BARS

Issue No. 42 June 2012 ISSN 0964-2447 Editor: David Higgins School of English University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT [email protected]

Reviews Editor: Susan Valladares Worcester College Walton Street IN THIS ISSUE: Oxford OX1 2HB [email protected] Editor's Column ...... 1 Notices ...... 1 BARS Events ...... 5 Conference Reports . . . . 8 President: Nicola J. Watson Copley Award Reports . . . 11 English Department Early Career and Postgraduate Faculty of Arts Column ...... 14 The Open University Reviews ...... 15 Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK 7 6AA [email protected]

Secretary: Kerri Andrews Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Strathclyde McCance Building 16 Richmond Street Glasgow G1 1XQ [email protected]

Treasurer and Membership Secretary: Angela Wright School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics University of Sheffield Jessop West 1 Upper Hanover Street Sheffield S3 7RA [email protected]

BARS MAILBASE

Editor’s Column As a BARS member, you are entitled to receive messages from the electronic BARS mailbase. This advertises calls for papers, events, Welcome to the first issue of the Bulletin for resources and publications relevant to Romantic 2013, published slightly later than planned but studies. If you would like to join, or post a well before the biennial conference at the end of message on the mailbase, please contact Neil Studies July. The programme for Southampton looks

Ramsey, the co-ordinator, by email great and (who knows) perhaps the weather will ([email protected]) with your full name

hold... and email address. Information about the This number of the Bulletin contains a bumper mailbase, along with copies of archived Reviews section, testament not only to Susan messages, can be found on the mailbase website: Valladares‘s assiduousness, but also to the www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/bars.html enthusiasm of BARS members who carry out this important work. There are also reports by recent holders of the Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research Award, accounts of BARS MEMBERSHIP recent conferences at Leeds and Edge Hill, and some calls for papers. Of particular interest Members can ask for notices to be placed on the might be the call for the BARS Early Careers mailbase, on the website, and in the Bulletin. Romantic Romantic and Postgraduate Conference to be held in The annual subscription for BARS membership Grasmere next March. is £25 (waged) and £10 (unwaged/postgraduate).

As always, please contact me if you have any Members receive copies of the BARS Bulletin material for inclusion in the Bulletin. I look and Review twice a year and can join the forward to catching up with many of you in electronic mailbase. Membership is necessary for attendance at BARS international for for Southampton. conferences. For a membership form, please David Higgins contact the BARS administrator, Fern Merrills,

Editor at: [email protected]

BARS DAY CONFERENCES

Notices BARS day conferences, in almost every case, are organised through the host institution. BARS assists by advertising conferences, advising on the format, and giving early warnings of any BARS WEBSITE likely clashes with other planned events in our

Association files. Part of the point of BARS is to act as a

www.bars.ac.uk supportive system nationally, and its involvement in planning would partly be to help Anyone wanting to place advertisements or with ensure that conferences are as evenly distributed other requests regarding the website should across regions as possible in the course of any contact our website editor, Matthew Sangster one year. BARS cannot underwrite day ([email protected]). conferences, but it can sometimes make a financial contribution of to help the organising department with costs.

British

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Individuals or groups who would like to run a 7. Name of supervisor/referee (with email day conference are invited to contact Dr Angela address) to whom application can be made for a Wright ([email protected]). In the supporting reference on your behalf. event of possible clashes, BARS will assist by Applications and questions should be directed liaising between conferences distributed across to the bursaries officer, Dr. Daniel Cook, the year, or across regions. BARS will actively Lecturer in English, University of Dundee solicit proposals. Proposals are also invited for ([email protected]). Reports by recent interdisciplinary conferences. bursary holders appear later in this number of the Bulletin. We are delighted to announce the recipients of the 2013 round of Stephen Copley Postgraduate STEPHEN COPLEY Research Awards: Stephanie Dumke (University of Durham) POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH Lucy Kellett (University of Oxford) AWARDS Christine Mangan (University College Dublin) Robin Mills (University of Cambridge) Postgraduates working in the area of Romantic Alys Mostyn (University of Leeds) studies are invited to apply for a Stephen Copley Bethan Roberts (University of Liverpool). Postgraduate Research Award. The BARS Executive Committee has established the awards in order to support postgraduate research. They are intended to help fund expenses incurred ROMANTICISM AND through travel to libraries and archives necessary to the student's research, up to a maximum of PHILOSOPHY £300. Application for the awards is competitive, and cannot be made retrospectively. Applicants Members of BARS who are also Facebook users must be members of BARS (to join please visit might be interested in the Facebook page our website). The names of recipients will be 'Romanticism and Philosophy'. This is a announced in the BARS Bulletin and Review, noticeboard for news and materials relating to and successful applicants will be asked to the fields of Romantic literature, philosophy and submit a short report to the BARS Executive intellectual history (and beyond), including Committee and to acknowledge BARS in their books, articles, reviews, clips, conferences, thesis and/or any publication arising from the seminars, exhibitions, job vacancies, research trip. Reports will also be published in studentships, funding grants, whims and oddities. the Bulletin. The page is updated daily (almost) and visitors Please send the following information in are free to post their own material. Feel free to support of your application: visit and 'like' for updates! 1. Your name and institutional affiliation. www.facebook.com/romanticismandphilosophy 2. The title and a short abstract or summary of your PhD project. 3. Details of the research to be undertaken for which you need support, and its relation to your PhD project. 4. Detailed costing of proposed research trip. 5. Details of current or recent funding (AHRC award, etc.). 6. Details of any other financial support for which you have applied/will apply in support of the trip.

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CFP: GOTHIC STUDIES precisely does this affirmative attitude toward subjective and artistic regeneration square with Embodiments of Horror: William Blake’s Gothic Blake's tortured affect, especially when this Sensibility follows from a desire to transcend the physical Guest Editors: Dr. Christopher Bundock (Huron body, the very matrix of sensibility? If Blake College) and Elizabeth Effinger (Western) embodies horror, he is also horrified by the body's limitations. How, then, does art— Within the frame of the late eighteenth-century particularly Blake's own art—respond to this Gothic revival, this special issue of Gothic problem? How does he make new kinds of Studies explores the relationship between bodies to embody desires differently? English poet and engraver William Blake and We are particularly interested in papers that particularly disruptive affective intensities consider the impact this ―thrust[ing] aside‖ by expressed at the level of image, text, and critical and of the body has for Blake‘s thought and art. reception as well as their extension into What is the work of horror in Blake? What, if contemporary adaptations. While a critical body any, generative potential is there in the of work exists on the relationship between Blake restlessness of Blake‘s tortured, gothic bodies? and the Gothic broadly—and in spite of an What is the cost of Blake‘s investment in horror obvious fascination with a nexus of aesthetic as a privileged affect? Does Blake‘s appeal to categories such as the grotesque, perverse, and horror and the Gothic challenge or render macabre—Blake's focus on affects like physical counterfeit his humanism? How does Blake‘s disgust and horror, specifically, have garnered revisioning of the body as an intensive site of little sustained critical attention. This special horror invite new modes of thinking about the issue seeks to redress this gap by opening up a human? How do the horrors of Blake‘s material dialogue between Blake and his gothic bodies (dis)figure or embody the horrors of sensibility that centers on the affective, aesthetic, larger discursive bodies? and philosophical implications of a physical While this collection follows in the spirit of body and sensorium that turns against itself. recent critical projects such as Blake 2.0 Registering the contestation between (Palgrave 2012) and Blake, Modernity and introjection and expulsion, the abject – Popular Culture (Palgrave 2007) – important Kristeva‘s term for a ―massive and sudden studies that foreground the continuing relevance emergence of uncanniness, which […] now of Blake in contemporary culture – it also harries me as radically separate, loathsome‖ (2) distinguishes itself by interrogating the – is frequently figured in Blake as a monstrous particular affinities between Blake and the Polypus, organic life in its merely vegetative, embodied experiences of revulsion, abjection, abhorrent state. Other examples of Blake‘s and horror. Given this topic especially, Blake's ―body horror‖ appear in the body turned inside illustrations may well play a central role in some out, revealing organs ―Dim & glutinous as the contributions. And we do hope to be able to white Polypus,‖ an uncanny ―Fibrous reproduce a certain number of his visual Vegetation‖ that seems less like animating flesh artworks. Nevertheless, we ask that contributors than the binding vines that tie spirit with ―living use their best judgement and include images fibres down into the Sea of Time & Space only if they come in for substantial, sustained growing / A self-devouring monstrous Human analysis and are necessary for advancing the Death‖ (Los 4.66; Milton 24.37, 34.25-6). paper's argument. Rending apart the coherence of representation to This collection is interested in papers that expose ―what I permanently thrust aside in order explore any aspects Blake's embodied affects to live‖ (Kristeva 3), Blake's revulsion stems – and affects of embodiment, and especially those perversely enough—from a willingness to peer dimensions wherein the body and affect clash. into the abyss of origination and expose art's We invite contributions from academics, always fragile constitution as an invitation for professionals, artists, and those with a scholarly revision, transformation, and rebirth. But how interest in Blake. All relevant material will be

3 considered. We welcome papers from NEW PUBLICATION multidisciplinary perspectives. Including notes, articles should be between 4000 and 9000 words in length. Potential contributors should send Stephen Ahern, ed., Affect and Abolition in the abstracts (500-750 words) to both Dr. Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830 (Farnham, UK: Christopher Bundock ([email protected]) Ashgate, 2013). ISBN 978-1-4094-5561-5 and Elizabeth Effinger ([email protected]) by 1 October, 2013. All submissions should be in Contributions: Stephen Ahern, ‗The Bonds of English and adhere to the Guidelines on Sentiment‘; George Boulukos, ‗Capitalism and Preparing and Submitting an Article for Gothic Slavery, Once Again With Feeling‘; Tobias Studies Menely, ‗Acts of Sympathy: Abolitionist Poetry and Transatlantic Identification‘; Anthony John Harding, ‗Commerce, Sentiment, and Free Air: Contradictions of Abolitionist Rhetoric‘; Mary NEW PUBLICATION Waters, ‗Sympathy, Nerve Physiology, and National Degeneration in Anna Letitia Michael Scrivener, Yasmin Solomonescu, and Barbauld's Epistle to William Wilberforce; Judith Thompson are pleased to announce the Brycchan Carey, ‗To Force a Tear: British publication by Broadview Press of the first Abolitionism and the Eighteenth-Century Stage‘; modern edition of John Thelwall‘s feminist, Joanne Tong, ‗―Pity for the Poor Africans‖: abolitionist, anti-imperialist (and immensely William Cowper and the Limits of Abolitionist readable) novel, The Daughter of Adoption; A Affect‘; Christine Levecq, ‗―We Beg Your Tale of Modern Times (1801), which they co- Excellency‖: The Sentimental Politics of edited. Broadview describes the new publication Abolitionist Petitions‘; Jamie Rosenthal, ‗The as ‗a witty and wide-ranging work in which the Contradictions of Racialized Sensibility: Gender, picaresque and sentimental novel of the Slavery, and the Limits of Sympathy‘; Margaret eighteenth century confronts the revolutionary Abruzzo, ‗The Cruelty of Slavery, the Cruelty of ideas and forms of the Romantic period. Freedom: Colonization and the Politics Thelwall puts his two main characters, the of Humaneness in the Early Republic‘. conflicted English gentleman Henry Montfort and the Creole Seraphina Parkinson, through their paces in a slave rebellion in Haiti, where they barely escape with their lives, and in London society, where Henry almost loses his soul. Combining political analysis with melodrama and flat-out farce, The Daughter of Adoption expands the scope of the abolitionist novel, pushing the argument beyond the slave trade to challenge empire and racial superiority. Historical materials on Thelwall‘s life, the abolitionist movement, and eighteenth-century educational theories provide a detailed context for the novel‘.

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CALLS FOR PAPERS Events ROMANTIC CONNECTIONS

FOUR NATIONS FICTION: NASSR supernumerary conference, supported by BARS, GER, and JAER WOMEN AND THE NOVEL, 1780-1830 13–15 June, University of Tokyo, 2014

28 September 2013, National Library of Wales, www.romanticconnections2014.org Aberystwyth Plenary speakers: Keynote Speaker: Professor Claire Connolly Christoph Bode (LMU Munich) (University College Cork) James Chandler (University of Chicago) Angela Esterhammer (University of Toronto) Recent book-length studies of women writers Peter Kitson (University of East Anglia) who have, until now, occupied more peripheral Jonathan Lamb (Vanderbilt University) positions within accounts of the period – Anna Kiyoshi Nishiyama (Waseda University) Seward, Elizabeth Hamilton, Joanna Baillie, Margaret Holford Hodson – and republications We invite proposals for a major international of lesser-known novels by major writers, such as Romanticism conference, to be held at the Lady Morgan, have moved these writers into University of Tokyo on June 13–15, 2014. new zones of reception and criticism. But as This unique event will bring together four literary canons continue to be contested and scholarly societies from three continents: it is a reconfigured by new readings and scholarly supernumerary conference of the North editions, where should we be looking next? Who American Society for the Study of Romanticism will move into the spaces formerly occupied by (NASSR), also supported by the British familiar-but-peripheral writers? How, in the case Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), the of Welsh, Scottish and Irish novelists, might German Society for English Romanticism they be viewed within a comparative but often (GER), and the Japan Association of English problematic four nations framework? What Romanticism (JAER). about regional or provincial English writers, and Over the last two decades, there has been the ways in which identity may be shaped or sustained scholarly interest in the connections played out in these contexts? What do form and between European Romanticism and the peoples, narrative contribute to the creation of national cultures, and literatures of the rest of the world. fictions, or representations of Wales, Ireland or In addition to discussing representations of the Scotland in the period? ―East‖ by Romantic authors, there has been a growing trend towards viewing Romanticism itself in a global context, as a movement shaped http://www.wales.ac.uk/Resources/Documents/ by wider eighteenth- and early nineteenth- Centre/Four-Nations-Fiction-poster.pdf century forces of trade, migration, material circulation, intellectual exchange, slavery, and colonialism. While our approach will be informed by the legacy of Saidian ―Orientalism,‖ we are particularly interested in models of intercultural connection which refine or challenge totalising models of domination and subordination. We welcome papers that shed light upon the

5 question of ―connection‖ from the broadest  trade routes, technology, infrastructure, range of perspectives: imaginative, linguistic, and modes of transport material, social, sexual, scientific, economic,  language, translation, interpretation, and and political. linguistic barriers Drawing on our location in Tokyo, we will use  cosmopolitanism and the creation of a this conference to consider the broader task of ―global consciousness‖ forging connections between Eastern and  pessimism, skepticism, and resistance to Western literature and scholarship. In a Japanese metropolitan or colonial narratives context, the idea of interpersonal ―connection‖  culture shock and challenges to national (kizuna) takes on a different resonance, because or personal identity of its close connection to the project of recovery  comparative models of connection (such (saisei) following the 2011 Great East Japan as Japanese ideas of kizuna, or bonds) earthquake and tsunami. This conference  Romantic reception and afterlives in wishes to explore how such acts of cross- different regions of the world cultural translation offer the possibility of  the future of Romanticism studies in a reciprocal transformations of meaning. global university context We welcome explorations of the reception of  advances in technology, critical theory, European Romanticism in Asia and other and pedagogy regions of the world, as well as discussions of the future status of Romanticism studies in a For more details about the conference and our geographically diverse and technologically location in Tokyo, see our website: connected scholarly world. www.romanticconnections2014.org. Send proposals for papers (200–300 words) to A limited number of travel bursaries may be [email protected]. available for graduate students. If you wish to The deadline is November 30, 2013. We will apply for one, please include a CV and a brief contact all participants by mid-December. statement of your current research (around 300 words) with your proposal. Organizing Committee: Topics for papers may include: Steve Clark (University of Tokyo) Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey (University of Tokyo)  Romantic and Romantic-period David Chandler (Doshisha University) representations of Asia, Africa, or South Tristanne Connolly (St. Jerome‘s, University of America Waterloo)  material, scholarly, scientific, and Kimiyo Ogawa (Sophia University) literary exchanges between European Kaz Oishi (University of Tokyo) and non-European cultures Ayako Wada (Tottori University)  trade and travel accounts Alex Watson (Japan Women‘s University)  connections with past civilizations or Laurence Williams (University of Tokyo) imaginary worlds  sympathetic, imaginative, and psychological models of interpersonal or intercultural ―connection‖  sociability, civility, ritual, and diplomacy  intimacy, romance, sexuality, and gender  bodily encounters, disease, and medicine  race, colonialism, and slavery  refugees, renegades, migrants, and exiles  transatlantic, expatriate, or transcultural identities

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IRISH GOTHIC CONFERENCE • Irish Gothic Art • Irish Gothic and Psychology • Irish Gothic and Imperialism • Irish Gothic and Science 5-6 December, 2013 • Irish Gothic and Technology Confirmed Speakers: • Irish Gothic and Popular ―Goth‖ Culture Professor W. J. McCormack (Former Professor • Irish Gothic and History of Literary History at Goldsmiths College, University of London) Abstracts (250 words max) for 20 minute papers Dr Laura Pelaschiar (Senior Lecturer in English and a short bio-sketch may be submitted to Literature, Università di Trieste) Enrico Terrinoni (Università per Stranieri di Dr Derek Hand (Senior Lecturer in English, Perugia) and Annalisa Volpone (Università degli Saint' Patrick's College, Dublin City University) Studi di Perugia): [email protected]. Gothic studies have recently been expanding Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2013. previous limits of what was once thought to be Accepted speakers will be notified by September an historically well defined genre. The extent of 20. Conference fee: Euro 25; Euro 15 for continual change in Gothic denotation is such students and the unwaged that it is now approaching the status of an inter- genre inter-semiotic category. This is even more the case with Irish literature. Not only because a remarkable number of Gothic writers are Irish, but also, and more significantly, because Ireland has provided an extremely fruitful cultural background for the particular narrative forms and devices that are usually associated with the Gothic. Moreover, Irish literature presents a ―gothicness‖ of its own, whereby it seems to simultaneously adhere to and reject the ideological and aesthetic models implied by the very notion of Gothic. At this conference we will explore the ways in which Irish Gothic can/cannot be considered part of the mainstream Gothic tradition, as well as investigating the origins and evolution of the genre in an Irish context. We welcome submissions addressing any topic relevant to Irish studies, and encourage papers, which explore any aspect of the Irish Gothic in literature, film, and other media. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Irish Gothic vs English Gothic • The Birth of Irish Gothic • Theorising Irish Gothic • Irish Gothic Modernisms • The Uncanny in Irish Fiction • Victorian Irish Gothic • Irish Gothic Geography • Irish Gothic in the Media

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day's student panels chaired by Dr. Ben Brabon (Edge Hill University), which offered three Conference diverse looks at Crime in Byron's works from three Edge Hill Students. The first of these, Reports Wayne Nuttall's ‗Byron and Augusta's Secret Crime‘, looked at the impact that Byron‘s turbulent familial relationships had upon his works, the candid details of such being reflected in some of his writings. Next was my own paper, ‗Abominable Outsiders: Social transgression in THIRD STUDENT BYRON the work of Lord Byron and the Beat CONFERENCE: ‘BYRON AND Generation‘, in which I compared the cultural, R moral and spiritual acts of criminality which CRIME’ intrigued Lord Byron in his works to those of the Beat Generation, writing over a century later Edge Hill University, Lancashire, 22 May in post World War Two America, examining 2013 whether said transgressions are mere criminality or rather whether they spur social change. The It is certain that Lord Byron is viewed as no final paper of the morning was given by Stuart stranger to crime. A popular perception is that Bates; his ‗Darkness is so strong, and so is sin: he is deviant in both in his life and writings, and, Byron's Darkness‘ presented a fascinating indeed, many of his works represent acts that examination of the apocalyptic imagery in stray from the accepted practices of society, Byron's works that was grounded in a look at the thoughts that confront taboo subject matter, and socio-political, economical and even characters that inhabit criminal spheres of environmental factors that influenced the existence. It was precisely this theme of ‗Byron portrayal of sin in Byron's writing. The portrayal, and Crime‘ that the Edge Hill Student Byron Bates argued, allows for a more concise Conference, now in its third year, sought to understanding of sin in both literal and address, offering speakers a number of different metaphorical forms as a functioning part of a ways in which to approach such a broad subject larger social dialectic. area. The conference played host to post After a confrontation with such apocalyptic graduate and undergraduate speakers, myself scenes, it was time for another short break included, along with academics, each of whom before reconvening for the second panel, this offered a unique discussion on the focal theme. time chaired by Dr. Steve Van Hagen (Edge The morning began with Jonathon Shears Hill), that began with James Reith (University of (Keele University), a regular and key supporter Manchester) on ‗Byron, de Stael and Goethe; of the conference, giving his paper ‗My words, Crimes of Passion‘. Centering on Byron's my thoughts, my crimes forgive; Byron and Manfred, Rieth took de Staël‘s controversial forgiveness‘, which probed Byron's trouble with translation of Goethe's work which Byron is said forgiving both himself and others for wrongs. to have possessed, and explored its impact on Moving across Byron's Childe Harold's the play. What followed was a compelling Pilgrimage, Parasina and Manfred, alongside thematic and linguistic comparison of the two Blake's Everlasting Gospel, the discussion works that unearthed their characters‘ lack of offered an intriguing look at Byron's own, clear moral distinction, action, and agency idiosyncratic brand of forgiveness, stripping it whilst also exposing the similar inclusion of back to the key components of the process and Napoleonic figures that receive differing comparing it to that of his Romantic treatment at the hands of the two writers in what contemporaries, culminating in a psychological is essentially the same narrative. Following this and spiritual discussion of guilt and criminality. philosophical discussion was Emma Povall After a short break, we turned to the first of the (Edge Hill) with ‗Byron, Godwin and

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Wordsworth; The conquering mind and What was clear throughout the entire day was questions of imprisonment‘. This paper showed the sheer enthusiasm shared by all participants how Byron's grappling with notions of deviancy and guests for Byron‘s works that collectively and the Romantic ideologies of Godwin and energized all the discussions inside and outside Wordsworth were reflected in ‗The Prisoner of of the conference room; there was a palpable Chillon‘, whilst also intriguingly demonstrating sense of interest and knowledge that made the his focus on an appreciation of the self through event something special. This was in no small the experience of the prisoner, over the part thanks to the dedication of organiser Dr. appreciation of nature stereotypically seen in Mary Hurst (Edge Hill), whose tireless efforts Romantic poetry. This second panel concluded shaped the conference into an enjoyable and with Penny Davies (Edge Hill) examining ‗The thought-provoking experience for participants Judgement of Juan and Julia: Byron's resistance and guests alike. It is quite clear that there is no to sin‘ and how sin in Don Juan has varying danger of Byron‘s works becoming irrelevant or functions for humour, irony and critique, uninteresting over the passage of time, as this looking at whether the supposed sins of the event proved that there are many new characters are in fact representative of the perspectives on them that, fuelled by enthusiasm conflict between the spiritual and the physical or and knowledge, will continue to energise and a product of society. inspire others to explore and ponder their myriad It was then time for the final panel of the day, themes for years to come. this time chaired by Dr. Jonathon Shears, and Robert Tompkins featuring a trio of examinations of Don Juan, Edge Hill University beginning with Lindsay Skinner's (Northumbria University) ‗Scandal's my aversion: Byron, Don Juan and the art of moral panic‘ that tethered the CREATIVE COMMUNITIES, publishing history of the texts and its usage by radical political activists to its controversial 1750-1830 subject matter, demonstrating its poignancy. It was then time for Hannah Meekin (Edge Hill) to A research network funded by the AHRC look at ‗Sins and Virtues in Byron's Don Juan‘, interrogating the seemingly clear contrast Dissenters and Evangelicals between the deeds of the characters in the text and Christian sins and virtues. The final student A one-day conference entitled ‗Dissenters and paper of the day was given by Paula Kelly-Ince Evangelicals‘ was held at the Leeds Library on 6 (Edge Hill). Her ‗Don Juan; Sinner or Sinned April, 2013. The event was part of an ongoing against?‘ took the sincere poetry of Byron as research project based at the University of Leeds highly reflective of his own voice and views, and funded by the AHRC, which explores the once more contradicting the labelling of the relationship between creativity and community titular character as a sinner by aligning him with through a series of historical case studies from virtue and seeing value in a more mundane, the period 1750 to 1830. One of the network‘s individualised morality. To bring an end to the main aims is to develop understanding of the day's proceedings, we were treated to a paper by genealogy of present-day cultural institutions; Bernard Beatty (St. Andrews University) on and therefore the Leeds Library was a ‗Byron's Sinners and Criminals‘ that provided a particularly fitting venue for the event. witty and fascinating look across a number of Established in 1768, it is the oldest surviving texts, discussing the fundamental causes of subscription library of its type in the UK, crime and sin being tied to sins and shames boasting the dissenting scientist and literary confronted, before later moving to the sins of the writer, Joseph Priestley, as a founding subscriber, Byronic hero in his pursuits for agency and self- Secretary, and second President. Stephen knowledge, his errant ways fundamentally Bygrave (University of Southampton) began making him human. proceedings with a discussion of the links and

