Romanticism and the Letter Edited by Madeleine Callaghan · Anthony Howe Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT, ROMANTICISM AND CULTURES OF PRINT

Series Editors Anne K. Mellor Department of English University of California Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

Clifford Siskin Department of English New York University New York, NY, USA Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print features work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries – whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it combines efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersec- tions of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series enables a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity. Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK; John Bender, Stanford University, USA; Alan Bewell, University of Toronto, Canada; Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge, UK; Robert Miles, University of Victoria, Canada; Claudia Johnson, Princeton University, USA; Saree Makdisi, UCLA, USA; Felicity A Nussbaum, UCLA, USA; Mary Poovey, New York University, USA; Janet Todd, University of Cambridge, UK.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14588 Madeleine Callaghan • Anthony Howe Editors Romanticism and the Letter Editors Madeleine Callaghan Anthony Howe University of Sheffield Birmingham City University Sheffield, UK Birmingham, UK

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print ISBN 978-3-030-29309-3 ISBN 978-3-030-29310-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Michael O’Neill (1953–2018) Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the contributors for their patience and general excellence, and Ben Doyle, Shaun Vigil, and Millie Davies at Palgrave for their support. We also would like to thank the anonymous reader, who offered a number of helpful suggestions. Anthony Howe would like to thank his colleagues at Birmingham City University for their help and support. Madeleine Callaghan is grateful to many people for their encouragement, help, and stimulating conversations, especially to her colleagues and PhD students at the University of Sheffield. We would particularly like to thank the late Michael O’Neill, to whom this book is dedicated, for being an ever brilliant source of inspiration and conversation.

vii Contents

1 Romanticism and the Letter: Introduction 1 Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe

2 Romantic Letter Writing and the Publisher 15 Mary O’Connell

3 The Letter and the Literary Circle: Mary Leadbeater, Melesina Trench, and the Epistolary Salon 29 Stephen C. Behrendt

4 The Disappointment of Wordsworth’s Letters 45 Oliver Clarkson

5 Two Wordsworths: Mountain-climbing, Letter-writing 61 Susan J. Wolfson

6 ‘Hare and Hound’: Ends and Means in Coleridge’s Letters 83 Gregory Leadbetter

7 The ‘Entire Man of Letters’?: Robert Southey, Correspondence and Romantic Incompleteness 99 Lynda Pratt

ix x Contents

8 Charles Lamb and the Rattle of Existence 117 Timothy Webb

9 The Tensions of Jane Austen’s Epistolary Style 133 Joe Bray

10 ‘Transported to your presence’: Leigh Hunt’s Letters to the Shelleys 147 Daniel Westwood

11 ‘Foam is their foundation’: The Poetics of Byron’s Letters 163 Jane Stabler

12 Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the Limits of Letters 183 Madeleine Callaghan

13 ‘The Varied Pauses of His Style’: Shelley’s Letters from Italy 199 Michael O’Neill

14 John Keats’s Epistolary Intimacy 219 Andrew Bennett

15 ‘don’t imagine it an a propos des bottes’: Keats, the Letter and the Poem 235 Anthony Howe

16 ‘The house of misery’: Space and Memory in the Later Correspondence and Literature of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 253 Angela Wright

Index 269 Notes on Contributors

Stephen C. Behrendt is University Professor and George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He has published several highly regarded monographs and edited works (alongside numerous articles and chapters), and his most recent book is British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (2009). His current projects involve an edition of Romantic-era Irish women poets and a new interdisciplinary study of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In addition to his scholarly work, he is also a widely published poet whose most recent book is Refractions (2014). Andrew Bennett is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. He has published widely on Romantic literature, including Wordsworth Writing (2007), Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (1999), and Keats, Narrative and Audience (1994); he is also editor of William Wordsworth in Context (2015). His other books include Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace (2017), Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology (2009), and The Author (2005). With Nicholas Royle, he has published An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (5th ed., 2016) and This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (2015). Joe Bray is Professor of Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield and the author of several books on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction, including The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (2003), The Female Reader in the English Novel (2009), and, most recently, The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period (2016)

xi xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS and The Language of Jane Austen (2018). He is also the co-editor of, amongst others, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012). Madeleine Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research specialty is the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. Liverpool University Press published her first monograph, Shelley’s Living Artistry: The Poetry and Drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 2017, and her monograph, The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley (2019), is published by Anthem Press. She has published various articles and chapters on Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, and, with Michael O’Neill, co-authored The Romantic Poetry Handbook (2018). Oliver Clarkson is currently Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford and Balliol College. He has published various articles on Romantic poetry and is finishing a book on Wordsworth for the British Council’s Writers and Their Work series. Anthony Howe’s main research focus is Romantic period poetry, but he has wider interests in literary theory, literary controversies, and the connections between poetry and philosophy. His monograph, Byron and the Forms of Thought, offers a provocative re-reading of Byron’s philosophical thought through an analysis of the poet’s varied use of literary form. He has published a number of essays on the Romantics and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is currently working on a project about letter writing and Romantic poetics. Gregory Leadbetter is a poet and critic. His research focuses on English Romanticism and the traditions to which Romantic poetry and thought relates, and the history and practice of poetry. His book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the University English Book Prize 2012. He has published widely on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, Keats, and Ted Hughes, including recent chapters in the Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (2014), John Keats in Context (2017), and Ted Hughes in Context (2018). His poetry collections include The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016) and the pamphlet The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). He is currently Reader in Literature and Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, where he is Director of the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Mary O’Connell is the author of Byron and John Murray: A Poet and His Publisher (Liverpool University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality (Pickering and Chatto, 2011). In 2012 she was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to the University of St. Andrews and in 2015 won the National University of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she held at University College Cork. She is currently working on a biography of the publisher John Murray. Michael O’Neill (1953–2018) was a Professor of English at Durham University. He is the author of books, chapters, and essays on Shelley, including The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (1989), edited ‘Defence of Poetry’ Fair Copies (1994), and is the co-editor (with Donald H. Reiman) of Fair-Copy Manuscripts of Shelley’s Poems in European and American Libraries (1997). With Zachary Leader, he is the co-editor of Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (2003). He is also the author of Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (1997) and The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, Irish, and American Poetry since 1900 (2007). Oxford University Press published his monograph, Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence: New Relations, in 2019. He is also an award-winning poet; his most recent collections Return of the Gift (2018) and Crash and Burn (2019) are published by Arc. Lynda Pratt Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Nottingham, has published widely on Robert Southey and his circle. She was General Editor of Southey’s Poetical Works, 1793–1810 (2004) and, with Tim Fulford, Later Poetical Works, 1811–38 (2012). Her current major project is the online edition of The Collected Letters of Robert Southey (Romantic Circles, 2009–), of which she is a General Editor. When complete, this will run to 12 parts and comprise over 7500 annotated letters and supporting apparatus. She is also working on an edition of Letters to Robert Southey, co-edited with Ian Packer. Jane Stabler is Professor of Romantic Literature and Head of School at the School of English, University of St Andrews. She is working on the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Lord Byron’s works and is author of Byron, Poetics and History (2002) and The Artistry of Exile (2013). Timothy Webb is a Senior Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus of the University of Bristol, where he was Winterstoke Professor and Head of xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS the Department of English. He has written and lectured widely on Romantic topics (especially Mary and Percy Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Byron, various cities including London and Rome, Latin heritage, and Romantic Hellenism) and on Irish topics (especially Joyce and Yeats). His two-volume annotated edition of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography is now with Oxford University Press. For many years, he has had a particular interest in letters and has written separately on the correspondence of Percy Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Leigh Hunt; less completely focused treatments have engaged with Mary Shelley, John Hunt, and the Romantic verse letter. Work in progress includes the second volume of Shelley’s prose (with Michael O’Neill and others), The Book of Stones, and an investigation of English Romantic writers and Ireland. Daniel Westwood is a Teaching Associate in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He completed his AHRC-funded PhD on Romantic poetry and quest at the University of Sheffield in 2017 and has published articles on Byron and Shelley in The Byron Journal and The Wordsworth Circle, respectively. He is currently working on a book on movement and teleology in Romantic poetry. Susan J. Wolfson Professor of English at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of Romantic Shades and Shadows (2018), Reading John Keats (2015), The Annotated Northanger Abbey (2014), The Annotated Frankenstein (2012, with Ronald Levao), Romantic Interactions: Social Being & the Turns of Literary Action (2010), and Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (2006). She has edited letters by Romantic-era writers, most extensively and founda- tionally for Felicia Hemans: Poems, Letters, Reception Materials (2009), and with innovations for John Keats: A Longman Cultural Edition (2007). Her first essay on letter writing was ‘Epistolary Poetics: Keats’s Letters’, Romanticism Past and Present (1982). Angela Wright is Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. A former co-President of the International Gothic Association, she has published widely on the relationships between Gothic and Romantic Literature. Her publications include Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013 & 2015), Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (with Dale Townshend, Cambridge University Press, 2014 & 2016), and NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Dale Townshend, 2015). Her most recent book is Mary Shelley (University of Wales Press, 2018). Her current projects include the Leverhulme-funded Fostering Romanticism and the co-editing of a three-volume Cambridge History of the Gothic. CHAPTER 1

Romanticism and the Letter: Introduction

Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe

The period 1700 to 1918, write Frank and Anita Kermode, is ‘the great age of letter-writing’.1 It is also three distinctive periods of letter writing, the first of which, the eighteenth century, has often been singled out for its literary superiority. Masters of the form such as Walpole, Chesterfield, Gray, and Pope have been widely praised for their elegance of style and cultured familiarity of address. The letter was leisured, fine writing and, in more than one case, the line between private correspondence and published work is blurred, deliberately or otherwise. The nineteenth century, so the story goes, was too fast to sustain such excellence and ushered in a decline in literary letter writing that technology would eventually render absolute. Thus Richard Garnett, editing a late Victorian selection of Shelley’s letters, commends the ‘familiar ease’ of the eighteenth-century

1 Frank and Anita Kermode, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xxiii.

M. Callaghan (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Howe Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 1 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_1 2 M. CALLAGHAN AND A. HOWE letter as the acme of the form’s ‘literary value’ while regretting that in his own century letter writing is no longer ‘an art among men of culture’ but has become the ‘earnest practical thing which it had always been among men of business’.2 This apparent falling off is mirrored in the generic composition of published writings, with epistolary literature declining in popularity as the nineteenth century proceeded.3 Epistolary communication, as we approach the British Romantic period, was in a state of bustle and progress, largely determined by the need for faster communications during the alarums of a French invasion. Thomas De Quincey recalled these, for him, profoundly exciting changes, in his nostalgic final contribution to Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘The English Mail–Coach, Or the Glory of Motion’ (1849):

SOME twenty or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr Palmer, M. P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our planet, the Earth, however cheap they may happen to be held by the eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke.4

Although John Palmer did not marry the daughter of a Duke, he did, approximately twenty years before De Quincey’s arrival at Oxford in 1803, usher in what Howard Robinson calls a ‘new era in postal services’, one that would last half a century until rail would bring another revolution in epistolary communication.5 For the authors considered in the following pages, however, Palmer’s revolution was immediately transformative. His new mail coaches were lighter, faster, and more secure than the crawling, highwayman-ravaged stagecoaches they replaced. They benefitted from better, increasingly ‘macadamized’ roads, regular changes of high-quality horses, and, unlike the creaking stagecoaches, stopped only for official

2 Select Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Richard Garnett (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co, 1882), pp. vii–viii. 3 The decline of the epistolary novel as we enter the Romantic period is evident and well documented. On the decline of the verse epistle from its eighteenth-century heights, see Bill Overton, The Eighteenth-Century British Verse Epistle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 4 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2013), p. 173. 5 Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), p. 126. 1 ROMANTICISM AND THE LETTER: INTRODUCTION 3 postal business.6 ‘It’s felony to stop the mail’, De Quincey exulted: ‘Look at those turnpike gates; with what deferential hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our approach!’.7 In 1780, the journey from London to Sheffield took twenty-six hours; twenty years earlier the same journey had taken four days.8 Such ‘velocity’ was ‘at that time unprecedented’ and captivated the daredevil while terrifying the timid.9 If the young De Quincey was spellbound, then for Wordsworth, the ‘fierce career’ of coach travel summarized the relentlessness of modernity while encouraging and enabling the tourism of surfaces he so despised.10 Although, with its ‘natural pace of ten miles an hour’,11 the mail coach’s role as vehicle of the sublime may be hard to imagine for the twenty-first- century traveller, its effects were radical. The idea of the Romantic writer as isolated genius has been thoroughly challenged by recent scholarship, partly through an increased recognition and understanding of close literary and social groupings, such as those centring on Leigh Hunt and the publisher Joseph Johnson.12 Often, such coteries were urban in nature and dependent upon regular and reliable correspondence. If London-based writers were brought closer to Bristol, the Lake District, and other important Romantic locales by the mail coach, they were particularly well served in their correspondence with each other. The Romantic-period Londoner, using the established and efficient ‘Penny Post’ (which rose in price significantly through the period) when

6 Coleridge’s flitting between Bristol and London around the turn of the century was aided by the fact that John McAdam, the Scottish road-building pioneer, moved to Bristol in 1802. Bristol was still a major port and, thanks to McAdam, its mail coach to London ran on some of the best roads in the country. 7 De Quincey, p. 178. 8 See Robinson, pp. 58–63 and also Susan E. Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 53–58. 9 De Quincey, p. 173. 10 ‘Alice Fell; or, Poverty’, 1. Quoted from William Wordsworth: The Major Works, Including The Prelude, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 241. 11 De Quincey, p. 194. 12 See Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 4 M. CALLAGHAN AND A. HOWE corresponding with other Londoners, might receive a reply to a letter delivered before 10 am the same day by the evening post, something today’s Londoner could not expect. If London-based writers could exchange their work and ideas rapidly, those reliant on piecemeal international modes of communication were not so lucky. Letters could take weeks, even months, to reach their destination and, especially during times of war, might not be delivered at all (ships carrying post were enemy targets and, if attacked, might jettison letters and other non-essentials to increase their chance of escape). Coleridge lost scores of manuscripts abandoned at sea en route from Malta to England. Byron was relentlessly baffled in his attempts to communicate with England from abroad. His letters often advertise a precariousness that also shapes them. ‘I shall scribble no further’, he writes to John Cam Hobhouse:

I believe the best way is to write frequently and briefly—both on account of weight—& the chance of letters reaching their destination—you must forgive repetitions (as uncertainty induces them) and amongst others the repetition of my being Very much & ever yrs. Byron.13

Although an admirer of the great, elegant letter writers of the previous century, Byron’s circumstances, for much of his life, did not favour epistolary craft. The rough-edged, dashing aspect of Byron’s letters, which later readers have found so appealing, speaks of real life in ways published works cannot easily recreate. If international mail was unpredictable, it was also, in a period of revolutionary war and domestic political reaction, prone to suspicion. ‘Jacobin’ ideas were seen everywhere and closely monitored by a jumpy British government. The link with letter writing was very clear. The London Corresponding Society (formed 1792) was perceived as a major threat. Its leaders were arrested for treason in 1794, in the wake of the Traitorous Correspondence Bill of the previous year. The government attempted to present Society members as an armed body of Jacobin insurgents and the latter were accused, without credible evidence, of more than one plot to

13 Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1980–94), V, p. 79. 1 ROMANTICISM AND THE LETTER: INTRODUCTION 5 assassinate the king. Personal letters were also intercepted and monitored by government agents, a fate which befell more than one of the writers considered in these essays. Shelley’s correspondence with Elizabeth Hitchener, a young woman with whom he exchanged radical views, was brought to the attention of Francis Freeling (Palmer’s successor), who was concerned enough to forward the matter to the Earl of Chichester, the Postmaster general.14 Letter-based works by anti-establishment writers such as Helen Maria Williams’s Letters Written in France (1790) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) only confirmed the connection in conservative minds. The demise of the epistolary novel in the Romantic period had as much to do with politics as it did changing literary trends.15 The decline of epistolary literature as we enter the Romantic period seems clear enough, but it was from a very high height and it was not absolute. Scott and Austen may not rely upon the letter to the extent that Richardson did, but their novels are full of letters and depend upon their readers’ understanding of epistolary culture. To take just one example: whole chapters of Scott’s Guy Mannering are letters—written by Julia Mannering—a calculated ploy that does a great deal to shape the reader’s understanding of that character. The period’s great poets are not great epistolary poets as Dryden and Pope were, but Coleridge’s achievement as a poet, to name one, remains strongly wedded to the traditions of epistolary verse.16 Many writers of the period were voluminous correspondents and even those who were not fond of letter writing (notably Wordsworth) were immersed in the habits and tacit comprehensions of epistolary culture. Authors were highly sensitized to nuances of address and to the letter’s complex play between public and private.17 They knew

14 See Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 191. 15 See Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 12 and passim. Also, Mary Jacobus, ‘Intimate Connections: Scandalous Memoirs and Epistolary Indiscretion’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 274–89. 16 If Overton is right that ‘for Coleridge, as for most other Romantic poets, the conventions of the verse epistle as it had been practised during the eighteenth century no longer carried any weight’ (p. 29), then it is because new conventions were emerging rather than because the epistolary mode was dead. 17 There is no clear distinction to be made in the period between private (letters) and public (published) writing. ‘Personal’ letters were widely shared among social groupings and often 6 M. CALLAGHAN AND A. HOWE the various strands of epistolary tradition and were adept in deploying, as Janet Gurkin Altman puts it, the ‘letter’s formal properties to create meaning’.18 This ingrained comprehension of the letter’s complexity was shared by the period’s readers. Readers of literary periodicals, in particular, would likely share the political and cultural inclinations of authors associated with those publications, a situation in which the epistolary mode takes on an extra significance in implying a broad, but not unlim- ited, intellectual collective. This is nowhere more evident than in the pages of The Monthly Magazine, first edited by John Aikin, the physician-belle lettrist, friend of Joseph Johnson, and author of the Letters from a father to his son, on various topics, relative to literature and the conduct of life (1794). The Monthly published, among others, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (Aikin’s sister), William Blake, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb. Barbauld’s ‘To Mr Coleridge’, which appeared in the Monthly in April 1799, includes elements of the open letter and advice letter, and draws upon, while critiquing, the imagery of Sensibility. Barbauld, who notoriously rejected ‘The Ancient Mariner’ as improbable and amoral, warns the young poet away from the ‘maze of metaphysic lore’ in which she fears he is becoming lost.19 Coleridge attracted advice and listened to some advisors more than others. One he did listen to was Charles Lamb, who suggested, in a letter to his old schoolfriend of November 1796, that he should, as a poet, ‘Cultivate simplicity […] or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness’.20 Lamb was epistolary to the core of his achievement. The Elia essays—for which he is now most celebrated—often draw from and develop ideas first dashed off in letters. Much of Lamb’s poetry, too, is epistolary, and strongly marked by a genius for address. ‘To the Poet Cowper’, which was published in the Monthly in December 1796, begins: ‘Cowper, I thank my written accordingly. Byron, for instance, knew that his letters to John Murray from Italy (as well as being read by the Austrian authorities) were read out to the cronies who assembled in the drawing room of Albemarle Street. For an intelligent discussion of this issue, see Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 3–6. 18 Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1982), p. 4. 19 Quoted from Romanticism: an Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th ed. (London: Blackwell, 2012), p. 46 (l. 34). 20 The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols (London: Cornell University Press, 1975–78), I, pp. 60–61. 1 ROMANTICISM AND THE LETTER: INTRODUCTION 7

God, that though art heal’d. / Thine was the sorest malady of all’.21 The unadorned directness rings entirely true and manages, in different ways, to play down and highlight the fact that we are reading a sonnet, that most formal of literary forms. The voice is powerful on a sliding scale, depending on the reader’s familiarity with the author and the addressee. Readers may have known that Lamb is referring to Cowper’s struggles with madness. Some will have known the deep and terrible source of Lamb’s especial sympathy, his sister Mary’s repeated bouts of lunacy, the first of which ended in scarcely believable matricide (Charles also suffered with mental illness throughout his adult life). The sonnet was originally written into a letter to Coleridge, of 5 July 1796, alongside another poem, titled ‘To Sara and Her Samuel’, a verse letter (within a letter) of complaint—at fate or the way of things—relating to Lamb’s inability to find time to visit his friends. When published in the Monthly later in the year (December’s issue), the personal signature remains, but that beautifully inclusive and familiar title becomes the mundane ‘Lines addressed, from London, to Sara and S.T.C. at Bristol, in the Summer of 1796’. Lamb’s writing, at its best, always has strong roots in personal correspondence, and it often loses out as it is moved further away from this context. This has not always helped his reputation, but it does offer a good example of how heavily the period’s literary achievement could depend upon transitions between private and public discourse—and the several shades between. Despite its historical and aesthetic richness, the epistolary culture of the Romantic period has been, on the whole, a minor concern of Romantic period studies, especially as an object of involved literary criticism.22 Books dedicated to the subject are scarce, and have tended to avoid canonical authors, with gender an especial focus. Favret’s valuable monograph focuses on female authors and the political, and often disruptive and dis- reputable, implications of letter writing in the period. Altman focuses on the epistolary novel rather than on the letter per se, although her attention to the significance and literary possibilities of the letter offers suggestive

21 The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London, 1903–05), IV. p. 16. 22 The exception is Keats, for whom there is a small but significant mass of critical work devoted to the letters. This tends to grow out of the tradition, started by Eliot and Auden, of thinking the letters equal to, if not better than, the poems in terms of literary excellence. See T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 100 and W. H. Auden, ‘Keats in his Letters’, The Partisan Review, 18 (November/ December 1951). 8 M. CALLAGHAN AND A. HOWE parallels to the scope of this collection. Jonathan Ellis’s collection Letter Writing Among the Poets takes a cross-period view of literary letter writing, of the ‘closeness of letter writing to poetry’ and the ‘ambiguous difference’ between the two, and several of that fine volume’s insights are recognized and developed here.23 On the whole, however, letters tend be thought of not as the business of literary critics but of biographers.24 Biography, in turn, tends to be held in suspicion by literary critics—as naïve, reductive, or even prurient—and this has helped to maintain a sharp distinction between letters and poems and the methods of interpretation typically applied to each.25 This artificial divide exacerbates the problem by prompting further assumptions about the transparency of letters in the direction of the author’s life. As Kylie Cardell and Jane Haggis note, there is a tendency to think of the letter as ‘a peep-hole through which to glimpse the person behind the creative or political public testimony’.26 Any such idea, however, naively assumes letters to be purely private docu- ments that in some way communicate—rather than distort, create, or develop—‘true’, bedrock human identities. On any level this seems dubi- ous, but doubly so in the case of letters produced by the same minds that have left us highly sophisticated literary works. As Gerard Genette put it: ‘we can use the correspondence of an author (any author)—and this is indeed what specialists do—as a certain kind of statement about the history of each of his works: about its creation, publication, and reception by the public and critics, and about his view of the work at all stages of this history’.27 But what, the question is wisely raised and left hanging, is this

23 Jonathan Ellis, ‘Introduction: “For What Is a Letter?”’, Letter Writing Among the Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 12. 24 To give one example: The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) treats Coleridge’s remarkable range of writings in great detail across its thirty-seven chapters. Yet, despite Coleridge being an aston- ishing and voluminous correspondent, there is no chapter dedicated to letters. 25 See Arthur Bradley and Alan Rawes, ‘Introduction: Romanticizing Biography’, in Romantic Biography, ed. Arthur Bradley and Alan Rawes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. xi (pp. xi–xvii) and Hugh Haughton, ‘Just Letters: Corresponding Poets’, Letter Writing Among the Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 57–78. 26 Kylie Cardell and Jane Haggis ‘Contemporary Perspectives on Epistolarity’, Life Writing 8.2 (2011), p. 129 (pp. 129–33), https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2011.559731. 27 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 374. 1 ROMANTICISM AND THE LETTER: INTRODUCTION 9

‘certain kind of statement’? The absence of easy answers here, as a form of important resistance, informs the essays collected in this volume. One idea that recurs throughout this collection is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to assert a meaningful distinction between an author’s letters and their literary productions. What is revealed, again and again, is the fascinating dynamic between the two. Reading between letters and the monumentalized literary works from which letters have been, in many cases, severed, reveals originary and powerful human stories that have been overwritten by the narratives of ongoing reception. Several contributors to this volume pay close attention to letters as artistic achievements in their own right. Yet this close interrogation involves more than drawing letters into the generalized category of the literary text. This would be to ignore the cultural and historical specificity of the letter, its distinct possibilities within the long and complex story of human communication. It would also be to overlook the letter’s generic fluidity, a feature of the form that has a particular resonance within Romantic writing. ‘Mixture’, writes Jacques Derrida, ‘is the letter, the epistle, which is not a genre but all genres, literature itself’.28 By encompassing yet evading all genres, the letter, for Derrida, becomes a privileged and also protean mode of literature, one that holds instrumental criticism at bay. Though sometimes domestic, or even banal in their content, letters at their finest stand as aesthetic achievements in their own right, refusing to rest within any pre-determined hierarchy of genres that would quickly and thoughtlessly diminish their significance. This collection places the letter under scrutiny, opening it to new forms of academic study and appraising its generic significance, while paying close attention to how the featured writers turned it to their own unique ends. We are interested in the letter as form, and a form that requires serious critical attention. This collection affirms the intrinsic value of letters as more than a mere supplement or biographical source to the imaginative, philosophical, or journalistic work produced by each writer. They are literary works, but of a specific kind, one that is always raising questions about what a literary work is and can be. They describe human dramas, both incidental and overwhelming, and become a vitally significant mode of thought and feeling in the Romantic age.

28 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. with introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 48. 10 M. CALLAGHAN AND A. HOWE

To treat letters as literary works should not involve forgetting their materiality. Jane Stabler and Susan Wolfson, notably in this regard, quote directly from manuscript sources, noting cancellations and substitutions, while other contributors quote letters from published sources, some using a mixture of the two. These differences remind us that for the Romantic author’s correspondents, the original, material letter would be full of significance that to today’s readers, who are usually limited to transcribed editions, may be lost. The valuable work of research libraries (notably the Houghton Library’s Keats digitizations), however, increasingly offers students an opportunity to pay sustained attention to manuscripts and their fascinating, unique properties, which include intriguing physical traces of the author. There is no single methodology embraced by contributors, with some focusing on close reading, others on historical and cultural context, and others still on theory and questions of epistolarity. But these are emphases rather than mutually exclusive methodologies: writing about letters, in fact, seems to demand that we think about all these things at once. Those who explore in detail the unique characteristics of their subject’s epistolary prose include Michael O’Neill, who skilfully explores the variations of Shelley’s epistolary style, as characterized by a ‘continual swiftness of mind that prompts thought and awakens feeling’. This brings the letters closer to the poems than we often find, but it does not simply blur letters and poems together: O’Neill reveals, also, Shelley’s depth of humanity and insight in the specific form of the letter, his ‘acute sense of the character and needs of the addressee’. A similar but broader perspective is taken by Madeleine Callaghan, who compares the letters of Byron, Shelley, and Keats in the light of each writer’s poetry. Her essay views the three poets’ compositional practices as reflecting upon and extending, in different, and highly complex ways, the concerns of their letters. Callaghan traces the way in which these poets transform their epistolary preoccupations into aesthetic achievements, viewing selected letters as the experimental and experiential ground for some of their finest poetry. Oliver Clarkson’s essay pays similar close attention to the tones and rhythms of Wordsworth’s letters, showing how their verbal tics and habits cross over into a body of poetry that Wordsworth tried, on the whole, to keep separate from his epistolary writing. Clarkson opens with the view, inaugurated by the poet himself, that Wordsworth’s letters were deliberately dull, but finds in this much of interest. Wordsworth’s sense of disappointment, of which his letters are 1 ROMANTICISM AND THE LETTER: INTRODUCTION 11 self-conscious emblems, has, flitting about its flipside, ‘the enduring energies of hope’. Disappointment and hope, we find with Wordsworth’s letters, ‘share the same DNA’. Susan Wolfson’s chapter turns from William to Dorothy, and her light- ness of touch in the letter mode. The chapter begins by comparing The Prelude with Dorothy’s Alfoxden Journal, revealing what is termed the ‘female textual underpresence’ in William’s poetry. In Wolfson’s reading, William’s poetry is always, among many other things, a letter to Dorothy, one in which artistic achievement meets a more intimate form of communication. Attuned to the playfulness as well as the beauties of Dorothy’s letter of 21 October 1818 to Reverend William Johnson, Wolfson shows how Dorothy’s epistolary practice reaches a state of prose poetry. Wolfson emphasizes the communicative as well as the aesthetic nature of Dorothy’s writing, where the shared emotion between the writer and her correspondents is vividly drawn out. Gregory Leadbetter’s essay takes us from the Wordsworths to Coleridge and shows us the deeply literary nature of the latter’s best letters, their finding ends in writerly means. The ‘verbal life’ of the correspondence, Leadbetter demonstrates, ‘refuses to be instrumentalised or subordinate to a purpose separable from their medium’. The letters are ‘constitutive—not merely denotative—of experience’. They comment upon and illuminate Coleridge’s complex thinking about the poetics of prose writing, his sense that impassioned prose is naturally rhythmical and, as such, impossible to distinguish, meaningfully, from verse. Completing the ‘Lake School’ section of the book, Lynda Pratt’s essay asks us to reconsider any preconceived notion of Robert Southey’s career as something ‘complete’, focusing on the evidence for the incompleteness of achievement compared to his literary ambitions. The relatively huge collection of Southey’s surviving letters bears witness to both his prolific sociability, but also reveals his responses to difficulty and loss, notably in letters concerning the death of his son, Herbert, in 1816, and his difficult relationship with John Murray and his associates at the Quarterly Review. Pratt draws attention to the problem of inheriting only a fraction of what an author actually wrote, and how such gaps in correspondences prevent critics from being able to create a full picture of the significance of various correspondents in the life of an author. The social and cultural vitality, as well as the sheer human depth, of Romantic period letter writing come to the fore in Stephen C. Behrendt’s account of the generous epistolary friendship of Melesina Trench and 12 M. CALLAGHAN AND A. HOWE

Mary Leadbeater. For these neglected but illuminating writers epistolary exchange was grounded in generosity, the letters themselves embodying warm gestures of mutual support. As such they chime with Lindsay O’Neill’s sense of exchanging letters as a kind of ‘gift economy’.29 If Trench and Leadbeater use letters to sustain a deep friendship against an unfavourable social backdrop, Leigh Hunt used them to articulate and maintain an entire literary coterie. Daniel Westwood’s essay focuses on one aspect of this, Hunt’s epistolary relationship with P. B. Shelley, revealing the deft intellectual and emotional play of their letters, despite the distances endured—although in some ways enjoyed—by this pair of correspondents. Something like a dance between well-matched partners, their letters push eloquence to its limits, becoming the fluent and fluid gestures of an inward, and outward-looking poetic friendship. Mary O’Connell’s chapter also focuses on epistolary relationships, this time the crucial connection, in the period, between author and bookseller. Moving from Joseph Johnson, the liberal publisher of writers including Priestly, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, to an exploration of John Murray’s dealings with Byron and Austen, and also Shelley’s pragmatic responses to Charles Ollier, O’Connell builds a composite picture of how, in more or less productive ways, the commercial world from which authorship had become forever inseparable, conflicted and negotiated with the highest levels of creative expression. The letter’s capacity for this creative expression is shown in Timothy Webb’s reassessment of Charles Lamb’s epistolary writing. Emphasizing Lamb’s urban perspective against Wordsworth’s nature poetry, Webb considers Lamb as offering a clear intervention into Romantic poetics. Lamb’s letters, Webb demonstrates, are not merely a biographical phenomenon, nor are they pseudo poetry, but represent the possibility of new modes of expression and critical thought. One of the fascinating features of letter writing in the period is how it weaves in and out of other major literary forms. Austen’s novels are full of letters and immersed in epistolary culture, as Joe Bray’s chapter demonstrates. If Austen’s own letters are rarely considered classics, the letter form, within her novels, becomes a sophisticated means of exploring interpersonal nuance. While letter writers are revealed through

29 Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 122–23. 1 ROMANTICISM AND THE LETTER: INTRODUCTION 13 their epistolary style, especially relating to the proximity of letter writing to speech, letter readers reveal themselves, Bray demonstrates, through the emotional fullness, or otherwise, of their responses. Also concerned with crossovers between epistolary practice and the Romantic novel is Angela Wright’s essay on the correspondence of Mary Shelley. As well as being ‘intrigued by the forms and shortcomings of correspondence’, Mary Shelley, Wright demonstrates, writes, in her grieving letters to Maria Gisborne, ‘as much to herself as to her addressee’. The letter becomes a mode of self-analysis but also of self- displacement, a way of interweaving private words with the tradition of the novel. Mary, in writing out her despair for her own purposes, takes on characteristics of her own character Walton and her father’s Caleb Williams. If letters are hosted by other literary forms such as the novel, they can also play host themselves, most frequently to poems. The sheer amount of the period’s poetry that was written into letters, often in different versions to what was eventually published, is remarkable and there has been insuf- ficient consideration of how such acts of hosting can inflect the meanings of particular poems. As Anthony Howe argues, certain forms of hybrid text begin at a hermeneutic disadvantage because of the categories—novel, poem, letter—that are etched so deeply into the critical and, especially, the editorial, consciousness. Some of Keats’s letters do far more than contain the poems written into them; as well as commenting on them directly, the letters become complex critical frameworks in which ideas and images from the poems are thought through, recollected, and tested. Several of Keats’s poems become more vital and relevant works when read atten- tively with reference to the letters with which Keats associated them. The practice of collecting poetry out of letters with little reference to the host text (beyond editors noting a letter’s direct references to hosted poems) has not helped our understanding of the potential complex workings of literary letters. A further obstacle is a lack of stable theoretical frameworks against which to test ideas about what we might (awkwardly) call the poetics of the letter. Several contributors encounter this issue directly or indirectly, and it is considered in some depth, although from different perspectives, by Andrew Bennett and Jane Stabler. Beginning with the large questions that drive literary theory, those relating to the singular nature of the literary work and what it means to read a text as ‘literature’, Bennett turns to the ‘personal letter’ as ‘an almost uniquely difficult case’. Focusing on the letters of Keats, Bennett’s chapter reveals 14 M. CALLAGHAN AND A. HOWE the paradox at the heart of Keats’s epistolary practice, where the letter creates ‘a sense of intimacy that is contingent upon a certain absence’. Given the unstable and plural generic status of the letter—as identified by Derrida—how do we develop new and productive theories of epistolarity? Stabler considers the case of Byron to be productive in this regard. Taking a relatively small body of Byron’s letters and correspondents—associated with the period before he became famous—Stabler considers in detail how Byron’s letters are ‘shaped by the contours of his relationship with living correspondents’ but also how they are the products of ‘self-conscious literary artistry’. Thinking between these aspects of Byron’s complex self- fashioning, Stabler works towards a poetics of Byron’s letters that has significant implications for a wider theoretical consideration of the form. Taken together, the following essays explore Romantic period letter writing as a vital mode of experimentation, in which creativity, critical thinking, and domestic concerns coalesce. Romantic letters possess a communicative power that expresses itself in different ways from writer to writer, and from letter to letter. To rethink the value of letters is to re- evaluate the canon, and as Timothy Webb’s, Stephen Behrendt’s, and Susan Wolfson’s essays in particular reveal, such reconsideration is not only overdue but also urgent. But in every essay in this collection, there is some acknowledgement that the correspondence of Romantic period constitutes a major literary achievement in its own right. CHAPTER 2

Romantic Letter Writing and the Publisher

Mary O’Connell

In his Life of Johnson James Boswell speculates that it is not properly considered ‘through how many hands a book often passes before it comes into those of the reader, or what part of the profit each hand must retain, as a motive for transmitting it to the next’.1 In what is in retrospect a nice one- line justification for the study of book history, Boswell reminds his own readers that a book is a changeable, material object, and that there is more than one person responsible for bringing it into the world. The figure who oversaw this process was typically the bookseller or publisher, and predict- ably one of the most common descriptors of the publisher in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that of a midwife, one whose role it was not to ‘form the child, but help it forth, / And with due care direct the birth: / A necessary art!’.2 In his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson defined the publisher as ‘One who puts out a book into the world’ and the author as ‘The first beginner or mover of any thing; he to whom any thing owes its

1 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Pat Rogers and R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 678. 2 James Fordyce, ‘To Mr. Cadell, Bookseller: An Ode’. Quoted in Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 213.

M. O’Connell (*) University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

© The Author(s) 2020 15 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_2 16 M. O’CONNELL original’. It is hardly surprising that the correspondence between a publisher and an author is often fascinating to read, a record of the communication between the originator of the text and the person responsible for, as Johnson describes it, putting it into the world. The great liberal publisher Joseph Johnson described his job matter-of-factly when he wrote to Elizabeth Hamilton: ‘Authors have nothing to do but to send their manuscript in a legible state to the bookseller; furnishing paper, employing a printer and corrector of the press, advertising, vending, in short, everything else will be his business’.3 Of course, the ‘everything else’ Johnson described was the business of the author too, so we see Jane Austen writing to John Murray to hurry the printers for Emma and Percy Bysshe Shelley urging advertisements for Laon and Cythna in The Times while the publisher Charles Ollier was in two minds about whether to proceed with it at all.4 The many surviving letters between authors and publishers of this period offer us a narrative of the complicated process of publishing, and particularly how Romantic authors dealt with the fact that their works would, in many cases, pass through many hands before finding their readers. How did Romantic authors approach publishers? It was dependent on the status of the author, and the publisher. Many authors aimed high initially, writing to a powerful publisher, and then worked their way down until they found a firm willing to distribute their works. While several authors had good business and personal relationships with their publishers, others had a more fractious association, illustrated by irritable correspondence. The publisher was frequently viewed as the commercial front of authorship and therefore as an antagonistic figure. Alistair McCleery puts it well, reminding us that the publisher was often seen as the ‘enemy rather than as facilitator or collaborator…the pimp associated with the commercialization of art…as obstacle to the unfettered communication of author with reader’.5 Publishers and booksellers were among the most visible symbols of the commercial transformation of the book trade which had taken place in the eighteenth century, and while (with a few exceptions) the majority of authors did not make a great deal of money from

3 Joseph Johnson to Elizabeth Hamilton, 16 January 1807, in The Joseph Johnson Letterbook, ed. John Bugg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 139. 4 Jane Austen to John Murray, 23 November 1815; Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 310. Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: E. P Dutton & Co., 1975), p. 390. 5 Alistair McCleery, ‘The Return of the Publisher to Book History: The Case of Allen Lane’, Book History 5 (2002), p. 161, p. 163. 2 ROMANTIC LETTER WRITING AND THE PUBLISHER 17 writing, it is also worth remembering that publishing was a precarious profession.6 Andrew Millar, who was one of the most important publishers of the eighteenth century, noted that for every book he made a profit on, he lost money on 20.7 Most titles that were published did not go beyond a first edition and the failure of book trade firms was common. It is necessary to consider this context when reading letters between authors and publishers because even allowing for all sorts of differences, in levels of success, social class, or gender, there are certain broad similarities in the motivation of both parties. We can safely assume that every writer corresponding with a publisher wants them to do what is best for their book, and it is a reasonable assumption that every publisher wants their publications to do well. Some publishers were less motivated by profit than others, but every publisher had to make a living. Joseph Johnson was an example of a bookseller who combined business sense with an extraordinary regard for the welfare of his authors. Joseph Johnson is arguably the most important publisher of the late eighteenth century. He published and befriended the likes of William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Maria Edgeworth, William Godwin, Joseph Priestly and Henry Fuseli. He was a liberal publisher and the co-founder of the Analytical Review. If his correspondence had survived intact, it would be a treasure trove for eighteenth- and nineteenth- century scholars. Most of his letters were destroyed, probably by Johnson himself, and he remains to some degree an enigmatic figure, our sense of him largely derived from the impressions of his contemporaries and from his surviving letter book. In her work investigating the extent to which Johnson can safely be considered a truly radical publisher, Helen Braithwaite reminds us that given the climate and the nature of the works he published, it was probably necessary that he ‘preferred to cut a slight, modest and remarkably unobtrusive figure in life’.8 Lamenting the habitual destruction of publishers’ letters and the former reluctance to engage with them, Johnson’s biographer Gerald Tyson wondered if there was a

6 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the term ‘bookseller’ was an all-encompassing term which denoted many different roles within the book trade, often it implied a figure who was responsible for both publishing and sales. The role of the publisher as distinct from the bookseller began to assert itself as the trade expanded. 7 James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 61. 8 Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (UK: Palgrave, 2002), p. xiii. 18 M. O’CONNELL desire to ‘create the impression that literary activity was conducted on Parnassus well away from the confines of a garret, the interior of a library, or the cluttered back room of a bookseller’s shop’.9 Johnson’s premises was in St. Paul’s Churchyard and, as was common practice for booksellers at the time, he would often host dinners there. In a wonderfully vivid description of these occasions, Marilyn Gaull imagines the authors gathering in Johnson’s upstairs dining room to ‘eat boiled cod, veal, vegetables, rice pudding, and wine under the brooding image of Fuseli’s “The Nightmare”’.10 Gaull describes Johnson in this setting as ‘the source of energy that generated ideas, the magnet that drew them together, the catalyst that held them in a single sphere, and the agent of dissemination, of diffusion into what will become intellectual history’.11 In the absence of much of his correspondence and records of his own life, it is partially in the letters addressed to Johnson that we can assess the magnitude of his impact. It would be difficult to find a better example than the letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Claire Tomalin writes that Wollstonecraft’s initial view of Johnson was condescending, as a ‘tradesman and a useful person to know’, although her relationship with him would become one of the most important of her life.12 Wollstonecraft’s association with Johnson began with his publication of her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). At a low point in her life, Johnson gave Wollstonecraft hope. He published her work, employed her to write reviews, gave her a place to stay, and established her in a house of her own. It was an unconventional relationship but one which worked well for both parties. In his memoirs of his wife, William Godwin attributed her prolific output during her time with Johnson to the security and society provided to her by the publisher: ‘The uninter- rupted habit of composition gave a freedom and firmness to the expression of her sentiments. The society she frequented, nourished her understanding and enlarged her mind’.13 Wollstonecraft’s letters to Johnson display what Godwin described as their ‘intimate friendship’, and

9 Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1979), p. xv. 10 Marilyn Gaull, ‘Joseph Johnson: Literary Alchemist’, European Romantic Review 10.3 (1999), pp. 265–78 (p. 266). 11 Gaull, ‘Joseph Johnson: Literary Alchemist’, p. 271. 12 Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 57. 13 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1798), p. 75. 2 ROMANTIC LETTER WRITING AND THE PUBLISHER 19 often take on the quality of a diary entry.14 Her letters from Ireland particularly reflect on her unhappiness with her situation and she clearly viewed Johnson as someone to whom she could confide her feelings. In December 1786 from Mitchelstown she wrote of the ‘many vexations’ she had to deal with and contemplated that while she had

most of the [n]ative comforts of life—yet when weighed with liberty they are of little value—In a christian sense I am resigned—and contented; but it is with pleasure that I observe my declining health, and cherish the hope that I am hastening to the Land where all these cares will be forgotten.15

From Dublin, her letters were similarly bleak:

I am still an invalid—and begin to believe that I ought never to expect to enjoy health. My mind preys on my body… How can I be reconciled to life, when it is always a painful warfare, and when I am deprived of all the pleasures I relish?—I allude to rational conversations, and domestic affections.16

That Wollstonecraft would feel it was appropriate to write to Johnson in this fashion is testament to her feelings of friendship for him, but emotional letters such as these are typical of several authors who wrote unguarded letters to their publisher. Byron often indulged in this type of correspondence with his publisher, to the disgust of his friends. It is possible a certain level of personal association, tempered by a business relationship allowed authors to write letters that revealed something of their authentic self. Wollstonecraft’s letters to her sister Everina claim that Johnson saved her from misery and that he encouraged her to pursue writing as a profession:

