risks losing her privileged place in court and diplomatic circles because of rumours that she has allowed a copy of a letter from ‘an illustrious personage to be handed about and read by several people’.46 (Edgeworth may be thinking of John Wilson Croker here, especially in his role as prosecutor in the Queen Caroline affair.) The illicit copyist turns out to be Lady Davenant’s Portuguese page, Carlos, whose communicative abilities lie at the heart of the mystery. Assuming that he cannot understand English, Lady Davenant allows him to attend her private parties and have free access to her correspondence. Even though she is teaching him to write at the same time, Lady Davenant fails to realize that he can, as the ever observant Helen puts it, ‘speak, read, and write English’.47 The novel’s treatment of the relationship between literacy and comprehension is complex. It is potentially related to elite fears about the spread of a kind of uninformed literacy or monstrous education. It may also bear on the bilingual world of nineteenth-century Ireland: a world in which it was possible to disassociate, at least imaginatively, writing from reading. This link between copying, cultural difference, and monstrosity has been very well discussed by Aileen Douglas, who argues for the novel’s Gothic resonances and compares Carlos’s ‘activities in his illicit copy-shop’ to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Fleeing for fear of capture, he leaves behind only ‘remains’: ‘the writing “scarcely yet dry” ’, argues Douglas, ‘recalls a corpse, scarcely yet cold’.48 The suggestive linkage between ‘reanimating bits of dead bodies’ and ‘copying bits of paper’ in the novel tie it directly into a particular kind of Gothic, one marked by a concern with doubling, as forms of duplication both material and cultural. Yet more compelling evidence for interest in the culture of the copy can be found in the writings of male Catholic middle-class novelists in the late 1810s and through the 1820s and 1830s. John and Michael Banim are often separated from Edgeworth via a literary history that allows religious background to establish lines of connection. Like Edgeworth, however,



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the fictions of the Banims strongly bear out Piper’s suggestion that literary doubles not only represent an increased interest in diffuse and split forms of identity but also ‘address a communicative world defined by increasingly reproducible cultural objects’.49 In Revelations of the Dead-Alive (1824) by John Banim we have a text that that focuses on the London publishing industry itself. The book consists of miscellaneous previously published essays and reviews crudely stitched together by Banim under pressure of financial hardship. Banim and his new wife had moved to London from Kilkenny in 1821 and within a couple of years had begun to suffer from the effects of what Michael Banim referred to as ‘the escape of gas from my brother’s balloon’.50 In 1823, John Banim sold Revelations of the Dead-Alive for 30 guineas to Simpkin and Marshall. The same publishers issued his better-known Irish tales, co-written with this brother—the first of the Tales of the O’Hara Family containing Crohoore of the Bill-hook, The Fetches, and John Doe—in the following year. The linking narrative that Banim created for Revelations of the Dead-Alive imagines the narrator in a state of suspended animation over a period of a year, in which he is able to project himself two centuries ahead to London in 2022–3. Banim’s narrator possesses not only the ‘rare and mystical attribute’ of an ability to suspend life but has also learned while at school to retain a degree of consciousness during the process.51 He has learned, following much practice, to project himself forward into time for increasingly long periods in doubled shape. Hunger is the chief enemy of these journeys on the astral plane but some further researches lead Banim’s narrator to the Americas and the purchase from some Otomac Indians of a certain kind of clay that will keep animal yearnings for food at bay for long periods. (The account of the clay is based on Helen Maria Williams’s translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799–1804, which was published by Longman in 1814 and had reached three editions by 1821.) From this ‘leafy cradle’ in the Oronooko basin, what comes into view is England: ‘All I saw was in England, and appertained to England’ opens the first chapter of these visionary travels.52 The time traveller’s commentary on 2022 examines London life and what are essentially the fads of the year 1823: fashionable clothing, phrenology, boxing, and astronomy are all satirized while the city’s culture industry—periodicals, theatre, needy authors, and expansionist publishers—receives special attention. Meanwhile, we learn that in 2022 ‘the prime minister of England was the grandson of an Irish pig-broker and the keeper of the seals had resulted from a scrivener’s apprentice’.53 A lunar British colony has been successfully established, in

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spite of the ‘scythes, sickles, and pitch-forks’ of some rebellious natives led by the Man in the Moon. A ‘grand rebellion in Ireland’ had taken place in 1829, led by Orangemen alarmed ‘at some prospect of relief and indulgence to the Irish papists’ and put down by Captain Rock who was rewarded with a government sinecure.54 ‘Dead-alive’ states afford an entry into the print culture of Romantic nationalism: literally in the case of this, Banim’s second London publication, but also metaphorically within a range of early nineteenth-century Irish novels where dead-alive states provide a means of addressing self-reflective questions to the business of national fiction. Revelations of the Dead-Alive thus addresses the London that troubles so many accounts of the novels of Irish Romanticism: ‘the rather unfigurative community for whose edification we write’, as Banim puts it.55 The time traveller’s first destinations on arriving in this future London point to Banim’s immediate preoccupations with the print culture within which he was attempting to earn his living. He immediately goes to Albemarle Street but finds, at ‘the well-remembered spot where erst a flaming yellow plate elucidated, in gigantic letters, the abode of the mighty publisher’, a sausage shop. Proceeding from there to Conduit Street (home of Saunders and Otley, and Henry Colburn before his move), he finds only a coach maker located behind Colburn’s famous ‘handsome front of pillars’:56 In a hurried pace, only recollecting, or only permitting myself to recollect Mr Colburn’s genteel removal, extension rather, to New Burlington-Street, I hastened thither. Conceive my start—the house was a feather-bed and bolster factory!57

It is only after a succession of such visits, to Bond Street, Maddox Street, and George Street, that the time traveller finally begins to understand the changes that have take place in the London he thought he knew. The traveller then makes his way to the new home of the publishing industry, which turns out to be Primrose Hill. He fails to meet the all-important Mr Quarto, the publisher, but learns some lessons about what is now popular: moral essays and poetry, above all things, in particular, epics, pindarics, and pastoral. On enquiring after the reputations of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Thomas Moore, he is told that few of these names are remembered. Instead, the noted writers are Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Milton, Pope, Dryden, and Young. Meanwhile Lady Morgan’s reputation continues to excite controversy and the painter James Barry has finally been claimed as a genius. The traveller expresses his surprise at the lack of originality in the list and is told that ‘original’—the word is repeated—is ‘a senseless word. . . that ages upon ages of experience



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have altogether exploded. Ours is the matured world, sir: thousands of fools and of failures have taught us, that nothing can be done out of the footsteps of a great precedent.’58 The text continues to debate the concept of originality as the time traveller discusses the publishing industry with a hard-working, underpaid author named Mr Drudge: the Romantic poets whom the traveller admires so much were too attached to this very idea, explains Mr Drudge, and the general cultural obsession with originality caused, he explains, ‘the rapid and total decay of literature after, I think, the year 1856’. (Mr Drudge here reprises Edgeworth in her letter about James Watt: ‘What one can invent another can detect and imitate’.59) Banim’s gentle satire on a future neo-classicism that disdains the literary obsessions of his own times allows originality—as with England itself—to emerge as an object of scrutiny. It is worth recalling too that, as this curious book offers a critical perspective on the idea originality, it does so via the perspective of a doubled narrator. Summarizing the book in a short but engaging discussion of the Banims, W. B. Yeats refers to the time travelling narrator as ‘his scin laca, astral body, doppelganger, or what you will’.60 The Banims continue to use doubled figures and plots involving doppelgangers in their novels. One tale, The Irish Lord Lieutenant and his Double (1838), is particularly worthy of note in this respect, in that it imagines a professional double or ‘copyist’: an Englishman who looks very like a certain nobleman and whose mimicry takes him to Dublin when the nobleman is appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In Ireland, however, the ‘copyist’ finds that the consequences of his act of imitation are much greater than in fashionable London. He becomes involved in real Irish agrarian violence and flees back to London. In The Irish Lord Lieutenant and his Double the question of the copy connects to the image of the double in order to address a public role—that of Lord Lieutenant—that is closely connected with the anomalies of union and the asymmetries of colonial power. ANTIQUARIANISM AND LITHOGRAPHIC I L LU S T R AT I O N The Banims’ interest in how the lived past could be captured in print extends into the area of visual representation. In his introduction to a novel called The Bit o’ Writin (1838), Michael Banim complains that he and his brother had wished to include in the finished novel a copy of a text—a bit of writing—on which an aspect of the plot turns. This is the ‘Memorandle O’Sarvice’, assumed to have been written by Murty Meehan, a character who has the role of ‘public’ or community writer, at the dictation of a

