Jon Mee, Gillian Russell, Clara Tuite, Assoc. Eds., an Oxford Companion
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REVIEW Iain McCalman, general ed.; Jon Mee, Gillian Russell, Clara Tuite, assoc. eds., An Oxford Comganion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1.32 Nelson Hilton Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 3, Winter 2002/2003, gg. 107-111 black-and-white image of an old woman, her eyes closed, of pictures and words) and his vivid colors, it's understand- her head moving back and forth as she grimaces and con- able that Moore sees Blake as an influential precursor. torts her features, as if in mental anguish. We hear what Moore's 1986 Watchman redefined the comic book me- sounds like someone hissing or breathing awkwardly, but dium, and his graphic novel, From Hell, was made into a the sound isn't synchronized to the picture. After a bit, the film, again starring Depp. image and sound freeze, and Sinclair begins to recite this After Moore settles into a seat at center stage, a recorded very strange poem from the Pickering Manuscript—until sound track commences, to which Perkins adds percussive he reads the first word of the sixth verse, "Till." At which touches. On the screen above Moore's head, a psychedelic point, the image and sound start up again for a while, then video plays. And then Moore begins to read "Angel Pas- freeze again, and the recitation or commentary picks up sage," his own densely evocative, epic description of Blake's again until the next "till." This becomes a bit tedious and life in blank verse (a recording is available on the RE: label, predictable, and some of the shifts back and forth don't go PCD04, at www.stevenseverin.com). After a bit, performer smoothly, but hearing the poem is worth the glitches. At Andrea Svajcsic, dressed in a white robe and carrying lighted the end of "Mental Traveller," Catling reads one of his own torches, appears on stage behind Moore, swigs drafts of poems—meaning, I suppose, to illustrate how Blake had flammable liquid, and breathes fire into the air. At the end, influenced him, but I couldn't discern any parallelism. she returns in a cloud of white smoke, cloaked in huge an- After hearing Jah Wobble's 1996 album, The Inspiration gel wings. Although it is overly busy, this performance seems of William Blake, months before the concert, I looked for- the centerpiece of the evening and the closest to a genuine ward to this set the most. The album is an eclectic mix of tribute. "It's not enough to study or revere him—only be Blake lyrics ("Songs of Innocence," "Tyger," "Holy Thurs- him," insists Moore, who actually believes himself to be the day," etc.), atmospheric soundscapes, backing tracks, East- reincarnation of Blake. ern esoterica, and Western beats—in the manner of what is Last, and I'm afraid least, comes film composer Simon often now referred to as "world music." Boswell (Photographing Fairies, A Midsummer Night's The music and name suggest Caribbean origins, but Jah Dream), along with a small chamber orchestra and classi- Wobble is actually an East End cockney named John Wardle, cal pianist Chris Ross, Blur's Dave Rowntree on drums, who emerged from the British punk rock scene of the late former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock on bass, and surprise guest, 70s and early 80s. In a drunken stupor, Sid Vicious of the actor Ewan McGregor. The musicians perform the first pub- Sex Pistols twisted his name into Jah Wobble, which he lic airing of a new work called Time to Die, which combines adopted because he thought it made him sound like a Ja- the classical score of Photographing Fairies with a contempo- maican bass player. When the Pistols dissolved, Johnny rary rap railing against the false glamour of early death, read Rotten invited Wobble to play bass in his new band, Public by McGregor. What this has to do with Blake, I can't guess. Image Ltd., and when that too crashed, he dropped out of For the grand finale, performers and audience join in a the music scene to become a train driver on London's un- standing singalong of Blake's "Jerusalem." All in all, some derground until the late 80s. When he came back, he dropped of the evening's performances worked, some didn't—much the virulent nihilism of punk rock—in part because he dis- like Blake's art. The tygers of wrath were as wise as the horses covered Blake—for experimental, eclectic collaborations with of instruction. Bjork, Brian Eno, Sinead O'Connor, and many others. Despite this inner change, Wobble is an imposing physi- cal presence—a big hulk of a fellow with a shaved head. Joining him on the Purcell Room stage is Deep Space, a An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: Brit- three-piece band he often plays and records with. The name ish Culture 