9 disjunctures between Priestley and Anna Letitia rather than influence. An understanding of Barbauld‘s modes of address; Les Woodcock imagination was also reconsidered in the light of (Priestley Society) introduced the polymath‘s religious conviction. Many of the dissenters many scientific discoveries and innovations. presented to us did not ‗imagine‘ community as Indeed, Priestley was a point of reference a future, unattainable state, but strove to root it throughout the day due to his various and in ordinary, pious, habitual modes of meeting. numerous contributions to dissenting life. Conversely, Naomi Billingsley‘s (University of The conference investigated how creativity Manchester) paper suggested how Blake and religious dissent intersected in communal imagined spiritual community as creativity or environments in the eighteenth and early artistic production. nineteenth centuries. A mixture of established The workshop shaped its own ‗circumstance‘ and early career researchers presented papers on of creativity — to borrow a phrase from one of several recognisable communities: the Aikin- the speakers, Joanna Wharton (University of Barbaulds; the Clapham Evangelicals; the York) — by drawing upon the thoughts of its Literary & Philosophical Societies; as well as diverse audience; it was made up of academics, the (re)imagining of community in the Biblical postgraduate students, library members, and illustrations of William Blake. Of particular members of public. There were ample interest were the conclusions made from a opportunities for questions and discussion and, comparison of the different dissenting as podcasts of the day will be made available communities; in order to foster a communal online, the creative exchange can continue. religious conviction, individuals were Rachel Webster encouraged to develop a self consciousness that University of Leeds influenced their behaviour. This was often with David Higgins, University of Leeds and carried out through accountability relationships, Joanna Wharton, University of York practicing confession between fellow members and/or with God. In fact, the survival of communities relied on these practices, for such communities were unstable and prone to scattering. As a result, identification often came to be established in opposition to others, through persecution, or by those who were excluded. As Rachel Webster (University of Leeds) pointed out, maintaining a sense of distinctivenessness while disseminating ideas beyond a specific community often involved a difficult ‗balancing act‘. Much discussion was focused on the definition of creativity, and the ways in which it might be considered as a process and as a model of exchange in which ideas were not only collaboratively conceived, but mutually produced. This also posed questions about who ‗owns‘ or claims authorship for the final ‗product‘. The collaborative ‗we‘ could quickly become absorbed into a public ‗I‘. Print culture, including the formation of literary institutions discussed by Becky Bowd (University of Leeds), was the principal mode for disseminating the values of different communities: a process that we might understand as creative confluence,

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as well as the diarist's propensity towards quoting certain passages of Romantic poetry Copley Award when at relevant loci. Secondly, I visited the archive of the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G. P. Vieusseux, housed in the Palazzo Strozzi. The Reports Gabinetto, founded in 1819, was the most famous circulating library in Florence with a huge supply of foreign books and subscribers. I was allowed to look at the early membership Will Bowers (University College London) lists, which confirmed the residence of a number The Stephen Copley grant I received in March of important English and French expatriates in 2012 funded my return flights and some Florence during the 1820s. My stay in Florence accommodation for aR two -week trip to Venice also provided my thesis with a number of subtle and Florence at Easter of the same year. The additions, not garnered from archives or libraries, cross cultural nature of my thesis makes these but available purely from being in the city. The trips a prerequisite of good research, but their description of the city viewed from the Boboli cost is often deterring, so I'm thankful to BARS gardens in a prose fragment by Shelley, is for the generous award. shown to be highly realistic only when one The main reason for my trip to Venice was to actually climbs the hill to see 'its domes and consult the collection of periodicals housed in spires occupying the vale'. Likewise viewing the the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana from the works described in Shelley's 'Notes on time of Byron and Shelley's residence. These Florentine Sculpture', particularly the smaller Austrian-controlled journals gave a sense of the reliefs in the context of the sarcophagi and other quantity and biases present in international news sculptures, gave me a sense of how selective his available to the poets, and more importantly taste was, and how opposed to the prevalent detailed regulations of day-to-day life in view of the Uffizzi sculptures. occupied Venice. Regulations on the festival As well as thanking BARS for the grant, period of carnivale have informed my reading of without which this trip could not have taken Byron's Beppo, which is often thought of as an place, I'd also like to thank two people who elegy for the festival of the eighteenth century, made the use of their respective archives when in fact it engages with modern debates enjoyable and achievable without great effort: over the carnivalesque. The Marciana also holds Alyson Price at the British Institute and Caterina a large collection of Byron's work in translation, Del Vivo at the Gabinetto Vieusseux. particularly Childe Harold, the prefaces to which were useful for displaying the appropriation of Byron by Italian writers in the Lucy Hodgetts (University of York) Classical vs. Romantic debate. My thesis addresses innovative uses of genre in Florence boasts a number of famous archives representing the London poor, from Pierce and libraries for anyone performing academic Egan‘s Life in London (1821) to Henry research, a fact I found quite foreboding in Mayhew‘s London Labour and the London Poor preparing for my trip. I settled on using (1851). BARS kindly awarded me funding with thoroughly two of the smaller archives which I which I could travel to the British Library and knew contained works relevant to my research, spend five days studying a long list of primary rather than sifting through the larger archivi di texts not available elsewhere. Initially I had stato. I first spent three days in the collection of planned to read Renton Nicholson‘s penny the British Institute at Florence, looking at the dreadful Cockney Adventures and Tales of manuscript diary of John Maquay Junior – an London Life (1837-1838) and his popular Anglo-Irish aristocrat who travelled in Italy in metropolitan periodical The Town (1837-1842). the 1820s. This document showed how travellers Nicholson‘s comic essays and stories are similar used guidebooks by Lady Morgan and Eustace, in their subject matter to Egan‘s Life in London

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(1821), and Dickens‘s Sketches by Boz (1836) Mayhew‘s writing are topics I plan to return to and provide guides to various ‗types‘ of cockney in the later stages of my research. miscreants. I was delighted to find parallels The research trip enabled me to fill in gaps in between these episodic publications but also to my thesis plan that I had been unable to rectify observe the increasingly novelistic renderings of earlier due to a lack of available primary young ‗men about town‘ and London clerks material. I was able to return to York and across the period. eventually complete a draft of my first chapter While in London I took the opportunity to on the cultural phenomenon of Egan‘s Life in consult a variety of other primary texts relevant London. The broad scope of material I to my thesis. Egan‘s Life in London and Henry encountered in London opened up new lines of Mayhew‘s London Labour and the London Poor thought I had previously not considered. The trip mark the chronological span of the research, and led me to reconsider the direction of my entire I was well prepared to maximise this rare thesis – it was a formative and exploratory opportunity to access a wealth of relevant texts experience, and I‘m very grateful to BARS for confined to the British Library. Particularly funding this research. helpful were the many adaptations and plagiarisms of Egan‘s work, demonstrating the extent of Life in London‘s afterlife in popular Sophie Rudland (University of Warwick) theatre and print. The story of Tom and Jerry has My thesis focuses on the work of William Blake been appropriated into a plethora of forms: and Mary Wollstonecraft, radical writers, born French translations, musical parodies, an two years apart, and who lived and worked in operatic burletta, a broadside commemorating London. I suggest that a comparison of Blake the death of the story‘s protagonists, and a cut- and Wollstonecraft allows us to capture a and-paste précis of the plot were some of the particular moment in history, when renewed texts I discovered. Numerous plays exist which interest in emotion, dissenting religion, and feature Tom and Jerry as minor characters in feminism, stimulated a resurgence of curiosity other metropolitan dramas, and one particular regarding David Hartley‘s two-volume broadside transplants the narrative to Paris. It text Observations on Man (1749). was especially rewarding to study these texts Fundamental to the argument of this project alongside some of the popular plagiarisms of was my belief that, as members of the Joseph Dickens‘s novels that the library holds, such as Johnson Circle and friends to Johnson himself, Oliver Twist: A Serio-Comic Burletta in Three Blake and Wollstonecraft were exposed to the Acts (illustrated by Pierce Egan the Younger). debates and issues surrounding Observations on This edition provided detailed descriptions of Man; I had read from other scholars‘ work that popular theatrical representations of the London the text had been republished on numerous poor in popular penny theatre and was one of occasions between 1790 and 1801 by Johnson, many texts I hope to return to in the future. however, as details were vague, I needed to view I was also able to spend a day reading over the various editions themselves at the British several play manuscripts from the Lord Library in order to clarify the exact publication Chamberlain‘s collection. These were mostly history, and also to view any important popular melodramas influenced by Mayhew‘s differences between the way the texts were London Labour and the London Poor such as J. presented and edited. Elphinstone‘s London Labour and the London The bursary awarded by the Stephen Copley Poor; or, Want and Vice (1854), St. James and Award enabled me to travel to London to see the St.Giles, an Original Drama (1853), J. B. original versions of Observations from 1749, Johnstone‘s How We Live in the World of 1791, 1801 and 1810. Being able to see the London (1856), and William Travers‘s The texts side by side allowed me to recognize their Watercress Girl (1865) to name a few. The similarities, affirm their publication by Johnson, influence of melodrama as a mode of and support my argument for the sustained representing the poor and the afterlife of

12 interest in Hartley‘s work within this specific Dissenting Academies and Rational Dissent, and intellectual milieu. to have a historian's perspective on my literary- Another interesting discovery that was made focused project. Professor Wykes' advised me to possible by the travel bursary was how the first purchase David Hartley's will from the National edition contained a detailed index, useful for the Archives as a way to ascertain his religious reader's exploration of the subjects discussed in background and to find further information the first two volumes. This made me consider about his character; he also spoke to me about that the text was designed to be read according the nature of Rational Dissent in society and to the reader's specific interests, and highlighted the work of Ruth Watts, a scholar who had what Hartley thought were the most relevant inspired my interest in Unitarianism because of topics. I was also made aware of the prominence her understanding of its Hartlean of the image of Hartley in the 1810 text, connections. Professor Wykes' generosity with published in Bath. This portrait was large in size his time was most encouraging in the final and, in depicting Hartley as "the man of stages of my project. He challenged some of my feeling", it focused readers‘ attention on what preconceptions about Rational Dissent, and gave Hartley symbolized. As a result, I have placed me the inspiration needed to complete my PhD the images of Hartley, both from the 1791 and and further understand the culture I was 1810 editions, in an appendix and discuss them exploring. within my Introduction. I thank the British Association for Romantic At the British Library I also located other Studies for their faith in my project's value, and shorter texts that were published by Johnson: for this funding that enabled me to complete my first, ―Of the Truth of the Christian religion. PhD. Receiving this award was deeply helpful From "Observations on Man," &c. Part II.‖, and motivating, and allowed me to feel part of a which was published in 1793 and 1798; and wider community in Romantic Studies that was second: ―The Conclusion of the late Dr. interested in my work. Hartley's Observations on the Nature, Powers, and Expectations of Man; Strikingly Illustrated in the Events of the Present Times, with Notes and Illustrations, by the Editor‖, published in 1794 and 1795. These texts were useful for my Chapter One, where I argue for the way Hartley came to be associated as a theologian (as well as a scientist), and how debate about his religious teaching would have been known to Blake and Wollstonecraft. I also used my time at the library to refer to books about Blake that are not stocked at Warwick Library. Most important was Women Reading William Blake, the most recent contribution to Blake Studies surrounding feminism. Jacqueline Labbe's essay was particularly useful for my work, and the collection helped me to situate my research amongst other critics writing about feminism and gender. My second visit to London allowed me to go to the Dr Williams Library to speak with the library director, Professor David Wykes, who has published extensively on Rational Dissent and the Dissenting Academies. I wanted to deepen my understanding about the nature of the

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traditional interpretations of the importance of location for Romantic-era authors. Topics might Early Career and include, but are not limited to:

Postgraduate - The roles played by places and spaces in the shaping of Romantic literature Column - Rural and/or/versus urban locations - The role of the local in the production of literary texts - The influences of nationalism, Romantic Locations imperialism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalisation The Early Careers and Postgraduate Conference - The challenges and opportunities faced for the British Association for Romantic Studies by marginalised authors, subjects and places 19-21 March 2014, Dove Cottage and the - Literary networks of influence and Jerwood Centre, Grasmere. competition - Literature‘s changing locations in Keynote Speakers: Professor Simon Bainbridge, relation to other fields of knowledge Lancaster University; 2nd speaker tbc (science, medicine, history etc.) - Challenges to the association of authors The desert, forest, cavern, breaker‘s foam, with a single place e.g. Wordsworth and Were unto him companionship; they spake the West Country, rather than A mutual language, clearer than the tome Wordsworth and the Lakes Of his land‘s tongue, which he would oft forsake - The roles played by the digital For Nature‘s pages glass‘d by sunbeams on the humanities in enhancing our lake. understandings of relationships between Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto authors, texts and places the Third, ll. 113-117 (1816) - Exiles and diasporas

‗There is no stretch of land, no cave, no tree Along with panel sessions and two keynote which does not arouse again in my heart that addresses, the conference will feature a session sweet and pathetic desire which always on manuscripts run by the Curator of the accompanies the unlucky exile far from home.‘ Wordsworth Trust, Jeff Cowton. Ugo Foscolo, Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1817) Each panel paper will last fifteen minutes. Please send abstracts of up to 200 words to: The BARS Early Careers and Postgraduate [email protected]. Conference for 2014 invites submissions for Deadline for abstracts: 15th November 2013. FIFTEEN MINUTE papers on ‗Romantic We aim to notify successful speakers by mid- Locations‘. We are delighted that we will be December 2013. Organizers: Matthew Sangster addressing this theme in one of the most famous (St Andrews), Helen Stark (Newcastle) and Romantic locations – Wordsworth‘s home in Matthew Ward (St Andrews). Grasmere, where the Wordsworth Trust will host what we hope will be an inspiring and convivial gathering. This conference will broadly be concerned with the roles played by places, spaces and the local in Romantic-period texts and thought. However, we invite delegates to address the theme creatively, reconsidering and challenging

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did during the period— much of it unidentified Reviews and unpublished until this edition—would transform it. While, on the one hand, Southey saw the poet as ‗a figure integral to the national good‘ (3: xix), on the other he pushed against Lynda Pratt and Tim Fulford, General the expectation that he would write on demand Editors, and Diego Saglia, Carol for the royal household, and effectively carved Bolton, Daniel White, Ian Packer, and out a space for poetic and creative autonomy. As Pratt, Fulford, White, Packer, and Bolton Rachel Crawford, eds., Robert Southey: conclude in the introduction to Poems from the Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838. 4 vols. Laureate Period, 1813-1823 (vol. 3), ‗Southey London: Pickering and Chatto: 2012. did, as he had prophesied in 1813, blaze a trail Pp. 2,238. £395.00. for his successors, including Wordsworth, who ISBN 9781851969593. accepted the post in 1843, on the basis that he would not be expected to write anything‘ (3: If scholarship can alter an author‘s canonical xxiv). fortunes, those of Robert Southey have taken a The Shorter Poems (vol. 1) give a robust decided turn for the better with the publication testimony of Southey‘s uninterrupted poetic of Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811- inventiveness, despite his protestations in 1822 1838. The breathtaking editorial labour of that ‗My career as a poet is almost at an end,‘ as General Editors Lynda Pratt and Tim Fulford, W.A. Speck notes (Robert Southey: Entire Man who also co-edited individual tomes, and of Letters, New Haven: 2006, 189). The first volume editors Ian Packer, Carol Bolton, Diego part of the volume contains a selection of poems Saglia, Daniel E. White, and Rachel Crawford published between 1794-1810 that did not make results in a Southey who complicates the it into the Poetical Works, 1793-1810. Readers radical-turned-Tory myth, one largely might be surprised and perhaps delighted that unquestioned for two hundred years. This the youthful author of occasional pieces such as edition unsettles this critical complacency by ‗Elegy on Eggs and Bacon,‘ radically prophetic challenging us to read the continuities in ones like ‗The Vision of the Maid of Orleans,‘ Southey‘s poetic development throughout his and historical ballads like ‗King Ramiro‘ and Laureateship, an achievement lost in the wake of ‗Garci Fernández,‘ returned to the historical his passionate literary and personal antagonisms, ballad in the late 1820s, even when his and Southey‘s even more paradoxical political motivation was purely financial. Southey‘s sympathies. Thorough introductory essays, reworking of the inscription as a form with collations and noted variants between all which he had experimented during his travels in authoritative versions of a text, and endnotes Spain and Portugal is no less interesting. Among that explain Southey‘s own and translate his the poems published in this edition for the first source material in other languages contextualize time, the notable ‗Inscriptions Triumphal and each volume and poem, making the Later Sepulchral Recording the Acts of the British Poetical Works the definitive Southey edition Army in Spain and Portugal,‘ composed during for generations to come, alongside Pratt‘s 1814-1813, show us a Southey who is Poetical Works, 1793-1810. sometimes at his poetic best in unguarded Although Southey‘s increasing conservatism moments, and adds to our understanding of how seeped into a lot of what he wrote in the second the Peninsular War shaped Romantic poetry. half of his life, the editors‘ emphasis on Yet it is Roderick, or the last of the Goths (vol. continuity dramatically reveals how the 2) that commands pride of place in Southey‘s reformist and experimental poetics that he treatment of Spain, and shows his continued shared with Coleridge and Wordsworth in the exploration of the form of the epic, which as 1790s found expression in Southey‘s approach Pratt has demonstrated eloquently, began with to the Laureateship, and how the work that he Madoc in the 1790s. Diego Saglia‘s dynamic

15 introduction to the poem‘s cultural and conversations with the veterans and his Romantic era contexts makes the case for descriptions of their post-war lives, which lead renewed critical attention on Roderick and him to ‗Grieve for the crimes and follies of reveals the reasons for Southey‘s deserved mankind‘ (3: 269) even as he celebrates victory. reputation as perhaps the most prominent British Readers also get a fresh look into controversial Hispanophile of his time. Even Byron praised it, literary events, such as the famous Wat Tyler ‗I think Southey‘s Roderick as near perfection as (1817) and the Vision of Judgment (1821) poetry can be,‘ and Saglia provocatively posits episodes. Southey‘s influence on Byron‘s Siege of Corinth Southey‘s attempts to distance himself from (1816) through the similarities of his earlier work and the efforts of his family to characterization between Count Julian and Alp control his posthumous reputation by silencing (2: xxiii, xxii). Glowing reviews from other his collaborations with his second wife, Caroline contemporaries such as Scott, Coleridge, Landor, Bowles, to some extent played into the hands of and John Gibson Lockart, and several his detractors. Fragments and Romances (vol. 4) translations into French, Dutch, Italian, and includes his later metrical experiments and Russian followed. Saglia‘s illuminating restores his collaboration with Bowles, Robin discussion on the connections between Roderick Hood (1847), the final poem of the Later Works. and Wordsworth‘s Excursion demonstrates that His younger self might have been saddened at Roderick ‗establishes a variety of suggestive how the New World did not register as a contacts with other contemporary works … that revolutionary space in works such as The Tale of were typical of the literary responses to the Paraguay (1825) and Oliver Newman (1845), agitated period from the Napoleonic war years yet the editorial restorations throughout Later to the post-Waterloo settlement‘ (2: xxxiv). Poetical Works show us that this less optimistic Indeed, Napoleon and the fate of Britain and portrayal ultimately was not a loss of poetic faith. Europe after Waterloo are central themes that Of all the heroes that the later Southey could occupied Southey throughout his laureateship. choose for a final poem, we might think that the While working on the first of the New Year‘s outlaw Robin Hood would be among the least Odes, Southey discovered the limits of the likely. The editors‘ tour de force in Robert Laureateship when the vehemence of his Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838 leads convictions led him to call for Napoleon‘s us to realize that Southey the poet—young assassination in the Carmen Annuale (comp. in radical or old Tory— could never rest easy as 1813). Not surprisingly, this version ‗never saw long as King John threatened the forest. the light of day,‘ and the poem had to suffer a Joselyn M. Almeida number of ‗castrations,‘ in Southey‘s words, University of Massachusetts, Amherst before it was published as Carmen Triumphale (1814). The editors reprint the Carmen Annuale in full as ‗testimony of Southey‘s belief in an unfettered Poet Laureateship‘ (3:10). Yet among Southey‘s chameleonic moments, it is gratifying to find the hawkishness of the Carmen Annuale and the teleology of the Vision of Judgment (1821) disrupted in a composition like The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816), a poem that ‗takes its place alongside other acts of commemoration, the public monuments and tributes erected in honour of Waterloo and its participants‘ (3: 223). The poem chronicles Southey‘s journey to Waterloo, which he visited with his family in 1815. A striking feature of this neglected poem is the narrator‘s

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Maria Schoina, Romantic ‘Anglo- provided fantastic scenes, composed of real Italians’: Configurations of Identity in buildings and places fancifully recombined or Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan relocated: ‗by breaking the established norms and genres, and by embracing ambiguity and Circle. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. equivocality, the capriccio mode resonated Pp. 202. £55. ISBN 978-0-7546-6292-1. important aspects of the Romantic aesthetic ideology, particularly in the way it proposes an Anglo-Italian relations in the Romantic period is artistic project of constant redefinition and a topic well explored by many critics, and recent expansion, open to the realm of possibility, books have attempted in-depth readings of the rather than of certainty‘ (42). As for Madame de complex historical, political and cultural Staël, Schoina concisely analyses in her writings contexts of the British Romantics‘ Italian the interdependence of literature, geography and experience. Schoina‘s aim in this engaging book politics, in order to identify the distinctive traits is to present a completely new, revisionist of different nations linking Enlightenment ideas reading of Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy to a new Romantic sensibility. Shelley, and Leigh Hunt‘s ‗italianità‘. Moving Through a learned reading of Mary Shelley‘s away from the idea of a purely aesthetic or works, Chapter 2 explains how Shelley carefully poetic attachment to Italy, Schoina instead employed Italy and ‗Italianness‘ in the analyses the varied degrees of identification construction of a new personality, a new cultural these writers display with Italy‘s geo-history, model with which she identifies while at the culture, politics, language, and community, as same time exploiting the dynamics of this part of a complex and qualitative attempt to discursive configuration in order to construct a configure a bicultural identity. distinct literary and political identity as a woman The circle of so-called ‗Anglo-Italians‘ is here writer of her age. Byron, instead, sought to referred to as a set of cultured, sophisticated, legitimate his supposed bicultural attitude, on emigrant Britons in Italy with common interests the premises of authenticity of experience and and a distinct standard of taste. Mary Shelley insider knowledge, in order to validate his defined this community of intellectuals as a representation of other people and places. Being ‗race‘ who seek to legitimate their cultural Anglo-Italian par excellence, Schoina claims the authority concerning Italian civilization, poet represents the exemplary of the expatriate language, art and politics with reference to their British intellectual, who claimed an unparalleled English audience, but who always qualify their emotional attachment to Italy and the Italians. acculturation process in relation to Italian The last chapter is dedicated to the Pisan society and its ambivalences and contradictions. Circle, a colony of British exiles in Tuscany, and Schoina successfully explores the phenomenon more specifically to Percy Shelley‘s relation of the ‗Anglo-Italians‘ as a hyphenated identity, with Italy. In this section of the book, Schoina characterized by a bicultural sensibility and frames the geopolitical conditions, which alternative coalition with the foreign community. supported Shelley‘s sojourn in Pisa, as well as Chapter 1 traces affinities between pre- his ambivalent position between his native and nineteenth century Anglo-Italian imaginative his adopted culture. Her acknowledged geographies and the figure of the Romantic investigation will prove how ‗Shelley‘s Anglo-Italian. The author chooses two case attachment to place maps an ambivalent studies of cultural paradigms to exemplify her conceptualisation of the notion of identity, argument of the Anglo-Italian symbiosis; engendered by the complex dynamics of his namely, creative paintings of the late eighteenth- Anglo-Italianess which enables him to seek century called Capricci, together with Madame ways of carefully assimilating the non-native de Staël‘s novel Corinne, or l’Italie. The former identity, through, what one could call, a politics were architectural fantasies, which recreated and of alliance‘ (128). The final section of the idealised visions of the classical past. These chapter is dedicated to the group formed in Pisa, landscapes (by Canaletto, Joli, and Marlow) principally composed of Byron, the Shelleys,

17 and Leigh Hunt, and the communal creative the place that ‗Byron saw as he first breathed the efforts to establish their political-literary air of mainland Greece‘ and ‗the landscape that magazine The Liberal. In particular Shoina surrounded him as in April 1824 he breathed his focuses her attention on Hunt‘s epistolary last‘ (xvii). But also, more sadly and ironically, travelogue ‗Letters from Abroad‘, an interesting it was a suitable locale because, as we have all record of Anglo-Italian politics since ‗Hunt seen to our disbelief, History with a big seeks to legitimate, through a series of Hegelian ‗H‘ has come shockingly and topographies, his professed ‗liberal‘ affiliation terrifyingly to Greece in the last few years. within Italianess, he parochially configures the Byron‘s Gibbonian conception of history as a latter into a zone of contention and cycle of destruction and renewal speaks thereby contradiction‘ (130). A (post)Romantic with particular pertinence to the urgency of the reflection on acculturation closes this very present moment in this region. engaging study, dedicated to the way in which As Caroline Franklin here reminds us, ‗the Romantic Anglo-Italians‘ diverse acculturation most cursory glance at Byron‘s oeuvre processes converge in terms of their methods demonstrates the centrality of history to virtually and logistics, since all their writing are sensitive anything he wrote‘ (85). And one of the to questions which revolve around the particular strengths of this collection is that its impossibility or discontents of acculturation, and range echoes the complexity and magnitude of how the hyphen that splits and unites the two Byron‘s engagement with this topic. As subject positions (Anglo-Italian) invited cultural Panagolpoulos and Schiona point out in their and anthropological investigations on identity. ‗Introduction‘: ‗Byron‘s perception of After the Romantics, Victorian travellers History…operates on multiple levels: as fact, actively renewed their construction of Italy as a imagined event, metaphysical design, scepticism, romanticised ‗other‘, while accentuating their personal myth, antiquity, progress, past and sense of moral obligation toward the nascent present, cultural and political milieu, nation, and their Protestant commitment to philosophical concept‘ (xxi). As an illustration freeing Italy from what they perceived to be the of this, the collection proceeds in five engaging worst of Catholic superstitious practises. and enlightening sections, encompassing: Serena Baiesi Byron‘s relationship with other cultures and University of Bologna histories; his engagement with the philosophy and aesthetics of history; Byron‘s constructions of history; his personal history; his status in Nic Panagaopoulos and Maria Schoina, cultural history; and role as anti-model. eds. and intro., The Place of Lord One of the most salutary aspects of this work Byron in World History: Selected Papers is its attention to Byron‘s transformative effect th on many different cultures. Maria Kalinowska, from the 35 International Byron for instance, provides a thoughtful account of Conference. Peter W. Graham, the impact of Byron on the leading Polish foreword. Lampeter, Wales: The Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz. She cites Edwin Mellen Press, 2013. Pp. 323. Mickiewicz‘s stirring description of Byron‘s ISBN 97807730429314. work as ‗a mass of combustible, underground materials‘ (quoted: 6). The volume demonstrates Byron in World History is a series of essays keenly that Byron‘s corpus has a habit of edited by Nic Panagaopoulos (University of creating political explosions. The poet has Athens) and Maria Schoina resurfaced ‗at critical moments in Greek history‘ (Aristotle University of Thessalonika). It is (27), as Maria Schiona shows us, in her based on a week-long conference that took place absorbing account of the role played by the in September 2009 in Messolonghi. This was a commemoration of Lord Byron in the collapse fitting location not only because – as Peter W. of the seven-year Greek dictatorship in 1974. In Graham puts it in his eloquent foreword – it is a completely different, but related, context, She-

