unconventional deist Mary Wollstonecraft, Reviews a congenial figure. A woman writer who did so little to forward the agenda of contemporary feminism was, apparently, best consigned to silence. But by ignoring Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First More, the scholars of this period Victorian. Oxford University Press, postponed the discovery that her 2003. Pp. 384. £25.00. reputation as a sanctimonious conservative ISBN 0199245320. is not fully deserved. More’s first biographer, William Though an important figure in her own Roberts, whose Memoirs of the Life and time, Hannah More (1745-1833) was Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More ignored by the generation of feminist appeared in the year after her death, bears scholars who began, during the 1970s, to much responsibility for the distorted rediscover forgotten or depreciated picture of More, which, as Stott notes, was women writers. The degree to which these until very recently ‘firmly embedded in scholars overlooked More is revealed by the historiography’ concerning her (p. ix). the fact that no full-length biography Roberts felt free to alter More’s appeared between 1952, when M. G. correspondence to fit his view of the way Jones’s sensible but rather perfunctory that the founding mother of the Hannah More was published, and the Evangelical movement ought to have appearance of Anne Stott’s Hannah More: written. Since few of More’s letters were The First Victorian in 2003. Yet More in print in any other form, Roberts’s was not only the most widely-read British portrait of More became the standard woman writer of her era, the author of picture, but in the early twentieth century plays, conduct books, tracts for the poor, a that picture, which corresponded to its best-selling novel and a variety of creator’s ideal of pious femininity, devotional works, but also a historical appeared less flattering. When, in the figure with connections to the 1990s, several feminist scholars, noticing bluestocking circle, to David Garrick and their predecessors’ oversight, began to pay Samuel Johnson, to Horace Walpole, to serious attention to More, the results were the abolitionist movement and to the first mixed. A number of these scholars, and second generations of the Clapham relying on a narrow range of sources and sect, most notably William Wilberforce, often using Roberts’s work uncritically, Henry Thornton and Thomas Babington show an ‘almost personal dislike of More’ Macaulay. as they dress up the old charges of What explains the fact that feminists of excessive religiosity and hypocritical the 1970s and 80s paid so little attention conservatism in the languages of cultural to More? More had a reputation as a studies and psychoanalysis (p. x). Others, political conservative; as a self-styled such as Mitzi Myers and Patricia Demers, Evangelical saint; as a repressive educator present a more balanced and sympathetic and philanthropist who offered instruction picture. and help to the poor on condition that they None of these commentators, however, accept their place in a supposedly God- has come close to presenting a portrait of given social order; and finally as a woman More that is as subtle, complex, who won public glory by counselling convincing and solidly grounded in other women to live modestly within the extensive research as the one delineated private sphere. This reputation did not by Anne Stott’s superb biography. Stott attract the scholars who found More’s spent nine years researching this book, contemporary, the fearless, and her hard work has certainly paid dividends. She consulted over a dozen British society and politics as seen collections of More’s unpublished papers through the lens of one extraordinary and correspondence, most of which were woman’s activities. ignored by earlier researchers. These Jane Nardin lively letters, which often escaped University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee bowdlerisation and from which Stott quotes judiciously, give a good sense of More’s humorous side. Stott uses the Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler correspondence to prove that More often (eds), Unfolding the South: Nineteenth- engaged in a ‘balancing act’ whereby she Century British Women Writers and presented her views as less progressive, Artists in Italy. Manchester University both politically and socially, than they Press, 2003. Pp. 246. really were, in order to retain her influence Hb: £47.50, ISBN 0719061296. with the conservative upper classes whose Pb: £15.99, ISBN 071906139X. beliefs, manners and conduct she hoped to influence (p. 160). Stott also does an Lively and detailed, meticulous and excellent job of showing the positive stimulating, these essays reconsider aspects of More’s much-criticised British involvements in Risorgimento philanthropic projects. Italy by focussing on women – writers, In addition to mastering More’s painters, historians and travellers. unpublished papers, Stott has studied, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning is famous in exemplary thoroughness, the huge body of this area and she is at the centre of several historical material that is relevant to of the essays: Richard Cronin considers understanding More’s wide-ranging Casa Guidi Windows as an attempt to activities. In elegant, economical and discover the stance of the true citizen, ‘at nicely paced prose, she presents the once separate from the state and joined to information one needs in order to it’ (p. 50); Isobel Armstrong addresses the comprehend More’s aims, choices and the same quality in the poem – its highlighting constraints under which she laboured. of a viewer distanced from events – and Stott knows that the context in which finds in it Barrett Browning’s recognition More acted is ‘hard to recover at this that ‘a mediated world is inevitable’ and distance of time’, but, unlike some other that ‘the multiplicity of symbol forces commentators, she invariably makes the choice upon the subject’ (p. 68). These effort to locate More in her own era, essays form an arresting pair, synergistic instead of judging her harshly by the by virtue of their closeness and standards of the present (p. 256). Indeed, divergence. Alison Chapman’s reading of Stott suggests that our world may not be Barrett Browning’s later Poems Before much more humane or enlightened than Congress develops these concerns by the one More inhabited, though we like to observing that the poems are ‘both think it is. Thus, discussing the fate of the prophetic and performative’ (p. 88). Their insurance societies for poor women, which lack of widespread critical acceptance More founded and funded, Stott dryly arises perhaps from their attempt to enact notes that they ‘continued to exist until the revolution as well as to inspire it, their twentieth century, when the creation of the wish to be immediate amidst the mediated. welfare state seemed to make them Though no one else receives such superfluous’ (pp. 118-19, my italics). concerted attention from the volume, the This biography not only does a collection has extraordinary breadth magnificent job of illuminating its subject, coupled with unusual detail. Jan Marsh it also offers a fascinating picture of late- and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, who have eighteenth and early-nineteenth century collaboratively done so much to revive interest in female Victorian painters, allegorised she says ‘as a marriage contribute two separate essays: Marsh on between la bella Italia and the King of Marie Sparlati Stillman, connected to the Savoy, Vittorio Emanuel II’ (p. 91). Her Rossetti circle, and Nunn on, among account of Cobbe’s withdrawal from ‘the others, Jane Benham Hay. Marsh evokes pulsating, busy world’ of modern Italy in vivid detail the Florentine milieu of ‘towards a far quieter, meditative one’ Sparlati Stillman, where the artist lived for sympathetically perceives its implication many years, plus her all-too feminine that ‘for striving women, as for striving reticence and submissiveness to an nations, regeneration is no easy matter’ oppressive husband. Italy provided the (pp. 107, 109). Her study offers a possible perfect environment for her to develop her explanatory context for Spartali Stillman’s own ‘delicate aesthetic offering quiet paintings too, indicating the many subtle harmonies in soft pinks and greens’ (p. interconnections that this collection 177). Benham Hay’s Italy was more of a suggests. battleground. Like Barrett Browning, she Another is dreams: repeatedly these addressed the relation between England critics discover Victorian women and Italy – between world-power and dreaming of la bella Italia, and seeing her backward, inchoate nation. Her paintings female form rise up before them, as if present the visible landscape of Italy with from the dead. Alison Chapman’s account an unusual degree of realism and question of Barrett Browning’s spiritualist the English viewer’s expectations of enthusiasm finds many parallels in Angela romance – expectations Spartali Stillman Leighton’s compelling discussion of embraced. Hay’s pair of paintings, writings from later in the century in which England and Italy and A Boy in Florentine Italy or the Renaissance rise up from the Costume of the 15th Century, exhibited in dead. Catherine Maxwell’s informative 1859, approach this task of disruption and and illuminating essay on Vernon Lee challenge from opposite directions. Nunn follows a similar path. In their contextualises the paintings wonderfully introduction Stabler and Chapman argue well, in relation to the artistic traditions that Madame de Stäel’s Corinne, or Italy they draw upon and the moment of their provided an enduring image not only of production. The female painter seems to Italy but of the female artist as well. Later have made herself politically astute and nineteenth-century women writers were engaged, even powerful in these paintings, ‘haunted by their fictive precursor, despite the ingrained Victorian prejudice Corinne’ (p. 1). That haunting, it emerges, against her being so. took a perhaps surprisingly direct form in Esther Schor likewise draws attention to these dream-visions; psychologically, too, hitherto little-known figures. Theodosia it was profound. The collection as a whole Garrow Trollope, married to Anthony confirms and develops what Schor puts Trollope’s brother Thomas Adolphus, ‘is most directly: that the fate of Italy, today all but unknown’ (p. 92); Frances politically and socially, was seen as the Power Cobbe has been written about by fate of women, as cultural agents and in Barbara Caine and Lori Williamson, their struggle against constraints on their among others, but like Trollope she social and personal conduct. benefits here from Schor’s insightful Francis O’Gorman’s essay on Margaret combination of empirical knowledge and Oliphant and her relation to Ruskin’s attentiveness to style. Schor observes that influential account of Venice raises debates surrounding the marriage laws in similar issues though with a somewhat English society were brought – sometimes different slant. Oliphant is seen in conflict subliminally – into writing about Italian with a more specifically literary male politics: the unification of the country was authority figure. Similarly, Nicola Trott’s impressive account of Romola Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of concentrates on George Eliot’s struggle to Romanticism. Cambridge University write a version of English that conveyed Press, 2003. Pp. 328. £45. ISBN something of its Florentine sources. There 0521816688. is a whole further book to be written, I think, about those writing of Italy from the Adriana Craciun’s groundbreaking study outside – Felicia Hemans, for example, explores a subject scholars of who never went there. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Romanticism have been unwilling to idea of ‘the south’, similarly, finds confront – the figure of the fatal woman in Italianate landscapes in Hampshire. writing by women. The result is an Jane Stabler’s opening essay also stands important and provocative book. Craciun to one side of the collection as a whole, contests a number of truths universally though in this instance simply because of acknowledged, beginning with her its attention to Romantic period writers: contention that the femme fatale is not Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, simply a product of the male imagination, Hester Thrale Piozzi and Charlotte Eaton. but forms a distinct female literary Stabler’s argument – that Catholic Italy tradition. Another misconception is the brought these women into conflict with stability of the sex/gender distinction. their own Protestant affiliations and Drawing upon the work of writers like prejudices – is interesting in itself. Here, it Thomas Laqueur and Foucault, Craciun also suggests how a visit to Italy could maintains that ‘Romantic-period writers turn from a touristic spectacular into the not only have questioned the nature of source of a more involved sense of loyalty femininity and culturally constructed and affiliation. Italy, in other words, made gender, but that they also questioned the patriotism doubtful. stability and naturalness of sex itself’ (p. For the Romanticist, perhaps, this is the 3). Above all, Craciun challenges the idea most important chapter. Its importance is that women ‘eschew violence, enhanced, however, by the collection’s destructiveness, and cruelty, except in demonstration that Romantic figures, such self-defense or rebellion’ (p. 8). She as Keats, Shelley and Byron, were ‘uncouples’ the fatal woman from an invoked and ‘resurrected’ in later ahistorical ‘narrative of male sexual nineteenth-century engagements with neurosis’ to demonstrate that ‘the femme Italy. The book undemonstratively fatale was an ideologically charged figure disrupts period boundaries. It hints too that both male and female writers invested that English concern with the Italian with a range of contemporary political, question was in part an attempt to carry sexual, and poetic significations’ (p. 16). forward a specifically English In so doing, she would undo a false Romanticism – one that was European in dichotomy of femme fatale and violent its outlook and progressive in its politics. woman and in place offers a view of Moreover, it was a form of Romanticism ‘inherent “doubleness”’ that offers ‘an that