Mr Johnson, whose uncommon kindness, I believe, has saved me from despair, and vexations I shrink back from—and feared to encounter; assures me that if I exert my talents in writing I may support myself in a comfortable way. I am then going to be the first of a new genus—I tremble at the attempt yet if I fail—I only suffer… I must be independent. I wish to introduce you to Mr Johnson—you would respect him; and his sensible conversation

14 Godwin, Memoirs, p. 62. 15 Mary Wollstonecraft to Joseph Johnson, 5 December 1786, The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 96. 16 Wollstonecraft to Johnson, 14 April 1787. Collected Letters, p. 118. 20 M. O’CONNELL

would soon wear away the impression, that a formality—or rather stiffness of manners, first makes to his disadvantage—I am sure you would love him did you know with what tenderness and humanity he has behaved to me… And freedom, even uncertain freedom—is dear.17

To Johnson himself, Wollstonecraft wrote that while she was without a father or a brother, she was grateful to have his support in their place, and thanks to his ‘humane and delicate assistance’ she was spared many obsta- cles and was glad to love him and respect him as a friend.18 Wollstonecraft’s letters to her publisher are important in several ways. Not only are they revealing of her own personal feelings toward Johnson himself, as well as her excitement and anxiety over professional writing, they also help us construct a portrait of Johnson in the absence of his side of the correspondence. It is unfortunately frequently the case with author/ publisher correspondence that the author’s letters are preserved where the publisher’s are not. There are also almost always far more letters written by the author who had one publisher, while the publisher had to deal with several authors. This was a fact which caused problems in more than one association—authors were very quick to point to a publisher’s alleged inactivity. This was particularly true of Byron and John Murray. There are approximately 2500 surviving original letters of Byron’s, and of those, about 500 are to Murray. Over the course of a decade long association, sometimes harmonious, sometimes tumultuous, Murray became one of the most important figures in Byron’s life and the letters to him reflect this. Many of the poet’s most entertaining and revealing letters are addressed to the publisher. In the years of Byron’s greatest success, Murray’s letters to the poet are gleeful reports of astronomical sales figures, full of praise and flattery. Byron’s letters to Murray reveal his ambivalence about his fame and popularity and his thoughts about writing. Read in tandem, the letters between Byron and Murray are a perfect example of how the correspondence between a writer and publisher can reveal their competing sense of a work and of the literary marketplace. The first letter Murray wrote to Byron asked him to make changes to the opening cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage on the basis that Murray felt some of the political sentiments did not reflect the general feeling. The publisher’s reasoning was that in the short term he did not want to be

17 Wollstonecraft to Everina Wollstonecraft, 7 November 1787, Collected Letters, p. 138. 18 Wollstonecraft to Johnson, [undated] 1789, Collected Letters, p. 159. 2 ROMANTIC LETTER WRITING AND THE PUBLISHER 21 deprived of customers, but also that Byron’s long-term reputation deserved the changes: ‘your Fame my Lord demands it—you are raising a Monument that will outlive your present feelings’.19 Byron replied accepting both the need for some changes as well as the compliments. Murray would become increasingly blunt as he asked for changes as the years passed, eventually telling Byron to ‘consider your publisher and be pacified’.20 Byron’s letters to his publisher demonstrate his struggle with his own immense popularity and whether it could be sustained, and whether he even wanted it to be. Murray was so effective in his role as representative of the reading public that Byron became highly dependent on him for news, and even advice—particularly once the poet left England. If Murray delayed in writing to him, Byron would assume that it was because one of his poems was selling badly, and on one occasion asked the publisher outright for his sense of the market:

If you would tell me exactly—(for I know nothing and have no correspondents except on business)—the state of the reception of our late publications & the feelings upon them—without consulting any delicacies—(I am too seasoned to require them) I should know how and in what manner to proceed.21

Murray was a notoriously and sometimes inexplicably indolent letter writer, which put extreme pressure on his literary association with Byron. Byron’s sense of isolation from England is evident in his letters from abroad, and he became so reliant on Murray that one reviewer wondered whether an ‘English nobleman’ was to ‘have no correspondent but his bookseller’.22 Byron was often indulgent with his publisher, for whom he had developed a degree of friendship, however he did not hesitate to remind Murray of his professional obligations:‘[y]ou are not expected to write frequent or long letters—as your time is much occupied…All I desire is two lines to say—such a day I received such a packet—there are now at

19 The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 3. 20 The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, p. 187. 21 Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973–94), V, p. 254; VI, p. 61. Hereafter BLJ. 22 ‘Cambridge Pamphlets’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XI (1822), pp. 740–41. 22 M. O’CONNELL least six unacknowledged.—This is neither kind nor courteous’.23 Eventually, Byron employed the services of his adviser Douglas Kinnaird, to mediate between himself and the publisher, in a role reminiscent of a modern literary agent. The poet’s breaking this news to Murray and explaining the necessity of the arrangement is possibly one of the best letters ever written by an author to a publisher:

To him [Kinnaird] you can state all your mercantile reasons which you might not like to state to me personally—such as ‘heavy season’ [‘]flat public’ ‘don’t go off’—Lordship writes too much—Won’t take advice—declining popularity—deductions for the trade—make very little—generally lose by him—pirated edition—foreign edition—severe criticisms. &c. with other hints and howls for an oration—which I leave Douglas who is an orator to answer.—You can also state them more freely—to a third person—as between you and me they could only produce some smart postscripts which would not adorn our mutual archives.24

Kinnaird, and Byron’s close friend John Cam Hobhouse were irritated by Murray’s habit of reading Byron’s letters aloud to his friends and associates in his premises at Albemarle Street. In their irritation they missed the point that Byron knew Murray’s character and knew the publisher would circulate the news of his letters. The poet’s correspondence with his publisher served several functions, not least as a means of keeping himself a topic of conversation among the Albemarle Street circle. Murray reas- sured Byron that his letters had the desired effect. In Murray’s early career he wrote to a fellow bookseller that his plan of business did not include being a publisher of novels. Despite this, he ended up publishing the later works of one of the most famous English novel- ists of all. Jane Austen (we should not be surprised by this) left us what is possibly the most perceptive description of the publisher in a letter to her sister where she describes him as ‘a Rogue of course, but a civil one’.25 She clearly figured out quite quickly that the best way to deal with Murray was face to face, writing to him that ‘short conversation may perhaps do more than much writing’, true of most dealings with publishers and Murray particularly—her sentiments would be echoed by Byron.26 Because of this,

23 BLJ 7, p. 77. 24 BLJ 8, pp. 186–87. 25 Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 18 October 1815, Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 291. 26 Jane Austen to John Murray, 3 November 1815, Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 307. 2 ROMANTIC LETTER WRITING AND THE PUBLISHER 23 not much correspondence survives between them but what does shows Austen to be thoroughly business-like and able in her dealings with her publisher, once she had the opportunity to deal with him directly. Austen’s dealings with publishers were often mediated through her male relatives. Her father, George Austen, wrote to Thomas Cadell in 1797 offering him the publication of First Impressions, an early version of Pride and Prejudice. Cadell, a major publisher, declined without having seen the manuscript. That George Austen would think of him as publisher for his daughter’s writing is surely evidence of his esteem for her work; Cadell published Frances Burney and Tobias Smollet.27 In later years Austen’s relatives would reflect that the offer to a publisher as eminent as Cadell did not say much for either ‘the tact or courtesy’ of George Austen. It was always highly unlikely that he would agree to publish ‘an unknown’.28Austen’s brother Henry sold the copyright of Susan to Benjamin Crosby in 1803 but it was never published. Austen herself wrote an irate letter to Crosby years later, surmising that they must have lost the manuscript, offering to replace it, but making it clear that she would look elsewhere if needed. Her first published works were brought out by Thomas Egerton before she moved to Murray in 1815. Murray initially dealt with Jane Austen’s brother, Henry. Kathyrn Sutherland has convincingly argued that because Henry was Murray’s banker, it was likely that the choice of Murray’s firm was initially less to do with literary than with business contacts.29 Being too ill to write, Henry dictated a letter in October 1815 where he expressed his gratitude to Murray for ‘the Quantum of [his] commendation’ for Emma which was greater than he had expected.30 He was disappointed, however, by the sum offered by Murray for the copyrights to Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma, informing the publisher that the offer was not equal to what Austen had earned by one edition of Mansfield Park. Austen herself soon took over dealings with Murray. After suggesting they meet to discuss matters in person, she later wrote to voice her dismay with the speed of Murray’s printers: ‘I am so very

27 For a detailed account of Austen and her publishers, see Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Jane Austen’s Dealings with John Murray and His Firm’, The Review of English Studies 64.263 (2013): pp. 105–26. 28 James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 185. 29 Sutherland, ‘Jane Austen’s Dealings with John Murray and His Firm’, p. 108. 30 Henry Austen to John Murray, 15 October 1815, Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 306. 24 M. O’CONNELL much disappointed & vexed by the delays of the printers that I cannot help begging to know whether there is no hope of their being quickened’.31 Austen was happy to defer to Murray’s experience in terms of how Emma should be distributed and was grateful to be corrected by him when she proposed a dedication on the title page, relieved in ‘having a friend to save me from the ill effect of my own blunder’.32 She was not entirely immune to Murray’s flattery, reporting to her sister that in an ‘amusing’ letter, he sent more praise than she had expected. Austen also knew enough to realize that Murray’s asking for the copyrights to Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma for £450 was not a good deal for her. Austen wrote confidently to her publisher and while she accepted his expertise in relation to matters such as the title page etc., she was assertive when she needed to be. Her letters to her publisher show her willingness and ability to engage with the marketplace and to negotiate the commercial elements of her work. Austen’s letters to Murray illustrate that there was never a need for her brother or her father to negotiate for her; she was engaged with the commercial realities of her work and perfectly able to deal with one of the most prominent publishers of the age. Not all writers were as assertive as Austen when writing to their publishers. For radical writers, unless they had the support of a figure such as Joseph Johnson, the dynamic with the publisher was very different. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s biographer, Richard Holmes, notes that the poet was much more self-assured in dealing with publishers on Mary Shelley’s behalf than he was for himself. Writing to secure a good contract for Frankenstein with Lackington, Shelley was firm and unrelenting: ‘You should take the risk of printing and advertising etc. entirely on yourselves, and after full deduction being made from the profits of the work to cover these expenses, that the clear produce, both of the first edition and of every succeeding edition should be divided between you and the author’.33 As Holmes reminds us, Shelley was never able to insist on a similar contract for any of his own works. Virtually all of Shelley’s poetry was published by Charles Ollier. Ollier was a friend of Leigh Hunt and published John Keats’s first book of poetry which did not sell very well, causing Keats to move to a different firm. Ollier had a firm in Bond Street with his

31 Jane Austen to John Murray, 23 November 1815, Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 310. 32 Jane Austen to John Murray, 11 December 1815, Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 318. 33 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press), I, p. 553. Hereafter Letters: PBS. 2 ROMANTIC LETTER WRITING AND THE PUBLISHER 25 brother, James. In December 1817 Ollier agreed to publish Shelley’s Laon and Cythna; or The Revolution of the Golden City. The poem dealt with themes of politics, religion, and incest, and only a few copies were issued. Ollier feared prosecution and insisted that Shelley change the text. Ollier’s printer, Buchanan McMillan, had expressed his fears which the publisher relayed to Shelley. The poet’s reply was bullish and without sympathy for the printer:

That McMillan is an obstinate old dog as troublesome as he is impudent. ’Tis a mercy as the old women say that I got him through the poem at all— Let him print the errata, & say at top if he likes, that it was all the Author’s fault, & that he is as immaculate as the Lamb of God. (Letters: PBS I, p. 571)

Ollier wrote to Shelley to inform him that he had no choice but to discontinue with publication; he told the poet that one of his oldest customers had walked out of his shop in protest that he was the publisher of such a work. Shelley was not impressed; however his reply is measured, and, as Holmes suggests, the letter very possibly reflects the result of discussions about the matter with Mary Shelley and with Thomas Love Peacock:

Assume the high and the secure ground of courage. The people who visit your shop, and the wretched bigot who gave his worthless custom to some other bookseller, are not the public. The public respect talent, and a large proportion of them are already undeceived with regard to the prejudices which my book attacks. You would lose some customers, but you would gain others. Your trade would be diverted into channels more consistent with your principles.

Shelley quite rightly reminds Ollier that ‘You foresaw, you foreknew, all that these people would say’ (Letters: PBS I, pp. 579–80). Ollier’s reply implied that he only wished Shelley to change a few lines, which surprised the poet.34 Shelley invited him to his house in Marlow and the changes were completed in two days. Shelley told his friends that the only alterations were to obscure the relationship of the protagonists, whereas in fact over 63 lines in total were altered, and the majority were taken out because of their references to religion, republicanism, and atheism.35 Ollier had got his way. Shelley did

34 Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, p. 391. 35 Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, p. 391. 26 M. O’CONNELL not have the luxury of being intransigent when it came to Ollier’s demands. As he later wrote to Leigh Hunt regarding the publisher:

As to Ollier—I am afraid his demerits are very heavy—they must have been so before you could have perceived them…I am afraid that I to a certain degree am in his power; there being no other bookseller, upon whom I can depend for publishing any of my works; though if by chance they should become popular, he would be as tame as a lamb. And in fact they are all rogues…perhaps we ought to regard an honest bookseller, or an honest seller of anything else in the present state of human affairs as a kind of Jesus Christ. (Letters: PBS II, p. 191)

Shelley’s assessment of Ollier is reminiscent of a lament by Samuel Johnson where he surmised that with ‘all our scholastic ignorance of mankind, we are still too knowing to expect that the booksellers will erect themselves into patrons, and buy and sell under the influence of a disinterested zeal for the promotion of learning’.36 The notion of the publisher as a vehicle for the dissemination of works, without commercial considerations, without deference to the public taste, and without suggestions for alterations was an idealized one, as Shelley knew. The poet was right of course to reason that if his works sold in high numbers then his publisher would be easier to deal with, but it is unlikely that Ollier would have risked a term of imprisonment. Shelley’s letters to his publisher illustrate the ways in which a poet who struggled with sales and popularity negotiated the fact that he needed to engage with the realities of bookselling, and the public. The letters of Romantic writers to their publishers often grapple with the reality that a publisher’s job was not to read for himself, but to read for other people. The decisions made by publishers directly impacted the success of a book; when to publish, what format to publish in, how much to charge for it, how to advertise it. In deciding what to publish, publishers assumed an authority, acting as ‘cultural middlemen… occupying the space between authors and their publics’.37 As the figure closest to the public, it is unsurprising that many of the letters from writers to publishers explore their feelings on the process of writing, and of what writing should be. John Keats’s letters to his publisher John Taylor illustrate this. Keats’s letters are frank about the struggles he faced:

36 Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 678. 37 Raven, The Business of Books, p. 197. 2 ROMANTIC LETTER WRITING AND THE PUBLISHER 27

the other day I found my Brain so overwrought that I had neither Rhyme nor reason in it—so was obliged to give up for a few days—I hope soon to be able to resume my Work—I have endeavoured to do so once or twice but to no Purpose—instead of Poetry I have a swimming in my head—And feel all the effects of a Mental Debauch—lowness of Spirits—anxiety to go on without the Power to do so which does not at all tend to my ultimate Progression.38

Keats’s letters to Taylor often fall into meditations on poetry; he famously wrote to the publisher on 27 February 1818 that ‘if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’.39 Keats frequently likened popularity with the reading public to love from a woman, writing to Taylor that ‘they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence’.40 Keats initially published with Charles Ollier, and moved to Taylor when he blamed the publisher for the poor sales of his first volume of poetry. Correspondence with a publisher from a Romantic writer rarely escapes the dynamic articulated by William Hazlitt, the belief that ‘to be well spoken of, [the writer] must enlist under some standard; he must belong to some coterie. He must get the espirit de corps on his side; he must have literary bail in readiness’.41 The suspicion that a powerful publisher protected authors and ensured popularity was common, if not entirely accurate. The correspondence of the Romantic writers with their publishers, looking at how they addressed them and what their concerns were tells us much about the ways these writers reacted to the increasing commercialization of literature. Lucy Newlyn states that the ‘defensive nature of Romanticism’s sacralisation of the author—and, more particularly, the poet—may be seen as arising reactively, out of a resistance to the consumerism and anonymity which characterized the publishing world’.42 The correspondence of authors and publishers is key to understanding this process.

38 John Keats to John Taylor and James Hessey, 16 May 1817; Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Jon Mee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 17. 39 Selected Letters of John Keats, p. 66. 40 Selected Letters of John Keats, p. 261. 41 The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), VI, p. 189. 42 Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 14. CHAPTER 3

The Letter and the Literary Circle: Mary Leadbeater, Melesina Trench, and the Epistolary Salon

Stephen C. Behrendt

Letters and the Epistolary Salon As ‘a central part of everyday life in eighteenth-century Britain’, letters were fundamental markers of free speech and the free circulation of ideas, whether about business, politics, religion, the arts, or quotidian details of human existence—as well as a formal literary genre.1 To explore the quarter century following 1800, in which women’s correspondence has received proportionally less attention than that of the previous century, I examine here the correspondence of the rural Irish Quaker Mary Leadbeater (née Shackleton; 1758–1826) and the urban Irish writer

1 Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 1. According to Paul Magnuson, between 1700 and 1800 more than twenty-one thousand publications included “letter” in their titles. Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), p. 37.

S. C. Behrendt (*) University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 29 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_3 30 S. C. BEHRENDT

Melesina Chenevix (later Trench; 1768–1827),2 which formed the nexus of a paradigmatic epistolary salon that approximated the social dynamic of more familiar eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons. In doing so, I draw upon social networking models propounded especially by Charles Kadushin, and upon Lewis Hyde’s studies of gift culture.3 Melanie Bigold sees eighteenth-century women’s epistolary exchanges as ‘concentrated efforts to perpetuate classical constructs of civic friendship and, particularly, humanistic ideals of intellectual reciprocity’ within increasingly empowered relationships.4 The familiar letter had evolved into a more public document typically intended for sharing: its authors now considered letters as a genre, as Leadbeater’s and Trench’s exchanges about the published letters of Elizabeth Carter, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Anna Seward demonstrate. According to Susan Staves, eighteenth-century Bluestockings ranged comfortably across nominally extra-literary genres like travel writing, autobiography, memoir, and correspondence.5 By century’s end correspondence fuelled social and political empowerment among an actual and an implied (virtual) community of readers. Paul John Eakin’s observation about the era’s autobiographical writing applies equally to letters: ‘the self is defined by—and lives in terms of—its relations with others’.6 Correspondence is both interpersonal and intertextual as it participates in overlapping communities of discourse. Among community-defined social networks Kadushin identifies as foundational the ‘symmetric’ relationship: two participants engage in bi- directional transactions, and when affection (‘liking’) is established, gift exchanges often follow, since ‘[f]lows and exchanges are very important in

2 I have discussed their letters as collaborative life writing in ‘“There Is No Second Crop of Summer Flowers’: Melesina Trench and Mary Leadbeater in Correspondence’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 52.2 (2016), pp. 130–43. 3 See especially Charles Kadushin, Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) and Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1983); see also Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations ([1922]; rpt. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955). 4 Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, and Elizabeth Carter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 11, p. 16. 5 Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), p. 304. 6 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010), p. 43. 3 THE LETTER AND THE LITERARY CIRCLE: MARY LEADBEATER, MELESINA… 31 network theory’.7 Significantly, as Lewis Hyde observes, ‘the gift must always move’: while other forms of property may ‘stand still, … mark a boundary or resist momentum, … the gift keeps going’. The gift is trans- formational in action and effect, inducing gratitude, and ‘the end of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. The gifted become one with their gifts’, establishing ‘a feeling-bond’ among donors and recipients.8 Liz Stanley writes:

In the epistolary form of gift exchange, what is circulated are the letters sent and replied to, but, more particularly, it involves the circulation and symbolic gifting of relationships—the reciprocity of correspondences. There is the gift of the letter itself, but more importantly, there is what it metonymi- cally stands for and symbolizes about the ongoing social bond between letter-giver and addressee-receiver.9

This social bond—the ‘gifting of relationships’—expands exponentially as letters are shared with others beyond the primary participants: rings of acquaintance radiate from the ‘centres’ formed by each of the primary correspondents,10 mediated through the agency of correspondence. Leadbeater’s and Trench’s symmetric relationship comprised two vari- ously overlapping circles (or extended communities) centred in themselves, an ‘open-system network’ characterized by flexible and non-restrictive boundaries that permit other, less intimately engaged members to share in the principal correspondence without actually contributing directly to it.11 When in 1810 Richard and Maria Edgeworth helped Leadbeater publish her Cottage Dialogues with their London publisher Joseph Johnson, the

7 Kadushin, p. 15. 8 Hyde, p. 4, pp. 55–56. 9 Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolary Gift, the Editorial Third-Party, Counter-Epistolaria: Rethinking the Epistolarium’, Life Writing 8.2 (2011): 135–52; 140. 10 An alternative scheme based upon Georg Simmel’s work represents these social networks as constellations, with major fixed points (representing the principal correspondents) connected by lines to one another and to some but not all subsidiary, lesser points, some of which are themselves interconnected. See Georg Simmel, Soziologie, Berlin, 1908 and Peter M. Blau and Joseph E. Schwartz, Crosscutting Social Circles: Testing a Macrostructural Theory of Intergroup Relations (Orlando: Academic P, 1984). A recent application of this model is Deborah and Steven Heller, ‘A Copernican Shift; or, Remapping the Bluestocking Heavens’, Bluestockings Now! The Evolution of a Social Role, ed. Deborah Heller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 17–54. 11 Kadushin, p. 17. 32 S. C. BEHRENDT friends exchanged numerous letters about the negotiations; Trench correctly understood that the Edgeworths’ association would benefit Leadbeater and she wanted to help as much as possible. Although Trench did not participate personally in these transactions, she also appreciated the Dialogues’ potential for engaging influential gentry in philanthropic activities like those she herself advocated. For Hyde, such multiple agency elevates a gift relationship from simple ‘reciprocal’ (two-partner) giving to ‘circular’ giving, in which the gift is always ‘beyond the control of the personal ego’ so that ‘each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith’.12 The ‘gift’ need not be anything physical but may be the implied interpersonal relationship for which the letter is itself both symbol and vehicle. Lindsay O’Neill observes of ‘the gift economy’ that ‘gifts augmented the social power of letters and letters added a new layer of complexity to the way gift giving operated. … Letters gave the gift of connection; they showed remembrance and could be revisited for reassurance’.13 According to Kadushin, any two-partner symmetric network (or dyad), exhibits several characteristics. First is propinquity, or physical proximity, although correspondence mitigates remoteness. The second is homophily, or affinity grounded in shared values or beliefs that also involves process: the participants incrementally recognize how much they share, while perceived differences diminish. Such dialogical relationships grow increasingly intimate because each letter is always ‘half someone else’s’.14 The third characteristic, reciprocity (or mutuality), denotes the absence of significant imbalance in power or authority between the participants.15 Firmly rooted in human psychology, behaviour(s), needs, and social networks are inherently about community. They are rarely without some element of social, political, intellectual, or other activism, whether it identifies and coalesces shared values and beliefs or involves organized resistance to (or subversion of) existing circumstances. These are often two sides of the same coin, activated by a shared conviction of the need for ‘action’ that further reinforces perceived bonds of community. ‘Networks are not only about getting things done’, Kadushin writes, ‘but about “community,”

12 Hyde, p. 16. 13 Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2014), pp. 122–23. 14 M. H. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1990), p. 293. 15 Kadushin, pp. 18–22. 3 THE LETTER AND THE LITERARY CIRCLE: MARY LEADBEATER, MELESINA… 33

“social circles,” and the “social support” one receives from these communities’.16 Bluestocking communities like Montagu’s and Elizabeth Vesey’s offered both a ‘centre’ for discussing options and a ‘vehicle’ for initiating action. Salons meeting in particular physical settings (like Lady Mary’s residences) enjoyed an obvious advantage of propinquity that could more easily nurture homophily and reciprocity than was possible among participants physically remote from one another, although improvements in the postal system, roads and transport were helping. The salon’s infrastructure was metamorphosing, too, reflecting the emergence of more socially, politically, and intellectually activist women. Susanne Schmid emphasizes ‘sociability’ in the efficacy of the early nineteenth-century literary salon, where it expedited ‘a cultural exchange that did not necessarily have the great literary text as its center but rather a chain of communicative acts’.17 Gillian Russell calls ‘sociability’ ‘the practices, behaviours and sites that enabled social interaction that was ori- ented toward the positive goals of pleasure, companionship or the rein- forcement of family, group and professional identities’.18 By the Romantic period, this more expansive sense of ‘sociability’ included also greater and more publicly visible political activism, the homophily and reciprocity of women’s empowering networked relationships facilitating participation in social and political action.19 Schmid notes the importance for Hannah More of ‘correspondent’ tastes, observing that ‘[n]otions of symmetry and equality … were at the very heart of bluestocking social and intellectual companionship’.20 Indeed, the epistolary relationship examined here turns upon an implied companionship mediated through the vehicle of letters; it underscores the social and cultural desirability of sociable intellectual companionship, egalitarian discourse, and non-hierarchical relationships that Leadbeater and Trench practised and advocated among their circles.

16 Kadushin, p. 58. 17 Susanne Schmid, British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 2. 18 Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 9. 19 See Carolyn D. Williams, Angela Escott and Louise Duckling, ‘Introduction’, Woman to Woman: Female Negotiations During the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Carolyn D. Williams, Angela Escott, and Louise Duckling (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2010), pp. 19–45; p. 19, p. 24. 20 Schmid, p. 9. 34 S. C. BEHRENDT

Schmid calls salons ‘both places and non-places’, situated not in any ‘definite space’ but rather somewhere between private and public spaces and characterized by their dual nature as both physical places and discursive transactions. This indeterminate position, coupled with the epistolary form’s flexibility, offered women a place in which dialogue—even argument—might be conducted with little risk of intemperate assertive excesses.21 Margaret Ezell reminds us that because ‘[t]he concept of “public” and “private” literary forms is a comparatively modern construction based on a nineteenth-century commercial literary environment’, regarding letters and diaries as ‘private’ discourse is ‘very much the product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiences’.22 Earlier correspondence presumed the possibility of ‘a frequent, candid exchange between writers who trust each other’ because they belonged to ‘a circle of familiar acquaintances, who shared a common knowledge of literature, history, and … social institutions’ [emphasis added].23 Romantic-era women’s letters typically include their recipients in a multivocal egalitarian community, unlike the hierarchical protocols more typical of male correspondence, evincing greater generosity of mind and of spirit, and greater willingness to share information and insight. Nevertheless, we do well to bear in mind the inherent hazards of all generalizations about personal correspondence in any (and all) historical and cultural periods, given the innumerable demographic, social, cultural, and gender variables such generalizations inevitably entail. In one of Trench’s first letters to Leadbeater following their meeting in Ballitore (while she was still the unmarried widow of Colonel Richard St George) and their exchange of gifts (in the form of samples of each other’s writing), Trench dismissed the seeming disparity in their ranks and circumstances:

It is scarcely necessary for me to add how greatly flattered I am by your remark on the mutual attraction of some minds. As to the “difference of

21 Clare Brant, ‘Varieties of Women’s Writing’, Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 285–305; pp. 295–96. 22 Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), p. 34. 23 Howard Anderson and Irvin Ehrenpreis, ‘The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century: Some Generalizations’, The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Howard Anderson, Philip B. Daghlian, and Irvin Ehrenpreis (Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 1966), pp. 269–82; p. 269, p. 274. 3 THE LETTER AND THE LITERARY CIRCLE: MARY LEADBEATER, MELESINA… 35

personal circumstances” you allude to, it does not exist, for I am unencum- bered by rank or precedence of any kind, and surely your friendship would throw a lustre on the highest. (LP II, p. 144)24

Leadbeater reciprocated warmly, acknowledging ‘the receipt of thy gift, which was handed to me this morning’, and praising Trench’s poems. The flexible boundaries indicated by these two rhetorical gestures foreshadow the flexibility and generosity of the quarter century of epistolary gift- giving documented in their letters.

Mary Leadbeater and Melesina Trench: A Record in Letters Mary Shackleton,25 born and raised in the Quaker village of Ballitore (County Kildare), in 1791 married William Leadbeater, with whom she had six children. She published poetry as early as 1790; her anonymous primer, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth (1794) was followed by Poems by Mary Leadbeater (1808). In 1811 her popular Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry appeared, a project encouraged and assisted by Trench, with whom she had by then become familiar, and by Richard and Maria Edgeworth. Her posthumous Annals of Ballitore (1862) traces the bloody 1798 Rising in Ballitore and its environs.26 At 18, Dublin-born Melesina Chenevix married Colonel Richard St. George,27 who died in Portugal in 1788. With her son, Charles, she trav-

24 Texts are from The Leadbeater Papers: A Selection from the MSS and Correspondence of Mary Leadbeater, ed. Elizabeth Leadbeater, 2 vols (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), hereafter LP; and The Remains of the Late Mrs. Richard Trench, being Selections from her Journals, Letters, and Other Papers. Edited by Her Son, the Dean of Westminster, ed. Richard Chenevix Trench, 2nd ed. (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1862), hereafter Remains. 25 For Leadbeater, see C. J. Hamilton, Notable Irishwomen (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1900), pp. 45–57; Maureen E. Mulvihill, ‘Mary Shackleton Leadbeater’, Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Alexandria: Alexander Street P, 2008), p. 16; The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), p. 639. 26 The Annals comprises the first volume of The Leadbeater Papers. See also Susan B. Egenolf, ‘“Our Fellow Creatures”: Women Narrating Political Violence in the 1798 Irish Rebellion’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 42.2 (2009), pp. 217–34. 27 For information on Trench, see Katherine Kittredge, ‘The Poetry of Melesina Trench: A Growing Skill at Sorrow’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (2005), 36 S. C. BEHRENDT elled in Europe, and socialized in London and cultivated literary friend- ships. In 1803, in Paris, she married Richard Trench, brother of the Irish parliamentarian the Lord 1st Baron Ashtown. Trench was detained in Orléans by French authorities later in 1803 when Napoleon revoked the Peace of Amiens; following his release in 1807, after they had been refused passports for four years, the Trenchs settled in Hampshire. After her Mary Queen of Scots, an Historical Ballad: with Other Poems (1800) came in 1815 her privately printed Campaspe, an Historical Tale; and Other Poems and the conventionally published Ellen: A Ballad,28 and in 1816, her remarkable science fiction poem,Laura’s Dream; or, the Moonlanders. Her poems attracted admirers including Anna Seward and her friends the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’ (Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby) as well as Mary Leadbeater. Leadbeater and Trench met at Leadbeater’s home in April 1802, when Trench visited Ballitore to assist the Irish peasantry residing on her estate at nearby Ballybarney. Leadbeater immediately liked ‘this most charming woman, who afterwards honoured me with her friendship’:

From this period our friendship became confirmed in strong enduring bonds, and we constantly corresponded. She gratified me by employing me on her charitable affairs, and I paid visits to her tenants at Ballybarney, who declared themselves happy and thriving since she took them under her own care, and their prayers for her and their praise of her were freely poured forth. (LP I, p. 288)

Leadbeater’s activities as Trench’s agent generated ‘a constant correspondence’29 and a communal ‘female negotiation’ that ‘supported philanthropic work or inspired literary achievement’30 like that of More, pp. 201–13, 201; ‘Melesina Chenevix St. George Trench’, Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, p. 24; Frances A Gerard, Some Fair Hibernians: Being a Supplementary Volume to ‘Some Celebrated Irish Beauties of the Last Century’ (London: Ward and Downey, 1897); The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, p. 1095. 28 The volume’s full title reveals Trench’s characteristically philanthropic motive: Ellen: A Ballad: Founded on a Recent Fact. And Other Poems. Sold for the Benefit of the House of Protection (in Bath, where the book was published). She also composed and ‘published’ or circulated privately pamphlets on education, the slave trade, and the oppression of chimney sweeps. 29 Charles Knight, Half-Hours with the Best Letter-Writers and Autobiographers, Second Series (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1868), p. 146. 30 Williams et al., ‘Introduction’, Woman to Woman, p. 29. 3 THE LETTER AND THE LITERARY CIRCLE: MARY LEADBEATER, MELESINA… 37

Edgeworth, Barbara Hofland, and others involved in philanthropic causes from the war effort and poor relief to education and child advocacy. Such philanthropic activities offered growing opportunities for women to engage in meaningful public work. Especially for the Christian ‘leisured woman’, the ‘active benevolence’ of charitable work offered an outlet for self-expression that struck many as ‘their rightful mission’ (a word that appears repeatedly in women’s discourse).31 In June 1809 Trench asked

Why should we not have a Friendly Society [in Ireland] on the plan of some of the English ones, where labourers and artisans might deposit their sav- ings…? I think your neighbourhood might furnish such an association. The “Reports of the Society for bettering the condition of the Poor” give us models, which we might alter at pleasure. (LP II, pp. 163–64)32

Leadbeater’s and Trench’s mutual concern for the rural Irish peasantry informed other possible projects, including in 1808 a plan (never realized) for a Lancastrian school. Their personal correspondence expanded into a larger flexible, inclusive female community mediated through letters. In 1802, for instance, Leadbeater reported hearing from “my much valued friend Juliet Smith,” adding “I know thou art much interested about her” (LP II, p. 145). Juliet Smith was the mother of Elizabeth Smith, whose 1808 Fragments in Prose and Verse was published posthumously.33 Smith’s friend, Lady Eleanor Butler, having mentioned Trench favourably to Smith, Leadbeater adds that ‘Miss Hamilton, a countrywoman of yours’ had taken up residence near her. Their epistolary community eventually included, among others, Maria and Richard Edgeworth, whom Trench seems never to have met, something she told Leadbeater in 1811 that she did ‘not very much regret’, ‘having invariably been disappointed whenever I have greatly admired a book, on being introduced to its author’ (Remains, p. 239).

31 F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1980), pp. 5–6, p. 11. 32 The Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (London, 1797); subsequent reports appeared frequently, with the fortieth in 1817. 33 The full title is self-explanatory: Fragments in Prose and Verse, by a Young Lady lately deceased, with some account of her life and character, by the Author of ‘Sermons on the Doctrines and Duties of Christianity’ [Henrietta Maria Bowdler] 38 S. C. BEHRENDT

Leadbeater’s and Trench’s letters contain extensive, sensitive comments on each other’s writing.34 While reading Cottage Dialogues (1811) in manuscript, Trench wrote diplomatically that she ‘presume[s]’ that ‘Rose and Nancy are to be published separately, and without a preface’, since ‘a preface to a work of instruction generally diminishes its utility by letting the instructed too much behind the curtain’. Moreover, she continues, ‘the dialogues for ladies and gentlemen should certainly not be in the same work’ (LP II, p. 176). Nevertheless, she pronounced ‘the second part’ of Cottage Dialogues ‘worthy of its predecessor; less humorous, perhaps, and less marked by a certain undescribable naïveté, but often pathetic, and always inculcating the purest morality’. About Leadbeater’s revised version of Tobit, Trench opined in November 1811 that it ‘is not a work which would have much chance of pleasing the public; as a Scripture story is a millstone which, I believe, would now sink any poem’ (Remains, p. 249). Later, when Trench sent her a copy of Laura’s Dream; or, The Moonlanders in November 1816, Leadbeater called it ‘the most beautiful fanciful poem I have read for a long time; from beginning to end it runs a clear, sparkling stream of the sweetest harmony, the purest ideas, an most ingenious invention’ (LP II, p. 285). Their letters are comparably rich with insightful responses to contemporary publications in Britain and Ireland by writers both famous (like Byron, Campbell, Moore, Sarah Trimmer, and Madame de Staël) and less well known (like Mary Tighe, William Sotheby, William LeFanu, John Wilson Croker, and Charles Phillips), as well as to a considerable range of evangelical ephemera. In a revealing exchange in 1808, for example, they trade comments on James Beresford’s 1806 The Miseries of Human Life; or, The Groans of Samuel Sensitive and Timothy Testy.35 Learning that

34 The two most widely accessible collections of Leadbeater’s and Trench’s letters to one another (the editions quoted in this essay) entail complicated historical, cultural, psychological and editorial considerations, including the principles of selection and editorial interventions to eliminate, expurgate, or simply falsify records to present their authors most attractively. When Richard Chenevix Trench in 1862 published the Remains of his mother, he self-servingly expunged and bowdlerized her writings. See Katharine Kittredge, ‘Missing Immortality: The Case of Melesina Trench (A Neglected, Celebrated, Dismissed and Rediscovered Woman Poet of the Long Eighteenth Century’. ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 1 (2001); http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol1/ issi/4. Other less intrusive inconsistencies arise from editorial errors in transcription and from publishers’ limits on size and space. 35 The work had reached its ninth already in 1807; in 1808 appeared An Antidote to the Miseries of Human Life by Harriet Corp, an English writer of religious and didactic fiction 3 THE LETTER AND THE LITERARY CIRCLE: MARY LEADBEATER, MELESINA… 39

Leadbeater had read and approved The Miseries, Trench concurred, adding that she has “often applied to myself the character of Mrs. Placid,” the protagonist of Harriet Corp’s 1808 Antidote to The Miseries (LP II, pp. 160–61). At Leadbeater’s urging, she read the Sequel to the Antidote, observing that while Mrs. Placid now exhibits both ‘less pleasantry, grace, and spirit than on her first appearance’, and a remarkable loss of ‘discre- tion’, ‘the volume is interesting, and may safely be given to young people’ (LP II, p. 200); her comment labours to avoid giving offence while main- taining a modicum of critical objectivity. Trench and Leadbeater express greater interest in their recently deceased countrywoman, Mary Tighe, a copy of whose long Spenserian poem Psyche Trench sent to her Quaker friend in November 1811. Leadbeater responded favourably in March 1812, declining to deprecate the relationship of Psyche and Cupid (which she calls “rather too tender for friendship”) because in her critical opinion “there is so much to admire and approve” (LP II, p. 234). The two primary correspondents in their epistolary salon habitually exchanged books and projects (and their opinions about them) with other members of their respective proximate circles. One example is typical: a plan for a miscellany of letters in which Leadbeater had apparently involved Trench:

I could not but smile at the graceful naïveté and enthusiasm of friendship which sent one of my letters to Mr. Wilkinson, in order to be placed amongst those of ‘eminent persons.’ I feel obliged to make poor Mr. Wilkinson some amends for your thus imposing on him, however unintentionally on your part. I therefore asked Mrs. Barnard, who happened to be present when your letter arrived, to procure me one of the Mr. Windham’s; and I send you for him an Italian sonnet, in the fairy penmanship of Miss Ponsonby, of Lllangollen. (Remains, p. 271)

This little passage tells us much—about their easy candour already by February 1813, when Trench wrote; about their mutual acquaintance with writers like Sarah Ponsonby, mentioned with light familiarity; about Trench’s access to political circles (‘the Mr. Windham’: William Windham whose work exhibited and addressed the spiritual and material condition of the poor. The year 1809 saw a sequel to the Antidote, also by Corp. Leadbeater inquired in 1808, ‘Hast thou read the “Antidote to the Miseries of Human Life”? I think it is a tale capitally told’ (LP II, p. 160). That Trench read and enjoyed the ‘Antidote’ is clear from Leadbeater’s letter of 20 July 1810 (LP II, p. 194). 40 S. C. BEHRENDT

[1750–1810], the Burkean Whig parliamentarian), both personally and through well-placed acquaintances like ‘Mrs. Barnard’; and about early Regency writers’ and publishers’ sensitivity to literary markets. This casual intimacy remains evident throughout their correspondence, as in Trench’s informal references to ‘Tommy Moore’ (e.g., Remains, p. 276) and her engagingly naughty gossip about Germaine de Staël, whom she calls ‘a large, coarse, and homely woman’ before quoting a friend’s comment: ‘Mrs. Jones, a lively friend of mine, put an end to a discussion of the kind in three words, “In short, she is most consolingly ugly,” thus by one happy phrase criticizing the critics with a light yet sharp touch’ (Remains, p. 276). Comments like these reveal the propinquity, homophily, and reciprocity that Kadushin identifies as the hallmarks of dynamic social networks. Most important, though, is what they shared about their reading. Trench admits in September 1809, for example, that she was ‘greatly disappointed’ in Southey’s Madoc (1805), which she had first read recently, but is glad that ‘[y]our admiration of [Thomas Campbell’s] Gertrude of Wyoming is not greater than my own’ (Remains, pp. 234–35). With characteristic discernment, Trench observes that Campbell’s style combines ‘exquisite sensibility’ with the ‘apparent truth of descriptive painting’, remarking that the poem’s numerous ‘condensed beauties’ are ‘particularly to be admired at present, when the art of saying much in a few words seems almost forgotten’ (Remains, p. 235). Trench’s comments on these two male poets bracket a paragraph that describes having ‘seen an interesting letter’ from Hannah More on Coelebs in Search of a Wife in which More assesses her novel’s moral strengths and deficiencies. That it is specifically another letter to which Trench refers further underscores how extensively the letters of such women correspondents approximate both the social and the critical discourse we typically associate with the physical, place-centered salon. Indeed, as Katharine Kittredge notes, ‘literature could be used as a direct route to intimacy’, since circulating one’s writing among female friends was virtually mandatory for participants in female literary circles. Once a work was circulated informally, Kittredge observes, ‘it was given whole-hearted support by everyone within the community, whether that support came in the form of reviewing, advertising, or sub- scribing to the publication’.36 Leadbeater’s and Trench’s exchange of both literary texts and critical commentary reveals the candour and perspicacity that characterized their

36 Kittredge, ‘The Poetry of Melesina Trench’, p. 205. 3 THE LETTER AND THE LITERARY CIRCLE: MARY LEADBEATER, MELESINA… 41 own epistolary exchanges and the dynamics of their critical exchanges with correspondents beyond the primary dyad. They exchange their own com- positions (especially poetry), of course, but they continually report on what they are reading and how they regard that reading within the context of their broad literary and intellectual experience. When Trench wrote, in 1818, ‘What have you been reading?’ (LP II, p. 306), it was no idle question but rather an invitation to the sort of dialogic sharing of mind and person characteristic of conventional salons. Thus in 1809 Leadbeater admits ‘I don’t know what to think of Southey’, whose poems she regards as sometimes ‘confused’ (like Madoc) and sometimes ‘shocking’, unlike Henry Kirke White’s Remains, with which she declares herself ‘much pleased’ (LP II, p. 172). Nor did she much like Byron, lumping, in 1817, Manfred together with his ‘other productions, which grow more and more gloomy, like the thunder-cloud, which, though so frequently enlivened by the exquisite splendor of the lightning flash, leaves its dark impression on the mind’ (LP II, p. 297). Leadbeater’s observation is as critically apt as it is metaphorically compelling. Thomas Moore, on the other hand, whom Leadbeater calls ‘a sweet poet’ in whose work ‘many fine passages glitter’, turns out on balance to be ‘too sweet, too fine,or rather too glittering’ (LP II, p. 300; emphasis added). Trench discussed literature also with correspondents like her ‘long tried friend’ Emily Agar (LP II, p. 158) and Fanny Proby.37 Writing to the former in 1814 about Byron’s Lara, she lamented that it was ‘extraordinary that Lord Byron should so often waste his admirable powers in celebrating the unnatural, and, thank Heaven, the unfrequent, union of guilt and genius; and should forget that the province of poetry is to elevate, soothe, or amend the heart’ (Remains, p. 299). In February 1821 she declares flatly that ‘The Abbot tired me’, particularly because Scott treated Mary Queen of Scots so differently than she had two decades earlier in her own Mary Queen of Scots; unlike her Mary, ‘whose courtesy and sweetness won all hearts’, she complains, Scott’s Mary is a ‘flippant miss’ who is ‘caustic, satirical, and full of repartee’ (Remains, p. 442). After expressing her ‘wild Interest’ in Walter Scott’s work to Fanny Proby in late 1819 (Remains, p. 410), she criticizes him in July 1821 for ‘appropriating our Irish Banshee’ in The Monastery, where he ‘degrades her to something between

37 Emily Agar, sister of Henry Welbore Agar (1761–1836), Lord Clifden, was according to her son ‘one of [Trench’s] oldest, and beyond the circle of her own family, by far her dearest friend’ (Remains, p. 298). 42 S. C. BEHRENDT a ghost and a fairy’. Following her complaint (indeed, without even start- ing a new paragraph), she praises as ‘by far the cleverest of the new books I have read’ [Pierre Alexander] Fleury de Chaboulon’s Memoirs of the history of private life, home, and the reign of Napoleon in 1815, published in London in 1819, which she declares ‘more amusing than Napoleon’s own memoirs’ (Remains, p. 448). Clearly, what Trench and Leadbeater read, remarked, and shared with other correspondents was not confined to traditional ‘literature’; in 1810 Trench had written to Leadbeater that she was about to begin ‘Sir Jonah Barrington’ which she reports ‘bears a great resemblance to the style of “The State of Ireland Past and Present”’, so much so that ‘I feel a strong conviction that both are from the same hand’ (LP II, p. 181).38 In other words, their reading was both wide-ranging and critically acute in terms of both content and form, subject and rhetorical mode.

