Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2017 Romantic Ends: Death and Dying, 1776-1835 Andrew J. Welch Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Welch, Andrew J., "Romantic Ends: Death and Dying, 1776-1835" (2017). Dissertations. 2874. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2874 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Copyright © 2017 Andrew J. Welch LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO ROMANTIC ENDS: DEATH AND DYING, 1776-1835 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY ANDREW JAMES WELCH CHICAGO, IL AUGUST 2017 Copyright by Andrew James Welch, 2017. All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In which several debts are acknowledged, &c. The first I owe to the Loyola University Chicago English Department, and the second to the University at large. A Pre-Doctoral Teaching Scholars Fellowship and an Arthur J. Schmitt Dissertation Fellowship provided the material base upon which this airy superstructure has come to balance. Thanks to Tom Kaminski for sharing his erudition, which extends far, far beyond the British Isles, and for tolerating my unenrolled presence in his classroom on many occasions. I’ve benefited from his provocative ideas about the history of British verse. Thanks to Steve Jones, who is an exemplary scholar and a symbol of possibility, as well as the reason I’m a Romanticist. There are a lot of people in the world I don’t know, but it’s hard to imagine many of them read better than Jack Cragwall. I used to think he was generous with his energy until I realized it was limitless. Nonetheless, I feel preposterously lucky he has been willing to serve as the director of this dissertation. My committee: thank you. I owe Heath Valentine—and yet refuse to pay—for what’s approaching a lifetime of thought. It is a marvel to be doing this, after all. I’m grateful to Miriam Piilonen for ancient sagacity, for revolutionary ardor, for never shying from the asymptotic task of wording the unspeakable, and for indefinite life. iii My final thanks are to Allison, Jessica, Zachary, and Christine, and to Timothy, who taught me, in spite of himself (through the very force of his striving to prove otherwise), that there is no adequate recompense for death. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION: THE STORY OF DEATH 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE THEATER OF THE FINAL MOMENT 18 CHAPTER TWO: DAVID HUME’S SECOND DEATH 54 CHAPTER THREE: WORDSWORTH AT DEATH’S END 112 CHAPTER FOUR: BLAKE, NATURAL RELIGION, AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF DEATH 142 CHAPTER FIVE: THE DEVOTIONAL POETRY OF FELICIA HEMANS 173 CHAPTER SIX: SUPERANNUATED GOVERNESSES AND IMAGINATIVE EUNUCHS: THE STERILITY OF ENDYMION 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 248 VITA 271 v ABSTRACT Romantic Ends reinterprets of the origins and legacies of romantic death, the cultural spectacle exemplified by the dramatic deaths of young poets like John Keats. Against the widespread belief that romanticism ushered in a uniquely theatrical vision of death, Romantic Ends traces a long history of death as rhetorical performance, from the early modern ars moriendi (“art of dying”) to the neoclassical obsession with the good death. The poetic deaths of the romantic period established a new repertoire of tropes and figures out of these longstanding and disparate deathbed traditions, set within the emerging discursive arena of “poetry.” Yet while romantic death is a recognizable and potent archetype, an underexplored strain of romantic-period writing evinces a deep suspicion toward the conventions and meaning-making logics of death. The precise function for which romanticism has been credited and blamed—the exploitation of death as shorthand for the “poetic”—is in fact subject to strategies of evasion and disruption in romantic poetry. vi INTRODUCTION THE STORY OF DEATH In its “List of Deaths for the Year 1750,” the Gentleman’s Magazine included one Mrs Reed of Kentish Town, aged 81. She had kept a mahogany coffin and shroud by her 6 years, when thinking she should not soon have occasion for them she sold them, and dy’d suddenly the same evening. (20:188) This brief obituary captures a world of death remarkably distinct from our own. We could begin with the common practice of keeping articles of burial near to hand, signaling constant preparedness for death. Coffin and shroud are inmates, privileged with domestic intimacy. When it comes, death too will arrive like an intimate relation returning home1—until Mrs. Reed disposed of these accessories on the assumption that she would live. Though no agency is directly attributed, the significance of the fact that death came as soon as she ceased to fear it was powerful enough to be left unstated. Readers would understand what her lapse in preparation had cost her: sudden death remained an object of terror well into the nineteenth century, as it denied the deceased the benefit of last rites. Death may be unknowable, but it seems to have an eye for formal irony and narrative resolution. Where we nod, the Gentleman’s suggests, it comes winking. 