Worlds Trodden and Untrodden: Political Disillusionment, Literary Displacement, and the Conflicted Publicity of British Romanticism
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ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: WORLDS TRODDEN AND UNTRODDEN: POLITICAL DISILLUSIONMENT, LITERARY DISPLACEMENT, AND THE CONFLICTED PUBLICITY OF BRITISH ROMANTICISM Joseph E. Byrne, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Neil Fraistat, Department of English This study focuses on four first-generation British Romantic writers and their misadventures in the highly-politicized public sphere of the 1790s, which was riven by class conflict and media war. I argue that as a result of their negative experiences with publicity, these writers—William Wordsworth, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Blake—recoiled from the pressures of public engagement and developed in reaction a depoliticized aesthetic program aligned with various forms of privacy. However, a “spectral” form of publicity haunts the subsequent works of these writers, which troubles and complicates the traditional identification of Romanticism with privacy. All were forced, in different ways, to negotiate the discursive space between privacy and publicity, and this effort inflected their ideas concerning literature. Thus, in sociological terms, British Romantic literature emerged not from the private sphere but rather from the inchoate space between privacy and publicity. My understanding of both privacy and publicity is informed by Jürgen Habermas’s well-known model of the British public sphere in the eighteenth century. However, I broaden the discussion to include other models of publicity, such as those elaborated by feminist and Marxist critics. In my discussion of class conflict in late- eighteenth-century Britain, I make use of the tools of class analysis, hegemony theory, and ideology critique, as used by new historicist literary critics. To explain media war in the 1790s, I utilize the media theory of Raymond Williams, particularly his conception of media as “material social practice.” All the writers in this study were profoundly engaged in the class conflict, media war, and politicized publicity of the British 1790s. They were similar in that they were negatively impacted by these phenomena, but different in their responses, depending on their discrete experiences and concerns. The various results were new conceptions of sensibility and the Gothic, new attitudes towards solitude and obscurity, all eventually incorporated into a new kind of literature now called “Romantic.” WORLDS TRODDEN AND UNTRODDEN: POLITICAL DISILLUSIONMENT, LITERARY DISPLACEMENT, AND THE CONFLICTED PUBLICITY OF BRITISH ROMANTICISM By Joseph E. Byrne Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Advisory Committee: Professor Neil Fraistat, Chair Professor Orrin N. C. Wang Professor Laura Rosenthal Professor Vincent Carretta © Copyright Joseph E. Byrne 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 2: William Wordsworth, Vexed Publicity, and Reclusion………….…. 27 Chapter 3: Embattled Publicity in the Gothic Novels of William Godwin ……. 68 Chapter 4: “Unsex’d” Sensibility and Publicity in the Polemical Works of Mary Wollstonecraft …………………………………….. 113 Chapter 5: William Blake, Antinomian Publicity, and the Tactics of Obscurity ……………………………………………. 169 Works Cited: ………………………………………………………………………. 220 i Chapter 1: Introduction In the fall of 1808, the young Thomas De Quincey moved into Dove Cottage in Grasmere, in the English Lake District. The former occupants—his idol William Wordsworth and William’s sister, Dorothy—were then domiciled nearby, at a nearly- completed mansion called Allan Bank. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another of De Quincey’s literary heroes, was a regular house-guest at Allan Bank. De Quincey’s reading of Lyrical Ballads, which was to him “an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds teeming with power and beauty as yet unsuspected amongst men,” enticed him to idyll where Wordsworth had been born and raised (19). Like Coleridge, De Quincey was drawn to the picturesque vistas and solitude of the Lake District, and to the domestic happiness shared by the Wordsworths. Reflecting on it after the fact, De Quincey wondered at the obscurity of his idols, their alienation from literary society, and plotted to bring them the attention they deserved. De Quincey claims he “paid an oriental homage” to Wordsworth, “at a time when the finger of scorn was pointed at Mr. W. from every journal in the land” (129). By the time his tenancy at Dove Cottage ended some seven years later, De Quincey was barely on speaking terms with Wordsworth and Coleridge. When De Quincey wrote about this period in his life, in the 1830s for Tait’s Magazine, his bitterness