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retired naval officer, ‘the Ould Admiral’. Murty, whom the Banims tell us is based on a real person, had given the authors an original memorandum, with the intention of having it inserted as it came to my hands. The printers were, however, provided with no font of type from which a fac-simile could be produced, so that my copy of the original went for nothing.61

The novel’s frame narrative thus expresses a desire for additional tactility via the textual production of ‘a fac-simile’ but regrets the technical difficulties that prevented the transmission of the original, culturally specific, text. Such possibilities were, however, beginning to open up within early nineteenth-century print culture, greatly helped by the illustrative techniques of lithography. Invented in 1790s, lithography is method of relief printing which works on the fact that water and grease repel each other: if a printing surface is marked with grease and then dampened with water, ink settles only on the unmarked parts of the surface. The printing surface was usually stone (lithography was sometimes called ‘stone drawing’). The process is, as its leading historian Michael Twyman puts it, ‘encapsulated in the expression “like water off a duck’s back” ’.62 Lithography was slow to make its mark and its impact on the British printing trade was minimal until the 1820s. It did, however, prove particularly suitable for the reproduction of particular kinds of graphic material: maps, plans, musical notation, autograph, and short-run printing that combined simple pictures with words. (Twyman even suggests that ‘lithography can be seen as a forerunner of the desktop publishing revolution of the mid 1980s’.63) Cork-born and London-based civil servant and antiquarian Thomas Crofton Croker was an early adopter of the technologies of lithographic illustration. Crofton Croker was involved with the use of lithography both in his desk job in the Admiralty in London, where he held the role of senior clerk,64 and in his reproductions of Irish folklore in print. A founding member of the Camden Society and probably a partner in the London lithographic firm of Engelmann Graff Coindet & Co., Croker was highly alert to the practical uses of lithography. There had been a lithographic press in the Admiralty: in 1807 the Quarter Master General’s Office in Whitehall bought the secret of the process and some materials, and ‘the first successful production of the press, a plan of Bantry Bay, was published on 7 May 1808’. From 1811 the Whitehall lithographic press ‘really began to flourish’ and was regularly used for circular letters.65 The ways in which Croker’s technical knowledge of lithography was put to work in the service of the depiction of the Irish past can be seen in his connection with a young Irish female writer named M. G. T. Crumpe, who, only leaving her home in Limerick for short visits to London,



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was patronized by Thomas Moore, Thomas Campbell, and Edgeworth. Crumpe was clearly an expert networker: an exasperated Edgeworth reports that ‘All I can say is that Miss Crumpe may have every virtue and accomplishment but she wants the natural feeling of modesty’; while the poet Thomas Campbell tried to interest the critic Francis Jeffrey on her behalf, maintaining that he would be ‘as convinced’ of her ‘talents’ ‘if she were the ugliest Woman in England’.66 Crumpe’s access to Crofton Croker serves to connect her into a network of other Irish writers in London and resulted in a further guarantee of the accuracy of her historical romance. Colburn published Crumpe’s novel Geraldine of Desmond (dedicated to Moore) in 1829, a year that marked a highpoint in the production of titles of Irish novels. Crumpe wrote to John Murray in 1830, telling him how ‘I have been furnished from a high official source with fac-similes of the autographs of the principal historical characters that are introduced into my work—Those fac-similes have been lithographed under the superintendence of my kind friend Mr Crofton Croker and will be annexed to the forthcoming edition—which I hope will invest it with a curious interest.’67 The second edition of Geraldine features these facsimile signatures at the opening of its first volume, while the third volume closes with the curious device of presenting most of the last paragraph (the final page of the volume) in a facsimile of the author’s own manuscript hand. A facsimile reproduction of her own signature is appended under the printed words ‘The End’.68 The edition was advertised as ‘useful to the searcher after historical records’. ‘The value of the second edition has been considerably enhanced by the introduction of a series of autographs of the principal personages whose names are introduced into the work.’69 Crumpe’s use of lithographed authographs depends upon a relationship between likeness and tactility, or what Marcus Boon calls ‘the tactile, contagious quality of mimesis’.70 The novel used facsimile signatures to underscore the accuracy of its depiction of a period of contested history, in the context of changing historiographical standards. As ‘writers grappled with the difficulty of giving shape to a historical sensibility no longer bounded by public transactions’,71 individual autographs accompanied by a specimen of the author’s own hand might be seen to provide not just a guarantee of authenticity and historical accuracy, but also a kind of personally mediated access to the inner life of the past. Antiquarian scholarship reminds us, however, of the difficulty of delivering on such promises. In the case of Croker’s own book, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, we can see how this very early collection of oral folk tales strives, via successive editions and supplementary lithographed material, to connect the pages of a printed book to a culture that is represented therein. Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South

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of Ireland was first published anonymously in London in 1825. It went on to influence both Scott and the Grimm brothers, who translated it as Irische Elfmarchen in 1826. Fairy Legends has a complex textual history to which it is difficult to do full justice here, but the collection stands out for the way in which Croker sought to supplement the original stories with additional material. Following some doubts as to his own original authorship of the tales, Croker produced second and third editions containing lithographed material. This included musical notation (to supplement a tale where the character in the first edition is described as singing a song), a lithographed signature in the author’s own hand, and drawings of fairy figures to illustrate particular stories. Throughout the various editions, we can see how Croker, in collaboration with his publisher Murray, uses visual material to supplement and finally supplant the written word. Despite complaints in his letters to Murray about the ‘wearisome job’ of ‘the correction of the press and the cobbling up of the Notes’, Croker continued to make alterations to the text until 1834.72 Across the editions, notes become shorter or are eliminated, as visual material extends across the printed page. In the third edition of the Fairy Legends, for example, lithographic etchings of fairy figures feature as embellishments at the end of each story. Croker’s use of lithography clearly emerges from his particular technical interests in this exciting new medium—‘the first essentially new method of printing to have been developed since the fifteenth century’73—but it quickly becomes a way of addressing urgent debates about the accuracy and authenticity of depictions of the Irish past. Among Croker’s remaining papers in the British Library can be found chromolithographic transfer plates, which experiment with new graphic images of Irish identity. Croker’s interest in modelling such images helps us to understand the ways in which antiquarian activity imagined an abundant Irish culture in need of retrieval and transmission. Antiquarians like Charlotte Brooke wished to present Irish poetry as emerging from a continuous oral tradition from the bards onwards—almost bypassing print or being only accidently and temporarily captured within its confines.74 A related problem faced field-based collectors of tales and legends such as Crofton Croker himself, who, as Jennifer Schacker puts it, were faced with deciding ‘how to represent imported narrative traditions on paper—a problem of defining and then maintaining cultural and textual accuracy— and how to render those representations readable and meaningful’.75 Yet antiquarianism also, with what Susan Manning calls its ‘object-cluttered commentary on, and resistance to’ history, repeatedly turns on the materiality of culture.76 Indeed, antiquarianism had already phrased one of the key questions for the nineteenth-century Irish novel: ‘the question



