Romantic Value and the Literary Marketplace: Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley and Landon in the Keepsake, 1829
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ROMANTIC VALUE AND THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE: WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, SHELLEY AND LANDON IN THE KEEPSAKE, 1829 by Laila Mary Ferreira B.A. (Hons.), Simon Fraser University, 2000 M.A., Simon Fraser University, 2002 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2010 © Laila Mary Ferreira, 2010 Abstract “Romantic Value and the Literary Marketplace: Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley and Landon in the Keepsake, 1829” is an investigation of mediations of value in the Romantic literary marketplace. I focus on the Keepsake (1828‐1855), the most commercially successful and longest running of the nineteenth‐century gift‐books and annuals. I approach the annual as embodying the flux and intersection of traditional, commercial and aesthetic ideas of value at a time when, according to some, they were well on their way to being established as separate categories. I look in particular at the writings five now canonical Romantic era writers published in the Keepsake: William Wordsworth’s five poems; Walter Scott’s five prose pieces and one play; Mary Shelley’s fifteen short stories as well the original pieces that she contributed on behalf of Percy Shelley; and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s twelve poems and two short stories. I look at why each writer was drawn, often several times and over many years to the Keepsake as a publication venue. My overall thesis is that these writers engaged with the Keepsake’s refinements of the annual form as an intervention into new forms of virtual sociability made available in the literary marketplace. The literal and virtual exchanges of emotion and sensation facilitated by the Keepsake allowed readers to vicariously experience a variety of values as they were embodied within the Keepsake’s stories, poems and art and by the form of the Keepsake itself. This experience provided the raw materials for writers’ reassessment of definitions and practices of value. I trace how these four writers used the Keepsake to mediate ii their experiments with aesthetics and commerce, reading and writing in the production of ideas of value that could be mobilized into the future. That the Keepsake offers multiple case studies of Romantic value as a dynamic idea in a state of flux opens interpretive possibilities for a rethinking of how value was understood and practiced in the era, including how ideas of value and forms of writing and print inflected one another. iii Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................................ ii Table Of Contents.................................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements..................................................................................................................................................v Dedication .................................................................................................................................................................vii Introduction The Keepsake, Virtual Sociability and Value................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One Pleasure and Choice: Wordsworth in the Keepsake................................................................................29 Chapter Two Sensory Exchange and Debt in Scott's Keepsake Stories.......................................................................53 Chapter Three Mary Shelley and a Collaborative Literary Practice.............................................................................101 Chapter Four City Space and the Literary Marketplace: Literalized Value in Landon's Urban Poetics......................................................................................................................................................................142 Epilogue...................................................................................................................................................................170 Notes.........................................................................................................................................................................177 Bibliography..........................................................................................................................................................193 iv Acknowledgements It is a pleasure for me to acknowledge all of the people who have supported and encouraged me over the years I have worked on this project. I would first like to thank my supervisory committee: My supervisor Professor Miranda Burgess, who I first emailed with a string of ideas in early 2002 and who, on the basis of that string, agreed to support my application to UBC. Since then, Professor Burgess’s commitment to me and to this project has been a constant source of inspiration. Her extraordinary intellectual and critical generosity can be found in all of the best ideas and moves of this dissertation; Professor Alex Dick, whose scholarship and critical insight has deepened and strengthened my own; and Professor Margaret Linley from Simon Fraser University who first introduced me to the literary annuals and to the theories of media and technology that inspired this project. I am truly grateful for my committee’s time and effort. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff of the English Department who have helped me to overcome the different challenges, big and small, that I have encountered over the years. In particular, Professor Mary Chapman has been an invaluable source of advice and support throughout my time at UBC. For financial support I thank the UBC English Department and the Social Sciences and Humanities and Research Counsel of Canada. v Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my family and friends (you know who you are) who provided me with the emotional, intellectual and moral support I needed to complete this project. I especially thank my parents Jane Degnan and Fernando Ferreira, for believing in me and sacrificing their own time and resources to see me succeed, and to my sons Max and Kai, whose young lives have been shaped by this project and who have so lovingly and patiently shared their mom with a stack of musty books and a computer. vi Dedication To my grandmother (“nanny”) Lilian Rosina Degnan vii Introduction: The Keepsake, Virtual Sociability and Value The following study focuses on the Keepsake literary annual, the most commercially successful and longest running of the nineteenth‐century gift‐books and annuals. My reading of the Keepsake is one that approaches the annual as a Romantic object—that is, I suggest, as an object that reflected a range of ideas around value, some radically experimental, in circulation at the time of the Keepsake’s production. According to my reading, the individual stories and poems in the Keepsake as well as the volumes as a whole were sites in which writers and readers could explore the possibilities and limitations of traditional notions of value (including property) and new commercial ones struggling to find purchase. I argue that the Keepsake embodied the flux and intersection of traditional, commercial and aesthetic ideas of value at a time when, according to some, they were well on their way to being established as separate categories. The organizing claim of this dissertation is that in the Keepsake categories such as economic or imaginative, commercial or Romantic were not those used to define value or distinguish between forms of writing. There is evidence, and I will bring this evidence forward in the following four chapters, that the distinction that was being experimented with and deployed to distinguish between literary writing and other forms of writing was literature’s power as a form of value making and communication that was the result of its unique interactions with readers. I suggest that this power included literature’s blending of the imagination and commerce and generating of what I call the Keepsake’s virtual sociability. 1 I look in particular at the contributed poems, essays and short stories of five now canonical writers—William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley (P.B.S), Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL)—to the Keepsake: Wordsworth’s “The Triad,” “The Country Girl,” “The Wishing‐Gate” and two sonnets (1829); P.B.S’s posthumously published “On Love,” and “Fragments” (1929); the fifteen short stories of Mary Shelley (1828‐1839); Scott’s five prose pieces and one play (1829‐1832); and the twelve poems and two short stories of LEL (1829‐1836).1 Each chapter takes up the question of why one of these major writers was drawn, often several times and over a sustained period of time, to the Keepsake as a publication venue. I examine each writer’s contributions to the Keepsake in context with the words and actions of the annual’s editors as well as the annual’s ambiguity not only as a form but a measure of literary value in itself. I argue that writers and their readers engaged with the Keepsake’s refinements of the annual form as an intervention into new forms of feeling and modes of action made available in the cultural marketplace.2 As readers encountered the Keepsake, and as they responded to the encouragement to personal response they found there, they also