destabilised gender-relations, especially productive perspective on the providing in Keats a ‘figure of feminine development of sexual difference in the martyrdom’ (p. 10) who, like Corinne, Romantic period’ (p. 7). haunted and empowered nineteenth- The volume is divided into six chapters century women. that recover significant contributions that Ralph Pite women writers offer through explorations University of Liverpool of the fatal woman. Chapter one examines the ultimate femme fatale, Mary Lamb, whose writings for children seem incompatible with her murder of her mother and bouts of mental illness. Craciun’s conviction that ‘these writers Craciun refuses to separate the murderer would benefit from a (feminist) reading from the writer of children’s literature or that actively resists feminism’s persistent view her violent behaviour as rebellion ideology of the consolation of women’s against male power. Violence ‘remained a natural nonviolence and benevolence’ (p. part of her writing, as violence remains a 9) is bound to provoke controversy. This necessary part of all symbolic systems’ (p. provocation is balanced with argument 36). Chapter two considers Mary that is always illuminating and intelligent, Wollstonecraft and Mary Robinson within and grounded in scholarly research. Her the context of the French Revolution and approach is wide-ranging, drawing upon their notions of women’s bodily strength writings on sexuality, literary theory and as a place of possible mutability that historical and social contexts. Her field of would erase their inferiority and reference is of a broad scope within the difference from men. Craciun stresses the period, and she does not hesitate to cite role of the corporeal in their writings modern writers and contexts when through which the categories of mind and relevant. Plates for four illustrations body are destabilised to suggest that included in her analysis accompany the physical equality is a means of political text. An extensive bibliography provides equality (p. 60). The third chapter looks at testament to the depth of research and representations of Marie Antoinette, in learning that went into the writing of this particular Mary Robinson’s unique volume. Aware that her argument might imagining of public seductress and private be subject to oversimplification, a virtue mother as a figure of the embodiment of of this study is that Craciun is ever careful female Genius (p. 104). While the figure to make clear what she is not arguing. of Sadean violence and depravity shadows This volume marks a significant Wollstonecraft and Robinson, chapter four scholarly achievement, marred simply by analyses Charlotte Dacre’s Sadean Gothic the wish from time to time for further bodies, notably in Zofloya whose exploration of works by the writers subversive nature celebrates the pleasures examined. Craciun views the 1790s and of destruction, destroys a stable subject the climate of the French Revolution as a identity or a ‘natural corporal identity’ (p. ‘brief window of opportunity’ (p. 18), 153) and extends possibilities for women while later writers are less political than writers. The fifth chapter concerns the Robinson and Wollstonecraft. poetry of Scottish writer Anne Bannerman Nevertheless Dacre, Bannerman and whose Gothic poems contain figures of Landon explore the body in a manner that the fatal female related to writings of complicates the sexualised readings by Coleridge, Schiller and Johnson. modern critics. Craciun offers a valuable Bannerman explores the destructive nature argument that invites us to extend her of a ‘feminized ideal, and of an ideal readings to other writers and to reconsider woman’ (p. 194). The final chapter looks how we read and teach Romanticism. at Letitia Landon’s philosophy of Lisa Vargo decomposition as a gendered critique of University of Saskatchewan, Canada Romantic idealism. Her figures of the prophetess, enchantress and mermaid unite ‘her poetic powers with those of Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic destruction and death’ (p. 197). Landon’s Prophecy. Stanford University Press, works question the figure of the ‘proper 2002. Pp. 346. woman as benevolent and non-violent’ (p. Pb: $24.95, ISBN 0804745064. 197). Hb: $65, ISBN 0804742316.

The central argument of The Rhetoric of concerned with its role in the formation of Romantic Prophecy is that ‘a revisionary a unified nation: ‘Herder underscores the understanding of Biblical prophecy as ability of Moses to address his people as poetry, elaborated throughout the “one person,” as if they were a single eighteenth century, prepared the way for a moral being. Moreover, all subsequent Romantic mythology of the poet as prophets are said to speak in the same way prophet’ (p. 250). Such an argument leads for “the whole people”’ (p. 113). This was Balfour, necessarily, into readings of some not merely of theological or historical of the key prophetic passages of the Bible interest since Herder believed that the and into examining a range of eighteenth- prophetic mode could play a similar role and early-nineteenth-century authors that for modern nations, especially Germany: goes beyond the purview of most recent ‘The Hebrews, for Herder, are not a thing Anglo-centric, monoglot and historically of the past but a model for an elusive delimited accounts of Romanticism. The future’ (p. 114). Curiously, however, second chapter, for example, explores the Balfour fails to link Herder’s reading of ways in which a number of Romantic and biblical prophecy either with the ‘pre-Romantic’ authors – Wordsworth, resurgence of the prophetic in Collins, Gray, Young, Smart, P. B. Romanticism or with the radical Shelley, Schlegel, Klopstock, Novalis and millenarianism of seventeenth-century Fichte – explore and employ the rhetorical Europe – despite quoting E. P. strategies of prophecy. Balfour then Thompson’s suggestion that ‘The closer moves back in time to consider what he we are to 1650, the closer we seem to calls ‘prophetic figures in eighteenth- Blake’ (p. 127). Although he is alert to the century interpretation’ – Robert Lowth, link between the prophetic and Richard Hurd, William Warburton, Herder nationalism (of various stripes) in the and Eichhorn. He shows that Lowth’s other writers he examines, Balfour is Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the much more keen to ‘deconstruct’ texts Hebrews (1753/1787) made it possible to than to read them as interventions in regard biblical prophecy as a poetic mode socio-political discursive formations. His or strategy rather than (or as well as) the textual analyses often seem determined by mediated word of God. Lowth did this not a set of reading protocols developed in the simply by identifying parallelism as the critical theory of twenty or so years ago Old Testament’s characteristic textual that have now largely lost their power to device, but by showing that prophetic excite or illuminate. With a growing sense power is generated by an array of of inevitability, Balfour repeatedly linguistic traits – including enigmatic, exposes paradoxes, contradictions, indeterminate figuration and a peculiar use interpretative ‘violence’, abysses, of tense in which history and prophecy supplements, moments where (we are seem to be reversed. In this way, although told) it is impossible to distinguish literal he ‘wrote as a Christian and a believer’, from figural, and claims that language can Lowth’s analysis of the textual strategies never be about anything other than itself – of biblical prophecy ‘helped open the a claim that, if true, would undermine sacred text to the powerful revisionary Balfour’s own scholarship and much of readings undertaken by the Romantic his argument. poets’ (Balfour, p. 77). In the final section of The Rhetoric of Balfour then examines the development Romantic Prophecy Balfour seeks to make of German biblical criticism at the end of good his claim that the achievements of the eighteenth century, especially in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writings of Eichhorn and Herder. Herder’s British and German biblical interest in the prophetic mode is mainly critics/scholars constituted one of the enabling conditions for the use of the Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic prophetic mode in Romantic poetry. He Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave, does so by developing readings of three 2002. Pp. 260. £45. ISBN 0333994353. poets – Blake, Hölderlin and Coleridge – for whom the prophetic had particular, At the time, Waterloo seemed to close and though significantly different, define an age, ending years of fighting in a implications. Yet Balfour’s reading of the final cataclysmic engagement. philosophical and theological prose texts Wellington’s victory ensured the he gathers together is often more restoration of monarchy in France and the illuminating than his interpretation of the triumph of conservatives in Britain. His poetry they are supposed to illuminate. A stern grasp of strategy and still tighter grip chapter on Blake begins with convincing on the contemporary media elevated him if predictable readings of America and to the status of national hero. Strikingly, Europe (though it’s not clear how the rest Wellington’s achievement was heralded in of the book contributes to those readings), terms that stressed the continuity of his but is mostly devoted to an intricate courage within longstanding narratives of reading of Milton that serves to compound heroic endeavour and British tenacity yet and valorise that text’s opaque equally introduced claims that the Iron strangeness. In the following chapter, in Duke represented a new kind of Briton the middle of a not wholly satisfying and a superlative modern fighting man. In reading of Hölderlin’s ‘Germanien’, the story of Wellington and Waterloo Balfour embarks on a long ‘Excursus on there was much for patriotic Britons to Revelations, Representation, and Religion extol and enjoy. But such celebrations in the Age of German Idealism’ in which always existed alongside and were even he develops a superb account of the haunted by a less confident, more doubtful interplay between theology and idealism sense of what had occurred. The in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and importance of the battle could not be Niethammer but which does not really denied, yet it was not always easily serve to illuminate the ‘moment of truth’ reconciled with simple narratives of nation in Hölderlin’s poem. And in the final building or personal accomplishment: chapter on Coleridge, Balfour avoids 50,000 men were killed in a single day, poetry altogether in order to attack the thousands more were maimed or mentally poetics and politics of The Statesman’s scarred; after the battle bodies of men and Manual. The book ends with this negative horses, their weapons, kit and an critique of Coleridge and there is no astonishing amount of rubbish littered the conclusion to the overall argument. field. A scene of wreckage and monstrous Although he suggests that ‘Prophecy violence confronted those who gazed on emerges [in Anglo-German biblical the battlefield (as very many did) in the criticism] as “political art”’ (p. 123), months after the battle. Even those who Balfour offers no real account of why merely read about the conflict were struck English and German Romantic poets by the vast, impersonal and mechanised might have found the prophetic mode so violence of the event. From this attractive or necessary in an age of perspective although the bloodshed of nationalism and counter-nationalism Waterloo remained sublime – such a level stimulated by the changing course of the of destruction could hardly be otherwise – French Revolution. it was also potentially unmeaning and Tom Furniss unending, a day of brutality that University of Strathclyde questioned the battle’s observers as much as its participants and cast heroism, particularly in its patriotic and chivalric struggled to find the right genre within modes, into doubt. which to present Waterloo; epic, pastoral These confused and uncertain and romance were all tried and all proved identifications are the subject of Philip only partially successful. Shaw suggests Shaw’s book. Shaw examines responses to that Scott’s poetry is made uncertain by the battle from the major poets of the two unresolved (even irresolvable) Romantic canon: Southey, Scott, contradictions. First, Scott’s desire to Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron. represent the war as a heroic encounter Shaw’s tight focus on the matter of was confronted by his awareness that Waterloo (rather than conflict more Waterloo’s fragmented, shattered remains generally) means that Hemans, Smith and displayed the filthy business of war. Shelley are notably absent. However, the Second, Scott hoped to find in war (and poets on whom Shaw focuses are well this is why he was such an enthusiastic chosen, each having an important and volunteer) a coherent identity for both the distinct perspective upon the battle, its individual and the state. Yet Waterloo meaning and implications. Shaw places revealed that the nation rested, even relied, their work within the context of its initial on a level of violence that appeared at production: the literary marketplaces of once both to make and to undermine the volume and magazine publication. There identity of the state and the subject. the work of Southey, Scott or Byron vied Similar anxieties haunted Coleridge as he for the public’s attention with Romantic grappled with the complexities of poetry’s lesser lights and with the nationhood after the battle. War seemed to extravagant claims made for battlefield make the nation cohere as everyone pulled visits, panoramas and other visual in more or less the same direction; yet this representations of the battle. Shaw offers very effort existed in a nasty relation to an illuminating study of this material, disharmony and destruction undermining suggesting that the vogue for battle tours the fiction of national unity even as it was and art spectaculars enabled non- made. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge combatants to enjoy a kind of involvement wanted Waterloo to mean triumph and through the vast canvasses and resolution, but found it difficult to make it encompassing perspectives of the do so. Byron, pointedly, had other panorama. Shaw explores how this objectives. Shaw’s analysis of the poet, seemingly cumbersome apparatus worked which is a nice response to Malcolm as a rather subtle form of ideological Kelsall’s work, explores how Byron’s engagement, smoothing out the violence writing on Waterloo, principally but not of the battle, making Wellington truly exclusively in Don Juan, is not merely an heroic and blurring the distinction expression of the frustrations of Whig between soldier and citizen; participant ideology, but a principled assertion of and mere observer. However, Shaw’s real poetry’s power to refute complacent interest lies with the poetry of the period unfeeling history. Boldly comparing and with the forms of ontology Waterloo Byron to Benjamin, Shaw argues that produced. He is an accomplished critic in Byron disrupts the providential accounts this field, nicely combining theoretical of the battle, countering the government’s insights (drawn from an admirable range claims to ‘empty homogenous time’, to of modern writers including Benjamin, insist instead on the disruptive and violent Lacan, Scarry and Žižek) with deft aspects of the battle, a violence that only analysis of form, metre and image. The poetry could reach or redeem. chapter on Scott, for example, is excellent. After reading Waterloo and the Shaw explores how Scott, like many of Romantic Imagination it is clear that the writers discussed in this book, Waterloo offered neither resolution nor salvation. Rather, the aftermath of the revising the normal understanding of it as battle disclosed that the nation was an ‘aesthetic rejection’ of the ‘supposedly wounded, not just in the bodies and minds corrupt poetical style’ of the Della of those who had suffered in Belgium, but Cruscans (p. 33). Gamer persuasively in its modes of self-articulation, its art and argues that its target was, in fact, the culture. This argument, conducted with ‘printer, newspaper editor and circulating much care and thoroughness, makes library mogul John Bell’ (p. 34), owner of Shaw’s book a very real contribution to The World and therefore the publisher of the study of Romantic poetry, especially the Della Cruscans. For Gifford, the Della in relation to the experience of war. Cruscan phenomenon highlighted the Robert W. Jones much larger cultural threat posed by Bell. University of Leeds Marcus Wood then considers satirical treatments of slavery in the period. Describing instances of the ‘weird and Steven E. Jones (ed.), The Satiric Eye: highly charged status of the slave body’ Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period. (p. 56) in works by Boswell, Teale and New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Wordsworth, Wood shows how ‘satire Macmillan, 2003. Pp. 231. £40. ISBN provided an unusually open space for the 0312294964. expression of white sexual pathologies’ (p. 56). Nicola Trott discusses the Recent books by Marcus Wood, Gary Romantic-period reception of Dyer and Steven E. Jones, among others, Wordsworth’s poetry and highlights the have much advanced our understanding of ‘intricate’ interactions between the the prominence and significance of satire ‘reviewers’ satire’ and the ‘Romantics’ in the Romantic period. Jones’s new poetry’ (p. 72). Trott lucidly demonstrates volume continues the work of these how these interactions collapse studies and, like them, ‘increases the distinctions between, for example, satirist richness and complexity of our critical and ‘Romantic bard’ or ‘neoclassical’ and understanding of Romantic-period culture’ ‘Romantic’. Even the distinction between (p. 7). It is full of fresh perspectives, and original and parodic becomes unstable in a repeatedly pulls the carpet from beneath satirical culture where parody ‘provides readings of the period that privilege ‘the the determining context’ (p. 90) for Romantic sincerity of satiric victims over understanding poetry – where ‘parody had the authority of satire’ itself (pp. 4-5). become the original of which the poems The first four chapters are interested in were the imitators’ (p. 88). ‘taste-making in the public sphere’ (p. 8). The fifth, sixth and seventh chapters Tim Fulford opens on a Romantic-period ‘focus on women and children – as satirical culture that was very different authors, readers, and characters – at what from the Pope-Cowper-Wordsworth might be called the satiric scene of tradition of commenting on the city from instruction’ (p. 8). Karl Kroeber argues rural retreat – and that undermined that that Northanger Abbey teaches ‘a practical tradition. Fulford foregrounds a culture of psychic flexibility that enables us to enjoy ‘pamphlet, magazine … handbill’ and grappling with the difficulties’ thrown at ‘popular caricatures’ (p. 12) that was us by evolution (p. 110). Particularly, the complicit in the ‘orientalized’ consumer novel teaches a ‘self-reflexiveness’ (p. world it dissected and that gained its 107) about judgement, language, the authority from knowingly speaking ‘from imagination and the ‘hegemony of false within’ (p. 27) that world. Michael knowledge every society necessarily Gamer’s chapter concentrates on William fosters’ (p. 110). Donelle R. Ruwe shows Gifford’s 1791 satire, The Baviad, that ‘our celebration of [William] Roscoe’s escapist fantasy’, The Butterfly’s The contributors to this volume very Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1807), valuably ‘highlight and question many ‘has blinded us to the very real political presuppositions about early-nineteenth- protests and social work found in other century literature’ (p. 1) by drawing contemporaneous animal poems’ (p. 119). attention both to the contemporary Of particular interest here is Catherine importance of long-neglected satires and Ann Dorset’s satirical parody of Roscoe’s satirists and to the more general cultural poem, The Peacock ‘at Home’ (1809), centrality of satire in the period. But the excluded from the canon, Ruwe argues, as volume’s subtitle announces a further a result of tensions between Romantic interest in form, and this surfaces in ideologies of childhood and political almost every chapter. As a result, while satire. Stuart Curran then discusses Jane the reader learns a lot about the work that Taylor’s Essays in Rhyme, on Morals and satire did in the culture of the Romantic Manners (1816) showing that, ‘in the period, s/he also learns a great deal about endemic secularity of the Romantic how it went about that work. period’, Taylor ‘stands as a unique Alan Rawes religious voice using satirical means to Canterbury Christ Church University undo the very essence of satire’ (p. 150). College The remaining four chapters discuss ‘topical and political satire in a variegated range of multi-media forms’ (p. 8). Gary Gates, Eleanor (ed.), Leigh Hunt: A Life Dyer focuses on Thomas Moore’s in Letters. Together with Some Twopenny Post-Bag (1813) and Fudge Correspondence of William Hazlitt. Family in Paris (1818) as parodies – and Essex, Connecticut: Falls River powerful critiques – of a principal Publications, 1999. Pp. 693. $44.95. surveillance practice of both the Society ISBN 0966825837. for the Suppression of Vice and the Government: the interception of letters. Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle- Kyle Grimes uses the figure of William Sinatra (gen. eds), The Selected Writings Hone to illustrate a kind of topical satire – of Leigh Hunt. 6 vols. London: what he calls ‘hacker satire’ (p. 174) – Pickering and Chatto, 2003. Vol. 1, that, for Grimes, had its birth in the Periodical Essays 1805-14, ed. Greg Romantic period but is still alive and well Kucich and Jeffrey N. Cox, pp. 414; in the ‘ethic of contemporary computer Vol. 2, Periodical Essays 1815-21, ed. hackers’ (p. 175). John Strachan’s topic is Greg Kucich and Jeffrey N. Cox, pp. the ‘New York barber, satirist, and 436; Vol. 3, Periodical Essays 1822-38, indefatigable self-publicist John Richard ed. Robert Morrison, pp. 449; Vol. 4, Desborus Huggins’ (p. 185), as one Later Literary Essays, ed. Charles example of the rich interplay between Mahoney, pp. 411; Vol. 5, Poetical advertising and literary satire/parody that Works 1801-21, ed. John Strachan, pp. ultimately blurs the distinction between 343; Vol. 6, Poetical Works 1822-59, ed. these: Huggins’ parodic self-publicising John Strachan, pp. 354. £475. becomes political satire concerned with ISBN 1851967141. ‘European geopolitical conflict’ and ‘contemporary American party politics’ Leigh Hunt, poet, critic and journalist, (p. 186). Finally, Marilyn Gaull offers an outlived his illustrious friends Keats, encyclopaedic discussion of pantomime as Shelley and Byron by so many years that ‘the consummate expression of both his long life (1784-1859) spanned the Romanticism and satire’ (p. 208). Romantic and Victorian eras. His influence in both periods was far reaching. He encouraged poets like Keats and work of reference for the Romantic and Shelley, Tennyson and D. G. Rossetti. His Victorian periods. Included here are reviews of the London stage opened the Hunt’s letters to his wife Marianne and way for theatrical criticism by Coleridge, sister-in-law Elizabeth Kent, Percy and Hazlitt and Lamb; his enthusiasm for Mary Shelley, William Hazlitt, Benjamin Italian arts had a fertile effect on the Pre- Haydon, Charles Cowden Clarke, Charles Raphaelites. Hunt’s editorship of the Ollier, Lord Holland, John Murray, Henry Examiner (1808-1822) was a high point in Brougham, Vincent Novello, Edward English journalism, and his campaigning Moxon, Thomas Carlyle, John Forster, on liberal issues – which brought him a Bryan Waller Procter, Thomas Noon two-year prison sentence – marks him out Talfourd, G. H. Lewes, Charles Dickens as one of England’s great reformers. His and Walter Savage Landor (Eleanor poetry is brilliant, sparkling, controversial, Gates’s volume is available from Falls while his Autobiography (1850) is the first River Publications, PO Box 524, Essex, modern example of the genre. Poets have CT 06426, USA). learned much from him. John Keats found The new six-volume edition of Hunt’s his voice by following Hunt’s example, Selected Writings published by Pickering and ‘To Autumn’ was the fullest and Chatto is the first to accurately expression of Hunt’s idea of ‘doubled represent the scale and richness of his pleasures’. Elizabeth Barrett remarked output. Greg Kucich and Jeffrey N. Cox admiringly that Hunt’s poetry makes us have drawn extensively from Hunt’s ‘feel & see’; Robert Browning emulated political and critical writings, 1805-1821, his informal brio. Virginia Woolf said in The News, Reflector, Examiner and Hunt was a ‘spiritual grandfather’ of the Indicator. Their annotation in these modern world. volumes is exemplary, and reflects the There has never been a Complete Works high standards of the edition as a whole. of Leigh Hunt or a Collected Letters of Robert Morrison and Charles Mahoney Leigh Hunt, and the materials that underlie have explored the labyrinths of Hunt’s the Pickering and Chatto edition of his later career in Periodical Essays 1822-38 work have been slow to appear. The and Later Literary Essays. Their volumes manuscripts from the Carl H. Pforzheimer include copious selections from twelve Library, published since 1961 in Shelley journals including The Liberal, The and his Circle 1773-1822, have included Companion and The Tatler, and generous rewarding seams of material by and about extracts from later writings including Hunt. At the University of Toledo, David Hunt’s influential estimates of Coleridge, Cheney has painstakingly assembled the Keats and Shelley from Imagination and materials for a complete edition of Hunt’s Fancy. letters, although, alas, this has not yet Following the disastrous reception of been published. In the meantime, Eleanor Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes M. Gates’s excellent Leigh Hunt: A Life In (1807), the notes to Hunt’s The Feast of Letters (1999) has supplemented Thornton the Poets (1814) included a perceptive Hunt’s heavily expurgated edition of essay which set the terms on which 1862, and Luther Brewer’s quirky My Wordsworth would be reassessed by Leigh Hunt Library: The Holograph Hazlitt and Coleridge. It was Hunt, in Letters (1938). Gates’s book covers the other words, who began the critical years 1802 to 1857 and contains nearly revaluation on which Wordsworth’s 450 letters, many hitherto unpublished. reputation in the nineteenth and twentieth The headnotes to the letters contain much centuries was based. John Strachan’s information about Hunt and his volumes of Hunt’s Poetical Works 1801- correspondents, making this a valuable 21 and Poetical Works 1822-59, include the 1814 Feast with its notes, along with Although critics from Abrams onwards Hunt’s early work in Juvenilia (1801), The have recognised the preoccupation with Story of Rimini (1816; the revised text of ‘knowing’ in English Romantic writing, 1844 is in volume 6), and Foliage (1818). Milnes moves the argument forward by Strachan reprints from the Examiner concentrating on the uncertainties of Hunt’s satirical poems on Peterloo, and Romanticism’s negotiations with the numerous later poems, from 1830-1860, theory of knowledge. He shows the great are presented in this edition for the first impact of Hume’s separation of truth and time. value, and demonstrates how, in a post- The editorial labour of retrieving Hunt’s Humean context, writers such as writings from scarce periodicals and rare Wordsworth and Hazlitt simultaneously editions has been immense and demonstrate a dependency on overwhelmingly worthwhile. Thanks to foundationalism, and a desire to question the editors of The Selected Writings of its boundaries. Leigh Hunt, it is now possible to begin a A recurring theme of this study is the thoroughgoing reassessment of Hunt’s way in which Romanticism’s embrace of achievement and his decisive impact on the ever-evolving creative process is Romantic and Victorian culture. coupled with the desire for epistemic Nicholas Roe security, the certainty offered by firm University of St Andrews foundations. These conflicts are particularly evident in Wordsworth’s prefatory and prose works. Throughout his Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference life, Wordsworth was to negotiate with his in English Romantic Prose. Cambridge need to distance himself from fact- University Press, 2003. Pp. 278. £45. foundationalism, and his simultaneous ISBN 0521810981. distrust of unfettered, lawless