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of how print might and should represent the fragmentary survival of past culture’. Among antiquarians, this ‘troublesome and much-contested’ question saw answers which, as Manning notes, ‘evolved from collection to collection through accusations and recriminations’ as the ‘distinction between collection, editing, improvement, imitation. . . and—at the extreme end—forgery, was elusive in practice’.77 Beneath these plural and competing antiquarian activities lies the older meaning of copia as abundance. As Boon points out, ‘the word “copy” comes to us from the Latin word “copia” meaning “abundance, plenty, multitude” ’.78 Its etymology returns us, he argues, to a paradox relating to ‘the deployment of abundance’. As he puts it, copia directs us to ‘both to the overflowing bounty of the harvest and to its storage for use’.79 The movement from an abundant folk culture to its ‘storage’ within print culture is one made repeatedly within the print culture of Irish Romanticism, as in Crofton Croker’s 1824 assessment of an abundant and living Gaelic manuscript tradition: ‘Modern manuscripts, in the Irish character, may be met with in every village, and they are usually the produce of the leisure hours of the schoolmaster.’80 Croker’s difficulties in recording Irish life from London are thus at once addressed and amplified by his interest in various forms of duplication. His is a special case of a situation we encounter within Irish Romanticism more generally: a book aimed at more fully representing national life, which understands and interrogates its own location within and between cultures and media, and is deeply and often self-consciously intertwined with forms of copying. C O N C LU S I O N I have been arguing that we have been too keen to see the predicament in which Irish writers find themselves in terms of ‘already established patterns of colonial response’.81 Instead, Irish Romanticism presents us with innovative writing intertwined with forms of duality and reproduction that emerge from conditions that were lived as everyday in early nineteenth-century Ireland. In this chapter I have focused largely on novelists and antiquarians but a fuller study of this topic would also discuss the extensive copying work undertaken for the offices of the Ordnance Survey (which opened in Dublin in 1824) and that of the Commissioner of Public Records. For the latter, James Hardiman paid the Gaelic scholar John O’Donovan a salary of 6 shillings each week, and breakfast each morning, for his employment in copying Irish manuscripts and extracts from legal documents. (O’Donovan is the basis for Owen in Brian Friel’s play Translations, 1980.) Hardiman also had

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the poet James Clarence Mangan in his employ, while Jeremiah Joseph Callanan was paid by Croker to collect tales in Cork and copy them down on his behalf. O’Donovan is remembered for his insistence on the respectful treatment of source material and his frustration at instances of incorrect or error-ridden copying. In a letter to George Petrie he says, ‘I am also fully convinced that unless we quote original and authentic manuscripts for the proof of Irish history, our arguments are baseless, and we leave the history of Ireland the same muddy thing which it has always been justly styled.’82 This drive to authenticity passes through multiple acts of copying and emerges as a kind of creative interest in copying as practice. Marcus Boon argues that calls for ‘a better understanding of practices of copying are continually being negotiated and refined by marginal communities today— defensively, in response to a global political and economic system that exploits them, but also autonomously, joyfully, as ends in themselves’.83 The emergence of copying as an end in itself serves as a good description of writers such as Mangan and William Maginn in the 1830s and 1840s. Mangan in particular is noted for his plagiarisms, pastiches, translations, and aesthetically charged practices of copying. More generally, the Irish literary culture that emerges in the 1830s seems to dilute emerging distinctions between creativity and criticism, and to defy the ‘ideology of professionalism for literary production’ that Ian Duncan associates with the Scottish Whig celebration of the civilizing power of a rationally regulated literary culture.84 Rather than seeing ‘the agenda of Irish romanticism’ as having ‘come to an end’, with its creative energies hampered by improvement and broken by violence,85 I would argue that the culture of the copy continues to generate versions of itself. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture yields ample evidence of how richly generative these paradoxes can be. James Joyce depicted an angry and frustrated copy clerk in his short story ‘Counterparts’ in Dubliners (1914): in the story, Farrington is punished at work for his failure to make the proper copies of a document, and then goes on to replicate the abusive behaviour he receives in his own home. In The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1989), the contemporary American poet Susan Howe mixes poetry and history in hybrid speculations on the figure of James Clarence Mangan (much admired by Joyce too). Howe finds in Mangan a kind of impossible original of Herman Melville’s famous fictional copyist: ‘I saw the penciled trace of Herman Melville’s passage through John Mitchel’s introduction and knew by shock of poetic telepathy the real James Clarence Mangan is the progenitor of fictional Bartleby.’86 Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ was written in 1853 but Howe improbably draws her evidence from



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Poe’s annotations on an 1859 edition of Mangan’s poetry, edited by John Mitchel. Howe’s imaginative project, written with brittle awareness of her own Irish-American heritage, is motivated by a sense of historical loss and an inherited sense of marginality. The Nonconformist’s Memorial resonates deeply within the culture of the copy. With its interest in Mangan’s job ‘as copier for Irish Ordnance Survey’ and ‘copyist and transcriber of documents’,87 its curiosity about Dublin journals of the nineteenth century, and its recollection of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Address to the Irish People (1812), Howe’s book might even lay claim to the status of an alternative archive of Irish Romanticism. I end not with Howe, though, but with a text written by an Irish poet who counts among her scholarly interests the work of Maria Edgeworth. Eiléan Ní Chuillenáin is, as Guinn Batten puts it, not only a poet of a lost Gaelic Ireland, but also a scholar of the Anglophone culture that succeeded and supplanted it.88 Ní Chuillenáin’s poem ‘Daniel Grose’, from her collection, The Brazen Serpent (1994), figures once more the problem of copying from life in the context of a highly charged history. The poem imagines the perspective of an antiquarian and artist of Irish ruins who trains his draughtsman’s eye on an abbey that has lain in silence for three hundred years, ‘While a taste for ruins develops’.89 At this distance, Grose sees light, upright lines, and the dimensions of an intrusive nature; yet the buildings that he sketches were destroyed during the Reformation and the poem vividly evokes their violent history. The poem does not, however, simply indict the historical Grose’s efforts to copy down this remnant of Irish antiquity but rather evokes the measured and powerful verse of an imagined ‘old woman by the oak tree’, whom Grose is using ‘to show the scale’: He stands too far away To hear what she is saying, How she routinely measures The verse called the midwife’s curse On all that catches her eye, naming The scholar’s index finger, the piper’s hunch, The squint, the rub, the itch of every trade. (29–35)

Ní Chuillenáin’s beautifully balanced poem stages a dream-like encounter between times and cultures. The poem’s own concern with scale is mirrored in the shift from one figure to the other, male to female, England to Ireland. The distinctions made by Edgeworth in her preference for humble copying from the life over highly charged aesthetic effects are present here, meaningful once more, as they give powerful imaginative expression to the passage of time and the work of history.

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1. Claire Connolly, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 2. Joep Leerssen, ‘Ossian and the Rise of Literary Historicism’, in Howard Gaitskill (ed.), The Reception of Ossian in Europe (London: Thoemmes, 2004), 109. 3. Clare O’Halloran, ‘Harping on the Past: Translating Antiquarian Learning into Popular Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in Melissa Calaresu, Joan Pau Rubiés, and Filippo de Vivo (eds), Exploring Cultural History: Essays in Honour of Peter Burke (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 330. 4. Pádraig Ó Macháin, ‘Nineteenth-Century Irish Manuscripts’, in Bernadette Cunningham and Siobhán Fitzpatrick (eds), Treasures of the Royal Irish Academy Library (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2009), 161, 163. 5. Leerssen, ‘Ossian’, 109. 6. Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. xi. 7. Richard Phillips to Sydney Owenson, 16 Oct. 1805, in Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence, ed. William Hepworth Dixon, 2 vols (London: W. H. Allen & Co, 1863), i. 254–5. 8. See Claire Connolly, ‘Introduction to the Text’, The Wild Irish Girl, ed. Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley (1806; London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000). 9. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. xi. 10. Richard Maxwell, ‘The Historical Novel’, in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 77. 11. I am drawing here on Mark Salber Phillips’s stimulating discussion of the dynamic movement between intimacy and distance in his book On Historical Distance. See n. 6. 12. Catherine Gallagher, ‘Review of James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels’, Victorian Studies, 49/1 (2006), 109. 13. Luke Gibbons, ‘Romantic Ireland: 1750–1845’, in James K. Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 185. 14. Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 84. 15. Gibbons, ‘Romantic Ireland’, 203. 16. P. D. Garside, J. E. Belanger, and S. A. Ragaz, British Fiction 1800– 1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception, designer A. A. Mandal DBF Record No. 1812A046. 17. Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 7. 18. See e.g. M. F. Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. v: ‘Considered merely as a reprinter of London books, the Dublin book trade looks like a pale and inferior reflection of that of London.