Life, Death, and the Gift of the Self Perhaps no gift, though, is as great—or as gratefully received—as com- miseration upon personal loss. Trench’s touching 1816 reply to Leadbeater’s news of her niece’s death is instructive: remarking on the ‘peaceable atmosphere of family affections, of well-directed energies, and of pure religious sentiments’, Trench writes: ‘the loss of one of your friends seems more like a sad and tender separation than that total and frightful disruption which in other cases fills the mind with awe and terror’ (Remains, p. 44; 29 August 1816). How awful it must have been for Trench to report, then, only two months later, the death of her own beloved four-year-old daughter Elizabeth Melesina39; unable to muster Leadbeater’s equanimity, she appeals in her despair to their shared experience: ‘you know how it must darken the remaining years of a mother, past the age of hoping for any new blessings, but clinging too eagerly to those she already possessed’ (Remains, p. 351; 4 November 1816). Leadbeater’s response paints her and her extended family in a community of grief: ‘Indeed, many true and sympathizing tears are flowing for thee

38 Barrington’s book is Historic Anecdotes and Secret Memoirs of the Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1809). A Sketch of the State of Ireland Past and Present (1809) is by John Wilson Croker. 39 When she wrote to Leadbeater in mid-July 1812 about her infant daughter (whom she usually called ‘Bessy’), Trench remarked that Bessy ‘in sweetness of temper and countenance is quite a Mrs. Placid’, indicating that she still remembered the Antidote to The Miseries. 3 THE LETTER AND THE LITERARY CIRCLE: MARY LEADBEATER, MELESINA… 43 here this morning; and, could we take a part of thy trouble to ourselves, so as to relieve one who so tenderly sympathized with us, and who has given us such a proof of her friendship in taking up the pen to inform us of this lamented event, oh! surely we would do so’ (LP II, pp. 284–85). Trench’s struggles with her heartbreak—compounded by guilt at the little girl’s demise while her mother was away—yielded only mixed results: ‘I do not disdain any means, nor neglect any efforts, which can aid me in returning to my usual habits—to my usual feelings it is impossible I can ever entirely return … I say not this in the language of complaint … I say it from the habit of opening my heart with some of its weaknesses (who will dare to say they open all?) to a dear and candid friend’ (Remains, pp. 365–57; 7 January 1817; Trench’s emphases).40 As they aged and declined, their letters recorded the passings of acquaintances in ways that implicitly foreshadowed their own. After Emily Agar died in September 1821, Trench thanked Leadbeater for ‘the depth of feeling with which you have entered into my deprivation’ (LP II, p. 318). Comparable expressions of shared emotion continued, prompted by their growing consciousness of their own mortality. Throughout their correspondence, Leadbeater and Trench repeatedly expressed their friendship, their admiration, and indeed their love for one another. Communicated and reinforced over a quarter century of regular correspondence, that bond became uncommonly meaningful to both. Writing in 1814, Leadbeater regretted that Trench’s continued residence in England denied her the fulfilment of her ‘wish, the wish of years’ for Trench’s physical presence, a wish that the typically self-deprecating Leadbeater characterized as ‘prompted more by selfishness than by wor- thier feelings’ (LP II, p. 271). Trench was always effusive in her gratitude for the gift of Leadbeater’s friendship: ‘I do consider that moment as fortunate to me which made us acquainted; you know not of how much use you have been to my mind, nor what moral benefit is derived from intercourse with you and yours’ (Remains, p. 320; 30 September 1815). Three years later, responding to a flattering comment about their friendship, Trench wrote: ‘Oh, do not say you are vain about my friendship. Believe me, the exultation ought to be all on my side, and I often thank Heaven

40 For more about Trench’s reactions to her daughter’s death, including her poetic trib- utes, see Kittredge, ‘The Poetry of Melesina Trench’, and Stephen Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), pp. 195–99, and ‘“There is no second crop of summer flowers”’. 44 S. C. BEHRENDT for the kindness which prompted you to seek me at Ballitore, and has followed me with partial affection from that hour’ (Remains, p. 384; 15 September 1818). Five months later she thanked Leadbeater for her confidence in electing ‘to communicate your sorrows to me’ and declaring herself ‘highly honoured by the power of infusing any portion of that balm you so well derive to receive from the hands of friendship’ (Remains, p. 394; 22 February 1819). For both women, then, it is clear, friendship was the greatest gift one could bestow, a gift of one’s entire self, given wholly and unconditionally and shared among their respective domestic circles. Writing within a year of her own death, Leadbeater explains:

We read … your kind letter in full conclave, and with general admiration. Indeed I seldom withhold your letters from my family, for they form a part of the education of those I love, as well as of my own. I am perfectly aware of being less faulty in many respects than I should be had not Providence permitted my friendship with you, and I expect the same consequences in others from the beauty of your example and your sentiments. (LP II, p. 327)

And yet, when the end came with ‘my Beloved Mrs. Leadbeater’s death’ in June 1826, how much must have remained unsaid is evident from Trench’s poignant remarks:

She had so many benevolent and literary plans; she was so loved, and so sweetly loved again. Her instinctive fondness for me was a boon from Heaven which I valued not half enough while I possessed it. How little gratitude did I show her for her unbounded kindness and partiality, not half so much as I felt! … Alas! I thought I should have her always. (Remains, p. 515; 30 June 1826)

Here, in death, the gift—which must always be kept moving—ceased its motion. And yet Trench’s final line expresses the fundamental paradox of gift-giving: the perpetually latent desire that one be permitted to keep the gift rather than passing it forward. In acts of imagination and intellect, spirit and body, of the sort represented in the epistolary salon cultivated by Mary Leadbeater and Melesina Trench, we glimpse a still insufficiently examined aspect of Romantic-era letters and the transactions of affection they memorialize. CHAPTER 4

The Disappointment of Wordsworth’s Letters

Oliver Clarkson

‘I have long ceased to write any Letters but upon business’, Wordsworth wrote in 1803 to his teenage-devotee Thomas De Quincey, ironically in a letter not written upon business at all.1 Wordsworth often spoke of writing letters (usually while writing a letter) as though it were the most arduous chore in the world: ‘You do not know what a task it is to me, to write a Letter’, he moaned to Francis Wrangham in 1804: ‘I absolutely loath the sight of a Pen when I am to use it’ (EY p. 436). He even told Thomas Moore that he took pains to make his letters ‘as bad & dull as possible’ to avoid the ‘horror’ of them being ‘preserved’.2 Many readers have thought his intention was duly achieved. ‘It is generally felt that his letters are not

1 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 401. Hereafter EY. I also quote from The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (1969–70); The Later Years, ed. Alan G. Hill, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (1978–88); and A Supplement of New Letters, ed. Alan G. Hill (1993). Hereafter MY, LY, and NL. 2 The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. W. S. Dowden, 5 vols (London and Toronto, 1988), I, 988.

O. Clarkson (*) Balliol College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 45 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_4 46 O. CLARKSON very good’, said Sara Coleridge (the poet’s daughter).3 But the letters were published eventually. In 1937, when Ford K. Brown reviewed the first two volumes of Ernest de Selincourt’s editions of Wordsworth’s letters he noted the ‘substantial interest’ they would attract but conceded: ‘it is still true that these letters are disappointing’.4 Beth Darlington’s fetch- ing edition of The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, published in 1981, warned that anyone looking for ‘sizzling rhetoric’ ‘may be disappointed’.5 And in the introduction to her Penguin selection of Wordsworth’s letters Juliet Barker felt the need to acknowledge the ele- phant in the room: ‘It cannot be argued that he was always the most sparkling of letter writers’.6 Part of the reason that the criticism feels so apposite is that many of Wordsworth’s letters talk glumly about his own disappointments. All sorts of matters engender the feeling. Meetings missed: ‘It was a great disappointment to me not to find your Lordship [Lowther] at home’ (MY I. p. 74). Letters not received: ‘We are much disappointed in not hearing from you [Coleridge] to day’ (MY I. p. 80). Uninspiring places: ‘The only very celebrated object which has fairly disappointed me […] is the Pantheon’ (LY III. p. 400). Disappointing children: ‘John is for book-attainments the slowest Child almost I ever knew […] I am much disappointed in my expectations of retracing the Latin and Greek classics with him’ (MY II. p. 172). And in a proleptic way, the letters repeatedly disappoint themselves. ‘This is a wretchedly dull Letter’, Wordsworth confesses to Isabella Fenwick in 1841 (LY IV. p. 210); ‘it is a stupid Letter’ (LY II. p. 116), he tells his family in 1829; and in 1804 he issues a dramatic warning to Francis Wrangham: ‘should this letter grow in length as it has grown in dullness, the Muses have mercy on you!’ (EY p. 436). As the jocular cast of that final example attests, Wordsworth often consciously and even wilfully fell short as a letter writer, as though savouring a prosaic terrain which served as an antidote to the burden of writing weighty visionary verse. But wilful failure was also the result of a serious ‘obstacle’ (LY II. p. 464), as Wordsworth saw it: he had convinced himself that he was incapable of

3 ‘Sara Coleridge to Henry Reed’, repr. in Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, 5 (1966), p. 120. 4 Ford K. Brown, ‘Wordsworth and De Quincey’, VQR 13 (1937), 300–03 (p. 301). 5 The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 20. 6 Wordsworth: A Life in Letters, ed. Juliet Barker (London: Penguin, 2007), p. xiii. 4 THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF WORDSWORTH’S LETTERS 47 mastering an impressive prose style, and in the letters we find countless self-dismissive remarks about a ‘desultory’ style which ‘want[s] fluency and sometimes perhaps perspicuity’ (EY p. 37, p. 127), a style not so much achieved as ‘dropped’ (LY II. p. 580) or ‘thrown away’ (NL p. 65). Among the characteristics of that falling style are unwieldy repetitions of the sort Eric Griffiths finds in the poetry of Christina Rossetti, when an ‘inane chime brings on a let-down’.7 The trochaic flop of a word such as ‘nothing’ lends itself especially well to those instances in which Wordsworth sulks about his own idleness:

The truth of the matter is that when in Town I did little, and since I came here I have done nothing. (EY p. 56)

I have been do[ing] nothing and still continue to be doing nothing. (EY p. 112)

after I left you I had a thoroughly idle summer; and part of the Autumn was as idle. (MY I. p. 191)

Wordsworth’s habit of writing disappointing letters was contagious: in 1828 his daughter Dora felt it necessary to apologise to the man she would later marry, Edward Quillinan, for sending him a letter written with ‘the usual Wordsworthian coolness’ (LY I. p. 620). The frosty letter-writing idiom had obviously become a running joke in the family, and William was its chief instigator. Sometimes Wordsworth’s letters are plainly disappointing. But there are other moments when disappointment induces not the deflation of a wishful rhythm of the imagination but the eerie continuation of that rhythm, a renewed cultivation of the chimera, which keeps hope alive even when all hope is gone. A letter Wordsworth wrote late in life following the death of his old friend James Watt is paradigmatic for the way that it finds in the disappointments of ‘one day passed’ the enduring energies of hope:

Of one day passed in his company, I have a most lively remembrance. We clomb Helvellyn together nearly to its summit, when a cloud overspread the mountain top, and barred our further progress. We descended almost to the

7 Eric Griffiths, ‘The Disappointment of Christina G. Rossetti’,Essays in Criticism 47 (1997), 107–42 (p. 107). 48 O. CLARKSON

Valley, when observing that the veil had disappeared we mounted again, and came again as near to the summit, when as dense a cloud disappointed us again, so that after waiting some time we returned with our wish ungratified as before. (9 June 1848, NL pp. 258–59)

For all its ‘ungratified’ ineffectuality, the nearly forgotten ‘wish’ lives on in the verve of those oscillatory cadences (‘mounted again […] came again […] disappointed us again’). The OED would have us believe that hope expires the moment disappointment takes hold: disappointment is the ‘Non-fulfilment of an expectation, intention, or desire’; ‘frustration, displeasure, or dejection caused by failure to achieve a hoped-for or anticipated outcome’. With the verb ‘disappoint’, the story is the same: ‘to prevent the realization of (a hope, intention, etc.)’. But in Wordsworth’s letter disappointment feels less like the dissipater of hope than the force which facilitates its ‘lively’ resurgence after years of lying fallow. Whenever a hope is realised, of course, it can no longer be a hope; but the peculiar flip-side of that truth is that ‘non-fulfilment’ becomes the unlikely guaran- tor of hope’s continuing existence, albeit an existence lived in the shadow of its own pointlessness. ‘Disappointment tracks / The steps of Hope’, writes Letitia Landon in A History of the Lyre, and hope tracks the steps of disappointment too.8 Part of the reason that the OED’s synonyms for disappointment do not suffice is that they are too hopeless: ‘frustration’ too hot-headed, ‘displeasure’ too unruffled, ‘dejection’ too unequivocally downtrodden. ‘The opposite of hope’, remarks Ian Craib in The Importance of Disappointment, ‘is hopelessness, despair, giving up’:9 but not disappointment, which shares with hope much of the same DNA. For just as we imagine with wide eyes something happening before it has happened (hope), so we imagine with dewy eyes the same thing happening after it has not happened (disappointment). A heartbroken lover, knowing that all hope is gone, continues to submit to visions of a blissful future first bred and then fostered by hope. The dense ‘cloud’ covering Helvellyn’s summit veils a jointly envisioned sublimity which remains forever unob- tainable, and yet forever alive.

* * *

8 Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess (Ontario: Broadview, 1997), p. 122 (ll. 276–77). 9 Ian Craib, The Importance of Disappointment (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 4. 4 THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF WORDSWORTH’S LETTERS 49

In a byzantine headnote composed for an 1837 poem about Rome, Wordsworth offers one of the finest explications of disappointment we are likely to find:

Sight is at first a sad enemy to imagination and to those pleasures belonging to old times with which some exertions of that power will always mingle; nothing perhaps brings this truth home to the feelings more than the city of Rome; not so much in respect to the impression made at the moment when it is first seen and looked at as a whole, for then the imagination may be invigorated and the mind’s eye quickened; but when particular spots or objects are sought out, disappointment is I believe invariably felt. Ability to recover from this disappointment will exist in proportion to knowledge, and the power of the mind to reconstruct out of fragments and parts, and to make details in the present subservient to more adequate comprehension of the past.10

The prose thinks on its feet brilliantly about an act of imaginative photo- shopping which superimposes the greater creations of expectation over the sorry inadequacies of reality as it actually is. But Wordsworth does not get it quite right when he speaks of the ability of the mind ‘to recover’ from ‘disappointment’, for it is rather that disappointment itself constitutes a recovery which never can be a cure: the present scene is ‘subservient’ only to the stuff of dreams, and as much as the embellishments of the imagination allure, they form an eerie memorial to a Rome that is not there. It is characteristic that Wordsworth should acclaim the capacity of the imagination to subjugate reality in the wake of its sad underperformance.11 This is the poet, after all, whose mighty mind executes extraordinary rescue acts when the ordinary world has precipitated the ‘dull and heavy slackening’ (The Prelude IV. 549) of disappointment.12 But even on epiph- anic occasions of that kind there usually swells in the verse a nullifying

10 The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford, 1940–49), III, p. 494. 11 The other option is to avoid reality altogether. Stacey McDowell has written very well about how the premise of ‘unvisiting’ in Wordsworth ‘precipitates a mixed feeling, where the sense of a place retaining the glow of an ideal is balanced against the suspicion that should one actually “visit” the place, the result would be a disappointment’. See ‘Rhyming and Undeciding in Wordsworth and Norman Nicholson’, Romanticism 23 (2017), 179–90 (p. 179). 12 Unless stated otherwise, Wordsworth’s poetry is quoted from Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York: Norton, 2014). 50 O. CLARKSON sense that something has been lost as well as found, as though Wordsworth is worried that he might be telling himself some grand apocryphal story. So much is felt in a sonnet he wrote after travelling over the Hamilton Hills on his wedding day in 1802:

Ere we had reach’d the wish’d-for place, night fell: We were too late at least by one dark hour, And nothing could we see of all that power Of prospect, whereof many thousands tell. The western sky did recompence us well With Grecian Temple, Minaret, and Bower; And, in one part, a Minster with its Tower Substantially distinct, a place for Bell Or Clock to toll from. Many a glorious pile Did we behold, sights that might well repay All disappointment! and, as such, the eye Delighted in them; but we felt, the while, We should forget them: they are of the sky, And from our earthly memory fade away.

Hope is the pre-eminent artist of imaginative life, and even when the object of the newly-weds’ affection is shrouded in darkness the vitality of their ‘wish’ abides in the ‘glorious’ piles they imagine in the sky, delighting them for long enough to delay the sonnet’s turn, but only for so long: ‘but we felt, the while, / We should forget them’. The mind, in its moment of recovery, cannot recover itself fully, weighed down as it is by the knowledge that fate has relegated ‘that power / Of prospect’ to a state of eternal insubstantiality. The buildings ‘of the sky’ are the imagination’s elegy for a failed wish, but they bear the ethereal beauty of a living hope. Wordsworth’s rhyme of ‘well repay’ with ‘fade away’ beholds in miniature the dynamic of disappointment found in so many of his letters, a vanishing which sees the imagination being hopelessly gifted a feeling of hopefulness. A letter Wordsworth wrote to Dorothy in 1790 about a walk he took beside Lake Como owes much of its power to the way that topographical description mingles with a niggling sense of disappointment:

The lake is narrow and the shadows of the mountains were early thrown across it. It was beautiful to watch them travelling up the sides of the hills for several hours, to remark one half of a village covered with shade, and the other bright with the strongest sunshine. It was with regret that we passed 4 THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF WORDSWORTH’S LETTERS 51

every turn of this charming path, where every new picture was purchased by the loss of another […]. (EY pp. 33–34)

The landscape holds in equipoise sunshine and shade as though giving visual form to the double-minded tone of the letter as a whole. For here Wordsworth expresses the mixture of elation and ‘regret’ he feels at having observed this scenery without Dorothy by his side: ‘I have thought of you perpetually and never have my eyes burst upon a scene of particular loveliness but I have almost instantly wished that you could for a moment be transported to the place where I stood to enjoy it’ (EY p. 35). There the prose imbues the evocation of an absent reality with the lifeblood of hope (‘I have almost instantly wished’) to the extent that reality becomes strangely enriched by its own depletion: sunshine is ‘purchased by’ shade, but shade is ‘purchased by’ sunshine too. As late as 1837, when he left home to tour Italy with Henry Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth wrote to Dorothy hinting at the plaintive beauty her absence would impart to his perceptions: ‘How I wish you could have gone with us; but I shall think of you everywhere’ (LY III. p. 373): ‘think of you everywhere’ in the sense of ‘while I am everywhere’ but also ‘my thinking of you shall suffuse everywhere’, the phrase evincing the ubiquity of unavailing wishfulness. It is the hallmark of Wordsworth’s letters, and not just those sent to Dorothy, that they thrive when hope is depleted, and thrive on its depletion by rekindling its vitality. Frances Wilson has shown recently how the impassioned letters Wordsworth wrote to his wife Mary in 1810 and 1812 are buttressed by ‘a language of longing’, and that language bears the same double-edged delicacy.13 The heat-of-the-moment unguardedness of these letters might make us wince:

Every day every hour every moment makes me feel more deeply how blessed we are in each other, how purely how faithfully how ardently, and how tenderly we love each other; I put this last word last because, though I am persuaded that a deep affection is not uncommon in married life, yet I am confident that a lively, gushing, thought-employing, spirit-stirring passion of love, is very rare even among good people. (11 August 1810, NL p. 27)

13 Frances Wilson, ‘Wordsworth’s Sweating Pages: The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth’, Letter Writing Among Poets, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 81–94 (p. 87). 52 O. CLARKSON

But this is as much ‘spirit-stirring’ as it is maladroit and saccharine: in the weak-at-the-knees way that the prose swings back to those words ‘each other’ (‘craving and clinging at once’, as Griffiths would have it14); in the manner in which the voice, unable to put the brakes on after the triplet our ears expect (‘how purely how faithfully how ardently’), topples over breathlessly into ‘and how tenderly’; and in the graceless repetition of ‘I put this last word last’, which feels all the more authentic because ‘love’ is not the last word but third from last. All this gives the letter its feel of viva- cious remoteness. As Alexander Freer has said while paraphrasing J-D Nasio, a ‘loved one disappoints us the most, precisely because he or she is most loved, and although we invariably resist it, the disappointment he or she gives us is the most important of his or her gifts’.15 And occasionally Wordsworth’s effort to ‘resist’ disappointment feels like a contentedly failing affair, as though disappointment is being cordially activated for the sake of ‘evergrowing Love’. If staying with the Beaumonts was not proving so pleasurable, he tells Mary in a letter of 1812,

I should be unable to resist my inclination to set off to morrow, to walk with thee by the woody side of that quiet pool, near which thy days and nights are passed. O. my Mary, what a heavenly thing is pure and evergrowing Love […]. (NL p. 62)

‘To set off’, ‘to walk’—this is hardly a language which intends on going anywhere. Christopher Ricks has said of some of Tennyson’s infinitives that they ‘stand in for the future tense but also stand out against it’,16 and it is with the same self-rescinding capacity that Wordsworth’s infinitives transfigure hope into a memory of hope, heralding visions which are more beauteous for being otiose. ‘Love’ is ‘evergrowing’ on the grounds that ‘to morrow’ never comes. As Wordsworth tells Mary in another letter of 1812, employing a less flighty tone, ‘every hour of absence now is a grievous loss, because we have been parted sufficiently to feel how profoundly

14 Griffiths, p. 110. 15 Alexander Freer, ‘Wordsworth and the Poetics of Disappointment’, Textual Practice 28 (2014), 1123–44 (p. 1130). Freer offers a fine account of the way that ‘erotic and poetic frustration’ bear upon ‘literary reading’ (p. 1124). Relevant to my concerns is his remark about the closing lines of ‘Simon Lee’: ‘Without an end, we can always anticipate gratifica- tion’ (p. 1140). 16 Christopher Ricks, Tennyson ([1972]; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 117. 4 THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF WORDSWORTH’S LETTERS 53 in soul and body we love each other’ (NL p. 109): that sentence, with its way of wandering from the deadweight ‘now’ to the wakening ‘because’ to the bona fide ‘profoundly’, is surprised to discover within itself that ‘love’ has grown deeper ‘because’ of ‘a grievous loss’, not in spite of it. ‘Love and feeling’, Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, are ‘Protracted among endless solitudes’ (V. 145–46)—which is to discern that we learn to love most deeply when we feel most alone. ‘There cannot be deep disappointment where there is not deep love’, Martin Luther King once said; and it is no doubt true that there cannot be deep love where there is not deep disappointment. ‘Without the presence of someone he loves, Wordsworth is only half there’, Wilson remarks.17 And being ‘only half there’ galvanises what Hazlitt describes in My First Acquaintance with Poets as ‘disappointments, throbbing in the human heart’.18

* * *

But disappointment could be a more severe matter for a poet whose life was encumbered by losses of the cruellest kind. When the word appears in a letter Dorothy wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1805, we are struck by the sheerness and the severity of its weight:

True it is that the agony which follows on the death of those in whom our hope has been could only close in settled gloom and heaviest disappointment, were it not for those elevating thoughts of a better life, and a more glorious nature which the contemplation of the virtues of the departed raises up in us with a strength unknown before. (EY p. 575)

So assuredly inspiriting is everything which comes after ‘were it not’ (‘elevating’, ‘better’, ‘glorious’, ‘virtues’, ‘raises up’, ‘strength’) that only slowly does it dawn on us that we have not forgotten what has come before (‘agony’, ‘death’, ‘gloom’, ‘heaviest disappointment’), and it might not have dawned on us at all were it not for that final—elegiac by way of negligence—‘before’. Dorothy’s letter shows in real time how the self- charged omnipresence of ‘hope’, its flight in the face of its own vacancy, is

17 Wilson, p. 84. 18 The Fight and Other Writings, ed. Tom Paulin and David Chandler (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 250. 54 O. CLARKSON noiselessly transfused by her ‘agony’. The dissonant coalition of recom- pense and ‘gloom’ exposes grief as disappointment in its ‘heaviest’ manifestation. For all Wordsworth’s talk about the premeditated dullness of his own letters, and for all their (at times) actual dullness, circumstances often demanded that he write with unconditioned compassion. On 17 April 1816, Robert Southey’s son Herbert died tragically at the age of nine of an inflamed heart. Wordsworth wrote to Southey days later:

Whether I look back or forward I sorrow for you; but I doubt not that in time your retrospective thoughts will be converted into sweet though sad pleasures; and as to your prospective regards in connection with this dear Child, as they will never stop short of another and a more stable world, before them your disappointments will melt away; but they will make themselves felt as they ought to do, since it will be for a salutary purpose. (MY II. p. 306)

How poised and watchful Wordsworth’s bid to console without sounding mendacious is. But weak spots in the prose lead us to suspect that the mind which endeavours to offer comfort is still engaged in a quest for comfort itself: there is the swithering between conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’, ‘as’); the conjectural fogginess of ‘a more stable world’; the way that ‘but they’ instantly restores what has just been banished (‘your disappointments’); the self-doubtfulness of ‘I doubt not’; the pained mellifluousness of ‘sweet though sad pleasures’; and the unwitting gathering into that chime of ‘melt away’ and ‘felt as they’ the double-edged quintessence of disappointment: the evanescence of hope as hope implacably endures. At some point in our lives most of us have had to rise to the challenge to which Wordsworth tries to rise there, of consoling someone else when we hardly feel consoled ourselves. Wordsworth lost his brother John in 1805, and then his two young children Thomas and Catherine in shock- ingly quick succession in 1812, so he is counselling Southey from the perspective of having been through it all, but his voice proceeds as if it feels and fears that ‘grief / Could never, never, have an end’ (‘Alice Fell’, ll. 39–40). When looking back at the letters Wordsworth wrote following John’s death, the pervasive bitterness of his disappointment is striking, but not just the bitterness, for the pain he feels at contemplating what should have been mingles with sweeter delights yielded by half-recovered visions of a future he knows to be lost: 4 THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF WORDSWORTH’S LETTERS 55

I feel that there is something cut out of my life which cannot be restored, I never thought of him but with hope and delight, we looked forward to the time not distant as we thought when he would settle near us when the task of his life would be over and he would have nothing to do but reap his reward. (16 March 1805, EY p. 565)

The prose surfs the vagabond rhythms of a grieving mind which finds no place in time to ‘settle’: one moment John is the departed ‘something’, and the next a constituent of the ‘we’ who look ‘forward’ to his quiet retirement. Wordsworth’s prose shivers at the prospect of succumbing to a categorical past tense. ‘He would settle’ and ‘he would have nothing to do’ manage to dodge the sadder finality of he would have settled and he would have had nothing to do, but they do so with an eye cast tremblingly on what ‘cannot be restored’. And although the scarcer form of ‘would’, used to express a wish (‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art’), does not fit grammatically, that does not stop it from loitering in the reviv- ifying doggedness of ‘he would settle […] his life would be […] he would have’. The beauty of Wordsworth’s syntax lies in its way of keeping an earlier dream on life support, while knowing that ‘hope and delight’ will never reawaken and breathe for themselves again. Wordsworth’s letters teach us that disappointment does not disappoint merely. The luring charms of hope are never forgotten, and the disappointed imagination hardly wishes to forget them, however much it feigns trying: ‘I hope’, Wordsworth told James Losh, ‘when I shall be able to think of [John] with a calmer mind that the remembrance of him dead will even animate me more than the joy which I had in him living’ (EY p. 565). But a pragmatist would say that there is little to be remembered about someone being dead. The heart rather depends for its throb upon those once-‘living’ thoughts which refuse to die and descend in the present, at the same time as grief exerts its gravitational pull upon them: pleasure is ‘sweet though sad’, ‘strength’ mingles with weakness, and ‘hope’ fades without a trace into its own ghost. In Book VI of The Prelude, Wordsworth eulogises famously about the supersensory ‘destiny’ of the imagination and its infinite attachment to ‘hope that can never die’ (l. 540), but the principle which drives the visionary agenda in the verse comes to haunt the letters as a chronically durable hopefulness: ‘many heavy thoughts of my poor departed Brother hung upon me; the joy which I should have had in shewing him the Manuscript and a thousand other vain fancies and dreams’ (EY p. 594). ‘I should have had’ drags its feet resentfully there, as though 56 O. CLARKSON unable to give up what the mind has been forced to give up upon: ‘joy’ and ‘fancies and dreams’, although terminal, can never die. So when in her fine book onThe Poetics of Disappointment Laura Quinney speaks of disappointment as ‘the state of the self estranged from the hopes of selfhood’, the definition feels just about right, but not right exactly:19 for rather than being ‘estranged’ from its former ‘hopes’, the disappointed ‘self’ remains all too intimate with them, even while, to borrow something Helen Vendler says about George Herbert’s relationship with God, ‘a distressing distance is felt within intimacy’:20 distressing, because the prophesied vision to which the mind feels tantalisingly close is cloaked in the nothingness of its eternal non-fulfilment. ‘A Parent breathes a sigh of disappointed hope over a lost Child’.21 Wordsworth’s remark in his Essay upon Epitaphs derives its power from the unthinking way in which the adjective modifies the noun without dousing it, such that we think not so much of thwarted hope as that peculiar brand of hope which resolutely survives its own end: disappointed hope. And it is this paradoxical species which enkindles a phantasmagoria of returns and reawakenings within the grieving mind, as Craib points out: ‘after the death of someone we love, we will see them walking ahead of us down the street, and run to catch up, before we remember’.22 But not just before we remember: after we remember and while we are remembering. The disappointed mind eludes rationality without debunking it. Writing to Benjamin Robert Haydon in 1817, Wordsworth spoke of his departed children, Catherine and Thomas:

You probably know how much I have suffered in this way myself; having lost within the short space of half a year two delightful creatures a girl and a boy of the several ages of four and six and a half. This was four years ago—but they are perpetually present to my eyes—I do not mourn for them; yet I am sometimes weak enough to wish that I had them again. (MY II. p. 361)

In the strong-willed cadence of ‘I do not mourn for them’, which chastens its own sure-footedness, we hear the poet of consolation who elsewhere

19 Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery (Charlottesville: University Press of Virgina, 1999), p. ix. 20 Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 11. 21 Poetry and Prose, p. 501. 22 Craib, pp. 3–4. 4 THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF WORDSWORTH’S LETTERS 57 says, ‘We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind’ (‘Intimations’, ll. 182–83), and ‘I will not mourn; / Content that holy peace and mute remembrance dwell / Within the bosom’ (‘Forsake me not’, ll. 9–11). Those lines harbour an archetypal Wordsworthian music, a defiant rhythm which comes to a grief-laden standstill before the syntax swivels with precarious bravery towards ‘strength’ and ‘peace’. But as much as the letter’s steadying ‘yet’ tries to muster up the same show of strength in moving forwards, the sentence drifts with a tenor of forlorn wishfulness—such that the rhythms ache: ‘weak enough to wish’—all too close to mournfulness. Wordsworth had earlier written of Thomas’s death: ‘in the agony of my spirit in surrendering such a treasure I feel a thousand times richer than if I had never possessed it’ (MY ii. 51). The befuddled eloquence (agony versus richness, surrender versus possession) is made by a mind that cannot distinguish consolation from pain.

* * *

Hazlitt once mischievously called Wordsworth ‘the spoiled child of disappointment’. The remark cut deep, and Hazlitt knew it: ‘To have produced works of genius, and to find them neglected or treated with scorn, is one of the heaviest trials of human patience’.23 As early as 1798, Wordsworth was hardly sounding auspicious when discussing the prospect of publishing his work: ‘There is little need to advise me against publishing’, he told James Tobin, ‘it is a thing which I dread as much as death itself’ (EY p. 211). And by 1807 he had trained himself wholly to expect disappointment, writing famously to Lady Beaumont with astonishingly undiluted pessimism about the immanent publication of Poems, in Two Volumes: ‘It is impossible that any expectations can be lower than mine concerning the immediate effect of this little work upon what is called the Public’ (MY I. p. 145). But anticipating disappointment rarely made the reality of experiencing disappointment any easier for Wordsworth to stomach. The politely quibbling letter he sent to Sara Hutchinson in 1802 after she had offered some constructive criticism regarding the style of ‘The Leech- Gatherer’ is characteristic of a poet who struggled to relinquish his inveterate dream of finding his perfect reader: there he insists that ‘not stood, not sat, but “was”’ (EY p. 366) is the decisive word in a line (‘By which an Old Man was, far from all house or home’) which he proceeded

23 Hazlitt, p. 314. 58 O. CLARKSON to cancel, ironically. This happens to be a very good piece of literary criticism, since the remarkable thing about the Leech-gatherer is the ‘naked simplicity’ of his unceasing fortitude; but it also marks disappointment’s pathetic guardianship of an ideal response longed for but not received. Wordsworth’s model reader turns out to be nobody other than himself. In the wake of his own disappointments, Wordsworth also took it upon himself to prepare less experienced writers for the disappointments which surely awaited them. When the up-and-coming poet Maria Jane Jewsbury wrote to him in 1825 she did not receive quite the encouraging response for which she no doubt wished:

let me caution you, who are probably young, not to rest your hopes or happiness upon Authorship. I am aware that nothing can be done in literature without enthusiasm, and therefore it costs me more to write in this vein […]. (LY I. pp. 343–44)

The merciless tone pulls no punches, but we detect in the plodding sincerity of ‘it costs me more to write in this vein’ the poet’s struggle to take heed of the advice he shares. Notwithstanding his self-safeguarding chat— ‘as to Publishing I shall give it up’, he told Henry Crabb Robinson in 1816 (MY II. p. 334)—the hopes Wordsworth rested on ‘Authorship’ died hard, and in some sense they refused to die altogether. ‘What then shall we say?’, he asked George Beaumont in 1808, ‘Why let the Poet first consult his own heart as I have done and leave the rest to posterity; to, I hope, an improving posterity’ (MY I. p. 195). There is something punier than recalcitrance in that ‘Why let’, the more so for the way that it is muffled by the fatigued candour of ‘as I have done’ and the fainthearted- ness of ‘I hope’. Wordsworth is aware that placing all his eggs in the basket of posterity involves peddling a defeat as a potential victory, and in a later letter to Abraham Hayward his prognosticating is precarious owing to its poise: ‘any writer will be disappointed who expects a place in the affections of posterity for works which have nothing but their manner to recommend them’ (LY I. p. 343). An inside-out version of disappointment’s trajectory manifests itself in these letters: the mind which inanely reclaimed the life of past hopes now contemplates a cheerful eventuality (‘an improving posterity’) from the removed perspective of its pre-existence. The letters Wordsworth wrote across his later years are haunted not just by the disappointments dealt to him by an unappreciative readership, but by a larger sense that his life and life’s work, despite his undoubtedly 4 THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF WORDSWORTH’S LETTERS 59 improving reputation, constituted one big disappointment: ‘I read my own [poetry] less than any other’, he tells Fenwick in 1846, ‘and often think that my life has been in a great measure wasted’ (LY IV. p. 776). Few ‘hands [are] so likely to disappoint the public as mine’ (LY IV. p. 67), he declares on another occasion. Such remarks do not feel like attention- seeking masquerades. But the letters are haunted most of all by the sense of an ending, not least because endings befell many of those individuals to whom Wordsworth was closest: Walter Scott and George Crabbe died in 1832; Charles Lamb and Coleridge in 1834; Sara Hutchinson, Robert Jones, James Hogg, and Felicia Hemans in 1835; Southey in 1843; and, most tragically, in 1847 his daughter Dora died from tuberculosis at the age of 42. Wordsworth was distraught: ‘We bear up under our affliction as well as God enables us to do’, he wrote to Edward Moxon, ‘but O my dear friend our loss is immeasurable’ (LY IV. p. 854). Bearing up (and not bearing up at all) was at once a matter of cherishing and fending off those visions of disappointed hope which ameliorated even as they deepened his sense of loss. Writing to Fenwick in December 1847, Wordsworth spoke of the way that Dora, just as Catherine and Thomas had done before her, hovered perpetually before his eyes:

I suffer most in head and mind before I leave my bed in a morning—Daily used She to come to my bedside and greet me and her Mother and now the blank is terrible. But I must stop. She is ever with me and will be so to the last moment of my life. (LY IV. p. 860)

Out of the muddled temporality of acute disappointment comes a ‘now’ in sync with memory rather than subsequent to it. If ‘the blank’ engendered by Dora’s loss were blank alone it would not be so ‘terrible’; but the blank is filled cruelly with the humble animations of a ‘Daily’ life which has her in it. Wordsworth entreats himself to ‘stop’ hoping hopelessly, and yet hope forges its self-sustaining, unstoppable legacy: Dora ‘is ever with’ her father while bidding him adieu. Part of the unbearable beauty of that final sentence lies in the way that ‘with me’ and ‘will be’ come together to form another of those unsuspecting rhymes (along with repay/away, melt/felt) which mingles evanescence with existence, while throwing into relief the truth Wordsworth had once unconvincingly tried to deny: that mourning and wishing are one and the same. Walter Pater observed of Wordsworth that he pondered deeply ‘those strange reminiscences and forebodings, which seem to make our lives 60 O. CLARKSON stretch before and behind us’,24 and that second ‘and’ (not ‘or’) picks up exquisitely on the way that Wordsworth discovers through his two-way visions of remembrance and wishfulness that ‘hope and memory are as one’ (Tuft of Primroses, l. 305). Nothing can bring back the hour of unal- loyed hope. But Wordsworth’s letters are aware that this agonising recognition never overrides the spirit-stirring feeling with which we are consumed when the future we have left behind glimmers before our mind’s eye once more—when, as Randall Jarrell puts it in a very lovely poem, ‘We can’t tell our life / From our wish’.25

24 Walter Pater, ‘Wordsworth’ (1874), Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1901), p. 54. 25 ‘A Man Meets a Woman in the Street’, Randall Jarrell: The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), pp. 351–53. CHAPTER 5

Two Wordsworths: Mountain-climbing, Letter-writing

Susan J. Wolfson

William’s Mountains The fiction of letters written ex tempore is synonymous with the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century. Readers had the illusion of real-time communication. No wonder that the literary form of a letter— call it epistolary poetics1—shimmers behind William Wordsworth’s shaping of his autobiography, which bore this title in his lifetime, an address to—2:

1 I take the term ‘epistolary poetics’ from my essay ‘Keats the Letter-Writer: Epistolary Poetics’, Romanticism Past and Present 6 (1982), pp. 43–61. 2 I transcribe Dorothy Wordsworth’s MS. B:4r; see the plate in The Thirteen-Book ‘Prelude’, 1805, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 1.1168. All references to The Prelude are from this edition. In general, I shall use forenames when referring to domestic persons, and full names or surnames when referring to the public writer.

