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William Hazlitt and the Uses of Knowledge by Patricia Anne Pelfrey

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William Hazlitt and the Uses of Knowledge by Patricia Anne Pelfrey William Hazlitt and the Uses of Knowledge by Patricia Anne Pelfrey A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Steven Goldsmith, Chair Professor Ian Duncan Professor David Bates Fall 2014 Copyright © Patricia Anne Pelfrey 2014. 1 Abstract William Hazlitt and the Uses of Knowledge by Patricia Anne Pelfrey Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Steven Goldsmith, Chair While Romantic literature provides ample evidence of the pleasures of knowledge, it also reveals strong counter-examples of knowledge as overwhelming, enervating, and potentially impoverishing. What inspired this reaction, and how was it channeled through Romantic writings? William Hazlitt is a particularly representative figure in the search for an answer to the question of why knowledge became a problem for Romantic writers because of his highly articulate awareness of the distinction between knowledge as an engine of social progress and its potentially negative role in the development of individuals. Using a range of Hazlitt’s essays— from his early metaphysical treatise on identity to The Spirit of the Age —as well as the writings of Thomas Love Peacock, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Thomas De Quincey, this dissertation analyzes the conflicted Romantic response to knowledge and its result, a variety of efforts to define the norms and values that should govern its organization, diffusion, and control. It makes two principal arguments. The first is that Romantic ambivalence derived from a complex of ideas and anxieties about the potentially damaging effects of certain kinds of education and learning on the brain, damage that could diminish cognitive vigor and distort the inner experience of identity. The collision between this image of the individual disempowered by knowledge and Enlightenment faith in its role as the engine of collective progress was intensified by the sheer quantity of ideas, information, opinions, theories, and discoveries that daily inundated the British reading public and critics alike. Discussions about education and learning became entangled in assumptions about the nature of the self and attitudes toward social and intellectual progress, all in the context of the need to bring order into a universe of knowledge that seemed to be expanding at a breakneck pace. The dissertation’s second argument is that Romantic ambivalence is valuable in giving us a perspective from a time when acceptance of the uncontrollable character of knowledge was not yet complete. The Romantic idea that there could be something inevitable, perhaps disturbingly inevitable, about the growth of knowledge has fallen out of consciousness in most discussions of 2 knowledge today. Its unceasing proliferation is widely celebrated, perhaps especially the evolving media and communication advances that have made learning a global enterprise. Useful knowledge has become the paradigm of all knowledge, rendering it immune from questions about what could or should be done about its less than beneficial outcomes. The contrast between Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s On the Constitution of Church and State (1829) and Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University (1963), discussed in the final chapter, sheds light on the distance between Romantic attitudes and our own. i Contents Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................... ii Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Shadow in the Water .................................................................................................9 Chapter Two: The Object of Feeling .............................................................................................25 Chapter Three: Cognitive Web: The Spirit of the Age ...................................................................43 Chapter Four: Romantic Knowledge .............................................................................................61 Chapter Five: Autonomous Knowledge.........................................................................................85 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................104 ii Acknowledgments A project like this—especially one that has been so long in the realization—accumulates many intellectual debts, and it is my pleasure to acknowledge them. My committee chair, Professor Steven Goldsmith, was a model of thoughtful guidance, scholarly insight, and unfailing generosity in helping me overcome every obstacle along the way, for which I will always be grateful. I also want to express my warm appreciation to Professor Ian Duncan and Professor David Bates for their support and excellent advice. Betty Lou Bradshaw, a good friend and colleague, gave me (and every chapter) the benefit of her keen analytical gifts. Our conversations were one of the great rewards of this project. And my deepest thanks go to Richard Atkinson, whose example was as important as his encouragement. 1 Introduction I am convinced that economic and cultural affairs, that money and literature and poetry, are much more closely linked than many people believe. Poems, like gold coins, are meant to last, to keep their integrity, sustained by their rhythm, rhymes, and metaphors. In that sense, they are like money—they are a ‘store of value’ over the long term. They are both aspiring to inalterability, whilst they are both destined to circulate from hand to hand and mind to mind . I have appropriated this statement, made by Jean-Claude Trichet, 1 the man who headed the European Central Bank during the Great Recession of 2008, as a way of introducing this dissertation because it reconciles a conflict I explore. The distance between poetic and monetary values was a literary given in the Romantic period, as it is in ours. William Wordsworth brought about a revolution in poetry because he composed poems about poor leech-gatherers and ordinary country people as if they really mattered. William Hazlitt celebrated “the People” in contradistinction to the powerful and wealthy who control society and its money. Yet Romantic (and many other) poets and critics consistently connect poetry and the other arts with wealth. “We acquire ideas by expending them,” Hazlitt wrote. “Our expenditure of intellectual wealth makes us rich: we can only be liberal as we have previously accumulated the means.” 2 The two kinds of currency seem to have a natural affinity, as Trichet says. The serene confidence with which he bridges the distance between them with the mediating term, value, seems to say that the differences are no problem at all. This is a dissertation about another form of value, knowledge, and the many ways it can become a problem. Like poetry, knowledge is assumed to inhabit an entirely separate category of value than actual money. But unlike poetry, the immaterial wealth of knowledge seemed to evoke a remarkable level of ambivalence in certain Romantic writers. There is ample evidence of its pleasures in the literature of the period, but what particularly interests me is the counter- evidence of knowledge that produced a sense of diminution and impoverishment. What inspired this reaction, and how was it channeled through Romantic writings? Even when you narrow the definition of knowledge to education, learning, and intellectual skills, as I do here, it remains a very broad term. Romantic writers tended to talk about knowledge in a similarly broad fashion, however, and the ambivalence I discuss was evident in all three domains. Thomas De Quincey thought some intellectual disciplines were dangerous to study. Hazlitt, even though he once admitted an attraction to academic life, harbored a deep distrust of traditional university education and of professional arts organizations like the Royal Academy. To an even greater degree than De Quincey did, he believed certain kinds of learning could disable cognitive skills. Both of them considered Samuel Taylor Coleridge a man whose wide-ranging erudition had crippled his intellectual power, living proof of the truth of their views. “He would have done better if he had known less,” Hazlitt snarled in his review of Coleridge’s Lay Sermons. 3 I make two principal arguments. The first is that Romantic ambivalence about knowledge derived from a complex of ideas and anxieties about the potentially damaging effects of certain kinds of education and learning on the brain, damage that could diminish cognitive vigor and distort the inner experience of identity. The collision between this image of the individual 2 disempowered by knowledge and Enlightenment faith in its role as the engine of collective progress led to some inevitable contradictions. What was true for persons—that knowledge could be a threat—was not necessarily true for society at large in the longer view of history. Yet there clearly were problems with knowledge at the societal level. Benthamite Utilitarianism was one. The sheer quantity of information and opinion, dumped by the printing presses on a steadily growing reading public, was another, and the retrograde character of English schooling and universities was a third. Thus, discussions about knowledge and education became entangled
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