Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2014 Luxury Romanticism: The Quarto Book in the Romantic Period Matthew Hale Clarke Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Clarke, Matthew Hale, "Luxury Romanticism: The Quarto Book in the Romantic Period" (2014). Dissertations. 1257. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1257 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]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2014 Matthew Hale Clarke LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO LUXURY ROMANTICISM: THE QUARTO BOOK IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY MATTHEW CLARKE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2014 Copyright by Matthew Clarke, 2014 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thinking about luxury and necessity means thinking about what one cannot do without, and this project would never have been completed without the help of the English Department faculty at Loyola University Chicago. After virtually giving me my dissertation’s topic during a conversation in the summer of 2012, Dr. Jeff Glover provided consistently detailed and thoughtful feedback at every stage of my project. In addition to modeling the art of close reading in the courses I took with him, Dr. Jack Cragwall encouraged me to think about the broad theoretical questions animating my project, leading me to develop my positions, refine my claims, and clarify the stakes of my argument. My deepest gratitude goes to Dr. Steve Jones, whose unstinting enthusiasm for my work gave me the confidence necessary to undertake this project, and whose expert guidance was crucial in helping me bring it to completion. Throughout my time at Loyola, Dr. Jones has embodied my scholarly ideal, and I am extraordinarily lucky to have had the opportunity to work so closely with him. I would also like to thank Loyola University Chicago, whose five years of generous funding allowed me the time and space both to pursue my interest in book history and Romantic poetry and to generate the ideas and perspectives that inform this dissertation. The Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation provided my project with essential support in its last stages through a Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2013-14, and the Gravett-Tuma Foundation funded valuable research undertaken at the New York Public iii Library’s Pforzheimer Collection. I owe additional thanks to Shane Mawe (of Trinity College Library’s Department of Early Printed Books) and Christian Algar (of the British Library’s Rare Books and Music Reference Team) for providing me with the bibliographic details of certain editions of The Battle of Aughrim and The Deserted Village. Finally, I would like to thank William St. Clair, who offered me detailed and wholly unexpected help via email correspondence in September of 2013, and whose influence everywhere pervades this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank those whose support has been personal as much as intellectual. Mark Owen and Andrew Welch have been as committed interlocutors as they have been constant friends. Casey Smith stuck with me through the whole process and gave me a reason to look forward to the end of every day. To those older, Maine friends who somehow all converged in Chicago at the same time—Ellen Ramachandran, Mike Cotter, Kathryn Grover, Sam Koenigsberg, Joel Duncan, Lindsey Lapointe, and Sam Caldwell—I owe thanks for giving me perspective when I most needed it. To my family—my brother, John; my sister, Heather; my father, Fred; and my mother, Jennifer—whose conversation and whose love made this project—and all of my projects—possible, this dissertation is dedicated. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii INTRODUCTION: LUXURY ROMANTICISM 1 CHAPTER 1: THE LUXURY QUARTO IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 16 CHAPTER 2: THE “LUXURY OF WOE”: SYMPATHY AND FORMAT IN THE DESERTED VILLAGE 62 CHAPTER 3: THE “LUXURY OF DEMOCRATIC CONVERSE”: JOSEPH JOHNSON, RESPECTABLE RADICALISM, AND THE QUARTO POETRY PAMPHLET 110 CHAPTER 4: THE “LUXURY OF IMAGINATION”: ANXIETY, IDEOLOGY, AND APOSTASY IN WORDSWORTH’S EXCURSION QUARTO 175 CHAPTER 5: THE “LUXURY OF THE EAST”: REGENCY ORIENTALISM AND THE QUARTO BOOK 238 CONCLUSION 284 BIBLIOGRAPHY 290 VITA 320 v INTRODUCTION: LUXURY ROMANTICISM In March of 1815, The Scourge ran a short article denouncing in the harshest terms a recent fad in British publishing: [s]ince the age of Elizabeth, the rewards of literary labor and poetical skill appear to have been a proportion directly inverse to the quantity of desert, and while it is yet recorded that the pitiful remuneration of ten pounds was regarded as no inadequate compensation for the Paradise Lost of Milton, the Scotts, the Wordsworths, and the Southeys, come forth in all the pomposity of