S. J. Wolfson (*) Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 61 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_5 62 S. J. WOLFSON

Poem

Title not yet fixed upon

William Wordsworth

Addressed to

S. T. Coleridge.

This address, posthumously titled The Prelude, holds two pivotal reports of mountain-ascending, each loaded with symbolic import: an alpine adventure in August 1790 that climaxed in a missed climax; and a Snowdon sunrise-hike the next summer, pre-empted by the sudden splendour of an unveiled moon. Both hikes were shared with Wordsworth’s college friend, Robert Jones. Because of the autobiographical idiom, the poetry reads in phases, like a letter. Book Sixth recounts the lads’ distressing discovery from a local peasant ‘that we had cross’d the Alps’ (6.524), missing the anticipated thrill. On a day that was cloudy, rainy, and mist-soaked, they had become disoriented, stunned by missteps, ‘lost’, the poet says, ‘as in a cloud’ (taking sensation from circumstance). Outer weather precipitates inner weather, the poet’s mind in a mist. Ever since Moses communicated with the Almighty at the summit of Sinai, men-on-mountains has been a big deal: topography as tropography. Petrarch had Mont Ventoux, accompanied by his brother in the spring of 1336; at the summit, he opened Augustine’s Confessions to read an admonitory passage about worldly pride, and that evening he wrote a letter describing a turning point in his spiritual life (Familiares Book IV, Epistle 1).3 What better genealogy for Wordsworth’s recovery of spiritual allegory fourteen years after his vexing disappointment!—now lodged in a chapter

3 For Petrarch on Mt. Ventoux, I am indebted to Albert Russell Ascoli, ‘Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the “Ascent of Mount Ventoux”’, Stanford Italian Review 10 (1990), pp. 5–43, and to Lyell Asher, ‘Petrarch at the Peak of Fame’, PMLA 108.5 (1993), pp. 1050–63. 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 63 designed for an epic autobiography whose ‘appointed close’ is ‘the discipline/And consummation of the poet’s mind/In every thing that stood most prominent’ (so the poet names the genre, see 13.271–72).4 On this appointment, he gives a retrospective spin to the unmarked crossing. In 1804, he reclaims the mist that enveloped him in 1790 to fashion a self- induced apostrophe to a muse of providential frustration:

Imagination! lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my Song Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power, In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through. (6.525–30)

This is great rhetorical drama: a call not only to a Power paradoxically independent of any command (the unique instance of unfather’d in Wordsworth’s poetry), but also to sheer textual presence. The cut athwart 28–29, ‘came/Athwart me’, is a mimesis of present poetic power. Autobiographer Wordsworth redeems the frustration of 1790’s material events as a spiritual boon, realized in the eye and progress of material writing in 1804.5

And now recovering to my Soul I say I recognize thy glory; in such strength Of usurpation, in such visitings

4 Alan Hill tried earnestly to establish Wordsworth’s awareness of Petrarch’s letter, but could get no further than speculation about parallels, echoes, affiliations, and probability. See Alan G. Hill, ‘The Triumphs of Memory: Petrarch, Augustine, and Wordsworth’s Ascent of Snowdon’, The Review of English Studies ns 57.229 (2006), pp. 247–58. Even so, what Ascoli writes about Petrarch could be said of Wordsworth: ‘the narrative … records a physical journey of alpine ascent, motivated by a desire for sensual and external seeing’, then follows ‘a narrative of spiritual conversion’, which seems less a displacement of the former than a ‘relation’ (in the sense of affinity and of telling) ‘between physical or spiritual or intellectual experience’, mediated by imagination, memory, and writing, the external record of interior life (p. 20). 5 For my fuller reading of this passage, with reference to other incisive discussions of the revisionary dynamics, see ‘More Prelude to Ponder; Or, Getting Your Words-Worth’, Review 16, ed. James O. Hoge (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994), pp. 3–29—with apology for an erratum (but with poetic logic) in transcribing ‘The invisible world’ as ‘invisible word’ (p. 12). 64 S. J. WOLFSON

Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode, There harbours whether we be young or old. (6.531–37)

So, too, Petrarch reflecting by moonlight on his ascent and descent of Mont Ventoux: the literary sequel becomes the primary boon, ‘the deliberate act of literary endurance commonly known as “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux”’.6 Wordsworth’s postscript in the genre is his tribute to Imagination’s access to what can never be secured in spectacles of mere sense:

With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be. (6.540–42)

This conversion narrative is an affirmative review both of Simplon mists and an earlier disappointment in the Alpine tour, a sunlit beholding of the much-storied summit of Mont Blanc (with no intention to scale it), which had left him

grieved To have a soulless image on the eye, Which had usurp’d upon a living thought That never more could be. (6.453–56)

This never more could be is poised to anticipate, a hundred lines on, evermore about to be: at Mont Blanc, the image on the eye is the enemy of imagination, and imagination responds in 1804 with a ‘strength/Of usurpation’ (6.532–33) that sublimely elevates what mere eye can never command. If there is some suspicion that Petrarch’s Ventoux-ascent was a fiction fabricated for a letter about spiritual reckoning, even this angle has Wordsworthian vectors. In ‘a very long letter’ of September 1790 to his

6 Asher, p. 1052. 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 65 sister Dorothy (so she describes it, EY p. 39),7 the Simplon Passage seems merely incidental: ‘we quitted the Valais and passed the Alps at Semplon [sic] in order to visit part of Italy’. While William alludes to ‘impressions’ of their three-hour ‘walk among the Alps’ on 16 August that ‘will never be effaced’ (6 September, EY p. 33), that’s about it in wordage, no detailing. Mentioning ‘a few little disasters occasionally’, the letter keeps these little and immediately beneficial: ‘far from depressing us they rather gave us additional resolution and Spirits’ (14 Sept., EY p. 37). Reporting this letter to her friend Jane Pollard on 6 October, Dorothy reiterates the high mood: ‘every thing had succeeded with them beyond their most sanguine expectations’ (EY p. 39). Mont Blanc gets no mention, just implied in Chamouny. Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches, composed 1792/1793, has neither a Simplon nor a Mont Blanc episode. Readers with only Book Sixth in hand might hardly guess such slight antecedence for the poet’s insistent legitimations. The Prelude—quasi-letter-to-Coleridge as it is framed—is a different genre, a deliberately crafted, elevated narrative. Its final climax-episode, placed for full symbolic assignment out of chronology at the start of its Conclusion, is a gratifying mountain story. Of ‘Wordsworth’s immediate impressions on Snowdon nothing is known’, remarks Jonathan Wordsworth.8 What we do know is that a now Wordsworthian Wordsworth is narrating a mountain-venture timed for sunrise, Snowdonia lit up in panorama. This ascent is pre-literary in real time, but in autobiographical time, it is a massive metaphor for the epic urgency with which it is invested. The narrative is so conspicuously motivated that the poet can even risk some light ironizing. The group ‘sallied forth’ as if a military contingent (the mind may not need, but surely enjoys those banners militant) on a night that is hyperbolically unpromising, Alpine Fogs Redivivus:

--It was a Summer’s night, a close warm night, Wan, dull and glaring, with a dripping mist Low hung and thick that cover’d all the sky. (13.10–12)

7 William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Letters, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press), The Early Years, 1787–1805, revised by Chester L. Shaver, 1967, p. 39. Hereafter EY. 8 Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Climbing of Snowdon’, Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth and Beth Darlington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 449–74, quotation, p. 451. 66 S. J. WOLFSON

The repetitions and metrical thuds (five of them march from ‘close’ to ‘dull’) play sensation into the time of reading. The only happy creature in this band, ‘Hemm’d round on every side with fog and damp’ (13.16), is the ‘Shepherd’s Cur’: no metaphysical aspirations here, just ‘great joy’ in unearthing ‘a hedge-hog in the mountain crags’ (23–24). Young Wordsworth burrows joylessly, with his own animal eagerness, into the agenda:

With forehead bent Earthward, as if in opposition set Against an enemy, I panted up With eager pace, and no less eager thoughts. (13.29–32)

Defined by sober panting—bent, set, up, thoughts hang with stress at the line-ends—this climber will not be distracted by anything mere earth may surprise to attention. Wordsworth is ‘the foremost of the Band’—as ‘chanced’, he says (13.35), but could it have been otherwise? Even in company, the leader is a loner. Yet a big surprise (which the narrating poet directs) comes with a sudden brightening of the ground on this foremost spot, and then the unveiled cause: the ‘Moon’ (symbolized) emerging from behind the clouds and the panorama ‘Usurp’d upon’ (this verb drawn forward from the two earlier mountain-narratives) by its light. A hundred hills, the ocean, an auditorium of torrents, roars, streams, ‘The universal spectacle throughout / Was shaped for admiration and delight’ (60–61)—the last noun punning on the light all over. Wordsworth’s subsequent reflection, represented as ex tempore, is a proactive transformation of the event and its regnant moon into a metaphor for ideal mental power:

The perfect image of a mighty Mind, Of one that feeds upon infinity, That is exalted by an underpresence. (13.69–71)

This is a mid-ascent colloquy of ‘lonely Mountain’ (67), Mind and Moon, and then of poet and moonscaped memory. In contrast to the Alpine damper—where what is missed gets recalculated, long after, as better gains—the gains here precede any disappointment (Who remembers this 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 67 was a hike to a summit to see a sunrise?). The verse reflects its production, including the coining of the word underpresence, as it theorizes and the- matizes the mind of the elevated poet and the mighty Mind cast as its counterpart. The perfect image is most significant as perfect imagination. Also significant, as Jonathan Wordsworth remarks with emphasis, is that the poet’s claim ‘A meditation rose in me that night’… is untrue’.9 It is a fiction retrojected by the poet that William Wordsworth had become— more specifically, by the autobiographer orchestrating the story in 1804.10 And as this poet knew, there was a female textual underpresence in his words, one upon which he frequently fed in these years of composition: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden journal, which she kept as a commonplace book, a sort of proto-letter, for her brother’s perusal. She recorded an event on 25 January 1798, six and a half years after his Snowdon- ascent, and as many years before his Snowdon-drafting:

The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in the centre of a black-blue vault.

Two days later, she describes how ‘the moon burst through the invisible veil which enveloped her’.11 William drafted a poem soon after and published it, revised, as ‘A Night-Piece’ in the 1815 Poems. The ‘imaginative power displayed’ struck him as ‘among the best’ of the unit ‘Poems of Imagination’—even as he had been foremost in the band.12 What he doesn’t say is that the imaginative power so claimed was actually a textual power not of his origination, but Dorothy’s, a ghost-writer.13

9 Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Climbing of Snowdon’, p. 451. 10 See Reed, ‘Introduction’, The Thirteen-Book ‘Prelude’, pp. x–xi. 11 Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘The Alfoxden Journal (1798)’, Dorothy Wordsworth: A Longman Cultural Edition (New York: Pearson, 2009), p. 6 for both quotations. 12 Henry Crabb Robinson, 9 May 1815; Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley. 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1938) 1:166. Decades on, Wordsworth recalled his lines as ‘composed … extempore’; Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1851) 1: 104 13 For a more likely chronology with Dorothy’s priority, see Beth Darlington, ‘Two Early Texts’, Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, p. 426 (pp. 425–48) and Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Climbing of Snowdon’, Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, p. 454. In Romantic Interactions: Social Being & the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 68 S. J. WOLFSON

‘I have thought of you perpetually and never have my eyes burst upon a scene of particular loveliness but I have almost instantly wished that you could for a moment be transported to the place where I stood to enjoy it’, he wrote to her in that letter of 14 September 1790 (EY p. 35). Dorothy, one of the fair-copiers of The Prelude, knew intimately, down to the very wordings, the iconic mountain ascents, the ‘missed crossing’ of the Alps and the night on Mount Snowdon. She was often his compositional sounding board, almost always his first reader, and frequently his word- processor. This was pretty much the case for thirty years. In this way, then, William’s poems were communications to her, letters by another name.

Dorothy’s Mountains William’s loaded narratives of men and mountains are in the background of the Lakeland mountain-climbing, mountain-pass, mountain-vista narrative that Dorothy Wordsworth writes up in a letter of 21 October 1818. The adventure took place on the 7th, initiated by an inspiring friend, Mary Barker, and included ‘a kind Neighbour’ of hers, ‘a Statesman & Shepherd of the Vale, as our companion & Guide’, along with Miss Barker’s maid, and a hired porter.14 Dorothy was ten weeks shy of forty-eight, and the adventure up and down this famously difficult terrain was thrilling enough for her to recap for her childhood friend, Jane Marshall (née Pollard) a week later (MY 2, p. 495). She and Mary Barker both wrote letters on one of the summits to Sara Hutchinson (the sister of William’s wife and the Wordsworths’ childhood friend) in Wales. These texts of temporal proximity have been lost, but literary recording was part of the fun, and what survived was Dorothy’s elaborate letter on 21 October to Reverend William Johnson, a former curate and schoolmaster in Grasmere, thirteen

2010), pp. 173–75, I discuss in detail the imprinting of her wording on William’s ‘Night-Piece’. 14 For Dorothy Wordsworth’s letter, I cite my and Madeleine Callaghan’s transcription of Journals DC MS 51 (Wordsworth Library, Jerwood Centre, Grasmere). We both consulted the transcription of Jeff Cowton. Citations give MS page by recto (r) and verso (v). Other than some accidentals and italics which I restore to underlining, our transcription accords with The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 364–68, hereafter PW: WW 2. This text is more reliable than that in William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth, Letters: The Middle Years, Part 2, 1812–1820, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revised by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 499–503, for reasons the editors explain (PW: WW 2. p. 363). This volume of the letters hereafter is given as MY 2. 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 69 years her junior, now teaching in London. She took pains to copy this letter into her journal, and seems to have enjoyed recounting her adventure several times, in the mode of ex tempore report but also with narrative imagination. If Wordsworth’s brotherhood of mountain-men are tacitly mindful of Petrarch and his brother, Dorothy’s letter is tacitly intertextual on Wordsworthian counterpoints: two women/two men; middle-age accom- plishments/youthful vigour; sociable, shared experience (her record of her Alpine ascents shows this too15)/solitary introspection and personal investments; a friendly letter of sequential reports/determined autobiographical crafting of symbolic episodes. In the tempo of real time, Dorothy interplays anticipation, pleasure, disappointment, and surprise as the everyday rhythms of adventure. Her literary tropes are ephemeral rather than mobilized, playful rather than programmed, self-ironizing rather than sublime. Miss Barker is key to these differences. Dorothy Wordsworth describes in effect an alter ego (a couple of years her junior): sister in spirit and an alternative to her brother. This brother was ironic about Miss Barker’s attempts at poetry, especially in a romance of curing Byron in Lakeland (MY 2, pp. 175–76, 204–05), but Robert Southey adored her. Miss Barker is a gender-fluid personality; one of her nicknames was ‘The Major’.16 Dorothy was quite taken with her when she met her in spring 1814. Infused with ‘Generosity, frankness, Sincerity, and perfect disinter- estedness’, she also had a ‘warm temper’ that did not disdain ‘to conceal her opinions on any point’ or any necessary ‘indignation’. She was independent, self-resourceful, happily single, with ‘a very social nature’ that guaranteed ‘a high enjoyment of society’ (MY 2, p. 139). She was a musician, a writer (of a novel and poetry) and kept an album that includes Dorothy’s poetry.17 Dorothy introduces her to Rev. Johnson as if she were a character out of fiction:

15 Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘Journal of a Tour of the Continent (1820)’, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt [1941], 2 vols (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon, 1970), 2. p. 158 (pp. 1–336). 16 Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 202. 17 Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, revised ed. (Jefferson: McFarland and Co., 2009), p. 159. 70 S. J. WOLFSON

a female Friend, an unmarried Lady, who, bewitched with the charms of the rocks, & streams, & Mountains, belonging to of that secluded spot, has there built herself a house, and, though she is admirably fitted for society, & has as much enjoyment when surrounded by her Friends as any one can have her chearfulness has never flagged, though she has lived more than the year round alone in Borrowdale, at six miles distance from Keswick, with bad roads between—You will guess that she has resources within herself—Such indeed she has—She is a painter & labours hard in depicting the beauties of her favorite Vale; she is also fond of Music and of reading, and has a reflecting mind: besides, […] she is become an active Climber of the hills. (25r–25v)

It was she who proposed to Dorothy Wordsworth the hike ‘up a mountain called at the top Ash Course’, promising ‘a most magnificent prospect’ (25v). Dorothy writes with a light epic touch, inscribing the ascent as ‘a feat that she & I performed on Wednesday the 7th of this month’. They left by cart before nine a.m. and returned around midnight. For the most part Dorothy’s letter stays in the moment, tracking anticipations, surprises, disappointments, frustrations, and unexpected rewards. The morning was so promising that her report verges on prose-poetry, paced in iambic rhythms:

the sun shone; the sky was clear and blue; and light and shade fell in large masses upon the mountains; the fields belowglittered with the dew, where the beams of the sun could reach them; and every little stream tumbling down the hills seemed to add to the chearfulness of the scene. (25v–26r)

Her overt mode is topographical description and weather-reporting, but it is full of personal imprints. She makes herself a character in the narrative, not with her brother’s sense of vocational declaration, but still unhesitant about self-commemoration, noting her pride, her inspiration, and events of her writing:

We found ourselves at the top of Ash Course without a weary limb, having had the fresh air of autumn to help us up by its invigorating powers, & the sweet warmth of the unclouded sun to tempt us to sit and rest by the way. From |the top of Ash Course | we beheld a prospect which would indeed have amply repaid me us for a toilsome journey, if such it had been; and a sense of thankfulness for the continuance of that vigour of body, which enabled me to climb the high Mountain, as in the days of my youth, inspiring me with fresh chearfulness, added a delight, a charm to the contempla- 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 71

tion of the magnificent scenes before me, which I cannot describe—Still less can I tell you the glories of what we saw. (26r–26v)

Those vertical lines highlight the accomplishment for her reader, as if to define a title. This measure of sense from youth, physical and mental, is inextricably entwined with the exhilarating panorama, which Dorothy reports in a blend of travelogue and epic catalogue:

Three views, each distinct in its kind, we saw at once—the Vale of Borrowdale, of Keswick, of Bassenthwaite—Skiddaw, Saddleback, Helvellyn, numerous other Mountains, and, still beyond, the Solway Frith, and the Mountains of Scotland. Nearer to us on the other side, and below them W us, were the Langdale Pikes—then our Vale below them,—Windermere—and, far beyond Windermere, after a long distance we saw Ingleborough in Yorkshire.—But how shall I speak of the peculiar deliciousness of the third prospect! At this time that was most favoured by sun sunshine & shade. The green Vale of Esk—deep & green, with its glittering serpent stream was below us; and on we looked to the Mountains near the Sea—Black Coombe & others—and still beyond, to the Sea itself in dazzling brightness. At the same station, (making what might be called a 4th division or prospect) Turning round we saw the Mountains of Wasdale in tumult; and Great Gavel, though the middle of the Mountain, was to us as its base, looked very grand. (26v–27r)

A glittering serpent stream might be allegorical grist for William—like the reflection of the moon on sullen water on a horrible night in the woods that he hellifies as ‘darkness visible’ (The Prelude, 6.638, 645). For Dorothy, the image is a moment’s fancy. Her modest tropes of inadequacy—‘how shall I speak’; ‘I cannot describe’—don’t really hold up in such present description. The three views were the goal, amply satisfied: ‘We had attained the object of our journey’ (27r). This survey, however, is only a third of the way into Dorothy’s letter, with no intent of closing on this climax—one inscribed by William in a note to The Brothers: ‘The great Gavel, so called I imagine, from its resemblance to the Gable end of a house, is one of the highest of the Cumberland mountains. It stands at the head of the several vales of Ennerdale, Wastdale, and Borrowdale’.18 This might have been a

18 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. 2 vols (London: T. N. Longman & O. Rees, 1800), Vol. 2, p. 37. 72 S. J. WOLFSON happy end, but thrilled by the propitious weather, by bodily vigour, and a confessed thirst for more, ‘our ambition mounted higher. We saw the summit of Scaw Fell, as it seemed, very near to us: we were indeed, three parts up that Mountain, & thither we determined to go’ (27r). Sca Fell (as it’s now called) is England’s second highest mountain, at 3162 feet, marked for the ambition to which Dorothy tunes her verb mounted.19 Even when they ‘found the distance greater than it appeared to us … our courage did not fail’ (27v). It was only when they realized they would first have to descend, then undertake an ‘exceedingly steep & difficult’ re- ascent that threatened to leave them ‘benighted’, that they ‘unwillingly … gave it up’. If unwillingly sounds, via a name-pun, ‘unWilliam- Wordsworth’, they recover with a resolve ‘instead, to ascend another Pike point of the same mountain, called the Pikes’ (27r).20 Dorothy does not allegorize the disappointment, nor does she subject it to a William-calculus of imagination nurtured by disappointment. They set out on a fresh adventure, unpegged to prior expectation, and amply rewarded. Dorothy’s letter doesn’t preview this, though by the time she is writing, she knows it. Instead, she gives the pulse of present sensations to her correspondent. The only thing she knows at the time of writing is an unanticipated honour: ‘I have since found, the Measurers of the Mountains estimate as higher than the larger summit which bears the name of Scaw Fell, & where the Stone Man is built, which we, at the time, considered as the point of highest honour’ (27r–27v). Even without this happy finding, the day, in the moment of experience, is extraordinary:

The Sun had never once been overshadowed by a cloud during the whole of our progress from the centre of Borrowdale; at the summit of the Pike there was not a breath of air to stir even the papers which we spread out containing our food. These refreshment which we ate our dinner in summer warmth; and the stillness seemed to be not of this world.—We paused & kept silence to listen, & not a sound of any kind was to be heard.—We were far above out of the reach of the Cataracts of Scaw Fell; & not an insect was

19 For Scaw Fell’s allure, see Jonathan Otley, A Concise Description of the English Lakes, The Mountains in Their Vicinity, and the Roads by which They May Be Visited (Keswick: Jonathan Otley, 1823), pp. 47–50. By 1849 this had reached an eighth expanded, illustrated edition (Scaw Fell, pp. 64–67). 20 I am informed that the plural Pikes probably refers to Sca Fell and Scafell Pike, this second, England’s highest peak, at more than 3200 feet (Mt Snowdon in Wales is 3560 feet). Mickledore, between the two, is a notorious descent and seriously dangerous territory. 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 73

there to hum in the air.—[…] the Majesty of the Mountains below us & close to us is not to be conceived. (27v–28r)

This is as close to heaven on earth as it gets, and it might have been a fit- ting narrative climax; but Dorothy embeds it in the unpredictable flux of the day, for which their Shepherd Guide is the best reader, in practical rather than metaphysical measures of providence:

While we were looking round after dinner our Guide said to us that we must not linger long, for we should have a storm. We looked in vain to espy the traces of it; for mountains, vales, & the sea were all touched with the clear light of the sun—“It is there,” he said, pointing to the sea beyond Whitehaven, and, sure enough, we there perceived a light cloud, or mist, unnoticeable but by a Shepherd, accustomed to watch all mountain bodings—(28r–28v)

He is twin to William’s iconic, savvy ‘Shepherd’ Michael (Lyrical Ballads 1800), ‘prompt/And watchful more than ordinary men. / Hence he had learn’d the meaning of all winds, / … often-times, / When others heeded not’ (pp. 201–02). A storm does come on, with cold air, boiling masses of clouds, and rain. But it passes, with yet another treat: ‘the Pikes were decorated by two splendid rainbows;—Skiddaw also had its own Rainbows, […] and before we found ourselves again upon that part of the Mountain called Ash Course every cloud […] had vanished from every summit’ (28v–29r). Rainbows come with no covenant. Dorothy’s letter unfolds a continuing ephemeral phenomenology, and she does not pause to sift the data into sacramental symbology—of the sort, say, that hovers over William’s ‘My heart leaps up when I behold / A Rainbow in the sky’ (1807 Poems 2, p. 44). As the ascent of the Pike had been, Ash Course becomes a bridge to another adventure: ‘Do not think we here gave up our spirit of enterprise. No! I had heard much of the grandeur of the view of Wasdale from Stye Head’ (29r). Here Dorothy partners the role of director that Miss Barker had played: ‘Down to that Pass (for we were yet far above it) we bent our course, a very deep red chasm in the Mountains’ (29r–29v), then up to Stye Head to gaze in awe at Wasdale, the heights of Great Gavel, and close enough to Scaw Fell that they could hear ‘the roaring of the stream, from one of the ravines of that Mountain’, of ‘tremendous’ depth, ‘black, and the Crags were awful’ (29v)—a nice, chance slant-rhyme with Scaw Fell. Thence they wend home, the sky dotted with a few stars and then washed 74 S. J. WOLFSON in ‘Moonlight’ (30r). As it had for William on Snowdon, moonlight (with a capital M, even) might have given Dorothy’s record a sublime theatrical close, the coda to a day of sunshine, storms, vistas, and rainbows. But she is not done. Remembering something from earlier in the day, she adds two postscripts, or rather further narrations that bring her reader back with her. When William redacted this letter for his guide to Lakeland ventures, he reordered her narrative into sequential chronology. Dorothy’s sequence of pause and recovery gives a flux and reflux in the moment of writing. What she wants to recall are sights that fascinate and repel human imagination. On their ascent of the Pike, she reports a nearly lunar landscape, above the tree-line:

There, not a blade of grass was to be seen—hardly a cushion of moss, & that was parched & brown; and only growing rarely between the huge blocks & stones which cover the summit & lie in heaps all round to a great distance. (30r)

On this minimal topography, Dorothy’s mind turns to earth-history, with a daring simile of vivid imagination for those huge blocks and stones:

like Skeletons or bones of the earth not wanted at the creation, & there left to be covered with never-dying lichens, which the Clouds and dews nourish; and adorn with colours of the most vivid and exquisite beauty, and endless in variety.—No gems or flowers can surpass in colouring the beauty of some of these masses of stone which no human eye beholds except the Shepherd is led thither by chance or Traveller is led thither by curiosity; and how seldom must this happen! (30r)

This could have cued a ‘sublime’ of description, from the gothic to the gorgeous. Dorothy doesn’t go there, but stays in the moment, with a sensation of good fortune rather than divine providence:

We certainly were singularly fortunate in the day; for when we were seated on the Summit our Guide, turning his eyes thoughtfully round, said to us, “I do not know that in my whole life I was ever at any season of the year so high up on the Mountains on so clear so calm a day”. (30v)

This once-in-a-lifetime sensation, of course, had already been embarrassed in the letter’s own narrative by the boiling storm. Dorothy wields no para- 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 75 digm of pride rebuked, but rather conveys nature’s unpredictable otherness, endlessly surprising human desire and satisfaction: ‘the storm which exhibited to us the grandeur of earth & heaven commingled, yet without terror; for we knew that the storm would pass away; for so our prophetic Guide assured us’ (30v). Lightly jesting about providential narrative—and with one more homage to Shepherd-savvy—‘earth & heaven’ register as material climates, the mountainscape and sky, with no tilt towards apocalypse. This is followed by the lightest touch of all, with a riff of images that matches Hamlet’s teasing of Polonius about the shape of clouds (Hamlet 3.2):

I espied a Ship upon the glittering Sea while we were looking over Eskdale. “Is it a Ship?” replied the Guide. “A Ship! Yes it can be nothing else don’t you see the shape of it?” Miss Barker interposed, “It is a Ship, of that I am certain—I cannot be mistaken, I am so accustomed to the appearance of Ships at Sea—” The Guide dropped the argument; but a Minute was scarcely gone when he quietly said—“Now look at your Ship, it is now a horse”—So indeed it was—with a gallant neck and head—We laughed heartily, and I hope when I am again inclined to positiveness I may remember the Ship and the horse upon the glittering Sea; and the calm confidence, yet submission of Our Wise Man of the Mountains; who certainly had more knowledge of Clouds than we, whatever might be our knowledge of Ships. (30v, see also PW: WW 2, pp. 367–68)

This is ‘Point Rash-Judgment’ done with self-spoofing, generous comic glee, without consecrating the moment with ‘Naming a Place’ (William’s genre).21 Dorothy ends her letter to William Johnson in a generous spirit, ‘that it may awaken in you a desire to spend a long holiday among the mountains, and explore their recesses’ (MY 2, p. 503). Her brother appreciated the inspiration enough to bring this letter into the independent launch of his Scenery of the Lakes (1822).22 If H. C. Robinson complained about ‘A Night-Piece’ that it too typically celebrated the poet’s own imagination—

21 ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ is a unit in William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1800 and after, and in subsequent collections. 22 William Wordsworth, A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England/ Third Edition (now first published separately), With Additions, Illustrative Remarks upon the Scenery of the Alps (London: Longman &c, 1822). 76 S. J. WOLFSON

‘It is the mere power which he is conscious of exerting in which he delights, not the production of a work in which men rejoice on account of the sympathies and sensibilities it excites in them’23—this poet could appreci- ate the alternative mode of Dorothy’s letter, which seems exactly this sort of production, with the endorsement of her delight. William gives it in anonymous quotation, and though he edits a bit, to focus on the scenery, he credits her voice, her views, her experience.24 With this broadcast, the infectious curiosity and inspiration of Dorothy’s letter guided other ventures on Scaw Fell Pike. Harriet Martineau was so impressed that she copied it into her guide to the Lakeland (with credit only to William Wordsworth), for an account of the ‘View from Scawfell’.25 She introduces the excerpt as ‘the best service to the stranger’ (p. 158) and, at its close, praises its phenomenology of experience, with this conclusion: ‘Before we had again reached Esk Hause [Ash Course], every cloud had vanished from every summit’. This feels revelatory, a summit seen after stood upon, the best postscript ever. ‘We cannot do better than stop at these auspicious words’, Martineau comments. Whether or not she meant a pun on ‘Wordsworth’, the effect is to include the poet’s sister in the praise, which Martineau elevates to virtual experience: ‘May the tourist who reads this on the Pike see every cloud vanish from every summit!’ (p. 160). Sponsored by her brother and Martineau, Dorothy Wordsworth’s account of the ascent, its scenery, and her in-the-moment experience was widely read, by tourists and virtual tourists, throughout the nineteenth century. Generously open rather than tuned to a providential personal narrative (crisis, revelation), her letter to a friend became a letter to the world about the adventure that awaits, in the prospect of Dorothy Wordsworth’s lively, creative writing.

23 Robinson, On Books and their Writers, 1, p. 167. 24 In addition to the rearrangement noted, William deletes the character sketch of Miss Barker and Dorothy’s reports of her pleasure in her ambition and physical vigour. 25 The title of Wordsworth’s 5th edition (1835), A Guide through the District of the Lakes, is mirrored by Harriet Martineau’s Complete Guide to the English Lakes (Windermere: John Garnett/London: Whittaker, 1855), with ‘portions of that “Letter to a friend” which Mr. Wordsworth published many years ago, and which is the best account we have’ (Part IV, chap. III; pp. 158–60); her Guide saw five lifetime editions by 1876. Subsequent references appear parenthetically. 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 77

Dorothy and William in the Mountains About two years later, Dorothy Wordsworth was writing of her adventures in other mountains. Her journal of her Alpine tour of 1820, in a party of seven that included William and his wife Mary, complicates the in-the- moment record of Ash Course by interplaying four temporalities—these nicely arrayed by Susan Levin: William’s experience in 1790, his representation of this in 1804, Dorothy’s youth, and her situation in 1820, just shy of fifty, with a sense that what ‘was for William a prelude is for Dorothy a finale.’26 My sense is that recording the tour is no such finale, but a fresh adventure that even returned William to his sensations thirty years earlier. When Dorothy first beheld the Alps from Zurich, she exclaimed aloud on realizing that these were mountains, not clouds. If in 1790 she was left tracing William’s route on maps, now she tracks the route and enters into the sensorium of his experience, including its bewilderments and disappointments. Reciprocally, she knew her journal would be read by him, their family, and their friends as real-time communication from the very sites. Amid the traveloguery, she is animated by self-measuring. She writes a letter to Sara Hutchinson on 8 August 1820 in which she surmises that she may be ‘the strongest of the Party,—climbing the Passes of the Alps is not near so fatiguing as our mountains. We reckon nothing of what we have hitherto done in that way’ (MY 2, p. 633). Two weeks on she registers in her journal her

thankfulness for the strength and cheerful spirits with which I was enabled to undertake a journey on foot across the Alps, having but a few weeks before suffered so much from oppression and sickness that I had little hope of being able to accomplish the journey in any way. The change was marvel- lous, for when I began to climb the mountains at Lauterbrunnen, the full possession of health and even youthful vigour seemed to have returned;— and never again did I suffer a moment from pain or weakness;—hardly from fatigue. (August 21; J 2. p. 174)

On another occasion she is happily like William: ‘I was alone—the first in the ascent’ (J 2. p. 184).

26 Susan Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, pp. 91–92. Dorothy’s Journal of a Tour of the Continent (1820) cited as J, will be quoted from Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 1941, 2 vols (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon, 1970), 2, pp. 1–336. 78 S. J. WOLFSON

After this ‘first of our happy days spent in crossing the Alps’, she can’t sleep for the pleasure: ‘so many images moved before my mind, not like dreams but realities, that I could not compose myself to sleep, and travelled over again the journey of the day’ (J 2. p. 188)—evidently by writing this long entry in her journal. At her record of St. Gothard’s pass, she inscribes a punning spectral brother-companion (again) in unWilling: ‘Unwilling to turn the mountain’, she finds herself entertaining, even ‘Entering into my Brother’s youthful feelings of sadness and disappointment when he was told unexpectedly that the Alps were crossed—the effort accomplished’; ‘I tardily descended’ (p. 190). Then the big one, marked by ‘my brother’s wanderings thirty years ago’: Simplon Pass. She and Mary follow the same path ‘we had so often heard of, which misled my Brother and Robert Jones in their way from Switzerland to Italy’. For William, ‘The feelings of that time came back with the freshness of yesterday, accompanied with a dim vision of thirty years of life between’. Then the joining of the paths with her brother of 1790 and 1820: ‘We traced the path together, with our eyes, till hidden among the cottages, where they had first been warned of their mistake’ (9 September; pp. 260–61). Dorothy and Mary participate in his gratified sensation: ‘I find that my remembrance for thirty years has been scarcely less vivid than the reality before my eyes!’ (p. 280); and Dorothy quotes phrases from The Prelude to gloss the vivid reality. It’s a shared joy, on foot and in writing. On their way home (October 29), they visited Dorothy’s mountain- mate, Mary Barker, in Boulogne, for a happy reunion: ‘she was recovering from an illness, and the sight of old Friends made her cast off all discom- fort; and we felt as if we were already seated by an English fireside’ in Cumberland (J 2. p. 331). The recovery-story may have been a cover story for debt-beating to builders of her home in Cumbria, on which she had overspent.27 Though Dorothy does not say so, I imagine that she distracted

27 Southey dubbed it ‘The Fawleigh’. Evading creditors, she settled in Bolougne in April 1819 (MY 2:556) and supported herself with work as a carver and gilder of picture frames. Mentioning this visit in a letter to a friend, Sara Coleridge reports that in her Boulogne display, Miss Barker ‘sits in her arm chair, with her screen behind her back, & receives visitors almost all day long; … her return to Cumberland appears quite out of the question’ (12 November 1820). Miss Barker by the 1830s found a husband in France (John Slade) (Gittings and Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth, p. 215, p. 229) and may have resettled with him in Dover. Visiting her in Boulogne in October 1823, H. C. Robinson ‘was amused by her vivacity and intelligence’, finding her quite ‘a character’ and writes that it was she who came up with ‘the appellation Satanic School’ and had gifted it Southey for his notorious preface to 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 79 her friend with her Alpine adventures, reprising the mode of her in-the- moment letter written in Miss Barker’s company two years before. Back home, Dorothy devoted herself to ‘my journal’ of the tour—with her habitual disclaimers of tedious or wasted labour for something likely to be of little interest. Yet as she writes, her devotion to what she might record for others is apparent: ‘at times I have worked very hard from ten o’clock in the morning till dinner time, at four’. This is recounted in the same letter to Catherine Clarkson which conveys her pride in enjoying a day in the mountains with William. ‘I can walk with as little fatigue as when I was twenty’, she boasts, six months shy of fifty; ‘Not long ago my Brother and I spent a whole day on the mountains … walking certainly not less than 14 miles; and I was not the least tired’ (31 May 1821; LY 1. p. 64 and p. 62, her emphases). There is no uncertainty that the simula- crum of walking, the record of the tour, will be accomplished, and one reason, she reports, is William’s encouragement, on the precedent of the Ash-Course letter he was ready to publish in the 1822 Scenery of the Lakes:

Had not my Brother so very much wished me to do my best, I am sure I should never have had the resolutions to go further than just re-copy what I did by snatches, and very irregularly, at the time; but to please him I have amplified and arranged; and a long affair will come out of it … which, through sympathy and a desire to revive dormant recollections, may in patches be interesting to a few. (LY 1. p. 64)

Dorothy stayed ‘hard at work’ through the end of the year, in expectation that her long affair would be ‘interspersed with her brother’s poems’ (LY 1. p. 89, p. 100): ‘I will write some Poems for your journal’, he promised. As her capitals may already indicate, ‘some Poems’ took off as an independent volume, while her comparative sense of the ‘importance’ of her own writing relaxed into something just to ‘interest friends, or a few persons, who enjoying mountain scenery especially, may wish for minute details of what they can never hope to view with their own eyes—or perhaps a few others who have themselves visited the countries which we visited’ (to

A Vision of Judgement (April 1821). Miss Barker smirked to Robinson that Wordsworth was ‘spoiled by having three wives’: the Mrs., Dorothy, and sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson (‘Oct. 9th and 10th’; Books and their Writers 1. p. 297). The Borrowdale extravagance (six miles from Keswick) had become byword: Dorothy assures this Sara about one over-eager home- improver: ‘she will never be like Miss Barker’ (13 February 1825; LY 1. p. 318). 80 S. J. WOLFSON

Catherine Clarkson, 16 January 1822; LY 1. p. 104). But she was still at it in November 1822 (p. 165). Dorothy Wordsworth took pains with the production, binding her manuscript in marble boards, with running headers, a list of contents, several coloured prints (which she asked a friend to procure), and a notation of miles covered on each adventure.28 William was quite ‘interested when I read it to him’ (LY 1. p. 115) and used some of it for headnotes in the 1827 edition of those ‘Poems’, Memorials of a Tour on the Content, crediting ‘Extract from a Journal’. ‘For my own sake … the time is not thrown away’, Dorothy tells Catherine Clarkson (LY 1. p. 104). Writing letters to her friends is, for this sake, Dorothy reminding herself that she has readers in the immediate future, and in futures of which she could not know, with appreciation for the labours and devotions that her letters allowed her not only to report but also to relive what took her up mountains at home and abroad. She is happy to write one letter to William’s travel-companion in the 1790s, Robert Jones, on 7 October 1825, to say that she’d be pleased if he would trust her ‘guidance to the Top of one of our Mountains’, assuring him ‘I can walk as well as when but twenty years old, and can climb the hills better than in those days’. Writing this letter, Dorothy Wordsworth tacitly writes herself into virtual companionship of the men’s Alpine adventures of their own youthful days. ‘The pure air of high places seems to restore all my youthful feelings’ (LY 1. p. 387). Perhaps his, too: she has felt on her pulses how letter-writing has this vital agency.29

28 Lucy Newlyn, William & Dorothy: All in Each Other (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), pp. 245–46. 29 I dedicate this chapter to the memory of Peter Laver, Librarian at Dove Cottage, whose last ascent, at age thirty-six, dying for what he loved in life, was of Sca Fell, 1983; and to Marilyn Gaull, extraordinary Wordsworthian and Lakeland mountainwoman. 5 TWO WORDSWORTHS: MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING, LETTER-WRITING 81

Works Cited Ascoli, Albert Russell. ‘Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the “Ascent of Mount Ventoux”’. Stanford Italian Review 10 (1990), pp. 5–43. Asher, Lyell. ‘Petrarch at the Peak of Fame’. PMLA 108.5 (1993), pp. 1050–63. Coleridge, Sarah. Letter to Elizabeth Crumpe, 12 November 1820. WLMS A / SC / 3. The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, England. Darlington, Beth. ‘Two Early Texts’, in Jonathan Wordsworth and Beth Darlington, ed. Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970. pp. 425–48. Gittings, Robert and Jo Manton. Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1985. Hill, Alan G. ‘The Triumphs of Memory: Petrarch, Augustine, and Wordsworth’s Ascent of Snowdon’. The Review of English Studies ns 57.229 (2006), pp. 247–58. Levin, Susan. Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. Revised edition. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2009a. ———, ed. Dorothy Wordsworth: A Longman Cultural Edition. New York: Pearson, 2009b. Martineau, Harriet. Complete Guide to the English Lakes. Windermere: John Garnett/London: Whittaker, 1855. Newlyn, Lucy. William & Dorothy: All in Each Other. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Otley, Jonathan. A Concise Description of the English Lakes, The Mountains in Their Vicinity, and the Roads by which They May Be Visited. Keswick: Jonathan Otley, 1823. ———. A Concise Description of the English Lakes, and Adjacent Mountains: With General Directions to Tourists. 4th edition. Keswick: Jonathan Otley, 1830. Robinson, Henry Crabb. Books and their Writers. Ed. Edith J. Morley. 3 vols. London: J. M. Dent, 1938. Wolfson, Susan J. ‘Epistolary Poetics: Keats’s Letters’. Romanticism Past and Present 6.2 (1982), pp. 43–61. ———. ‘More Prelude to Ponder; Or, Getting Your Words-Worth’. Review 16. Ed. James O. Hoge. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994. pp. 3–29. ———. Romantic Interactions: Social Being & the Turns of Literary Action. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. Wordsworth, Christopher. Memoirs of William Wordsworth. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1851. Wordsworth, Dorothy. Alfoxden Notebook, in Susan Levin, ed. Dorothy Wordsworth: A Longman Cultural Edition. New York: Pearson, 2009. pp. 5–16. ———. ‘Excursion to the Top of Scawfell’, excerpted and rearranged by William Wordsworth, Description, 3rd edition, pp. 129–36; 4th edition, pp. 111–17; A 82 S. J. WOLFSON

Guide through the District of the Lakes. Kendall: Hudson and Nicholson/ London: E. Moxon, 1835a. pp. 113–18. ———. ‘From a letter to Mr. Johnson’ (‘Scafell Pike Excursion’), 21 October 1818. Journals MS 13, 2803–2906, Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere England. Transcription of DC MS 51 by Susan J. Wolfson and Madeleine Callaghan, with advice from Jeff Cowton’s transcription. See also Prose Works 2. pp. 364–68. ———. ‘Journal of a Tour of the Continent (1820)’. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 1941; 2 vols. Hamden: Archon, 1970. 2. pp. 1–336. Wordsworth, Jonathan. ‘The Climbing of Snowdon’, in Jonathan Wordsworth and Beth Darlington, ed. Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970. pp. 449–74. Wordsworth, Jonathan and Beth Darlington, ed. Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970. Wordsworth, William. A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England/Third Edition (Now First Published Separately), With Additions, Illustrative Remarks upon the Scenery of the Alps. London: Longman &c, 1822. ———. A Guide through the District of the Lakes. Kendall: Hudson and Nicholson/ London: E. Moxon, 1835b. ———. Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. 2 vols. London: T. N. Longman & O. Rees, 1800. Vol. 2. ———. ‘A Night-Piece’. Poems. 2 vols. London: Longman & c, 1815. 1. pp. 301–02. ———. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1974. ———. The Thirteen-Book ‘Prelude’. 1805. Ed. Mark L. Reed. 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Wordsworth, William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Letters. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Clarendon P. The Early Years, 1787–1805, revised by Chester L. Shaver, 1967; The Middle Years, Part 2, 1812–1820, revised by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 1970. The Later Years, Part 1, 1821–1828, revised by Alan G. Hill, 1978. CHAPTER 6

‘Hare and Hound’: Ends and Means in Coleridge’s Letters

Gregory Leadbetter

‘The End is in the Means’, Coleridge wrote to his son Hartley, in a telling aside: ‘Southey once said to me: You are nosing every nettle along the Hedge, while the Greyhound (meaning himself, I presume) wants only to get sight of the Hare, & FLASH!—strait as a line!—he has it in his mouth! […] But the fact is—I do not care twopence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; and find a Hare in every Nettle, I make myself acquainted with’ (CL V. p. 98).1 The blend of apologia and unapologetic assertion is characteristic of the man and the writer, as is the fact that elsewhere Coleridge could confess himself envious of Southey’s greyhound-like directness. The aside within the aside, on Southey’s meaning, is also a parenthesis in parenthesis: almost the entire paragraph in which these words appear is a bracketed digression, of which he was immediately and amusedly self-conscious (‘Digress? or not digress? That’s now no question’ (CL V. p. 99)). It was

1 The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), for which I use the in-text abbreviation CL throughout.

G. Leadbetter (*) Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 83 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_6 84 G. LEADBETTER a trait he had long recognised in himself, as he admitted to his friend Thomas Poole:

Of Parentheses I may be too fond—and will be on my guard in this respect—. But I am certain that no work of empassioned and eloquent reasoning ever did or could subsist without them—They are the drama of Reason—and present the thought growing, instead of a mere Hortus siccus. (CL III. p. 282)

Coleridge acknowledges the pattern, promises to be on his guard, but won’t give up the habit: he is anxious to present his ideas as a living ecol- ogy, not as the dried herbs of a ‘hortus siccus’. His parenthetical ways are part of what Seamus Perry aptly calls the ‘zigzaggery of Coleridgean prose’: ‘the self-delightingly comic enactment of his shifting imaginative life’.2 There is, as Charles Lamb knowingly observed, a ‘great deal of fun in Coleridge’,3 and in his letters, especially—like his notebooks—the ‘thought growing’ in all its drama often blends high seriousness and play: ‘free Activity’ not as a means to an end, but an end in itself, irreducible to calculations of utility and as such analogous to the intrinsic value of life, to which the activity of growing is itself intrinsic. This vital process within Coleridge’s prose supplies image after image of itself in action: ‘my Thoughts are like Surinam Toads—as they crawl on, little Toads vegetate out from back & side, grow quickly, & draw off the attention from the mother Toad’ (CL III. pp. 94–95); elsewhere, ‘my Thoughts, my Pocket-book Thoughts at least, moved like a pregnant Polypus in sprouting Time, clung all over with young Polypi each of which is to be a thing of itself—and every motion out springs a new Twig of Jelly-Life’.4 As Coleridge noted to Thelwall in 1796, ‘whatever a man’s excellence is, that will be likewise his fault’ (CL I. p. 279), and it is illustrative that in these images, the diagnosis of a fault and the flourish of an excellence are simultaneous. However vulnerable to a certain kind of

2 Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 101. 3 Quoted in Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, rev. ed. (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1870), p. 253. See Gregory Leadbetter, ‘The Comic Imagination in Lamb and Coleridge’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin 159 (2014), pp. 11–19. 4 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn et al., 5 double vols (London and (vols. III–V) Princeton: Routledge and (vols. III–V) Princeton University Press, 1957–2002), II. 2431; the English numerals relate to the entry number. 6 ‘HARE AND HOUND’: ENDS AND MEANS IN COLERIDGE’S LETTERS 85

critique his ‘intangled and parenthetic’ (CL IV. p. 685) style may make him,5 and however anxious a witness he is of his own way with words, my contention here is that in the distinctive fabric of his language, Coleridge’s letters—like so much of his prose—communicate a quickening virtue beyond their value as sources of information. The figurative, lyrical life of the language itself conveys a leavening dividend. The end is in the means— and a poetic process is in play. In his description of the hound and the hare, Coleridge makes the hare and finds the hare at one and the same moment (‘poiêsis = making’: CL IV. p. 545): it emerges from the activity and sensitivity of the intelligence involved in its pursuit, and the pursuit of itself. In the verbal energy that ramifies within, around and in spite of their practical purposes, Coleridge’s letters likewise act creatively, as an organ of thought and feeling, kindling the life of ideas in both their reader and their writer. Coleridge’s abundant self-consciousness was intensely mindful of the performative nature of communication—and the mercuriality inherent in the mediation of experience through language. One of the purposes of ‘metaphysics’, as Coleridge conceived it, was to ‘expose the Folly & the Legerdemain’ of those who have ‘abused the blessed Organ of Language’,6 and he felt keenly the power, risk and moral responsibility involved in the use of words—not least because both Coleridge and his friends recognised in himself an almost mythological embodiment of the relationship between eloquence, ingenuity and illusion. ‘Query’, Coleridge speculates in a margin, ‘mentire [to lie]—doesn’t it mean a mente ire [to go from the mind]?’; and although his etymology is a little errant, the lexical root in the Latin is suggestive: as George Whalley points out, mentiri originally meant ‘to invent’.7 The very powers of intellectual and creative agency in ‘a charm of words’ (CL I. p. 511) might also be the means of trickery, deceit and error.