1776-1832. Iain McCalman, general is apt: with Wobble laying down the steady bass line, the others join in a hypnotic thirty-minute improvised instru- ed.; Jon Mee, Gillian Russell, Clara Tuite, assoc. mental piece that builds, Bolero-like, to a loud crescendo. eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 780 Clive Bell and Jean-Pierre Rasle supply most of the sound— pp., 109 illus. £85/$ 150 cloth; £20/$29.95 paper. an improbable, exotic mix of French bagpipes, crumhorn, recorders, Turkish sipsi, shinobue flute, and stereo goathorns. On the screen above them, a slide show alternates between Reviewed by NELSON HILTON drawings and paintings by Blake and John Freeman (who did the concert program cover above). Certainly Blakean nlike the Encyclopedia of Romanticism: Culture in Brit- in the spacey sense. Uain, 1780s-1830s, reported on in these pages nine years After the intermission, visionary comic book novelist Alan ago, this larger and more comprehensive volume offers it- Moore smolders onto the stage. He's tall, with long dark self as a "companion": AM Oxford Companion to the Roman- hair and beard, dressed in black, and accompanied by com- tic Age: British Culture 1776-1832. Discussing this de- poser Tim Perkins. Given Blake's comic book style (the mix nomination in the "Introduction," the general editor Iain Winter 2002/2003 Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 107 McCalman refers to the advent of the "encyclopaedia" in (59). If one compares his numbers for tons of sugar im- the eighteenth century, but notes Coleridge's deprecatory ported with population data elsewhere in the volume, it rant that "[t]o call a huge unconnected miscellany of the seems that the average consumption of sugar per person omne scibile, in an arrangement determined by the accident of per year increased 400% to 500% between 1700 and 1800 initial letters, an encyclopaedia, is an impudent ignorance of (on its way to an average consumption of 100 pounds per your Presbyterian bookmakers" (5). The '"Companion" he person per year in 1900). This dramatic change, written into continues, formed "another genre [which] made a quiet en- the very bodies of the British public and the rituals of daily try onto the publishing scene during the Romantic period," life, emphasizes the extent to which "apparently innocent as- though " [ n ] obody, including its authors, seems to have been pects of domestic consumption" were enabled by "the exer- sure" as to what constituted one (10). Leigh Hunt's hopes cise of imperial power and commercial dominion" (61) that for his 1828 periodical, The Companion, are invoked to char- saw the delivery to the Americas by British slavers of 35,000 to acterize the editor's aims for the present endeavor: it would 40,000 Africans annually. Walvin also offers a concise discus- "not express a unified view of the world, but generate a colli- sion of the "brilliant propaganda campaign" of the abolition sion and comparison of opinion from which truth would movement and how it meshed with the growing ethos of emerge ... in a form that was always entertaining and per- sensibility (subject of an exemplary essay, the book's elev- sonable, so as to generate a real friendship" (11). enth, by Barker-Benfield). One cannot but wonder, in light The volume divides almost exactly into two parts, first a of the larger complex social dynamic which the volume so collection of forty-one essays grouped under the four con- powerfully conveys, to what extent abolition served also as ceptual headings "Transforming Polity and Nation," "Re- a kind of lure or false-consciousness to deflect and diffuse ordering Social and Private Worlds," "Culture, Consump- concern for the growing wage-slavery in Britain itself. tion, and the Arts," and "Emerging Knowledges," and then Anne Janowitz's essay on "Land" (the book's sixteenth) alphabetical entries for "subjects viewed by the editors as foregrounds "the practice and rhetoric of'improvement'" intrinsically and self-evidently important to the cultural his- (153). The term turns out to have implications far beyond tory of the period" (ix). This latter section is wonderfully husbandry: ample, and includes useful entries on a variety of subjects not included in the 1992 Encyclopedia (e.g., The Anti-Jacobin Improvement as a practice referred to the management Review, the London Corresponding Society, C. F. Volney, and cultivation of land to render it more profitable; as a discursive and rhetorical term improvement came to re- Edward Williams, Rousseau, lohn Thelwall). There are also fer to moral or social cultivation. In the context of Euro- 109 black-and-white illustrations "to reflect the fascination" pean and trans-Atlantic warfare as well as trade, improve- of the Romantic epoch "with visual culture—with new ment had a global dimension.