ponderous quartoes, beautiful to the eye, and expensive to the pocket. (“The Spoils of Literature” 221) The steep rise in the production of such “ponderous quartoes” marked a troubling trend, in which public attention was increasingly diverted away from literary merit and toward bibliographic display. The consequences of this trend were both numerous and disturbing. Sky-rocketing book prices threatened to fracture the republic of letters, bringing about a crisis in which “[t]he really deserving portion of the literary community is left to pine in necessity and despair while the manufacturers of quartoes absorb the attention of the public, and the money of the bookseller” (222). Meanwhile, the quarto format, whose flashily ornamental trappings allowed publishers to pawn off work of inferior quality to benighted book buyers, enabled a species of robbery that had grown so severe that “the trade of a poetical pick-pocket only [differed] from that of his brother pedestrian by the greater extent of its atrocity” (222). Indeed, such “mercenary dealers in tales of sympathy, and scenes of chivalrous generosity” (222) had grown cunning enough to swindle “[t]he 1 2 admirer of poetical talent, and the critical friends whose expectations have been excited by the promise displayed in the first effusion” into sacrificing “their dinners or their places at the theatre, to the anticipated luxury of enjoying a second Lay …” (223) in quarto. Finally, the magnificently high prices of recent verse quartos hinted at an uneasy relationship between certain of the literary ideologies defining the new poetic schools and the commercial context in which these ideologies were materialized and circulated. Writing of the quarto publication of Wordsworth’s monumental Excursion, The Scourge expressed its confusion that “this immaculate and virtuous enthusiast has ventured upon a mercantile speculation that would scarcely have become the character of his own pedlar, and has published ‘The Excursion, a Portion of the Recluse’, a poem, price £2 2s. 0.” (224). Impacting writers, readers, and the status of the poetic text itself, the quarto was envisioned by The Scourge as situated solidly, if unsettlingly, at the center of Romantic- period literary culture. But The Scourge was not alone in fixating on the prevalence of the quarto book. Indeed, such diatribes were widespread, and they serve to register the changing conditions of the British book market in the Romantic period, during which there occurred not only an explosion in the production of inexpensive small-format books but also the emergence of a specialty market for luxurious verse publications in quarto. My argument in this dissertation is that the luxurious quarto profoundly shaped the reception of Romantic-era verse, and that it did so in ways that have been hitherto neglected. As the period’s preeminent luxury book, “beautiful to the eye, and expensive to the pocket,” the format’s reputation as an “unnecessary expense” and a “bibliographic ornament” classed 3 the poetic ideologies it embodied, configuring for the era’s readers a set of literary discourses—from sentimentalism, to liberalism, to Wordsworthian Romanticism, to orientalism—as luxuries meant exclusively for the wealthiest consumers. The quarto’s power to convert these aesthetic and political ideologies into cultural capital was out of all proportion to the actual number of quarto books, for the format’s massive prestige meant that its texts, more than any others, absorbed “the attention of the public” and its major reviewing organs. Consequently, the luxurious quarto helped define Romantic- period literature as it was received by most Romantic-period readers, who were far more familiar with quarto authors like Byron, Scott and Southey, than with small-format authors like Shelley or Keats. Yet the quarto’s status as a bibliographic ornament also generated a host of related anxieties about the format’s effects on British readers, who were both drawn to and repelled by the book’s lavish but useless ornamentation. Even while it served to render polite the vulgar poetic subjects—wandering vagrants, urban workers, rural laborers, “orientals”—upon which much of its poetry relied, the Romantic- period quarto also threatened to corrupt its readers by bringing such subjects too close for comfort. More directly, it was worried worried that the luxuriousness of the quarto itself would contaminate British consumers, turning them away from the edifying activity of useful reading and toward the status-oriented gesture of bibliographic display, thus endangering their moral purity and jeopardizing the nation by moving it closer to the sort of decadence thought to hasten the downfall of empires. In identifying the quarto as a “luxury” book, I seek to place Romantic-period literary culture in a new light meant to foreground its material luxury.