5 To Marilyn Butler, his sentences ‘tend to be laboured and tortuous’: Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 69. In ‘The Spirit of the Age’ (1825), Hazlitt, continuing over years his inimitable fusion of hatchet job and mythologisation, damned Coleridge’s prose as ‘utterly abortive’: The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1930–34), XI. p. 35. 6 Notebooks, I. 1623. 7 Marginalia, ed. George Whalley (vols. I and II), H. J. Jackson and George Whalley (vols. III–VI), 6 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1980–2001), I. p. 61n. 86 G. LEADBETTER

Lamb blithely describes Coleridge’s curious slipperiness in this regard in a letter of early 1800: ‘As long as Lloyd or I have known Col. so long have we known him in the daily & hourly habit of quizzing the world by lyes most unaccountable & most disinterested fictions’.8 This striking portrayal does not, however, suggest malicious mendacity: to ‘quiz’ implies mockery, ridicule and playfulness—and the odd thing about these ‘lyes’ and ‘fictions’ is that they are ‘unaccountable’ and ‘disinterested’: the crime, such as it is, has no apparent motive. Lamb, in any case, is untrou- bled by his friend’s waywardness: in the same letter, he says that he’s ‘been drunk two nights running at Coleridge’s’, and the next month, writes that ‘the more I see of him in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to love him and believe him a very good man’.9 His account of Coleridge’s ‘quizzing’, ‘lyes’ and ‘fictions’ is continuous with a glowing affirmation of his good nature. Wordsworth was more disturbed by this peculiar blend in his friend’s character: ‘The self-created sustenance of a mind’ that he saw in Coleridge both fascinated and frightened him.10 The older Wordsworth remembered in Coleridge ‘a sort of dreaminess which would not let him see things as they were’,11 complicated immeasurably, of course, by the addiction to opium and alcohol to which Wordsworth and his sister became horrified witnesses. It is suggestive that Coleridge would criticise Wordsworth for clinging to a ‘matter-of-factness in certain poems’,12 given his own appetite for ‘“Facts of mind”’ that included ‘Accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers from Tauth, the Egyptian to Taylor, the English Pagan’ (CL I. p. 260). The paradox of an excellence that trips into a fault arises again (and might apply to both men).

8 The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975–78), I. p. 183. The emphasis is Lamb’s. 9 Marrs, I. p. 183, p. 189. 10 Prelude (1805) VI. 312 in The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979), p. 202. See my Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 35–39. 11 Henry Crabb Robinson: On Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: J.M. Dent, 1938), II. p. 487. 12 Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1983), II. p. 126. Hazlitt dates this critique to spring 1798, at the height of Coleridge’s closest collaboration with Wordsworth: see Howe IX. p. 104. Coleridge raises his unease with Wordsworth’s tendency to ‘strict adherence to matter of fact’ in poetry to Southey in a letter of 1802 (CL II. p. 830). 6 ‘HARE AND HOUND’: ENDS AND MEANS IN COLERIDGE’S LETTERS 87

Coleridge’s habit of recycling his own language and imagery across several contexts discloses further the performative nature of his writing. The Surinam toad, for instance, recurs in a lost letter extracted in part by Crabb Robinson for his diary, as a memento of Coleridge’s ‘involved style’:

‘Each, I say (for in writing letters I envy dear Southey’s power of saying one thing at a time in short and close sentences, whereas my thoughts bustle along like a Surinam toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, side and belly, vegetating while it crawls). Each, I say,’ etc.13

This hyper-generative Coleridgean toad is again contrasted with Southeyan directness, dovetailing with the contrast in the story of the hound and the hare—which Coleridge likewise redeployed in modulated form in 1826 to James Gillman Jr., to prove the same point regarding ends and means that he had made to Hartley a few years before (CL VI. p. 634). Southey noted that in the 1790s, when among a group, Coleridge’s discourse might be ‘repeated to every fresh company, seven times in the week if we were in seven parties’,14 and John Clare appears to have picked up on precisely this habit after meeting Coleridge thirty years later: ‘you woud [sic] suppose he had learnt what he intended to say before he came’.15 Southey, however, was not entirely above such repetition; after sending it to Coleridge, he repeated his comparison of the Coleridgean hound with the Southeyan greyhound to another correspondent:

he goes to work like a hound, nosing his way, turning, and twisting, and winding, and doubling, till you get weary with following the mazy movements. My way is, when I see my object, to dart at it like a greyhound.16

The poet shares with the actor and the raconteur a tendency to inter- nalise, repeat and to quote. It’s apt that in echoing here the ‘mazy motion’

13 On Books and their Writers, II. p. 632. 14 S.T. Coleridge: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Seamus Perry (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 126. 15 John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 137. 16 Interviews and Recollections, p. 127. Compare Southey’s letter to Coleridge of 28 October 1809, in The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Three: 1804–1809, ed. Carol Bolton and Tim Fulford (Romantic Circles, 2013): https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/ southey_letters/Part_Three/HTML/letterEEd.26.1704.html 88 G. LEADBETTER of the sacred river of ‘Kubla Khan’ (l. 25),17 Southey (however subcon- sciously and exasperatedly) draws upon Coleridge’s own mythopoesis of the common source of life and language.18 While Coleridge’s performances in language could be self-conscious as such—and could sometimes mask the man behind the dance of words—this does not necessarily render them inauthentic, any more than the fact that an actor who plays the same part the same way night after night detracts from its authority as theatre. As in his other writings and our records of his speech, the letters reveal in Coleridgean repetition its own peculiar fidelity, both to the rewards of language and to the different contexts in which similar words may be freshly and spontaneously productive. Wordsworth wrote of his friend that he ‘talks as a bird sings, as if he could not help it: it is his nature’.19 In Coleridge, the urge to communicate and to perform are practically identi- cal—and their interplay becomes a form both of knowing and being known, based less in abstract statement than creative realisation. Coleridge was acutely aware of the philosophical questions raised by the ingrained artfulness of his utterance, whether in speech or writing. Joking with Wordsworth in 1798, he wrote that he could not achieve ‘simplicity & naturalness’ except ‘by assumption—I resemble the Dutchess of Kingston, who masqueraded in the character of “Eve before the Fall” in flesh-coloured Silk’ (CL I. p. 379): the Fallen masque of art performs the unfallen state of nature. The jest hits upon a productive tension fundamental to the entirety of Coleridge’s thinking on metaphysics, ethics and poetry: the relationship between the natural and the transnatural, the passive and the active, the reconciliation of ‘the truth of nature’ and ‘the modifying colours of imagination’, and the ‘interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose’.20 Coleridge recognised early the complexity in which this involved him, which he grasped, as ever, through his extraordinarily articulate insight into himself. He writes to Thelwall in 1796:

17 Poems, ed. John Beer (London: Everyman, 1986), p. 167. 18 On the nature of this mythopoesis, see Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, pp. 183–200. 19 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Middle Years, 1806–1820, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd ed., rev. Mary Moorman, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), II. p. 664. 20 Biographia Literaria, II. p. 5, p. 65. 6 ‘HARE AND HOUND’: ENDS AND MEANS IN COLERIDGE’S LETTERS 89

I feel strongly, and I think strongly; but I seldom feel without thinking, or think without feeling. Hence tho’ my poetry has in general a hue of tenderness, or Passion over it, yet it seldom exhibits unmixed & simple tenderness or Passion. My philosophical opinions are blended with, or deduced from, my feelings: & this, I think, peculiarizes my style of Writing. (CL I. p. 279)

Coleridge sees in this indissolubly restless dynamic the matrix of his style, and both feed into the ultimate questions that animate his metaphysics, as he described them to Godwin in 1803: ‘what we are, & how we become what we are; so as to solve the two grand Problems, how, being acted upon, we shall act; how, acting, we shall be acted upon’ (CL II. p. 949). For Coleridge, the artfulness or artlessness of our language is inextricably and reactively involved in the constitution of our being and our power to manipulate reality. The English word ‘fiction’ derives from the Latin fingere, ‘to shape’, and ‘fact’ after all—usually used to denote a simple truth—derives from a Latin root with equally artful connotations: facere, ‘to make’. The relationship between the two Latin words may be etymologically oblique, but with regard to language, shaping and making are essential to the fact, and create the very action of poetry. Language becomes an affective and edu- cative medium in and through precisely this fictive virtue. In distinguish- ing poetry from matter-of-factness in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge quotes William Davenant to describe the nature of its alternative claim to truth: ‘truth operative, and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in reason’.21 A feel for the ductility and mutability in our apprehension of reality runs through Coleridge’s work. From his earliest self-portraits in verse, he identifies in himself ‘Energic Reason & a shaping Mind’ (CL I. p. 128),22 and in the verse ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’, later modified and published as ‘Dejection: An Ode’, his ‘shaping Spirit of Imagination’ (CL II. p. 796) is given both thematic and performative prominence. In fact ‘shaping’ recurs as a word loaded with significance across Coleridge’s writings, most often as a productive, ordering and creative power—as in the ‘wild Ducks shaping their rapid flight’ (CL II. p. 814), which he uses as an image for poetry, and in the esemplastic power of the imagination ‘to shape into one’23—but the letters also reveal its uneasy

21 Ibid., II. p. 126, p. 127 (Coleridge’s italics). 22 1794; published in his 1796 collection as ‘Lines on a Friend’. 23 Biographia Literaria, I. p. 168 (Coleridge’s italics). 90 G. LEADBETTER undertow. In consecutive months in 1796 Coleridge fluctuates between pleasure in his ‘shaping and disquisitive mind’ on the one hand, and the way his ‘ever-shaping & distrustful mind’ overflows with ‘hideousPossibles ’ on the other (CL I. p. 271, p. 250). The danger is that there are times when he is not in control of the shaping activity of his mind. The day after an evening’s carousing with Godwin in 1800, he writes a good-humoured note to apologise for having talked ‘very extravagantly’ under the stimulus of wine and punch: ‘the whole Thinking of my Life will not bear me up against the accidental Press & Crowd of my mind, when it is elevated beyond it’s natural Pitch’ (CL I. p. 580). More ominously, of course, when paired with the opium addiction that took hold over the next few years, his experience of being out of control became acute.24 With regard to his relationship to language, the issue was whether—in all his ‘flowing Utterance’ (CL II. p. 1000)—he might merely be a verbal automaton, shaped by language rather than shaping it. The notion that self-consciousness might be the helpless witness of its own absolute passivity—that a human being could be a ‘drone-hive strange of phantom purposes! / Surplus of Nature’s dread activity’ (‘Human Life’, ll. 9–10)25—was literally the stuff of nightmares for Coleridge.26 Within these dilemmas of lived experience, language itself becomes a microcosm for the metaphysics of moral and creative agency—how far we have a life of our own within the life-of-its- own that we inhabit—to which Coleridge is peculiarly sensitive: another form of the fundamental tension out of which his philosophising grows. For his readers, this fertile unease is inseparable from the ‘shaping Spirit’ that everywhere animates and distinguishes his writing. Its self- contesting activity is part of the ‘drama of Reason’ played out in Coleridge’s prose, and this process is poetic in ways that are not confined to his verse. In Coleridge—in ways similar to the Keatsian ‘poetical Character’, that ‘is every thing and nothing’27—particular gifts involve particular risks: a rare susceptibility to the shaping power of language

24 In 1809, Wordsworth wrote privately that ‘he has no voluntary power of mind whatsoever, nor is he capable of acting under any constraint of duty or moral obligation’: Middle Years, I. p. 352. In 1814, Coleridge himself diagnosed his condition as ‘an utter impotence of the Volition’, that is ‘the faculty instrumental to the Will, and by which alone the Will can realize itself’ (CL III. p. 477, p. 489). 25 Poems, ed. Beer, p. 321. 26 ‘Whirled about without a center—as in a nightmair’: Notebooks, III. 3999. 27 Letters of John Keats: A Selection, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 157. 6 ‘HARE AND HOUND’: ENDS AND MEANS IN COLERIDGE’S LETTERS 91 attends his rare power to shape language and all that language affects. This poetic activity—that implies its own substance—finds the true in the fictive, and its end in its means. Contrary, then, to Tom Paulin’s view that letters comprise ‘an anti-aesthetic, a refusal of the literary’,28 Coleridge’s letters implicate the poet in the correspondent. In light of the qualities that I am claiming for the letters, Griggs’s remark in the introduction to his edition that Coleridge ‘is not among the best of English letter-writers’ (CL I. p. xxxvi)—somewhat incongruous in its otherwise admiring and admirable context—reads like a concession to established tastes. Virginia Woolf, by contrast, was among the first to champion the peculiar life of Coleridge’s letters in all their variety: ‘in our tongue-tied age there is a joy in this reckless abandonment to the glory of words’, she writes, and suggests that in his letters we have ‘the best record of the siren’s song’ of his talk—anticipating Perry’s point that ‘the letters are often dazzling recreations of the speaking voice’.29 In this, Coleridge’s achievement in the form slips past his aversion to the task: ‘I have a raging Epistolophobia’, one letter declares (CL III. p. 436). The problem was that, however subtly, letters carried with them a sense of obligation, which throughout his life always induced anxiety in Coleridge—and with anxiety, an instinct to flee that most often resulted not in flight, but a state of guilty and restless suspension. ‘Anxieties that stimulate others, infuse an additional narcotic into my mind’ (CL I. p. 125), he writes aged twenty-two, echoing himself over sixteen years later: ‘The Blow that should rouse, stuns me’ (CL III. p. 307). The sheer volume of his letters, however—as well as their character—is testimony to how far the impulse to speak tran- scended the narcotic of obligation. At times he is anxious that writing itself cannot comprise the full-spectrum communication of bodily presence that mediates the use of words: ‘When we talk, we are our own living Commentary / & there are so many running Notes of Look, Tone, and Gesture, that there is small danger of being misunderstood’ (CL II. p. 872). This very anxiety, however—the impulse to enact that full-spectrum, physical communication—invests the language of his letters with

28 Tom Paulin, ‘Writing to the Moment: Elizabeth Bishop’, Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 215–39, p. 216. 29 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Man at the Gate’, Collected Essays, vol. III (London: The Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 219, p. 221; Seamus Perry, ‘The Talker’, The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 103–25, p. 113. 92 G. LEADBETTER

performative verve, as it stretches for the dynamic form that will act upon his reader in ways analogous to ‘Look, Tone, and Gesture’. Besides this, Coleridge needed correspondents: the ‘social nature’ of his own heart, he confides to his notebook, ‘compelssome Outlet’,30 and it became a fundamental principle of his philosophy that ‘there can be no I without a Thou’.31 At once a stimulus and a productive pressure, the act of addressing oneself to another becomes a medium for the mutual recognition, realisation and individuation of each person as an end in themselves: a humanising exchange that implicitly resists the sacrificial economy of utility. Dialogue through letters provokes in Coleridge ‘the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings’,32 driving self- reflection into extended displays both of self-representation and philosophical inference. Each of these brings into particular focus the writing of letters as ‘performance art’, in Jonathan Ellis’s phrase33—never more so than in Coleridge’s gift for epistolary self-portraiture.34 In 1797 he com- menced a series of vivid autobiographical letters to Poole, in which he describes how his prodigious appetite for reading as a child estranged him from his peers, making him a dreamer with ‘an indisposition to all bodily activity’, and ‘a memory & understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness’ (CL I. pp. 347–48). In this account of his formative experiences, Coleridge writes a myth in which his own mixed nature—prodigal both in eloquence and indolence—involves both exaltation and alienation, power and vulnerability. It was a pattern that would inform the entirety of his life and works.35 This in itself is continuous with the very substance of much of his poetry—not least ‘This Lime-tree Bower my Prison’, a complete draft of which appears in a letter to Southey of July 1797. In form and theme, it

30 Notebooks, III. 3325. 31 ‘Essay on Faith’, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1995), II. p. 837. 32 Biographia Literaria, II. p. 21. 33 ‘Introduction: “For What is a Letter?”’, Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 10. 34 For an overview of Coleridgean self-representation more generally, see Anya Taylor, ‘Coleridge’s Self-Representations’, The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Fred Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 107–24. 35 See Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, pp. 10–11 et seq. 6 ‘HARE AND HOUND’: ENDS AND MEANS IN COLERIDGE’S LETTERS 93 was a breakthrough poem for Coleridge, if not quite the first of its kind.36 Its lyrical blank verse, combining wonder and joy in the living world with meditations on emotional and imaginative growth addressed to an intimate audience, characterises the ‘conversation poems’.37 Like a poem, a letter might achieve imaginative life in attaining a quality Coleridge identified in his own poetics as ‘forma efformans’,38 ‘forming form’: becoming, as Angela Leighton puts it, ‘not a body but an agent’,39 ‘a living Thing / That acts upon the mind’ (CL I. p. 335). The verse ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’, dated in manuscript 4 April 1802, itself responds to Wordsworth’s early work on the ‘Immortality’ Ode.40 The lines are included in Coleridge’s correspondence (CL II. pp. 790–98)—and he quoted them at length in a letter to William Sotheby in July 1802 (before publication as ‘Dejection: An Ode’ on 4 October 1802)—but the manuscript presents a highly worked poem, without the prose frame of a letter as such. Yet in writing a ‘letter’ Coleridge involves the intimacy of that form both in its composition and its themes, and would retain something of its epistolary virtues in the ode. Highly personal in nature, the poem works through his love for Sara Hutchinson, his troubled marriage, his feelings of failure—and both the breaking of his hopes and their tentative remaking in the poem itself, communicated and felt in the life of the language even as it records the experience of challenge and loss. Conceiving of the poem as a ‘letter’, at first, evidently enabled Coleridge to push further into both the causes and the complexity of his feelings than might otherwise have been possible, allowing him to present—through the lib- erating demands of poetic technique—words that conduct a potent charge far beyond their autobiographical context. In this sense, the poetic fiction of the ‘letter’—allusive, mutual, provisional—helped Coleridge fulfil what

36 ‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ and ‘To the Rev. George Coleridge’ preceded it. 37 The term was coined by George McLean Harper in ‘Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, Spirit of Delight (London: E. Benn, 1928). 38 Notebooks, III. 4066. 39 Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 7. 40 For a very brief summary of this relationship, see John Worthen, The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 33; for an extended discussion, see Gene W. Ruoff, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics, 1802–1804 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989). 94 G. LEADBETTER for Mays is ‘the rationale of his poetry’: ‘the play of mind, the exploration of feeling, its mobility and reversals’.41 Coleridge also put the conversational virtues found in private letters to expressly public use—not least in relation to the problem of how to bring a readership with him, be it in politics, criticism, philosophy or religion. In October 1809, when his periodical The Friend was limping through its fourth month of publication, Coleridge asked Southey to look over the preceding eight issues, and then ‘write a letter to The Friend in a lively style, chiefly urging, in a humorous manner, my Don Quixotism in expect- ing that the public will ever pretend to understand my lucubrations’, so that Coleridge might then publish a reply ‘to state my own convictions at full on the nature of obscurity, &c’ (CL III. p. 254). Southey duly com- plied, and although Coleridge never published his letter, he did write and publish his own response, to an imaginary correspondent, ‘R.L.’ (lamenting the ‘aversion to all intellectual effort’ that he discerned in the reading public).42 From the outset of The Friend, Coleridge saw ‘in a periodical Essay the most likely Means of winning, instead of forcing my Way’:43 the spur of having to persuade a sceptical readership, in a manner akin to conversation by correspondence, would also, he hoped, allow him to find a way past entrenched views and prejudices. Coleridge’s ‘original apprehension, that the plan and execution of The Friend is so utterly unsuitable to the public taste as to preclude all rational hopes of its success’ (CL III. p. 253) proved prophetic for the journal, but he never abandoned either the theory or practice of ‘mutual Propulsions’ (CL I. p. 636), where the very obstacle to be overcome is taken up into the action of movement and progress: in Biographia Literaria, the motion of the ‘water-insect’ that ‘wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion’, becomes an emblem both of ‘the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking’ and the working of the imagination.44 Famously, Coleridge introduces another ‘friend’—with what purports to be his ‘very judicious letter’—in Biographia Literaria, in order to swerve round the philosophical deduction of the imagination at the close

41 J.C.C. Mays, Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 163. 42 The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1969), II. pp. 149–53, p. 152. 43 Ibid., II. p. 17. 44 Biographia Literaria, I. p. 124. 6 ‘HARE AND HOUND’: ENDS AND MEANS IN COLERIDGE’S LETTERS 95 of the first volume.45 Coleridge was his own imaginary correspondent on this occasion, as he privately admitted (CL IV. p. 728), and he evidently had some fun with it: the letter comically dramatises a condition of sympathetic bewilderment with Coleridge’s own writing, which is presented as a fusion of the Gothic and the oracular, in which ‘substances were thinned away into shadows, while every where shadows were deepened into substances’—and even adds to the list of works promised by the arcane author.46 Whether or not it helped him win over his readers, the sleight of hand in this performative fiction did serve a purpose in effectively channelling the entire import of his discussion of the imagination into his poetic project of 1797–98—the account of which begins the second volume.47 Coleridge also incorporated edited versions of actual letters into the Biographia, in part to fill up his sheets: ‘Satyrane’s Letters’, on his trip to Germany of 1798–99 (in turn recycled from The Friend), and letters originally submitted to The Courier in 1816 that apply some Coleridgean principles to a critique of Maturin’s play Bertram.48 Taken as a whole, however, Biographia Literaria itself can be read as one long letter: having made the decision in 1803 ‘to write my metaphysical works, as my Life, & in my Life—intermixed with all the other events / or history of the mind & fortunes of S.T. Coleridge’,49 the ‘Biographical Sketches’ of his ‘Literary Life and Opinions’ presents its philosophising as a living process, growing in and through his being and experience, just as so many of his most brilliant ideas find form in the creative matrix of his correspondence. Woolf compares Coleridge and his letters to ‘a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering, and hanging suspended’,50 and the flow of insight, inference and utterance found in his letters is continuous with what he called ‘the whole working Hive of my Thoughts’ (CL V. p. 411): seeking, sending and returning signals, laden with pollen and nectar. Many of the great themes of his published poetry and prose emerge in this epistolary activity: a single letter to Sotheby in September 1802—in which Coleridge envisions ‘a sort of map of my mind, as a Poet & Reasoner’ (CL II. p. 863)—asserts that ‘Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every

45 Ibid., I. pp. 300–04. 46 Ibid., I. p. 301, p. 302. 47 See Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, pp. 160–62. 48 Biographia Literaria, II. pp. 159–233. 49 Notebooks, I. 1515. 50 Woolf, ‘The Man at the Gate’, p. 217. 96 G. LEADBETTER

Thing has a Life of it’s own, & that we are all one Life’; admires Edward Young’s remark that ‘there is as profound a Logic in the most daring & dithyrambic parts of Pindar, as in the Ὄργανον of Aristotle’; and draws the distinction between the ‘Fancy, or the aggregating Faculty of the mind’ and the ‘Imagination, or the modifying, and co-adunating Faculty’ (CL II. pp. 864–66). Coleridge explains the distinction between Reason and Understanding—developed from Kant, and key to his later philosophy— to Thomas Clarkson in a letter of 1806: the Understanding ‘apprehends and retains’ the ‘notices of Experience’, the ‘φαινόμενα of our nature’, while Reason is ‘not the effect of any Experience, but the condition of all Experience’, and apprehends ‘Νοούμενα’ (CL II. p. 1198). In his political thought, Coleridge consistently focuses his energies on the ideas and principles that shape and determine political action—for example, in regard to slavery, ‘those principles, of which the necessary effect was—to abolish all Slavery’ (CL I. p. 126).51 Always heterodox in questions of religion—pil- loried both as an atheist by Christians, and bafflingly Christian by athe- ists—we find the older Coleridge sharing a mischievous joke at Wordsworth’s expense when he notices the ‘introduction of the popular, almost the vulgar, Religion in his later publications (the popping in, as Hartley says, of the old man with a beard)’ (CL V. p. 95). The provisional, unsystematic and fragmentary character of the letter suited the opportu- nistic motility of Coleridge’s intelligence: ‘indeed’, he writes in Aids to Reflection, it is ‘for the fragmentary reader only that I have any scruple’.52 The glancing encounter might be enough for language to effect its germi- nating power: as Coleridge observes in a late notebook entry, ‘to act as an awakening ferment, a generative principle, on a mind— / A single impreg- nation of the Queen Bee suffices for the Birth of a Hive’.53 ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises’, Auden declared,54 and Coleridge’s letters share the vitality of his notebooks with the liveliness of address that Elizabeth Bishop responds to so personally when she says that she ‘just couldn’t stop’ reading them: ‘I feel as if I could scarcely be said to exist, beside C’, she writes, and it’s clear that Coleridge was a stimulus

51 See Gregory Leadbetter, ‘Coleridge and the “More Permanent Revolution”’, The Coleridge Bulletin 30 (NS) (2007), pp. 1–16. 52 Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 244–45. 53 Notebooks, V. 6810. 54 W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand ([1963]; London: Faber and Faber, 2012), Foreword. 6 ‘HARE AND HOUND’: ENDS AND MEANS IN COLERIDGE’S LETTERS 97 to her thinking on letters ‘as an art form or something’.55 For all their long-recognised value in relation to Coleridge’s other works and their themes, my contention here is that the poetic character of the prose in the letters comprises and embodies a theme in itself, which can only be found in the fabric of their language: a virtue that transcends the transmission of information—and the reduction of writing to utility—‘to act as an awakening ferment, a generative principle’. ‘The penny saved penny got utilitar- ians forget, or do not comprehend’, Coleridge told a guest, ‘high moral utility,—the utility of poetry and of painting, and of all that exalts and refines our nature’,56 and his letters are literary and creative in finding such ends in their means: their verbal life refuses to be instrumentalised or subordinate to a purpose separable from their medium, and as such becomes constitutive—not merely denotative—of experience. ‘Language’, writes Coleridge, is ‘the sacred Fire in the Temple of Humanity’ (CL III. p. 552), and words are ‘living powers, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized’.57 The affective power and poetic agency of language are fundamental to his metaphysics, whether ‘Amid the profoundest and most condensed constructions of hardest Thinking, the playfulness of the Boy starts up, like a wild Fig-tree from monumental Marble’,58 or in his projected synthesis of philosophy and religion, ‘on the Logos, or communicative Intelligence, Natural, Human, and Divine’ (CL III. p. 533), in which the Logos, or Word, was conceived as the realising principle at the root of both verbal and nonverbal life, and the copula of their activity. Animated by the imagination, itself continuous with ‘the very powers of growth and production’59—the antithesis of ‘the Gorgon Head, which looked death into every thing’—language invokes a ‘vital & idea-creating force’.60 This is the nexus, for Coleridge, between poetry, metaphysics and the meaning

55 Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 332, p. 544. As John Beer points out, Coleridge’s work has a way of ‘stimulating others to be themselves’: Coleridge’s Play of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 241. For a fine discussion of Bishop’s own letter-prose and the form more generally, see Vidyan Ravinthiran, Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2015), pp. 83–124. 56 Interviews and Recollections, p. 192. 57 Aids to Reflection, p. 10. 58 Notebooks, IV. 4777. 59 Biographia Literaria, II. p. 84. 60 Notebooks, III. 4066, I. 1016. 98 G. LEADBETTER of education: ‘what is a liberal Education? That which draws forth and trains up the germ of free-agency in the Individual’ (CL VI. p. 629). In the letters, as elsewhere, Coleridge’s language performs this fundamentally poetic role. Lecturing in 1811, Coleridge claims that ‘metre and passion’ are so closely connected that ‘many of the finest passages we read in prose are in themselves, in point of metre, poetry—only they are forms of metre which we have not been familiarized to’: ‘wherever passion was, the language became a sort of metre’.61 Wherever intensity of feeling, enthusiasm and desire is found, Coleridge suggests—be it ‘empassioned and eloquent reasoning’, ‘the drama of Reason’ or ‘the thought growing’ (CL III. p. 282)— poetry lifts into spontaneous life. In 1820, Coleridge was working with his son Hartley on ‘the possibility of improving & enriching our English Versification by digging in the original mines—viz. the tunes of nature in impassioned conversation’ (CL V. p. 93). The prose of his letters provides abundant ore for such explorations. A poem should carry the reader forward, Coleridge writes, ‘not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself’.62 In common with the poetry to which their prose is cousin, ‘The End is in the Means’ (CL V. p. 98)—and the curious may find a hare in every letter they read.

61 Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols. (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1987), I. p. 222, p. 223. 62 Biographia Literaria, II. p. 14. CHAPTER 7

The ‘Entire Man of Letters’?: Robert Southey, Correspondence and Romantic Incompleteness

Lynda Pratt

‘[I]ncompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin’ have been described as central to ‘both the theory and the actuality of Romanticism’.1 In contrast, accounts of Robert Southey, now acknowledged as one of the most high profile and controversial of Romantic period writers, often stress his completeness as key. It is an emphasis captured in the subtitle of W. A. Speck’s important 2006 study, which itself invokes a phrase originated by Byron: Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters.2 There is no doubt that Southey’s published works contribute to this sense of entirety. They span a wide range of genres and fill thousands of pages. Yet their range and vastness

1 Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 13. 2 W.A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006); and Leslie A. Marchand, Byron’s Letters and Journals, Volume III: ‘Alas! the Love of Women’, 1813–1814 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 214.

L. Pratt (*) University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 99 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_7 100 L. PRATT mask a complex situation, one in which incompleteness played an important part.3 For Southey, not being ‘entire’ was at best problematic and at worst unacceptable. He criticized those, like William Taylor, whose ‘information upon all subjects was very incomplete’.4 Writings by others that were ‘unavoidably incomplete’ were, in turn, dismissed as substandard and unfit for purpose CLRS( , 1727). Paradoxically, Southey was himself beset by the incompleteness he abhorred, and he admitted that his own published oeuvre was anything but complete. This was, he explained, something for which he was not responsible. Rather his writings had been subjected to the depredations and mutilations of editors, printers and publishers, a process that Southey compared to castration (e.g. CLRS, 2924, 2977). This essay will draw on the new edition of Southey’s Collected Letters to explore this unfamiliar conjunction of Southey and incompleteness and its implications for understanding both of his writings and of the culture within which he worked. Southey’s longest and loudest laments are to be found in his letters. Yet, ironically, at first sight, the very size of his correspondence both undermines his complaints and reinforces the familiar narrative of Southeyan completeness. Around 7500 letters by Southey have survived. This is a significantly larger total than is the case with the correspondence of his direct contemporaries: Coleridge, 1819 letters, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, 2283 letters, and Jane Austen, 161 letters, respectively, in the standard editions. Vast in numbers, Southey’s letters were sent to over 300 correspondents, covered a huge range of subjects and brought together the private man and the public polemicist, thus bridging his domestic and working lives. Correspondence, particularly after his move to Keswick in 1803, played a key role in developing and sustaining Southey’s familial, professional and social networks. At the same time, letters sent under his own name and pseudonymously to newspapers and periodicals allowed him to intervene in local and national debates (e.g. CLRS, 152, 2616). Yet, as this essay will demonstrate, Southey’s letters are an invaluable but complex resource. They subvert the image of the prolix, ‘entire’

3 See Lynda Pratt, ‘What Robert Southey Did Not Write Next’, Romanticism 17.1 (2011), pp. 1–9. 4 Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford, and Ian Packer, general editors, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Parts One to Six, Romantic Circles (2009–17), Letter 3740. https://romantic-circles.org/editions/southey_letters. Accessed 1 November 2019. Hereafter abbreviated in the essay as CLRS, followed by letter number. 7 THE ‘ENTIRE MAN OF LETTERS’?: ROBERT SOUTHEY, CORRESPONDENCE… 101 author who always completed everything he started and reveal a career that was significantly more fractured and complicated than is often thought. Furthermore, their physical survival is an important reminder of the incomplete nature of all the Romantic period correspondence that has come down to us. Southey’s letters therefore raise important questions about our own use and understanding of letters. They make us think about how we reflect and respond to the fact that what is left to us is a fragment of something much larger and fundamentally irrecoverable. Letter writing was an important part of Southey’s life. He was an inde- fatigable correspondent who produced letters on almost a daily basis. From 1803, the remoteness of his Keswick home from family, friends and contacts in the book trade and the public sphere meant that correspondence was an essential way of sustaining old and developing new personal and professional bonds. Southey’s letters provide important evidence of his writing life. Indeed they mirror it, their numbers peaking in the 1810s, 1820s and early 1830s, when his career was at its height. They tell us what he read and when he read it. They make it possible to track the development of individual works, from idea to printed page, and through subsequent editions. They reveal his negotiations with publishers and printers and show his response to contemporary reviews and criticism of his work. They provide important evidence of his at times fraught relationships with contemporaries, of his connections with international writers, and of his attempts to foster the careers of younger or less high-profile authors, including Caroline Bowles, Henry Kirke White and Herbert Knowles. The letters also do something else. They offer a major corrective to the idea of Southey completing everything he started and show that incom- pletion and incompleteness played an important role in his literary career. The Southey that emerges from his correspondence is fizzing with ideas for new works. In 1796, for example, he produced a list of all the things he wanted to write. It included a romance, a ‘Norwegian’ poem, a novel and four tragedies (CLRS, 168). His energy and enthusiasm did not diminish with age or increasing commitments. In 1820, he admitted that, whilst working hard on a number of other projects, he was simultaneously ‘proceeding at fits & starts with my American poem,—reading East Indian History to fit myself for writing the life of Warren Hastings,—& preparing for a Life of George Fox, upon the scale of that of Wesley’ (CLRS, 3521). Southey was, then, an inveterate planner and projector, though, inevitably, many of his proposed writings, including all of those listed in 1796 and 1820 above, were not finished. 102 L. PRATT

These incomplete writings cover all aspects of Southey’s writing life. Some ideas collapsed quickly. A proposed selection of the poems of James Dusautoy, who had died whilst an undergraduate at Cambridge, was halted when Southey decided that it would not suit ‘common readers’ who ‘read only to be amused’ and to whom ‘these pieces would appear crude and extravagant, because they would only see what is, without any reference to what might have been’.5 An edition of the voluminous writings of Elton Hamond was also rapidly abandoned, this time on the grounds that their ‘morbid matter’ would be positively injurious to a sus- ceptible reading public (CLRS, 3443). Other works did not progress beyond plans in Southey’s notebooks. These included an ode for the coro- nation of George IV, to be composed, or, as it turned out, not composed, in Southey’s official capacity as Poet Laureate, and a play on ‘The Days of Queen Mary [Tudor]’.6 However, others came much closer to comple- tion. These included prose works such as a multi-volume ‘History of Portugal’, a ‘moral & literary history of England’, a travel book based on the journal kept during his 1817 European tour, biographies of George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, and of the educationalist Andrew Bell, and a novel The Doctor. They also encompassed poetical works such as ‘Oliver Newman’, ‘Robin Hood’, a sequence of thirty inscriptions on the Peninsular War and a long poem in blank verse. Southey titled the latter ‘Consolation’. As his correspondence reveals, it emerged out of a traumatic event, the death of his nine-year-old son Herbert on 17 April 1816. As Southey explained, ‘no equal affliction can ever again befall me for here was the very heart & life of xxx my happiness & xxxx my hopes’ (CLRS, 2756). ‘Consolation’ was conceived by 1 May 1816 as ‘a monument in verse for him [Herbert] & for myself which may make our memories inseparable’ (CLRS, 2776, 2761). It was to be

… in blank verse, as desultory in its subject as the Night Thoughts or the Task, but in a more elevated strain than the latter, & in a happier one than

5 Charles Cuthbert Southey, ed., The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Volume IV (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1850), IV. p. 24. 6 Lynda Pratt, Daniel E. White, Ian Packer, Tim Fulford, and Carol Bolton, eds., Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811–1838, Volume III (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 170, n.1. Hereafter abbreviated in text as LPW, III; John Wood Warter, ed., Southey’s Common-Place Book, 4th series (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850), pp. 190–92. 7 THE ‘ENTIRE MAN OF LETTERS’?: ROBERT SOUTHEY, CORRESPONDENCE… 103

the former;—describing my own habits, views & feelings,—what they have been, & what they are. (CLRS, 2898)

The poem opened up a possible new direction for Southey, indicating a move inward to his ‘own’ self rather than outward to what he regarded as the ills of contemporary society. As such it was a marked departure from the public voice he had adopted since taking up the Poet Laureateship in late 1813. The surviving fragments of ‘Consolation’ reveal the ways in which the plan was developed. An opening invocation conjures up both the ‘Daughters of Jove and of Mnemosyne’, the nine muses of classical myth, and Southey’s personal poetic heroes, explicitly invoking Homer, Milton, Dante and Spenser. (It also echoes, but does not name, Milton and Wordsworth.) Their assistance is required to prepare Southey for the task to come:

… For no strain Of querulous regret I ask your aid, Impatient of the chastening hand of Heaven; But rather that your power may discipline Thoughts that will rise—may teach me to control The course of grief and in discursive flight Leading my spirit, sometimes through the past, Sometimes with bold yet not irreverent reach Into the region of futurity, Abstract her from the present sense of woe. (LPW, I, 387–88)

The lines that follow reinforce the focus on the self, as Southey begins to confront his own ‘past’ and own ‘futurity’. They describe recent events: his joyous return home after a visit to the battlefield of Waterloo, the death of Herbert, and Southey’s grief for his lost son (LPW, I, 389–90). The largest surviving part of ‘Consolation’ breaks off here, but a series of smaller verse fragments and prose notes consolidate the exploration of Southey’s life, particularly his youthful responsiveness to the

Beauties of Nature,—the passion of my youth, Nurs’d up and ripen’d to a settled love, Whereto my heart is wedded … Feeling at Westminster, when summer evening sent a sadness to my heart, and I sate pining for green fields, and banks of flowers, and running streams,—or dreaming of Avon and her rocks and woods. (LPW, I, 365) 104 L. PRATT

Southey here invokes the sites of his childhood, both Westminster School, where he had been a pupil from 1788–92, and the river Avon and its environs, close to his family home in Bristol. This turn to blank verse autobiography, to personal retrospect and to the natural world draws tantalizing links between the use of the same verse form and of strikingly similar themes in another poem intended to be published after its author’s death—Wordsworth’s The Prelude, with which Southey was acquainted. Yet whilst Wordsworth builds to an epiphany of the imagination (the subject of his poem is the ‘growth of my own mind’), Southey works towards something else. He had found ‘Consolation’ in religion. The correspondence he produced whilst working on the poem uses ‘consolation’ almost exclusively in this sense, thus making the connection clear: ‘the only consolation is to be found, in a deep & habitual feeling of devotion’; and ‘consolation can be found only in religion,—& there I find it’ (CLRS, 2749, 2801). In a confessional letter of 1820, sent to Robert Gooch, whose five-year-old son had recently died, Southey claimed that the loss of Herbert and, earlier, of two infant daughters, had taught him to see the error of ‘loose belief’, something he would never had done if ‘God had not chastened me’. He went on to explain that as a result of these bereavements

I sought for consolation in religion,—& more than consolation was given me: —strength & hope & assurance,—the peace which passeth all understanding, & that calm abiding happiness which nothing in this world can give or can take away. (CLRS, 3485)

Southey’s own view of religion was deeply personal, and he admitted that he was uncomfortable with any specific label: ‘when dissenters talk of the Establishment, they make me feel like a high Churchman,—& when I get among high churchmen, I am ready to take shelter in dissent’ (CLRS, 2749). His poem ‘Consolation’ would have made that connection between himself and his faith even more clear. Although its subject was deeply personal, Southey aimed to finish and publish ‘Consolation’, probably as a ‘post-obit’ (CLRS, 2909, 2938, 2919). Murray offered 1000 guineas for the completed poem, though Southey thought it worth twice as much (CLRS, 3201, 2919). Yet nothing came of this. His letters suggest why. In June 1816 Southey explained his work on ‘Consolation’ was impossibly painful and had therefore been held back: ‘my eyes & my head suffer too much in the occupation 7 THE ‘ENTIRE MAN OF LETTERS’?: ROBERT SOUTHEY, CORRESPONDENCE… 105 for me to pursue it as yet’ (CLRS, 2810). In October of the same year he felt no better, needing to ‘refrain from it a while longer’ (CLRS, 2853). By March 1817 he had still ‘not recovered heart enough to proceed with it’ (CLRS, 2938). The poem was abandoned unfinished, probably by 1818. Fragments of it were published after Southey’s death, in 1845 and 1850, respectively. Southey’s poem on his own life was then contemplated, begun and not completed. The longest surviving section concludes with Herbert’s death, suggesting that Southey was frozen in his grief, unable in 1816–17 to move beyond that and to explore his own life and faith. Within 2–3 years, his autobiographical impulses found a new direction. They were diverted away from blank verse and into a series of eighteen letters. Seventeen of these were sent to John May, one of his closest friends, between July 1820 and January 1826. An eighteenth letter-fragment was never sent. They were probably intended as a memoir or record to be used by an official biographer and Southey made copies, suggesting their significance to him. The letters are important records of Southey’s early life and of his early passion for books and writing, and have been heavily relied upon by biographers and critics. Whereas ‘Consolation’ would have dealt with Southey’s religious beliefs, the letters provide information of a different kind. They are packed with details about his family history, his early years and everyday life in Bath and Bristol in the late eighteenth century. Yet they too are incomplete: they break off abruptly in 1788 whilst recounting his time at Westminster School. Personal decisions not to complete an individual work, poetic or epistolary, were one matter. However, on occasion, a work being either incomplete or not as ‘entire’ as Southey wished it to be was the result of factors beyond his control, in particular the actions of his publishers. Southey’s publishing career had its roots in the south west of England. Richard Cruttwell of Bath issued his first collection,Poems , a co-production with Robert Lovell, in late 1794.7 In 1795 Southey moved to a new publisher, the Bristol-based Joseph Cottle. The latter was ambitious to build a port- folio of regional talent and thus to raise the profile of regional publishing. He offered Southey very generous terms for his next work, Joan of Arc, and aimed to make it ‘the handsomest book that Bristol had ever yet sent

7 Although Southey had written two Acts of the topical The Fall of Robespierre, published by Benjamin Flower in 1794, it appeared under Coleridge’s name only. 106 L. PRATT forth’ (RSPW, I, 201).8 Cottle determined on issuing it in quarto, and ordered in special paper and a new font of type for the purpose. His benefi- cence did not stop here. Whilst he remained Southey’s publisher, Cottle printed special presentation copies of all the latter’s new works for Southey to present to family and friends. He also underwrote Southey’s 1795–96 trip to Portugal by engaging to publish a book of his travels, which duly appeared in 1797. Southey was not always grateful. He was frequently cutting about Cottle’s own poetic ambitions and circulated unflattering anecdotes about his behaviour. In 1796 he described how Cottle had ‘begged with most friendly devotion’ to have one of the early manuscript versions of Joan of Arc for himself, and joked how the publisher probably valued it ‘as much as a Monk does the parings of his tutelary Saints great toe nail’ (CLRS, 149; RSPW, I, l). Whilst Cottle’s generosity and willingness to accommodate his demands were of immense value during Southey’s early career, they also had a downside. They gave Southey a distorted impression of the relationship between writers and the booktrade, particularly when it came to an author’s ability to dictate terms for his publications. Cottle thus spoiled him for working with any other publisher. After Cottle gave up his publishing business in the late 1790s, Southey had two main publishers: Thomas Norton Longman and his partners, and John Murray. As his letters reveal, with both firms Southey found himself less in control of the relationship and of his writings, both finished and projected, than he would have liked. Whilst his publishers often proposed new works to him and in return accepted some of his ideas, they did not, to his frustration, take up all of them. In January 1820 Southey suggested ‘an experiment’ to Longman; this was ‘to print one of my poems with or without the notes, in a small cheap form’, thus making them available to ‘a whole [new] class of customers, who never buy books till they are low- ered in price to their means’ (CLRS, 3426). For Southey, the revenue generated by such new editions was crucial at a point when the declining sales of older works were impacting on his income. Longman and his partners, however, did not follow up on the idea. Nor, indeed, did they approve a suggestion for a new edition of Blaise de Monluc’s Commentaires, to be edited by Southey. Such an edition would, they explained, ‘not answer at these times’.9 The project was therefore abandoned.