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Ru Kao describes how the Chinese poets Liang Richard Lansdown, The Cambridge Qichao and Su Manshu found Byron‘s poems Introduction to Byron, (Cambridge: sufficiently ‗pliable‘ (295) to arouse Cambridge University Press, 2012). revolutionary anger in early twentieth-century China. If we are to build a truly global and Pp. 174. £12.99. holistic understanding of Byron‘s infamous ISBN 9780521128735. ‗mobility‘, we need more work like this. The many contexts in which Byron has Any introduction to a poet as complex as Byron, participated alert us also to the multivalent status and the manifold social and literary phenomenon of history in his work. As Michael O`Neill which his work created, is a difficult task. In informs us, ‗what Byron grasps about History is general Richard Lansdown handles this well, the fundamental ambivalence enshrined in the pitching his analysis at a level that will word: that history is both experimental data and challenge undergraduates. He should be praised a mode of narrative‘ (104). An excellent essay, for devoting a chapter to Byron‘s afterlife in providing an eloquent example of this ambiguity, literature and the arts, and for beginning his is James Pott‘s description of how those study with an examination of his moments at which Byron associates Greece with correspondence. From this he assiduously eroticism, femininity and death complicate the chooses extracts, which he treats not only as poet‘s otherwise more utopian construction of letters but, looking at their prosody and register, the nation. As Potts demonstrates, ‗the as literature in their own right. Anyone ambiguous materiality of Byron‘s Greece as a beginning the task of reading Leslie Marchand‘s woman at the point of death shows Byron edition of Byron‘s correspondence would do radically departing from his contemporary‘s well to begin here. Lansdown also resists utopian ideals of Greece‘ (121). In another fine spending too much time on biography, with a essay, Mark Sandy describes how ‗Venice exists fifteen-page 'Life' detailing the crucial events of as a mythical and historical reality which, for Byron's thirty-six years whilst avoiding the Byron, delights in those blurred boundaries usual obsession with sex and scandal. between personal memory and public record, The real strength of the work comes in its ruin and whole, and nature and cultural artifice‘ close readings, which encompass all the major (131-2). works and some lesser-known plays. A good If I had one criticism of this collection it balance is struck between examining the formal would be that the language of ‗ambiguity‘ and traits of the poet, in the Spenserian stanza and ‗ambivalence‘ does not always give adequate ottava rima, and discussing issues of theme and testimony to the manic-depressive oscillation genre. These are aided by three invaluable tables between idealism and cynicism, fact and opinion, – one tracking Byron‘s Grand Tour and another collecting and discarding, totality and dating the composition and publication of his fragmentation we find in Byron‘s work, life and works. Lansdown's discussion of Childe Harold afterlife. But this is a minor charge against a places necessary emphasis on the separate volume whose diversity and richness is journeys which make up the four cantos, and the impossible fully to encapsulate in an eight- readings of the ‗Turkish Tales‘, though brief, hundred word review. As Jerome McGann puts usefully pick up common themes between their it in his welcome contribution, Byron‘s work is heroes and heroines. I was initially skeptical still ‗burning fiercely like some stellar about grouping works as diverse as The Prisoner hypergiant….the centre of an enormous gravity of Chillon, Beppo, Mazeppa, and The Island, as field‘ (143). At this critical juncture in Greek ‗Philosophical Tales‘, but Lansdown teases out history, the book demonstrates that Byron can effectively their shared discussion of Liberty‘s still provide new stimulus. many guises. Alex Watson The best of these readings is of Don Juan Japan Women’s University which provides the reader with a clear sense of the poem in Byron‘s career and among its Italian

19 antecedents. Showing the links between Childe appreciation. This affects Lansdown‘s appraisal Harold and Don Juan is a helpful exercise, and of Cantos VI-VIII of Don Juan, particularly the giving time and critique to Jerome McGann‘s ‗dubiously satirical elements‘ (146) against influential reading of the poem will provide Castlereagh and Wellington. students with an alternative view. In fact this If this book needs such a long context section chapter is so good that it is disappointing we then it must be a balanced one, looking at critics could not have more of it: only devoting twenty- like Marilyn Butler, James Epstein, and Ian eight pages to a poem that Lansdown tell us is McCalman, alongside quantitative and ‗the greatest comic poem in any language‘ (1) conservative appraisals. I think the work would seems a shame. be far better without it, using context weaved Despite these strengths, there is a significant into the discussions of the poetry throughout. fault in the work. The second chapter of the With it the Introduction is hampered from doing Introduction is a twenty-nine page historical what it does very well, giving illuminating and summary from 1790-1830. Before discussing the informed readings of an important poet. content of this chapter, one must ask why it Will Bowers exists at all? Of course Byron should be viewed University College London in his time, but surely the students to whom the work is aimed will already be on courses in early nineteenth-century literature, thus making Michael Ferber, The Cambridge this unnecessary? On an European level Introduction to British Romantic Poetry. Lansdown is keen on sweeping teleologies: bad Cambridge: Cambridge University Napoleon was defeated by those stout upholders of freedom, the British and the Austrians, who Press. 2012. Pp. 248. £15. enshrined this freedom at Vienna, which ISBN 9780521154376. ‗underwrote peace in central Europe until 1914‘ (17). Yes, another widespread continental war In his valuable addition to this attractively did not occur until the First World War, but why presented series, Michael Ferber analyses a not say that, rather than dismiss the Spanish civil number of high canonical poems from the period. conflicts, the Portuguese Civil War, the Crimean The impressive ‗slow or close readings‘ (211) War, and many others which can be traced back on offer are, as these terms suggest, basically to Vienna? And yes, 'no British soldier fired a New Critical, but Ferber at various points stops shot in earnest in Western Europe for ninety- to acknowledge other influential ways of nine years' (29), but they did give and receive a interpreting Romantic poems. In his introduction great amount of lead throughout the rest of the he also gives some convincing reasons for the world. ‗Big Six‘ (7) being front and centre here, though In Britain the early nineteenth century is anyone looking for a wider sense of Romantic shown to have been a time of prosperity, a poetry beyond Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, judgment based on a number of demographic Byron, Shelley, and Keats might – in light of statistics. Two groups weren‘t so lucky: ‗the recent developments in scholarship of the period Whigs wailing for peace and reform‘ (22), and – occasionally be left a little frustrated. As the radical movement which was dealt with by Ferber points out (207), however, his task is not ‗varying degrees of moderation and good sense‘ to survey but to introduce, and while large (24). Lansdown reassures the reader that radical sections of the study are given over to fresh protest wasn‘t political at all, with the baffling treatments of, for instance, ‗Ode on a Grecian claim that, ‗Most social unrest in the period Urn‘ and ‗Ode to the West Wind‘, less well- involved food and work rather than politics‘ known works from the period are not entirely (26). He is full of praise for Wellington and Pitt, neglected. and claims that it is ‗humiliating‘ (35) when we The Introduction is organised for the most part realise that a lot of their contemporaries, according to poetic genre. Before these chapters, including Byron, were not so fulsome in their however, we are lead through a section which

20 concisely draws together literary precedents that nearly all of these pages to Manfred and were especially important for the Romantic Prometheus Unbound, and – even allowing for exaltation of the poet, including representations the necessarily confined scope of an of the minstrel, the bard, and the prophet. Ferber Introduction – the effect is to produce a produces a cogent outline of these different seemingly very narrow view of the development figures, while this section also contains of verse drama in the Romantic period. Whether instructive explanations of religious contexts in or not one agrees that there is a ‗blunt gimmick‘ Romantic poetry, whether in terms of such (193) or the presence of a ‗somewhat repetitive notions as ‗rapture‘ (23-5) or in relation to scene‘ (195) anywhere in Manfred, Ferber‘s Biblical parallels and textual allusions. We are contention that Wordsworth‘s The Borderers also given some central thematic considerations and Shelley‘s The Cenci (no mention is made of in the sub-sections on Aeolian harps, birds, and Byron‘s two intriguing Venetian verse dramas) other peculiarly Romantic poetic interests, do ‗not amount to much‘ (192) seems difficult to though there is a potential shortcoming here countenance. Admittedly, Ferber makes this with Ferber‘s preference for the obvious statement with reference to lack of stage canonical example in that, unlike Coleridge, performance, but it remains a matter of at least Shelley, and Keats, other Romantics (notably some debate whether or not all of these works John Clare) do not always treat birds as poetic were ever intended for the stage. In fact, on symbols. whatever terms we approach them, a good many In Chapter 3 Ferber attends to the many verse dramas from the Romantic period are of ‗memorable phrases‘ (47) of ‗Tintern Abbey‘ considerable complexity. Still, pairing Manfred and the poem‘s approach to the sublime, before and Prometheus Unbound makes sense for more section 4 brings into focus the considerable than a few reasons, and the detailed summaries achievements made in the ode form in the period. of those works contained here will be useful for Chapter 5 takes an interesting approach to the first-time readers. context of the French Revolution: by moving There is a brief chapter on Romantic satire forward through the parts of ‗France: An Ode‘, (represented primarily by Don Juan) near the Ferber skilfully attends to the pattern of end of the book and an Appendix. This latter Coleridge‘s back-tracking/apostasy in the poem section helps to isolate some of the in the context of the relevant historical events. idiosyncrasies of Romantic verse and offers Ferber‘s turn to the sonnet in the next chapter useful strategies for tackling such issues as gets to grips with some famous examples in the archaic diction, tense, and elision. Again, the period, notably through sustained attention to considerable detail in these demonstrations form and words in ‗Ozymandias‘ (126-8). The keeps the focus firmly on the poetry: the level of detail which Ferber goes into means that practical demonstration of how the Romantics such readings potentially offer rewards for do certain things with language is representative readers of poetry beyond the period in question. of Ferber‘s lively, engaging, and insightful It is hard to disagree with Ferber‘s contention approach to his subject. in Chapter 9 (‗Romantic Epics and Romances‘) Adam White that The Prelude is ‗the greatest long poem since University of Manchester Paradise Lost‘ (168), and, before moving on to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, this section also features a helpful outline of the plot of Sir Walter Scott‘s Marmion. An extended analysis of this once popular work (important for Byron‘s Tales and a favourite of Charlotte Brontë) would also have been welcome in these pages. In the section on ‗Romantic verse drama‘ there are more immediate limitations. Ferber devotes

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Ian Duncan and Douglas S. Mack, eds, Hogg is usefully presented both as a The Edinburgh Companion to James representative figure within Scottish and British Hogg. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Romanticism and as something of an outsider; the authors‘ refusal to simplify the paradoxes of University Press, 2012. Pp. 216. £19.99. his writing is admirable. Given the volume‘s ISBN 9780748641239. targeting to a non-specialist audience and consequent broad scope, many readers will find This collection capitalises on what Ian Duncan aspects of Hogg‘s writing that might have marks as a resurgence of interest in Hogg‘s received more attention. Further exploration of writing over the past two decades, as shown Hogg‘s connection to Edinburgh periodical both in the increased critical attention he has cultural, especially his involvement with received and the ongoing publication of the Blackwood’s, would certainly benefit such an Stirling/South Carolina Edition of the Collected introduction. Although Duncan invokes Pascale Works of James Hogg by Edinburgh University Casanova to term Edinburgh an ‗international Press. As Duncan notes in his spirited and literary space‘ in his introduction (2), more genuinely useful, wide-ranging introduction, space could be allotted to both the national and ‗Hogg wrote in a wider variety of literary forms international literary context in which Hogg‘s than almost any contemporary‘ (3), and it is one writing emerged. of the primary virtues of this volume that it Readers new to Hogg might also benefit from attempts to treat all of these forms without over- a greater sense of his current reputation and privileging Hogg‘s most familiar works. The reception. While Gillian Hughes‘s essay on the volume opens with several essays that provide a ‗afterlives‘ of The Private Memoirs and solid grounding in the history of Hogg‘s Confessions of a Justified Sinner points to the publishing ventures and contemporary reception influence of Hogg‘s now most famous work and moves on to treat Hogg‘s work in relation to (with the notable omission of Muriel Spark), both theme and genre. The most successful there is no corresponding discussion of the contributions are those that combine these treatment of Hogg‘s other texts. Similarly, while approaches: Douglas S. Mack‘s essay on Penny Fielding‘s essay on that novel offers the ‗Politics and the Presbyterian Tradition‘ both most in-depth reading of a single text, offering a places Hogg‘s work in an Enlightenment context range of philosophical comparisons ranging and offers a new and convincing reading of The from Kant to Derrida and Bourdieu, the volume Brownie of Bodsbeck, while Meiko O‘Halloran‘s might have benefitted from prolonged essay on Hogg and theatre introduces aspects of discussions of several other key texts, especially Hogg‘s work that will be unfamiliar to many The Queen’s Wake. Many of these issues are readers. Both of these essays, alongside several further developed in Sharon Alker and Holly others, give full attention to the diversity of Faith Nelson‘s excellent collection James Hogg Hogg‘s literary productions. As Carolyn and the Literary Marketplace, which includes McCracken-Flesher writes, ‗Hogg‘s cluttered essays from all but four of the Edinburgh texts with their clashing dynamics and their Companion‘s contributors. author‘s multiple and contesting personae evoke Despite these reservations, the Edinburgh a lumpiness, an excess, an unpredictable Companion is notable both for its range and otherness‘ (75); one of this volume‘s primary enthusiasm. Not only is the volume expertly virtues is its attention to all of Hogg‘s various organised, with each chapter leading smoothly styles and forms without undue focus on his to the next, but individual contributions are most famous works. consistently lively and accessible; to a greater Taken as a whole, the essays display a extent than in many similar volumes, this is a productive tension between thinking of Hogg in pleasure to read throughout. Its chief appeal to terms of textual production and oral tradition: an academic audience lies in the diversity of Hogg is treated both as a member of a local and approaches and texts mentioned: there are few national community and as an original stylist. readers who will finish the book not wishing to

22 return to Hogg‘s texts, or discover new ones. As on Scott‘s work, refusing to reduce Scott to easy an introduction it will be useful both to expressions of this or that ideological stance. undergraduates and general readers, while as a Such subtlety informs Ina Ferris‘s reading of collection of current criticism, it demonstrates a Scott‘s authorship as an ever-multiplying broad range of approaches that hopefully augurs composite of heterogeneous elements (18), an a sustained interest in Hogg that will continue to idea of authorship thoroughly immersed in the develop. material processes of the literary market that Timothy C. Baker allowed Scott to participate in the cross-cultural, University of Aberdeen cross-national movement of European Romanticism. Focusing on Scott‘s ballad collecting and his narrative poetry, respectively, Fiona Robertson, ed., The Edinburgh the subsequent two essays provide further Companion to Sir Walter Scott. examples of how such multiplicity operates in Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Scott‘s works: Kenneth McNeil points to Scott‘s investment in balladry as a way to preserve Press, 2012. Pp. 195. £19.99. authenticity of origins even as Scott ISBN 9780748641291. simultaneously underscored ‗the uncertainty that had long surrounded‘ the ballad as a genre (27); If there ever were a misconception about Scott‘s on the other hand, Alison Lumsden and Ainsley centrality to the cultural production of McIntosh see in Scott a Romanticist par Romanticism, The Edinburgh Companion to Sir excellence precisely in those moments when the Walter Scott, a long-overdue companion to author espoused an ironic scepticism toward the Scott‘s literary and cultural achievement, sets dictates of ‗Romantic sensibility‘ (36). things straight: as Fiona Robertson asserts both For Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Scott‘s in her introduction and her essay, Scott was ‗at complexity is registered best through the the heart of Romantic aesthetic‘ (105), and the novelist‘s refusal to write ‗plots with simple other contributors‘ rich explorations of Scott‘s choices‘ (48). By choosing ‗not to speak a fervent interest in questions of memory, choice‘ (53), McCracken-Flesher felicitously imagination, past, nationality, antiquity, liberty, argues, the wavering heroes of Scott‘s Jacobite feeling, to name only a few, strongly confirm novels, far from betraying weakness, exhibit the this assessment. Furthermore, as Nicola J. strength of character necessary for ‗the hard Watson ponders the extent of Scott‘s work of becoming a self‘ (58). According to ‗posthumous celebrity‘ (143), if you ever find Catherine Jones, a different paradox underwrites yourself on a ‗Waverley‘ square, or in a town Scott‘s novelistic representations of history: in called ‗Ivanhoe‘, you will recognise Scott‘s combining the Enlightenment approaches to indelible influence on Anglophone and history with expressions of public memory and, European experiences of history ‗as a living often, aspects of Gothic fiction (68), Scott heritage materialised within story, place, simultaneously recovers the past and subjects it building and artefact‘ (143). We are all Scott‘s ‗to rational understanding‘ (69), allowing him creatures. thus to ‗transform historical writing in the The editorial feat of Robertson‘s effort is best nineteenth century‘ (65). reflected in the companion‘s deceptive slimness: History for Scott, according to Samuel Baker‘s with less than two hundred pages, the volume fine essay, often meant history of warfare, and, packs insightful analyses of Scott as a ballad as Baker argues, Scott‘s novels urge a nuanced collector, poet, novelist, reviewer, diarist, relationship to war to ensure a proper philosopher and economist, covering a functioning of the state (79) and, ultimately, ‗the breathtaking amount of works by this tirelessly very possibility of making new worlds‘ (72). If prolific author. And Scott, with all ―his literary war is one of Scott‘s central preoccupations, finesse‖ (2), brings the best out of his critics: pondering religious strife, according to George essay after essay delivers nuanced perspectives Marshall, allowed Scott to dramatise ‗private

23 struggle against...a background of great events‘ Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics. (91), and espouse a ‗need for moderation‘ (91) Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins in matters of religion and faith. Both Baker and University Press, 2012. Pp. 254. £55. Marshall recognise a certain ambivalence on Scott‘s part toward war and religion, ISBN 9781421407081. respectively; Tara Ghoshul Wallace‘s analysis of Scott‘s treatment of Stuart monarchs—of ‗Why read Wordsworth—indeed, why read their ‗inability to fashion a coherent center of poetry at all?‘ asks Adam Potkay (1). His book- power and authority in the body of the monarch‘ length answer, Wordsworth’s Ethics, begins and (110)—points to Scott‘s equivocal stance toward ends with the answers of Wordsworth‘s a matter that most often generates simplified nineteenth-century readers. From John Stuart readings of his investment in the Stuarts and Mill, Matthew Arnold, and Leslie Stephen in the their burdened history. ‗Introduction‘, to Theodore Parker and Henry Shifting focus from politics to economy, Reed in the ‗Envoy‘, Potkay musters his Alexander Dick investigates Scott‘s qualified Victorians against what he calls ‗the relationship to the marketplace whose fickle antihumanist excesses that have come to forces underwrote ‗the role of the writer‘ in characterize many literary studies‘, ushering his society (122), prompting Scott to advocate for a readers ‗toward a fuller engagement with the ‗special space within‘ the market, a safe heaven explicit and important ethical concerns of the for writers from the compromising influences of Romantics‘ (204) in ten chapters which range ‗economic populism‘ (122). Economy ambitiously throughout Wordsworth‘s writing eventually ruined Scott, and his late fiction is life. ‗I hope to recapture some of literary usually dismissed, in Ian Duncan‘s words, as criticism‘s quondam moral authority, in part, by ‗his weakest, blighted by overproduction, developing the Victorians‘ best insights into distress and illness‘ (130). Duncan, however, Wordsworth‘, Potkay explains (4). Some might refuses such a stance toward this, as he calls it, say it takes a lot of work even to see the insights ‗posthumous writing‘ of Scott‘s (142), pointing of nearly two hundred years ago clearly, let instead to its experimental nature, its ‗strange‘ alone develop them, but this is a book that wants, and ‗unsettling‘ tendencies (132) and its not to comprehend its distance from the past, but ‗disconcerting‘ power (132) to dismantle and to overleap it. ‗We went too far in making ‗disarticulate‘ the very foundations of the Romantic literature the handmaiden to history‘, author‘s own brand of historical novel (140). Potkay argues; ‗historical concerns should not And if, as Watson has shown, the twentieth eclipse our view of the fundamental reason century continued to insist on stripping Scott‘s readers turn to imaginative literature: that is, to fiction of its complexities, this wonderful enjoy through verbal style other human beings companion – which should prove equally useful thinking and feeling‘ (204). To enjoy other for students, teachers, and scholars of Scott – human beings thinking and feeling – as if this stands as a testament of immense richness of were the easiest thing in the world, and everyone Scott‘s work and undeniable complexity of his from Arnold to Aristotle was simply accessible vision. to everyone else. Hence the book‘s blithe Natasha Tessone alignment of Wordsworth‘s poetry with the Oberlin College ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, which Wordsworth apparently ‗anticipated, giving them a particular content or enactment in advance of their theorization‘ (6). Hence, also, its predilection for unsupported statements and invented or adapted quotations – unnecessary ‗historical concerns‘ apparently including concerns about textual accuracy or the appropriateness of speaking on behalf of a man who has been dead for 163 years:

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‗Wordsworth hoped his poems might make his sounds, and what they represent, but also to the readers better or more flourishing persons‘ (1), world itself, as acoustic environment and ‗Wordsworth‘s fundamental question would horizon of poetic reference‘ (7). Wordsworth‘s seem to be: ―what is my obligation to others— 1815 ‗Preface‘ gave a more complex account: others I cannot fully know or judge—and where Poems, however humble in their kind, if does it come from?‖‘ (5), ‗In The Prelude, they be good in that kind, cannot read Wordsworth evokes the ―power in sound/To themselves; the law of long syllable and breathe an elevated mood, by [distinct, visual] short must not be so inflexible, - the letter form/Or image unprofaned‖‘ (189). of metre must not be so impassive to the Potkay dismisses David Simpson‘s interests in spirit of versification, - as to deprive the an untitled manuscript fragment incorporated Reader of all voluntary power to modulate, into The Prelude, which he misleading treats as in subordination to the sense, the music of a free-standing poem called ‗The Discharged the poem. Soldier‘: where the soldier comes from ‗is not Poetry does not simply possess ‗its own sounds‘ necessarily a problem‘, Potkay argues; ‗we here: poems ‗cannot read themselves‘, and their should avoid the temptation of reading a poem ‗music‘ is made out of a reader‘s tense as an allegory for its historical context‘ (50). Is negotiation between competing pressures and reading a poem as an allegory for one‘s own his or her own ‗voluntary power‘. In this light, interests any better (50-51)? thinking about ‗how ethics can get done in As I read it, The Discharged Soldier gives poetry, and especially through the music of descriptive content to a question of ethics: poetry‘, should include thinking about the ethics are we obligated, and if so how far are we of reading itself. It would mean thinking about obligated, to help a stranger who is or how, as well as why we read Wordsworth‘s appears to be in need? [...] The Discharged verse – and since this would involve negotiating Soldier answers this question, with the past (whether its persons or metrical provisionally, by depicting a specific act practices), it would be more difficult than of charity; but by not presenting this act as Wordsworth’s Ethics makes it sound. conclusive or satisfactory suggests at the Ruth Abbott same time the difficulty of setting limits to University of Cambridge one‘s responsibility to the other. If The Discharged Soldier were to have an envoy, it could be: what can be done is done for Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism now. and Childhood: The Infantilization of Treated as a poem that it never was, a question British Literary Culture, 2012. Pp. 305. that the fragment does not ask is answered by an envoy it never included – to demonstrate that it $90. ISBN 978-0-521-76814-6. dramatises the liberal values Wordsworth’s Ethics begins with and finds everywhere it looks The French Revolution, to Mary Wollstonecraft, (‗poetry is, or should be, that which, without was engineered through the vital energies and telling us what to do, opens us up‘, 12). Is this the bloody excesses of ‗hardened children of really an attempt to experience ‗other human oppression,‘ if we are to believe An Historical beings thinking and feeling‘? It sounds rather and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of like ventriloquism. the French Revolution (1794). Wollstonecraft Potkay insists that his ‗focus is very much on invokes the common eighteenth-century how ethics can get done in poetry, and rhetorical trope of relating history as the especially through the music of poetry‘ (3-4). progress of human life through childhood to This music, he claims, comes from elsewhere, maturity. This trope forms the object of from poetry itself: ‗Attuned to our most primal comprehensive enquiry in Romanticism and communicative level of rhythm, pitch, and Childhood, through which Ann W. Rowland gesture, poetry can attach us not only to its own argues for a paradigm shift through the