creativity, a distrust paralleled by his political ‘Nothing puzzles me more than time and anxieties, and by his ambivalent attitude space’, wrote Charles Lamb to his friend toward the reading ‘public’. His Thomas Manning in 1810, ‘and yet discussions of the language of feeling in nothing puzzles me less, for I never think the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, for of them’. Lamb’s is a classic example of example, struggle to reconcile an Romantic indifference, a self-conscious empirically given notion of ‘truth’ with denial of the problem of knowledge which his own concept of poetic spontaneity. As seems nevertheless to insist on its Milnes neatly puts it, Wordsworth’s prose importance. This excellent discussion of ‘plays leap-frog with tropes of empirical Romantic epistemology examines this verification, as spontaneity is checked by double-minded approach: Tim Milnes sets veridical observation’ (p. 76). He shows out to show the ways in which Romantic how Wordsworth developed different writers are deeply interested in strategies to deal with this, ranging from philosophical thought, even as they strive the idea that poetry should imitate the to conceal their involvement. Examining ‘real language of men’ in the 1800 Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Coleridge in a Preface, to the notion that sheer poetic context both of eighteenth-century power may compensate for a lack of philosophical thought and modern post- actual knowledge, which emerges in the analytic philosophy, Milnes traces what he ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ of terms ‘the serpentine movement of 1815. English Romantic theoretical prose’ (p. The questions of power and knowledge 15), its alternations between engagement raised by this discussion lead into a with and abstention from argument. consideration of Hazlitt’s similarly ambivalent approach to epistemology. His and ultimately unknowable, remained is ‘an indifference to knowledge which unresolved. betrays a compulsive attachment to truth’ It is this continual tension which makes (p. 109). Milnes characterises this paradox Romantic philosophy so deeply as ‘immanent idealism’, and traces the fascinating. As Milnes shows, the sinuous development of Hazlitt’s philosophy of patterns of commitment and resistance in abstraction from his Essay on the Romantic discourse mirror the Principles of Human Action onward in preoccupations of post-modern reading support of this. The discussion of Hazlitt’s and criticism. In some senses, we share Dissenting background is interestingly the dilemmas of knowledge faced by the paired with an enquiry into how his Romantics, the puzzling uncertainties training as a painter may have affected his Lamb jokes about. Coping with these, philosophical thought, allowing insights Milnes suggests, requires that ‘literary into his oscillatory approach to criticism ... give up its quest for empiricism. It shaped and formed his indifference, just as philosophy is thinking, and yet, through his assertion gradually giving up its quest for certainty’ that the mind had an active part in (p. 18). His own elegant study goes some determining moral knowledge, he went way toward achieving this. Milnes beyond the conditions of empirical illuminates the relationship between thought: his position came into conflict Romantic philosophy and literature; in with the very language he was using to doing so, he affords new insights into describe it. contemporary approaches to cross- Wordsworth and Hazlitt were disciplinary criticism. negotiating with patterns of thought Felicity James belonging to British empiricism: in the Christ Church, University of Oxford second half of this study, Milnes examines Coleridge’s dialogues with a new kind of foundationalism, based on his readings of Thomas Barran, Russia Reads Rousseau Kant. Plunged into German intellectualism 1762-1825. Evanston, Illinois: in the late 1790s, Coleridge was Northwestern University Press, 2002. encountering new possibilities such as Pp. 404. $89.95. ISBN 0810118440. transcendental argument, which offered ways out of the empirical dilemmas of Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A British philosophical thought. Milnes pulls Cultural History of Russia. London: apart the tangled philosophical Allen Lane, 2002. Pp. 729. £25. preoccupations of Biographia, the 1818 ISBN 0713995173. edition of The Friend and the 1819 Philosophical Lectures to show how In 1841, Richard Ford wrote to George different discourses shape Coleridge’s Borrow, an early translator of Russian thinking. The book closes with a detailed literature into English, to express his discussion of the ways in which contempt for Russians and their culture: Coleridge’s delicate negotiations with ‘[I] regard them as barbarians, and what is post-Kantian concerns affected his later more, uninteresting barbarians – Scythians attempts to ‘establish a new doctrine of in Paris-cut coats’. Ford believed the theosophy’, harmonising philosophy and Russians innately barbaric, in spite of their religion. Yet the tensions between, on the veneer of Frenchified sophistication, their one hand, his desire to ground knowledge glittering exteriors unable to disguise their in certainty, and, on the other, his savage Asian heritage. Despite Ford’s Christian reverence for things invisible accusations of barbarity, it was during the eighteenth century that Russia became a European power with increasing political Although covering a wide range of importance and her relationship with literature, art and music Figes never loses Western Europe was renegotiated. the plot and maintains a steady and Thomas Barran’s Russia Reads Rousseau sophisticated argument about each, as well and Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance as revealing the importance of an provide welcome studies both of the interaction between the different artistic woefully under-researched interactions genres. Russia’s unique geographical between Russia and the rest of Europe and position, straddling both Europe and Asia, the development of Russian literary and has encouraged a cultural mêlée of East cultural identities during the Romantic and West, and Figes offers a particularly period and beyond. pertinent criticism of Edward Said, who Natasha’s Dance hit the headlines upon bypasses Russia and her ambivalence its publication last autumn when a review towards the ‘Orient’ completely in his in the TLS by Rachel Polonsky queried work. Indeed, Russia’s cultural Orlando Figes’ methodology. cosmopolitanism, suggests Figes, does not Consequently, any achievement of this end with the assumed early nineteenth- vast Cultural History of Russia from the century repudiation of European style and eighteenth to the late twentieth century has embracing of a more Russian heritage. It been overshadowed by controversy about continues with a clever twist during Soviet its ‘originality’. Polonsky’s review was at times, providing a nostalgic return to the times frustrating (numerous quotations elegance of eighteenth-century from the book taken out of context to fit architectural and musical influences and the argument), at others pertinent themes. (highlighting factual inaccuracies and The complexity of Russian responses to sweeping statements). While the Europe and Russia’s position within antagonism between Figes and Polonsky European culture is highlighted most is best left to their legal representatives, it impressively by an analysis of the Russian is the subtext to Polonsky’s review which use of the French language. As Count hints at more important questions about Rostopchin ironically laments in Tolstoy’s what is at stake in the writing of cultural War and Peace: ‘“The French are our history, especially the acclaimed, but also Gods: Paris is our Kingdom of Heaven”’. best-selling, kind written by Orlando While a Russian obsession with French Figes, whose previous study of the culture may be one of the themes that background to and aftermath of the 1917 Polonsky suggested in her TLS review as Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy, most obvious even to an informed general achieved massive popular as well as reader, Figes offers a different spin by critical success. Can such overarching examining more closely the speaking of surveys ever hope to realise the Russian in daily life and the French complexities of a national culture? Is the employed in ‘the sphere of thought and term ‘national culture’ itself suspicious? sentiment’ (p. 103). In a fascinating angle And the perennial nightmare: does on the sentimental language of late- popularity with the ‘general reader’ entail eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century academic suicide? literature, Figes discusses how vocabulary For all Polonsky’s criticisms, Figes of the ‘private world of the individual had states from the outset that Natasha’s never been developed into the Russian Dance is intended as a celebration of the tongue’: ‘“gesture”, “sympathy”, ‘sheer diversity of Russian culture’ (p. “privacy”, “impulsion” and “imagination” xxviii). The book’s major achievement is – none could be expressed without the use precisely this: an impressive marshalling of French’ (p. 50). In order to keep up of a huge body of cultural fact and fiction. with the Romantics, Russians were compelled to speak in the French outset. Literate Russia presents Barran language. with only 0.5 to 1% of the entire The relationship between Russia and population, and that ‘a small and French literary language, in the form of homogeneous elite’ (p. xx). Rousseau’s the writings of Genevan Jean-Jacques Russian readers are few and aristocratic: Rousseau, forms the core of Thomas hardly representative of ‘Russia’. To be Barran’s immensely detailed and fair to Barran, he is more than aware of painstakingly researched account of the the deficiencies of his project, but, reception, translation, adoption and consequently, makes his work appear reworking of the Rousseauvian oeuvre overly hesitant and nervous. A question from the reign of Catherine the Great to such as ‘who in the Russian Empire would Nicholas I’s accession to the throne in have responded to Rousseau’s subversive 1825. Russia Reads Rousseau suggests message?’ when answered with ‘[i]n all that the Rousseau received by the likelihood, nobody’, does not inspire Russians ‘remain[ed] constant only in his confidence about the efficacy of evasion of final coherence’, emerging ‘in Rousseau’s writing in inspiring a very a number of guises ranging from popular nascent intelligentsia to rebel against the composer, literary genius, educator, or absolutism of the state (p. 46). Reading dedicated patriot to misanthrope, Rousseau alongside particularly Russian scoundrel, proto-Jacobin, or outright grievances also ensures a tendency to lunatic’ (p. xiv). So far, so familiar. Yet assume that Rousseau was the only Barran is, of course, dealing with commentator upon issues pertinent to the Rousseau’s writings within the context of Russian situation – even when Rousseau a country ruled by enlightened despots, does not mention Russia. Other remarks and he is most impressive when analysing suggest more than conjecture. For the effect of the Russian climate upon the example, Catherine the Great placed an translation of Rousseau’s political imperial ban upon the sale of the French writings. While, surprisingly, the edition of Émile, which Barran interprets Discourse on Political Economy remained as having been far more serious than the exceptionally popular over this period blocking of a book about Peter III, simply with Russian readers both in the original because, in the list, Émile was mentioned French and in part or in its entirety first (p. 41). translated into Russian, Barran’s Far more confusing is Barran’s comparative textual analysis explains why determination from the opening of Russia this interest occurred. ‘Rousseau’s Reads Rousseau to claim that ‘Rousseau’s separation of sovereignty from the writings do form an internally coherent executive function of government, as well whole that holds together in its larger as his treatment of these topics in separate outlines’ (p. xvi). He then states that: ‘The works’, explains Barran, ‘enabled his reader can contrast this construction to the Russian translators to present only the Russians’ persistent countertendency to work outlining the executive or regard Rousseau as a fragmentary administrative mechanics of government, consciousness who produced a quantity of while keeping Rousseau’s discussion of unrelated and contradictory texts’ (p. xvi). the radically democratic foundations of According Rousseau a coherence, which a civil society in the background’ (p. 37). reading of any of his internally In similar fashion to Natasha’s Dance, contradictory texts would instantly however, Russia Reads Rousseau implode, ensures that a false distinction is provokes questions about the validity of set up immediately to allow for ‘tension’ its form: in this case, comparative between Russia and Rousseau. An literature. The problem emerges from the argument based upon Russian reaction to an essentially consistent Rousseauvian identity allows for some odd readings, Tom Cain (ed.), The Poetry of Mildmay especially of the politics of confession. Fane, Second Earl of Westmoreland, Barran traces a Russian tradition of Manchester: Manchester University mistrust of a Rousseauvian confessional Press, 2001. Pp. 384. £75. ISBN discourse that slyly manipulates readers. 