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Virtual Realities: Literary Change and Fantasies of Social-Material Community in British Poetry and Criticism, 1725-1785 by John F. Rowland A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Clement C. Hawes, Co-Chair Associate Professor Silke-Maria Weineck, Co-Chair Professor Marjorie Levinson Professor David L. Porter Assistant Professor Christina J. Lupton TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 28 THE HAPPY COMMUNITY: THOMSON, DUCK, AND THE VIRTUE OF NATURE POETRY, 1725-31 CHAPTER TWO 67 'EARTH-BOUND SENSIBILITY': MATERIAL- COMMUNAL EXPERIENCE IN LITERARY HISTORICISM, 1735-60 CHAPTER THREE 113 'TRUTH SEEN COMPLEAT': INTERNALIZING VIRTUE IN THE IMAGINATIVE ODE, 1742-57 INTERLUDE 162 OSSIAN AND THE LURE OF MATERIALITY CHAPTER FOUR 177 THE REFORMING GENIUS: IMAGINATION, CRISIS, AND MORAL CONVICTION IN LITERARY CRITICISM, 1754-65 CHAPTER FIVE 220 'TIS FREE TO ALL, TIS EVERYDAY DAY RENEWED': THE LOCALIZATION OF COMMUNITY, 1770-85 WORKS CITED 255 ii INTRODUCTION Virtual-Real Community This dissertation tells two stories simultaneously: one about literary change in British poetry and criticism from 1725-85, and one about eighteenth-century writers' intense investment in fantasies of merging with or becoming part of environments. The dissertation proposes that the most essential motive force behind changes in the forms and values of eighteenth-century British poetry and criticism from the 1720-80s was the desire to participate in a 'true' or authentic environment, an environment perceived to be both inscrutably real and inclusive or communal. As the dissertation argues, in the middle two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the poetic realm came to be redefined as the place in which the individual feels, comes into contact with, and experiences an environment larger than him- or herself and providing an incomparably complete sense of satisfaction. The well-known features of poetry and criticism of the period all turn on the desire to have such satisfying interactions with environments. The best known innovative poems of the period show how this desire was both social and directed to the non-human object world, associating socially meaningful experiences with those of a solitary individual surrounded by human-less landscapes. On almost any page of the two most popular eighteenth-century British works of poetry, James Thomson's The Seasons and 1 Ossian's Fingal, one finds passages like the following two, dense with both distant personified natural forces and the material beings and objects of a specific location: sober Evening takes Her wonted Station in the middle Air; A thousand Shadows at her Beck.... A fresher Gale Begins to wave the Wood, and stir the Stream, Sweeping with shadowy Gust the Fields of Corn; While the Quail clamours for his running Mate. Wide o'er the thistly Lawn, as swells the Breeze, A whitening Shower of vegetable Down Amusive floats.1 THE clouds of night came rolling down and rest on Cromla's dark-brown steep. The stars of the north arise over the rolling of the waves of Ullin -they flew their heads of fire through the flying mist of heaven. A distant wind roars in the wood; but silent and dark is the plain of death... Cromla, with its cloudy steeps, answered to his voice. The ghosts of those he sung came in their ruslling blasts. They were seen to bend with joy towards the sound of their praise. '2 This sort of description, perched between description of local, quotidian nature and invocation of sublime figures, was new to eighteenth-century literature, and it arose extraordinarily quickly to become an aesthetic end-in-itself during the 1720s. Unlike previous versions of pastoral or landscape poetry, these new descriptions draw the reader into the world they describe and present interaction with these worlds as pleasing because real. The notion that a material environment was a living place that called out to and interacted with the viewer (literally in the Ossian example) demonstrated a strikingly new use of nature and environment, one in which the material world was integral to and totally intertwined with the social or human one, and one in which the human's attentions and intentions were fundamentally routed through the external, material world. As my dissertation argues, various poetic innovations—the nature poetry of Thomsons and Stephen Duck in the late 1720s, the Pindaric ode in the 1740-50s, the pseudo-primitive poems of Ossian, and the localist poems of Cowper and Burns in the 1 Thomson, Works, 129. 2 Ossian, Fingal. 34. 