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Enlightenment and Romantic periods whereby eighteenth century revival of ballads and other the ‗images, phrases, metaphors and figures‘ artefacts from the past (particularly those associated with the figure of the child flower historically associated with children, such as synchronously with the rise of a national nursery lore)--as championed in the emergent ‗vernacular literary tradition‘(5). Rowland‘s culture of popular antiquarianism spearheaded ‗literary‘/ ‗rhetorical history of childhood‘ by Walter Scott and Thomas Percy, amongst elegantly swats earlier critical conceptions of the others (20, 194-203). Noting that child‘s ‗Romantic child‘ as an autotelic figure of ‗prattle‘ becomes a common (if ambivalent) idealism and innocence, revealing the ‗image of poetic inspiration and linguistic Wordsworthian ‗father of the man‘ as a being innocence‘ over this period, Rowland cites the textured into the intellectual gestalt of the long totemic case of ballad-singer Anna Gordon eighteenth century (11). Brown, whose prodigious memory of lore heard A scholarly monograph on Romantic and recited in her childhood enthused childhood is a bold venture, as Rowland antiquarians to annotate printed ballad texts acknowledges deftly; such a project may seem pedantically, in view of their collective urge to ‗both grandiose and trivial‘ in the breadth of its preserve the details of intergenerational oral ambition and inevitable engagement with texts transmission (18, 189-93). Even as the not quite making it to the ‗literary‘ cut (11). omnipresent phrase ‗remembered from Rowland‘s coup d’état, in view of this challenge, childhood‘ in these texts lends the authenticating is to wed diverse ideas to the penumbral topic of stamp of nostalgia, it is in Wordsworth‘s The childhood, arranging the chapters wisely in two Prelude, as Rowland contends in the book‘s last broad sections. In the first half, entitled ‗History chapter, that an ‗antiquarian understanding of of an Analogy,‘ Rowland assembles evidence to childhood‘ gingers what she terms ‗a poetics of unpack an obsessive preoccupation with the the trifle‘(22). Marking popular antiquarians‘ ideas and rhetoric of infancy and childhood in emphasis on the form (rather than sensationalist re-envisionings of human history and content) of ballads as a ‗vehicle for cultural and development through language and literature, national continuity‘, Rowland argues that the through a Grand Tour of the foremost rhetorical power of the Prelude is vested in Enlightenment thinkers (nuancing the European Wordsworth‘s autobiographical memories of the and Scottish varieties of the phenomenon), ‗forms of Nature‘ persisting through his life, ranging through John Locke, Condillac, Adam divested of their original emotional content. Smith, Monboddo, Hugh Blair, and Johann Rowland amplifies Wordsworth‘s achievement Gottfried Herder. Chapter 2 offers a particularly through a critically chic reference to cognitive enlightening view into some of these thinkers‘ linguist Steven Pinker‘s theories on translating attention to the pre-linguistic nature of the images of thought into the realms of children‘s early communication, mirrored – as language and communication (20, 253-4). per their theories – in early societies‘ reliance on Rowland‘s maverick emphasis on Romantic sounds rather than words for communication. childhood‘s cumulative shaping of literary Their astonishing conclusion, that the artifice of tradition thus triumphantly breathes new life into poetry rather than everyday prose formed the canonical texts and signature lines seemingly expression of the earliest expression of human deadened into critical cliché. If there is an aspect language, is one that Rowland traces all the way in Rowland‘s otherwise encyclopaedic approach down to Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s oft-quoted to be faulted, it is the narrowness of Anglophone polemical yet passing simile in A Defence of focus in the discussion of the Romantic period‘s Poetry (1821): ‗for the savage is to ages what privileging of ballads and other forms of popular the child is to years‘ (67-71). culture. While Rowland is convincing in her In the second half of the book, entitled ‗Prattle claim that the antiquarian culture of British and trifles,‘ Rowland persuasively locates the collectors begets the discipline of folklore Romantic literary ethos of privileging ‗the studies over the nineteenth century and ordinary and insignificant‘ within the late- afterwards, I find a curious and nagging

26 omission in the lack of a comparative Blake responded to the question raised by perspective with the immense contribution of 'good likeness', a term by which Erle means 'a German Romanticism in this respect, mimetic representation of the body' (1), in a very particularly in the philological and linguistic complex and enticing manner. Lavater‘s theories scholarship of the Brothers Schlegel and the concerning human physiognomy helped him to Brothers Grimm. shape his own view on the dialetic between body Malini Roy and soul. Erle believes that the influence exerted Independent Scholar on Blake by the Swiss theologian was very likely mediated by the painter Henry Fuseli, an old acquaintance of Lavater‘s. Predictably, the Sibylle Erle, Blake, Lavater and crux of Erle‘s argument revolves around a Physiognomy. London: Legenda, an particular Blakean text, i.e. The Book of Urizen, imprint of the Modern Humanities which constitutes its author‘s ironic reading of Research Association and Maney the first veterotestamentarian text, The Book of Publishing, 2010. Pp. 244. £ 45. ISBN Genesis. 978-1-906540-69-2. Quite naturally, once Henry Hunter‘s 3- volume translation of Essays on Physiognomy A study like Sibylle Erle‘s Blake, Lavater and started appearing in 1789, Blake quickly became Physiognomy has been long overdue in the interested in the possibilities offered by a Anglo-Saxon academic context and its recent technique of interpreting a person‘s character publication is important for two main reasons. simply by analysing his/her face (and, at one Firstly, it places the problematic of Johann point, Erle argues that the visionary poet played Caspar Lavater‘s reception into a broader a part, however minor, in this translation cultural context, by establishing a genuine link project). Although Lavater himself kept his between the Swiss pastor‘s highly original reservations as to the validity of his method to thought and William Blake‘s equally fertile the very end and regarded his own work as incomplete at best, Blake responded imagination. Secondly, it emphasizes the subtle relationship between pictorial and textual enthusiastically to the topic, mainly because it representations of the human face in Blake‘s suited his own quadripartite design of vision and prophetic books, which may well trace its therefore his interpretation of the cosmic man. origins in the inventive treatment of the theme The first three chapters are chiefly devoted to offered by Lavater. elucidating the secrets of the face-reading Divided into seven chapters, with two techniques advocated by Lavater, and, by appropriate Interludes centred exclusively on making full use of previous English and The Book of Urizen and rounded off by an international sources (Graeme Tytler, Melissa Introduction and a Conclusion, Blake, Lavater Percival, Lucy Newlyn, etc.), Erle succeeds in and Physiognomy delineates its critical interest sheding light on many hidden or controversial in a very sharp and convincing manner. Without aspects of the theme. Chapters 4 and 5 are attempting to say everything there is to say primarily meant to elucidate the common aspects in the body perception shared by Lavater, about the relationship between Blake and Lavater (a fact altogether impossible, mainly Blake and Fuseli. The last two chapters explore because of the huge amount of data which must the the multilevelled relationship between text be processed), Erle only focuses on Blake‘s and image in Blake‘s artistic treatment. In her response to Lavater‘s theories concerning concluding remarks, Erle is, I believe, right physiognomy, as this becomes transparent in the when she emphasizes that 'the way in which gradual unfolding of the Blakean creation myth Blake handles text-image relationship was in three of the early prophetic books, i.e. The inspired by his reading of Aphorisms on Man' Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (205), Lavater‘s opus translated into English by (1795) and The Book of Los (1795). Fuseli in 1788.

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From the very beginning of Blakean exegesis, complementary range of critical approaches i.e., since the halcyon days of S. Foster Damon, (autobiographical, biographical, historical, the demon of interpretation has separated critics mystical, psychedelic, and theological) according to their taste for the spiritual or the facilitates a multi-dimensional reading of each material. There have been strong advocates of an text as well as an inclusive model for ideal Blake, as an aethereal companion of angels, accommodating in dialogue a similar range of just as there have been fierce supporters of an approaches to religion. The poems, perhaps empirical Blake, all too often driven to excess questionably representative of Blake and by his humours. Erle‘s convincing case is in Wordsworth, suggest curiously illuminating favour of the latter class, but without links between these Romantic poets; both disregarding the rewarding gifts of the former: it engage with aesthetically pleasing, uncrowded is thanks to her elegant critical demonstration rural environments. Via the experiences that scholars may, once again, understand that recounted, landscapes ultimately transform into there can be no clear-cut frontier between the panoramic views of heaven as familiar, domestic. two mutually opposed dimensions of Blake‘s Using this approach, Roberts also reveals Blake theory of vision, and that, ultimately, Urizen‘s and Wordsworth‘s poems (as well as a head was drawn by the material brush of an fascinating excerpt from J. Trevor‘s My Quest artist made of flesh and blood. Erle‘s subtle for God (1897)) as texts that privilege a personal, lesson is that, firstly and lastly, Blakean visions over an institutionalized, corporate, religion. In were rooted in the clay of concrete reality. so doing they appear to prefigure twenty-first Catalin Ghita century (American and English) responses to University of Craiova Christianity, ‗contain[ing] all the doubt of modern religious belief, [while] not reduc[ing] religion to [a] caricature‘ (87). Jonathan Roberts, Blake. Wordsworth. For a work that focuses on two short texts, we Religion. Foreword by Christopher receive little commentary; Roberts‘ book rather functions as a ‗companion‘ (5) to the poems. Rowland. Pb. London: Continuum, Roberts asserts that a theological approach 2010. Pp 144. £16.99. complements recent material research (Keri ISBN 9780826425027. Davies on Moravianism for instance). If the poems are ‗linguistic enactment[s] of a religious Magnus Ankarsjö. William Blake and sensibility‘ (95), we need to be ‗attentive […] to Religion. Jefferson, North Carolina: [their] experiential particularities‘ (96). ‗What literature can achieve – as these poets show – is McFarland & Company, 2009. Pp 171. to take us closer to a depiction of a multifaceted £35.50. ISBN 9780786445592. human universe that any single discipline can.‘ (103). For Roberts, Blake‘s Jerusalem is a Despite their related titles, Jonathan Roberts and religious text, in which ‗everything is included‘, Magnus Ankarsjö‘s books deploy very different while any attempt at uniformity is sabotaged critical approaches in their explorations of (97). Such ‗particularity within unity‘ (100), the Romanticism and religion. Roberts in Blake. ‗essence of religion itself‘ (103), is also Wordsworth. Religion. attempts a reassessment illustrated in Blake‘s poem to Butts by of both Romantic religion and modern religious anthropomorphized beams coalescing to become debate through complementary critical readings the body of Christ. of two passages of ‗religious‘ Romantic poetry: Roberts goes on to argue that while drug Blake‘s 2 October 1800 poem in a letter to experiences, whether Coleridge‘s or Leary‘s, Thomas Butts (‗To my friend Butts I write‘) and lack the surrounding supportive social program a passage from Book II of Wordsworth‘s The and methodical cultivation enjoyed by the Excursion. Both texts are reproduced for easy religious, Wordsworth and Blake‘s narratives, reference and reflection. For Roberts a seemingly solitary, in fact benefit from the

28 support of a textual community. It is only work, produced in response to the experience through earlier Christian sanctioned texts that described in his poem to Butts, suggesting a ‗they themselves have heard the voice of God‘ correlation between experience, painting and (80). Both poets draw on the ‗public language of poem. This potentially fertile discussion is the Judaeo-Christian tradition‘ – and thus hampered by a poor reproduction of the painting become part of a communal religious experience in which none of the details Roberts discusses – an experience all (or at least American and are identifiable. Also fascinating, despite logical British participants in that Christian tradition) leaps and little evident ‗math‘, is Roberts‘ can relate to. identification of when the painting was created: Roberts brings a refreshing approach to a ‗2nd October 1800 […] 10.54 am‘ (36). Reading neglected aspect of Romantic studies. I was against Roberts‘ sub-text, the reading most intrigued by Roberts‘ strategy in Chapter 4 persuasively gestures to the real possibilities of (‗Autobiography‘), in which he appears to give IT enhanced historicism in reclaiming historical an ‗unacademic‘, autobiographical account of Blake. Perhaps Roberts is of the historicist‘s his own ‗religious‘ experience under the party without knowing it. influence of peyote in the Lancashire Unlike Roberts‘ study, Magnus Ankarsjö‘s countryside. Later Roberts reveals the narrative William Blake and Religion summarises a to be a pastiche of accounts of others‘ religious / wealth of recent discoveries and scholarship drug experiences (Ginsberg, Huxley, Traherne principally related to the religious milieu and Christopher Mayhew). Roberts thereby surrounding Blake, before attempting to provide highlights difficulties in verifying, and a reading of the poet-artist‘s writings in the light differentiating between, narratives of religious of these findings. At the centre of Ankarsjö‘s and drug experiences. Roberts also tellingly study is Keri Davies‘ 2001 discovery that suggests that Blake and Wordsworth‘s poems Blake‘s Nottinghamshire-born mother was a are themselves ‗knowingly manufactured from member of the Moravian church, during a period disparate sources [or] informed by sources […] in which sexuality remained prominent within which have shaped and organized not only the Moravian liturgy and theology. Davies‘ research experience itself, but also the recollection, and explodes the long accepted view of Blake as part writerly transcription of that process […] both of a dissenting tradition. As Davies suggests, [are] consciously and unconsciously Blake needs to be repositioned within a new intertextual‘ (66). cultural and religious background. The But if Roberts can be so plausibly Moravians‘ use of the printing press and their disingenuous here, can readers trust him ecumenism seem peculiarly resonant in a elsewhere? Indeed Roberts‘ stated aim to Blakean context. In addition the rhythms and demonstrate how complementary critical imagery of their hymnody uncannily resembles approaches illuminate the poems, is somewhat Blake‘s own Songs. Ankarsjö attempts to undermined by a cavalier modeling of abrogate Robert Rix‘s assertion that ―Blake‘s historicism, that appears to verge on parody. writings show no tell-tale signs of Moravian Unspecified internet resources substitute practice‖ (13). If Ankarsjö does not wholly archival research and no reference is made to succeed here, he goes some way in making a Mark Crosby‘s painstaking reconstruction of case for Moravianism influencing Blake‘s ideas Blake‘s life at Felpham. Indeed, for Roberts, concerning sexual equality and religion. The historicism appears even less helpful in Moravians‘ veneration of the breasts of Mary interpreting the poems than the ‗cul-de-sac‘ indeed seems to chime with aphorisms of avenue of psychedelics he goes on to explore. Blake‘s such as ‗The nakedness of woman is the Such a caricature conveniently sets the work of God‘. concluding and more seriously treated religious But lacking his fellow scholar‘s nuance and and theological approaches, in an enhanced light. precision, Ankarsjö runs too far with Davies‘ More fruitful is Roberts‘ rereading of Blake‘s discovery. If we can‘t be certain what Catherine landscape painting of Felpham as a visionary Blake shared of her Moravian past with her son,

29 it seems premature to conclude that ‗we can now becoming so repoccupied with others‘ speak of Blake as Moravian‘ (139). Ankarsjö scholarship. After reading William Blake and determinedly sees Moravianism, and sex, Religion I feel a renewed interest in and desire everywhere in Blake. Aspects of mainstream to grapple with Blake‘s illuminated books. Christianity such as the crucifixion, forgiveness Towards the end of the book, Ankarsjö of sins (yet ‗another nod to the Moravians‘ announces his intention to follow Rix‘s example, (110)), seeing souls as female, ranks of angels, and use his background and expertise to mine for Ankarsjö become peculiarly, distinctively the Swedish archives to bring the Moravian. Characteristically, in describing a Swedenborgian milieu surrounding Blake into passage from Milton, Ankarsjö notes, ‗lending a sharper focus. I look forward to Ankarsjö‘s next Moravian touch to the poem, Jesus appears‘ (62). book with interest. Ankarsjö also engages with Blake‘s Angus Whitehead fluctuating attitudes toward Swedenborgianism Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in his poems. The readings, lacking reference to context or previous scholarship are often less than convincing. This is not helped by Dennis M. Read, R. H. Cromek, Ankarsjö‘s frustratingly non-linear, and Engraver, Editor, and Entrepreneur. unfocussed narrative. With too many typos and Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 182 pp. + xii. extensive repetition of similar arguments about the same poems (a paragraph from page 52 even £55.00/$99.95, hardcover. reappears on page 76), Blake and Religion needs ISBN 978-0-7546-6399-7. a copyeditor. When Ankarsjö tells us ‗The lark is a standard symbol of the advent of the The engraver and publisher Robert Harley apocalypse‘ (62) less informed readers like Cromek formed a brief literary alliance with myself would appreciate supporting evidence. Robert Hunt and edited three volumes of The readings illuminated by recent research are Scottish verse, including Reliques of Burns also hindered by strict adherence to the old (1808), but in Romantic circles he is chiefly homogenizing systems of Keynes and Damon. remembered as one of William Blake‘s principle Yet Ankarsjö with his knowledge of Blake‘s antagonists. Alexander Gilchrist, Blake‘s complete writings, and a wealth of new Victorian biographer, presents Cromek as a scholarship, makes this body of fascinating new mediocre engraver and an ‗unscrupulous‘ material about Blake available for a wider, less businessman whose treatment of Blake over two scholarly audience. Ankarsjö also highlights engraving projects, illustrations to an edition of significant gaps in Blake scholarship, such as Robert Blair‘s The Grave and a painting and our incomplete understanding of the Unitarian engraving of Chaucer‘s Canterbury Pilgrims, as milieu of Joseph Johnson, and figures such as ‗predacious‘. Supported by Blake‘s own Peter Panah (model for Blake‘s ‗Little Black manuscript comments, this view of Cromek Boy‘?) and the prophetess Dorothy Gott. gained significant traction with Blake Ankarsjo also sensibly suggests that while Blake, biographers and went largely unchallenged until unhappy with the practical realities of Dennis Read‘s 1988 article, ―The Rival Moravianism and Swedenborgianism, would Canterbury Pilgrims of Blake and Cromek: almost certainly have been attracted to Moravian Herculean Figures in the Carpet‖ (Modern conceptions of sexual equality. He also reminds Philology 86:171-90), which debunked some of us of the possible influence of Francois Gilchrist‘s claims regarding the Canterbury Barthélemon‘s ‗Oithoon‘ on Visions of the Pilgrims project. Read‘s diligent scholarship has Daughters of Albion (86). Indeed, Ankarsjö‘s since prompted Blake scholars to reconsider argument that Blake was too preoccupied to get both Gilchrist and Cromek. round to polishing and publishing the pickering The arrival of Read‘s long anticipated MS (117) seems to make sense. If only Ankarsjö biography provides a more comprehensive and had followed up on these leads rather than much needed reassessment of Cromek that sheds

30 light on his fractious relationship with Blake and Read uses contemporary evidence to show that offers a window onto the mechanics of the book the idea came from Cromek, who engaged one and print trade. The opening chapters briefly of the most fashionable book illustrators of the chart Cromek‘s early career as a commercial period, and coincidently a friend of Blake‘s, engraver including his apprenticeship with the Thomas Stothard to execute a painting of the leading engraver of the period, Francesco Canterbury pilgrims to serve as the basis for an Bartolozzi. Drawing on primary evidence, Read engraving. Stothard‘s painting won generous details Cromek‘s interactions with various praise from his fellow Royal Academicians and publishers, showing how these relationships together with an advertisement for the often descended into petty disputes, typically ‗forthcoming‘ engraving, was exhibited opposite over payments. We also learn that like Blake, Somerset House during the Academy‘s annual Cromek was not well disposed to publishers exhibition in 1807. Like the illustrated edition of questioning his skill with a burin, responding The Grave, the Canterbury Pilgrims project was ‗indignantly whenever anyone criticized his intended to appeal to a broad audience by engraving work‘ (13). Around 1805, Cromek exploiting the fashion for the picturesque. quit the burin in favour of distributing Cromek was tireless in his promotional work, commissions to other engravers, including Blake. spending two years touring the length and In his reassessment of the Cromek and Blake breadth of the country to drum up business for relationship Read reconstructs the circumstances the engraving. Blake took exception not only to that gave raise to the lavishly illustrated edition Stothard‘s painting, but Cromek‘s salesmanship, of The Grave, meticulously piecing together seeing it as attack on art. Cromek along with his contemporary accounts of Cromek‘s engraver, Schiavonetti, died before their professional activities. We learn how the project engraving after Stothard was finished, and while developed and how initial plans changed, much Blake completed his engraving before his rivals, to Blake‘s chagrin, so that the publication would it was Stothard‘s version that proved be a commercial success. Cromek had commercially and critically successful. commissioned Blake to create series of In the final chapters, Read details Cromek‘s watercolour designs to illustrate Blair‘s poem, role in the founding of the Chalocographic but rather than employ Blake to engrave these Society, which sought to ‗revive the market for illustrations Cromek commissioned Louis highly finished engravings‘ (87), his brief Schiavonetti who had, like Cromek, been taught connection with Robert Hunt in their mutual by Bartolozzi. Schiavonetti‘s engraving defence of the society, and finally his publishing technique, a dot-and-lozenge style that produced activities relating to Robert Burns. Read‘s a softer, richer texture and was extremely biography portrays Cromek as an indefatigable, popular, differed to Blake‘s more linear, less shrewd, and at times, ethically dubious, fashionable style. By giving Schiavonetti the businessman. While there are some minor slips engraving commission, Cromek was appealing with names, this is an important biography that to popular tastes, but he also ‗cost Blake a increases our understanding about the world of significant amount of remuneration‘ (29). In commercial engraving and book and print Read‘s account, Cromek comes across as a keen publication and goes a long way to rescuing the businessman whose awareness of market-place historical Cromek from Blake and his demand, promotional skills, and, in a broader biographers. sense, concept of art differed markedly from Mark Crosby Blake‘s. Kansas State University Read explores these differences in greater detail in his chapter on the Canterbury Pilgrims project. Much of the material in this chapter updates Read‘s earlier article. Contrary to Blake‘s claim that he originally conceived of a large-scale engraving of Chaucer‘s pilgrims,

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David Sandner, Critical Discourses of enlightened, the present, the male‘ (8). This is the Fantastic 1712-1831. Farnham and just one of the crucial features of the genre Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 191. studied by Sandner, which place it ‗in a necessary and dialectical – antagonistic but £ 55. ISBN 9781409478997. complementary – relationship with its contemporary moment‘ (14). By juxtaposing his Since the publication of Todorov‘s The critical readings of Addison, Dennis and Burke Fantastic (1973) new studies of the genre have to those of Romantic novels such as Hogg‘s appeared each decade. Within English Studies, Justified Sinner, Sandner also shows that the Rabkin‘s The Fantastic in Literature (1977) and fantastic arises in the eighteenth century as a Jackson‘s Fantasy (1981) are acknowledged quintessentially ‗―modern‖‘ (114) genre. It classics. Spacks‘s The Insistence of Horror questions the Enlightenment belief in an (1962), Seibers‘s The Romantic Fantastic (1984) empirically verifiable reality: ‗[t]he fantastic and Geary‘s The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction image has ―no existence,‖ and so casts suspicion (1992) together cover the long eighteenth on any image that attempts to represent century. The chapter titles of Critical Discourses existence‘ (37). of the Fantastic 1712-1831 show that this book Another key insight into the development of covers similar ground to some of the titles the fantastic arises out of Sandner‘s analysis of mentioned above. While an overlap in primary Johnson‘s and Hawkesworth‘s argument over material studied is inevitable and expected, I the nature and merit of the fantastic in literature. also expected the author of The Fantastic Sandner shows that these two critics agreed on Sublime (1996), and editor of Fantastic the nature of the fantastic, even if they disagreed Literature: a Critical Reader (2004), to offer on its merits. He emphasizes how their critical new insights on these materials, as well as new language reveals ‗the interconnectedness of the avenues for future study. I was not disappointed. realistic and the fantastic‘ (90). Sandner‘s book In fact, I am exited about the prospect of reading also illustrates how, in the course of the (in the not to distant future) a fully developed eighteenth century, a consensus started to appear version of the promising typology of the amongst critics about the fantastic‘s affective fantastic that Sandner outlines in his Afterword. power. When he turns to the analysis of Critical Discourses proves that the origins of Romantic literature, Sandner emphasizes that it the fantastic can be traced back to early- is this superior affective power in the fantastic eighteenth-century debates concerning the that ‗attracts readers and casts a powerful spell supernatural in literature and the function of the on the passions not to be underestimated‘ (90). imagination. The Romantic period, often He persuasively argues (as I understand it) that considered the spring of the river fantastic, the rise of realism actually helped rather than ‗might be more usefully figured as a turning hindered the rise of the fantastic as a popular point‘ (1). In this sense, the book is a pre-history genre. of the fantastic. While you could say that Spacks In Gothic Studies distinguishing between the made a similar point, in a different way (and accepted and explained supernatural has been a long ago), Sandner‘s detailed comparative dominant critical approach to the fantastic. analyses of a variety of philosophical treatises, Radcliffe‘s Udolpho is often cited as typical of essays, novels and poems, offers new insights the ‗explained‘ school. Sandner takes a different into eighteenth-century theories of the fantastic approach, however, and focuses on ‗the that have an important bearing on our possibility of the supernatural‘ (91) in Udolpho. understanding of the modern form of the genre, Through this shift in focus Sandner shows that which is so popular today. Radcliffe‘s novel actually ‗courts uncertainty‘ Sandner highlights, for instance, that in the (94) about the non-reality of the supernatural, early eighteenth century the fantastic was instead of explaining it away. This original already ‗a counter-tradition to the real approach to Radcliffe‘s influential Gothic novel ―manner … of mankind‖ that is – the adult, the has the potential, I think, to spark a re-evaluation

