Thomas Percy: Literary Anthology and National Invention
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Thomas Percy: Literary Anthology and National Invention Danni Lynn Glover MA (Hons.), Scottish Language and Literature Faculty of Arts, Glasgow University 2012 MPhil., English language Faculty of Arts, Glasgow University 2014 Faculty of Arts, Ulster University Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) October 2017 I confirm that the total word count of this thesis is less than 100,000 words. Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract ii Note on Access to Contents iii Introduction 1 Contexts 1 A note on ‘Cultural Anglicanism’ 16 The Enlightenment Context 17 Research Questions and Methodologies 19 Review of Literature 30 Chapter one – Anthology as national canvas 45 Introduction 45 Anthology and Gothic Ruin 46 The Case for Anthologies of Translation 57 Identity and Ideology 61 Conclusion 71 Chapter two – National Identity in the Translated Anthology 73 Introduction 73 Recognising Identity in the Translated Anthology 73 Percy and Macpherson 82 Five Pieces of Runic Poetry 87 Hau Kiou Choaan and Miscellaneous Pieces 97 Conclusion 110 Chapter three – Britain and the Reliques 112 Introduction 112 Anthological Pretexts 113 Collaborators 118 Locating Anthology 123 Nation as Anthology, Anthology as Nation 133 The Britains of the Reliques 141 Conclusion 155 Chapter four – Applied Anthology 158 Introduction 158 Paratexts 158 Hearing Voices: Heteroglossia 179 Decolonizing the Canon: Colonialism, Gender, Labour 189 Conclusion 213 Conclusion 215 Future research 218 Final reflections 223 Bibliography 225 i Acknowledgements I offer my sincerest gratitude to my primary supervisor, Dr Frank Ferguson, whose knowledge, dedication, and sincere interest in my research has been indispensable at all stages of preparing this thesis. Thanks are also owed to Dr James Ward, whose thoughtful attention to detail made him an exemplary second supervisor. I would also like to extend thanks to Professor Jeremy Smith, whom I have been privileged to call a mentor and a friend for many years. I am grateful to the librarians at Queen’s University Belfast Special Collections and Archives, particularly Bronagh McCrudden for her assistance with scans; University of Glasgow Special Collections; The British Library Western Manuscripts; and the Mitchell Library, Glasgow for their continued assistance. I extend this gratitude to the librarians and archivists at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Bodleian Library; and the Tate for their assistance by email. I am especially grateful to Mr Tom Gribben of County Down, whose local expertise and personal dedication to the preservation of documents in the Dromore area is a marvellous effort. This thesis has been financially supported by the Department for the Economy (NI), formerly the Department for Employment and Learning. At Ulster University, I would like to thank Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick for all the support she has afforded the Research Graduate School during our shared time here, and the administrative staff for the Faculty of Arts for their continued, daily assistance. Finally, my gratitude in all things goes to my parents Michelle and Craig Glover, who always ensured I was vaccinated, educated, and validated. To my good friends Michelle Jamieson and Ryan Young, whose academic and moral support has been unwavering – thank you. And finally, to my husband, Paul Faulkner, with whom I want to share this moment of pride and every other wonderful moment forever. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Frank Murphy. ii Abstract This thesis examines three key anthologies by Bishop Thomas Percy as a means of discussing ideas of British identity. It is argued here that the imaginative construction of Britain in the century following the Union of 1707 is anthological in its nature, and therefore that anthology is an appropriate vehicle for national textual imaginings. This argument has been achieved by an examination of Hau Kiou Choaan (1761), Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763), and Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). This study situates these books in their contemporary contexts, such as the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century print culture, and Percy’s epistolary network and establishment sympathies and connections, in order to come to a full understanding of their influences, impact, and uses in developing a poetry of nationhood. Percy’s conception of Britain was of a Gothic nation, and this informed his work aesthetically and politically, but similar works such as James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry suggest alternative origins for the British native genius. This thesis argues that Britishness in the eighteenth century was an identity with inherent hybridity and plurality, and that for Percy it was predominantly informed by English establishment morals, culture, and politics, which we might term ‘Cultural Anglicanism’. This study has been undertaken using primarily archival methods, but there is also a significant