2 1780s—offered different ways of dramatizing the pleasures and pains of this new way of thinking and being. Innovative criticism of the period—the literary historicism of Thomas Blackwell and William Warburton and his followers, the discourse based on the genius of Joseph Warton and others, the social reform-minded review magazines during the Seven Years' War—shows how this new sense of being beholden to a social-material environment brought a new sense of purpose and satisfaction that other, more directly human or exclusively interpersonal forms of interaction could not. Critics and poets speaking of the inspiration and gratification that comes from feeling and thinking the social through external material environments constantly refer to the sort of truth that the material provides. The first treatise on Ossian's Fingal, Hugh Blair's Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), argued that Ossian's epic conveyed a sense of interaction with the real world that no reader could deny the power of: 'the foundation which those facts and characters (in Fingal) had in truth...must be considered as no small advantage to (Ossian's) work. For truth makes an Impression on the mind far beyond any fiction; and no man, let his imagination be ever so strong, relates any events so feelingly as those…which he has personally known.’3 In Blair's phrasing, the peculiar feeling of experiencing and being compelled by unknown forces and things brings the highest sort of aesthetic Truth; the imagination, no matter how sublime and heady, is not as powerful as the world of experience, and no pleasure of the imagination could compare with the feeling of the heft and density of the real world. The truest sensations a human could feel thus came from poetic or virtual experience that captured how reality felt and how direct interaction with the material. 3 Blair, 29 (emphasis added). 3 This type of thought was not limited only to so-called 'primitivist' poetry (and criticism about it) but rather took a wide variety of forms and encompassed a wide range of values. In the 1780s, for instance, John Moir notes that whatever 'the Genius of Poetry...creates or fabricates, is so far excellent only as it bears this resemblance (to) nature and truth, otherwise her fables were monsters without a likeness, were images without an original!'4 A few years later, William Cowper's 'The Task' would declare that interaction with the particulars of nature brought an undeniable (and deeply pleasing) sensation of truth: trees, and rivulets whose rapid course Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer, And sheepwalks populous with bleating lambs, And lanes in which the primrose ere her time Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root, Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth, Not shy, as in the world, and to be won By slow solicitation, seize at once The roving thought, and fix it on themselves. The immediately compelling reality of nature commands 'the roving thought' and leaps right out of the environment to both shake the reader and give it a sense of 'wisdom' and security. As with Blair's Ossian, no mere work of imagination could produce this sense of forceful, undeniable truth and, by implication, no human could settle for anything less real and moving than it. This dissertation demonstrates that this sort of fantasy of fulfilling and truthful experience with the external world lies at the heart of the most important innovations in mid-eighteenth-century British poetry and criticism. Though few critics have written specifically about it, this fantasy gives various works their impetus and value and redefining the role of the aesthetic or virtual in the process.5 I refer to this desire as a 4 Moir, Gleanings, 34. 5 Most recent critics have failed to deal properly with the material medium of eighteenth-century poetic 4 fantasy of virtual reality, a phrase which recurs so frequently that it merits some careful unpacking here. I intend each of the three parts of the phrase to be understood in precise and delimited senses, ones carrying connotations specific to the eighteenth-century situation. To begin with, 'reality' refers to an object—namely the empirical or material natural world—but I mean for it to convey a sense of irreproachable truth or presence that eighteenth-century Britons attributed to nature. Following the brand of empiricism pushed by numerous writers, scientists, and courtiers (most notably Bacon and the members of the Royal Society) during the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century writers increasingly assumed that material nature was God's material Creation, and thus the only true object of human attention 6 This British form of empiricism maintained that God had created the material world and intended humanity to study and know Him desires and the peculiar fantasies of materiality and opacity, but there are some notable exceptions. Bogel's Literature and Insubstanitality as well as various works by Jonathan Lamb and Peter de Bolla make frequent reference to materiality and the inter-mixture of ideal and material in eighteenth-century aesthetics, and Marshall Brown's Preromanticism makes some gestures towards it.

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