0719059844. Such a statement is contingent upon an interpretation of a work which was less The poetry of Mildmay Fane is not than subtle in its hints of its author’s unknown to scholars of the seventeenth ability to control an audience. Suggestions century, albeit mainly those concentrating that later nineteenth-century Russian on the civil war period. His collection writers, Dostoevsky, for example, then Otia Sacra (1648) is an important volume ‘lay bare the device’ are only successful if of devotional and loyalist verse, and he is one considers naïvely, as Barran a key figure in the collection and propounds, that Rousseau believed transmission of manuscripts and books wholeheartedly in the innocence of the during the war years. He also wrote confessional enterprise. The desire of several plays that are currently in the protagonists to confess in late nineteenth- British Library. What this volume collects, century Russian literature is more than and the reason it should be celebrated, is apparent and need only be illustrated by the huge amount of manuscript verse Crime and Punishment and, more written by this fascinating and important particularly, Tolstoy’s final novel figure. Some of Fane’s manuscript verse Resurrection (the latter not mentioned by has been long available in his ‘Fugitive Barran). Poetry’ collection in the Houghton Natasha’s Dance and Russia Reads Library, Harvard. However, much of his Rousseau do make important strides in the work was sold in 1887 and 1893 by rarely discussed field of Russian literature various earls of Westmoreland, and found and culture in a Romantic, European its way to Fulbeck Hall in Lincolnshire context, but neither is without problems. and the Northamptonshire Record Office. Both Barran and Figes attempt to Tom Cain has printed the material from highlight Russia’s literary and cultural these three hitherto unknown manuscripts, heritages, but in doing so, occasionally and has thus added another 300 or so become caught up in the very complexity poems to Fane’s canon. In the process, of that legacy. Barran sums this up Cain makes his case for Fane being towards the close of his text, when he accorded prestige and status as an discusses how he has ‘somewhat important figure; or at least one artificially presented the Russian reception warranting much scholarly attention: of Rousseau as a collection of avatars, ‘whatever the quality of the poetry, it personifications of Russian readings of his almost always takes the modern reader particular texts and re-creations of his further into the mentalite of the mid- personality’ (p. 318). It is perhaps this seventeenth century, into contact with the ‘somewhat artificial’ presentation that contingent detail of everyday experience, affects both Natasha’s Dance and Russia than does that of more ambitious writers’ Reads Rousseau, the sense of how, as (p. 3). Figes puts it, ‘we expect the Russians to Cain’s volume is part of a series of be “Russian”’ (p. xxxii). A cultural bind editions – Peter Davison’s recent seminal which neither text really escapes. edition of Fanshawe springs to mind – Claire Brock reclaiming relatively unknown poets from University of Warwick the graveyard of manuscript. During the period up to 1660 or so, appearance and circulation in manuscript was as important an interesting voice and offstage if not more so than print. Print was commentary on the 1640s and 1650s. Yet suspected, particularly by Royalists wary Fane’s withdrawal from the fray, his very of increasing literacy and a burgeoning desire not to interact, signals an intent public sphere. The Royalist distrust of which is at odds with most scholarship print is expressed by Dudley, Lord North and the attitudes of most of his who reluctantly submitted to the contemporaries: ‘prostitution of the Presse’ when publishing his Forest of Varieties in 1645. Whilst some delight However, Dudley’s very metaphor betrays In warrs to fight a conception of the text which is corporate And make the Camp their cheefest care and spatial; he fears the physical violation Others there are of his property and the possibility of Shun Discords Jarr misreading. His reasons for publication Soe build their Castles in the ayre are the worries attendant upon writing and (‘Upon the Castle in the Ayer owning textual property in ‘this and Bower of Bliss’, ll. 1-6). plundering age’. Poets desired control of their work (Donne requested that his A find of this magnitude is of great poems be burnt after his death) and importance to those studying this period, suspected the printing press. Furthermore, and Cain is to be applauded for making during the war period several Royalist these poems well usable for the general poets chose to withdraw to a lifetime of student. consideration and otium, or retirement. Jerome de Groot They stepped away from the fray, and University College Dublin returned to scholarly seclusion. Fane was one of these, choosing to write his private poems out of the public arena. We are Morris Eaves (ed.), The Cambridge only just beginning to discover and use the Companion to William Blake. Cambridge caches of work that still lie in manuscript, University Press, 2003. Pp. 302. Hb: £45, and much of this new turn towards ISBN 0521781477. Pb: £15.99, relatively unknown poets is due to the ISBN 0521786770. work of editors such as Cain and Davison. Cain’s scholarship in this volume is first- As for other volumes of the ‘Cambridge rate. The editing and presentation are clear Companions to Literature’ series, the and coherent, the notes unfussy and reader implied by this collection of essays exhaustive. The edition is also nicely is the curious, but uninitiated illustrated, important as it replicates pages undergraduate or graduate student. from manuscript and reiterates the status Approaching the works of William Blake, of these poems as physical entities rather she or he may learn a lot from the practical than reprinted ‘texts’. ‘travel tips’ (p. 15) and useful ‘navigational So is Fane worth reading? Certainly, the aides’ (p. 252) supplied by Morris Eaves new poems present a poet full of variety and his team of collaborators. Moreover, and technical ability. We get some earlier even the seasoned Blake scholar will find poems from the 1620s and 1630s that are here an up-to-date and well-informed vade- of a standard generic type. Much recent mecum of current scholarly trends which interest in Fane has been for his can be put to good use in the classroom, consideration of contemporary events, and and can also serve the purpose of a handy there are more poems on the war and his work of reference. For most parts, the reaction to it – the long poem ‘The Times Companion to Blake can be described as a Steerage’ is particularly insightful. His is custom-built and far-ranging introduction to the poet’s works in manuscript, entries, and an even shorter gazetteer of conventional typography and illuminated Blake collections. Much printing space printing; it is both reasonably detailed in its might have been saved, and the discussions of specific works and generous reduplication of information and the in its contextualisation of the poet’s proliferation of citation styles may have achievements. Unlike earlier attempts to been avoided, if only the lists for further come to grips with much the same textbook reading here appended to the essays, had agenda, the book under review has not been integrated into Alexander Gourlay’s been pieced together from previously short, yet sensibly arranged ‘Guide’ to the published articles. It started life as a vast literature on the poet-printmaker. (This commission from the publisher, and its would have allowed for a select editor was more or less free not only in the bibliography similar in scope to that in the choice of the subjects to be treated in the 1999 Milton volume of the same series, book’s chapters, but also in bringing which mentions 335 publications.) together and in briefing his team of The purpose of an introductory authors. The resulting publication, guidebook is reflected in the two-part according to its blurb, therefore offers structure employed by Eaves to arrange the ‘readable’ and ‘fresh’ introductions which essays and to make them readable almost ‘identify the key points of departure’ into as if the book was the work of one single the complex world of Blake’s productions author. Summary accounts of ‘Blake’s (see front free endpaper). Early Works’, of the prophetic books up to How did Eaves and his collaborators The Four Zoas, of Milton and of tackle their task? As an introduction, the ‘Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works’ were book is not primarily concerned with solicited from Nelson Hilton, Andrew presenting new approaches to, or novel Lincoln, Mary Lynn Johnson and Robert interpretations of, Blake’s poetry and art, Essick. Their succinct, erudite, and often but with an overview of the poet’s writings enlightening expositions of Blake’s poetic and with a summary of current debates in themes as well as of the stylistic devices Blake criticism. Written for the beginning shaping them, do not, however, take student, things needed to be kept simple, centre-stage. Rather, Eaves decided to that is as simple as Blake’s well-known place the discussion of ‘Blake’s Works’ in ‘difficulties’ would permit. Though one Part II of the book which occupies scarcely encounters different styles and strategies of one third of its pages (pp. 191-271). Before presentation, some more elegant, some allowing the student a more detailed more complex in their reasoning than glimpse of the ‘minute particulars’ of the others, all of the Companion’s chapters works themselves, the editor thought it remain relatively jargon-free and appear mandatory to provide a guided tour through easily accessible. The documentation of the a musée imaginaire of contexts relevant for historical evidence and of the their production as well as for their methodological concepts adhered to by the historical and contemporary reception. authors was reduced to a minimum, and the These chapters are described as printing space assigned to the critical ‘Perspectives’ and figure as Part I of the apparatus that frames the volume’s two Companion. They cannot be categorised as main sections has unfortunately been a sequence of different ‘approaches’ to calculated rather too economically to serve Blake and their respective methodologies; as an antidote. It consists of a meagre rather, they survey his poetry and art from ‘Chronology’ of dates, a sometimes varying distances and from viewpoints courageous (and not always Damonesque) supplied by a variety of contexts. ‘Glossary’ of Blakean terms and The innermost circle is ‘William Blake characters, a reading list of less than 70 and His Circle’. The effect of Aileen Ward’s knowledgeable biographical Ryan investigate Blake’s politics and the outline is affected only by the occasional preeminent role played in their articulation tendency to ‘psychologise’ Blake’s works by religious and ‘enthusiast’ vocabulary as as autobiography. The following chapter well as thinking. Often drawing on the admirably condenses Joseph Viscomi’s same sources, Mee foregrounds the social groundbreaking research into an and political aspirations of London illuminating account of the poet’s peculiar artisans, while Ryan untangles the methods of writing, etching and publishing processes of de- and re-mythologising the his ‘Illuminated Printing[s]’. Susan Bible in Blake’s poetry. Thus having Wolfson’s ‘Blake’s Language in Poetic charted the intellectual milieu of Blake’s Form’ offers a keen and stylishly written times, the Companion’s concluding analysis of the meaning of Blake’s choice ‘Perspective’ provides a hinge between of metre, his use of enjambment, his Part I and the reader’s guide to Blake’s invitation to ‘vertical reading’ or the poetic works in Part II. David Simpson’s ‘Blake use he makes of repetitions. The limitations and Romanticism’ analyses not only the of this essay are due to the author’s limits of periodisation in literary criticism, decision not to provide a genuinely ‘fresh’ its effects of inclusion and of exclusion, but introduction to Blake’s poetics, but to reuse also shows how Blake has been represented a 1996 publication devoted exclusively to according to various competing concepts of Poetical Sketches; it is often quoted here ‘Romanticism(s)’ during the past century. verbatim (and without acknowledgment) A more thorough critique of the book’s for page after page. Thus, Wolfson’s contents and of its physical properties perspective on Blake’s poetic form touches (such as the mediocre quality of the only briefly on the mature poetry of the illustrations or the wasteful layout) would 1790s and avoids the discussion of the yield the usual number of minor subsequent epics altogether. David complaints. These, however, would by no Bindman introduces ‘Blake as a Painter’. A means impair the reader’s huge respect for witty and polemical confrontation of art the achievement of Eaves and his and poetry functions as Bindman’s sub-text contributors. Their Companion provides a for a chronological record of the paintings veritable hitch-hiker’s guide to the galaxies of an artist ‘who never doubted that he was that are opening up in Blake’s writings, a the peer of any author’ (p. 85). In ‘The guide which will stand the test of teaching Political Aesthetic of Blake’s Images’, Blake in more than the first decade of the Saree Makdisi addresses the problems new century. posed by the poet-engraver’s ‘composite D. W. Dörrbecker art’ for the process of reading. He asks University of Trier readers to think of Blake’s illuminated poetry as sort of a ‘virtual text’ (p. 111), and to cross-examine it in a comparative Sally Bushell, Wordsworth’s Spots of fashion which has become possible only Time. Lancaster University Television / with the advent of modern reproductive Films for the Humanities and Sciences, technologies, critical catalogues and a web- 2002. 