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As something of a phenomenon in its very rapid development in the eighteenth century, however, it deserves study in its own right, not in spite of its reprints but because its prosperity was largely based on them while its market was chiefly confined to Ireland through most of the century.’ 19. Peter Garside et al. (eds), The English Novel: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), i. 97. 20. Quoted in Garside et al., The English Novel, i. 99. 21. Adrian Johns, ‘Changes in the World of Publishing’, in James K. Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 377. 22. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 21–2. See also, Johns, ‘Changes in the World of Publishing’, 392. 23. Garside et al., The English Novel, i. 39. 24. Garside et al., The English Novel, i. 39. See also William R. McKelvy, ‘ “This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print”: Making Literary History in the Age of Steam’, in Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (eds), Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 61–84. 25. Piper, Dreaming in Books, 56. 26. Piper, Dreaming in Books, 13–14. 27. Ina Ferris, ‘Popularizing the Public: Robert Chambers and the Rewriting of the Antiquarian City’, in Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 177. 28. Maria Edgeworth to the ‘Author of Waverley’, Edgeworthstown, 23 Oct. 1814, in The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Augustus J. C. Hare, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold, 1894), i. 226–31. 29. Tom Dunne, ‘Haunted by History: Irish Romantic Writing, 1800–1850’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teichs (eds), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 88. 30. Dunne, ‘Haunted by History’. 31. Maria Edgeworth to Frances Beaufort, 13 Oct. 1814, in Letters, ed. Hare, i. 225. 32. Ian Duncan, ‘Edinburgh and Lowland Scotland’, in James K. Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 163. 33. See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), 44–50, 125–66. 34. Maria Edgeworth to Frances Beaufort, 13 Oct. 1814, in Letters, ed. Hare, i. 225. 35. Maria Edgeworth to Mrs Frances Edgeworth, n.d. [Dec. 1821], inMaria Edgeworth: Letters from England, 1813–1833, ed. Christina Colvin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 303. 36. 20 Aug. 1816, Murray Correspondence, National Library of Scotland. NLS MSS 42182.

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37. Frances Edgeworth, A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth: with a selection from her letters, by the late Mrs Edgeworth (London: Privately Printed, 1867), 296. 38. Maria Edgeworth to John Murray, 23 Dec. 1816. NLS MSS 42181. 39. Quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 257. 40. Maria Edgeworth to Mrs Ruxton, 18 Sept. 1816, in Letters, ed. Hare, i. 220. 41. Maria Edgeworth to Mrs Edgeworth, 4 Mar. 1819, in Letters, ed. Colvin, 176. 42. Andrew Prescott, ‘In the Footsteps of Boulton and Watt’: . 43. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993), 21. 44. John and Michael Banim, Crohoore of the Bill-Hook (1825; New York, 1884), 51. The comment resonates with Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980): ‘We’ll always have the Lanceys’. 45. Piper, Dreaming in Books, 4. 46. Maria Edgeworth, Helen (1834), ed. Susan Manly and Clíona Ó Gallchoir, in The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Marilyn Butler, Mitzi Myers, and W. J. McCormack (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), p. ix. 216. 47. Edgeworth, Helen, 218. 48. Aileen Douglas, ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Writing Classes’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 14/3 (2002), 387. 49. Piper, Dreaming in Books, 75. 50. John and Michael Banim, The Fetches (1825; New York, 1884), 10. 51. John Banim, Revelations of the Dead-Alive (London, 1824), 4. 52. Banim, Revelations of the Dead-Alive, 16. 53. Banim, Revelations of the Dead-Alive, 357. 54. Banim, Revelations of the Dead-Alive, 369. 55. John and Michael Banim, The Bit O’ Writin’ and Other Tales, by the O’Hara Family, 3 vols (London, 1838), i. 15. 56. Banim, Revelations of the Dead-Alive, 32. 57. Banim, Revelations of the Dead-Alive, 34. 58. Banim, Revelations of the Dead-Alive, 72. 59. Letters, ed. Colvin, 176ff. 60. W. B. Yeats, ‘John and Michael Banim’, in Representative Irish Tales (1891; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979), 96. 61. Banim, The Bit O’ Writin’, i. i. 62. Michael Twyman, Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography (London: British Library, 2001), 2. 63. Michael Twyman, The British Library Guide to Printing History and Techniques (London: British Library, 1988), 49. 64. See W. J. McCormack, ‘Croker, Thomas Crofton (1798–1854)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, Oct. 2006 . 65. Twyman, Breaking the Mould, 166.



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6 6. Garside et al., British Fiction [3 April 2010]: DBF Record No. 1829A033. 67. 23 January 1830, Murray Correspondence. NLS MSS 12604/1298. 68. M. G. T. Crumpe, Geraldine of Desmond: or, Ireland in the Days of Elizabeth. A Historical Romance. Second edition, with autograph fac-similes of the Principal Characters (London, 1830), 286-87. 69. Garside et al., British Fiction: DBF Record No. 1829A033. 70. Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 57. Boon explores the issue in relation to designer handbags and the booming world market in their replication. 71. Phillips, On Historical Distance, 142. 72. Thomas Crofton Croker to John Murray, 18 Aug. 1834, Murray Correspondence. NLS MSS 40294. 73. Twyman, Breaking the Mould, 3. 74. Leith Davis, ‘Refiguring the Popular in Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry’ Urbe’, in Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 72–87. 75. Jennifer Schacker, National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 11. 76. Susan Manning, ‘Antiquarianism, Balladry and the Rehabilitation of Romance’, in James K. Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 50. 77. Manning, ‘Antiquarianism’, 57. 78. Boon, In Praise of Copying, 41. 79. Boon, In Praise of Copying, 45. 80. Thomas Crofton Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland (London, 1824), 331. 81. See n. 29. 82. Quoted in Patricia Boyne, John O’Donovan (1806–1861): A Biography (Kilkenny: Boethius, 1987), 53. 83. Boon, In Praise of Copying, 248–9. 84. Duncan, ‘Edinburgh and Lowland Scotland’, 175. 85. James H. Murphy, Irish Novelists of the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10. 86. Susan Howe, The Nonconformist’s Memorial (New York: New Directions, 1989), 106. 87. Howe, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, 86. 88. Guinn Batten, ‘Boland, Mc Guckian, Ní Chuilleanáin and the Body of the Nation’, in Matthew Campbell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 183. 89. Eiléan Ní Chuillenáin, The Brazen Serpent (Loughrew: Gallery Books, 1985), 34–5.

Bibliography P R I M A RY S O U RC E S British Library BL MS 16922 BL MS 36485 National Library of Scotland NLS MS 12604/1298 NLS MS 40294 NLS MS 42181 NLS MS 42182 National Library of Wales NLW MS 2532B NLW MS 2594E P R I M A RY P R I N T E D S O U RC E S Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Noten zur Literatur’, in Rolf Tiedemann (ed), Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970–86), xi. 457–60. Aeschylus, The Persians, tr. Edith Hall (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1996). ‘Ancient Literature of the North’, London Magazine (Apr. 1820), 391–401. Arnold, Matthew, The Complete Poems, ed. Kenneth Allott, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1979). Asiatick Researches, i. (London, 1798). Auden, W. H., Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1976). Austen, Jane, The History of England, ed. Deirdre LeFaye (London: British Library, 1993). Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey (1818; London: Penguin, 1985). Austen, Jane, Persuasion (1818; London: Penguin, 1985). Baillie, Joanna, ‘Introductory Discourse’, Plays on the Passions (1798; London, 1851). Bakhtin, Mikhail M., The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981). Banim, John, Revelations of the Dead-Alive (London, 1824). Banim, John, and Michael Banim, Crohoore of the Bill-Hook (1825; New York, 1884). Banim, John, and Michael Banim, The Bit O’ Writin’ and Other Tales, by the O’Hara Family, 3 vols (London, 1838). Banim, John, and Michael Banim, The Fetches (1825; New York, 1884).

298 Bibliography Barbauld, Anna, ‘On the Uses of History’, in A Legacy for Young Ladies (London: Longman, 1826). Bennett, Alan, The History Boys (London: Faber & Faber, 2004). Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907). Bentham, Jeremy, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, 11 vols (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–43). Bentham, Jeremy, Memoirs and Correspondence, ed. John Bowring (London: Bowring Edition, 1838–43). Bertin, E., ‘Obituary of Richard Parkes Bonington’, Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires (28 Sept. 1828), non-paginated. Bingley, William, Excursions (London, 1804). Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769, 4 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Blake, William, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1970). Blake, William, Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson and David V. Erdman (London: Longman, 1971). Blanchot, Maurice, The Infinite Conversation, tr. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993). Blanchot, Maurice, The Step Not Beyond, tr. Lycette Neilson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992). Blanchot, Maurice, The Book to Come, tr. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Budden, Maria Elizabeth, True Stories from Ancient History, 2 vols (London: J. Harris, 1822). Budden, Maria Elizabeth, True Stories from English History (London: J. Harris, 1826). Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (1790; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Byron, Lord, Byron: Poetical Works, ed. F. Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Byron, Lord, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82). Byron, Lord, Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Byron, Lord, Byron’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Alice Levine (New York: Norton, 2010). Callcott, Lady Maria, Little Arthur’s History of England, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1835). Campbell, Thomas, The Pleasures of Hope (London: Longman, 1799). Campbell, Thomas, Gertrude of Wyoming (London: Longman, 1809). Campbell, Thomas, ‘Lectures on Poetry. By T. Campbell. Lecture V. Part II.’, New Monthly Magazine, 4 (Jan. 1822), 193–9.