32 of the function of the supernatural in Gothic among Edinburgh‘s anatomists in 1828 become, fiction. by 1829, a most notorious practitioner. While Sandner‘s chapters on Wordsworth‘s and Burke and Hare were arrested – the former Keats‘s explorations of the ‗real‘ in relation to executed on the latter‘s evidence – Knox was fairyland support his argument that ‗[a]n inner never brought before a court (he had not opened appetite of the mind demands the fantastic‘ (87). the delivery that led to the discovery of the Sandner‘s analysis of Keats‘s ‗La Belle Dame murders). Nor did he make a public declaration Sans Merci‘ concludes with a statement that clarifying his position in respect of the case, a reveals the extent to which the fantastic plays a silence compared to Sir Walter Scott‘s central role in our every-day lived experience: reluctance – despite considerable pressure – to ‗Fairyland‘ offers ‗a sleep and a forgetting that pronounce upon the matter. is more than life, too intense, too ecstatic, too Silence then, interpreted variously as awake….it empties the everyday world, complicity, responsibility, guilt, aloofness, rendering it unsatisfactory, a pale substitute for scientific detachment, is one provocation of what becomes characterized as another reality, traumatic resonance: without definitive the more intense and pleasing one‘ (157). judgement to curtail speculation, delimit Overall, I feel that Discourses of the Fantastic suspicion or assuage anxiety, stories and scares puts forward a convincing and relevant proliferate. Indeed, bodysnatching and murder argument about the significant role that fantastic for medical ends already circulating in popular fiction plays in the processes by which we fantasy was, McCracken-Flesher notes, an ‗open continually (re)construct ourselves and our secret‘ (13). Stories unpick trust in the law, world. medical institutions, respectable society and, of Evert Jan van Leeuwen course, the ‗systematic‘ thinking of the Leiden University Enlightenment on which those institutions and much of Edinburgh‘s wider prestige at the time was based. Not knowing is as much the problem Caroline McCracken-Flesher, The as the horror of the murders themselves: a Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of ‗dearth of information‘ is linked to a loss of the Burke and Hare Murders. Oxford: memory, cultural anxiety and trauma (63). Not only does this trauma appear as if it is an after- Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 272. effect rather than linear cause, it is linked to ISBN 978-0-19-976682-6. scarcity of knowledge rather than, as in shock, to excess input. Starting with the shock of the Burke and Hare What emerges is an unnerving locus of dis- case, this ‗cultural autopsy‘ traces its diverse ease and dis-belief, a destabilisation of the traumatic reverberations in and across discursive, complex social, political and discursive relations disciplinary, textual and national bodies, and that tie a national imaginary to networks of class, through archives, legal and medical records, and commercial and scientific power. The effect, as onto pages, stages, screens and streets. One McCracken-Flesher argues in line with models single, yet productively obscure, story is of trauma, is another excess, an insistent, almost reiterated, ‗a tale of medical horror‘ asking why obsessive pattern of repetition, of retelling and ‗Scots choose to pick at the own horrible past‘ rewriting, that attempts to make sense, contain (9). It is a tale rich in medical and corporeal and explain. This trajectory – ranging across metaphor in which horror entwines with trauma nearly two hundred years and through famous to disclose wounds that are simultaneously and lesser-known texts – is documented (and physical, psychological and cultural. Rather than dissected) exhaustively in the book. In the mid- focus exclusively on the bodysnatching and nineteenth century, for example, Alexander murdering suppliers of cadavers to renowned Leighton‘s The Court of Cacus and David Pae‘s institutions of medical learning, the account Lucy and Mary Paterson, locate the case in examines the position of Dr Robert Knox, a star stories framed as factual reconstruction or in

33 terms of religious concern. Later, Jekyll and ‘Crime and the Sublime,’ special Hyde‘s shift from anatomy to chemistry and edition of La Questione Romantica, relocation from Edinburgh to London does not (intro. Maurizio Ascari and Stephen deter a reading of the case in terms of questions of complicity between medicine and crime. In Knight), Vol. 2, No. 2, Naples: Liguori the early twentieth century, James Bridie‘s – a Editoi, October 2010. Pp. 176. €29.00. Glasgow doctor – play, The Anatomist, takes ISBN 9788820758165. place amid the revitalisation of Scottish drama. Genre fiction, too, gets involved, as well as The introduction of this special edition of La Hollywood, with Karloff starring in The Questione Romantica declares it to be an Bodysnatcher. exploration of early crime literature. According The quite dizzying amount of references and to Maurizio Ascari and Stephen Knight, such readings encompass high and popular forms – writing is the wild, older sibling of modern from Alasdair Gray‘s Poor Things to fictions by detective fiction. Within, Romantic ideals Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin, plays and coincide with Enlightenment intellectual rigour, Broadway musicals, comic books and ‗Burke creating an understanding of crime as a sublime and Hare‘ heritage tours. In contrast to a act; a rational act that subverts normality. This scholarly argument that located Frankenstein in introduction, while full of insight into the close relation to the Anatomy Act (Tim influence of Romanticism over early crime Marshall‘s Murdering to Dissect is critically fiction, does not entirely do justice to a series of cited), this account is significantly more articles which are in fact concerned with much expansive, both in its modes of historicisation broader questions of the variety of different and in identifying a curious traumatic continuity literary and social forces at play in the alongside period-specific rereadings: the gap development of the genre(s) of detective and opened by horror is variously filled by calls for crime fiction. religious community (Pae), suspicions of Knox The article most closely allied to the declared (Stevenson) and, later, giving voice to the agenda of the introduction, is, perhaps victims. The reading of Poor Things, for unsurprisingly, Maurizio Ascari‘s own article on example, finds the novel reaching ‗beyond the work of Thomas De Quincey. Focusing in identity politics to express the complex dynamic particular on De Quincey‘s lesser known works between past and present from the victim‘s ‗Klosterheim: or the Masque‘ and ‗The perspective‘ (181). As in Gray‘s novel, ‗Bella Avenger,‘ Ascari reveals De Quincey‘s focus on Caledonia‘ is very much at stake. In every re- the emotional and sensational dimensions of visitation, fictional and theatrical forms crime itself, rather than its detection, drawn especially, a disturbing negative reflexivity from his interest in the ‗Literature of Power‘ manifests a resistance to explanation and a rather than the ‗Literature of Knowledge.‘ This return to textuality, a double bind that entwines article, perhaps the most successful of the entire trauma and cultural history: the ‗nostalgia‘ volume, demonstrates how works which evoked to ‗alleviate past events‘, the repeating depicted crime through sublime aestheticism and romancing of national heritage, encounters came to instil many of the aspects of crime disruptions of memory, experience and meaning writing that would become central to detective (22). For all the impressive efforts of cultural- fiction, long before the publication of Poe‘s ‗The historical analysis and recovery, then, the Murders in the Rue Morgue.‘ Maurice Hindle argument is careful to admit those traumatic and and Giacomo Mannironi also show the influence productive disturbances in excess of history, that sublime aestheticism, particularly the work sense and assimilation. of Edmund Burke, had on the writing of William Fred Botting Godwin, and, through Godwin‘s influence, on Kingston University Honoré de Balzac. Moving beyond the sublime, these articles also show how crime writing reflected its political and ideological context;

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Mannironi, for example, demonstrates a clear Russia respectively are much less theoretical in connection between early nineteenth-century approach, the primary focus of each being a sociological and scientific ideas of a ‗criminal potted history of developments in the genre of class‘ who were physiologically wired to detective fiction for these two areas, explored commit crime, and Balzac‘s representations of through particular texts from either nineteenth- the criminal Argow. century or contemporary authors. Both these Both Stephen Knight and Struan Sinclair articles are academically sound, but the demonstrate in their works that changing connections to the ‗sublime‘ are not always clear. experiences of urban living, in particular the The odd one out is Heather Worthington‘s study identification of the city as a unique criminal of the writing of Samuel Warren. Her argument, environment, also had a direct impact on crime that Warren used sublime motifs in his writing. Sinclair argues that the development of depictions of (male) insanity, while compelling, Poe‘s ‗superperceiver,‘ the Chevalier Auguste sits slightly awkwardly with the theme of the Dupin, was the result of a shift in criminal plots volume. from centring on ‗open secrets‘ which reveal This volume is an exploration of the dynamics themselves to a community, often by Providence, behind the changing structures and motifs used to ‗closed secrets‘ which must be deduced. This in crime and detective fiction, and while the was due to a breakdown in communities with connection to ‗the sublime‘ is not always urban environments; the city became a space in explicit, it is nonetheless a coherent and which evidence could be obscured and important publication on the – as yet – shady contradicted. Stephen Knight argues in his origins of this genre. search for the origins of the genre of Anna Jenkin ‗Mysteries,‘ that such an understanding of the University of Sheffield city in criminography came not from what Robert Mighall has termed the ‗urban gothic‘ Marilyn Francus, Monstrous but instead from popular melodramatic crime Motherhood: 18th-Century Culture and publications such as the Newgate Calendar. the Ideology of Domesticity. Baltimore: Knight maintains that although the city had served as an important setting for criminal The Johns Hopkins University Press, activity in much eighteenth-century literature, it 2012. Pp. 297. £28.50. was nothing more than a passive backdrop, and ISBN9781421407371. that (Moll Flanders aside), the city as a cause of crime, with a clearly identifiable geography of The implications of motherhood make a criminal spheres, was new to the second quarter fascinating topic for scholars of literature and of of the nineteenth century. social and cultural history. The striking cover The importance of setting is explored in image of Marilyn Francus‘ book, with its Matthias Stephan‘s article on Michael inscrutable Disneyesque shadow, indicates the Gregorio‘s novel Critique of Criminal Reason. elusiveness of the figure of the monstrous Stephan argues that Gregorio‘s subversion of a mother. This absorbing study examines a wide- specific historical setting involving real ranging selection of themes and issues on the historical actors reveals the work‘s postmodern representation of eighteenth-century British attributes. This article, the last in the collection, motherhood and the discourse of domesticity as provides a cyclical return to ‗crime and the sites of ideological conflict. Francus‘ exciting sublime‘ in that Stephan demonstrates how engagement with matters of maternity and the Gregorio seeks to subvert the common structures monster within offers a new perspective on of detective fiction, evolved from early crime historical and literary narratives. Starting with writing, to reveal the ultimate sublime act: the allegorical misogyny in Swift and Pope, Francus motiveless murder. introduces Hester Thrale as her case study for Yvonne Leffler and Gabriella Imposti‘s the fecund embodiment of the allegorical articles on crime fiction in Scandanavia and monstrous mother. Other topics include the

35 infanticidal mother, the stepmother, and spectral separated the perceptions of ‗good‘ and ‗bad‘ maternity or the absence of the mother figure. infanticidal mothers. Interestingly, most cases of The first chapter contains an illuminating infanticide were to preserve the mother‘s insight into the figure of the fertile mother, working class status, lost through bearing demonised by Spencer, Milton, Swift and Pope, illegitimate children in the first place but who present their respective characters, Errour, regained by killing the child or allowing it to die. Sin, Criticism and Dulness, as the allegorical Court records indicate that class pressure and monstrous breeders of similarly monstrous poverty led to frequent murders, with babies children. These uncontrollable women refuse to smothered or drowned in excrement-filled repress their sexuality and Francus demonstrates privies. Francus presents court transcripts and how their image shifts from religious sin to other accounts, including that of Mary Cook‘s ‗literary catastrophe‘ (30). This concept moves trial. Cook, a suicidal married woman, was from allegorical monstrosity to the very human, executed for murdering her two-year-old very fertile figure of Hester Thrale as a daughter by cutting her throat. Francus studies perceived egotistical, authoritative mother. Cook‘s crime in terms of monstrosity and the Thrale, whose writings document her tragic unsettling of patriarchal power, in this case experiences of motherhood, was in a perpetual through the domestic repulsion she embodied as state of pregnancy over fourteen years, coping much as the violence of the murder. with difficult births and the deaths of several Stepmothers in literature and life form the infants. Her children that survived were study of the following two chapters. Here, encouraged to develop their academic skills Francus avoids the traditional readings and from an early age. With the model for intimacy considers unexamined features of representation, based on her closeness to her own mother, analysing two plays from either end of the Thrale hoped for a similar relationship with her century, Nicholas Rowe‘s The Ambitious daughters, particularly with the bright Queenie, Stepmother (1700) and the Earl of Carlisle‘s The but her parental ego was too great to command Stepmother (1800). Both literary wicked the affection she constantly sought. Thrale‘s stepmothers perpetuate stereotypes founded in self-documented life is an indication of the fairy tales such as Perrault‘s ‗Cinderilla‘. anxieties of all contemporary mothers. Francus shows how the same image of The contentious subject of infanticide also monstrosity echoes through history with a study comes under scrutiny. Francus presents a critical of Elizabeth Allen Burney as ‗wicked‘ analysis of child murder in Walter Scott‘s Heart stepmother to Frances and her siblings, of Midlothian (1818) and follows with an subverting from within. The final section deals unflinching account of infanticide in seventeenth with questions arising from the anxieties of and eighteenth-century society. A fascinating maternal absence where the missing mother interpretation of Scott‘s female protagonists is in haunts her children and, in turn, is haunted by their repeated infanticidal narratives, replete motherhood. Amelia Opie‘s Adeline Mowbray with gaps and silences that define self and (1805), for example, moves away from experiences. Ultimately, Scott‘s novel displaces depictions of stereotypical compensatory infanticide and its horrors, yet avoids closure. narratives from mother to daughter, as Mrs The notion of displacement continues as Francus Mowbray absents herself, spending her time reminds us of the infanticide statute, established writing didactic works instead of engaging with in Restoration times, which condemned women Adeline‘s childhood. Dead mothers, too, on circumstantial evidence alone – in effect, communicate through letters and wills, haunting they were guilty until proved innocent. the child from a fixed narrative. In short, Eventually, accused women became wise to Francus‘ book is an important insight into a means of providing evidence, such as complex topic. It uncovers fascinating material preparations for birth and the introduction of drawn from both historical and literary sources, witnesses. Francus examines the way in which delivering an invaluable and compelling study. the courts‘ displacement of monstrosity Teresa Barnard, University of Derby

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Rosa Mucignat, Realism and Space in to offer intriguing readings of how space the Novel, 1795-1869 Imagined structures the narratives of canonical realist Geographies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. novels, namely Johann Wolfgang Goethe‘s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Jane Pp181. £55. ISBN 9781409450559. Austen‘s Mansfield Park, Alessandro Manzoni‘s I Promessi sposi, Stendhal‘s Le Rouge et le noir, Stendhal‘s short, humorous ‗essay in moral Charles Dickens‘ Great Expectations and geology‘ written under the pseudonym of Blaise culminating in Gustave Flaubert‘s L’Éducation Durand, describes a person‘s true character as sentimentale. Mucignat uses each chapter to granite, disguised by a layer of vegetable mark an increase in complexity of the use of detritus – social conventions. Stendhal‘s jokey space in the novels. In the chapter ‗Space and essay is an indication of how developments in the Symbol‘, it is argued that Goethe and the earth sciences influenced literary Austen‘s use of space moves between the representations of character depth. As Rosa eighteenth-century, more symbolic use of space Mucignat notes in Realism and Space in the and the new realist treatment of space. The Novel, 1795-1869 Imagined Geographies, the chapter on Manzoni and Stendhal, ‗Space and way depth is represented in nineteenth-century the Map‘, demonstrates how the authors‘ novels parallels key advancements in the narratives involve an accurate map of diverse sciences, as well as history and philosophy (15). territories across state boundaries. ‗Space and Mucignat advances a compelling argument the Field‘, discussing Dickens and Flaubert, centring on the transformation of novelistic use argues that specific places on the novelists‘ map of narrative space in this period, showing how become charged with power, transforming space is crucial to understanding the European characters into ‗susceptible vectors‘ (123). realist novel in the late eighteenth and early Mucignat‘s conceptualisation of space is as nineteenth centuries. Realism and Space in the broad as her argument is enticing, drawing on Novel can be classed as part of a growing body geographical, socio-political, philosophical, of scholarship on space, place and the novel, historical, psychoanalytic and scientific influenced by Franco Moretti‘s Atlas of the paradigms of space. Realism and Space in the European Novel 1800-1900 and Graphs, Maps, Novel is a slim volume, and the breadth of its Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory. conception of space on occasion works against it. Mucignat focuses the investigation of narrative The book covers a great deal of ground, but at space around three qualities: visibility, depth times further depth and detail would have aided and movement. Visibility entails the way large Mucignat‘s thesis. For example, Realism and sections of space become detailed, extending Space in the Novel opens by stating that it beyond descriptions required for the plot, contests the ‗standard definition‘ of novelistic making the space itself a visible, solid presence. realism which excludes space (1), this argument Depth involves the way these narratives impel for the book‘s importance would have been both characters and readers to dig beneath the strengthened by referring to specific works surface and decipher what is hidden. Movement which do omit space from their definition of comprehends how, through describing realism. There is also the quick assertion that the characters‘ motions, novelists animate and space of Mansfield Park is more complex than narrativize space. These qualities determine the ‗often assumed‘ (80) – it would have been useful way realist novelists transfigure space, in for Mucignat to engage with the large body of particular the way they simultaneously recent scholarship which addresses Austen‘s humanize great events and stage the everyday; subtle use of space in that novel, such as work space itself becomes used to mediate between by John Skinner or Keiko Kagawa, rather than the quotidian and the catastrophic. only referring throughout the chapter to four With these theoretical concerns and works of Austen criticism, from the eighties and methodology outlined in the first part of the earlier. With the author‘s enthusiasm for the book, Realism and Space in the Novel proceeds nineteenth-century realist novel comes a

37 tendency to characterise the eighteenth-century explains how Austen both humorously and novel as a poorer version of what came later – seriously appropriated stylistic and thematic remarks on the similarities between Flaubert‘s features of genres such as conduct literature, in and Samuel Richardson‘s use of space conclude constructing the courtship plots that in their turn with a pronouncement of Richardson‘s prompted variously ‗compliant‘ (appreciative) or inferiority and long-windedness (38). Yet it is ‗resisting‘ (hostile or questioning) responses common for an academic work to be partial to among her readers. In one of several striking its own subject, though the complexities and new analyses of familiar passages from the concerns from other places might complicate the major works, Halsey shows how closely – and argument in interesting ways. thus with what trenchant mockery – Austen‘s Despite these caveats, Mucignat‘s book famous paean to the novel in Northanger Abbey advances a compelling argument about the mirrors the text of James Fordyce‘s praise of the manner in which narrativized space was Spectator in his Sermons for Young Women transformed in late eighteenth and early (1765). Similarly observant readings of Austen‘s nineteenth century novels. Moreover, often fleeting or oblique allusions to poets and Mucignat‘s division of narrativized space into prose moralists in Mansfield Park reveal a visibility, depth and movement provides a useful literary frame of reference in that novel tool for engaging with the complexity of space extending far beyond Lovers’ Vows, which is in literature in general. shown to be only the most prominently engaged Amelia Dale with of the many ‗spectral texts‘ that haunt its University of Sydney pages. In further discussion of Mansfield Park and Emma, in particular, Halsey persuasively argues Katie Halsey, Jane Austen and Her that Austen‘s skills as a reader informed her Readers, 1786-1945. London and New deliberate constructions of her fictions as York: Anthem, 2012. Pp. 290. £60. challenging ‗games of ingenuity‘ for careful readers of suitably advanced aesthetic taste and ISBN-10: 0857283529. moral judgement (59). As Halsey shows, Austen devised these exercises in ‗hard‘ reading as In this richly informative study, Katie Halsey ways to enable readers closely to observe explores how the novels of Jane Austen both characters‘ flaws, whilst retaining a correct level emerged from, and contributed to, particular of detachment from such characters. Austen is cultures of literary reception between the late shown to have developed ‗free indirect‘ eighteenth, and early twentieth, centuries. Close discourse as an especially effective ‗filter‘ for readings of primary texts including novels, flawed viewpoints that parodically appropriated letters, and other MS materials are such fictional characters‘ attitudes and speech- complemented by skilfully blended theoretical mannerisms – just as Fordyce‘s phrasings echo and bibliographical engagements. Whilst through her celebration of the novel in informed by rigorous engagements with feminist Northanger Abbey, for the pleasure and and narratological theory in particular, Halsey‘s instruction of the reader ‗ingenious‘ enough to work is most innovative in its attention to discern them. material aspects of print cultures and reading While Halsey acknowledges that the limited practices across the historical scope of her study. range of surviving, historical accounts of In the first of her study‘s two parts, Halsey readings of Austen‘s works makes some examines how Austen‘s reading practices ‗overlap‘ with others‘ studies inevitable, the informed her writing both as a juvenile parodist great value of the second half of her own work confronting the literary traditions she inherited, lies in the new uses she makes of some of the and as a published, mature author claiming her more frequently-cited reading experiences. Thus own place within an English tradition of moral, Charlotte Bronte‘s famous account of Pride and as well as fictional, prose writing. Halsey Prejudice as an ‗accurate daguerrotyped portrait

38 of a common-place face‘ (qtd. 101) is given a however, so ‗resisting‘ readers such as the ‗post- prominent place among the mid-nineteenth- romantic‘ Elizabeth Barrett Browning also century examples, but it is newly illuminated by reacted against Austen‘s personality as it had Halsey‘s suggestion that Bronte‘s opinion might been represented by nineteenth-century have been informed by engraved illustrations commentators (beginning with Austen‘s brother included in Henry Colburn‘s frequently Henry) anxious to preserve her reputation as a reprinted 1833 ‗Standard Novels‘ edition of the ‗proper lady‘ as well as a great English moralist. work (one of four editions that would have been While Halsey clearly distinguishes her aims available to Bronte when she read it in 1847). from those of scholars concerned with Austen‘s Halsey‘s work most abundantly demonstrates receptions in such modern-day forms as film that personally-felt ‗Janeite‘ enthusiasm – adaptations or fan fiction, this study is likely to whether individually or collectively expressed – prove highly instructive to specialists in these is not a phenomenon to be associated solely with areas, given the thoroughness with which Halsey the postmodern, costume-drama-driven cult of surveys historic, imaginative appropriations of Austen. At the current time, when media Austen‘s narratives and characters within private representations of Austen tend to dismiss (or, and public spheres alike. Halsey‘s book is most indeed, to celebrate) her as a direct antecedent of successful, however, in compelling attention populist women‘s novelists, Halsey‘s survey of back to Austen herself as not only the object of Austen‘s readers from the 1820s onward readerly enthusiasms, but also an author whose valuably highlights Austen‘s popularity with own enthusiastic – and bracingly rigorous – male, as well as female, readers and critics prior practices as a reader enabled her to achieve to the mid-twentieth century. While Austen‘s some of her most admired characterisations and fellow novelist Sarah Harriet Burney is found narrative innovations. boasting of having read Pride and Prejudice Jenny McAuley nine times by 1838, Thomas Babington Hertford College, University of Oxford Macaulay appears as a besotted evangelist of Austen‘s works, both in public and private. Although ‗Janeites‘ would first be named as Rachel M. Brownstein, Why Jane such in the title of Rudyard Kipling‘s 1924 short story about Austen-admirers on the Western Austen? New York: Columbia UP, Front, as early as 1831 Macaulay was writing to 2011. Pp. 285. £20.50. his sister of a conversation on novels during ISBN 9780231153904. which the eminent lawyer Sir James Mackintosh had pronounced a liking for Emma to be ‗the test Why Jane Austen? has been well-reviewed in the of a true Austenian‘ (qtd. 148). American press and predictably so; it is very As this anecdote demonstrates, and as Halsey much an American book. Whether it altogether observes throughout the second part of her study, deserves the almost overwhelmingly positive a spirit of sociability characterised Austen response it has received is another question, as is enthusiasm in the nineteenth and twentieth the mystery of its intended audience. Brownstein centuries alike, with manifestations ranging explains that she views the writing of the book from intimate, family in-jokes to the Austen- as an act of atonement for ‗misreading Austen, themed trivia quizzes that had begun appearing and not reading her as she meant to be read‘ (8). in popular magazines by the early 1900s. In all What she has produced is a personal meditation these phenomena, Halsey finds parallels with the on Austen, digressive, anecdotal, and, largely, sociable reading practices – such as the sharing ahistorical. We open at a literary party in of texts by reading aloud, or through Brooklyn, and drift gradually to an Italian membership of local literary societies – of lakeside conference centre via a collection of Austen‘s own, late eighteenth-century literary eccentrics, several pieces of brilliant but fitful culture. Just as personality cults flourished textual analysis, and sections on Wollstonecraft among readers who appreciated Austen, and Byron.