57 mins. VHS £29.99, DVD based Archive. This has been tried – and £35.00. ISBN 0736545549. subjected to severe criticism – before. While such readings lead to politically Stephen Gill (ed.), The Cambridge correct statements, they advertise a method Companion to Wordsworth. Cambridge of reading Blake out of his time. Therefore, University Press, 2003. Pp. 295. Hb: Makdisi’s seems not very wise advice for £45.00, ISBN 0521641160. Pb: £15.95, the historian of literature and of art. In their ISBN 0521646812. contributions, both Jon Mee and Robert How are students to come to a lively students increasingly untrained in reading understanding of Wordsworth, an often handwriting. difficult poet increasingly distant from the The Companion would be more use to perspectives of the new reader? The the reader wishing to develop his or her Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth Wordsworth studies at advanced and Wordsworth’s Spots of Time are both undergraduate level or beyond. Joel Pace’s designed to address this question. The ‘Wordsworth and America: reception and Companion claims to offer ‘students reform’ appears designed for a invaluable reference material’. Inevitably, transatlantic market, but this clear and it raises the question of what a engaging chapter performs the difficult ‘Companion’ is. Like the rest of the series, and universally useful task of establishing this book isn’t one, in the sense of a book the political effect of Wordsworth’s allowing easy reference, often in a poetry. Lucy Newlyn’s ‘“The noble living dictionary style, to individual characters, and the noble dead”: community in The poems, plots, contextual ‘background’ and Prelude’ is more like a conference paper the explication of allusions. Rather, it than an introduction to a set category. It is consists of topic-based essays stimulating but tendentious in its commissioned from ‘established argumentative sleights of hand. The model specialists’ intended to ‘cover all the for the poem is said to be conversion important aspects’ of Wordsworth. The narrative (p. 56), but this proposition is title Wordsworth’s Spots of Time, and then undermined rather than supported. indeed the video format, suggest a much One of the main objections to this more selective approach, though its collection in fact centres on Newlyn’s provenance and the use of ‘leading essay. It is not difficult to argue that the scholars’ to discuss Wordsworth’s texts early Wordsworth was not really a and ‘analyse key concepts in his poetry in Christian, but the claim that an historical context’ demonstrate a ‘Wordsworth’s is a secular vision’ (p. 55) comparable ambition. needs a more thorough and precise Although more restricted in scope, the examination of the evidence than is film has the potential to bring to life the attempted by any of the contributors. Pace landscapes the poet knew and the sounds is in the minority here in seeing of his poetry. Most of the video would suit Wordsworth as important in a religious a general audience or those at the context, yet the debates about him among beginning of Wordsworth study. I gave it his own contemporaries and ours need a test drive on second- and third-year airing. There is no chapter on religion, a undergraduates who had already surprising omission in its own terms and completed an introductory course on in terms of other Cambridge Companions, Romanticism which included the Lyrical such as that on Austen, from whose Ballads, and they found much of the published texts actual spirituality is material already familiar. Its approach and conspicuously absent, whereas one of content are similar to what proves useful Wordsworth’s key words is ‘blessed’. for non-specialist American summer Critics who are themselves the product of school teaching in Britain. Its scholarly a secular age find it all too easy to solidity is most apparent in material hived colonise Wordsworth ideologically, which off into the coda, in which James Butler does not assist ‘the post-Christian, talks about textual variation in urbanized readership’ (p. 3) in overcoming manuscripts, especially those of The a key gap between our time and the poet’s. Ruined Cottage. This develops the As R. E. Brantley observes in frequent shots of manuscripts in the main Wordsworth’s Natural Methodism, they body of the film, an instructive insight for tend to ‘overlook the theological content of the earlier poetry and to be Introductory material includes a triumphantly impatient with it in the later’ chronology and extracts from (pp. 1-2). Wordsworth’s views on imagination. Is the answer, then, to recuperate Other chapters on Wordsworth’s career Wordsworth through eco-criticism? Ralph are Nicola Trott’s instructive contrasts Pite is an understandable choice as the key between ‘radical and reactionary contributor to the book here, whereas Wordsworths’, Kenneth Johnston’s Jonathan Bate handles this question in the discussion of the composition of The film, and, indeed, its main section ends Recluse, and Duncan Wu’s account of the with the debt of modern ecological poetry up to 1798. This last is another of thinkers to Wordsworth. The texts agree the pieces that raises quibbles in the that nature is important not so much for reader’s mind. There are sloppy itself but as a key model for and factor in assumptions about pantheism here, as psychological and social relations. Of the elsewhere in the book. The line ‘From two, the video gives more space to a [s]till small voices heard on every side’ is traditional stress on landscape and the said on page 25 to be ‘pure Wordsworth’ natural world. However, even while it (no input from I Kings xix, then?). On the acknowledges that the poem commonly secular side, soldiers are said to be called ‘Tintern Abbey’ is not about the recruited by press-gangs (p. 29). Susan building, but a spot some miles away, the Wolfson offers some sharp analysis in camera focuses on the abbey. The ‘Wordsworth’s craft’. Companion also fudges issues in this area. The remaining six chapters cover the James Butler repeats the old Marxist poet’s relation to his times. Among them, chestnut that Wordsworth does not write the editor, Stephen Gill, offers an elegant about ‘the industrialisation and grinding and discriminating study of how far poverty around the Abbey’ and says that ‘philosophical aspiration was integral to the speaker in ‘The Daffodils’ is ‘as Wordsworth’s sense of his poetic remote from the natural world as is a vocation’ (p. 143). Nicholas Roe provides cloud’ (p. 51); what sort of cloud would a useful summary of new material on this be? Mainstream conservationists may Wordsworth’s life and politics, arguing, not recognise themselves in Pite’s after David Bromwich, that the staged trial characterisation of them. of French anti-Revolutionaries in 1793, There is a little overlap between the for an assassination that never took place, eminent contributors to the two texts; shaped the way in which Wordsworth James Butler and Keith Hanley feature in connected ‘dread’ and ‘love’. both. Nevertheless, no one buying both The video focuses on the psychological will feel s/he has paid twice for the same complexity of Wordsworth, his humanism thing. In the film, Professor Butler’s and support of the dispossessed, and contribution is marked by a focus on insists on the musicality of his verse. manuscripts and by some sensitive reading Unfortunately, this is less apparent from of some of the poetry, whereas Professor the ‘Wordsworth’ voiceovers. The use of a Hanley develops a challenging if local accent is a brave and appropriate overstated argument that the ‘spots of choice for a poet who rhymes ‘waters’ and time’ are ‘mostly’ or even ‘all’ about ‘chatters’, but the readings are flat, with ‘transgression and guilt’. In the book, they little sense of either meaning or phrasing. offer substantial and detailed bread-and- Visually, too, the choice of sepia for butter chapters on, respectively, scenes from Wordsworth’s boyhood is a Wordsworth’s poetry 1798-1807 and a good idea but actually disappointing. It guide to textual issues and further reading. gives an over-quaint effect, and the frequent focus-pulling is disruptive. A golden opportunity to demonstrate the about individual and collective identity, topographical geometry of the boat- has enriched our understanding of the stealing episode that forms the opening quarrels which erupted in the wake of the sequence is lost, partly by having the French Revolution by highlighting a rower glance behind him all the time complex discursive inheritance which rather than adopting his viewpoint more. helped to define the revolutionary debates, The music is unnecessary. Overall, but which their polarised nature frequently though, the map and location shots eclipsed. Prominent amongst them was the identify places significant to Wordsworth thorny issue of ‘the demon of property’, as within and beyond the Lake District, and Mary Wollstonecraft referred to it (p. resist the temptation of heritage industry 155). A series of recent books such as lushness. Sally Bushell provides April London’s Women and Property in workmanlike and informative links the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and between contributions from five other Miranda Burgess’s British Fiction and the scholars. Production of Social Order 1740-1830 has The film touches accessibly on traced the evolution of debates about substantial issues and although it does not property over the century. Like London excite it bears repetition well. Readers are and Burgess, Wolfram Schmidgen’s more likely to find themselves at issue Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law with this Companion than with some of Property concentrates on changing others on Romantic writers in the series. ideas about the links between property, the Objections range from the trivial and law and competing notions of community, typographical (Kipling’s most famous or what he calls the ‘profound, ongoing poem as ‘It’) to the more serious issues of cultural dialogue about property which recuperation as colonisation discussed was shaping the communal imagination of above. In spite of the real solidity of much eighteenth-century Britain’ (p. 10). of the material, it is thus not so much an Schmidgen’s emphasis is on the indispensable first-choice study guide as a embattled nature of Britain’s communal book to be valued for constant reference to imagination as Britain adapted itself to the individual chapters and discussion points. impact of a commercial revolution that C. M. Jackson-Houlston went far beyond economic issues to Oxford Brookes University broader ethical and epistemological challenges imposed by an often alienating sense of cultural modernity. He focuses on Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth- landed property, not ‘as the curious Century Fiction and the Law of Property. remnant of an older world, but as the most Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. characteristic figure of eighteenth-century 266. £45. ISBN 0521817021. Britain’s long history of objectification’ (p. 8). The manor house offered a vision The current vogue for situating of the unity of property with localised Romanticism at the latter end of the long social relations which, ironically, became eighteenth century has foregrounded the all the more influential on a discursive impact of two very different cultural level as it declined as an empirical reality. phenomena – debates about the politics of The tensions generated by this irony are politeness and the ongoing influence of the main subject of Schmidgen’s book. civic humanism and landed wealth – on Like London and Burgess, he approaches the major preoccupations of the Romantic these broader economic and cultural issues period. Our growing sense of the impact by way of the novel because literature’s of these phenomena, each of which ‘special figurative potential’ enables it to implied a particular nexus of assumptions capture the often fraught nature of these debates (p. 3). His argument advances by Ann Radcliffe’s evocation of ‘Gothic way of a series of highly nuanced and claustrophobia’ exposed and implicitly suggestive readings of particular novels, critiqued the ideological conservatism of from Robinson Crusoe to Waverley, which social codes grounded in the certainties of are illuminated by his careful engagement landed wealth (p. 172). Sir Walter Scott’s with a range of seventeenth- and Waverley, the end point of Schmidgen’s eighteenth-century commentators such as historical narrative, celebrates the Edward Coke, Matthew Hale, William communal vision of the landed estate but Blackstone, Edmund Burke and Adam only by enshrining the idea of it as a kind Smith. Schmidgen’s central text is of ‘museum’ whose attractiveness is Robinson Crusoe, and, in particular, bound up with its practical distance from Crusoe’s ‘secret kind of pleasure’ in the demands of modern Scottish society possessing his island ‘as completely as (p. 211). Inevitably, an historical narrative any lord of a manor in England’ (p. 42). which is simultaneously so ambitious and Rather than read Defoe as an apostle of so tidy risks simplifying the very cultural modernity, articulating the conditions for a complexities which it is Schmidgen’s new credit-driven social order, Schmidgen project to recover. It necessarily leaves out treats him as central example of the pre- as much as it includes in its account of the modern ideological world that was triumph of new forms of personal, eighteenth-century Britain, with its political and national identity. And the inherited notions of social deference and very dexterity of its critical readings custom. The book’s central chapter returns sometimes creates its own questions: can to the novel, this time reading Crusoe’s Robinson Crusoe’s lists of goods really ‘lengthy and detailed lists’ of recovered support the ambitious theoretical argument possessions as evidence of the irrelevance which Schmidgen rests on them? Does the of Marx’s theorisation of the commodity sentimental novel’s predilection for fetish to what, Schmidgen suggests, was intensely private moments really hail the still a mercantile economy free of the triumph of the modern capitalist spirit social abstractions that underpinned over mercantilism’s emphasis on Marx’s equation of commodity fetishism circulation? And can the trope of with the autonomous world of exchange circulation be quite so thoroughly aligned value (p. 107). with mercantilism to begin with? These Having forcefully distanced himself sorts of uncertainties, however, are the from critics such as Michael McKeon who inevitable consequence of a provocative align the rise of the novel with the advent study which addresses some of today’s of ‘modern notions of objectification’, most urgent theoretical and historical Schmidgen goes on to demonstrate the debates by way of insightful literary ways that generic shifts in the novel form analyses. reflected a dawning recognition of the Paul Keen practical irrelevance of this premodern Carleton University, Ontario emphasis on the primacy of landed wealth with its associated mercantile priorities (p. 134). Sentimental novels such as A Robert Mayer (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Journey (1768) and The Man Fiction on Screen. Cambridge of Feeling (1771) privileged concentrated University Press, 2002. Pp. 240. £47.50. moments of private drama, or ‘sentimental ISBN 0521793165. commerce’ as Yorick calls it, which were at odds with ‘the wide landscape’ of Although the fraught question of the mercantilism’s emphasis on the ‘faithfulness’ of a screen adaptation to a productive force of circulation (p. 143). literary text is central to this volume, the collection nevertheless succeeds in (1984) and Rivette’s La Religeuse (1966). advancing a variety of convincing and Focusing upon the interplay of mimesis innovative theoretical alternatives to a and diegesis in Diderot’s Jacques, Le ‘fidelity model’ of criticism which, as Fataliste, arguably its least translatable Mayer’s introduction suggests, has tended feature, Alan J. Singerman analyses to privilege the literary work and to judge Santelli’s innovative use of visual the cinematic adaptation in terms of the narrative techniques to translate the ‘accuracy’ of its translation of the text to metafictional qualities of Diderot’s text the screen. What unites the diverse critical and to query the very status of the film as perspectives of the contributors to this cinematic fiction. The adaptation becomes volume is the understanding that each metacinematic, thus achieving a certain adaptation enacts a reading of the literary fidelity to Diderot whilst at the same time text that has its own cultural specificity interrogating the notion of what ‘fidelity’ and distinct aesthetic consciousness and might mean in the context of the cinematic that cannot be critiqued adequately in adaptation of fictional works. The terms of ‘truthfulness’ to a privileged subversive potency of spectacle, literary original. meanwhile, orients Kevin Jackson’s re- Several of the essays identify the evaluation of Rivette’s controversial importance to film of the spectacle – the adaptation of La Religeuse towards a ‘fetishisation of the image’, as Peter consideration of whether, and why, Cosgrove puts it – as a productive site of cinema might be a medium with such a difference between text and film. capacity to shock that even a relatively Cosgrove’s detailed analysis of the tame treatment of a potentially subversive importance of historical spectacle to subject is likely to attract the censor’s screen adaptations of Fielding contends attention. From this perspective, that film’s necessary prioritisation of the twentieth-century cinema could be seen to image over such textual concerns as emerge as the cultural equivalent of the interiority, subjectivity and ‘story’ eighteenth-century novel in its perceived detaches film adaptations from any capacity to shock, inflame and dislocate responsibility to their source text which its audience and the status of film as the might be theorised in terms of fidelity to site of struggle over meaning, expression textual detail and literary technique. and the public consumption of narratives Invoking visual analogy as the key to raises further vital issues for the critic of successful screen adaptation, Martin C. cinematic adaptations of eighteenth- Battestin’s analysis of Fielding on screen century fictions. stresses also the extent to which reliance The question of censorship in the upon spectacle both constrains and context of film adaptations of texts expands the creative possibilities of considered culturally dangerous in the adaptation. For Cynthia Wall, meanwhile, eighteenth century is radically reworked the cinematic utilisation of movement, by Alan D. Chalmers who contends that space and lighting in the BBC’s cinematic adaptation might in certain adaptation of Clarissa produces a instances enact a fresh censorship of the powerful translation on to screen of literary original. The 1993 television Richardson’s text which remains faithful adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, argues to the novel’s thematic and narrative Chalmers, amounts to an ideological re- concerns even as it re-contextualises and writing of Swift which represents Gulliver reworks them. as an entirely trustworthy, sympathetic The power of the image is central to the upholder of Enlightenment values. In so volume’s two analyses of adaptations of doing, the adaptation robs the text of its Diderot: Santelli’s Jacques, Le Fataliste critical force and could be said to repeat the censorial gestures of earlier cinematic treatment of the ontological generations of critics of Swift. Chalmers’ concerns of eighteenth-century fiction. essay points to the dangers of a Mayer’s volume is a timely intervention complacent disavowal of the notion of into literary and film studies which itself fidelity in film criticism, for what re-visions not only the relation between infidelity amounts to in this adaptation is film and fiction, but also the relation not a liberatory reworking of the original, between early modernity and but a denial of its subversive power. A postmodernity. As Mayer’s own similar point could be drawn from contribution suggests, the very notion of Catherine N. Parke’s interrogation of the ‘post-ness’ – of following on from and effacement from three twentieth-century creatively re-visioning the past – appears adaptations of Moll Flanders of certain central to the process of adapting for a details of the life of Defoe’s protagonist. twentieth-century cinema audience the Whilst they differ markedly in terms of fictions of early modernity. It is central their representations of Moll, each film also to this collection’s creative approach omits certain aspects of Moll’s experience to fiction, film and ‘fidelity criticism’. in a manner which suggests an attempt to Sue Chaplin deproblematise Moll’s gendered Leeds Metropolitan University subjectivity. Parke relates this censoring of Moll’s experience to her status as an invention of the male author/director and John Goodridge (gen. ed.), Simon opens up a space for the Kövesi (ass. gen. ed.) and David Fairer reconceptualisation of Moll from a (advisory ed.), Eighteenth-Century feminist directorial perspective. English Labouring-Class Poets 1700– It is an understanding of cinematic 1800. 3 vols. Vol. I, 1700-1740, ed. adaptation in terms of a creative re- William Christmas; Vol. II, 1740-1780, visioning of eighteenth-century fictions, ed. Bridget Keegan; Vol. III, 1780-1800, rather than a ‘faithful’ translation of them, ed. Tim Burke. London: Pickering and which underscores the majority of Chatto, 2003. Pp. 1288. £275. contributions to this collection. ISBN 1851967583. Representations of eighteenth-century libertinism in Laclos’s Les Liaisons This collection reinvents the ‘specimens’ Dangereuse become the vehicle, in Roger anthology of the romantic era, the three- Vadim’s 1960 adaptation, for a critique of volume chronological arrangement of mid-twentieth sexual and artistic poems from hard-to-find volumes constraints and, in Stephen Frears’ 1988 illustrated by biographical and critical version, for a critical engagement with prefaces. The original anthologies, aspects of 1980s English culture in general organised by period, gender or region, and of Thatcherite ideology in particular. were often goldmines of information and Postmodern concerns with the unstable, did much to establish the canon of minor shifting boundaries of the self are poets. While several writers included here powerfully articulated, Margaret appeared in them, no specimens anthology McCarthy argues, through Wender’s road was devoted specifically to labouring- movie adaptation of Goethe’s Wilhelm class writers. As with those pioneering Meister (Wrong Move, 1974) in a manner forays, the challenge confronting John which pushes to a postmodern extreme Goodridge and his team of editors has Goethe’s vision of the fragile subject of been to identify neglected poems early modernity constantly on the move. representative of their class and of interest Again, McCarthy invokes the importance to contemporary readers, illustrating them of spectacle and spatial metaphor in the with information and anecdote about the writers. The challenge has been met with consciousness, its full development had to all the success that might reasonably be wait until labouring-class poets began hoped for, and a vast new territory opened addressing their peers upon matters of up for critics and literary historians to common concern, which happens only late ponder. An additional three volumes are in in the century. An anthology drawing the works for nineteenth-century poets. more heavily on anonymous ballads, Although labourers had always broadsheets and periodical verse would composed poems it was not until the have a different character. advent of Stephen Duck in the 1730s that The general tone is reflected in the three they began to appear in significant representative figures singled out by the numbers, and of Robert Burns in the editors. In the first volume (1700-1740), 1780s that labouring poetry as such began edited by William Christmas, Stephen to be accorded literary status. The number Duck strives for politeness by learning to of labourers, artisans and servants polish his periods; in the second (1740- publishing verse in the eighteenth century 1780), edited by Bridget Keegan, James runs into the hundreds; while there are Woodhouse strives for taste through fewer to whom biographical particulars access to William Shenstone’s garden and can be attached, the sixty writers collected library, while in the third (1780–1800), here do not exhaust that group by any edited by Tim Burke, Ann Yearsley means. Some were celebrities, others left strives for power by insisting on financial anthology pieces, many were not known independence and control over her texts. beyond a small circle of acquaintances. Labouring writers thus participated in the While they are a diverse lot with respect to broader literary movements of their times, occupation, social background, opinions, though under circumstances peculiar to knowledge, skill and literary ambition, themselves. Many changes, happy or their stories are almost always compelling. tragic, were rung on the personal histories A small core of these poets made their of Duck, Woodhouse and Yearsley. The lives and labours the focus of their verse. highlight of the first volume is the editor’s From this collection we learn that discovery of a whole group of poems labouring-class writers, on the whole, written in emulation of Duck’s were much like everyone else: they were ‘Thresher’s Labour’ (Robert Tatersal is anxious about morality and religion, especially moving). Keegan presents a money, love and status. In style and clutch of cobbler-poets; I share her sentiment their poetry resembles that of enthusiasm for Woodhouse, who of all amateur poets drawn from whatever walk sixty poets seems most in need of serious of life. The ratio of poets to versifiers attention. Burke deserves plaudits for among labouring writers was much the including both sides of the ideological same as in other demographic groups; spectrum: Edward Rushton’s clarion-call while the characteristic failings of to conscience juxtaposed with James autodidact verse are sometimes in Walker’s unabashed defence of the slave evidence (prolixity, formlessness, bland trade (we also discover that Yearsley’s generalisation) these writers are not semi- politics could be as high as her verse was literates. They generally model themselves tumid). on the popular poets of the present and Sound editorial principles have been preceding generation, Pope and Thomson followed, contextual introductions are being particular favourites. Most of the supplied for each volume, and references poems collected here appeared in volumes to names, places and events are destined for patrons, subscribers or thoroughly annotated. The fact that the general readers. While one can observe, canon and history of working-class poetry fitfully at first, the beginnings of class are far from settled has led to occasional dilemmas. One is uneven chronological Duck set an example for others to emulate. distribution: because most of this poetry We need to know more about practices of was published in the final two decades of imitation among autodidacts; what has the century, selections in the first and third been derided as inauthentic may prove the volumes suffer by offering, respectively, authentic basis for a labouring aesthetic too much and too little. Irish poets appear (artisans did work from patterns). The in all three volumes, American poets in ‘specimens’ approach is not very helpful none. No Scottish writers appear in the in this respect: one would not realise that first, in the second they get headnotes but Elizabeth Bentley created a whole oeuvre not poems, while in the third they occupy out of Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, or sense the a prominent place. Some fairly well- breadth and intensity of the labouring- known writers might also have been class response to Gray, Shenstone and included: the pen-cutter Moses Browne Goldsmith. (beginning the natural history series), the What is clear is that labouring poets provincial printer Thomas Gent assembled abundant materials from which (beginning the antiquary series), the later writers could develop their own provincial actor John Cunningham traditions about untutored inspiration, (excellent pastoral ballads), and, in the rural felicity, suffering genius, the dignity later era, William Hamilton Reid (‘The (or indignity) of labour, radical dissent, English Burns’), the Jacobitical Andrew local poetry, folkways, religion and Macdonald, and the Jacobinical John nationality. It has been easier to view the Thelwall. No doubt much had to be left on work of Duck and his early successors the cutting-room floor. The strength of through the lens of nineteenth-century this pioneering anthology is its attention to traditions than to see it on its own terms, individual writers; the biographical which as often as not value civility more research is uniformly impressive, and the than authenticity. With the publication of editors generously reprint prefatory matter this landmark anthology we now have a from the original volumes. much more complex field of poets, poems, In his terse, elegant introduction, John genres, traditions and categories to work Goodridge speaks of labouring-class with, nor is the sequel likely to simplify poetry as a ‘category’ and a ‘tradition’. matters. But the work of interpretation and These are terms worth pondering. In the re-evaluation can now proceed on a firmer eighteenth century, the category-term was empirical basis. not ‘labouring’ but ‘unlettered’. The David Hill Radcliffe distinction matters if we are to grasp the Virginia Tech expectations of poets who saw themselves as persons-on-the-rise and readers who regarded labouring writers as less Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and members of a class than exceptional Legend. John Murray, 2002. Pp. 674. geniuses. Both