8 Lynda Pratt, ed., Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, Volume I (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004), 201. Hereafter RSPW, I. 9 Longman & Co., Letter to Robert Southey, 22 October 1824, University of Reading, Reading. Longman Archive, Longman I, 101, no. 466A. 7 THE ‘ENTIRE MAN OF LETTERS’?: ROBERT SOUTHEY, CORRESPONDENCE… 107

Things were no easier with Murray, particularly in his role as proprietor of the Quarterly Review. In 1816 Murray asked Southey to write an article on the West Indies. Southey accepted and made clear his intention of concluding ‘with reference to the Registry Bill’, the 1815 Parliamentary Bill that proposed the registration of all slaves in British colonies and was vio- lently opposed by plantation owners and other supporters of slavery. Murray, ‘well pleased’ with Southey’s response, collected ‘abundant pam- phletts’ for his use. However, he made the mistake of assuming that Southey would take the part of ‘the Planters & Slave Smugglers’. As soon as he realized that Southey was on the side of the abolitionists, even though these included two of the Laureate’s personal bêtes noires Francis Jeffrey and Henry Brougham, Murray withdrew his offer (CLRS, 2833). Southey, angry at losing the chance to write on a subject of importance both to himself and to the country, privately accused the publisher of self- interest, of either having ‘West Indian property or connections’ or having ‘submitted his journal to some undue influence—I pretend not to say what’ (CLRS, 2833). However, he was powerless to do anything about it and the article was not written. His publishers’ handling of completed works also tested Southey, particularly when these were not put into the public domain in precisely the form that he wanted. Especially contentious was the treatment by Murray and his associates of the articles Southey produced for the Quarterly Review. These were routinely censored and rewritten without consulta- tion or consent, something Southey bitterly resented. As he explained in 1816, William Gifford, the Quarterly’s editor from 1809–24, ‘is at his old work of castrating my reviews, against which I must resolutely & decidedly remonstrate’ (CLRS, 3833). The difficulty was that remon- strating had little effect. Gifford insisted that he simply ‘could not always print what … [Southey] could write’, even if it were true. Moreover, he cited ‘the growing success’ of the Quarterly as proof of his ‘good man- agement’ and the rightness of his practice (CLRS, 3703). Material rejected by Gifford included Southey’s appeal to the followers of Thomas Spence to ‘attempt to demonstrate the utility of their schemes in a manner that will bring no injuries to others’.10 This should have appeared in an 1816 essay on ‘Parliamentary Reform’ written at a time when the

10 The deleted paragraph was restored to the text published in Southey’s Essays, Moral and Political, Volume I, (London: John Murray, 1832), pp. 411–12 (p. 412). Compare with Robert Southey, ‘Parliamentary Reform’, Quarterly Review 16.31 (1816), p. 271. See also 108 L. PRATT

Quarterly did not want to be seen even partially to tolerate the views of a revolutionary group.11 It did not. Instead it remained unpublished until Southey reinstated the passage in the version he published in 1832 as ‘On the state of Public Opinion, and the Political Reformers’.12 Gifford’s revisions cut both ways. They also moderated the more extreme manifesta- tions of Southey’s conservatism. The original text for ‘Parliamentary Reform’ insisted that ‘Two measures’ were ‘imperatively required’ to safeguard society:

… first, that Lord Grenville’s bill against seditious assemblies be revived; secondly, that the punishment for seditious libel be made such as shall prevent a repetition of the offence, … that punishment should be exile from the country which the offender has endeavoured to disturb.13

This remained unpublished until 1832. In the version issued by the Quarterly in 1816, Southey’s paragraph was substituted with two less inflammatory pages written by Gifford. This substantial insertion concluded that the duty of the government was to ‘save both the poor and rich from the common curse and misery of a Revolution’.14 In effect, Southey had become the unwilling co-author of his own article. Southey fumed at the ‘mutilation’ of his work and pointed out that such editorial changes were ‘stupid’, reducing what he had written to ‘nonsense’ (CLRS, 3735). There was, however, a bigger point at stake. Southey did not just detest Gifford’s exercise of his ‘editorial authority’ (CLRS, 3537). He felt that the reshaping of his work to fit the format of the review had much larger consequences:

I cannot speak out, as I would do, tho by so doing I should serve the Government with far greater effect. This passage must be softened, & that must be expunged,—till sometimes a paragraph appears so mutilated in argument & so emasculated in style, that I scarcely recognize my own writing … (CLRS, 3386)

the discussion in Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of a Conservative Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 221–23. 11 Robert Southey, ‘Parliamentary Reform’, Quarterly Review 16.31 (1816), pp. 224–78. 12 See Southey, Essays, Moral and Political, Volume I, pp. [327]–422. 13 Southey, Essays, Moral and Political, Volume I, p. 422. 14 Southey, ‘Parliamentary Reform’, pp. 276–78 [p. 278]. 7 THE ‘ENTIRE MAN OF LETTERS’?: ROBERT SOUTHEY, CORRESPONDENCE… 109

The result was that he found himself ‘in the situation of a man brought into the lists … as a Champion’ but then deprived of effectiveness by those ‘for whom he fights’ CLRS( , 3386). For Southey, who believed firmly in the power of the press to influence for good or for evil, this was both invidious and unnecessary particularly, as in the late 1810s, at what he saw as a time of unprecedented political crisis. He felt strongly that the ‘castration’ of his articles worked against the public good. Gifford, who believed that ‘Southey … [required] to be watched’ and took an ‘infinity of pains’ editing and removing things ‘of a dangerous or doubtful tendency’, dis- agreed.15 It was Gifford who won the day. Although Southey was relatively powerless over what the Quarterly actually printed, he could and did take steps to ensure that the complete versions of his ‘mutilated’ writings were not lost. As early as 1809, he amused himself by writing material back ‘into my own copy as carefully as Gifford’, the Quarterly’s editor, ‘had cut it out’ (CLRS, 1600). As his association with the journal developed, he insisted on having ‘a duplicate set of proofs of my articles, that I may not lose the passages’ removed by Gifford (CLRS, 3546). His demand was a clear indication that at least some of the latter’s editorial interventions were happening after the proof stage, thus explaining Southey’s annoyance at only finding out about them when he read the final printed issue of theQuarterly . On other occasions, Southey attempted to get his original manuscript text of an article returned to him (CLRS, 3405). He claimed that having these complete, unedited texts rendered Gifford’s excesses less wounding: ‘provided I have the whole as it is written, he may cut away to his hearts content’ (CLRS, 3692). It also meant that when Southey decided to republish a selection of his articles in Essays, Moral and Political (1832), he could use these as the basis for his copy text and thus provide his readers with unexpurgated versions that gave vent to his own voice. Unlike the ‘castrated’, anonymous articles that had appeared in the Quarterly, these were published under his name and therefore additionally sanctioned. The irony was that these authorized versions appeared long after the debates they had been written to intervene in had been settled.

15 Gifford to George Ellis, 6 April 1810; Gifford to Walter Scott, 28 March 1810; and Gifford to George Ellis, 3 September 1810, Letters 43, 41, and 44, in J. Cutmore, ed., The Quarterly Review Archive. https://romantic-circles.org/reference/qr. Quoted in Lynda Pratt, ‘Hung, Drawn and Quarterlyed: Robert Southey, Poetry, Poets and the Quarterly Review’, p. 247 n. 15, Conservatism and the ‘Quarterly Review’, ed. Jonathan Cutmore (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), pp. 185–202. 110 L. PRATT

At other times, Southey’s letters reveal that the disconnection between what he wrote and what his publishers wished to print took an even more extreme form. In early 1816 Southey dispatched an article on Andre Delagrave’s Campagne de l’Armée Francaise en Portugal, dans les années 1810–11 (1815). It was a subject close to his heart. He had closely followed the course of events in Spain and Portugal, written polemical pieces in support of the campaign against Bonaparte’s forces, and was at work on what eventually became a three-volume History of the Peninsular War (1823–32). He fully expected his review to appear in the next issue of the Quarterly (CLRS, 2693). He was to be disappointed. The review was not published, but ‘supprest’ by Gifford for reasons that are not quite clear (CLRS, 2833). Southey, who had not been informed, was furious and considered this ‘rejection as a great piece of incivility & disrespect’ (CLRS, 2836). This was not a unique example. In 1831–32, Murray pulled a second series of Colloquies at a late stage in the publication process, in part because Southey’s proposals for electoral reform had been rendered redundant by the passing of the Great Reform Act.16 The non-appearance of these works meant that Southey earned nothing for them, a situation of considerable concern for a professional writer. Southey’s letters thus show that he was less autonomous than he seemed to be. His publishers and their associates could cut or reshape his writings at will, rendering them less complete than he had envisaged or wished. They could also ensure that a completed work did not appear. His correspondence is, then, evidence that Southey was part of a wider culture of print that was shaped by commercial, political and social pressures. It exposes the tension between what writers like Southey wanted to do and the exigencies, accommodations and incompletenesses enforced on him, and his contemporaries, by the Romantic period booktrade. Southey’s letters reflect on Romantic incompleteness in other key ways. Textually they are significantly more diverse and fractured than the simple phrase ‘a Southey letter’ suggests. They exist in a variety of states, including: complete manuscripts written in Southey’s own hand (e.g. CLRS, 3228); fragmentary texts, with sections missing because of wear and tear or deliberate cutting away of the manuscript page at some point in its his-

16 See Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of a Conservative Mind, pp. 187–88; Robert Southey, Letter to John Murray, 3 December 1831, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. MS 42553. 7 THE ‘ENTIRE MAN OF LETTERS’?: ROBERT SOUTHEY, CORRESPONDENCE… 111 tory (e.g. CLRS, 3345); transcripts, both complete and partial, in another hand of a ‘lost’ original (e.g. CLRS, 3517, 150); printed texts published either in newspapers and periodicals in Southey’s lifetime or by later editors after his death (e.g. CLRS, 289, 3233); and quotations in letters or other writings by members of Southey’s circle. A notable example of the latter is a controversial letter announcing his decision to abandon Pantisocracy sent by Southey to Coleridge in November 1795, which survives in part only in Coleridge’s reply of [13] November 1795. The latter quotes from and paraphrases both Southey’s letter of November 1795 and others sent by him to Coleridge.17 It also cites a letter written by Southey to Robert Lovell, another key associate. The complex overlaying of correspondence that results can be seen at work in the following. Here, Coleridge is speaking:

In one of your [Southey’s] Letters alluding to your Mother’s low Spirits and situation—you tell me that I ‘cannot suppose any individual feelings will have an undue weight with you[’]—and in the same letter observe (alas! Your recent conduct has made it a prophecy!) ‘God forbid! that the Ebullience of Schematism should be over. It is the Promethean Fire that animates my soul—and when that is gone, all will be Darkness!’—‘I have DEVOTED myself!’—… Your Letter to Lovell … was the first Thing that alarmed me. Instead of ‘It is our duty’ ‘such and such are the reasons’—it was ‘I and I’ and ‘will and will’—sentences of gloomy and self-centering Resolve. I wrote you a friendly Reproof … (Griggs, I, p. 164)

Coleridge’s critique of Southey is thus deeply embedded in a culture in which letter writing and letter exchange play key roles in creating, sustaining and eventually fragmenting a network. The difficulty for modern editors and critics is that none of the letters by Southey mentioned here have survived, making it impossible to know how complete and accurate Coleridge’s quotations and summaries are. The situation is further complicated by Coleridge’s habit of copying out and, in the process of so doing, reworking others’ writings. In December 1794, for example, he sent Southey a revised version of a sonnet recently published by the latter. Coleridge prefaced it with the explanation, that ‘I transcribe not so much to give you my corrections as for the

17 Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 163–73. Hereafter abbreviated in the essay as Griggs, I. 112 L. PRATT pleasure it gives me’ (Griggs, I. 146).18 Whether Southey gained as much ‘pleasure’ from receiving Coleridge’s corrections is open to debate. Coleridge’s rewriting of Southey’s poetry of the mid 1790s thus provides important context for his treatment of the latter’s correspondence. When key words attributed to Southey by Coleridge in the latter’s angry letter of [13] November 1795 are compared to the former’s surviving letters the results are mixed. Southey did, indeed, use the word ‘duty’ fairly frequently in the mid 1790s. For example, he described how he had ‘done my duty’ by marrying Edith Fricker in November 1795, the same month as Coleridge sent his accusatory letter (CLRS, 143). However, other words put into Southey’s mouth by Coleridge, including ‘ebullience’, ‘Schematism’ or ‘Promethean’, are found in none of the former’s surviving letters from this or, indeed, any other period. It is, of course, possible that Southey had been responding to Coleridge’s use of these in his own correspondence (see, e.g. Griggs, I, 132), or, indeed, that his and Coleridge’s letters had developed their own particular language. More likely, the lack of verbal similarity between Southey writing in his own letters and Southey as quoted by Coleridge in his letters shows how the latter reshaped Southey’s correspondence freely and for his own purposes. (In November 1795 Coleridge’s aim was to critique what he regarded as Southey’s selfish and self-interested withdrawal from the radical community promised by Pantisocracy.) This, in turn, raises wider and important questions about both the reliability of Coleridge’s versions of what Southey had written, the weight critics and literary historians place upon that evidence and its impact upon their understanding and interpretation. Southey’s correspondence offers, then, a complex patchwork, where complete, ‘authorised’ texts exist alongside other fragmentary, ambigu- ously derived ones. The c. 7500 letters that survive also reflect on incompleteness in another way because they are a mere fraction of what Southey actually wrote. Significant gaps in the record include his letters to the radical surgeon Anthony Carlisle, to the writers William Hayley, Charles Lamb, Charles Lloyd, Germaine de Staël and Charlotte Smith, and to the engineer Thomas Telford. The presence, in some of these cases, of letters sent by these and other individuals to Southey gives an indication of what has been lost but does not replace it. For another group of correspondents, only the slight remains of a much larger exchange now exist. Just

18 See also David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 213. 7 THE ‘ENTIRE MAN OF LETTERS’?: ROBERT SOUTHEY, CORRESPONDENCE… 113 two letters, for example, one complete and one fragmentary, survive to Robert Lovell, his brother-in-law and an important early collaborator (CLRS, 85, 147). There are also significant lacunae in the letters sent to a third group, including Coleridge, the classicist Peter Elmsley, the poet- publisher Joseph Cottle, and the writer Caroline Bowles. Even in cases where large runs of letters are still extant there are gaps, for example, in correspondence with the politician Charles Wynn, the civil servant Grosvenor Bedford and the census-taker John Rickman. Taken individually and cumulatively, these and other absences make evaluation either impossible or fraught with difficulty. It is possible to overstate the importance of a relationship with a correspondent where most of the correspondence has survived, and to downplay or misunderstand one where the manuscripts are entirely, or at best largely, missing. It is now hard, for example, to judge the significance of Southey’s interactions with Edmund Seward, a major influence during his time at Oxford University and the subject of his 1799 ode ‘Not to the grave, not to the grave my soul’.19 Instead, Seward’s impact on Southey has to be extrapolated from: comments about him in letters sent by Southey to others; the one surviving letter sent by Seward to Southey; and Seward’s correspondence with other members of their social network. These sources reveal Seward’s frequent reluctance to engage Southey in discussion of subjects that had ‘a very close connexion with politics’.20 They also provide tantalizing traces of what has been lost, including a letter sent to Seward by Southey in late 1794. All that survives of this is Seward’s summary, describing how Southey’s ‘disappointment at my declaring off [i.e. refusing to join Pantisocracy] has not amounted to anger, but contrariwise … [Southey] supposes me to act upon laudable motives’.21 At the other end of Southey’s life, the loss of the letters he wrote to Caroline Bowles during their court- ship makes it hard to reconstruct a series of events that were to have major consequences both during his lifetime and beyond. These and other absences have important implications for how letters are perceived and used, and about how such gaps are acknowledged by textual editors and by literary critics and historians.

19 Lynda Pratt, ed., Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, Volume V (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004), pp. 271–73. 20 Edmund Seward, Letter to Robert Southey, 5 May 1793, Morgan Library, New York, MA Misc. 21 Edmund Seward, Letter to Nicholas Lightfoot, 2–6 January 1795, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Eng. Lett. c. 453. 114 L. PRATT

As he reached the end of his long working life, Southey was aware that his own letters were simultaneously valuable resources for future biographers and vehicles by which his legacy could be distorted. In 1838, he expressed concern about the way [his] correspondence had been mishan- dled by the biographers of an old associate, William Wilberforce: ‘So little consideration is shewn in publications of this kind, that no one knows what mischief may arise from trusting any letters out of his own keeping’.22 In an attempt to safeguard the future treatment of his own letters, Southey appointed Henry Taylor as his literary executor and official biographer. Taylor was charged, after Southey’s death, with calling in the latter’s correspondence for the projected tombstone life. In the event, the plan came to naught. By 1843, Southey’s family and friends were at war over his marriage to Caroline Bowles and Taylor’s job was made impossible because of their refusal to ‘bury all their enmity in … [his] grave’.23 He abandoned it due to the insurmountable ‘difficulty’ involved.24 Instead Southey’s son, Cuthbert, and son-in-law, John Warter, made use of the letters in competing accounts. They thus fragmented both Southey’s correspondence and his claims upon posterity.25 Romantic period letters did not just present difficulties for their authors. They were troublesome for the family and friends entrusted with editing them and are also potentially problematic for twenty-first century readers and critics. They shed light on the intricacies, complexities, ambi- guities and compromises both of the individual writing life and of Romantic period writers’ engagement with the booktrade. Fragmentary relics of a once much greater whole, they bear textual witness to a wider culture of incompleteness. Many, even the majority, of their peers fell victim to a series of deliberate, casual and unthinking acts of destruction, both in the early nineteenth century and later on. The letters that survive thus possess the inherent capacity to inform but also to mislead, to exag-

22 Kenneth Curry, ed., New Letters of Robert Southey, Volume II (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 475–76. 23 John Wood Warter, Letter to John May, 5 April 1843, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Eng. Lett. c. 290. 24 Henry Taylor, Letter to Walter Savage Landor, 8 March 1848, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Eng. Lett. d. 10, fol. 224. 25 See Lynda Pratt, ‘Family Misfortunes? The Posthumous Editing of Robert Southey’, Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 219–38. 7 THE ‘ENTIRE MAN OF LETTERS’?: ROBERT SOUTHEY, CORRESPONDENCE… 115 gerate a relationship or a belief that would have been subverted or recon- textualized in other letters that are now lost and irrecoverable. Engagement with all Romantic period correspondence, even one as vast and seemingly all-encompassing as Robert Southey’s, should be shaped by this knowledge. CHAPTER 8

Charles Lamb and the Rattle of Existence

Timothy Webb

1 The precise number of Lamb’s extant letters is still to be established but it is large enough to suggest that for him letter-writing was a regular and habitual practice. Even more than his essays, his letters have been critically neglected, or ignored, or dismissed as damagingly bellelettristic. Yet they constitute a suggestive and impressive body of work and show once more that Lamb’s literary reputation requires urgent re-examination (as a few recent studies have happily, if belatedly, demonstrated)1 and that he should be approached as a writer who (in spite of the jokes and sportive sallies) deserves to be taken seriously. In working our way towards this new reading we need to acknowledge that more than one previous approach to Lamb was quite properly driven by the sense that he was a writer of recog- nizable, if puzzling, stature; but we can now understand more fully the

1 For example: Simon P. Hull, Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010); Felicity James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

T. Webb (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 117 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_8 118 T. WEBB contexts which helped to generate his work and, in particular, the frames of thinking (psychological, political, sociological and literary) which informed Romantic writing, especially of the first generation. At last, we find ourselves in a position to appraise the significance of Lamb’s letters, not as a decorative extra or a biographical supplement (in spite of their valuable biographical resonances and whatever insights they might provide into Lamb’s character), but as a sustained and original contribution to literature, which increasingly demands to be recognized in its own right. Lamb also gives vivid expression to an urban perspective which makes a vital alternative to more received poetics, but is still only beginning to be acknowledged. Although the seven-volume edition of Lamb’s works by E. V. Lucas is now more than a hundred years old, it is still the most complete and authoritative version; Lucas devotes two capacious volumes to the letters, which he updated to three volumes in 1935 and which still represent most completely the whole extant range of Lamb’s epistolary life from 1796 till his death on 27 December 1834.2 For all the virtues of his scholarship, and the inclusion of more recent discoveries, Lucas was aware that this three- volume edition was frustratingly incomplete: ‘That Lamb wrote many more letters than we possess is made evident by the leanness of certain years—say, for instance, from 1809 to 1818, while there is nothing preceding those to Coleridge beginning with 27 May 1796, when the writer was twenty’ (Lucas, I, p. v). Lucas might also have mentioned that, almost certainly with distorting effect, all 31 letters which represent 1796 and 1797 in his edition are addressed to Coleridge; no letters to other addressees are included. Few letters to Lamb from Coleridge survived the passage of time; perhaps because of what Sarah Burton has identified3 as Lamb’s ‘passionate ambivalence towards Coleridge’s influence on him that led him to enjoy and then destroy his friend’s letters’; perhaps for other reasons; perhaps for a mixture of both. The representation for 1812 is much thinner and even more improbable than that of 1796 and 1797, since it amounts only to two. These examples alone demonstrate that in

2 The Letters of Charles Lamb, to Which Are Added Those of His Sister, Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols (London: Dent and Methuen, 1935) (cited in the text as ‘Lucas’); up to the end of 1817, letters are cited from The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin J. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols only (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975–78) (cited in the text as ‘Marrs’). 3 Sarah Burton, A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb ([2003]; London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 85. 8 CHARLES LAMB AND THE RATTLE OF EXISTENCE 119

Lamb’s case, as in many others, the survival of correspondence can be random and arbitrary and may even create a misleading impression. Yet, in spite of its necessary imperfections and unfortunate lacunae, this record also shows that Lamb was an industrious writer of letters since it prints 992 letters by Charles Lamb himself, including 19 jointly written with his sister (and 35 by Mary alone). Even Lamb himself could sometimes be unenthusiastic about the nature of this considerable epistolary achievement. On 26 May 1820 he suggested with characteristic self-deprecation that his impulse to write letters was no longer the same force as of old: ‘I have been in my time a great Epistolary Scribbler but the passion (& with it the facility) at length wears out, & it must be pumped up again by the heavy machinery of Duty, or Gratitude, when it should run free—’ (Lucas, II, p. 278). This eloquent excuse is a resourceful exercise in metaphor connected perhaps to that impulse which led him to devote his creative impulses to the writing of essays, though some of them had much in common with the best of his letters, and parallels and influences can easily be detected; even so, Lamb’s self-history as a writer of letters should not, perhaps, be taken at full face value. Firstly, it was dictated by his need to apologize to Joseph Cottle for not acknowledging the gift of a book; secondly, Lamb still had nearly fifteen years to live and records show that, even if his letters are less frequent or less passionately argued or less inventive than they had been, they still constitute an important element in the changing dimension of a correspondence of originality and genuine distinction. Although this essay will concentrate on the earlier letters, this emphasis should not be interpreted as a dismissal of the letters of his later years, which include, for instance, the joyful epistle to Wordsworth in which he anticipates retirement (Marrs, III, pp. 174–75) and another letter, written after the event, in which he sadly confesses that ‘I had thought in a green old age (O green thought!) to have retired to Ponder’s End—emblematic name how beautiful! In the Ware road’; a teasing letter to Dorothy Wordsworth about her nephew; another teasing letter to Barron Field in Australia in which Lamb interprets an Antipodean address as a pretext for reversing realities (this might remind us of Leigh Hunt’s friendly observation that Lamb liked running a narrative on the edges of fiction’)4; and the detailed analysis of the strange experience of eating a John Dory, which has ‘rather a crude

4 The Tatler, No. 293 (11 August 1831), III, p. 144. 120 T. WEBB

river-fish-flavor’ and a taste ‘of a dead man’, as opposed to a Brighton Turbot or a cod (both exquisitely analysed) (Marrs, III, pp. 253–54). These excurses, and others, almost match those passages in earlier letters where, for example, Lamb provides a vivid description of an encounter with a rattlesnake; or a gourmet’s anticipation of the delights of the menu at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; or the acting in Richard III of George Frederick Cooke (‘the lofty imagery and high sentiments and high passions come black and prose-smoked from his prose lips’); or his first visit to Coleridge in the Lake District (‘great floundering bears & monsters … [the mountains] seem’d, all couchant & asleep’); or his advice to Manning to beware of being eaten by the Tartars (‘ ’Tis terrible to …sit at table …, not as a guest, but as a meat’); or a detailed catalogue of those foods which might be substituted for brawn (‘It is not every common Gullet-fancier that can properly esteem of it. It is like a picture of the choice old Italian masters’) (Marrs, I, pp. 241–42, pp. 263–64; II, pp. 7–8, pp. 68–70, pp. 95–96, pp. 155–56). Yet the fact that we do not have a ‘definitive’ edition of all the letters sadly indicates that Lamb’s correspondence (like his life, as opposed to that of his sister, or of the Lambs as a pair)5 is generally still considered of secondary importance. Some contemporaries such as Southey, Byron, Mary Shelley, Coleridge and William Wordsworth (whose letters, like those of Lamb, are usually collected with those of his sister) produced more letters, but (even taking into account the existence of recent additions to the canon) Lamb wrote many more letters than Blake, Hazlitt, Peacock and Moore and, perhaps more surprisingly, if less emphatically, outscored Percy Shelley though, of course, he lived much longer. These facts suggest that for Lamb the writing of letters performed a function which was often more than the traditional exchange of civilities, or the expected communications, which characterized an age before the invention of the telephone. Although he comments on the medium from time to time, Lamb has relatively little to say about the nature of letters or letter-writing. Near the end of a particularly wide-ranging letter to Coleridge he admits: ‘I cram all I can in, to save a multiplying of letters—those pretty comets with

5 For examples, see: Jane Aaron, A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Sarah Burton, A Double Life (full details in n.3 above); Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London ([2005]; New York/London: Norton, 2006); Kathy Watson, The Devil Kissed Her: The Story of Mary Lamb ([2004]; London: Bloomsbury, 2005). 8 CHARLES LAMB AND THE RATTLE OF EXISTENCE 121

swingeing tails’ (Marrs, I, p. 220). A letter to Manning shows that he remains attentive to the nature of those pretty comets and, characteristically, to their materiality: ‘Observe [Lamb actually wrote ‘Oberse’] the superscription of this letter. In adapting the size of the letters which constitute your name & Mr. Crisp’s [Manning’s landlord] name respectively, I had an eye to your different stations in life. Tis truly curious and must be soothing to an aristocrat—’ (Marrs, I, p. 243). Here one can sense both the resourcefulness of the writer and the delighted sensitivity of his political antennae. When Manning visits France in early 1802 Lamb expresses ‘the strange joy, which I felt at the Receipt of a Letter from Paris’ (perhaps, as in his later essay ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, the capital letters serve to enact his own dignifying and the significance of Manning’s communication, although Lamb also uses capitals at other points in his letter). He continues: ‘It seemed to give me a learned importance, which placed me above all, who had not Parisian Correspondents’ (here, too, ‘Parisian Correspondents’ are accorded a capitalized dignity entirely appropriate to Lamb’s courteous compliment to Manning and also, circuitously, to himself). Manning is assured that his letter from Paris achieved an enduring significance, even when it reported details which might seem trivial or mundane: ‘Believe, that I shall carefully husband every Scrap, which will save you the trouble of memory, when you come back. You cannot write things so trifling, let them only be about Paris, which I shall not treasure’ (Marrs, II, p. 54). By an obvious train of association, Lamb proceeds to list some of the everyday attractions not of Paris (which he had still not visited in person) but of London, which he had rhapsodically celebrated both in a now-famous letter to William Wordsworth and an earlier and memorable letter to Thomas Manning (for both letters, see below); this celebration of London formed the public subject of ‘The Londoner’, which had appeared in the Morning Post only a fortnight earlier and which, in due course, Lamb himself was to transcribe in full in another letter to Manning (Marrs, II, pp. 56–58). In this letter, Lamb’s contagious urban excitement expresses itself in a series of delighted but impatient questions, after which he continues by summarizing some of the uses of letters from abroad: ‘All this expence of ink I may fairly put you to, as your Letters will not be solely for my proper pleasure, but are to serve as memoranda & notices, helps for short memory, a kind of Rumfordizing recollection [a reference to the inventor of a stove, so perhaps intended to signify a com- forting warmth] for yourself on your return’ (Marrs, II, p. 54). Whatever the shortcomings of his letter from Paris, Manning is then commended in 122 T. WEBB a sentence which seems to offer a blueprint for that kind of writing: ‘Your Letter was just what a letter should be, crammed, and very funny’ (Marrs, II, p. 54). Perhaps one should remember here that, for a variety of reasons, some beyond his own control, Lamb himself was rarely in a position to produce his own letters from abroad; he did not visit Paris till the summer of 1822, and this expedition proved to be his only visit to a foreign country.

2 In spite of apparently good spirits, both epistolary and more general, Lamb was always a haunted man. Although many of his letters avoid the subjects of depression and insanity, Lamb spent some weeks in an asylum even before his sister killed their mother with a carving-knife. His attention to Mary was exemplary, but her very presence and those bouts of insanity which caused her occasional return to the asylum must have left their mark on a sensitive brother, who himself was painfully aware of those thin partitions separating the ‘sane’ from the ‘insane’. This situation, and its restrictions which necessarily cramped his behaviour and denied him many of the natural outlets (including foreign travel) available to most of his contemporaries, has been explored by Thomas McFarland in a sensitive and strongly argued essay which reminds his readers of the darker side of Romanticism. After listing a number of Romantic suicides, he notes: ‘Lamb did not commit suicide, though his situation might have indicated such a course’ and supports his view by adding, in a footnote, ‘For, as Wordsworth says of him, he was beset “by troubles strange, / Many and strange, that hung about his life”’.6 It might seem that this more troubled and darker side of Lamb had little or nothing to do with his correspondence. Such a simplification might well be gratifying but it contradicts the sad if uncomfortable truth. Precisely because of those anxieties and precisely because he was deprived of wider compensations, Lamb depended heavily, especially in his earlier years, on close friends. Immediately after the killing of his mother, he made particular claims on Coleridge who was sympathetically responsive to the emotional needs of his old school-fellow. Although Lamb and

6 Thomas McFarland, ‘Charles Lamb and the Politics of Survival’, Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 25–52 (p. 31). 8 CHARLES LAMB AND THE RATTLE OF EXISTENCE 123

Coleridge were well acquainted, and although Coleridge even offered sanctuary to his friend, this relationship was conducted not in person but through the much less immediate means of correspondence (‘would to God you were in London with us [Lamb and Charles Lloyd], or we two at Stowey with you all’ (Marrs, I, p. 93)). So, on 23 October 1796 Lamb writes to Coleridge to thank him for his letter: ‘I feel myself much your debtor for that spirit of confidence and friendship which dictated your last letter’. He explains how Coleridge’s letters are received and gratefully experienced by both Lambs: ‘I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight’ (Marrs, I, p. 53). Obviously, Lamb was uncomfortable with his social surroundings and distressed by the unsettling feeling that he was somehow out of place, even in his own home as, of course, he also felt in his office in the East India House. On 10 December 1796, for instance, he writes a long letter in which he admits that he can find no solace in the company he is forced to keep: ‘Not a soul loves Bowles here; scarce one has heard of Burns; few but laugh at me for reading my Testament—they talk a language I understand not: I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to them. I can only converse with you by letter and with the dead in their books’ (Marrs, I, p. 79). The therapeutic function of an exchange of letters is made clear in a letter of 10 January 1797. Reporting on his solitary condition, Lamb encourages Coleridge to send him letters but also recognizes their necessary limitations: ‘Tis true, you write to me. But correspondence by letter, & personal intimacy, are very different. Do, do write to me, & do some good to my mind, already how much “warped & relaxed” by the world!’. He then requests Coleridge, who cannot be with him in person since he is domiciled in Somerset, to send an account of his everyday life: ‘If you are sufficiently at leisure, oblige me with an account of your plan of life at Stowey—your literary occupations & prospects—in short make me acquainted with every circumstance, which, as relating to you, can be interesting to me’. This urgent desire for more detailed knowledge of his friend’s activities is painfully contrasted with his own inertia and sense of worthlessness: ‘My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of nothing. But I must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it—. It makes me think less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not totally disconnected from the better part of Mankind’ (Marrs, I, p. 89). This letter is particularly revealing since in sentences which are short, simple and unmistakeable in meaning it powerfully expresses Lamb’s dis- affection and Coleridge’s moral superiority, while explicitly claiming that 124 T. WEBB sometimes a letter can serve to bring its receiver into positive contact with an absent friend (on occasion, Keats wrote to his brother and sister-in-law in America with the same purpose in mind). In the absence of photo- graphs and more generally of images which were both accurate and afford- able, the arrival of a letter might bring together, with whatever imperfections, two people (or sometimes even more) who could not otherwise meet. Lamb’s ‘I must talk. I love to write to you’ is a direct confession that, sometimes at least, and however unsatisfyingly, a letter may act as a form of substitute conversation. The association was not continued, as a Coleridge letter of May 1798 to Lamb makes unhappily clear; yet, as the record of correspondence shows, there was some reconciliation and Lamb remained grateful to Coleridge, whose ‘great and dear spirit haunts me’ (as he admitted shortly after Coleridge’s death) and who provided ‘the proof and touchstone of all my cognitions’.7 The early history of this relationship as articulated in Lamb’s letters of the time is an excellent example of that penchant for friendship which marks so much of Lamb’s life and was so necessary to him throughout his life, not least during that particular period of instability following his own detention and release from the madhouse at Hoxton, the sudden and brutal death of his mother, and his sister’s subsequent removal to an asylum in Islington. It would be easy to interpret this recourse to the support of friends as a comfortable safety net or a convenient form of escape; yet, in practice, and although it sometimes provided confirming and necessary support, this system also operated rather differently. As Felicity James has demonstrated persuasively and in detail, the concept and practice of ‘friendship’ has a rich and complicated history and could entail a great deal more than sentimental predilections or attachments. As Lamb’s correspondence both during this seminal period and the subsequent years recurrently demonstrates, it was the confirming presence of this network which provided him with the security to give expression to feelings and judgements which could be woundingly critical. So, for example, he found in Coleridge a friend who was consoling and sympathetic, but it was precisely his reliance on these reliable attributes of character which allowed him to criticize Coleridge’s poetry as well as his behaviour, if not to his face, then in correspondence directly intended for his attention.

7 The Works of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, vol. I, Miscellaneous Prose, ed. E. V. Lucas (London: Methuen, 1903), p. 351. 8 CHARLES LAMB AND THE RATTLE OF EXISTENCE 125

So, in a letter of 20 January 1797, in which he insists on his own poetic inadequacy, he tells Coleridge whom, elsewhere, he addressed without irony as ‘Master Poet’: ‘In spite of the Grecian Lyrists, I persist in thinking your brief personification of Madness useless; reverence forbids me to say, impertinent’ (Marrs, I, p. 85). In this case, perhaps, he was driven by considerations which were more than merely literary and was particularly offended by Coleridge’s inability to convey the experience of madness with greater empathy or understanding; more generally, however, he dis- sected other words or lines in ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ with a clinical and completely dispassionate attitude to their poetic successes and fail- ures. More than three years later, he was able to tell Coleridge that the only contribution to the Annual Anthology which pleased him was Coleridge’s own ‘Lewti’; however, he added a criticism: ‘but of that the last stanza is detestable, the rest most exquisite!—the epithet enviable would dash the finest poem’. Lamb also objected with surprising and perhaps self-revealing ferocity to the description of himself in ‘This Lime- Tree Bower my Prison’ (which also featured in the Anthology): ‘For God’s sake (I never was more serious), don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verse’. The word (occurring three times) ‘almost always means poor-spirited’ and is ‘fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer’. Just over a week afterwards, he referred to Coleridge’s poem as a ‘Satire upon me’ and preferred that he should be called ‘drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-ey’d, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question’. Lamb had also reversed his judgment on ‘Lewti’ which, in spite of its unusual virtues for anthology-verse, was essentially superficial and ‘cannot deeply affect a disenthralled mind’ (Marrs, I, pp. 217–18, p. 224). These examples show that his criticism was sometimes affected by factors which were personal rather than strictly literary. However, with a few exceptions this does not apply to his dissection of the Annual Anthology or to his carefully considered critique of the first volume ofLyrical Ballads set out in a letter to William Wordsworth of 30 January 1801 (Marrs, I, 265–66). Lamb is full of admiration: he admits to Wordsworth that one passage even made him cry. Other touches he had absorbed with grateful attention. For example, the ‘delicate & curious feeling in the wish for the Cumberland Beggar, that he may ha[ve] about him the melody of Birds, altho’ he hear them not’ leads him to notice, with particular subtlety, the effect upon a reader: ‘Here the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon her- 126 T. WEBB self, first substituting her own feelings for the Beggar’s, and, in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish’. This admiration does not prevent him from observing, rather resistantly, that ‘An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think upon this subject’. He continues by praising ‘The Ancient Mariner’: ‘For me, I was never so affected with any human Tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days’. Yet he also objects to what he interprets as Coleridge’s unnecessary subtitle (‘A Poet’s Reverie’): ‘it as bad as Bottom the Weaver’s declaration that he is not a Lion but only the scenical representation of a Lion’. Nor did he agree (‘I totally differ’) with Wordsworth’s ‘idea that the Marinere should have had a character and profession’.8

3 As so often, it was Manning who received the first expression of Lamb’s thoughts, when he was still ‘pent up … in a dirty city’, in a letter written before he accepted an invitation to visit the Lake District. He encouraged his friend to join him in a visit to ‘Grassmere! Ambleside! Wordsworth! Coleridge!’; but the same letter admitted that he was ‘not romance-bit about Nature’ and included a breathless and surprisingly rhapsodical catalogue of those seductive features of city life which he was reluctant to abandon (Marrs, I, pp. 247–48):

Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, Shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, Ladies cheapening, Gentlemen behind counters lying, Authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), Lamps lit at night, Pastry cook & Silver smith shops, Beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drousy cry of mechanic watchmen at night, with Bucks reeling home drunk if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of fire and stop thief, Inns of Court (with their learned air and halls and Butteries just like Cambridge colleges), old Book stalls, Jeremy Taylors, Burtons on melancholy, and Religio Medici’s on every stall—. These are thy Pleasures O London with-the-many-sins—O City abounding in whores—for these may Keswick and her Giant Brood go hang.