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The book is littered with a number of errors, desultory and occasionally repetitive nature. most minor, but some more serious. Brownstein Brownstein wishes to see Austen as unique, as a makes mistakes about British geography and the genius, but is unaccountably upset when others relative locations of Derbyshire and the north either challenge this view or endorse it. country, suggesting that Darcy is ‗from even Anecdote jostles uneasily against literary further north‘ than the Bingleys, not particularly criticism. Why Jane Austen? is not a sustained problematic until she attempts to make it the study of popular ideas of Austen and, while it basis of a reading of Darcy‘s character as contains little jewels of critical reading, nor is it ‗glacial‘ (122). She makes mistakes about film a monograph. Scholars of Austen are likely to adaptations – the 2005 film of Pride and find the errors irritating and even if those same Prejudice does not locate the Bennets in a errors did not make the book unsuitable for ‗cottage‘ as Brownstein claims (52), but in a recommending to students, they are unlikely to run-down Jacobean mansion, actually a much find much in it that is suitable for their needs. more plausible Longbourn than the Regency- There is some good pedagogical material amidst period house which featured in the 1995 the rest, however, and if any group is likely to television series. The revisionist 2007 adaptation find it useful, it is teachers, who may be tempted of Persuasion concludes with Captain to borrow an excellent Emma-based reading Wentworth buying Kellynch for Anne, not ‗a exercise. new house he has built for her‘ (54). She I have read Brownstein‘s critical work with informs us that Debo Devonshire gifted pleasure in the past, and those parts of this work Chatsworth to the National Trust in the 1970s which concentrate on the detail of the Austenian (112), which may well surprise the current Duke. text are what saves it, but this is, ultimately, not Estates, and the complex legal situation which only a self-indulgent but a frustrating book. often surround them, appear to confuse Helena Kelly Brownstein, and this is troubling, given the University of Oxford importance of inheritance in Austen‘s novels. Brownstein misunderstands co-inheritance, assuming that Hartfield will descend to Catherine M. Parisian, Frances Isabella‘s eldest son (221). She also Burney’s ‘Cecilia’: A Publishing misunderstands entails, suggesting that ‗bad men History. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. defraud‘ not only Anne Eliot but also Elinor and Marianne ‗of houses that ought by rights to be 363. £65. ISBN 9781409418207. theirs‘ (107). Elsewhere, Brownstein presumes to correct Francesca Saggini, Backstage in the W.H. Auden‘s Letter to Lord Byron, deciding Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater that, in the stanza where he discusses several of Arts. Charlottesville and London: Austen‘s less popular characters, he ‗must mean University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. Musgrove‘ rather than Musgrave (56). It seems probable that Auden did indeed have in mind the 315. $45. ISBN 9780813932545. objectionable Tom Musgrave from the unfinished The Watsons and not Persuasion‘s Both books reviewed here help to extend our obtuse but well-meaning Charles Musgrove. understanding of the cultural contexts of Frances Less egregious is the fact that her description of Burney‘s work. Catherine Parisian‘s detailed the Jane Austen House Museum is out of date, publishing history of Cecilia interprets the the portrait which she describes as dominating nature and significance of the novel‘s physical the cottage having hung for several years in the life from its first publication in 1782 to its more suitable surroundings of Chawton House modern incarnation as an Oxford University Library (81). Press World‘s Classic in 1988, while Francesca That the work is the product of several years is Saggini‘s work analyses the pervasive influence evident, and perhaps accounts for its somewhat of the theatre arts on Burney‘s writings and the

40 richness of theatrical reference to be found until 1825, the novel almost dropped out of print therein. While distinct in method and aim, the until 1882, the only intervening editions (1844 books share similar goals in their desire to and 1846) being paraphrased abridgements. A support our understanding of Burney and of flurry of reprints in the late nineteenth and early eighteenth-century culture through material twentieth centuries was then followed by a detail, and both books end with substantial period between 1914 and 1986 in which there accumulations of information: Parisian‘s final was only one reprinting, in 1965. Parisian‘s chapter, ‗The Facts of Life: Bibliographical account of this history makes clear the varied Descriptions of Cecilia, 1782-1998‘, provides pressures at work in the selection of works for 150 pages of bibliographical description of all reprinting. Expiration of copyright is a key known editions of the novel, allowing for factor in this, as she explains of Cecilia‘s dip in reference and comparison, while Saggini‘s book the mid-nineteenth century: ‗Many novels of the concludes with an index listing ‗plays, operas, late eighteenth century would meet the same fate, musical performances, and other productions for copyrights expired each year, making a fresh that Frances Burney attended, read, performed in, batch of titles available from which reprint or referred to in writing between 1768 and 1804‘. publishers could choose‘ (42); similarly, ‗by That this takes up twenty pages indicates in 1914 the copyrights of all of Dickens and most itself something of the importance of the theatre other early and mid-Victorian writers had in Burney‘s life and work, and it offers scholars expired‘ (56). While this explains why Cecilia another very useful source of reference. In the fell out of print, it doesn‘t explain what brought list of performances mentioned in Burney‘s it back: the rise of feminist criticism and the writings, however, Hoadly‘s Suspicious drive to recover women‘s writing clearly Husband is included in 1775 ‗with Jenny inspired the Virago reprint of 1986 and Doody Barsanti as Clarinda‘ (235), which is possibly and Sabor‘s new edition of 1988; the re- misleading: Burney does write of Barsanti in appearance of Cecilia in the late nineteenth relation to the part, but she was prevented from century is perhaps more intriguing. Bell and playing Clarinda that year through ill health. Sons, the firm behind the new edition of 1882, By its nature Parisian‘s study contains much were part, Parisian explains, of a trend towards descriptive detail of primary concern to provision of ‗good literature at inexpensive historians of the book and this reviewer was prices to the ―common reader‖‘ as well as duly (and probably belatedly) educated in the satisfaction of a ‗demand for instructive texts‘ associated terminology of gatherings, press generated by educational reforms (43). Anne numbers, and so on. There is plenty for the Raine Ellis, Burney‘s nineteenth-century editor, reader with a solely literary bent, however, commented that ‗―Evelina‖ and ―Cecilia‖ are, emphasising how much book history can offer unless you name ―The Vicar of Wakefield,‖ the non-specialists. Parisian‘s first chapter follows only (more‘s the pity) books of fiction you the publishing history of the novel until the would like to put into maiden hands with no expiration of its copyright in 1810, including omissions‘ (45). The moral acceptability that valuable information about the nature of had impressed eighteenth-century reviewers of Cecilia‘s early success and helping to challenge Burney (daughters will ‗grow wiser, as they modern popular preconceptions about the likely read‘, commented the Critical Review readership for fiction such as Burney‘s: ‗in her approvingly of Evelina) gave Burney renewed own time and even throughout the nineteenth currency over a hundred years later and helped century, Burney‘s novels knew no age or gender her to maintain her tenuous hold on the fringes boundaries in their readership‘ (25), she reminds of the canon. us. Chapter 2, focussing on post-copyright Chapter 3, on foreign editions of the novel, editions of Cecilia, is of particular value in offers among other things a fascinating insight charting the fortunes of Burney‘s reputation and into the history of translation theory and practice, commercial viability from the early nineteenth as different editions privilege accuracy on the century to the present. Reprinted regularly up one hand and adaptation to particular tastes

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(which often involved substantial abridgement) significantly build on or diverge from the work on the other. An intriguing spin-off of Cecilia‘s of previous critics. On the other hand, specific popularity abroad was a German pocket calendar points such as Saggini‘s deft identification of for 1789, illustrated with scenes from the novel. Morrice as a character from a harlequinade (166) (Mrs Schwellenberg, Burney‘s bête noire during offer the reader something both original and her service at Court, gave her a copy!) One of convincing. Certainly, the argument that the book‘s especial pleasures is its reproduction, theatrical culture and dramatic modes are deeply in Chapter 4, of all Cecilia‘s illustrations embedded in (indeed constitutive of) Burney‘s (including those from the calendar) and fiction is a valuable one, and Saggini‘s teasing Parisian‘s useful commentary on their reflection out of more or less prominent references and of changes of taste, away from ‗sentimental allusions to Shakespeare, contemporary drama themes toward more technical aspects of plot and popular theatre performs a signal service to and character‘ (107). Unfortunately for the Burney scholarship. author, this chapter was poorly checked, so that In both books there is a sense that Burney‘s the introductory section‘s references to its three work is important as much for its emblematic parts serve to confuse rather than clarify. No significance as for itself. In showing how a late part one or part three exists, and part two (111) eighteenth-century novel was subsequently re- contains what the reader expected to find in part packaged, translated, illustrated, abridged and three. There are further mistakes – such as a re-issued, Cecilia in Parisian‘s book becomes an footnote on p.100 directing the reader to pp.114- important kind of ‗everynovel‘ in its 15, when the relevant material is on pp.112-13, exemplification of general trends and cultural or the attribution of the scene in which Cecilia developments. For Saggini, Burney is an sits under a tree with Fidel variously to Book V, ‗emblematic case‘ of ‗a writerly reader‘, ‗a Chapter 8 and Book VI, Chapter 8 (112), when highly versatile and successful author, but also it‘s in Book VI, Chapter 10. In a book in which […] an avid reader who kept abreast of the latest accurate detail is so important, such slips publications‘ (6). Thus while both books offer undermine the reader‘s confidence. much specifically to Burney scholars, they also Saggini‘s first chapter undertakes a reading of undoubtedly merit attention from the wider theatre history from the Restoration to the mid- academic community in eighteenth-century and eighteenth century that emphasises the shift Romantic studies. from the heroic to the sentimental mode and the Gillian Skinner importance of this change for the rise of the Durham University novel. The argument it offers in relation to fiction is not in itself new, as the prominence of Laura Brown in the chapter‘s conclusion Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, eds., indicates, but it provides a very useful summary Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. of developments in drama of the period and lays Cambridge: Cambridge University the necessary groundwork for the subsequent examination of theatrical culture in Burney‘s Press, 2012. Pp. 468. £65. work. In this, the detailed reading of sections of ISBN: 9780521898607. the novels for dramatic conventions was, for me, somewhat heavy-handed: more instances of the The extensive collection Shakespeare in the way in which Burney attends to ‗kinesic‘ and Eighteenth Century examines the eighteenth ‗proxemic‘ relations between her characters, for century as the formative period for example, were offered than felt strictly Shakespeare‘s growth as the National Poet, necessary to either the reader‘s grasp of the through performances, editions, and adaptations. point or the furthering of the argument. Editors Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor organize Similarly, while readings of major scenes (such their sixteen chapters into five sections, looking as the masquerade or Vauxhall in Cecilia) at ‗what Shakespeare meant to his eighteenth- clearly support Saggini‘s approach, they don‘t century consumers‘ in order to uncover how he

42 was shaped by the ‗aesthetic, cultural and discusses the relationship between adaptation political values of the period‘ (8). Overall, the and moral and aesthetic taste, focusing on two editors seek to demonstrate that Shakespeare case studies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream over represented a collective ‗way for England to the course of the century, and Colley Cibber‘s forge its identity by celebrating its national hero, adaptation of Richard III. The final essay in this whether in criticism, in performance, or in chapter, by Michael Burden on Shakespeare and popular culture‘ (8). operatic adaptations in London and Germany, The first section, on the dissemination and surveys A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo reception of Shakespeare in print, includes four and Juliet, The Tempest, and The Merry Wives essays. Marcus Walsh discusses trends in editing of Windsor in various operatic traditions. and publishing, including the dominance of the Section Four, ‗Memorializing Shakespeare,‘ Tonson publishing house in the period. Jack includes three essays. First, Shearer West looks Lynch covers how critical responses affected at Shakespeare and the visual arts, particularly Shakespeare‘s reputation, which grew into an the establishment of the Boydell Shakespeare established cultural institution by the end of the Gallery and the growing presence of eighteenth century. Antonia Forster looks at Shakespeare in art due to his status as a national early reviews of Shakespeare in periodicals, icon and his commercial potential. In a more where issues such as textual editing, adaptation, localized study, Kate Rumbold examines role of establishment of the Shakespeare canon, and the Stratford Jubilee of 1769, which contributed critical studies were debated. This first group of to Shakespeare‘s growing fame without having essays concludes with Brean Hammond‘s to depend on his actual words. At the end of this analysis of discoveries and forgeries, focusing section, Kathryn Prince covers Shakespeare‘s mainly on Lewis Theobald‘s Double Falshood role in developing senses of nationalism and (1727) and William Henry Ireland‘s infamous national identity, through productions like John forgeries, as well as on editor Edmund Malone‘s Philip Kemble‘s Coriolanus (1796) which establishment of documentary evidence as the associated Shakespeare with forces of order as standard for Shakespeare studies. opposed to the disorder of contemporary France. Section Two, on ‗Shakespeare in Literature,‘ The final section of the book seems a bit of a is organized by genre, with chapters on miscellany, under the umbrella title of Shakespeare in poetry, in the novel, and in ‗Shakespeare in the Wider World.‘ The first drama, by David Fairer, Thomas Keymer, and essay is by Frans De Bruyn on ‗Shakespeare and Tiffany Stern respectively. Focusing on poetry the French Revolution,‘ where he argues that after 1740, Fairer argues that Shakespeare adaptations, editions, and performances of ‗became a byword for the natural, original Shakespeare in the 1790s suggest a broader use genius, exemplifying poetry‘s imaginative of Shakespeare for political purposes. Roger potential‘ (11). Keymer looks at Shakespeare‘s Paulin covers Shakespeare in Germany, role in the development of the novel, particularly particularly his influence on Goethe and with Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Schlegel, and his role in the renewal of German Laurence Stern, and Frances Burney. Stern literature. Philip Smallwood‘s contribution on examines the paradoxical situation of ‗Shakespeare and Philosophy‘ examines the Shakespeare and eighteenth-century dramatists, connections between Shakespeare‘s works and who adapted his work with abandon on the one eighteenth-century philosophy, where hand and paid homage to the entity of Shakespeare received surprisingly little attention. ‗Shakespeare‘ on the other. This wide-ranging work concludes with ‗Shakespeare on the Stage comprises the third perhaps the most useful feature of the book, a section, with an opening essay by Robert substantial ‗Reference Guide‘ by Frans De Shaughnessy on the growing popularity of Bruyn. De Bruyn organizes his guide into five Shakespeare‘s plays on the stage, as well as their sections: ‗Editing, Annotating and Publishing role in technical innovations and in evolving Shakespeare,‘ ‗Eighteenth-Century Critical acting styles. Jenny Davidson‘s chapter Commentary‘ organized by decade, ‗Staging and

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Adaptation,‘ ‗Shakespeare Adapters, Actors, and In their ambitious Annotated Frankenstein, Managers,‘ ‗Visual Representations of Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald L. Levao use the Shakespeare,‘ and ‗Other Modern Criticism.‘ visual possibilities of the format to explore both Seventeen illustrations supplement the textual Frankenstein’s literary and cultural background richness of this collection, and underline the and its complex reception in various media. importance of the eighteenth century in shaping Their edition is part of a series of luxury editions Shakespeare. While this collection covers of seminal texts (mostly novels, but also familiar ground in terms of adaptation, including works such as the US Constitution or performance, and editing, it‘s useful to have Darwin‘s Origin of Species) published with the these topics gathered together in one place, with Belknap Press, a Harvard UP imprint. Oversized the addition of a superb and up to date reference and lavishly illustrated in colour, yet reasonably guide. Scholars of both Shakespeare and priced, the volumes are designed both as eighteenth-century studies will want to consult collectors‘ items and critical editions. Using this useful book before embarking on future annotations, modern fonts and consecutive projects. pagination with Arabic numbers throughout, Katherine Scheil they are also meant to combine vivid readability University of Minnesota with academic rigour. While, with its own double life, Frankenstein is particularly suited for such a project, Wolfson and Levao are an Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The equally suitable team. A Romanticist, gender Annotated Frankenstein. 1818/1831. historian and Professor of English at Princeton Ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald L. University, and an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University specialising in Levao. Cambridge, Massachusetts and Early Modern Literature and Intellectual History, London: The Belknap Press of both are prolific and experienced editors. Indeed, Harvard University Press. Pp. 390. Wolfson has edited Frankenstein previously, as £22.95. ISBN 9780674055520. a Longman Cultural Edition (2003). The Annotated Frankenstein follows late Once considered a literary curiosity, since the twentieth- and early twenty-first-century 1980s Mary Shelley‘s ―hideous progeny‖, academic trends by focusing on the 1818 text Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, has (originally published in London with Lackington, moved to the centre of Romantic studies. A key Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones) preferred by text in feminist criticism and crucial to the most contemporary teachers. Covered with a establishment of Gothic studies, it has become reprint of the original title page, it is presented one of the most popular texts on the curriculum without later revisions. Wolfson and Levao have in English Literature programmes in the consulted the original manuscript and fair copy, Anglosphere and beyond, with both its 1818 and carefully corrected printing errors and 1831 versions available in numerous critical and modernised of the use of quotation marks, but popular editions. Yet, it occupies a peculiar preserve idiosyncratic spellings and original place in cultural history. While Frankenstein is punctuation. Like most critical editions, The arguably the most famous piece of Romantic Annotated Frankenstein includes Shelley‘s prose fiction in the English language, claiming introduction to the 1831 version (published with that its various cinematic incarnations are still Bentley‘s Standard Novels) with the legendary much better known would surely be an story of the novel‘s origins in an informal ghost understatement. This is particularly true for the story competition with a party of friends iconic 1931 adaptation, directed by James (including her future husband Percy Shelley and Whale, with its instantly recognizable image of Lord Byron) in 1816. Additionally, it features Boris Karloff as the nameless creature. Thus, the key passages from the 1831 edition which novel itself has acquired a cinematic significantly expand or depart from the original doppelgänger. text. Wolfson and Levao‘s comprehensive

44 critical introduction is itself thoroughly Gregory Leadbetter, Coleridge and the illustrated, and accompanied by a detailed Daemonic Imagination. New York: section on the novel‘s authorship and Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 288. publication history (also considering Percy Shelley‘s involvement). A particular highlight is £58.00. ISBN 9780230103214. an extensive timeline, spanning the years between 1752 (Benjamin Franklin‘s experiments Ve-Yin Tee, Coleridge, Revision and with lightning) and 1935 (the release of Romanticism: After the Revolution, Whales‘s Bride of Frankenstein). Listing key 1793-1818. New York: Continuum, events in scientific, literary and cultural history 2011. Pp. 190. £24.99. as well as events in the lives of Shelley and her family, it also includes events in the fictional ISBN 978-1441137500. world of Frankenstein (set in italics). As Shelley provides no full dates, the editors use two Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s status as an author specific day-dates in Walton‘s correspondence has always posed a significant challenge to and Victor Frankenstein‘s narration in scholars. As the recent publication of the combination with literary references to situate Oxford Handbook to Coleridge attests, his the main events firmly between 1789 and 1797 – writing, which spans multiple genres and modes thereby illustrating the pervasiveness of and often blurs the line between public and Shelley‘s references to the French Revolution, private, is marked by the influence of a the radicalism of the 1790s and her own family staggering range of persons and events and ideas, heritage. The Annotated Frankenstein closes both historical and literary. Coleridge and the with an extensive list of reading and viewing Daemonic Imagination and Coleridge, Revision suggestions, featuring biographical material on and Romanticism, while divergent in method, Shelley, other critical editions and further share an interest in questions of authorial agency critical reading, but also websites, stage and film and intent, and each offers a compelling reading adaptation as well as sequels and films inspired of the relationship between author, text, and by the story‘s main motif. history in order to argue for the enduring However, it is the annotations and illustrations relevance of Coleridge‘s diffuse body of work. that truly render this volume unique. Frequently Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination in conversation with each other, they offer a begins with a close reading of an October 1812 wealth of literary, religious, historical, scientific, notebook entry, through which Leadbetter sets geographic and biographical cross-references. up the key terms of the ‗formative drama‘ (1) While the ruby-coloured annotations are that unfolds over the course of Coleridge‘s restricted to the novel itself, the illustrations career. In Chapter 1, ‗The Willing Daemon: (themselves provided with detailed comments) Coleridge and the Transnatural‘, Leadbetter span the entire volume. Including eighteenth- takes Coleridge‘s admission in this entry of an and nineteenth-century portraits and landscape ‗apprehension of being feared and shrunk from paintings, engravings, book illustrations, maps, as a something transnatural‘ (8) as a starting scientific and alchemistic illustrations, images of point for articulating the ways in which letters and journals and extracts from novels as Coleridge‘s lifelong struggle with questions well as playbills, movie stills and twentieth- concerning the relationships between Mind and century expressionist images, they reflect the Body, Science and Religion, Reason and edition‘s wide-ranging approach. The Annotated Understanding, Nature and Imagination, are Frankenstein is a fruitful teaching resource and marked by a ‗sense of transgression‘ that drives a valuable work that provides a bridge between his ―philosophy of human potential‘ (11). the scholarly and the popular, and between the Leadbetter asserts that this ‗daemonic will‘ is novel‘s literary, visual and cinematic heritage, not, as previous critics have surmised, a and should appeal to a large and varied audience. confession of evil, but a sign of a more nuanced Imke Heuer, Independent Scholar moral struggle, a construct that enables

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Coleridge to experiment with ‗the means of natural objects, Leadbetter outlines a ‗poetics of experiencing and directing forces beyond the creative disturbance‘ (102) that ‗proceeds by deliberative, conscious self‘ (13). Chapter 2 stealthy equivocation‘ (115). Coleridge‘s begins by identifying Coleridge‘s Unitarian poetics, then, enact a relationship between the years, 1795-1797, as a key period for the self and nature that ultimately unsettles development of his heterodox metaphysical Wordsworth‘s attempts to regulate the potential stance and the instantiation of a ‗pattern in excesses of the human intellect. The book‘s final which the pursuit and access of spiritual and chapters invite the reader to witness the intellectual power is experienced as a form of operation of Coleridge‘s transnatural drama in shame‘ (18). Reading Coleridge‘s early prose in poems that are usually read in relation to their conjunction with his treatment of superstition use of the supernatural: ‗Christabel‘, ‗The Rime and orthodoxy in poems such as ‗Religious of the Ancient Mariner‘, and ‗Kubla Khan‘. The Musings‘, Joan of Arc, and ‗The Eolian Harp‘, daemonic figures in these poems emerge as Leadbetter begins to elucidate a distinct poetics emblems of the transgressive power of the that enacts this pattern through an interplay human imagination, the outcome of a struggle between activity and passivity, setting the stage that, for Coleridge, was not only poetic and for a reading of Coleridge‘s career as an ongoing philosophical, but also deeply personal. psychological drama of desire, seduction and In contrast, Coleridge, Revision and transgression. Romanticism explicitly positions itself as a work Chapters 3-6 turn to the ways in which this of cultural materialism. Although Tee is careful drama plays itself out through Coleridge‘s not to ‗ignore the author as an agent in the complicated history of collaboration and formation of his work‘, the study is less tumultuous friendship with William Wordsworth. concerned with locating ‗the man himself‘ as it This is familiar territory, of course, but is in reading Coleridge‘s work ‗as a conduit for Leadbetter brings a fresh perspective to the his times‘ (11). The book‘s four chapters, which relationship through a reading of what he calls focus on the historical phenomena surrounding Coleridge‘s ‗elective organicism‘, a philosophy Coleridge‘s publication and subsequent revision that envisions the interplay between the of specific literary texts, might then be read as autonomy of human will and the equally experiments designed to test the possibilities and autonomous living forces of nature (47). limits of historicist literary criticism. For Drawing heavily on Coleridge‘s musings on the example, Chapter 1, ‗The Catholicity of ―Frost will in his notebooks and letters, Leadbetter at Midnight‖‘, examines the poem in its begins to articulate an inherent element of iterations from 1798, 1812, 1817 and 1892 in theological and existential risk in Coleridge‘s order to explicate Coleridge‘s shifting narrative of becoming, which is characterized by relationship to Catholicism in light of the major the ‗directed exposure of the self to transfiguring events and complex ideological dynamics of the forces beyond the comprehension and full French Revolution. Drawing on letters, reviews, control of the mind‘ (48). This reading casts and other periodical publications, Tee frames the self-development as destabilizing process first appearance of ‗Frost at Midnight‘ in the inherently open to the transgression of natural Fears in Solitude pamphlet as a ‗conciliatory and religious boundaries, a process that gesture‘ designed to ‗offer a pose of recantation Coleridge pursues through a poetic project and patriotism‘ in the wake of the controversy driven by the desire to uncover the power of a surrounding the initial appearance of ‗France, an ‗transnatural‘—as opposed to a more morally Ode‘ (18). The readings of the poem focus on stable, Wordsworthian ‗natural‘—language that Coleridge‘s representation of his wife and son crosses ‗the sensory boundaries of being and ‗in the image of the Madonna and Child‘ and knowledge‘ (85) established by theorists such as explore the religious and political significance of Locke. Through close readings of poems that the omission of this Marian image in its later juxtapose light and shadow, calm and chaos, and versions, tracking its key revisions alongside the intertwined agencies of human culture and notebook entries, lectures and prose that develop

