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Romantic Pedantry © 2012 Sean Patrick Barry ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ROMANTIC PEDANTRY : PERSONIFYING THE INTELLECTUAL FROM MR. SPECTATOR TO REV. CASAUBON by SEAN PATRICK BARRY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of William H. Galperin And approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Romantic Pedantry: Personifying the Intellectual from Mr. Spectator to Rev. Casaubon By SEAN PATRICK BARRY Dissertation Director: William Galperin This dissertation examines how the pedant, a seemingly familiar object of satire, came to personify passionate intellectual absorption in romantic-era writing. The pedant’s ostentatious displays of erudition might seem antithetical to the spirit of an age conventionally associated with the veneration of nature, childhood innocence, and untutored genius. Indeed, pedantry had first attracted attention in eighteenth-century British literature as a problem concerning the performance of specialized knowledge, exemplified by professionals who use jargon outside its proper context. For advocates of polite conversation, excessive attachments to useless knowledge threatened social intercourse by making an individual’s preoccupations a matter of public discourse. Various romantic-era texts, however, imagine other ends for these objects of polite ii Augustan censure as sources of rhetorical suasion and aesthetic delight. From the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, British writing celebrated the figure of the rambling professional: soldiers, sailors, lawyers, clergymen, and authors whose ardent attachments to useless knowledge structure their conversation and writing. In fact, the romantic pedant’s digressions furnish a recurrent model for literary forms strongly associated with the period. William Hazlitt’s familiar essays, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fragmentary autobiography-cum-philosophical treatise, the blathering personae of Walter Scott’s novels, and the antiquarian-inflected speakers of ballads by Robert Burns and William Wordsworth each characterize the relation between feeling and language as an ambivalent product of life in a fragmented world defined by professional specialization. The lyric involution of Wordsworth’s solitaries, the historical musing of Scott’s narrators, and the political and erotic infidelity of Coleridge and Burns are motivated by simultaneous feelings of immersion and rootlessness. Absorbed in process, whether at the level of minute detail or grand abstraction, the romantic pedant loses sight of outcomes and practical ends. In pedantry, romantic-period writing adopted an ubiquitous term of rebuke and refashioned it into a characteristic mental and physical disposition, an individuated persona that typifies impassioned expression. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have many debts to acknowledge, first to Robert Maccubbin and Adam Potkay, whose teaching, scholarship, and conversation inspired me as a student of the eighteenth century and still do. I’m deeply grateful to my dissertation committee. This project began to take shape in Colin Jager’s graduate seminar on Romantic Period Writing. He embraced my fascination with pedants then and has nurtured it every step of the way. Lynn Festa has read my work with unparalleled care and rigor. She took nothing for granted, and I gained greatly. In Billy Galperin I found a steadfast mentor, an intellectual sparring partner, and a tireless supporter. I can’t thank him enough. I owe much to the Rutgers English faculty. Michael McKeon, Jonah Siegel, and Henry Turner asked difficult questions that sharpened my thinking. Emily Bartels, Richard Miller, and Ann Jurecic helped me reconsider the practice of writing. I benefited in ways small and large from the guidance and encouragement of John Kucich, Meredith McGill, Diane Sadoff, and Carolyn Williams. Mike Goode provided considerable insight as an outside reader of the dissertation. A version of my second chapter is forthcoming in Modern Philology, and I owe considerable thanks to both the editorial board and the anonymous reviewers. The Graduate School - New Brunswick provided funds in support of research and travel that helped shape this work. The School of Arts and Sciences and the Mellon Foundation provided crucial support for writing the dissertation. iv Cheryl Robinson, Eileen Faherty, and Courtney Borack offered me constant guidance, support, and humor. I'm utterly terrified of the payback they have in store for years of April Fool's Day pranks. I had the good fortune to begin this project writing in the company of three amazing interlocutors: Carrie Hyde, Colleen Rosenfeld, and Sarah