curdled his grudging admiration. He did indeed bring the poets the attention he thought they deserved, and most of it was negative. De Quincey depicted Coleridge as a serial plagiarist, opium addict, and book thief; Wordsworth he exposed as a blinkered and pompous windbag who was not to be gainsaid—a man who not only ruled his own roost 1 but also stuck his beak in the domestic affairs of others. De Quincey’s own struggle with opium and his affair with a local farmer’s daughter, while living at Dove Cottage, no doubt played a part in his tense relationship with the Wordsworths: De Quincey had dared to sully the sacred solitude that they had sedulously cultivated during their own seven years at Dove Cottage. In his articles for Tait’s, De Quincey demolished the romantic myth of Dove Cottage, showing that the new worlds of Wordsworth and Coleridge were in fact well-trodden, even run-down. De Quincey insinuated that in their precious rustic solitude the poets of Lyrical Ballads were as self-important, as petty, as contentious as any of the city dwellers they disdained in their writings. By making public the compromised privacy of the poets, De Quincey earned their enmity. But for De Quincey, such publicity acted as a necessary corrective to an idealized, “romanticized” privacy that ensnared admirers like himself. De Quincey’s sardonic and cynical take on the Lake poets anticipates many of the critical treatments of first-generation Romantic writers issued in the past thirty years, such as those of the new historicists. These critics have been as eager as De Quincey to dispel the myths of British Romanticism, particularly as they relate to privacy. They assail the Romantic idea that true art demands the rejection of the public sphere, and a retreat to the private sphere, ideally located in rustic environs, where the poet suffers the martyrdom of obscurity for the sake of enlightened posterity. New historicists argue that this myth obscures the once-radical politics of prominent Romantic writers. They point out, for instance, that William Wordsworth contributed to the French Revolution controversy with political poems, penned a republican pamphlet, and likely edited a radical magazine; and that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a notoriously radical lecturer 2 and preacher in Bristol and edited an anti-government magazine. New historicists aver that Mary Wollstonecraft courted public controversy with her two vindications, which advocated republicanism and gender equality in education; and that William Godwin, with a pamphlet, saved radicals from the noose and wrote a best-selling anarchist treatise that suggested that public debate might replace government. They assert that William Blake wore the revolutionary cockade and authored illuminated prophecies that addressed the burning political topics of the day. In the more recent new historicist studies of these Romantic writers, this early commitment to public discourse is privileged and praised, then typically compared and contrasted with a later retreat to privacy, to the disadvantage of privacy, which many of these critics equate with political quietism or outright apostasy. In this study, I continue this program of de-romanticization, while at the same time troubling the strict distinction between political publicity and apolitical privacy, which usually accompanies such a critique. I map the public activities and writings of the first-generation British writers listed above, arguing that each had a vexed relationship with the public sphere in the period following the French Revolution. More specifically I show how these writers became enthusiasts for publicity in the early 1790s but, after encountering class conflict and media war in the public sphere, became disillusioned with public debate and retreated to a private sphere associated with seclusion, domesticity and imaginative writing. Their anxieties about publicity remained, however, and these are 1 represented in their writings by what I call “spectral publics.” These spectral publics 1 In this study, the term “publicity” will refer to activity within the public sphere. With Andrew Franta, I distinguish publicity from the public sphere itself, seeing the public sphere as “a realm of action or reflection,” and publicity, by contrast, as “a set of practices or mode of action…as a process rather than a space” (2). 3 imply resistance to publicity, but also the continued, albeit ambivalent, engagement of these writers with the public sphere. I also consider the distinctive factors that made the experiences of each of these Romantic writers unique vis-à-vis publicity. All of them were forced, in different ways, to negotiate the discursive space between privacy and publicity. Indeed my study shows that, in sociological terms, British Romanticism