46 from an initially ambivalent into a distinctly book‘s narrative trajectory, this evidence is anti-Catholic position. More broadly, Tee asks ultimately effective in supporting Tee‘s readers to reconsider the relationship between concluding claim that a poem such as ‗Frost at aesthetic form and historical context, proposing Midnight‘ does ‗not seem to be political today that the changes to the ending of ‗Frost at because the work we are familiar with…has had Midnight‘ were not, as Coleridge himself and its politics erased‘ (140). Likewise, Coleridge subsequent critics have maintained, purely and the Daemonic Imagination reminds us that structural concerns, but ‗in fact represented an the processes that produce the poetry that we emotional and ideological investment that inherit, read, and teach are inherently instable Coleridge was no longer prepared to make‘ (37). and fraught with internal conflict from their Chapter 2, ‗The Submerged History of ―The inception. The immersion into Coleridge‘s Ancient Mariner‖‘, continues this line of thought and language that this study provides argument, stating that Coleridge‘s own ‗appeal also has the potential to be overwhelming in its to an autonomous imagination is at its heart an density and intricacy, but Leadbetter‘s elegant appeal against the poem‘s historical prose crafts the darker materials of Coleridge‘s connections‘ (43). The chapter begins with a mind into a narrative that organizes without search for the ‗historical correlatives‘ behind the attempting to fully tame them. Both of these ‗seemingly incidental details provided by the studies point to the conflicts inherent in reading poem‘ (58). Tee attributes the Mariner‘s Coleridge‘s writing, and, more tellingly, to the perception and description of the spectral ship, multiple and linked internal and external for example, to a spike in publications conflicts that shape it. concerning the situation of soldiers in the Allison Dushane English Navy, and reads the identity of the University of Arizona ship‘s female spectre in the context of anxieties concerning the spread of yellow fever that accompanied the colonial occupation of the Suzanne E. Webster, Body and Soul in West Indies. A meticulous record of the poem‘s Coleridge’s Notebooks, 1827-1834: textual history, in conjunction with a ‘What is Life?’. Basingstoke and New consideration of the socioeconomic conditions in which each version appeared, foregrounds a York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. discussion of its revisions from the 1798 Lyrical Pp.314. £55.00. ISBN 9780230545229. Ballads to Sibylline Leaves. The final chapters continue to investigate the causes of Coleridge‘s Although the final volume of the Notebooks of continued efforts at revision as a combined Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which effectively effect of political pressures and the shifting completed the whole collected works, was demands and expectations of the literary published just over a decade ago, few studies marketplace. Chapter 3, ‗Ungodly Visions‘, have engaged with this material in any sustained tracks the transformation of Coleridge‘s radical way. The main reason for this neglect is that ‗allegoric vision‘ that first appeared in his 1795 towards the end of his life the poet- political lectures into a more pointed ‗allegory philosopher‘s preoccupations centred more than against Catholicism‘ (91) while Chapter 4, ‗A ever before on difficult questions of theology Tale of Remorse‘, focuses on the production, and biblical criticism (the latter a field well staging and reception of Coleridge‘s dramatic surveyed by Jeffrey W. Barbeau in a book work at Drury Lane. perhaps published too recently to appear in Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism makes Suzanne E. Webster‘s bibliography). Webster‘s an important argument about the necessity for monograph is a courageous exception to the scholars to consider what is lost when literary general neglect. Several years in the making and works become canonized. Although the sheer laden with footnotes that present a formidable amount of historical evidence presented can at appearance even to the specialist, it scrupulously some points make it difficult to keep track of the documents Coleridge‘s fascinating but often

47 tortuous attempts to answer the question posed topics. What is ultimately at stake for Coleridge in the subtitle: what is life? in the body-soul question is the nature of the Webster‘s narrow focus on a few years‘ worth Atonement: whether and how Christ the of speculation in Coleridge‘s Notebooks, leaving redeemer can absolve us from the transgressions aside the Opus Maximum and various other against the moral law which (in Paul‘s language) sources that broach similar topics, represents at arise from the ‗mind of the flesh‘. Whilst highly once the weakness and the strength of this book. attentive to Coleridge‘s intellectual The opening survey of ‗competing views on ambivalences, Webster rarely mentions the body and soul‘ – classified as ‗radical dualism‘, Atonement, thus downplaying the moral ‗non-radical dualism‘, and ‗holism‘ – relies on dimension. To present Coleridge ‗viewing encyclopedia summaries of the German himself as comparatively sinless‘ (78) indicates Naturphilosophen, skating over the a distortion of perspective that is not quite philosophical dualist of foremost importance to rectified until the section ‗Fleshly Thwartings‘ Coleridge and his age, Immanuel Kant. But (218-220). It was Coleridge‘s emphasis on Webster‘s work takes on far greater conviction practical religion arising from his personal sense when she turns to one of her central interests, of sin that helped to make him the great Coleridge‘s struggle with what he generally theological hope of his circle in the 1820s and regarded as the radical dualism of St Paul. A 1830s; in dark times, he glossed his initials characteristically agonised remark on this topic S.T.C. as ‗Sinful, Tormented Culprit‘. begins: ‗Who shall deliver me from the Body of Nevertheless, Webster‘s treatment of the this Death – from this Death of the Body!‘ (qtd. theories she reconstructs is admirably thorough, 85). Meticulously tracking Coleridge‘s opening a new path through the complex reflections on a single verse (Romans 7.24), territory of the late notebooks. The speculations Webster succeeds in underlining the importance presented in this book seem a fitting destination of Pauline rigorism to his anxieties about the for Coleridge‘s complaints against his body in way of all flesh. an entry made back in 1807: ‗O ‘tis a crazy Nevertheless, as she also shows, ‗Hebraic‘ tenement, this Body, a ruinous Hovel, which the holism competed for Coleridge‘s assent at the striving Tenant, tired out with the idle toil of same time. Much of Webster‘s work thus forms patching it, deserts and leaves to the sap of the a catalogue of ambivalences and ‗oscillations‘ in sure silent fire‘. Coleridge‘s notebook explorations, especially on James Vigus the controversial doctrine of the Incarnation. A Queen Mary, University of London very interesting section traces Coleridge‘s critique of his sometime protegé Edward Irving, the charismatic minister of the Church of John Beer, Coleridge’s Play of Mind. Scotland whose Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of our Lord’s Human Nature (1830) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. placed Christ alarmingly close to sinful Pp. 273. £61. ISBN 9780199574018. humanity. The final chapter, ‗Resurrection‘, sees Coleridge return to a controversy familiar to him Writing in 1797, Coleridge recognised an from his Unitarian phase in the 1790s: what abiding impulse ‗to play off my intellect ad theory of personal identity can account for the libitum‘, and this restless, fascinated condition possibility of an afterlife? Webster here was a constant of his wild career. In Coleridge’s expounds Coleridge‘s notion of the ‗threefold I- Play of Mind, John Beer picks up on this spirit, ness‘ of the human being – the I spiritual, human, developing the more playful Coleridge that first and animal – which appeared to offer a release emerged to contemporary readers with Richard from disabling dualism. Holmes‘s superb biography. Coleridge’s Play of Focusing firmly on these speculative theories, Mind can in fact be read as something of a Webster‘s approach tends to overlook the moral companion volume to that work: a critical impetus of Coleridge‘s thought on all such excursion with a leading scholar into the

48 intellectual life of a writer at the centre of his philosophy. Coleridgean connexions with other distinguished record. writers are prominent – notably D.H. Lawrence, I confess something of an interest here: Beer‘s Vaclav Havel, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath Coleridge the Visionary (1959) was the first (with reflections upon whom the book closes). book of criticism on Coleridge that I read, aged Beer‘s humane prose and intellectual civility is seventeen, when studying for A-Level, and not given to acts of magisterial summation, and Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (1977) followed this book presents itself as one more enquiry not long after. For me at that time, both of these into a fascinating field. Its open-endedness, in works, like Lowes‘s The Road to Xanadu, fact, is part of its message – and Beer most often opened up worlds within worlds in Coleridge‘s reserves his quiet insistence for points on which writing, full of arcane riches – and I am still he has found fellow critics too definite or grateful for the (unabated) excitement they dogmatic in their conclusions. Beer above all stimulated. Coleridge’s Play of Mind has the cherishes Coleridge‘s power to kindle hallmark of Beer‘s idiosyncratic erudition and imaginative and intellectual activity in others: breadth of research, this time applied to the ‗stimulating others‘, in fact, ‗to be themselves‘ whole of Coleridge‘s life. It focuses more upon (241). the history of ideas played out in Coleridge‘s Writing on an author as mercurial as Coleridge thinking than upon poetry as an end in itself, and raises questions of form and method for any takes the form of a biographical compound of critic drawn to the flame. In places, Beer Beer‘s multi-faceted engagement with his work. presents moments of epiphanic directness: ‗Love, There are of course overlaps with Beer‘s ministered through the kind of sensibility that previous criticism, and between chapters, can respond to nature, is for Coleridge the (including the blip of an entire paragraph from p. perpetual solution‘ (37). Elsewhere, though, 19 repeated verbatim on pp. 30-1) but it still has Beer might leave his readers feeling as if he has fresh things to say. At times Beer finds arrived at some Coleridgean threshold – only compelling ways past old questions – for then (as he often observes of his subject) to back example on the place of organicism in the away from the pursuit – as if wary of finding critical work of Coleridge and A.W. Schlegel, what had seemed a bridge across a beckoning showing the blinkered nature of much abyss to be merely a trail of vapour. commentary on the subject, and instead It is only fitting, however, that a book on highlighting in Coleridge ‗a view of art that was Coleridge brings into play as many questions as founded in his thinking about the nature of life answers. After all, as Beer remarks, the high itself‘ (150). The book covers the subjects one rewards of reading Coleridge remain ‗for those might expect, given Beer‘s long-held research who find a way of responding to his mental interests: Coleridge‘s theories of life and form, energies with similar ones of their own‘ (186). his friendship with Wordsworth, his troubled Gregory Leadbetter love for Sara Hutchinson, his recondite reading Birmingham City University and speculative metaphysics, and his criticism. It also sheds light, however, on less frequently trodden territory, including Coleridge‘s interest in animal magnetism, his relations with James Mackintosh and the Wedgwoods, The Friend, the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and the obstinate persistence of theological heterodoxy in the older Coleridge (which, not least as editor of the Bollingen edition of Aids to Reflection, Beer is well placed to do) – a persistence that duelled with Coleridge‘s equally obstinate attempt to squeeze Anglican Christianity into the shape of his own

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Edward Larrissy, The Blind and scarcely apprehensible tropes‘ (204) in the Blindness in Literature in the Romantic conclusion. Period. Edinburgh: Edinburgh The book begins with an illuminating discussion of blindness in an age characterised University Press, 2007. Pp. 240. £50. as its literal opposite: Enlightenment. The ISBN 9780748632817 ‗enigma of the blind‘ was primarily important to Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley, Larrissy Edward Larrissy‘s monograph covers a subject suggests, as it provided test-cases for different which, as the author notes, has not received full sensory and epistemological theories. The treatment in Romantic critical writing, although literary examples presented in relation to this are sight, its absence, and analogous themes have sometimes directly relevant (the role of Milton always been understood as important for as blind poet, Thomas Blacklock) and Romantic authors, and ‗closely linked with the sometimes less so, only ‗being predicated on development and the definition of the central discussions in which the blind play their part‘ ideology of poetic vision‘ (36). To its credit, (25). Next is a section on the ‗blind bard‘ and this often ambitious book engages with these his or her ‗second sight‘; these Larrissy sees as broader themes of vision and insight understood strongly connected to Celtic writing and identity. literally and metaphorically, as well as obvious There are perceptive comments here about the instances of literary blindness, although uncanny, borders, crowds, and prophecy; in the consequently the eponymous subject sometimes extended discussion of Thomas Moore‘s Irish drops out of focus. Larrissy‘s principal argument Melodies further analysis of the political is that Romantic writing continued or renewed, connotations of blindness in relation to occluded in primitivist aesthetics such as those or disappeared national histories might have surrounding the Ossian poems, an ancient been interesting. A chapter on Blake—one of association between blindness and bardic Larrissy‘s particular areas of expertise—follows, ‗intense inward vision‘, whilst also developing a in which his characterization of empiricism as ‗historical self-consciousness‘ about such a narrowness and dimness of vision (‗Winking & power, expressed in the figure of the blind blinking Like Doctor Johnson‘) is explored and person who develops compensatory sensitivities, complicated, as are later images of blindness as especially to the sound of poetic language. For compromised prophetic vision. Provocatively, Larrissy, this trade-off is ‗associated with the but less successfully, Larrissy then argues that loss and gain inherent in the modernity of a Blake‘s relief printing was a sort of ‗analogue‘ post-bardic age‘ (Preface, n.p.) and is, to printing for the blind. After a short chapter on furthermore, a figuration of modernity‘s instructive and sentimental writing about the ‗exchange of vision for reflection and blind, genres in which ‗fortitude and a sense of association‘ (27). This is a bold and largely duty‘ are apparently unfailing moralised upon, convincing thesis, although the book sometimes there is a much longer section (the distribution has trouble linking it to the textual detail of argument across chapters is somewhat uneven) adduced: there is an occasional feel of about Wordsworth. Here Larrissy‘s arguments skittishness or lack of traction as the about ‗melancholy reflections on loss of vision commentary slides past three or four authors or and its compensations‘ (12) really connect, not disparate examples in one sentence. On the other only with Wordsworth‘s poetic ideology and its hand, the book is dense in connections for spots and ‗borders of vision‘ but also in relation further exploration: in the best way, it is not to his actual ocular degeneration, which began exhaustive. There are some presumably as early as 1805. There are subtle readings of deliberate omissions: Derrida and subsequently passages from The Borderers, ‗Tintern Abbey‘, De Man on Rousseau and the ‗rhetoric of and of course the appearance of the blind beggar blindness‘ make fleeting appearances, the latter in The Prelude. Although lacking sustained only with a glancing reference to ‗subtle and conclusions (I‘d have liked more on the blind beggar, and what Geoff Dyer has called his role

50 as a ‗corollary of…longed-for invisibility‘), Waites‘s important and fascinating account of there are excellently phrased encapsulations, as Common Land in English Painting 1700-1850. when Larrissy finds in The Borderers ‗a dark, In this period enclosure rather than hedgerow proleptic parody of the homing instinct which removal was one of the clearest indicators of the was to be such a central feature of Wordsworth‘s revolution in farming. Hedgerows demarcated poetry‘ (111). individual fields which replaced the older open A section on Coleridge has interesting points fields which once characterised a large tract of about ‗the despotism of the eye‘ (qtd. 147) and the country stretching from the southwest, images of night and darkness reflecting a through the Midlands up to Yorkshire. Other paradoxical link between Coleridge‘s notions of parts of England, including sections of Devon the ‗the self-watching subtilizing mind‘ (qtd. and Cornwall, the south east and northern 148) and ‗inward blindness‘ (qtd. 152) (‗Early England had a markedly different agricultural Visions‘ and ‗Darker Reflections‘ indeed); on landscape that had been enclosed rather earlier Keats, Larrissy explores ‗the fertile boundary than the eighteenth century. Some between the ideal conception locked in the blind contemporaries saw the new boundaries as an man‘s head, and the world of experience‘ (163) intrusion. William Gilpin (Observations on the he perceives in the clearly significant ‗To River Wye, 1782, 6) when travelling across the Homer‘. A chapter on Byron and Shelley Cotswolds on the way to the Wye Valley concerns itself with reason and is rather thought that ‗About North-leach the road grows abbreviated, but again has an excellent line on very disagreeable. Nothing appears but downs the appearance of the blinded Rousseau in the on each side; and these often divided by stone- ‗Triumph of Life‘, where ‗the error of the walls, the most offensive separation of Enlightenment is convicted in the extinction of property.‘ William Wordsworth on his tour of its leading metaphor of understanding‘ (183). the Wye (Tintern Abbey, July 13, 1798) The concluding section on Mary Shelley is good celebrated the older hedges in the Wye Valley on De Lacey in Frankenstein, although it makes itself: ‗Once again I see | These hedge-rows, a confusing last-minute swerve into mesmerism. hardly hedge-rows, little lines | Of sportive James Whitehead wood run wild‘. King’s College, London By focussing on the paintings of all types of land held in common Ian Waites cuts against the grain of many interpretations of landscape Ian Waites, Common Land in English painting. Most types of land use could be subject Painting 1700-1850. Woodbridge: The to rights of common, whether woodland, rough Boydell Press, 2012. Pp. 181, £50. pasture, heath, meadow or arable. Representations of common meadow and arable, ISBN 978-1-84383-761-9. which covered the largest area of land in Midland England, have largely been ignored by The English landscape is changing rapidly and others, and it is upon these which Ian Waites in the last fifty years many miles of hedgerows concentrates, his intention being to present ‗the have been removed to increase the sizes of fields first comprehensive study of the artistic to make them more manageable and efficient for depiction of England‘s … open and communally modern farm machinery. Farm sizes have organised arable fields, meadows, commons, increased dramatically and the number of heaths and wastes‘ (9) that were almost farmers and farm workers has declined to such completely erased by Parliamentary Enclosure. an extent that in many villages one only meets A key point, however, is that in most of the infrequently anyone with direct experience of drawings and paintings considered the open working and managing the land. Massive fields appear as a secondary element of the changes in the nature of agriculture were also depiction. In many cases the open fields are the taking place in the eighteenth and early place from which the artist took a view of some nineteenth century which is the focus of Ian distant prospect, whether town, ruin or mansion.

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At the core of the book is a consideration of Betsy W. Tontiplaphol, Poetics of the work of Peter Tillemans and especially a Luxury in the Nineteenth Century: collection of prospect drawings of Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins. Northamptonshire from 1719-21. Peter Tillemans (c. 1684-1734) was a successful Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 222. £55. painter of landscapes and horses in the early ISBN 9781409404897. eighteenth century. One of his most important patrons was William 4th Lord Byron (1669- Betsy Tontiplaphol offers an analysis of 1736) who was his pupil. In 1719 Tillemans was nineteenth-century luxury that is almost as much commissioned by the historian John Bridges to about physical luxuries as it is about textual draw 237 views of the Northamptonshire for a lusciousness. Fascinating details of nineteenth- projected history which was not published until century consumer culture are woven into 1791 and in which only about 40 of the Tontiplaphol‘s move to ‗reorient the traditional drawings were used. The great value of these narrative of nineteenth-century poetics within a drawings for understanding the open fields of critical weave that knits cultural-history studies the county is the way they carefully depict the into a vital reconsideration of poetic form‘ (21). way in which the arable fields are cultivated, Particularly notable is her ‗endeavour, as often with ridges and furrows, furlong boundaries and as possible, to turn an analytical eye on critics‘ headlands. own diction‘ (21). She indicates that other Other important sources of drawings of open literary critics ‗have, in the course of making fields are the remarkable series of prospects of arguments quite different from the one presented towns produced by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck here, referred casually or figuratively to Keats‘s for over two decades from 1728 onwards. They poetic ―worlds,‖ Tennyson‘s verbal ―tapestries,‖ are perhaps most famous for publishing nearly and Hopkins‘s textual ―objects‖‘ (21). This extra 500 engravings of ruins but they also produced layer of analysis adds depth to a piece of nearly 90 prospects of English and Welsh towns. criticism that is, on balance, a very worthwhile These are admired by landscape historians for read. providing insights into what these towns looked Tontiplaphol opens each of her chapters (on like before industrialisation, but Ian Waites individual poets) with a close reading of one of shows that they also give a detailed picture of their early poems. Her choice of Keats‘s ‗An the open fields and meadows which often Imitation of Spenser‘ is perhaps unsurprising, surrounded them. Their South Prospect of but the decision to begin the Tennyson section Nottingham of 1743 shows ‗the beautiful with an analysis of ‗Timbuctoo,‘ the prize poem Meadows‘ in the foreground, with cows, a that Tennyson thought should have ―been milkmaid and promenading gentry; suffered to slide quietly off, with all its errors, demonstrating what Waites terms ‗the naturally into forgetfulness‖ (quoted, 79) might invite a accepted…mixed agricultural and communal few raised eyebrows. Tontiplaphol uses‘ (128) of open land near to towns. This acknowledges this, but argues that her ‗project‘s view can be compared to a prospect painting twin interests in literary inheritance and the attributed to Jan Siberechts Pierrepont House, luscious aesthetic demand that ―Timbuctoo,‖ Nottingham, c. 1710 which also shows the strange and disdained, launch the discussion‘ common meadows along the river Trent, but (79). As the chapter progresses, the reader is which gives precedence to St Mary‘s Church inclined to agree. and the great houses such as Wollaton Hall, The highlight of Poetics of Luxury is Nottingham Castle and Clifton Hall. Overall this Tontiplaphol‘s examination of consumer culture is an exciting and informative book which opens in the nineteenth century, and its evolution up new approaches to studying and through the writing periods of her three chosen understanding open field agriculture. poets. Despite sometimes becoming a little Charles Watkins stretched, the argument continues to appeal University of Nottingham throughout each chapter. A fine example comes

52 during the Tennyson section, in the midst of a Clare Broom Saunders, Women Writers discussion of the shopping experience in the and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism. mid-nineteenth century, which, writes NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Tontiplaphol, had evolved from the ‗packed- luxury experience that shaped Keats‘s new Pp. 244. £57. ISBN 9780230607934. aesthetic‘ to include a focus on window shopping: ‗sensorily speaking, department store Saunders‘ Women Writers and Nineteenth- windows were even more successful…at Century Medievalism is a welcome addition to dissolving the distinction between inside and existing scholarship on the subject. Though this out‘ (89). Tontiplaphol‘s short reading of ‗The area of research has been widely explored by the Lady of Shalott‘ in the context of this new likes of Alice Chandler, Kevin L Morris, Clare shopping experience is clear and concise. She A Simmons and Elizabeth Fay. Saunders study argues that the ‗heroine peers, day in and day wishes to extend earlier scholarship by turning out, through a glass that, instead of showing her her attention to women‘s writings and its the real world, offers a reflection – an artificial association with medievalism. With this in mind, construction – of its sensory delights‘ (89). Sir Saunders considers the ways in which the Lancelot, with his ‗visually stunning array of literature and history of the medieval past helped metals and gems‘ (89), is , she suggests, the women develop a concept of femininity, which bringer of consumer goods into the Lady‘s rejected the masculine model offered under the sheltered world. However, there are moments banner of chivalry. According to Saunders, there when Tontiplaphol‘s shopping experience is a clear ‗identifiable ―female‖ medievalism‘, analogy becomes slightly overstrained, such as existing alongside the ‗dominant ―male‖ version her reading of Hopkins‘ ‗The Starlight Night.‘ in nineteenth-century literature‘ (1). Within this Quoting lines 1-7 of the poem, Tontiplaphol conceptual framework, her work explores how suggests that ‗the fairytale brightness of the medievalism ‗gave women an imaginative imagery and the breathless quality of the lines means to express‘ their social and political evoke something like a child‘s response to the concerns without fearing social condemnation crowded temptation of the toyshop window (8). The women Saunders examines did not (―Look, Mother, look!‖)…‘ (146). Despite the simply rely on the past but rather employed the clear allusions to purchase and exchange in ‗The past as a means to voice their political opinions, Starlight Night,‘ one is left to question whether criticise society‘s configuration of the passive likening the ‗catalogue of star-inspired images‘ female and the propagation of chivalric values. to a ‗toyshop window‘ is, somehow, too cheap a The merit of Saunders research is that she does comparison? not focus solely on well-known female writers In the opening pages of Poetics of Luxury, such as Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Tontiplaphol does not attempt to answer any Browning, but also on less familiar ones like pre-formed anxieties that her reader may have, Amelia Opie, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and nor does she aim straight for the core of her Louisa Stuart Costello. Chapter one shows how thesis. However, as her chapters progress, and writers such as Browning and Costello used the each new poet is introduced, layers are added to art of translating medieval form and language to her arguments, which finally draw together to subvert long lasting traditions concerning gender make up – if not an entirely coherent, at least an roles, without directly undermining the socio- intriguing – whole. gender structure. Saunders argues that Elsa Hammond translation was used as a ruse allowing women University of Bristol writers to ‗comment imaginatively on contemporary socio-political issues that were not considered in their sphere‘ (6). The following three chapters examine the relation between medievalism, women writers and the idea of war. By focusing on Hemans and

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Landon, chapter two considers the ways in socio-political stance and defies the gender which the ‗historical distancing of medievalism‘ constraints of chivalry. (32) allowed women to voice their anti-war Saunders‘ study contains some precious gems, polemics, without jeopardizing their career. like her analysis of Florence Nightingale‘s role Chapters three and four turn our attention to and contribution to the gender debate, a Victorian Britain. In chapter three, Saunders stimulating analysis of Joan of Arc and an argues that the Crimean war was a turning point absorbing evaluation of Guinevere‘s in women‘s use of medievalism. Saunders contribution to the idea of femininity. It is claims that as the government used medieval unfortunate, however, that the study does not motifs and ideas to glorify the war effort, dwell on female conservatives who also women rejected the past as a means to express embraced the gender roles of chivalric values. It their views about the war. Instead, they resorted would have been interesting to see whether the to medievalism to emphasise the ‗suffocating writers examined in this study responded not social stereotypes of Victorian gender society‘ only to masculine conceptions of chivalry and (65). Chapter four examines how Joan of Arc‘s female passivity but also to conservative female androgynous figure and cross-dressing as a voices. Regardless, Saunders‘ informed and domestic warrior undermined the gender interesting analyses of the journals, poetry and constraints of chivalry. illustrations examined makes her study a The idea of androgyny is further extended in welcomed contribution to our understanding of the following chapter as Saunders explores the women‘s writings in the nineteenth century and tensions between Queen Victoria‘s image as a their cultural significance. The strength of this chivalric lady and her responsibilities as the project lies in its comprehensive examination of head of nation. The second section of chapter cultural productions, which clearly explore the five further considers the Victorian idea of imbrication between women, politics, the ‗queenly‘ women by focusing on the various written word and art. interpretations of the female characters in the Rachel Schulkins Arthurian legends. Saunders‘ study offers an Independent Scholar intriguing and illuminating comparison between Tennyson‘s The lady of Shallot, Costello‘s The Funeral Boat and Landon‘s A Legend of Serena Baiesi, Letitia Elizabeth Landon Tintagel Castle. Following from this, the remaining chapters focus on the idea of and Metrical Romance: The Adventures queenship through a close examination of of a ‘Literary Genius’. Bern: Peter Guinevere‘s character in various Victorian texts Lang, 2009. Pp. 200. £44. and art. Chapter six surveys women‘s rendering ISBN 9783034304207. of the Arthurian queen as either a response to Tennyson‘s image of Guinevere as the fallen Serena Baiesi‘s book on Letitia Elizabeth woman or as a response to William Morris‘ Landon is a welcoming and, at the same time, more complex portrayal. The last chapter frustrating reminder of the continuing dearth of concentrates on Guinevere‘s image in art and book-length studies on this crucial ‗in-between‘ illustrations. Focusing on the works of Julia (81) Romantic/Victorian writer in what the Margaret Cameron, Eleanor Fortescue- author describes as ‗a line of continuity between Brickdale, Jessie Marion King and Florence the metrical romance and the dramatic Harrison, Saunders examines how women artists monologue‘ (59). In this rare single-author look responded to Tennyson and Morris‘ masculine at a major bridge figure between the metrical interpretation of Guinevere. Saunders concludes romances of Scott, Byron and Hemans and the that although these women referred to masculine dramatic monologues of Browning, Baiesi textual authority, it is only to offer a counter and expounds a seminal moment in the ‗continuous creative feminine interpretation that expresses a evolution of certain generic characteristics‘ (41) of the narrative poem from Romanticism to the

