The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism 9780199660896, 0199660891

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Part I Historical Phases
1. Romanticism before 1789
2. The Revolutionary Decade
3. The New Century: 1800–​1815
4. Post-​War Romanticism
5. The 1820s and Beyond
Part II Region and Nation
6. England and Englishness
7. Scotland and the North
8. Wales and the West
9. Ireland and Union
Part III Hierarchies
10. Romantic Generations
11. Poetry and Social Class
12. The Spectrum of Fiction
13. Gender Boundaries
14. Literature for Children
Part IV Legislation
15. Freedom of Speech
16. The Regulation of Theatres
17. Poetic Defences and Manifestos
18. Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession
19. Trial Literature
Part V Cognition
20. The Subjective Turn
21. Literature and the Senses
22. ‘High’ Romanticism: Literature and Drugs
23. Writer-​Physicians
Part VI Composition
24. Orality and Improvisation
25. Revision and Self-​Citation
26. Intertextual Dialogue
27. Letters and Journals
Part VII Publication
28. Book-​Making
29. Oeuvre-​Making and Canon-​Formation
30. Celebrity and Anonymity
31. Romantic Readers
32. Non-​Publication
Part VIII Language
33. Literary Uses of Dialect
34. Romantic Oratory
35. Creative Translation
36. The Ineffable
Part IX Aesthetics
37. The Romantic Lexicon
38. Literature and Philosophy
39. Practical Criticism
40. Word and Image
41. The Culture of Song
Part X Imports and Exports
42. The Greco-​Roman Revival
43. Orientalism and Hebraism
44. Continental Romanticism in Britain
45. British Romantics Abroad
46. Transatlantic Engagements
Index

Citation preview

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

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

The Oxford Handbook of

BRITISH ROMANTICISM Edited by

DAVID DUFF

1

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

Contents

List of Illustrations  Notes on Contributors  Introduction  David Duff

xi xiii 1

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

13

2. The Revolutionary Decade  Jon Mee

30

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

44

4. Post-​War Romanticism  Kelvin Everest

59

5. The 1820s and Beyond  Angela Esterhammer

74

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

91

7. Scotland and the North  Penny Fielding

106

8. Wales and the West  Mary-​Ann Constantine

121

vi   Contents

9. Ireland and Union  Jim Kelly

137

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

157

11. Poetry and Social Class  Brian Goldberg

173

12. The Spectrum of Fiction  Gary Kelly

188

13. Gender Boundaries  Anne K. Mellor

204

14. Literature for Children  Susan Manly

217

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

233

16. The Regulation of Theatres  Gillian Russell

250

17. Poetic Defences and Manifestos  Anthony Howe

264

18. Critical Judgement and the Reviewing Profession  William Christie

279

19. Trial Literature  Victoria Myers

294

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

311

Contents   vii

21. Literature and the Senses  Noel Jackson

327

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

341

23. Writer-​Physicians  Catherine Jones

355

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

373

25. Revision and Self-​Citation  Jane Stabler

388

26. Intertextual Dialogue  Beth Lau

404

27. Letters and Journals  Pamela Clemit

418

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

437

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

449

30. Celebrity and Anonymity  Tom Mole

464

31. Romantic Readers  Felicity James

478

32. Non-​Publication  Lynda Pratt

495

viii   Contents

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

513

34. Romantic Oratory  Judith Thompson

529

35. Creative Translation  Michael Rossington

547

36. The Ineffable  Stephen C. Behrendt

562

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

579

38. Literature and Philosophy  Tim Milnes

592

39. Practical Criticism  Gregory Dart

608

40. Word and Image  Sophie Thomas

625

41. The Culture of Song  Kirsteen McCue

643

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

661

43. Orientalism and Hebraism  James Watt

675

44. Continental Romanticism in Britain  James Vigus

691

Contents   ix

45. British Romantics Abroad  Patrick Vincent

707

46. Transatlantic Engagements  Fiona Robertson

723

Index

739

List of Illustrations

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

486

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

489

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

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

537

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

539

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

540

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

629

40.2

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

632

40.3

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

633

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

639

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

Notes on Contributors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I n t rodu ction David Duff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pa rt  I

H I STOR IC A L  P HA SE S

Chapter 1

Romanticism Be fore  1 7 8 9 Nick Groom

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28 

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

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

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

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

33 

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

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

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

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

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

39 

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

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

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

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

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

41 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

49 

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2

The Revolu t i ona ry Deca de Jon Mee

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

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

1 

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

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

5 

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

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

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

7 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20 

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

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

23 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 3

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

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

1 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 

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

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

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

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

18 

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

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

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

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

26 

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

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

27 

28 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

34 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24 

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

Chapter 5

T he 1820s an d  Beyond Angela Esterhammer

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

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

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

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

4 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

32 

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

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

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

35 

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

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

Pa rt  I I

R E G ION A N D NAT ION

Chapter 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 

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

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

20 

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

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

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

21 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 7

Sc otl and and t h e  Nort h Penny Fielding

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

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

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

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

6 

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

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

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

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

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

10 

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

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

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

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

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

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

14 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24 

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

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

25 

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

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

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

27 

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

26 

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

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

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

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

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

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

34 

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

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

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

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

42 

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

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

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

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

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

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

53 

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

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

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

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

57 

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

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

Chapter 9

Irel and and  U ni on Jim Kelly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17

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

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

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

23 

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

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

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

28 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

44 Morgan, Wild Irish Girl, 198. 45 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

55 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

63 

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

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

Pa rt  I I I

H I E R A RC H I E S

Chapter 10

Rom antic Gene rat i ons Michael Bradshaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 

6 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 11

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

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

1 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20 

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

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

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

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

27 

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

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

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

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

30 

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

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

34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

53 

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

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

Chapter 12

The Spectrum of Fi c t i on Gary Kelly

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

1 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11 

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

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

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

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

18 

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

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

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

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

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

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

28 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

37

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 14

Literature for C h i l dre n Susan Manly

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

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

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

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

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

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

9 Rousseau, Emile, 75, 76.

10 

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

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

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

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

18 

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

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

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

23 

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

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

27 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

37 

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

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

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

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

45 

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

230   Susan Manly

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

Pa rt  I V

L E G I SL AT ION

Chapter 15

F reed om of  Spe e c h David Worrall

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

1 

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

234   David Worrall

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

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

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

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

5 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

35 

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

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

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

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

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

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

41 

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

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

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

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

45 

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

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

Chapter 16

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

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

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

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

2 

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

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

3 Thomas, Theatre in Europe, 225.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20 

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

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

22 

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

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

24 

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

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

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

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

29 

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

30 Shelley, Major Works, 698.

278   Anthony Howe

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

Chapter 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical Review 1 (1756), 257.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

39 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

50 

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

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

Chapter 19

Trial Lite rat u re Victoria Myers

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

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

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

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

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

8 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

36 

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

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

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

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

43 

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

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

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

Pa rt  V

C O G N I T ION

Chapter 20

The Subjecti v e  T u rn Thomas Keymer

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

1 

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

312   Thomas Keymer that threatened the age-​old distinction between material bodies and immaterial (hence unchanging, immortal) souls. The Boyle Lectures, founded in 1692 to combat deism and atheism, and still going st