8 For Lamb’s critical pronouncements, see Lamb as Critic, ed. by Roy Park (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). 8 CHARLES LAMB AND THE RATTLE OF EXISTENCE 127

Without any obvious satirical intention, the opening of this extraordinary passage implies that, by its very juxtapositions, the impact of a large and living city undoes any traditional preconceptions of order or received morality (‘markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, Shops’). Its main effect is to suggest an animated confusion, an effect accentuated by Lamb’s seemingly unpredictable use of initial letters: following the eighteenth- century mode, he usually employs capitals for many nouns (12 in this case, together with 11 proper names (6 of which are doubles—for example, ‘Jeremy Taylors’)), though these are blended with the presence of 19 other nouns clearly beginning with lower case. Nine seemingly normal adjectives are supplemented by two beginning with capitals and five present participles (e.g. ‘reeling home’), used here as in many descriptions of the city to convey constant activity. This feeling of restless or unceasing action blended with general uncertainty is magnified by the way in which names are transformed into plurals. As a whole, the passage is saturated by plurals (which can be calculated as amounting to 36); nowhere is this more strikingly evident than in the opening image of ‘Streets, streets, streets’, turning precisely that feature of the city which transfixed De Quincey with a sobering vision of the urban sublime, into a sibilant repetition. As in various eighteenth or early nineteenth-century descriptions (e.g. those of Mary Robinson),9 noise is treated as an index not of irritat- ing distraction but of the endless varieties of city life. In this case at least, Lamb is concerned not with conventional ethical standards but with urban vitality (not unlike Keats who claimed that, ‘Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine’).10 Climactically, this identification of the city is, as ‘London with-the-many- sins’ might suggest, the moral judgment of a Bunyan faced by the depravi- ties of a Vanity Fair, but here the multiple adjective is surely a sign of admiration for inexhaustible pluralities. As it turns out, this was a first detailed expression of a consuming and recurrent interest which was soon to establish an important place in English cultural history. Lamb’s most significant letter was written to William Wordsworth on 30 January 1801, but it could not have been so

9 Timothy Webb, ‘Listing the Busy Sounds: Anna Seward, Mary Robinson and the Poetic Challenge of the City’, Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender, ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Cecilia Pietropoli (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 79–111. 10 The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), II, p. 80 (19 March 1819). 128 T. WEBB confident and so clear in its formulations without the previous letter to Manning. The letter to Wordsworth begins with the response to Lyrical Ballads which has already been quoted in some detail. Without even the relief of a paragraph-ending or a beginning, it then proceeds to turn down a ‘kind’ invitation to visit Cumberland, although it is careful not to offend the Wordsworths: ‘With you and your sister I could gang any where…. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t mu[ch] care if I never see a mountain in all my life’—the notable use of the dialect-word as well as the obvious compliment must have been intended as a concession to his Cumbrian friends, who might have been affronted, or puzzled, both by his refusal and by his blunt assertion about mountains. Lamb continues by introducing an alternative set of urban values which he considers equally valid to those of the Wordsworths and the Lake-Poets: ‘I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you Mountaineers can have done with dead nature’. Still in the same paragraph, he lists a vivid series of particulars which present the alternative attractions of London, a city which, unlike the Wordsworthian world, Lamb regards as far from ‘dead’, and where (as he complained to Manning) he has been living all his life (he was nearly twenty-six when he wrote this letter). The passage is well known but it demands to be quoted in full, both because of its similarities to the Manning letter, and because of its suggestive differences:

The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, play houses, all the bustle and wickedness about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, drunken scenes, rattles;—life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt & mud, the Sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the Old Book stalls, parsons cheap’ning books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitch- ens, the pantomimes, London itself, a pantomime and a masquerade, all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much Life. (Marrs, I, p. 267)

Felicity James shrewdly notices the ‘energy which at times threatens to overwhelm the sentence structure’ of this description yet, for all its energies, the writing here is more obviously regulated than that in the letter to 8 CHARLES LAMB AND THE RATTLE OF EXISTENCE 129

Manning.11 Whether because Lamb had already broached the argument, or because he felt that Wordsworth should be approached in a more rev- erential fashion, this passage is more obviously organized, and many of its emphases are new, though they would be developed in the future. Capitals have been more or less regularized while present participles have almost disappeared. The plurals have been reduced from 36 to 20, but are still crucially important in establishing the tone of the whole. As before, there may still be only two sentences but although the first is once more domi- nated by a list, this time it is more than a miscellaneous catalogue and is syntactically in order. Less emphatically than in the earlier description of London, but still noticeably, Lamb reminds his reader that London was inescapably connected to the needs of commerce. Perhaps with Wordsworthian poetic psychology in mind, he reminds Wordsworth, the supposed first reader of his letter, that observation depends on the observer as well as the observed, that city life may be continuous but that impressions are necessarily influenced, or even created, by the point of view (‘life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night’). Various features of city life are introduced: print-shops, night-walks (a habit Lamb seems to have shared with Dickens), and the constant availability and inescapable temp- tation of food and drink (coffee-shops and ‘steams of soups from kitch- ens’—another collection of sibilant plurals). Even London itself is presented in gustatory terms as generating an appetite for urban sights which can never be satisfied (‘all these things … feed me without a power of satiating me’). As the beginning of Lamb’s list of the features of London life suggests, the enigmatic word ‘rattles’ appears to be the plural of a noun, presumably signifying a noisy instrument for attracting attention used by some watch- men12; yet, whatever its exact significance, it characterizes a noise which is not harmonious but peculiarly life-enhancing and recognizably urban (‘Is any night-walk comparable to a Walk from St. Paul’s to Charing Cross, for Lighting, & Paving, Crowds going & coming without respite, the rattle of coaches, & the chearfulness of shops’ (Marrs, II, p. 54; to Manning). The sound even seems to affect his appraisal of some contemporaries: John Rickman, for instance, is described as ‘a fine rattling fellow, [who] has gone through Life laughing at solemn apes’ (Marrs, I, p. 244). While for

11 James, p. 196. 12 Lamb reported to Manning that a rattlesnake he encountered in London ‘set up a rattle like a watchman’s in London, or near as loud’ (Marrs, I, p. 241). 130 T. WEBB some observers, a rattle might be a portent of imminent death, for Lamb it is the very index of vitality. This impressionistic catalogue is an immediate response to the many stimulations of the city and it is rarely, if ever, directly allusive or apparently conscious of previous writers; for instance, though the presence of Pope and Samuel Johnson is possibly absorbed, it is never explicitly acknowledged, even in ‘the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street’, an unusual generalized reflection which is quickly swept away by ‘the crowds, the very dirt & mud’. This constant motion is sig- nalled by the breathless catalogue, held together here as in the letter to Manning, by a seemingly unending succession of commas. Not only is space constantly under challenge, but even time is strangely elastic. The city-observer can be, if he chooses, awake at all hours of the night; until he finds that the sun is ‘shining upon houses and pavements’. As an enthusi- astic reader of Hogarth’s prints, Lamb would have known that the city was awake and alive at all twenty-four hours of the day and night, a phenomenon which defied the constraints of traditional experience or of normal numerical calculation. Lamb introduces the crowds not as an obstacle but as an inescapable and apparently positive feature of life in the city streets, a view clearly not shared by, among others, Wordsworth himself (see Book VII of The Prelude heavily influenced by a visit to Bartholomew Fair made by the Wordsworths in the company of the Lambs) or by Lamb’s good friend Leigh Hunt, who complained in ‘A Walk in the City’ of April 1824 that ‘It seems as impossible for anybody but a hypochondriac to think in Cheapside, as for a fish in the Channel to be at rest’.13 Theatricality is not a sign of falseness or hypocrisy but a measure of vitality: this relatively short encapsulation of city theatricalities includes the literal presence of ‘play houses’ and ‘the pantomime’ among the causes of wonder and suggests there is a pleasure to be derived from acknowledging that the city itself is ‘a pantomime and a masquerade’. Even the Strand is experienced as ‘motley’ in a phrase where Lamb admits ‘I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much Life’, an admission reminiscent (though he won’t have known the passage) of Goldoni’s description of his delight in returning after travels abroad to the charged intimacy of a Venetian crowd. The author’s persona in ‘The Londoner’ also admits a suggestive development: ‘often… have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour till tears have wetted my cheek for inutterable

13 ‘A Walk in the City’, The Examiner, No. 847 (25 April 1824), p. 260. 8 CHARLES LAMB AND THE RATTLE OF EXISTENCE 131 sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which never fails to present at all hours, like the shifting scenes of a skilful Pantomime’ (Marrs, II, p. 57). This statement allows the possibility that, in addition to being the cause of tears, ‘moving’ could also suggest motion which goes beyond the possibilities of the popular but restricted ‘panorama’. The phrase ‘multitudinous moving picture’ might even look forward to Ezra Pound’s recognition that the modern city was inherently cinematic, as opposed to the country, which presented a narrative which was more traditional and less pressingly urgent. It is, of course, crucially important that this description was directed at Wordsworth, the poet most immediately associated with the values of the Lake District. As noticed already, and as Wordsworth himself must have observed, it is unmistakably tied to the Lyrical Ballads in particular, not least because it emerges from the same lengthy paragraph containing Lamb’s appraisal of that book’s achievement. Felicity James, who has traced the intellectual and literary relationship of the two men with care and subtlety, rightly recognizes that, for all its inherent vitality, Lamb’s ‘poem in prose’ is also contrarian or confrontational, since it deliberately expresses a challenge to the poetics embodied in the Lyrical Ballads and in its ‘Preface’. Lamb’s evocation of London ‘acts as an immediate response to the opening sentences of the “Preface” […] This is that “vivid sensation” instantly arrested in words—a startling antidote to Wordsworth’s restrictive anxiety’.14 The Manning letter, even more obviously than the later one addressed to Wordsworth, but with a similar inclination, places the emphasis on plurals, a feature of city life which Wordsworth found uncongenial and at odds with his marked preference for the singular.15 Simply by expressing his emotions in a ‘poem in prose’ Lamb also begins to set the agenda for a new kind of writing which will not, in the first place, resort to poetic forms. Perhaps it is no accident that, alongside the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and others, the period also found room for the writings of Lamb himself, Hazlitt, Hunt and Haydon (and, in due course, for Dickens, who was much enriched and encouraged by their example).16

14 James, p. 196. 15 Timothy Webb, ‘Dangerous Plurals: Wordsworth’s Bartholomew Fair and the Challenge of an Urban Poetics’, London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis, ed. Susana Onega and John A. Stotesbury (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2002), pp. 53–82. 16 For a recent and suggestive analysis, see Gregory Dart, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). CHAPTER 9

The Tensions of Jane Austen’s Epistolary Style

Joe Bray

Jane Austen’s letters contain few insights into her practice or philosophy as a writer. A series of letters in 1814 to her niece Anna offer comments and advice on the ongoing novel which this budding author has sent her aunt for feedback, but these are mainly of a practical nature, concerning such matters as names, titles and etiquette (‘And when Mr Portman is first brought in, he wd not be introduced as the Honble—That distinction is never mentioned at such times;—at least I beleive not’).1 The majority of the letters which survive are concerned with day-to-day, rather than literary or intellectual, concerns. Jane’s letters to her sister Cassandra in particular are full of commonplace gossip between sisters, which could strike a modern reader as trivial, even frivolous. Their structure and style are, as many critics have noticed, akin to the spontaneity and rapidity of speech. In the novels such breathless letters are frequently a sign of negligent behaviour, even moral weakness. However, the letter can be a much more

1 Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deidre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 280. Hereafter JAL.

J. Bray (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 133 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_9 134 J. BRAY complex form in Austen’s fiction. Letters in her novels do not always reveal character so transparently, and the focus is often on difficulties surrounding their interpretation. The deciphering of epistolary meaning involves Austen’s heroines in some of their deepest personal struggles, and as a result these scenes of reading are crucial in each novel. Far from being trivial and frivolous, the letter is for Austen a powerful means of illustrating fictional consciousness, and the key to generating sophisticated stylistic techniques. Jane begins a letter to her sister Cassandra in early January 1801 by indicating that she is not going to obey the usual pattern of correspondence: ‘As you have by this time received my last letter, it is fit that I should begin another’ (JAL, p. 69). Having relayed her hope ‘that you often wore a white gown in the morning, at the time of the gay party’s being with you,” she recounts a visit to Ashdown Park in Berkshire (‘Ash Park’), which ‘went off in a come-cá way; we met Mr Lefroy & Tom Chute, played at cards & came home again’ (JAL, p. 69). She then turns to news of two of their brothers: ‘James & Mary dined here on the following day, & at night Henry set off in the Mail for London’, briefly followed by their friend Martha Lloyd’s opinion of the latter (‘He was as agreable as ever during his visit, & has not lost anything in Miss Lloyd’s estima- tion’), and then news of Martha’s activities today (‘the scene is agreably varied by Mary’s driving Martha to Basingstoke, & Martha’s afterwards dining at Deane’) (JAL, p. 69). The letter then switches to the family’s prospective move to Bath, with discussion of the servants they might keep and where they might live, followed by which furniture might be going with them (‘My father & mother wisely aware of the difficulty of finding in all Bath such a bed as their own, have resolved on taking it with them’) (JAL, p. 70). Jane then seeks Cassandra’s opinion on whether to take other items or buy them there:

We have thought at times of removing the side-board, or a pembroke table, or some other peice [sic] of furniture—but upon the whole it has ended in thinking that the trouble & risk of the removal would be more than the advantage of having them at a place, where everything may be purchased. Pray send your opinion.—Martha has as good as promised to come to us again in March.—Her spirits are better than they were.—I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter. (JAL, p. 71) 9 THE TENSIONS OF JANE AUSTEN’S EPISTOLARY STYLE 135

The rapid, speech-like quality, which Jane notes here, is indicated in part by the dashes which are characteristic of her epistolary style. These often signal a switch of topic, as here for example when Martha’s promise of a return visit and her state of health are inserted following the furniture discussion. As if to prove the point of her adherence to ‘the true art of letter-writing’, the next section of the letter flits even more speedily between apparently unconnected subjects:

Your Christmas Gaieties are really quite surprising; I think they would satisfy even Miss Walter herself.—I hope the ten shillings won by Miss Foote may make everything easy between her & her cousin Frederick.—So, Lady Bridges in the delicate language of Coulson Wallop is in for it!—I am very glad to hear of the Pearsons’ good fortune—[…] (JAL, p. 71)

Again the dashes here are characteristic markers of the spoken quality of Jane’s style, as too are the emphatic underlining and exclamation in ‘in for it!’ (Lady Bridges was pregnant). The discourse marker ‘So’ also indicates a relaxed, casual transition to a new topic which seems designed to imitate speech. Such markers are frequent throughout Jane’s letters to Cassandra, confirming the impression that we are eavesdropping on a conversation between the two; one from March 1814 opens ‘Well, we went to the Play again last night’ (JAL, p. 272). Critics have often commented on the speech-like quality of Jane’s letters and compared those to Cassandra to one half of a conversation between the two.2 In her preface to the fourth edition of Austen’s correspondence, Deidre Le Faye notes that ‘[t]he letters to Cassandra are the equivalent of telephone calls between the sisters’ (JAL, pp. xiii–xiv), while Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, in her historical sociolinguistic analysis of Austen’s letters, comments that while ‘obviously not being actual speech, [they] nevertheless come very close to it despite being in writing. As such, they actually represent the next-best thing that is available to us. It is unlikely that we will be able to get any closer to what the spoken language of the period actually may have been like, or to that of Jane Austen in particular’.3

2 Unfortunately the other half of the conversation has been lost; no letters from Cassandra to Jane survive, and according to family tradition Cassandra burned the majority of Jane’s letters to her two or three years before her own death in 1845 (see JAL, pp. xii–xiii). 3 Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 6. 136 J. BRAY

There are indeed occasions throughout the letters to Cassandra when Jane appears to conceive of her writing as speech. She thanks her sister in early 1807 for ‘writing so much; you must really have sent me the value of two letters in one’, and then in return declares that of her sister’s visit to Mrs. Knight in Canterbury she ‘must now speak “incessantly”’ (JAL, p. 119). The physical form of the letter can at times be an obstacle to such incessant speaking; after a typically diffuse opening to an 1809 letter Jane reprimands herself with the promise ‘I shall now try to say only what is necessary, I am weary of meandering—so expect a vast deal of matter con- cisely told, in the next two pages’, (JAL, p. 179) while an 1813 missive is interrupted by the lament ‘Oh! dear me!—I have not time or paper for half that I want to say’ (JAL, p. 264). There are reminders too that in this period letters typically would be read aloud by their recipients; Jane tells Cassandra that ‘I had but just time to enjoy your Letter yesterday before Edward & I set off in the Chair for Canty—& I allowed him to hear the cheif of it as we went along’ (JAL, p. 257), and records in an earlier letter that ‘Your Letter gave pleasure to all of us, we had all the reading of it of course, I three times—as I undertook to the great releif of Lizzy, to read it to Sackree, & afterwards to Louisa’ (JAL, p. 243). For some of Austen’s fictional characters too there does appear to be very little gap between the style of their letters and that of their speech. The Miss Dashwoods’ first impression of Mrs. Jennings in Sense and Sensibility is of ‘a good-humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal, seemed very happy, and rather vulgar’.4 Her energetic gar- rulousness is apparent throughout, for example when she finds Elinor alone on an early visit to Barton Cottage:

She came hallooing to the window, ‘How do you do, my dear? How does Mrs. Dashwood do? And where are your sisters? What! all alone! you will be glad of a little company to sit with you. I have brought my other son and daughter to see you. Only think of their coming so suddenly! I thought I heard a carriage last night, while we were drinking our tea, but it never entered my head that it could be them. I thought of nothing but whether it might not be Colonel Brandon come back again; so I said to Sir John, I do think I hear a carriage; perhaps it is Colonel Brandon come back again—’ (SS, pp. 122–23)

4 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland ([1811]; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 40. Hereafter SS. 9 THE TENSIONS OF JANE AUSTEN’S EPISTOLARY STYLE 137

This train of somewhat loosely connected thoughts appears likely to continue indefinitely, until eventually Elinor is ‘obliged to turn from her, in the middle of her story, to receive the rest of the party’ (SS, p. 123). Of a similarly rambling monologue on the possible causes of Colonel Brandon leaving Devonshire ahead of schedule the narrator comments: ‘So wondered, so talked Mrs. Jennings. Her opinion varying with every fresh conjecture, and all seeming equally probable as they arose’ (SS, p. 83). Mrs. Jennings’s epistolary style is similarly diffuse. After the news of Lucy Steele’s marriage she writes to Elinor from London ‘to tell the won- derful tale, to vent her honest indignation against the jilting girl, and pour forth her compassion towards poor Mr. Edward, who, she was sure, had quite doted upon the worthless hussey, and was now, by all accounts, almost broken-hearted, at Oxford’ (SS, pp. 419–20). What starts here as a report of her letter by the narrator modulates into a more direct representation of the actual words used by Mrs. Jennings (‘the jilting girl’, ‘the worthless hussy’). The letter is then given with full directness in the first person:

‘I do think’, she continued, ‘nothing was ever carried on so sly; for it was but two days before Lucy called and sat a couple of hours with me. Not a soul suspected anything of the matter, not even Nancy, who, poor soul! came crying to me the day after, in a great fright for fear of Mrs. Ferrars, as well as not knowing how to get to Plymouth; for Lucy it seems borrowed all her money before she went off to be married, on purpose we suppose to make a shew with, and poor Nancy had not seven shillings in the world;—so I was very glad to give her five guineas to take her down to Exeter, where she thinks of staying three or four weeks with Mrs. Burgess, in hopes, as I tell her, to fall in with the Doctor again. And I must say that Lucy’s crossness not to take her along with them in the chaise is worse than all. Poor Mr. Edward! I cannot get him out of my head, but you must send for him to Barton, and Miss Marianne must try to comfort him’. (SS, p. 420)

This letter bears all the hallmarks of Mrs. Jennings’s spoken style, notably in the long sentence beginning ‘Not a soul’, which moves rapidly from Lucy’s deception to her sister’s reaction, to the two sisters’ financial situations, to Mrs. Jennings lending Nancy money, to the latter’s rumoured (mostly by her) romance with Dr. Burgess. The final sentence returns to Lucy’s behaviour and its effects on Edward, and her fantastical plan to bring him together with Marianne. 138 J. BRAY

Mrs. Jennings is by no means the only character in Austen’s novels to talk ‘almost as fast as [she] could’ on paper. A few pages earlier in Sense and Sensibility, Lucy’s own account of her surprise marriage in a letter to Edward passes rapidly over her change of heart:

Dear Sir, Being very sure I have long lost your affections, I have thought myself at liberty to bestow my own on another, and have no doubt of being as happy with him as I once used to think I might be with you; but I scorn to accept a hand while the heart was another’s. Sincerely wish you happy in your choice, and it shall not be my fault if we are not always good friends, as our near relationship now makes proper. I can safely say I owe you no ill-will, and am sure you will be too generous to do us any ill offices. Your brother has gained my affections entirely, and as we could not live without one another, we are just returned from the altar, and are now on our way to Dawlish for a few weeks, which place your dear brother has great curiosity to see, but thought I would first trouble you with these few lines, and shall always remain, Your sincere well-wisher, friend, and sister, Lucy Ferrars I have burnt all your letters, and will return your picture the first opportunity. Please to destroy my scrawls—but the ring with my hair you are very welcome to keep. (SS, pp. 413–14)

The abbreviated, rushed style of Lucy’s letter, especially its omission of pronouns (‘Sincerely wish you happy in your choice’) and the way it moves hurriedly from topic to topic (‘we are just returned from the altar, and are now on our way to Dawlish for a few weeks’), is suggestive of her narcissism and vanity, and the rapidity with which she has shifted her attentions to the younger Ferrars brother. An ashamed Edward admits to Elinor that he has often been embarrassed by Lucy’s letters:

‘I will not ask your opinion of it as a composition’, said Edward.—‘For worlds would not I have had a letter of her’s seen by you in former days.—In a sister it is bad enough, but in a wife!—how have I blushed over the pages of her writing!—and I believe I may say that since the first half year of our foolish—business—this is the only letter I ever received from her, of which the substance made me any amends for the defect of the style’. (SS, p. 414)

Here as elsewhere in Austen’s novels a rushed epistolary style suggests a lack of care, thought and moral integrity on the part of the writer. The 9 THE TENSIONS OF JANE AUSTEN’S EPISTOLARY STYLE 139 letter which Lydia Bennet writes to Mrs. Forster in Pride and Prejudice announcing her elopement (which Colonel Forster later gives to her sister Jane) is similarly self-damning:

My Dear Harriet, You will laugh when you know where I am gone, and I cannot help laughing myself at your surprise to-morrow morning, as soon as I am missed. I am going to Gretna Green, and if you cannot guess with who, I shall think you a simpleton, for there is but one man in the world I love, and he is an angel. I should never be happy without him, so think it no harm to be off. You need not send them word at Longbourn of my going, if you do not like it, for it will make the surprise the greater, when I write to them, and sign my name Lydia Wickham. What a good joke it will be! I can hardly write for laughing. Pray make my excuses to Pratt, for not keeping my engagement, and dancing with him to night. Tell him I hope he will excuse me when he knows all, and tell him I will dance with him at the next ball we meet, with great pleasure. I shall send for my clothes when I get to Longbourn; but I wish you would tell Sally to mend a great slit in my worked muslin gown, before they are packed up. Good bye. Give my love to Colonel Forster, I hope you will drink to our good journey. Your affectionate friend, Lydia Bennet.5

Elizabeth is appalled by both the content and the style of this letter:

“Oh! thoughtless, thoughtless Lydia!” cried Elizabeth when she had finished it. “What a letter is this, to be written at such a moment. But at least it shews, that she was serious in the object of her journey. Whatever he might afterwards persuade her to, it was not on her side a scheme of infamy. My poor father! how he must have felt it!” (PP, p. 322)

Lucy’s and Lydia’s letters provide evidence of what Ian Jack calls ‘Austen’s habit of expressing character by means of the style of letters’.6 As many critics have observed, it is often the less admirable characters in her novels who are given away by their epistolary style; Ralph Tumbleson comments that many letters in Austen’s novels reveal ‘the inadequacies of

5 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Pat Rogers ([1813]; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 321. Hereafter PP. 6 Ian Jack, “The Epistolary Element in Jane Austen,” English Studies Today, 2nd series (1961), pp. 173–86 (185). 140 J. BRAY their authors in wit, integrity, or sincerity’.7 Yet what they reveal about their readers is perhaps equally, if not more, important. Edward’s and Elizabeth’s responses to these thoughtless letters are indicative of how the focus throughout Austen’s novels is often not just on the content and style of the letter itself, but also on how it is read and interpreted. In Northanger Abbey reading a letter marks Catherine Morland’s decisive change of feeling towards her former friend Isabella Thorpe, as she finally manages to see through her sentimental jargon and cliché. Isabella’s letter from Bath attempts to justify her behaviour towards Catherine’s brother James and Captain Tilney, affecting to dismiss the latter (‘he is the greatest coxcomb I ever saw, and amazingly disagreeable’), and professing her love for her correspondent and her brother (‘Lose no time, my dearest, sweetest Catherine, in writing to him and to me’).8 Catherine is at last no longer fooled:

Such a strain of shallow artifice could not impose even upon Catherine. Its inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehood, struck her from the very first. She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of having ever loved her. Her professions of attachment were now as disgusting as her excuses were empty, and her demands impudent. (NA, p. 224)

In discerning the true motives behind the ‘shallow artifice’ of Isabella’s style, Catherine, perhaps most belatedly of all Austen’s heroines other than Emma Woodhouse, has acquired what Jack calls ‘the important art of assessing characters through letters’.9 This assessment is however often considerably more difficult than in the examples given so far. The letter in Austen’s fiction can be a complex, challenging form, which on many occasions occludes and obscures the character of its writer, rather than revealing it transparently.10 One particular case study is illustrative of the effort which Austen’s characters often have to

7 Ralph Tumbleson, “‘It is Like a Woman’s Writing’: The alternative epistolary novel in Emma,” Persuasions 14 (1992), pp. 141–43, 141. 8 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Barbara M. Benedict and Deidre Le Faye ([1818]; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 223–24. Herefter NA. 9 Jack, p. 173. 10 There is not space enough here to detail Austen’s early experiments with epistolary form. The juvenilia contains several playful mini novels-in-letters, while Lady Susan, probably written around 1794–95, is a sophisticated, dazzling demonstration of the conflicting points of view which the epistolary novel can generate. 9 THE TENSIONS OF JANE AUSTEN’S EPISTOLARY STYLE 141 put in to deciphering a letter’s meaning, and the multiple, careful re- reading which can be required. Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park is a gossipy correspondent whose letters often resemble those of Jane to Cassandra. Yet to their recipient Fanny Price they are opaque and confusing. What exactly they signify, especially in terms of Mary’s feelings towards her cousin Edmund, is hard to make out. Her struggles to work out her correspondent’s underlying motives and her often angry responses to Mary’s flighty, jokey tone are represented in one particular narrative style which is critical to Austen’s stylistic practice. After being somewhat forced into a correspondence Fanny at first dreads receiving letters from Mary, especially because each usually contains a few lines from her brother Henry, ‘warm and determined like his speeches. It was a correspondence which Fanny found quite as unpleasant as she had feared’.11 She also realizes that Mary counts on her letters being read aloud to one other person in particular:

Miss Crawford’s style of writing, lively and affectionate, was itself an evil, independent of what she was thus forced into reading from the brother’s pen, for Edmund would never rest till she had read the chief of the letter to him, and then she had to listen to his admiration of her language, and the warmth of her attachments.—There had, in fact, been so much of message, of allusion, of recollection, so much of Mansfield in every letter, that Fanny could not but suppose it meant for him to hear; and to find herself forced into a purpose of that kind, compelled into a correspondence which was bringing her the addresses of the man she did not love, and obliging her to administer to the adverse passion of the man she did, was cruelly mortifying. (MP, p. 434)

Fanny’s surmise that Mary expects her letter to be read aloud to Edmund recalls the way in which letters were typically disseminated within the Austen family circle. The pain which this causes Fanny given her own feelings towards her cousin increases her suspicion of both Mary and her brother Henry, who as she correctly judges has not given up his designs on her. When she is staying with her family in Portsmouth, however, she begins to be more appreciative of Mary’s letters, recognizing that ‘in her present exile from good society, and distance from every thing that had been wont to interest her, a letter from one belonging to the set where her

11 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. John Wiltshire ([1814]; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 434. Hereafter MP. 142 J. BRAY heart lived, written with affection, and some degree of elegance, was thoroughly acceptable’ (MP, p. 455). In total four letters from Mary to Fanny at this period are given in full. The first covers, in Mary’s lively style, a trip by Henry to Norfolk, Mary receiving a visit from Julia Bertram and her newly married sister Maria (‘dearest Mrs. Rushworth’), the prospect of Maria moving to Wimpole Street, gossip about a potential suitor for Julia, and Edmund being detained by his parish duties. It ends with a typically playful plea: ‘Adieu, my dear sweet Fanny, this is a long letter from London; write me a pretty one in reply to gladden Henry’s eyes, when he comes back—and send me an account of all the dashing young captains whom you disdain for his sake’ (MP, p. 457). Although Fanny is made uncomfortable by parts of the letter, in her state of isolation at Portsmouth she is grateful for it too: ‘There was great food for meditation in this letter, and chiefly for unpleasant meditation; and yet, with all the uneasiness it supplied, it connected her with the absent, it told her of people and things about whom she had never felt so much curiosity as now, and she would have been glad to have been sure of such a letter every week’ (MP, p. 457). Mary’s second letter follows Henry’s unexpected visit to Portsmouth, of which it contains a rapturous account, presumably derived from his own report: ‘the balmy air, the sparkling sea, and your sweet looks and conversation were altogether in the most delicious harmony, and afforded sensations which are to raise ecstacy even in retrospect’ (MP, p. 481). Fanny reads it with ‘anxious curiosity’ for another reason, however; to discover if anything has been declared between Edmund and Mary herself. Her correspondent typically spends most of the letter on society gossip, before turning briefly to Edmund and reporting that ‘we have seen him two or three times, and […] my friends here are very much struck with his gentleman-like appearance’ (MP, p. 482). A postscript mentions her and Henry’s plan to take Fanny ‘back into Northamptonshire’ (MP, p. 483) as well as another forthcoming trip by Henry to Norfolk, when he will see the Rushworths. Fanny finds the letter both engrossing and frustrating:

This was a letter to be run through eagerly, to be read deliberately, to supply matter for much reflection, and to leave every thing in greater suspense than ever. The only certainty to be drawn from it was, that nothing decisive had yet taken place. Edmund had not yet spoken. How Miss Crawford really felt—how she meant to act, or might act without or against her meaning— whether his importance to her were quite what it had been before the last separation—whether if lessened it were likely to lessen more, or to recover 9 THE TENSIONS OF JANE AUSTEN’S EPISTOLARY STYLE 143

itself, were subjects for endless conjecture, and to be thought of on that day and many days to come, without producing any conclusion. (MP, pp. 483–84)

While as usual entertaining and lively, Mary’s letter is thus frustratingly hard to read. Little is clearer to Fanny on the state of affairs between the letter-writer and Edmund, other than that nothing decisive has yet taken place. In contrast to the breathless, transparent letters of Lucy Steele and Lydia Bennet, Mary’s letter is opaque, even confusing, the cause of ‘endless conjecture’ in its reader. Some of this conjecture is then given in the narrative style known as free indirect thought as Fanny reflects further on what Mary’s apparently casual society gossip might mean:

A house in town!—that she thought must be impossible. Yet there was no saying what Miss Crawford might not ask. The prospect for her cousin grew worse and worse. The woman who could speak of him, and speak only of his appearance!—What an unworthy attachment!—To be deriving support from the commendations of Mrs. Fraser! She who had known him intimately half a year! Fanny was ashamed of her. (MP, p. 484)

The exclamation marks here are a sign of Fanny’s point of view, together with the italics for emphasis. These are clearly her indignant reflections on the letter rather than the narrator’s. As is usual in free indirect thought the retention of the third person and backshifted tense (with the past perfect ‘had known’ used instead of the present perfect ‘has known’ in the penul- timate sentence) suggests the continued presence of a narrator. This allows for an alternative angle on Fanny’s outrage, with a hint that she may be magnifying the unworthiness of the attachment as a result of her own feelings for Edmund.12 Mary’s third letter causes even more consternation. It is mostly focused on the reports she has heard of Tom Bertram’s ill-health, and the prospects, were he to die, that would be opened up for Edmund, and, by implication, for her. The style is as playful as ever, with Mary even propos- ing that ‘“Sir Edmund” would not do more good with all the Bertram property, than any other possible “Sir”’ (MP, p. 503), yet it seems to conceal a deeper agitation and a real anxiety to find out how things stand.

12 For more on free indirect thought, usually seen by critics as Austen’s most lasting contribution to the style of the English novel, see Joe Bray, The Language of Jane Austen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), chapter 4. 144 J. BRAY

A postscript adds that Henry has seen Mrs. Rushworth (Maria) again, with the reassurance that ‘he cares for nobody but you’ (MP, p. 504). The offer of removing her from Portsmouth and taking her back to Mansfield Park is repeated. Fanny is horrified, while admitting to herself that this final offer is attractive: ‘Fanny’s disgust at the greater part of this letter, with her extreme reluctance to bring the writer of it and her cousin Edmund together, would have made her (as she felt), incapable of judging impar- tially whether the concluding offer might be accepted or not. To herself, individually, it was most tempting’ (MP, p. 504). As she reflects further, however, with free indirect thought again emerging, Fanny decides that she cannot accept their assistance at the present time: ‘the sister’s feelings—the brother’s conduct—her cold-hearted ambition—his thoughtless vanity. To have him still the acquaintance, the flirt, perhaps, of Mrs. Rushworth!—She was mortified. She had thought better of him’ MP( , pp. 504–05). Again the italics and the exclamation mark are clear signs of Fanny’s point of view here, together with the dashes which suggest her indignation and alarm as she considers the Crawfords’ behaviour. As before though, the retention of the third person and backshifted tense are reminders that the narrator remains on the scene, casting a sidelong glance at her perhaps excessive reactions. Mary’s fourth letter is much briefer than the earlier three, though it has the greatest impact. She opens by reporting that ‘A most scandalous, ill- natured rumour has just reached me, and I write, dear Fanny, to warn you against giving the least credit to it, should it spread into the country’ (MP, p. 506). The rest of the letter gives clues as to Henry’s elopement with Maria, though characteristically Mary cannot help adding her assurance that ‘Henry is blameless, and in spite of a moment’s etourderie thinks of nobody but you’ (MP, p. 506). Her reader’s response is one of shock and bafflement: ‘Fanny stood aghast. As no scandalous, ill-natured rumour had reached her, it was impossible for her to understand much of this strange letter’ (MP, p. 507). It is only when her father reads about the scandal in the newspaper and then receives a letter from Edmund that Fanny fully understands what has taken place. This letter, in which Edmund announces that he will be with her the next day to take her back to Mansfield Park, brings Fanny some consolation, even happiness, amidst her shock and distress. Her emotions on receiving it contrast greatly with his only other letter to her at Portsmouth, which causes her great pain. In the former, Edmund confides in her about his feelings for Mary, expressing doubts over the company she is keeping 9 THE TENSIONS OF JANE AUSTEN’S EPISTOLARY STYLE 145 in London and the friends who he thinks are leading ‘the weak side of her character’ astray, but confessing that ‘I cannot give her up, Fanny. She is the only woman in the world whom I could ever think of as a wife’ (MP, p. 488, p. 489). Although he fears being rejected, he tells Fanny of his determination to propose as well as how he was going to do so: ‘Considering every thing, I think a letter will be decidedly the best method of explanation’ (MP, p. 490). Edmund ends his long letter with praise for Henry (‘“I am more and more satisfied with all that I see and hear of him”’) MP( , p. 490), plus some brief remarks on how much he and the rest of his family miss Fanny, and his father’s plans to fetch her home after Easter. Fanny is understandably plunged into misery and despair: ‘“I never will—no, I certainly never will wish for a letter again’, was Fanny’s secret declaration, as she finished this. ‘What do they bring but disappointment and sorrow?—Not till after Easter!—How shall I bear it?—And my poor aunt talking of me every hour!”’ (MP, p. 491) Her vexation with Edmund increases as she revolves some of the most painful parts of the letter in her mind: ‘“There is no good in this delay,” said she. “Why is not it settled?— He is blinded, and nothing will open his eyes, nothing can, after having had truths before him so long in vain.—He will marry her, and be poor and miserable. God grant that her influence do not make him cease to be respectable!”’ (MP, p. 492) Fanny’s anger with Edmund becomes even more evident when she then starts picking out phrases from the letter:

‘So very fond of me!’ ’tis nonsense all. She loves nobody but herself and her brother. Her friends leading her astray for years! She is quite as likely to have led them astray. They have all, perhaps, been corrupting one another; but if they are so much fonder of her than she is of them, she is the less likely to have been hurt, except by their flattery. ‘The only woman in the world, whom he could ever think of as a wife.’ I firmly believe it. It is an attachment to govern his whole life. Accepted or refused, his heart is wedded to her for ever. ‘The loss of Mary, I must consider as comprehending the loss of Crawford and Fanny.’ Edmund, you do not know me. The families would never be connected, if you did not connect them! Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself. (MP, p. 492)

While some of these quotations are direct from Edmund’s letter, including ‘The loss of Mary, I must consider as comprehending the loss of Crawford and Fanny’, others are subtly changed, including ‘The only woman in the world, whom he could ever think of as a wife’, which 146 J. BRAY switches the pronoun from the original ‘I’. This suggests that Fanny is incapable of quoting directly in her mind the most hurtful part of the letter, as if the brief transposition into her own report in the third person might provide some small crumb of consolation. Her flash of anger soon subsides and as she becomes more ‘softened and sorrowful’ free indirect thought replaces her more direct outbursts: ‘his warm regard, his kind expressions, his confidential treatment touched her strongly. He was only too good to every body.—It was a letter, in short, which she would not but have had for the world, and which could never be valued enough. This was the end of it’ (MP, p. 492). Both Mary’s and Edmund’s letters to Fanny at Portsmouth indicate then that letters are capable of generating powerful emotional responses in Austen’s fiction. Though Fanny finds Mary’s lively, playful letters frustratingly opaque and in many ways worthy of condemnation, she reads them anxiously for a clue as to their writer’s feelings for Edmund. His letter is more open about his feelings for Mary and as a result more distressing. Her complicated responses to each letter are indicated in a variety of ways, including in the style which has been hailed as Austen’s most significant contribution to the English novel. Free indirect thought captures the internal debates of Fanny and other Austen heroines as they struggle, often unsuccessfully, to make out the underlying intentions and characters of their correspondents. Like Austen’s own real-life letters, those in her fiction can appear somewhat frivolous and concerned with trivialities and gossip. Yet they often nevertheless conceal as much as they reveal and demand careful reading and re-reading. The letter is more for Austen than a simple vehicle for communicating the everyday. It is instead a complex, often confusing source of emotion, and a crucial cornerstone of her stylistic practice. CHAPTER 10

‘Transported to your presence’: Leigh Hunt’s Letters to the Shelleys

Daniel Westwood

‘Whenever I write to you, I seem to be transported to your presence’: the remarks that open Leigh Hunt’s 23 August 1819 letter to the Shelleys exhibit, in miniature, the characteristics that define Hunt’s epistolary style.1 If Hunt is a writer who delights in the bonds that might be established or maintained through the letter, his letters remain conscious of the physical experiences and encounters that cannot be replicated easily within the scope of the epistolary form. In the above quotation, the conditional ‘seem’ casts a qualifying shadow over Hunt’s celebration of an imagined proximity, even as the letter prizes this state of seeming as a means of con- verting absence into a virtual form of presence, however temporary this

1 Hunt’s letters are quoted from The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, Edited by his Eldest Son, ed. Thornton Leigh Hunt, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1862), I, p. 135. Hereafter CLH. Letters absent from CLH or that appear with passages redacted are quoted from Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 10 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), hereafter SC. Shelley’s letters are quoted from The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), hereafter Letters: PBS.

D. Westwood (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 147 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_10 148 D. WESTWOOD illusion may be. Such ambivalence is typical of Hunt’s letters to the Shelleys, which exemplify Hunt’s use of the letter as a means of negotiat- ing divisions between himself and his correspondents, as well as Hunt’s understanding of the letter as a vehicle of mobility, a space in which a writer must adopt varying postures and positions depending on the needs of his correspondent and the communicative situation. Having first met in 1811, Hunt and Shelley forged a friendship in 1816 that remained close until Shelley’s death in 1822, including the years from 1818 onwards when Shelley, with Mary, was resident in Italy. Their separation shaped a correspondence that involved Marianne Hunt and Mary Shelley as active participants (though Marianne wrote less frequently than Shelley, Mary, or Hunt), with letters often centring on the enduring quality of the two couples’ friendship and the possibility of the Hunts joining the Shelleys in Italy, a reunion belatedly achieved just weeks prior to Shelley’s death. Focusing on letters exchanged by Hunt and the Shelleys in 1819, including those written while Shelley was composing works such as The Mask of Anarchy late that year, this essay will explore the varying ways Hunt’s letters attempt to conjure into being a sense of proximity, connection, or consensus that might reconcile, or at least mitigate, divisions ranging from physical separation to ideological discord. Hunt has long been recognised as a central figure in accounts of Romantic sociability. Jeffrey Cox presents a unified ‘Cockney school’ of poets that, with Hunt at its core and Shelley an important member, saw writing as a social as well as political endeavour.2 Nicholas Roe’s biography of Hunt, too, illuminates how the Romantic period’s most vital writers and personalities ‘sought Hunt’s company, courted his approval, and prized his friendship’,3 and is attentive to the way Hunt’s relationship with Shelley was forged and sustained through the letter. Similarly, Timothy Webb and Daisy Hay highlight the centrality of Shelley’s correspondence with Hunt in shaping Shelley’s life and work.4 Building on this work, this

2 Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3 Nicholas Roe, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (London: Pimlico, 2005), p. xiii; for Hunt’s importance to the cultural and literary climate of nineteenth-century London, see Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene: A Reception History of His Major Works, 1805–1828 (New York: Routledge, 2005). 4 Timothy Webb, ‘An Uncelebrated Facility: The Achievement of Shelley’s Letters’, The Neglected Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), pp. 13–34; Daisy Hay, ‘Shelley’s Letters’, The Oxford Handbook of Percy 10 ‘TRANSPORTED TO YOUR PRESENCE’: LEIGH HUNT’S LETTERS… 149 essay focuses on the complexities of Hunt’s role in this relationship, stress- ing the experimental quality of Hunt’s epistolary style as well as Hunt’s efforts to manage the terms of the group’s epistolary exchange. Though Hunt’s poetry’s courting of an abstract reader contrasts with the epistolary mode’s direct communication with a known individual, Hunt’s letters to the Shelleys bear a strong affinity to the ‘aesthetics of intimacy’ that Jane Stabler identifies in Hunt’s poetry. Stabler reads Hunt as a poet who strives to establish community with his reader, exploring different methods of ‘attracting and holding [the reader’s] attention’ to the extent that Hunt sometimes risks ‘over-familiarity and vulgarity’.5 Considered alongside Roe’s portrait of Hunt as an individual who exhibited an almost ‘“hypochondriac” anxiety for company and community’,6 such an approach invites a more qualified reading of Hunt’s ostensibly easy, free-flowing conversational style with the Shelleys. While Hunt’s letters share some of the qualities identified in Heidi Thomson’s sensitive reading of Keats’s correspondence, most notably the wish to bridge physical separation through rhetorical figurations of closeness and connection,7 Hunt’s epistolary style exemplifies how an air of wilfulness, sometimes manifesting as an overt desire to assert communicative control, might underpin a letter writer’s attempts to foster friendship and understanding.8 Hunt’s letters to the Shelleys also deserve special emphasis for revealing Hunt’s aesthetic of intimacy as an artistic strategy that works in tandem with, and occasionally seems the product of, the commitment to spontaneity that Michael O’Neill sees as pivotal to Hunt’s art. O’Neill points up Hunt’s ability to write prose that is calculatedly yet ‘gracefully aware of the positions it is taking’, able to ‘bring various ideas into play’, and marked by ‘a readiness to qualify, to change tack’.9 While a wish to maintain

Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 208–24. 5 Jane Stabler, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Aesthetics of Intimacy’, Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, ed. Nicholas Roe (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 95–117 (p. 99, p. 115). 6 Roe, Fiery Heart, p. 169. 7 Heidi Thomson, ‘Keats’s Letters: “A Wilful and Dramatic Exercise of Our Minds Towards Each Other”’, Keats-Shelley Review 25.2 (2011), pp. 160–74 (p. 161). 8 Timothy Webb identifies such traits in Hunt’s prison letters to Byron in ‘Leigh Hunt’s Letters to Byron from Horsemonger Lane Gaol: A Commentary’, The Byron Journal 37.1 (2009), pp. 21–32 (p. 30). 9 Michael O’Neill, ‘“Even now while I write”: Leigh Hunt and Romantic Spontaneity’, Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, pp. 135–55 (p. 140). 150 D. WESTWOOD

interpersonal bonds shapes Hunt’s epistolary exchanges with the Shelleys, the mobility of Hunt’s letters means that intimate address represents just one mode among many that the letter writer seeking to manage division might choose to adopt. Hunt’s desire to sustain social harmony occasionally prompts him to turn away from intimate address by delaying responses, or even avoiding responding entirely to letters on issues he was unwilling to discuss. Nimbleness, dexterity, and adaptability become the defining features of Hunt’s epistolary style, which strives to sustain closeness and connection through techniques that include imagined physical proximity, stimulating intellectual discussion, directive comments on the Shelleys’ letter writing habits, and unexpected moments of silence, slipperiness, and evasion. Hunt’s 23 August 1819 letter demonstrates this multi-faceted, tonally diverse style. ‘My dear friends’, Hunt begins,

Whenever I write to you, I seem to be transported to your presence. I dart out of the window like a bird, dash into a southwestern current of air, skim over the cool waters, hurry over the basking lands, rise like a lark over the mountains, fling like a swallow into the vallies, skim again, pant for breath— there’s Leghorn—eccomi!—how d’ye do? (CLH I, p. 135)

Such an elongated sentence forces Hunt and his readers to ‘pant for breath’ amidst this breathless reimagining of the epistolary landscape. With ‘pant for breath’ foregrounding speech and communication as a bodily, rather than strictly textual, act, the passage reads as an effort to transcend the ties that bind epistolary communication to the written word. Hunt’s aim is to convert the letter into a site capable of housing the familiar, spoken greetings that characterise a face-to-face encounter between friends. After the opening glide through subordinate clauses, the letter’s shift into the sharper, almost staccato transitions of the final three dashes suggests Hunt’s reliance on increasingly pronounced imaginative leaps. Hunt’s first dash marks a shift from the imagined movements of Hunt as lark or swallow to his envisioned arrival at Leghorn, or Livorno, home to the Shelleys from June to September 1819. The second instigates a shift into Italian, allowing Hunt to announce his arrival in the country’s native language: ‘eccomi’ [‘here I am’]. The third dash, crowning the efforts of those that come before it, marks the letter’s movement into the greeting ‘how d’ye do?’, where the colloquialism seems to show Hunt’s prose flying freely beyond the restrictions of the written word. On one level, 10 ‘TRANSPORTED TO YOUR PRESENCE’: LEIGH HUNT’S LETTERS… 151

Hunt’s dashes function as markers of stylistic mobility, spotlighting the letter writer’s ability to dance between registers and languages so as to evade the trappings of excessive formality. More radically, though, they work incrementally to reconcile the distant ‘there’ of Livorno with the letter’s own sense of ‘here’ (‘eccomi’). Hunt’s letter shows how the imaginative power of letter writing exists in tension with practical and logistical issues. Webb describes the dashes of Keats’s letters as a ‘corrective tissue’ that indicate a ‘readiness to accept the promptings of the immediate, the unexpected and improvisational’,10 but Hunt’s dashes function visually as the seams that hold together his constructed image of proximity. As a kind of textual suture, these recurring dashes highlight the fragility of an imaginative scenario that, if it is to be sustained, relies on the acquiescence of the Shelleys. Having acceler- ated giddily into ‘how d’ye do?’, Hunt’s letter changes tack in recognition of the difficulties of transposing this greeting into the epistolary arena, where a response can never be immediate. Hunt seems conscious that, until the Shelleys respond, ‘how d’ye do?’ must ring out unanswered in a kind of epistolary echo chamber, as his letter is forced to acknowledge the fact that the divisions inherent in letter writing are temporal as well as physical:

I wish you would encourage my epistolary virtues by writing to me every Monday morning;—I would write on the same day myself,—say at nine o’clock—& then we should have the additional pleasure of knowing that we were occupied on the very same thoughts, & almost actually chatting together. I will begin the system at any rate; & if you do not help me to go on with it—why I will heap Christian coals of fire on your heads by endeav- ouring to go on without you.—There is the same continued sunshine this season, as last year. (CLH I, 135)

If Hunt is a letter writer of mobility, spontaneity, and bold imaginative leaps, his letters are often shadowed by an anxious need for reins to be tightened and obligations fulfilled. Recalling Betty T. Bennett’s assertion that ‘the recipients of letters [act] as unacknowledged collaborators, their

10 Timothy Webb, ‘“Cutting Figures”: Rhetorical Strategies in Keats’s Letters’, Keats: Bicentenary Readings, ed. Michael O’Neill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 144–69 (p. 151). 152 D. WESTWOOD distinctive presence necessarily influencing the letter writer’,11 Hunt recasts the collaborative dimension of letter writing as a form of commitment. For Hunt, the establishment of a ‘system’, in which both writers compose letters at the same time ‘every Monday morning’, would mitigate the temporal and physical disjunctions of epistolary exchange.12 Hunt claims that this would bring the pair closer to a feeling of ‘almost actually chatting together’, where ‘almost’ has a similar effect to the letter’s earlier use of ‘seem’: ‘whenever I write to you, I seem to be transported to your presence’ [emphasis added]. The qualifier shows Hunt acknowledging the difficulty of what he proposes and the effort it requires, but his letter adamantly rejects the possibility that this correspondence might be subject to circumstance, even with the delays that seem inevitable when sharing letters across the continent.13 Through the biblical allusion in the reference to ‘Christian coals’,14 Hunt strengthens his appeal for a ‘system’ by tailoring the request uniquely to Shelley, playing on the poet’s self- proclaimed atheism and his extensive biblical reading.15 The tone-shift from the intensity of ‘Christian coals of fire’ to everyday musings on the weather deliberately catches the eye. Hunt’s playful yet provocative allusion shows him coercing Shelley into composing the response that would constitute an acceptance of Hunt’s ‘system’, with ‘chat’ only becoming possible once commitments have been reaffirmed. Hunt’s tendency to offer epistolary instruction was by no means exclusive to his correspondence with the Shelleys. Webb points up the manipu- lative quality of the letters Hunt wrote to Byron while imprisoned for libel

11 Betty T. Bennett, ‘The Editor of Letters as Critic: A Denial of “Blameless Neutrality”’, Text 6 (1994), pp. 213–23 (p. 221). 12 Compare Keats’s instruction to George and Georgiana Keats: ‘I shall read a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten o Clock—you read one [a]t the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’ (Letters: JK II, p. 5). Keats’s letters are quoted from The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), hereafter Letters: JK. 13 See Shelley’s frequent references to the delays of the Italian post (Letters: PBS II, p. 111, p. 150, p. 151). 14 ‘For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the LORD shall reward thee’ King( James Bible, Prov. 25.22). Quoted from The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, intro. and notes Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 15 See Gavin Hopps, ‘Religion and Ethics: The Necessity of Atheism, A Refutation of Deism, On Christianity’, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, pp. 117–31; Ian Balfour, ‘Shelley and the Bible’, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, pp. 411–26. 10 ‘TRANSPORTED TO YOUR PRESENCE’: LEIGH HUNT’S LETTERS… 153 in Horsemonger Lane Gaol between 1813 and 1815, as seen in Hunt’s self-pitying declaration that ‘I know the thousand little things that prevent a man who is living out in the world from keeping engagements elsewhere; & I expect to have you some day or other, if I live’.16 As Webb writes, the comments ‘unsparingly turn an emotional screw’.17 A strain of neediness on Hunt’s part unites his correspondences with Byron and the Shelleys. But it is impossible to imagine Hunt imposing a codified ‘system’ of letter writing on Byron, regardless of the pair’s later friendship, and particularly given the fact that it was Hunt’s defence of the style of The Story of Rimini, itself said to be the product of a ‘system’, that provoked Byron’s acerbic denouncement: ‘when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless’ (BLJ VI, p. 46).18 This comparison illustrates how the closeness of Hunt’s relationship with the Shelleys allowed his letters to draw upon the full range of Hunt’s writing styles and personality traits. These are letters that hover between playfully inviting their addressees to revel in the unpredictability of the imagination and more forcefully bending the Shelleys to the letter writer’s will. Even amidst the poignant message at the heart of the 23 August 1819 letter—‘In no race of friendship would I be the last, if my heart broke for it near the goal’ (CLH I, p. 136)—what stands out is the directness with which Hunt dictates terms, prompting the Shelleys’ writing habits so as to prop up his imagined vision of proximity. The letter approaches paradox in the way its rapid shifts between locales, languages, and registers—‘there’s Leghorn—eccomi!—how d’ye do?’—themselves exemplary of the spontaneity of Hunt’s imagination and conversational tone, co-exist with Hunt’s insistence on a correspondence governed by order, regulation, and ‘system’. This mixing of methods, recalling even as it qualifies O’Neill’s emphasis on Hunt’s art of spontaneity, illustrates the complexity of the demands Hunt’s letters made of the Shelleys at this time.