designations tend to £25. ISBN 071955621X. exclude a significant group of ‘lettered labourers’, poets like Samuel Boyse and Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and John Huddlestone Wynne who wrote for a History. Cambridge University Press, living and were among the poorest of the 2002. Pp. 251. £40. ISBN 0521812410. poor. ‘Tradition’ also raises issues that need to be dealt with. While there was an Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: unbroken sequence of writers, tradition in History, Translation, Nostalgia. Palgrave the sense of an identifiable mode or Macmillan, 2003. Pp. 241. £47.50. manner proves elusive. Allan Ramsay left ISBN 1403904030. a literary school behind him; Stephen Byron: Life and Legend is the third major affairs with women were Byron’s main biography of Byron to have been emotional focus during most of his life, published in eight years. Flagging readers, MacCarthy makes a rod for her own back. however, have been pulverised into For Byron’s affairs with boys seem submission by the formidable publicity mainly to have occurred in his youth, machine which went into action on its except for an unrequited passion for his publication. This juggernaut consisted of page during the Greek revolution. So it is an exhibition and programme of talks at with an obvious effort that MacCarthy the National Portrait Gallery last year, keeps asserting the supposed relevance of curated by its author, Fiona MacCarthy; Byron’s homosexuality to events between the BBC 1 documentary of November his homecoming from his grand tour in 2002 in which she took a prominent part; 1811 and his return to Greece in 1823: in and the glossy two-part mini-series other words, most of his writing life. For starring Jonny Lee Miller broadcast in example, after describing the ‘infidelity’ Autumn 2003 flagged up by numerous or freethinking of the biblical play Cain titillating trailers. Jane Tranter, BBC being denounced from the pulpits, Controller of Drama Commissioning, MacCarthy makes the perplexing defined the aim of the latter as ‘to explore observation: ‘The accusations of sodomy what it meant to be a sex-god aristo’, and are not far from the surface’ (p. 415). the promotional leaflet for MacCarthy’s When describing the impact of Shelley’s NPG exhibition patronised the public in death on Byron, she must drag in Oscar equal measure by making a spurious link Wilde’s bizarre speculation that the poets’ between the Regency ‘superstar’ Lord relationship had cooled because Byron Byron dying in the Greek revolution and had tried to seduce his friend, even while the iconic status of Che Guevara in the conceding how unconvincing this idea 1960s. The BBC chose to intersperse was (p. 429). talking-head academics in its documentary MacCarthy makes much of the fact that with clips from daft biopics of yesteryear, she has not worked under the restrictions to somewhat surreal effect. imposed on Leslie Marchand by Sir John All this force-feeding of Byron-lite is a Murray, then head of the publishing firm, little nauseating especially when it comes who would not countenance ‘any plain from an intelligent biographer such as statements drawn from the evidence in MacCarthy. She is much too good a writer those matters’ (p. xii) of sex in and researcher not to have produced a Marchand’s classic three-volume Life of perfectly decent book, of course, but those 1957. For John Murray have attracted to it by the cynically commissioned MacCarthy’s biography, sensationalist advertising will be sadly opened their archives to her and in the disappointed for they will learn nothing twenty-first century not only countenance new about Byron’s sex life. Despite the facts but presumably welcome an MacCarthy’s claims to originality in emphasis on sexuality. In this their last foregrounding the poet’s attraction to flagship production before the family boys, Byron’s bisexuality has actually business, founded in 1768, was bought up been in the public domain for thirty years. by Hodder Headline in May 2003, Murray It was documented in Leslie Marchand’s perhaps wanted to make amends by 1973 edition of the letters; discussed in erasing the memory of the prurience Doris Langley Moore’s Lord Byron: which had led the firm to prioritise the Accounts Rendered (1974); and was the protection of its own respectability over subject of a scholarly monograph by Louis respect for Byron’s wishes by burning his Crompton in 1985. By taking issue with memoirs in the grate at Albemarle Street. Doris Langley Moore’s contention that his What would have been more interesting and Robert Gleckner in the 1960s. Jane than the old prurience covered in a Stabler pays particular attention to the sensationalist coating, would have been early verse and to neglected satires such as for MacCarthy to have used the Murray Hints from Horace and The Age of Bronze archive to document the strategy of the in a painstaking study of the tension business partnership between Byron and between literary convention and Murray which produced the publishing digression which informed Byron’s phenomenon unique in English literature poetics throughout his career. Following in which a poem could sell 10,000 copies the lead of critics such as Stuart Curran, on the first day of publication. It would be Susan Wolfson and William Keach, she equally fascinating to have the inside story employs a formalist approach which pays of its dissolution when, to Murray’s historicist attention to the reception of chagrin, Byron had his later works poems in their own day as well as the published by the radical Hunt brothers. reading process as we experience it now. But MacCarthy is not interested in the ‘When a man talks of system, his case writing or the forces behind its production. is hopeless’ remarked Byron, and Stabler She dismisses Byron’s early verse as follows him here, admitting she has no ‘wishy-washy love poems’. She parrots overarching thesis: her commentary patronising clichés left over from the days provides only local, particular insights. of high modernism that his poetry is This does not make for a lively book, but ‘grossly uneven in quality, his thought Stabler’s detailed readings provide processes slipshod’ (p. xiv). It is only as additional support for our growing ‘the man of experience’ who has lived awareness of the constant artistic through terrible excesses, or as the experimentation belied by Byron’s instigator of a fashionable cult, that Byron dilettante pose. Stabler defines digression deserves to be remembered at all. So we broadly: concentrating not on deviations must wait for Andrew Nicholson’s from the plot, but on abrupt transitions, forthcoming edition of John Murray’s instances of ‘feminine’ caprice or mobilité letters to Byron for a fuller understanding in parenthetical asides, and literary of the publishing of Byron. Meanwhile, allusions which make up the fine texture this biography is a sparkling, meticulously of verse calculated to seduce yet unsettle researched account of Lord Byron the the contemporary reader. Her study historical personage. Despite the fact that grounds Byron’s satiric techniques in the we know the story all too well, MacCarthy reconfiguration of the work of Charles still manages to surprise us with Churchill, Matthew Prior and Laurence unexpected details and unusual quotations Sterne, as well as in recurrent attempts to to illuminate the characters amongst adapt Popean heroic couplets to liberal whom he moved. Its partial success serves politics. to remind us what an opportunity has been Chapter five is the most interesting part missed in this mismatch between an able of the book, where Stabler looks at biographer and her slippery subject, who Galignani’s Messenger as a source for has escaped once more from the net while digressions on current affairs in the she was looking the wrong way. English cantos. Her research on his The distance between MacCarthy’s lack newspaper sources and London of interest in Byron’s poetry and the correspondents constitutes new and respectful treatment of it by today’s young convincing evidence for Byron’s up-to- scholars is a measure of the datedness of date knowledge of British politics and much literary biography, in this case adoption of radicalism in the 1820s, lagging over thirty years behind the despite his residence in Italy. Chapter six revaluation instigated by Jerome McGann indicates the importance of Byron’s friendship with the radical Douglas part of the book shows how, from the Kinnaird, in the period when he left outset, Byron was anxious to record the Murray and was distanced from Hobhouse places where his poetry was composed, and Moore by his literary partnership with yet was unwilling to be identified with Leigh Hunt. The book has the distinctly Britain’s imperialists and avaricious un-Byronic but scholarly virtues of being antiquarians. He distanced himself from careful, cautious and unpretentious. classical connoisseurship by his Stephen Cheeke’s more important commitment to the here and now in monograph investigates the trope most caustic notes to orientalist verse tales set central to Byron’s poetry: that of ‘being in the recent past. In Childe Harold’s there’ on the very spot – of a ruin or Pilgrimage he often let the landscape battlefield, for example. The poet’s dictate the poem to him as amanuensis, subjectivity is opened up to the reader rather than using it merely as a mirror of when ecstatically communing with the his own mind. Though viewing ‘the real past. Byron’s ‘spots of time’, like Parnassus’ proved comically Wordsworth’s, could also be re- disappointing, nevertheless it experienced by a tourist in situ. With authenticated Philhellenist desire as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as uniting the ideal with the mundanity of the indispensable to a nineteenth-century real. traveller as a Murray guidebook, access Cheeke notes the Protestant aesthetic was granted to historical experiences values with which Byron and Hobhouse associated with famous places, while scrutinised the battlefields, epitaphs and Byron’s own presence there was memorials of the Napoleonic wars, but no simultaneously recreated. This is to state Catholic peasant could rival Byron’s the obvious, but Cheeke draws on intense fascination for collecting the most contemporary cultural theories which bizarre of relics and souvenirs (especially ground subjectivity in the spatial and the bones of warriors, hair of lovers). This temporal to analyse the palimpsests desire for material authentication of the produced by the poet’s situated fled spirit was intensified by the embodiment. He asserts that Byron’s extinguishing of the French republican poetry neither proclaims Wordsworthian ideal in 1815. The third canto of Childe transcendence of the material nor a Harold turned for inspiration to the pure scepticism oppositional to it, but explores spirit of love inhabiting the environs of the philosophical relation between the Rousseau’s Clarens, while Manfred and materiality of geo-history and the The Prisoner of Chillon explored the mysterious supernatural of the genius loci. consolatory idea of the self-sufficiency of In other words Byron recreates the the mind as its own place free from the religious concept of pilgrimage for the determining forces of situation. modern age, visiting historical sites to Cheeke is especially strong on this imaginatively recreate human heroism and period of Byron’s writing life when he to ponder its survival into the present. was exploring the concept of nationhood Cheeke’s approach is to examine the and the meaning of exile in the fourth poetry together with the life, and, while canto of Childe Harold and The Lament of his book contains no startling Tasso. He applies to Byron the seriousness revaluations, it provides solid detailed scholars usually reserve for Wordsworth evidence of a linked preoccupation with in tracing the poet’s philosophy of the the inspiration of place and the meaning of spirit of place. Byron adopted an almost exile throughout the poet’s career. bardic role in memorialising national Influenced by Nigel Leask’s fine analysis cultures and mystically communing with of Byron’s anxieties of empire, the first the spirits of the dead. Cheeke gives a refreshing emphasis on the quasi-religious immensely heartening in that they see no nature of the earlier poetry which enthused need to justify treating Byron seriously as Byron’s original readership, and is now a major poet, and so busy are they often neglected in favour of the scepticism analysing his poetics and philosophy of the ottava rima burlesques. respectively that they have no time to The second half of the book is less spare for his celebrity or his sex-life. convincing. Though Cheeke achieves Caroline Franklin coherence by following through the theme University of Wales, Swansea of place in tracing Byron’s ambivalent acculturation in Italian society, and his ‘pathology of nostalgia’ in the English cantos of Don Juan, he thereby produces a backward-looking poet fixated on English Whiggism of the 1790s. This was indeed the period in which the story of Norman Abbey was set, but, as Stabler’s research has demonstrated, Byron made sure his narrator’s topical references were up to date despite his own pose of having ‘gone native’. Cheeke gives the preface to cantos six to eight as his prime example of Byron’s ‘datedness’. But Byron composed this just when the leading radical journalist of the day had arrived from London to help him set up his own journal. Leigh Hunt was hardly out of touch. By alluding to the ‘wretched infidel’ Richard Carlile, languishing in Dorchester gaol for six years for selling The Age of Reason (admittedly a 1790s text!), Byron’s preface acknowledged that the publication of Don Juan by the Hunts instead of John Murray was a significant moment in the campaign for reform. For it signalled that the Romantic poet was making common cause with the radical propagandists in the campaign for freedom of speech. This soft-pedalling of Byron’s increasing radicalism is perhaps a misguided attempt to make him seem more Wordsworthian. More disturbing is the Britain-centred insularity of approach which results in a monograph on the meaning of place having no reference in the index to Herder, no consideration of sturm und drang and German Romanticism. Nevertheless, both Stabler and Cheeke have produced intelligent well-written monographs which are