Kennedy. Along the way, I benefited from the conversation and good cheer of Sarah Alexander, Greg Ellerman, Angie Florscheutz, Josh Gang, Mike Gavin, Devin Griffiths, Rich Squibbs, and Mark Vareschi. I offer special thanks to Sarah Balkin, Michael Leong, John Savarese, and Meryl Winick who read substantial portions of the dissertation and helped see me through. Thanks, finally, to my parents, who taught me to pay attention, and to my brother and sister, who’ve provided much-needed distractions. v CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Illustrations vii Introduction 1 1. What is Pedantry? – Definitions of Useless Knowledge from Montaigne to Hazlitt 13 2. The Fox-brush of Pedantry, the Sans-culotterie of Ignorance, and the Incomprehensible Coleridge 61 3. Soldado, Sassenach, Seanchaí – Scott’s Martial Pedantry 91 4. Collecting Retirement – Immersion, Effusion, and Pedantic Transcendence in Grose, Burns, and Wordsworth 144 Postscript: Reader, I Buried Him – Middlemarch and the Realist Death of the Romantic Pedant 210 vi ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 3.1 “Sir Hildebrand Studying Heraldry” 129 4.1 Title Page, Tales of My Landlord, Third Series, Volume IV (A Legend of Montrose), Web, Google Books. 146 4.2 Francis Grose, “A Fat & Lean Antiquarian,” © Trustees of the British Museum. 158 4.3 Francis Grose, “Antiquarians Peeping into Boadicia’s Night Urn,” © Trustees of the British Museum 159 4.4 Francesco Bartolozzi, after Nathaniel Dance, “Francis Grose,” National Portrait Gallery, London. 162 4.5 James Douglas, “Francis Grose,” National Portrait Gallery, (1785). 163 4.6 “Alloa Church Airshire,” in Francis Grose, The Antiquities of Scotland (1791), Volume II, 198. Web. Wikimedia.org 179 4.7 Thomas Landseer, Tam o’ Shanter and Souter Johnny, A Poem, Illustrated by Thomas Landseer (London: Marsh and Miller, 1830) plate inserted between 12 & 13. Web. University of Toronto. 181 4.8 John Massey Wright, “The Witches’ Dance in Tam o’ Shanter,” (London: George Virtue, 1839). 182 4.9 John Faed, Tam o’ Shanter, by Robert Burns, for the members of the Royal Association of the Fine Arts in Scotland. (Edinburgh: 1855). Web. Google Books. 183 vii 1 INTRODUCTION From Lydus, the servus paedegogicus of Plautus’s Bacchides (c. 188 BCE), to Jack Gladney, Professor of Hitler Studies in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), from Greco-Roman comedy to the postmodern novel, the pedant has proven a reliable object for satire, perhaps never more so than in eighteenth-century arguments favoring polite style. During the romantic period, however, British writing appropriated this familiar target of mockery, transforming the pedant into as a persona for powerful feelings of attachment. If romanticism is the internalization of quest-romance, then the pedant is its chevalier errant.1 Romantic pedantry names the passionate attachment, the chivalry as it were, that animates tedious expression from the lyric effusion of “I wandered lonely as a cloud” to the periphrastic narration of the Waverley novels. More than a mere bore, the romantic pedant personifies a tendency to wander from paths of useful knowledge and political fidelity, paths that would end in uniformity of style and opinion. In word and deed, romantic pedants ramble. Self-absorbed, but also absorbed in process, they digress from the points of their stories, collect curious relics, needlessly coin new words, and otherwise number the streaks of the tulip. The pedant’s romance with useless knowledge imbues shambolic literary forms and irrational tropes – including picaresque narrative, superstitious exclamations, non sequiturs, and tautologies – with a humor that is at once insufferable and irresistible. 1 While I wish to appropriate Bloom’s sense that romanticism reframes the quest-romance by orienting it “downward and inward,” what I describe as the romance of useless knowledge and the spirit of pedantry that drives it emphatically lack the clear sense of telos Bloom attributes to the poet-quester in pursuit of imaginative freedom. See Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” in Romanticism and Self-Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, Norton, 1970) 3-23. 2 The Preface to Don Juan (1819) exemplifies this romance when it asks readers to “suppose” a litany of details concerning the time, place, and company of the poem’s narration. It surveys every particular of the scene, from the remnants of the story-teller's dinner of Olla Podrida to the blood that stains the bandaged forehead of an imprisoned French Hussar who watches a group of peasants dancing the Fandango some distance from the clutch of old men who linger over wine and cigars, listening
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