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300 Bibliography Dow, Alexander, The History of Hindostan, translated from the Persian, 3 vols, 3rd edn (London: John Murray, 1792). Dumesnil, Alexis, Histoire de Don Juan D’Autriche (Brussels: L. J. Brohez, 1827). Edgeworth, Frances, A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth: With a selection of her letters, by the late Mrs Edgeworth (London: Privately Printed, 1867). Edgeworth, Maria, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Augustus J. C. Hare, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold, 1894). Edgeworth, Maria, Maria Edgeworth: Letters from England, 1813–1833, ed. Christina Colvin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Edgeworth, Maria, (1834), The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, p. ix, ed. Susan Manly and Clíona Ó Gallchoir, gen. eds. Marilyn Butler, Mitzi Myers, and W. J. McCormack, 12 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999). Fenton, Richard, Poems (London, 1790). Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767). Fielding, Henry, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies, rev. Thomas Keymer (1742; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Flaxman, John, Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus designed by John Flaxman engraved by Thomas Piroli (London: J. Matthews, 1795). Forster, John, ‘Review of The Curse of Kehama, by Robert Southey’, Eclectic Review, 7 (Apr. 1811), 334–50. Franklin, Caroline, ‘Byron and History’, in Jane Stabler (ed), Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 86. Franks, James, Memoirs of pretended prophets, Who have appeared in different ages of the World, and especially in modern Times; Pointing Out, from Authentic Sources, their Blunders, and the Pernicious Consequences of their Pretensions: With An Examination of some of the most Remarkable and best attested Modern Predictions, Shewing that no inference can be Deduced From them in Favor of the Recent Existence of a Prophetic Spirit. By a Clergyman (London: J. Johnson, 1795). Friel, Brian, Translations (London: Faber & Faber, 1981). Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edn (1975; New York: Continuum, 2011). Gilchrist, Octavius, ‘Some Account of John Clare, an Agricultural Labourer and Poet’, London Magazine, 1 (Jan. 1820), 7–11. Gleig, George, ‘Prophecy’, Encyclopædia Britannica, 3rd edn (1797), non-paginated [accessed Apr. 2012]. Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness, ed. Isaac Krammick (1793; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). Godwin, William, The Enquirer (London, 1797). Godwin, William, History of Rome (London: M. J. Godwin at the Juvenile Library, 1809). Godwin, William, Life of Lady Jane Grey, and of Lord Guildford Dudely, Her Husband (London: M. J. Godwin & Co., 1824).

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Index Abrams, M. H.  145, 235 Natural Supernaturalism  145 Addison, Joseph  78 Adler, Hans  148 Adorno, Theodor  236, 238 Aeschylus 157–9 Aikin, Lucy  36 Epistles on Women  36 Alfieri, Vittorio  215 Althusser, Louis  2, 13 Alfred, King  48 America  3, 5, 15, 24, 39, 75, 81, 146, 169, 246–51, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256–65, 275, 276, 282, 283, 290, 291 André, Major John  263 Ankersmit, Frank  15 Ariosto, Ludovico  252 Orlando Furioso  252 Aristotle 78 Ars Poetica  78 Arnold, Matthew  214 Ascue, Anne  50 Asia  60, 77, 157–8 Astell, Mary  40, 41 Serious Proposal to the Ladies  41 Auden, Wystan Hugh  211, 214, 219 ‘Dover’ 214 Austen, Cassandra  37, 38 Austen, Jane  37, 38, 43 Northanger Abbey  37 Persuasion  37 History of England  37 Mansfield Park  265 Austria  194, 195 Bacon, Francis  40 Baillie, Joanna  16, 17, 36, 44, 46, 98, 108, 112 Plays on the Passions  16 Metrical Legends  98, 112 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain  58, 62 Bakhtin, Mikhail  145 Banim, John  24, 273, 281–6 Crohoore of the Bill-Hook  281 Revelations of the Dead-Alive  283–4 Tales of the O’Hara Family  283 The Bit o’ Writin  285 The Irish Lord Lieutenant and his Double  285

Banim, Michael  24, 273, 281–6 Crohoore of the Bill-Hook  281 Tales of the O’Hara Family  283 The Bit o’ Writin  285 The Irish Lord Lieutenant and his Double  285 Bann, Stephen  7, 13, 15, 39, 187 The Inventions of History  13 Barbauld, Anna  36, 40, 42, 45 Legacy for Young Ladies  36 Barnard, Toby  275 Barrell, John  235, 238 Barry, James  284 Barthes, Roland  6, 8, 235 Bate, Jonathan  243 Batten, Charles  123 Batten, Guinn  291 Baudelaire, Charles  209 ‘The Voyage’  209–10 Baym, Nina  39 Beaufort, Daniel Augustus  272 Beaufort, Frances  279 Bennett, Alan  35 The History Boys  35 Bentham, Jeremy  18, 72–3, 75, 78–84 Berryman, John  219 Bertin, Edouard  183 Bingley, Reverend William  133 Excursions in North Wales  133 Black, Jeremy  254 Blackwood, William  174 Blair, Hugh  8, 12 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres  8 Blake, William  38, 50, 137, 149, 161, 239, 246–7, 251, 264, 265 America a Prophecy  246–7, 251, 283 Blanchot, Maurice  21, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 154–5, 159, 161, 206 Le Livre à venir  150 The Infinite Conversation  154 Bloom, Harold  218, 239 The Visionary Company  218 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich  58 Bolingbroke, Henry St John  1st Viscount  98, 105 Letters on the Study and Use of History  105 Bonaparte, Napoleon  65, 135, 208, 212 Bone, Drummond  215, 216

326 Index Bonington, Richard Parkes  22, 23, 179–97 Rouen Cathedral and Quays  181 Restes et Fragmens d’Architecture du Moyen Age  182 Rouen Cathèdrale de Notre Dame telle qu’elle était avant l’Incendie de 1822 182 L’Église St-Sauveur, Caen  182 A Fishmarket near Boulogne  182 Picardy Coast with Children—Sunrise  183 Meditation  184, 186 The Old Man and the Child  185 The Antiquary  186 Amy Robsart and Leicester  187 Le Silence Favourable and Le Doux Reproche  187 Quentin Durward at Liège  189 Henri IV and the Spanish Ambassador  192 François I and Marguerite of Navarre  192 Henri III of France  194 Henri III at the Death-bed of Marie of Cleves  194 A Lady Dressing Her Hair  195–6 Boon, Marcus  287, 289, 290 In Praise of Copying  289 Borch, Gerard Ter  185, 197 Concert: Singer and Theorbo Player  185 Bossche, Chris Vanden  103, 111 Boswell, James  99, 101, 106 Bowen, Huw  55 Bridges, Frances  185 Britain  4, 11, 14, 17, 19, 23, 39, 75, 79, 85, 128, 136, 169–70, 195, 246–8, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259–64, 265, 275, 278 Britton, John  181 Brooke, Charlotte  288 Brothers, Richard  149 Brummell, George Bryan ‘Beau’  171, 212 Budden, Maria Elizabeth  42, 43, 45 True Stories  42 True Stories, from Ancient History  43 True Stories from English History  43, 45 Bundock, Christopher  13, 21, 22, 144, 206 Burckhardt, Jacob  11 Burke  38, 95, 252, 253, 262, 271 Reflections on the Revolution in France  252 Burnet, Gilbert  104 Burns, Robert  101, 175 Burstein, Miriam  36 Butler, Marilyn  3, 86

Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries  3 Bygrave, Stephen  36 Byron, Lord George Gordon  9, 16, 22, 23, 86–8, 151, 159, 165, 170, 171–2, 173, 191, 205–20, 223–35, 238, 239, 240–3, 284 The Corsair  16, 87, 233, 234 The Bride of Abydos  87 The Giaour  87 Lara  87, 207, 208, 226, 227–43 The Siege of Corinth  87 Parisina  87 Don Juan  159, 165, 170, 171–2, 206, 208–20, 223, 227 Childe Harold  173, 207, 208–20, 227, 228, 230, 233, 240, 242 Marino Faliero  191 Beppo  214, 229, 235 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers  225 Cain  231 Byzantium 152 Caen  182, 191 Caerwys 137 Callanan, Jeremiah Joseph  290 Callcott, Maria  43, 45 Little Arthur’s History of England  43, 45 Cambridge 35 Campbell, Thomas  168, 223, 248, 254, 287 ‘Lectures on Poetry’  168 ‘Ancient Literature of the North’  168 ‘Goethe on Art and Antiquity’  168 The Pleasures of Hope  168 Gertrude of Wyoming  168, 248, 254 Cambria 122–3 Canada 253 Capper, Louisa  42 A Poetical History of England, Written for the Use of the Young Ladies Educated at Rothbury-House School  42 Carey, William  60 Carlyle, Alexander  103 Carlyle, Thomas  2, 10, 11, 18, 20, 88, 94–112, 126, 173 Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell  94-97 ‘On History’  97–8 ‘Essay on Burns’  100 ‘On Biography’  100, 101 Life of Friedrich Schiller  101 Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I and Charles I 103 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History  103, 106 ‘Baillie the Convenator’  106

Index Caroline, Queen  282 Carr, John  272 Carr, Robert  51 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount  212 Chambers, William  55–6, 65 ‘On the Ruins at Mavalipuram’  55, 65 Chandler, James  5, 6, 15, 17, 146, 243 Chapone, Hester  40, 42, 44 Letters on the Improvement of the Mind  40, 42 Charles I  38, 48, 103 Charles X  195 Cornwallis, Charles, Lord  260 Chantrey, Francis Leggatt  281 Cheeke, Stephen  212 Childers, Joseph W.  108 Clare, John  23, 175, 223–5, 232, 235–43 ‘The Fairey Rings’  237 ‘An Invite to Eternity’  238, 239 ‘The Flitting’  239 ‘The Mores’  239 ‘Decay’ 240 ‘Don Juan’  240 ‘The Moorehen’s Nest’  240 ‘Gipsy Song’  240 ‘The Badger’  241 ‘Noon’ 241 ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’  242 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, First Earl of 104 History of the Rebellion  104 Clouet, François  189 Cochran, Peter  215 Colburn, Henry  168, 174, 274, 284, 287 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  137, 175, 227, 231, 284 Christabel  231 Conder, Josiah  211 Condorcet, Nicolas de  50, 73 Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain  73 Connell, Philip  76 Connolly, Claire  24, 25, 126, 271 Constantine, Mary-Ann  21, 121 Constantinople  152, 223 Cork  213, 286, 290 Cowley, Charlotte  42 The Ladies History of England  42 Crabbe, George  167 Craciun, Adriana  48 Cradocus 131 Craufurd, Quintin  59, 60, 64, 66, 67 Sketches of Hindostan  64 Croker, John Wilson  99, 101, 282

327

Croker, Thomas Crofton  273, 286, 287–90 Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland  287–8 Cromwell, Elizabeth  107–8 Cromwell, Oliver  20, 94–7, 102–12 Cronin, Richard  22, 24, 165, 181 Crossley, Ceri  10, 14 Crumpe, M. G. T.  286–7 Geraldine of Desmond  287 Cunningham, Allan  175 Dante  156, 224 Darwin, Erasmus  40 Deane, Seamus  274 De Blois, Charles  48 Defoe, Daniel  97, 100, 105 Delacroix, Eugène  179, 180, 189, 190 Deleuze, Gilles  241 De Man, Paul  154, 161, 243 De Montfort, Jane  48 Derrida, Jacques  6, 8 De Staël, Mme  224 De l’Allemagne  224 Diderot, Denis  100 Douglas, Aileen  282 Dow, Alexander  60 History of Hindostan  64 Droysen, Johann Gustav  11, 148 Dryden, John  169, 284 Dublin  275, 278, 285, 289, 291 Dubois, Jean-Antoine  84 Duffy, Stephen  179, 185, 188, 195 Duke of Cumberland, Prince William Augustus  212, 250 Dumesnil, Alexandre  195 Histoire de Don Juan D’Autriche  195 Dunbar, James  102, 108 Duncan, Ian  279, 290 Dunne, Tom  274, 278 Du Sommerard, Alexandre  187 Dyce, Alexander  47, 51 Specimens of British Poetesses  47 Eagleton, Terry  274 East Smithfield  40 Edgeworth, Maria  24, 40, 258, 273, 275, 277–91 Castle Rackrent  258, 280 Tales of Fashionable Life  279 Helen  282 Edinburgh Review  9 Edward I  124, 128 Edward IV  38 Edwards, Elizabeth  135 Eichhorn, J. G.  14 Elizabeth I  38, 45, 47–9,188, 224

328 Index Ellis, George  8 England  40, 127, 166–9, 188, 211, 247, 260, 283 Europe  5, 14, 19, 24, 79, 136, 264 Evans, Paul  132 Everest, Kelvin  4 Farquhar, Sir Walter  263 Fennel, Alice  166, 167, 173, 175, 176 Fenton, Richard  122, 123, 128, 135 Ferguson, Adam  38, 72, 73, 75 Essay on the History of Civil Society  73 Fermanis, Porscha  15, 20, 94, 126 Ferris, Ina  9, 124, 247, 277 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  98 Wissenschaftslehren  98 Fielding, Henry  100, 278 Joseph Andrews  100 Flaxman, John  158 Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus  158 Fletcher, Loraine  252, 253 Fleury-Richard, François  192 Florence 208 Forster, E. M.  265 Howard’s End  265 Foster, John  66 Foucault, Michael  13 Fordyce, David  42 Fordyce, James  40 Fradelle, Henri-Joseph  188 Fraistat, Neil  206 France  3, 11, 14, 40, 81, 132, 150, 180, 195, 253, 254 Franks, James  149 Freeman, Mark  133 Friel, Brian  289 Translations  289 Froude, James Anthony  11 Fulford, Tim  254 Fukuyama, Francis  225 Fuseli, Henry  261 The Nightmare  261

Gibbon, Edward  8, 13, 38, 50, 54, 94, 205, 207 An Essay on the Study of Literature  8 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire  205 Gibbons, Luke  273, 274 Gilbert, Eliot, L.  100 Gilchrist, Octavius  175 ‘Account of John Clare, an Agricultural Labourer and Poet’  175 Gilpin, William  21, 123, 126, 134 Observations on the River Wye  123 Gladwin, Francis  64 Ayeen Akberi  64 Gleig, George  149 Godwin, William  18, 41, 42, 45, 82, 99, 101, 108, 110, 206 Enquirer  82 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice 41, 82 ‘Of History and Romance’  82, 99, 108 History of Rome  45 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  14, 15, 100, 101, 104, 218, 224 Goldsmith, Oliver  37, 100 History of England  38 Goldsmith, Stephen  159 Goldstein, Jan  79 Gossman, Lionel  8, 10, 15, 96 Gough, Richard  126, 134 Grafton, Anthony  13 Grey, Lady Jane  47 Gray, Thomas  134 Greece  60, 146, 151–9, 168, 206 Green, Sarah  166 Scotch Novel Reading  166 Gregory, John  40 Griffith, Moses  130, 132 Grimm, Jakob  14, 288 Gros, Antoine-Jean  181 Guattari, Felix  241 Gurney, Thomas  170 Guyer, Sara  243

Gadamer, Hans-Georg  146, 147, 148, 151 Gallagher, Catherine  273 Galt, John  16, 97 Garside, Peter  166 Geddes, Jenny  103 Geetz, Clifford  5 Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse de  40 Geoffrey of Monmouth  138 Géricault, Théodore  197 Raft of the Medusa  197 Germany  11, 14

Hamilton, Paul  19, 23, 223 Hand, Derek  273, 274 Hardiman, James  289 Hays, Mary  36, 47, 51 Female Biography  36 Hazlitt,William  82–3, 167, 169, 170, 175, 250 The Plain Speaker  82 The Spirit of the Age  250 Hegel, Friedrich  11, 18, 96, 148 Philosophy of History  148 Heidegger, Martin  146, 153