1 Margaret Spufford’s study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chapbooks shows that “Death was a figure who was very well-known by, and very close to, their readers” (201). Historical demography bears out Spufford’s claim: life expectancy fell throughout the seventeenth century, hit a nadir in the 1680s, began to rise precipitously from 1691 to 1706, and then declined again until the 1730s. Taking a longer view, it was not until the seventeenth or eighteenth century that the English population recovered to its fourteenth century peak prior to plague and famine (Smith 200, 212-13; Wrigley and Schofield 240-244; Houlbrooke 5-6). Of the forty-six chapbooks Spufford surveys, seven even purport to be written from the deathbed. 1 2 Ars Moriendi in the Periodical Age As Mrs. Reed’s example shows, the early obituary was less a posthumous biography than a brief narrative of death.2 Seventy years after the passing of Mrs. Reed of Kentish Town, the New Monthly Magazine bore witness to the death of the poet John Keats: There is something very impressive about the death of genius, and particularly of youthful genius. Poets, perhaps, have shared most of this feeling from mankind; indeed their labours which survive themselves are for ever creating it. Not only By fairy hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung, but the beautiful, the tender, and the wise, are perpetual sorrowers over their obsequies. (3:258) The space between these two obituaries seems to reflect a sea change in the representation of death, from austere description undergirded by a vast eschatology bound to preparation for death to the pathetic spectacle of a beautiful, wilting boy-poet. The New Monthly even suggests that the capacity to feel sorrow for Keats is itself a mark of beauty, tenderness, and wisdom, apportioning Keats’s own poetic genius out to his perpetual mourners, who inherit the mantle of poetic sensibility simply by grieving his death—an apt demonstration of sensibility’s trade in what Robert Markley calls the “affective spectacle of benign generosity” (211). The gap between Mrs. Reed and Mr. Keats thus registers a transformation from the solemn devotional paradigm of the ars moriendi (“art of dying”) to an emerging aestheticization of death, which valorized vicarious suffering and the performance of grief. Keats is the child of a sentimental revolution that continues into our present.3 2 In the eighteenth century the term obituary meant “register of deaths,” and was originally synonymous with necrology, “An ecclesiastical or monastic register containing entries of the deaths of persons connected with, or commemorated by, the church” (OED). 3 Placing Keats’s death within a long history of sensibility, I follow Christopher Nagle, Adela Pinch, Jerome McGann, Elizabeth Fay, and others who have argued, in Pinch’s words, “It may be more accurate 3 And yet there are important continuities between these two endings. Keats had sought “a grander system of salvation than the chryst<e>ain religion,” and had laughed at his friend Benjamin Bailey’s attempts to woo “with the Bible and Jeremy Taylor under his arm” (Letters 2:102, 2:67), but on his deathbed, he asked Joseph Severn to find a copy of Taylor’s 1651 The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, the central text in the English ars moriendi tradition. It came recommended by William Hazlitt as “more like fine poetry than any other prose whatever,” and was, as Severn recorded, “the book he has set his mind upon” (Complete Works 6:342; Keats Circle 1:181). Though they do not mention Taylor, his devotional discourse reverberates throughout Keats’s obituaries. Taylor framed the suffering that accompanies death as an opportunity to demonstrate submission to God’s will, and to share in the glory of Jesus’s suffering. “Sickness,” he writes, “is that agony in which men are tried for a crown” (3:327). Dying is a test of election: remain tranquil, detach yourself from worldly concerns, and resign yourself to judgment. Keats’s obituaries mute Taylor’s eschatology but amplify the sense of deathly suffering as a mark of election—to Parnassus, if not precisely heaven. Aglow with the fetching pallor of consumption,4 the poet “often talked of his approaching death, with the resignation of one who contemplated its certainty without anxiety, and seemed to wish to ‘steal from the world’ into silence and repose” (3:257).