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Victorian era. Her careful tracing of Landon‘s success‘ or ‗as something that would consecrate metrical romances from long metrical tales (in a poet to everlasting fame‘ has ‗symbolic value particular, The Improvisatrice), to short and ideological significance‘ for ‗a woman poet monologues in verse (published mainly for battling for public recognition such as Letitia literary annuals), and finally to dramatic Landon‘ (82). Although the chapter is not as metrical narratives (The Venetian Bracelet and comprehensive in scope as Angela Castruccio Castrucani) provides an useful guide Esterhammer‘s recent works on the subject, its to the host of issues central to both Landon‘s analysis affirms the gender-inflected link writing career as it developed and women‘s between the art of improvisation and the writing in general. Elaborated in four chapters, ambivalent status of the female versifier, as both these familiar issues include the relationship art and artist hover precariously ‗between public between gender and genre, the affirmation and self-annihilation‘ (96). The third professionalization of women writers, the chapter is arguably the most rewarding of the negotiation between public and private spheres, four, especially for those well-versed in the the conflict between financial security and history of consumerist culture, literary annuals artistic independence, and the perennial and women‘s periodicals. Financially compelled questions of influence and canon formation. to endure a ‗kind of literary enslavement‘ (104), Baiesi divides the opening chapter into two Landon‘s involvement in the flourishing market separate but related accounts of Landon‘s of gift-books and annuals in the 1820s and literary development: first, a detailed, and 1830s not only brought her greater economic somewhat protracted, biography of the poet‘s independence but also, like the proverbial life, career and death; and second, her double-edged sword, restricted creative freedom. contribution to the evolution of romantic Baiesi‘s multi-mediated assessment of ‗The metrical romance into the dramatic monologue. Mask‘ in Heath’s Book of Beauty is certainly the Adhering to the ‗continuity‘ argument, she highlight, if not the emblematic heart, of the attributes the writer‘s interest in the book, as the ‗naïve young poet‘ progresses into ‗primitivism‘ of an ‗untaught minstrel‘ (57) to ‗a more disillusioned practical woman‘ (114) Scott, ‗the use of the mask and the role-playing under the duress to publish on a ‗strict delivery of the author‘ to Byron (58), and her deep schedule for poems‘ (115). The final chapter, articulation of ‗gender conflicts‘ to Hemans‘s which is the shortest and in some ways the most poetics of ‗domestic affections‘ (58). Baiesi‘s problematic, charts Landon‘s late turn to long overarching claim is that the combination of metrical drama, concluding with Barrett‘s and ‗lyric, drama and narrative, and shifting Rossetti‘s ambivalent responses to her poetic relationships between speaker and author‘ (61) legacy. Despite Baiesi‘s contention that the in the dramatic monologue has already been blank verse used in Castruccio Castrucani ‗links experimented with ‗using altered forms and the genre of the dramatic poem with that of the dynamics‘ (61) by Landon. Given the historical play‘ and that ‗the stylistic and importance of ‗continuity‘ to this study, a close metrical characteristics‘ of her long poems comparison between the subject‘s metrical ‗unmistakably recall the plays of the romantic narratives and Browning‘s dramatic monologues era‘ (142), such statements, assured as they would have helped substantiate this claim. sound, are not adequately supported by textual, Meanwhile, Chapter 2 discusses Landon‘s The analytical or comparative evidence. Improvisatrice against the Italian tradition of To be sure, Baiesi‘s book should alert its improvvisazione, feminised and popularised by readers to the need for more extended studies on the celebrated eighteenth-century Landon‘s diverse corpus, accounting for both improvvisatrice, Maria Maddalena Fernandez her repetitions and subversions within (also known as Corilla Olimpica), and Mme de established traditions and prevailing practices. Staël‘s trendsetting Corinne. As Baiesi asserts, Aside from the uneven emphasis on context as rather poignantly, the art of improvisation either opposed to text – more quotations from ‗as an oral performance with a short-lived secondary criticisms and prefatory materials

55 than from Landon‘s actual poetry and play – and careful to emphasize that his is a study of the lack of close comparative analyses, this ‗knowledge by English writers about Americans volume offers a historically and culturally for English readers,‘ rather than an accurate sensitive survey of the poet‘s largely understated ethnography of early Americans (3). metrical innovations. Americans in British Literature examines such Tim Chiou conflicted representations of Americans through Balliol College, University of Oxford an historically rich and mostly theoretically compelling narrative. Flynn frames this narrative with an introductory meditation on time, or the Christopher Flynn, Americans in way British writers treated the spatial separation British Literature, 1770-1832: A Breed of Britain and America as a temporal separation Apart. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. as well. This tendency, Flynn argues, enabled writers like Coleridge and Frances Trollope to Pp. 155. $99. ISBN 9780754660477. conceive of Anglo-Americans as a people without their own history, yet without a British One reason Christopher Flynn‘s study of how history either. Flynn‘s temporal argument is British writers represented early-national most useful in his first chapter on ‗English Americans is of interest today is that Americans Novels on the American Revolution‘, as it helps remain something of a curiosity in the British explain what Flynn identifies as the sympathetic national imaginary. Americans in British portrayal of Anglo-Americans in texts like Literature recalls for me a friendly exchange I Samuel Jackson Pratt‘s Emma Corbett (1780). once had with a Londoner about guns in As Flynn notes, Pratt‘s novel generates America. When I asked my friend what sympathy and intense feeling from scenarios in percentage of Americans he figured own guns, which the time-lag in transatlantic his earnest guess was ‗about 95 percent‘. correspondence would mean waiting anxiously Notwithstanding the demographic complications on news of the condition of loved ones abroad. involved in guessing a 95-percent gun From this nuanced discussion of sympathetic ownership rate when roughly a quarter of the portrayal, and the idea of post-Revolutionary American population is under the age of America as a severed appendage of the British eighteen, my friend‘s exaggerated guess re- body-politic (causing pain for both nations), enacts the very discursive process between Flynn moves into his second chapter on utopian early-national America and Romantic-era visions of America, focusing on radicals like Britain that Flynn‘s study addresses. Blake, Coleridge, and Imlay. Less concerned for This discursive process is more specifically the fate of Anglo-Americans in Revolutionary the reflecting of key components of national struggle, these British writers of the late-century identity in the mirror of a typified other; though, saw progressive potential in America, but for as Flynn convincingly demonstrates, what one inconvenience: the Americans themselves. constituted an American in the eyes of British As Flynn‘s focus in his third chapter shifts to the writers shifted not just over time, but across the conflation of the Anglo-American with the various kinds of ideological investment British Native American as a kind of hybrid-savage in writers had in representing America and its texts like Charlotte Lennox‘s Euphemia (1790), people. Gilbert Imlay, for example, was so his argument builds to its crescendo in the fourth invested in American land speculation that his and final chapter, ‗A Breed Apart.‘ In this Topographical Description of the Western chapter, British writers‘ full-fledged, Territory of North America (1792) and his anthropological interest in Americans renders epistolary novel, The Emigrants (1793), had to them, at last, a type of their own, with bad table strike some balance in representing Americans manners and a penchant for spitting tobacco as just exotic enough, but also sociable enough, juice on the floor. to pique the interest and assuage the anxieties of Such accounts, treated with greater depth and prospective British settlers. Fittingly, Flynn is circumspection in Flynn‘s study than perhaps I

56 have shown here, are what make this book so Emma Major, Madam Britannia: useful and so fascinating. We have studies that Women, Church, and Nation, 1712-1812. track the influence of British writing on Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. American writing, and studies that focus on early-American writing itself to show how Pp. 384. £64. ISBN: 9780199699377. Americans actually lived. Between these fits Flynn‘s study, which exposes the shortcomings Emma Major‘s ambitious study, Madam of an ethnographical approach in situations Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation, 1712- where the literarily constructed image of a 1812, is a welcome addition to the relatively people is powerful and pervasive enough to new branch of cultural studies that examines the make fact of fiction. importance of religion in the discourse of That said, Americans in British Literature nation-building. A carefully researched and disappoints slightly in three ways. One, it misses comprehensive exploration of the overlapping an opportunity to briefly triangulate American relationships between women, Protestantism, writing about Americans with British writing and nationhood, Madam Britannia challenges about Americans, given that early-American the general assumption that British women had texts like Hugh Henry Brackenridge‘s Modern little to do with the shaping of the Anglican Chivalry (1792-1815) expressed many of the Church during its most critically formative same sentiments about ill-mannered Americans period in the eighteenth century. But Major goes as did British texts. Two, its arguments on to demonstrate that the imbricated concerning temporality and the Americans as an relationships between women and the church – ahistorical people appear more relevant to some which inevitably become articulations of nation chapters than others, and, as a consequence, can – extend beyond the eighteenth century. British obstruct Flynn‘s more convincing arguments women were crucial in defining the Church of about what English writers projected upon England throughout the nineteenth century, America and Americans. Third, by setting up the especially by exemplifying its practice, which, final chapter on more explicitly ethnographic she points out, ‗seems a neglected dimension in writing as a demonstration of how such writing debates about Anglican women clergy today‘ did more than previous texts to shape Americans (311). in the eyes of Britons, Flynn risks undermining Madam Britannia‘s chief focus is on the figure the force of one of his most valuable of Britannia and its various iterations throughout contributions: that writing that signals itself the long eighteenth century. From a richly explicitly as ethnographic is not necessarily a detailed chapter on the history of this icon, more effective shaper of impressions than a Major traces the intricate emergence of female novel or a poem. Overall, however, Americans personifications of the Church with female in British Literature is very much worth the read representation of nation: the queenly figure of for anyone interested in British Romanticism or Britannia presiding over Neptune‘s son Albion. the long-eighteenth-century Atlantic World The ‗fascinating slippage‘ (26) between queen more broadly. Flynn‘s concise and compelling and emblem – Britannia‘s close association with study thankfully fills a gap in scholarship on the the Protestant queens Elizabeth I, Anne, Mary II relationship between Britain and early America. – is also a discursive means of buttressing the Aaron R. Hanlon Church of England with a female identity. This Georgetown University history, then, gives the basis for her subsequent investigation into eighteenth-century women‘s behaviour – conversation, religion, social practice, domestic duty – by which means, Major argues, they are placed – and place themselves – at the centre of Enlightenment civilizing discourse.

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Major‘s Madam Britannia is ingeniously term ‗women‘ which is often not as nuanced as organized. Following the history of Britannia as readers of cultural studies would expect. For emblem, Major discusses on the tensions that example, even as far back as 1995, Gretchen erupt between the representation and practice of Holbrook repainted eighteenth-century British female exemplars. The second chapter focuses life in her monograph Black London: Life Before on the lives of Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Emancipation, a work that significantly altered Montagu: women embodying ‗blessings‘ by the assumption of a homogenous England. One their admirers who looked to their practice of wonders how central a place ―other‖ women had Christianity in terms of both patriotism and in the process of shaping the nation. That being politesse. Thus Major continues to develop the said, this book does make an important ways in which both female personal and contribution to the study of liturgy in early political discourse was just as important to modern Britain. shaping the public sphere as the more celebrated Rajani Sudan masculine forums of coffeehouse culture. Indeed, Southern Methodist University the chapters on the uses of female communities, performances, and the ‗province of public Geraint H. Jenkins, series editor, Iolo virtue‘ – the apotropaios directed by John Morganwg and the Romantic Tradition Langhorne to a female Church of England in Wales. Geraint H. Jenkins, Ffion readership in order to ward off the dangers of private, reclusive Methodist femininity – Mair Jones and David Ceri Jones, eds., provide an important supplement to and The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg. corrective of Habermas‘s account of the Cardiff: University of Wales Press, structural transformation of the public sphere. In 2007. Three volumes. £130. Volume I: addition to Montagu and Talbot, Major traces 1770-1796. Pp. lx + 852. ISBN the works of many women writers, including 9780708321324. Volume II: 1797-1809. Elizabeth Burnet, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hester Piozzi, and Hannah More in order to Pp. xxiv + 884. ISBN 9780708321331. demonstrate that discourses of religion, personal Volume III: 1810-1826. Pp. xxvi + 869. conduct, emulation, and social virtue were self- ISBN 9780708321348. consciously deployed by these writers who saw themselves as active agents of nation-building. Mary-Ann Constantine, The Truth Sandwiched between two revolutionary Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and moments, one glorious and the other uncanny, Romantic Forgery. Cardiff: University Major represents the figure Britannia first of Wales Press, 2007. Pp. [xvii] + 231. aligning with the Church of England to secure William of Orange‘s Protestant succession. The £45. ISBN 9780708320624. role of religion in political debates against revolutionary change in which women engaged Cathryn A. Charnell-White, Bardic in the 1790s, she argues, are as compelling as Circles: National, Regional and the ‗pyrotechnics of revolutionary writing‘ (233) Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of and cannot be dismissed as mere conservatism. Iolo Morganwg. Cardiff: University of Even if the figure of a serene Britannia rules, as Wales Press, 2007. Pp. xvi + 296. £45. in Rowlandson‘s 1792 ‗The Contrast‘, this very ISBN 9780708320679. propriety becomes a form of entrapment during the Napoleonic Wars, although female Christian Marion Löffler, The Literary and example prevails to support a Britannia whose Protestantism eventually triumphs over Historical Legacy of Iolo Morganwg Napoleon‘s infidels. 1826-1926. Cardiff: University of Madam Britannia is an original and elegant Wales Press, 2007. Pp. [xv] + 240. £45. book; if it has a fault, it is Major‘s use of the ISBN 9780708321133.

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There are daunting obstacles involved in witness) he is at last receiving his scholarly due. mounting a recovery research exercise on the An equally serious problem for scholars is the Welsh poet and bilingual polymath Edward more practical one of how exactly to deploy and Williams (1747-1826), better known by his present his surviving writings, which centre on bardic name of Iolo Morganwg. Like James 100 volumes of miscellaneous papers, in Welsh Macpherson in Scotland and Thomas Chatterton and English, in the National Library of Wales. in England, he was a ‗forger‘ of early literary One cannot just print all this mass of material materials (I use the scare-quotes advisedly: the verbatim, or post it online. What exactly should Oxford Dictionary of National Biography now one do with it, then? Clearly it is important, but terms him a ‗Welsh Language Poet and Literary how can one best allow it properly to reflect and Forger‘). But his concoctions were enmeshed in, add to our understanding of this remarkable and part of, a very substantial and important figure and his contribution to culture? The team contribution to literary history and Welsh culture. at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Disentangling them from the ‗authentic‘ Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberyswyth has scholarly record was a difficult enough job; risen to these considerable challenges quite whether and how to punish their author, once the magnificently. Having first set an imaginative spurious materials were discovered and their agenda for Iolo‘s recovery in a wide-ranging extent fully delineated, and what to do with the book of essays (A Rattleskull Genius, 2005; rest of his writings, has created a major 2009, reviewed in these pages by Tim Burke, 31: headache for scholars. Forger or no, the fact 35-37) they have produced a three-volume remained that the ‗prodigiously gifted‘ Iolo was edition of his letters, accompanied by three a key figure in Welsh cultural history, an monographs which between them squarely ‗extraordinary force of nature‘, as Geraint H. address the anxieties and possibilities I have Jenkins puts it (Facts, Fantasy and Fiction: The briefly summarised here. Two of these Historical Vision of Iolo Morganwg, monographs, moreover, offer substantial Aberystwyth: 1997, 1). His invention of the appended sections of ‗documents‘, selected Gorsedd and his central role in the revival of the samples from the marvellous but daunting bran- national eisteddfod, to take two major examples, tub of Iolo‘s 100-volume archive, to put were decisive in the development of Welsh alongside the letters and the scholarly exegesis. national and cultural identity in the formative The letters are beautifully edited. They are early nineteenth-century period. One could not numbered in a single chronological sequence, and cannot simply cast his writings out of the with postal details, dating and sourcing at the canon, like so much biblical apocrypha. head of each letter, judicious annotations on Nor is this only a Welsh issue. Iolo travelled page, and a full presentation of incoming as well and worked at his trade as a stonemason in as outgoing letters, so that one can follow and England, and lived in London for years. His understand the interactions as directly and antiquarian and literary interests, his nationalism clearly as possible. The first thing that strikes and his radicalism, all formed part of a vast one about the letters themselves is the range of international movement of radical ideas in the ideas and interests contained in them. period after the French Revolution. Mary-Ann Constantine makes the point in her monograph Constantine points out (4-5) that Iolo has been (8) that the concept of a ‗self-taught labouring- generally omitted from recent scholarly work on class poet‘ hardly has the same resonances in forgery that puts it at the centre of the Romantic Welsh historical culture as it may have within project, and that Iolo in particular and Welsh the often very different structures of English and culture in general have also been thinly served anglophone culture; nevertheless all kinds of (so far) by the postcolonial and archipelagic questions about the relationship between Iolo‘s approaches to the cultures of these islands (5-6). trade as a stonemason and his role as a writer Yet Iolo cries out for investigation in all these and thinker suggest themselves. As a working fields, as well as in the field of Welsh cultural mason he took an interest in all aspects of the and literary history, where (as these volumes built environment and clearly, in something like

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Letter 37, described by the editors as ‗an being descendants of those who, in the former important early account of the opening of ages of brutal ignorance, were robbers and the Silbury Hill in Wiltshire‘ (I, 123), the most unprincipled of depredators of which we perspectives of his trade and his intellectual can have any conception, who robbed our interests coincide. The cover blurb grandly ancestors of their lands, their properties of every describes Iolo as ‗one of the finest exponents of description, of their liberties and of their lives, the epistolary art in his day‘, and for once such and whose insolent descendants remain amongst hyperbole seems appropriate. As with the us as so many tyrants to whose wills forsooth we recently published online edition of Robert must, it seems, all submit, whose dictates we are Bloomfield‘s correspondence, a previously arrogantly called upon to obey, and for all this little-known letter-writer of real richness and be thankful, and consider them as a superior engagement emerges in these volumes. This is order of beings.‘ The planned ‗letter to the partly a measure of Iolo‘s wide-ranging freeholders‘ may need a bit more editorial intellectual curiosity and his undoubted polishing, yet even in this dry-run Iolo‘s rhetorical power as a prose writer, but also, as universalising vision, political indignation and with Bloomfield, I think it reflects a sensitised passion, and Miltonic sense of betrayal responsiveness that may originate in his own encapsulate the struggles of his age fascinatingly. difficulties, as a writer of humble origins trying The 1,230 letters of Iolo and his correspondents to find a viable role in the literary world. Thus, presented in these volumes are full of such replying to a friendly letter from the writer Mary interest. Barker (Letter 462; II, 44-7), Iolo gives an Mary-Ann Constantine takes for the title of her animated and intense account of himself in monograph Iolo‘s ‗most famous motto‘, Y Gwir which at one point he compares his struggles to yn erbyn y Byd: The Truth against the world. publish his poems with those of Ann Yearsley The ‗complicated nature of that truth‘ (2) is the and Robert Burns. He has discussed Yearsley subject on her book; and indeed the complex ‗frequently‘ with her alienated patron, Hannah nature of Iolo and his ‗truth‘ is, broadly More, and he recounts that he has himself speaking, the subject of all three monographs resisted attempts to correct his poems by ‗Mr under review, which offer interlocking accounts Anstey (author of the Bath Guide)‘ (Letter 463; of Iolo as a forger in both senses: forging in the II, 50). Some of the familiar defensive strategies sense of founding a bardic culture, partly by of the labouring-class writer are in evidence here, forging, in the sense of imaginatively including his protested independence, and the manufacturing, its history and continuity. parade of carefully dropped names. Cathryn A. Charnell-White offers a thematically Not that these reflexive strategies hold him well-structured account of Iolo‘s bardic vision, back from raising his sights to the big issues of as a personal, and then a Welsh, and then a the day, or confidently commenting on political Glamorgan and regional phenomenon, and social issues. When he writes to a concluding with an account of the making of the correspondent in March 1820 (Letter 1110; III, Gorsedd of the Bards of the Island of Britain, 543-4) in order ‗to arrange my thoughts for a characterised as ‗part of a pseudo-antiquarian letter, or rather two or three letters, which [I] system devised and used by Iolo Morganwg to intend to address to the freeholders of validate the image and identity of Wales, Glamorgan, and another to some of those iron Glamorgan and himself‘ (118). She masters at Merthyr‘, his comments rise swiftly contextualises its inception in the revolutionary from the local and particular to the universal, as year of 1792, noting that it was ‗gradually in the following, extraordinarily rhetorically embraced as a national institution during the ambitious sentence: ‗Arts, sciences, decades after Iolo‘s death in 1826‘ (118). The manufactures, beneficial trade and commerce latter year gives the opening date for Marion require in those who carry them on such powers Löffler‘s 100-year survey of Iolo‘s legacy, in and illumination of intellect that can never some ways an even more complex ‗truth‘ than become the lot of those darkminded boasters of the forming of his bardic vision. Where

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Charnell-White moves from the individual, to structuring of the Charnell-White and Löffler the national, to the regional, Löffler offer a books. By choosing an English, Scottish and series of perspectives that seem structured French author against which to discuss Iolo she around the nature of Iolo himself, as a way of places him in archipelagic and European getting at what she calls his ‗public cultural contexts, and opens up some immensely fertile legacy‘ and the uses that were made of it. First areas of intertextual critical discussion. These the ‗mythic‘ Iolo, the Romantic construction, three authors in particular offer rich points of must be dealt with, before dealing with the comparison in many ways. Chatterton‘s legacy of bardism: how druidism, the eisteddfod, medievalism, his place in the self-taught and the Gorsedd of Charnell-White‘s last tradition, his manuscript forgeries, his local and chapter were to develop. Next comes the regional pride and inventiveness (largely around intricate job of describing and untangling Iolo‘s a city with which Iolo had important ‗legacy of invention‘ (‗invention‘, like ‗forgery‘, connections: Bristol), his diffidence, disaffection being a term that interestingly suggests both the and isolation, and the immense posthumous dissembling and the creative aspects of his controversy around his work and its authenticity, writing). A chapter on ‗the forgotten Iolo‘ opens all have important resonances for Iolo. James some perspectives on his poetry, Unitarianism Macpherson‘s Ossian construction was equally and political radicalism: all topics of much influential. As Constantine puts it, it gave Iolo ‗a greater interest to us now than they were to the framework, a set of assumptions, and a Victorians who, as Löffler sharply puts it, vocabulary to work with‘, while the controversy preferred a ‗sanitized myth of a saintly figure, a around his work was an ‗irritant‘ (85), patriotic antiquary and a folk hero‘ (129). unavoidable for scholars of Welsh poetry, and as Finally there is ‗The Case against Iolo significant in terms of issues of oral culture as Morganwg‘. This again is an account of part of Chatterton was to manuscript culture. (The the legacy: in this instance, how the saintly folk emphasis on poetry in this study extends one of hero became tarnished. But (as someone who is Löffler‘s ‗forgotten Iolo‘ topics very usefully.) always asking his students to make sure they Through the intriguing links to La Villemarqué, fully discuss counter-arguments in their essays), recounted in Constantine‘s third section, we are I quite liked the rather sternly legalistic tone in importantly reminded of the paradoxically that phrase ‗the case against‘: it seems to me to international character of post-French acknowledge some lasting anxieties about Iolo, Revolutionary cultural nationism. Finally, the and helps counter-balance the dangerous three part structure allows Constantine, as she impulse towards hagiography inherent in a says, to ‗roughly follow the contours‘ of Iolo‘s project of this sort. ‗long life‘, giving an appropriately biographical Both the Charnell-White and Löffler studies shaping to this major study of a man whose are shorter monographs of about 150 pages each, personal character constantly, and fascinatingly, allowing the authors space to recover and reveals itself in all of the volumes under review. present substantial appendices of relevant I am unable to do more than sketch out some documents from the archive (about 150 pages in of the many riches in these six volumes here. the Charnell-White book, rather less in the This has been a thoroughly worthwhile and Löffler), in line with their intricate and fairly enlightening recovery research project, and the specialised approaches to Iolo. Mary-Ann coherence and range of the volumes it has Constantine‘s is a longer study, which attempts produced are testimony to this. I cannot fault to insert Iolo and his writings squarely into the this work on any level. discussion of eighteenth-century and Romantic John Goodridge forgery that has been so fertile in recent decades Nottingham Trent University and from which (as noted) Iolo has been hitherto excluded. She divides her material into three sections, on Chatterton, Ossian, and La Villemarqué. This is as cleverly devised as the

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