Index Heine, Heinrich  101 Helme, Elizabeth  43, 46 The History of England  43, 46 Hemans, Felicia  36, 137 Records of Woman  36 A Selection of Welsh Melodies  137 Henderson, Heather  96 Henri III  194 Henrietta, Queen  48 Henry IV  38 Henry VII  38 Henry VIII  46, 50 Henry, Robert  17 Herder, Johann Gottfried  14, 136, 148 Hilton, Mary  36, 39 Hogg, James  175 ‘Tales and Anecdotes of the Pastoral Life’ 175 Hogle, Jerrold E.  156 Holbein, Hans  197 Holborn 40 Hölderlin, Friedrich  236, 238 Andenken  236, 238 Holywell 130 Homer 284 Hopps, Gavin  215 Horace  78, 223 Poetics  78 Howe, Susan  290–1 The Nonconformist’s Memorial  290–1 Humboldt, Alexander von  283 Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799–1804 283 Hume, David  13, 19, 37, 38, 44, 45, 50, 54, 84, 94, 99, 101, 176 A Treatise of Human Nature  99 Hutcheon, Linda  6 Hutcheson, Francis  16 India  19, 20, 54–69, 72–90 Ingamells, John  179 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique  192 Ireland  75, 103, 109, 124, 146, 272, 273–91 Irving, Washington  169, 173, 262 The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon  169 Tales of a Traveller  262 Italy  55, 64, 136, 190, 224 Jacobs, Carol  155 Jameson, Fredric  2, 5 Jann, Rosemary  108–9 Jarvis, Simon  23, 88 Jefferson, Thomas  75

329

Jeffrey, Francis  85–8, 287 Joan of Arc  47–8 Johns, Adrian  276 Johnson, Samuel  99, 211, 212 Johnston, Dafydd  129 Jones, Edward  136 Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards  136 Bardic Museum  136 Jones, William  20, 54–65, 68, 69, 78 ‘Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nation’ 61 ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India’ 55 ‘On the Literature of the Hindus’  55 ‘On the Chronology of the Hindus’  58 Joyce, James  213, 290 Dubliners  290 Kalidasa  61, 65 Śakuntalā  65, 74 Sacontala: Or the Enchanted Ring  61, 64 Kames, Henry Home, Lord  73 Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion  73 Kant, Immanuel  15, 16, 58, 102, 224 Critique of Judgment  224 Kasmer, Lisa  36 Keane, Angela  254 Keats, John  16, 50, 162, 195, 228, 230, 242 The Eve of St Agnes  195 Kejariwal, O. P.  56 Kennedy, Maire  275 Kidd, Colin  165, 176 Kilkenny 283 King, Judy  262, 263 Klein, Lawrence  78 Koselleck, Reinhart  13, 144–9, 162 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe  144 Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time  144, 147 Kucich, Greg  16, 19, 22, 35, 180, 190 Labbe, Jacqueline  48 LaCapra, Dominic  1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 15 Lamb, Charles  169 Lamb, Lady Caroline  170 Glenarvon  170 Lancashire 131 Leerssen, Joep  271, 272 Lefebvre, Georges  11 Levinson, Marjorie  5 Rethinking Historicism  5 Lewis, Matthew  261 The Monk  261

330 Index Limerick 286 Llywelyn the Last  128 Lloyd, John  129, 136, 137 Locke, John  40, 61 Loeber, Rolf  275 London  276, 278, 279, 280, 283–6, 287, 288, 289 Looser, Devoney  36 Lorenz, Chris  102 Löwith, Karl  146 Lowth, Robert  61 Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews  61 Ludlow, Edmund  104 Memoirs  104 Lukács, Georg  14, 249 Luther, Martin  50 Lynch, Deidre  104 Mabillon, Jeans  11 Macaulay, Catherine  36, 40, 44–6 History of England  36, 44 Macaulay, Thomas Babington  9, 10, 11, 12, 15 Machiavelli, Niccolò  49 Maclise, Daniel  274 MacNeice, Louis  219 Macpherson, James  74, 136 Ossian  136 Maginn, William  290 Mahabalipuram 55–6 Mahon, Derek  213–4, 219 Majeed, Javed  54, 86, 89 Malthus, Thomas  18, 50 Mangan, James Clarence  290, 291 Mangnall, Richmall  43 Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the use of Young People  43 Mannheim, Karl  14 Manning, Susan  94, 251, 288–9 Marcet, Jane  42, 43, 45 Conversations For the Use of Children  42 Conversations on the History of England  43, 45 Marguerite of Navarre  192 Markham, Mrs [Elizabeth Penrose]  42–46 Historical Conversations  43 History of England  43 Marx, Karl  223, 225 Grundrisse  225 Maturin, Robert  273–4 The Milesian Chief  273–4 Maurice, Thomas  57, 60, 64 The History of Hindostan  57, 60 Mavor, William  50

Mayer, Robert  9 McGann, Jerome  3, 207, 209, 211, 233 Rethinking Historicism  5 The Romantic Ideology  3, 207 McGavran, James Holt  39 McInerney, David  72 James Mill and the Despotism of Philosophy  72 Meinecke, Friedrich  14, 15 Mellor, Anne  36, 46 Melville, Herman  290 ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’  290 Menze, Ernest A.  148 Merionethshire 129 Michelet, Jules  14, 18 Mill, James  17, 19, 20, 23, 54–65, 72–90 History of British India  17, 19, 23, 54, 65, 72–90 Mill, John Stuart  90 Millar, John  72–3, 176 Origin of Ranks  73 Milton, John  50, 88, 103, 104, 284 Mink, Louis, O.  21 Mitchel, John  290 Mitchell, Rosemary  22, 23, 179 Mitford, Mary Russell  41 Myers, Mitzi  36, 39 Momigliano, Arnaldo  11, 15 Mohammed II  152, 157, 161 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord  73 Of the Origin and Progress of Language  73 Monod, Jean-Claude  145 Montagu, Lady Wortley  272 Turkish Letters  272 Montaigne, Michael de  212 Morgan, Sydney, Lady  35, 36, 284 Woman and Her Master  35 Moore, Thomas  16, 85, 86, 87, 223, 274, 284, 287 Lallah Rookh  86 Irish Melodies  274 More, Hannah  40 More, Thomas  40 Möser, Justus  14 Muldoon, Paul  219 Murray, John  170, 213, 223, 280, 287, 288 Nairn, Tom  165 Naseby 102 New York  253 Ní Chuillenáin, Eiléan  291 The Brazen Serpent  291 Niebuhr, B. G.  11, 14

Index Nietzsche, Friedrich  11, 233, 253 Noon, Patrick  179, 180, 182, 189, 192, 195 Normandy  181, 191 Novalis 101 O’Brien, Karen  10, 13, 105, 110, 247 Narratives of Enlightenment  13 O’Donovan, John  289, 290 O’Halloran, Claire  271 O’Malley, Andrew  39 O’Neill, Michael  16, 23, 151, 159, 161, 205 Orr, Linda  7 Otway, Thomas  215 Owain Glyndŵr  124, 128, 129 Owenson, Sydney  9, 272–3, 284 The Wild Irish Girl  272–3 Oxford 35 Paine, Thomas  130, 246 Rights of Man  130 Palgrave, Francis  11 Parry, John  137 A Selection of Welsh Melodies  137 Parsons, Coleman  262 Peacock, Thomas  227 Essay on Fashionable Literature  227 Pennant, Thomas  21, 121–39 Tours in Wales  21, 121–39 Tour in Scotland  125–7 History of the Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell  130 Penrose, Elizabeth [Mrs Markham]  42–46 Historical Conversations  43 History of England  43 Percy, Thomas  136 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry  136 Petrarch, Francesco  224, 227 Petrie, George  290 Philips, Mark Salber  12, 13, 14, 44, 105, 109, 125, 180, 183 Society and Sentiment  13 Philips, Richard  46–7, 51, 272 Piper, Andrew  274, 276, 282–3 Pittock, Murray  3 Plotz, Judith  39 Pocock, J. G. A.  6, 11, 15 Poe, Edgar Allen  291 Pointon, Marcia  179, 180, 184, 192, 194, 197 Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley, William  212 Pollard, Mary  275 Pomarè, Carla  207