theoretical component, as the discipline of book history (under which studies of anthology fall) is opened to postcolonial, gendered, and class readings. By expanding the meaning of anthology to include national hybridities, this thesis has been able to suggest that other hybridities may be found in anthologies, taken as micro-canons, which may be subverted or upheld by anthologists and readers according to their own aims. In this sense, the anthology becomes an ideal textual expression of complex plural identities. iii Note on Access to Contents I hereby declare that with effect from the date on which the thesis is deposited in Research Student Administration of Ulster University, I permit 1. the Librarian of the University to allow the thesis to be copied in whole or in part without reference to me on the understanding that such authority applies to the provision of single copies made for study purposes or for inclusion within the stock of another library. 2. the thesis to be made available through the Ulster Institutional Repository and/or EThOS under the terms of the Ulster eTheses Deposit Agreement which I have signed. IT IS A CONDITION OF USE OF THIS THESIS THAT ANYONE WHO CONSULTS IT MUST RECOGNISE THAT THE COPYRIGHT RESTS WITH THE AUTHOR AND THAT NO QUOTATION FROM THE THESIS AND NO INFORMATION DERIVED FROM IT MAY BE PUBLISHED UNLESS THE SOURCE IS PROPERLY ACKNOWLEDGED. 1 Introduction The Library has existed ab æternitate. That truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no rational mind can doubt. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant appointments – its bookshelves, its enigmatic books, its indefatigable staircases for the traveller, and its water closets for the seated librarian – can only be the handiwork of a god. In order to grasp the distance that separates the human and the divine, one has only to compare these crude trembling symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book with the organic letters inside – neat, delicate, deep black, and inimitably symmetrical.1 Jorge Luis Borges Contexts This thesis is a study of the role of anthology at a pivotal time in British history, and centres on a central figure in British literature. Thomas Percy (1729-1811) was a Bishop, a man of letters, a poet, and a collector. He was born within 25 years of the Union of Parliaments, and in the year his magnum opus Reliques of Ancient English Poetry had been published (1765) the last major Jacobite rebellion was history by twenty years, and the Seven Years’ War by only two; the authority of Britain had begun to be questioned in America and James Macpherson’s Ossian poetry had identified a distinctly Caledonian strain in the British poetic tradition. The question of British identity was contentious, defined by the nation’s international conflicts, intranational power struggles, and, increasingly, global reach. As a moderate conservative working during peacetime in a revolutionary century, Percy tasked himself with inventing a poetic legacy for Britain that centred the Anglo-British experience; that is, a sense of Britishness that was directed by the moral authority of 1 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel’, in Collected Fictions, ed. by Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 112–18. p.113. 2 the crown, constitution, and church of the English people. Whereas Macpherson, to whom Percy was responding with his book Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763), characterised the national poetic genius as Celtic, Percy’s books identify the history of Britain’s eighth-century Icelandic invaders as the origin of the British voice. In fact, the history of Britain is a patchwork in which no single, authentic, poetic voice takes precedence. Percy sought to resolve this tension by presenting the British voice as driven by a textually literate Gothic experience which was capable of both rising to the fore of oral poetry and surviving the onslaught of time. To underscore the antiquity and literacy of his bards, he arranged his efforts in anthologies. Percy was born in Shropshire in 1729, to Arthur Pearcy and his wife Jane.2 He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford in 1750, having read classics (and by this time spelling his name Piercy) and in 1753 obtained a postgraduate MA in Hebrew while working as a deacon and, later, an Anglican priest. In 1756, he became the rector of Wilby parish, the personal chaplain to the Earl of Sussex, and settled for the rest of his life on ‘Percy’ as the spelling of his surname. ‘Percy’ was an illustrious surname to have, as it was the surname of the House of Northumberland, with whom Percy would come to share a lasting professional bond, both clerical and literary. In 1761, he published his first major work Hau Kiou Choaan, or The Pleasing History, which was the first complete English translation of a Chinese novel, and a supplementary text the following year Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese. The Chinese books were followed in 1763 by an Icelandic translation, Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, and a new version of Song of Solomon in 1764.