331

Pope, Alexander  88, 210, 223, 225, 226, 284 Essay on Man  210 Popper, Karl  149 Porter, Jane  16 Prescott, Andrew  281 Price, Robert Holland  135 ‘Llangollen Vale’  135 Pugh, Edward  134 Cambria Depicta  134 Pughe, William Owen  138 Radcliffe, Ann  262 Rad, Gerhard von  149 Ramsay, David  253, 254 History of the American Revolution  253, 254 Ranke, Leopold von  2, 11,18, 111, 148 Raven, James  275 Redding, Cyrus  168 Reeve, Clara  40, 41, 97 Plans of Education  41 Regan, John  1, 17, 19, 20, 72 Reid, Thomas  16 Reiman, Donald  206 Reviczki, Charles  61 Révoil, Pierre  192 Rhŷs, John  134 Richard II  129 Richardson, Alan  39, 40 Richardson, Samuel  20, 97, 100, 104–5, 110 Rigney, Ann  6, 13, 17, 98, 180 Imperfect Histories  13, 180 Ritson, Joseph  8 Rivet, Charles  190 Roberts, Daniel  19, 54, 75 Roberts, James  181 Robertson, Fiona  3, 24, 101, 246 Robertson, William  13, 37, 38, 45, 50, 54, 72, 101, 176, 248, 264 History of America  248, 264 Robinson, Eric  243 Robinson, Mary  41 Rochefoucauld, François de La  212 Rome  209, 218 Roscher, Wilhelm  15 Roscoe, Henry  169 Rosenberg, John  96, 101, 108 Rosenthal, Leon  179 Ross, Marlon  5 Rowse, Elizabeth  43 Outlines of English History in Verse  43 Rouen 191 Rousseau, Jean Jacques  40, 207, 208, 228

332 Index Rubens, Peter Paul  197 Ryan, Vanessa  101 Sandy, Mark  216 Saratoga  24, 250–5, 257–60, 264 Savage-Landor, Walter  85 Gebir  85 Savigny, Friedrich von  14 Schiller, Friedrich  101–3, 234 A History of the Thirty Years War  103 Schmitt, Carl  146 Scotland  73, 123–7, 130, 134, 136, 165–75, 247, 278–9, 281 Scott, Joan  36 Scott, John  173 Scott, Walter  1, 8, 9, 16, 17, 22, 85, 86, 88, 94–5, 97, 99, 110, 165–76, 179, 181, 223, 227, 247, 249–51, 255, 257–65, 273, 276, 277–9, 284, 288 Waverley  1, 9, 166, 247, 251, 255, 257–8, 264, 277–80 The Antiquary  16 Ivanhoe  17, 174 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border  86 Rob Roy  166, 174 Redgauntlet  166–7 Guy Mannering  167, 259 The Abbot  174 The Antiquary  174, 187 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border  175 Kenilworth  188, 189 The Lay of the Last Minstrel  195 ‘The Tapestried Chamber’  247, 259–62, 263–4 ‘Memoirs’ 249–65 Chronicles of the Canongate  260 Miscellaneous Prose Works  257 Rokeby  259 The Pirate  279 Scott-Waring, John  75 Seeley, J. R.  10, 111 Seward, Anna  134, 135, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264 ‘Llangollen Vale’  134 Monody on the Death of Major André 261 Schacker, Jennifer  288 Shakespeare, William  213, 215, 216, 227, 277 As You Like It  252 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper  3rd Earl of  16 Shelley, Mary  36, 193–4, 282 ‘The False Rhyme’  193–4 Frankenstein  282 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  21, 50, 68, 86, 144, 147, 150, 151–62, 205, 206, 207,

212, 215, 217–8, 227, 232, 238, 242, 284, 291 Hellas  21, 22, 144, 151–62, 206 Queen Mab  86, 205 The Triumph of Life  152–5, 158, 161–2, 217, 218 Epipsychidion  155 Prometheus Unbound  155–159, 205 A Defence of Poetry  156, 217 Adonais  217, 232 Address to the Irish People  291 Shore, Jane  47 Skrine, Henry  134 Sicily 136 Smethurst, Paul  127 Smith, Adam  8, 19, 73, 75 Wealth of Nations  73 Smith, Charlotte  24, 35, 36, 37, 42–51, 247, 252–9, 264–5 The Old Manor House  24, 247, 252, 253, 254–65 History of England  42–51 Minor Morals [and] Historical Anecdotes  43 History of England, from the Earliest Records to the Peace of Amiens  46 The Emigrants  48 Desmond  257 Smollett, Tobias  100, 255 The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker  255, 259 Sommerard, Alexandre du  187, 197 Southey, Robert  9, 16, 20, 56, 60, 64–67, 85, 248, 284 The Curse of Kehama  20, 56, 60, 64, 85, 86 ‘On the Literature of the Hindus’  55 64 ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’  55 64 ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindus’ 64 ‘On the Antiquity of the Indian Zodiac’ 64 ‘On the Orthography of Asiatick words’ 64 Thalaba  85–6 Oliver Newman: A New-England Tale  248 Spitalfields 40 Spenser, Edmund  87, 210, 217, 224 Spongberg, Mary  36 St Clair, William  166, 276 Stephen, Leslie  96 Sterne, Laurence  100 Stewart, Dugald  84 Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political

Index Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe  84 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth  1st Earl of 103 Strutt, Joseph  17 Stuart, Charles  45 Stuart, Mary  38, 45, 48 Stukeley, William  126 Sultan, Tipoo  65 Sun Lee, Yoon  9, 95 Swift, Jonathan  212 Switzerland 132 Tarling, Barbara  253 Tarr, Roger  100 Tasso, Torquato  284 Taussig, Michael  281 Taylor, Baron  181 Voyages Pittoresques et Romantiques dans l’Ancienne France  181 Thapar, Romilla  64 Thierry, Augustin  14 Thomas, William  72 Thomson, George  137 Select Collection of Original Welsh Airs  137 Thoré, Théophile  189 Tocqueville, Alexis de  150 Tilloch, Alexander  281 Todd, Janet  40 Trautmann, Thomas  54, 58 Trimmer, Sarah  41, 42, 43 A Description of a Set of Prints of English History  43 Tromans, Nicholas  17 Trumpener, Katie  94, 138 Tulloch, Graham  262, 263 Turner, Sharon  17 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques  73 Tableau philosophique des progrès successifs de l’esprit humain  73 Twyman, Michael  286 Tyson, Michael  134 Ulmer, Terry  152, 161 Ussher, Archbishop  56 Valdez, Mario  6 Van Dyck, Anthony  185, 197 Vasari, Giorgio  191 Venice  191, 214, 215, 216 Verrocchio, Andrea del  191 Virgil 284 Vishnu 57

333

Volney, Constantin-François Chassebœuf, Comte de  50, 60 Voltaire  101, 147, 148 Wales 121–39 Walker, Gina Luria  47 Walpole, Horace  126 Wang, Orrin N. C.  3, 4 Warner, Richard  133–4 Second Walk Though Wales  134 Warre, Joseph  246 Warton, Thomas  8 History of English Poetry  8 Washington, George  246, 250, 260 Watson, Richard  149 Apology for the Bible  149 Watt, James  280–1, 285 Watteau, Jean-Antoine  189 Two Cousins  189 Webb, Timothy  216 Weber, Alfred  146 Webster, Lady Frances  170 West, Jane  16, 40, 97 Whale, John  81 Whitechapel 40 White, Hayden  1, 6, 8, 10, 11, 15 Metahistory  15 Wilkins, Charles  60 Wilks, Mark  64 Historical Sketches of South India  64 Williams, Edward  137 Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales  138 Williams, Helen Maria  283 Williams, Raymond  217 Culture and Society  217 Keywords  218 Wolfson, Susan  87 Wollstonecraft, Mary  18, 40–1, 45 An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution  18 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  41 The Female Reader  45 Original Stories from Real Life  45 Woodville, Elizabeth  38 Wordsworth, William  3, 22, 82, 107, 137, 153, 154, 169, 170–1, 187, 223, 230, 241, 249, 259, 284 Guide to the Lakes  241 The Prelude  249 The Excursion  259 Wright, Beth S.  179, 183, 188 Yeats, William Butler  218, 240, 242, 285 ‘Meru’ 218 Yorktown 260–4