16 This letter was published for the first time in Timothy Webb, ‘Leigh Hunt to Lord Byron: Eight Letters from Horsemonger Lane Gaol’, The Byron Journal 36.2 (2008), pp. 131–42 (p. 138 [letter 6]). 17 Webb, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Letters to Byron from Horsemonger Lane Gaol: A Commentary’, p. 30. 18 Byron’s letters are quoted from Lord George Gordon Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: Murray, 1973–96), hereafter BLJ. For Byron’s letter to Hunt denouncing Rimini’s ‘system’, see BLJ IV, p. 332. For Hunt’s response, see Webb, ‘After Horsemonger Lane: Leigh Hunt’s London Letters to Byron (1815–1816)’, Romanticism 16.3 (2010), pp. 233–66 (p. 249 [letter 7]). 154 D. WESTWOOD

Hunt’s letter pits the power of regular, imaginative letter writing as a stay against the ever-changing circumstances of life. But the years when Hunt remained in England while the Shelleys were abroad were tumultuous, often challenging Hunt’s ability to sustain intimacy within the letter. In June 1819, Hunt learned of the death of the Shelleys’ son, William, due to malaria.19 The letter Hunt writes in response, dated July 1819, reveals him drawing on his knowledge of Shelley’s character, and his sensitivity to the limits of epistolary communication, to craft his message of condolence:

I had received the news of your misfortune, and thought of all which you and Mary must suffer. Marianne, I assure you, wept hearty tears of sympathy. He was a fine little fellow, was William; and for my part I cannot conceive that the young intellectual spirit which sat thinking out of his eye, and seemed to comprehend so much in his smile, can perish like the house it inhabited. I do not know that a soul is born with us; but we seem, to me, to attain to a soul, some later, some earlier; and when we have got that, there is a look in our eye, a sympathy in our cheerfulness, and a yearning and grave beauty in our thoughtfulness that seems to say, “Our mortal dress may fall off when it will; our trunk and our leaves may go; we have shot up our blos- som into an immortal air”. This is poetry, you will say, and not argument: but then there comes upon me another fancy, which would fain persuade me that poetry is the argument of a higher sphere. Do you smile at me? Do you, too, Marina,20 smile at me? Well, then, I have done something at any rate. (CLH I, pp. 130–31)

Flitting between tones and registers, the letter searches for the most effective means of alleviating Shelley’s pain. Moving from the opening sentence, in which the circumstances of suffering are kept at arm’s length in generalised references to ‘your misfortune’ and ‘all which you and Mary must suffer’, into the tender reference to William as a ‘fine little fellow’, the subsequent semi-colon marks Hunt’s shift into philosophical speculation. ‘I affront your understandings and feelings with none of the ordinary topics of consolation’ (CLH I, p. 131), Hunt writes, and though the letter affectingly addresses the emotional trauma of William’s death, it also seeks

19 In his June 8 1819 letter bearing news of William’s death, Shelley writes to Thomas Love Peacock ‘you will be kind enough to tell all my friends, so that I need not write to them—It is a great exertion to me to write this’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 97). For how Hunt learned of this news, see SC VI, p. 837. 20 Hunt often addresses Mary Shelley using this name. 10 ‘TRANSPORTED TO YOUR PRESENCE’: LEIGH HUNT’S LETTERS… 155 to turn Shelley away from personal suffering, if only temporarily, by subtly reframing the terms of the discussion. Madeleine Callaghan writes of the bravery of Keats’s final letter in which Keats demands that Charles Brown ‘applies a philosophic eye to suffering’,21 and, likewise, Hunt’s meditations on the soul are not simply an attempt to comfort Shelley with the thought that William’s ‘young intellectual spirit’, unlike ‘the house it inhabited’, cannot ‘perish’. Designed to engage Shelley’s critical and intellectual faculties, these existential meditations force Shelley to view personal suffering with a ‘philosophic eye’. Hunt’s concession that ‘this is poetry, you will say, and not argument’, and the suggestion that ‘poetry is the argument of a higher sphere’, mark a concerted effort to engage Shelley on issues that were integral to Shelley’s thought,22 as a poet who possessed a deep-seated belief in poetry’s worth, but who also refused to embrace any doctrine or idea without scrutiny. Hunt’s turn to this consolatory strategy seems motivated, in part, by his awareness of the difficulties of providing consolation within a letter, hinted at in the self-deprecation of ‘Well, then, I have done something at any rate’. The question ‘Do you smile at me?’ poignantly acknowledges the elements of spoken conversation that cannot easily be replicated in epistolary exchange, invoking the kind of gesture that, in a communicative situation that calls for heightened levels of delicacy, Hunt might draw upon were he consoling the Shelleys in person. As Hunt writes in his letter to the Shelleys of 6 April 1820, ‘friends, to say all they can to each other, must talk and look’ (CLH I, p. 154).23 But if the limitations of letter writing force Hunt to rely on the written word alone for consolation in a situation where consolation is near-impossible, Hunt pursues a strategy to which his form is well suited, opting to stoke the coals of Shelley’s intellect as the most viable means of assuaging trauma.

21 Madeleine Callaghan, ‘Letters’, John Keats in Context, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 66–74 (p. 73). 22 Hunt’s terms anticipate Shelley’s On Life, composed later in 1819, which asks ‘Whence do we come, and whither do we go? Is birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth and death?’, as well as A Defence of Poetry: ‘what were our consolations on this side of the grave—and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar’ (Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed., intro. and notes Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 634, p. 696). 23 Compare Keats’s assertion that ‘Writing has this disadvan[ta]ge of speaking. one cannot write a wink, or a nod, or a grin, or a purse of the Lips, or a smile’ (Letters: JK II, p. 205). 156 D. WESTWOOD

For a letter writer who craved the order of a communicative ‘system’ (CLH I, p. 135), such traumatic circumstances posed a troubling reminder of life’s tendency to evade any systematising impulse. Even when his letters are at their most sensitive and tactful, as in the previous example, Hunt can seem preoccupied by his own feelings of powerlessness as a letter writer. Hunt’s experimental efforts to construct proximity within his letters suggest his alertness to the fact that, as Susan J. Wolfson puts it, ‘epistolary performance is not merely occasioned by absence, […] but is a mode of creativity based on absence, where the very “disadvantage” of writing becomes the advantage of imagination’.24 Nevertheless, the way Hunt’s letters frequently reach after communicative control suggests a lingering anxiety regarding the perceived shortcomings of written communication. The letter Hunt writes to Mary Shelley later in July 1819, redoubling his efforts to ease Mary’s grief, demonstrates how such demands can simmer beneath the surface of even Hunt’s most imaginative letter writing:

Imagine that in this sheet of paper, which your eyes are now engaged upon, you are perusing my petitioning face—(don’t take your hand from my chin)—I am sure there is enough sincerity in it to obtain my pardon, and, I hope, enough gaiety and good humour to bring out a few little smiles from your own. I wish in truth I knew how to amuse you just now, and that I were in Italy to try. I would walk about with Shelley wherever he pleased, having resumed my good old habits that way; I should be merry or quiet, chat, read, or impudently play and sing you Italian airs all the evening. (CLH I, p. 133)

In a moment as strange as it is affecting, Hunt aligns the materiality of words inscribed on a ‘sheet of paper’ with the materiality of the human body, suggesting that the physical existence of the letter makes it the ideal proxy for Hunt’s face. Key to the letter’s effect is the fact that the contact Hunt describes is not entirely imaginary. Through delicate references to the role of Mary’s eyes and hands in the act of reading, the hand that holds Hunt’s letter momentarily transforms, in an imaginative manoeuvre bol- stered by the present tense, into the hand that holds Hunt’s ‘petitioning face’. In this reliance on the present tense, one senses an effort to transcend the temporal and physical divisions that Hunt’s 23 August 1819 letter sees as underpinning all epistolary interaction. But the parenthesised

24 Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Keats the Letter-Writer: Epistolary Poetics’, Romanticism Past and Present 6 (1982), pp. 43–61 (p. 59). 10 ‘TRANSPORTED TO YOUR PRESENCE’: LEIGH HUNT’S LETTERS… 157 phrase ‘(don’t take your hand from my chin)’ also jolts a reader. The prose abruptly disregards any imaginative scaffolding, swiftly shifting from the instruction to ‘imagine’ into the imaginative scenario itself. This technique is illuminated by Stabler’s stress on the importance of unexpectedness in Hunt’s poetry, the suggestion that Hunt’s writing promotes sociality through moments that surprise and disorientate readers into suddenly, sometimes unsettlingly, rediscovering the pleasures of intimacy.25 Such feelings are compounded for the modern reader upon encountering, or perhaps intruding upon, this moment of private, imagined physical contact. But the modulation of tone between Hunt’s appeal to ‘imagine’ and the forcefulness of ‘don’t’ also serves as a reminder of the subtle demand for co-operation that lies implicit in the Huntian aesthetic of intimacy, a subtext that is amplified by the letter’s broader request for Mary’s ‘pardon’.26 One thinks of Keats’s dictum, issued against Wordsworth’s writing, that ‘we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us’ (Letters: JK I, p. 224). As the passage continues, the link between Hunt’s palpable design on Mary and his frustration at his inability to console the Shelleys in person becomes clear. Central to the letter’s drama is the way the confidence of ‘I am sure’ fades into the less certain expression of ‘I hope’, then into ‘I wish’, before finally giving way to the modal forms ‘I would’ and ‘I should’, a movement that charts Hunt’s waning optimism regarding what his letter might achieve. With the plaintive tones of ‘I wish in truth I knew how to amuse you just now, and that I were in Italy to try’ so emphatically puncturing the illusion of face-to-face contact developed in the passage’s opening lines, the phrase ‘just now’ recalls Charles Lamb’s meditation on the ‘confusion of tenses, the grand solecism of two presents’ inherent in epistolary communication, where the letter’s writer’s moment of writing, ‘my Now’, is always divorced from a recipient’s moment of reading, ‘your Now’.27 Hunt touchingly reflects on how the ‘now’ of his writing can never be at one with the ‘now’ of Mary’s reading, such that any consolation the letter provides will be belated and potentially outdated by the time it is received. When Hunt insists that he would ‘walk with Shelley’, ‘be merry or quiet’, ‘chat’, ‘read’, or ‘impudently play and sing’, any sense of Hunt dictating the terms of the interaction—‘(don’t take

25 Stabler, p. 100. 26 Earlier in the letter Hunt apologises for delaying ‘speaking about your writings’ (CLH I, p. 133). 27 Charles Lamb, ‘Distant Correspondents’, The Portable Charles Lamb, ed. John Mason Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 491–98 (p. 492). 158 D. WESTWOOD your hand from my chin)’—has disappeared. Were he in the Shelleys’ company, Hunt claims, he would adapt himself to the needs of his friends in any given moment. If Hunt’s letter writing exhibits its own kind of mobility in its ability to adapt to the needs of a given communicative situation, such epistolary mobility seems, for a moment, to pale in comparison with that which Hunt might display in person, a recognition that spurs Hunt’s efforts to experiment with and reimagine the limits of epistolary exchange. Given the degree to which Hunt commits to the role of imaginative ringleader and practical instructor in his correspondence with the Shelleys—‘(for you will write again, nymph of the sidelong looks, now I have done my epistolary duty)’, Hunt tells Mary in an exemplary comment of 9 March 1819 (CLH I, p. 129)—the final months of 1819 reveal a striking change in Hunt’s writing habits. In Shelley’s 13 November 1819 letter bearing news of the birth of his son, Percy Florence Shelley, Shelley adds as a postscript the following reproach: ‘I have received no letter from you for a month’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 150). Having sent Hunt The Mask of Anarchy in late September without reply, on 2 November Shelley writes again enclosing Peter Bell the Third, telling Hunt that ‘I am about to publish more serious things this winter’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 135). Four days later Shelley sends Hunt a public letter addressed to ‘The Editor of The Examiner’ decrying Richard Carlile’s trial for libel (Letters: PBS II, p. 136). But by mid-November Shelley was growing anxious regarding his friend’s lack of response. ‘You do not tell me whether you have received my lines on the Manchester affair’, he enquires of The Mask of Anarchy in his letter of 14–18 November, before reiterating his desire for the poem to appear in Hunt’s politically-minded periodical The Examiner, as opposed to his new miscellany The Indicator (Letters: PBS II, p. 152). On 23 December, Shelley writes again, this time more forcefully, asking ‘Why don’t you write to us? I was preparing to send you something for your “Indicator”, but […] perhaps, as you did not acknowledge any of my late inclosures, it would not be welcome to you, whatever I might send’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 166). Bemoaning Hunt’s refusal to ‘write politics’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 166), Shelley ends the letter by tersely referring to his latest enclosure, ‘England in 1819’: ‘I send you a Sonnet. I do not expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 167). Shelley’s feelings of uncertainty and frustration are palpable throughout these letters. Even for a pair of correspondents who were accustomed to lengthy delays—a portrait of Hunt, sent to the Shelleys’ Italian residence to alleviate their feelings of isolation, took over a year to 10 ‘TRANSPORTED TO YOUR PRESENCE’: LEIGH HUNT’S LETTERS… 159 arrive in Leghorn (Letters: PBS II, p. 111)—Hunt’s extended silence was conspicuous. On 2 December 1819 Hunt belatedly responds to Shelley with a letter that flits between apology, self-justification, delight at Shelley’s public expression of support in the dedication to The Cenci, and a barely con- cealed caginess. Exacerbating the effect of his previous epistolary inactivity, Hunt’s financial difficulties meant the note remained unsent for several weeks and did not reach the Shelleys in Florence until 8 January 1820.28 Though parts are written in the lively, playful style that characterises this correspondence, the letter opens apologetically. ‘What shall I say to you for my long silence? You have been loading me with letters and with hon- ours, and yet I have been looking all the while like the most ungrateful person upon earth’, Hunt begins, before explaining that

I was obliged to write for my Wednesday’s paper on Monday and Tuesday, and then I regularly repented of not writing to you; as regularly vowed to do so to-day and the other, and as regularly behaved like a—. I leave you to supply the word, for I know it will be as kind a one as possible. (SC VI, pp. 1090–91)29

Hunt’s suggestion that Shelley ‘supply the word’ to describe his behaviour reflects Hunt’s understanding of letter writing as a process of mutual participation, presenting a Huntian equivalent of what Heidi Thomson terms the ‘interactive’ approach to companionship modelled in Keats’s letters.30 But here, the request for participation provides a window into the complicated power dynamics playing out in Hunt’s and Shelley’s letters from this time. Having suppressed Shelley’s writing and stripped Shelley of any voice on the public stage, however well-meaningly, Hunt’s invitation to ‘supply the word’, framed in an appeal to Shelley’s kindness, offers Shelley a momentary illusion of agency within a situation in which Shelley had been rendered powerless. Hunt’s emphasis on the logistics of his working week also makes clear his lapse from the ‘system’ of letter writing proposed in his letter of 23 August 1819. With Hunt attributing this to the demands of some ‘unpleasant matters of business’, Donald Reiman opines that such excuses ‘sound

28 For datings, see SC VI, p. 1092 n.3. 29 This letter is quoted from SC owing to the fact that CLH omits later passages. 30 Thomson, p. 166. 160 D. WESTWOOD genuine’ (SC VI, p. 1092). But in any case, given Hunt’s earlier assertion that a system would allow both letter writers the pleasure of ‘knowing that we were occupied on the very same thoughts’ (CLH I, p. 135), this sustained gap in communication can be taken as a sign that Hunt and Shelley spent the close of 1819 in differing intellectual and ideological positions. Though Hunt would have been sympathetic to Shelley’s desire for his political writings to be disseminated in his homeland, Hunt also knew the dangers of publishing such material in a legal landscape that, since his imprisonment for libel, had become even riskier for society’s radical voices. Regardless of whether Hunt’s excuses for failing to write were genuine or not, the final months of 1819 show him beginning to use silence as a communicative strategy in its own right, as Hunt strives to avoid deepening the cracks that appear in his relationship with Shelley. Even in the letter that breaks this silence, what Hunt chooses not to say is as significant as what he does. Curiously, Hunt neglects to mention the ‘Six Acts’ of Parliament passed in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre, which were designed to quell the possibility of radical disturbances through measures that included a strengthening of laws against the circulation of seditious publications. Any references to politics are side-lined even when they might explain Hunt’s silence. Because of this, Hunt’s letter reads as brusque and evasive where it might have openly appealed to Shelley’s understanding:

I will write more speedily, and tell you about your political songs and pamphlets, which we must publish without Ollier, as he gets more timid & pale every day;—I hope I shall not have to add time serving; but they say he is getting intimate with strange people. What a delicious love song is that you enclosed! I would put it into the Indicator by-and-by—at present this bold- ness of benevolence must go into the more established Examiner. As to the Indicators, I make up my mind that you and Marina will like them, as they tell me I am at my best in this work, which succeeds beyond all expectation. (SC VI, p. 1090)

The emphatic feel of ‘we must publish’ is undercut by the dispropor- tionate level of attention Hunt devotes to Shelley’s ‘delicious love song’, the short, apolitical lyric ‘Love’s Philosophy’ enclosed with Shelley’s letter of 14–18 November 1819. Shelley could not have missed the significance of this praise. If the ‘political songs and pamphlets’ that had been in Hunt’s possession for several weeks were forced to await a future letter for 10 ‘TRANSPORTED TO YOUR PRESENCE’: LEIGH HUNT’S LETTERS… 161 appraisal, it is telling that ‘Love’s Philosophy’, so deliberately set apart from the ‘political’ works, inspires Hunt to an immediate response. Diminishing Ollier’s standing so as to elevate his own, Hunt asserts his claim not just over ‘Love’s Philosophy’ but over a series of poems that he has no intention of publishing, seeming to engage with Shelley even as he holds Shelley’s political agitations firmly at arm’s length. As Daisy Hay suggests, Shelley’s public letter on Carlile and his dedication to The Cenci show Shelley engaging Hunt in a public as well as private conversation throughout the closing stages of 1819. In using ‘the privi- leges of private correspondence to recall [Hunt] to a public duty’, Hay writes, Shelley positions Hunt as at once a ‘sympathetic friend’ and a ‘public figure on whom specific demands can be made’.31 Though Hunt’s 2 December letter gratefully acknowledges Shelley’s dedication, the slipperiness of the remainder of the letter shows Hunt evading Shelley’s formulation of Hunt’s dual epistolary identity and quietly adjusting the parameters of the pair’s exchange. The previously quoted passage’s insistence on the distinction between The Examiner and The Indicator, mirroring Shelley’s earlier request for The Mask of Anarchy to appear in the former (Letters: PBS II, p. 152), shows the subtle means by which Hunt pursued this goal. Hunt’s pointed reference to the success of The Indicator, and the affirmation that he is at his best in a work framed as a ‘retreat from public care and criticism’,32 invites Shelley to read between the lines. Where one can sense Shelley seeking to align his correspondence with Hunt with the concerns of the politically minded Examiner, Hunt’s comments in the first issue of The Indicator resonate with the tensions playing out in the pair’s correspondence at this time:

The Indicator will attend to no subject whatsoever of immediate or temporary interest. […] The editor has enough to agitate his spirits during the present eventful times, in another periodical work; and he is willing to be so agitated: but as he is accustomed to use his pen, as habitually as a bird his pinion, and to betake himself with it into the nests and bowers of more lasting speculations, when he has done with public ones, he is determined to keep those haunts of his recreations free from all noise and wrangling, both for his own pleasure and for those who may choose to accompany him.33

31 Hay, p. 213. 32 Leigh Hunt, The Indicator (20 October 1819), Leigh Hunt, Prefaces by Leigh Hunt, Mainly to His Periodicals, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (Chicago: Walter M. Hill, 1927), p. 53. 33 Hunt, The Indicator (13 October 1819), Prefaces by Leigh Hunt, p. 50. 162 D. WESTWOOD

Hunt’s reference to his pen as his ‘pinion’ echoes his earlier vision of a euphoric epistolary flight: ‘I dart out of the window like a bird, […] fling like a swallow into the vallies’ (CLH I, p. 135). But if Hunt’s view of the letter as a form that draws upon an author’s mobility allows the 23 August 1819 letter to cast Hunt imaginatively across continents, the 2 December letter shows Hunt redeploying this mobility to evade the aspects of Shelley’s correspondence that he found discomforting. Poignantly, given the way Hunt prizes the letter as a means of bridging division, the letters at the close of 1819 reveal two individuals struggling to maintain intimacy in the face of divided and irreconcilable understandings of what form and function their epistolary relationship should take, with Shelley eager for Hunt to publish his political works and Hunt intent on making their correspondence one of ‘those haunts of his recreations free from all noise and wrangling’, to adopt his words in The Indicator. Though Hunt’s rejection of Shelley’s political writings constituted a troubling refusal of open dialogue, the pair’s relationship survived these difficulties. ‘I take this as rather an unkind piece of kindness in you; but which, in consideration of the six hundred miles between us, I forgive’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 2), Shelley had written presciently on 22 March 1818 in his first Italian letter to Hunt, lightly scolding his friend’s failure to wake him and say goodbye on the final evening before the Shelleys departed England. Nearly two years later in the pair’s relationship, Shelley’s reference to ‘an unkind piece of kindness’ becomes an apt description of Hunt’s awkward efforts to maintain harmony amidst disagreement, mirroring the sense of slipperiness and misunderstood motives that shadow Hunt’s unwillingness to engage with Shelley’s writing. Similarly, in the way Shelley’s first Italian letter teasingly reopens lines of communication after Hunt’s well-meaning refusal to conduct a proper farewell, this earlier exchange anticipates the way the pair’s 1819 letters would, beneath their rich imaginative surfaces, play out dramas of attention and neglect, expression and silence, and engagement and evasion. In moments of tension and intimacy alike, however, Hunt’s 1819 letters to the Shelleys are enlivened by their impassioned consideration of what Shelley calls ‘the six hundred miles between us’, creating drama and complexity out of Hunt’s unstint- ing desire to be ‘transported to your presence’. CHAPTER 11

‘Foam is their foundation’: The Poetics of Byron’s Letters

Jane Stabler

When Byron’s letters were first published, they gripped the nation: ‘Could settle to nothing’, Henry Crabb Robinson wrote in his journal on 20 October 1832, ‘Lord Byron’s Life had so completely taken possession of me. His letters are at least a psychological phenomenon’; Maria Edgeworth shared her sister’s response in February 1831: ‘I quite agree my dear Honora in all you say and feel about Moore’s life of Lord Byron and about Byron’s own letters. Lord Lansdowne … said … just the same that you do that he could not help liking Lord Byron often in reading his letters’; on 31 December 1831, Benjamin Robert Haydon was also captivated: ‘Read

I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the fellowship which allowed me to consult Byron’s manuscripts in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the National Library of Scotland. I am grateful to the librarians in these institutions for their kind help in locating research materials.

J. Stabler (*) University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 163 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_11 164 J. STABLER

Moore’s 2nd Vol. with such intensity I forgot the last day of the year, a thing I never did before in my life’.1 In 1830, Thomas Moore hailed Byron’s letters as ‘equal, if not supe- rior, in point of vigour, variety, and liveliness, to any that have yet adorned this branch of our literature’.2 Moore’s criteria set the tone for the next 200 years and Richard Lansdown’s introduction to his selection from the Leslie A. Marchand edition provides a helpful digest of leading nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics who hunted through Byron’s correspondence for biographical and aesthetic coherence.3 There is, as yet, no detailed study of the ways in which Byron’s epistolary style changes over time, responding and adapting to external contexts. From late 1816 onwards, for example, Byron’s letters make increasing use of a rueful ‘So—’ like the Italian ‘Allora …’ or the French ‘Eh bien …’ as a way of opening enquiries to people back at home.4 After he has lived in Italy for a while, it is also possible to detect the influence of a more emphatic place- ment of ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’ and ‘always’ (which occur as forse and sempre early in Italian cadences), lending his prose that pivotal concession to con- tingency that would appear to reviewers of his poetry as the contamination of a dangerous foreign scepticism. Jonathan Ellis’s 2015 collection on Letter Writing Among Poets quotes the view that poetic correspondence is ‘something like poetry’.5 Allowing that Romantic-period letters might share the generic hybridity of

1 Edith J. Morley, ed., Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, 3 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1967), I, p. 415; Christina Colvin, ed., Maria Edgeworth Letters from England 1813–1844 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 484; Willard Bissell Pope, ed., The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 5 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), III, p. 502. 2 Thomas Moore, ed., The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, 17 vols (London: John Murray, 1832–33), I, p. ix. 3 For the importance of Byron’s letter to constructions of his biography see Julian North, The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 91. 4 See, for example, ‘And so—Lady B[yron] has been “kind to you” you tell me—’, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1980–94; hereafter BLJ V. p. 91); ‘—So—Mr. Frere is married—(BLJ V. p. 134); ‘—So—Webster is writing again—is there no Bedlam in Scotland?’ (BLJ V. p. 208); ‘—so—there’s for you;— there is always some row or other previously to all our publications’ (BLJ V. p. 240). ‘So’ is how Byron starts his lyric ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving’. The characteristic pause after the ‘so’ is relayed as a comma in Moore’s transcription but is more likely to have been a dash in MS. 5 Jonathan Ellis, ed., Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 12. 11 ‘FOAM IS THEIR FOUNDATION’: THE POETICS OF BYRON’S LETTERS 165

Romantic-period poetry opens the way for a more nuanced approach to the diversity of Byron’s correspondence than critical attempts to identify a single key. Byron’s private business letters, for example, range between drab instructions about stocks and funds for John Hanson, carefully methodical tuition of his Italian steward (with a rare embrace of system): ‘Voi sapete che il sistema di mia famiglia è di avere delle ricevute anche per le più piccole cose—così so cosa che pago—e cosa debbo pagare’ (BLJ VII. p. 46: You know that my family’s system is to keep all receipts, even the most little ones, so I know what I have paid and what I must pay), the swaggering mix of travelogue, gossip and business for John Murray and the epigrammatically venal: ‘If we must sell, sell Rochdale’ (BLJ XIII. p. 11) or ‘Honourable Doug—Consent to Mortgage—is in t’other paper’ (BLJ XIII. p. 52). There is plenty of ‘vigour, variety, and liveliness’ here, but is it possible to define a poetics of Byron’s letters any more precisely? A few years before Ellis’s collection, Andrew Stauffer criticized the one- sidedness of critical approaches to Romantic epistolarity.6 Stauffer argued for the use of psycholinguistic speech theory to analyse ‘common ground’ between both voices in the Byron-Murray correspondence,7 though he wisely acknowledged the difference between letters and conversational exchange. Most obviously, people in conversation usually realize immediately when their interlocutor cannot hear them, whereas there is always some delay in postal correspondence and a chance that letters will mis- carry. By treating letters like a vocal form of social exchange Stauffer’s sophisticated analysis downplays Byron’s awareness that he might be addressing his intended recipient or (equally possible) writing to thin air. To this extent, letters and lyrics are similar acts of self-expression and though I agree with Stauffer that we should not ignore the role of Byron’s respondents, it is not unreasonable to focus critical attention on the side of correspondence which was produced by a self-conscious practitioner of the craft.8 Byron’s library included Lord Chatham’s letters, Nelson’s letters to Lady Hamilton, Wakefield’s correspondence with Fox, Lady Hervey’s let-

6 Andrew Stauffer, ‘How to Analyze a Correspondence: The Example of Byron and Murray’, European Romantic Review 22.3 (2011), pp. 347–55. 7 Stauffer, p. 348. 8 Byron’s doubts about the transmission of letters intensified in Italy when his correspondence was intercepted and opened by the Austrian authorities, leading him to include remarks against ‘the Huns … in my most legible hand’; see BLJ VII. p. 238. 166 J. STABLER ters and Hume’s correspondence. Byron’s own notes to his poems reveal that he was familiar with the letters of Pope, Gibbon, Voltaire, Chesterfield, Johnson, and Walpole—all of whom address posterity as much as their contemporaries. Byron went out of his way to read the ‘beautiful’ letters of Lucretia Borgia in Milan (BLJ V. p. 115); the ‘letters of Titian to Ariosto—& Tasso’s correspondence about his dirty shirts’ (BLJ V. p. 217); he consulted Murray about an Italian translation of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (BLJ V. p. 276), planned a volume of miscellaneous manuscript correspondence by English travellers abroad (BLJ VI. p. 30), and, in 1821, arranged for the posthumous publication of his own letters (BLJ VIII. p. 226). During his residence in Italy, Byron expected his epistolary anecdotes to be discussed by a wider audience, and he rather unfairly orchestrated Murray’s narration of anecdotes he would not fully understand (BLJ VI. p. 62). To examine the poetics of Byron’s letters, we need to be alert to the extent to which they were shaped by the contours of his relationship with living correspondents, as Stauffer directs, but we need also to attend the element of self-conscious literary artistry that is evident when—such as with the account of the shooting of the military commandant in Ravenna in December 1820 or his picture of Teresa Guiccioli’s flighty equestrian- ism in a sky-blue riding habit—Byron recasts anecdotes across a series of letters. His epistolary relationship with Lady Melbourne and his love letters have received expert attention from Jonathan Gross and Alan Rawes; Timothy Webb and Anthony Howe have examined narrative features of Byron’s letters from Italy; Andrew Stauffer and Mary O’Connell have examined the dynamics of the Byron-Murray letters.9 Building on this recent research, the rest of the present chapter will focus on Byron’s letters to a small group of male friends in 1809–11 to suggest ways in which we might begin to define a poetics of Byron’s early letters before he became the poet of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. On 25 June 1809, before he set sail for Lisbon, the twenty-one-year- old Byron wrote a succession of letters to bid farewell to three older male

9 Jonathan Gross, ed., Byron’s “Corbeau Blanc”: The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (Rice: Rice University Press, 1997); Alan Rawes, ‘Byron’s Love Letters’, The Byron Journal 43.1 (2015), pp. 1–14; Timothy Webb, ‘Unshadowing the Rialto: Byron and the Patterns of Life’, Byron Journal 39.1 (2011), pp. 19–33; Anthony Howe, ‘He Describes What He Sees: Byron’s Letters from Italy’, Keats-Shelley Review 31.1 (2017), pp. 66–73; Mary O’Connell, Byron and John Murray: A Poet and his Publisher (Liverpool University Press, 2014); Stauffer, ‘How to Analyze a Correspondence’, pp. 347–55. 11 ‘FOAM IS THEIR FOUNDATION’: THE POETICS OF BYRON’S LETTERS 167 friends: Henry Drury (1778–1841), Byron’s first tutor at Harrow, Francis Hodgson (1781–1852) from Cambridge University and Edward Ellice (1783–1863), a successful Scottish businessman associated with Whig circles in fashionable London. To each, Byron sent an account of the preparations for his voyage and a quick sketch of Falmouth. Here is the short- est of the three letters, transcribed from the manuscript held in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, to preserve Byron’s lineation, deletions, page and paragraph breaks:

Falmouth June 25 1809 My dear Drury, We sail tomorrow in the Lisbon packet having been de= =tained till now by the lack of wind and other necessaries, these being at last procured, by this time tomorrow evening we shall be embarked on the vide vorld of vaters vor all the vorld like Robinson Crusoe. – – – – The Malta vessel not sailing for some weeks we have determined to go by way of Lisbon, and as my servants term it to see “that there Portingale” thence to Cadiz and Gibraltar and so on our old route to Malta and Constantinople, [end of side one]

if so be that Capt. Kidd our gallant or rather gallows commander understands plain sailing and Mercator, and takes us on our voyage all according to the Chart. – – – Will you tell Dr. Butler that I have taken the treasure of a servant Friese the native of Prussia Proper Proper into my service from his recommendation. – – He has been all among the worshippers of Fire in Persia and has seen Persepolis and all that. – Hobhouse has made woundy preparations for a book at his return, 200 pens” two Gallons Japan Ink,, and several vols best blank is no bad provision for a 168 J. STABLER

discerning Public – I have laid down my pen, but have promised to con= =tribute a chapter on the state of [end of side two]

morals, and a further treatise on the same to be entitled “Sodomy simplified or Pederasty proved to be praiseworthy from ancient authors and modern practice.” –– Hobhouse further hopes to indemnify himself in Turkey for a life of exemplary chastity at home by letting out his “fair bodye” to the whole Divan. –– Pray buy his missellingany as the Printers’ Devil calls it, I suppose ’tis in print by this time. Providence has interposed in our favour with a fair fair wind to carry us out of its reach, or he would have hired a Faquir to translate it into the Turcoman Lingo. – –

“The Cock is crowing “I must be going “And can no more Ghost of Gaffer Thumb Adieu believe me yours as in duty bound – Byron turn over [end of side three]

P.S. – We have been sadly fleabitten at Falmouth. – –

We can see from this letter why Byron’s correspondence is often recom- mended as a prose primer for aspects of his poetic style (especially, but not exclusively, the satirical ottava rima verse). Byron’s epistolary prose yields a rhetorical projection of selfhood, allusiveness, digressiveness, wordplay, speculative sallies of wit, satirical asides, a talent for mimicry and ventriloquism, an aristocratic drawling litotes, a love of listing, self-consciousness about closure and delight in the material recalcitrance of texts such as intervention of the ‘printer’s devil’. Stauffer’s sensible admonition that we should weigh both sides of epistolary correspondence when considering Romantic-period letters is slightly less relevant for the missives from 11 ‘FOAM IS THEIR FOUNDATION’: THE POETICS OF BYRON’S LETTERS 169

Falmouth. Since Byron was about to leave England, he knew that he could not expect to read a reply to his letter for many months, if at all, and he plays with a valedictory format (amongst other generic forms) so that each letter incorporates a ‘last say’. The allusion to a ‘fair bodye’ borrows the language of ballad romance, but Byron bows out to Drury by quoting the ‘bo-peep’ ghost from Henry Fielding’s burletta Tom Thumb, which rises through a trap door, begins a doom-laden prognostication, is interrupted by a cock crowing and drops out of sight without delivering the whole warning. The whimsicality of this scene obviously appealed to Byron as a way of staging his own exit from the role of reliable correspondent. Byron’s deft reconfiguration of the same news for three men with whom he held linked, but discrete relationships tells us that, well before Childe Harold, he had mastered the art of creating and divulging an art- fully constructed version of his consciousness. His letters are torrential monologues which give the impression that the addressee is the focal point for a teeming inner world relayed through a bricolage of quotation, allusion, remembered fragment, anecdote, reported fact and fantasy.10 All this content is delivered through a broad repertoire of rhetorical gestures which allow the performer to evade any absolute settling of identity. Instead, Byron’s letter-writing inventories the activity of the conscious mind through reconfigurations of objects and sounds that affirm links with each recipient, and keep all relationships (with other minds and other things) in play for the duration of the letter. To each friend, Byron dis- patches a subtly different assemblage of the qualia of experience, producing three performances of expansive masculinity. Byron’s art of urbane understatement probably goes back to the mandatory postures of the schoolboy. Advertised to Drury in the comments about ‘lack of wind and other necessaries’, the mannerism is also invoked in ‘Persepolis and all that’. The emphatic informality of ‘all that’ recurs across Byron’s writing and is deployed even more obtrusively in the letter to Hodgson:

We are going to Lisbon first, because the Malta Packet

10 David Duff draws the term bricolage from the cultural philosophy of Levi-Strauss to discuss the heterogeneous genre of Don Juan (Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 185); more recently, the term has been extended by edu- cational psychologists to describe multi-perspectival, relational, eclectic, provisional approaches to problem-solving. 170 J. STABLER

has sailed dye see? From Lisbon to Gib= =raltar, Malta and Constantinople and “all that,” as Orator Henley said when he put the Church and “all that” in danger. –11

From this, one can hear how Byron’s circle used allusive tags from shared political and cultural spheres as familiar points of contact. Detached from their original context and exceeding their original meaning, these catch phrases affirm continuity, allowing friends to repeat hackneyed refrains simply for the pleasure of recognition; in this regard, Byron’s letters recapture the nonsensical hilarity of the common room.12 The argot of educated young Englishmen rapidly gives place to lightly mocking imitation of foreigners in the quotation of the Germanic (Possibly Prussian) ‘vide vorld of vaters’ and the working class West country accent of ‘that there Portingale’ (Byron’s delight in ventriloquism is perhaps best exemplified in the spoof letter of June 1818 in which he pretends to be Fletcher in Venice reporting his master’s death (BLJ VI. pp. 44–45)). Byron is always tickled by acoustic proximities, and his fatal weakness for puns and alliteration runs throughout his letters and poems, evident here in the laboured alliteration of ‘gallant or rather gallows commander’. In the letter to Hodgson, the same name is tried out in a mock sea-shanty with ‘the noble Capt. Kidd, as gallant commander as ever smuggled an anker of right Nantz’. In his memoir of Byron, William Parry records that he ‘had the greatest stock of quaint sayings and phrases of any man I ever met with; of the different languages and terms used by soldiers, sailors, tradesmen, and of other classes of men, or of what is called slang, he was quite as master … Much of his conversation with me was carried on in sea- phrases, and he always made use of them’.13As well as evoking the atmosphere of Falmouth, naval slang is Byron’s way of reinforcing masculine camaraderie. In poetry and prose, Byron’s imagination is always stimulated by the eclectic potential of a list. Cataloguing occurs naturally in preparations

11 Beinecke Gen MSS 892. Box I Folder 16 f1r. 12 ‘And all that’ is much re-used in Don Juan, probably from the character Bayes in George Villiers’s The Rehearsal; see BLJ VII. p. 181, ‘D’ye see’ is used again in a letter to Hodgson of 20 January 1811 (BLJ II. p. 37). 13 William Parry, The Last Days of Lord Byron (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825), pp. 220–21. 11 ‘FOAM IS THEIR FOUNDATION’: THE POETICS OF BYRON’S LETTERS 171 for a journey, but Byron’s letter relishes the inventory for its own energetic momentum: ‘Before this reaches you’, Byron tells Hodgson, ‘Hobhouse, two officers’ wives, three children, two waiting maids, ditto subalterns for the troops, three Portuguese esquires, and domestics, in all nineteen souls will have sailed in the Lisbon Packet’. In the poem ‘[Lines to Mr. Hodgson]’, Byron fits the same subject into rollicking quatrains and couplets (‘Gemmen, Ladies, servants, Jacks, /Here entangling /All are wrangling/Stuck together close as wax’); prose lists, however, do not have to conform to rhyme or metre and Byron can rummage through his articles of baggage in all their phenomenological peculiarity. In the letter to Drury, the pageant of disparate things leads from Mercartor (a Flemish geographer who gave his name to a cylindrical map projector) to the newly acquired servant from Prussia and the ‘100 pens, two gallons Japan Ink, and several vols best blank’ that materialize nascent literary ambition. The recollection of travel literature in ‘worshippers of Fire in Persia’ (echoing English translations of Hafez) allows Byron to jump to mockery of pretensions to authorship. A long-running joke about Hobhouse’s creativity features in the letter to Hodgson:

Hodgson! remember me to the Drury, and remember me to – yourself when drunk, – I am not worth a sober thought. –––– Look to my satire at Cawthorn’s Cockspur Street, and look to the Miscellany of the Hobhouse it has pleased Providence to interpose in favour behalf of a suffering Public by giving him a sprained wrist so that he cannot write, and there is a cessation of inkshed. – – 14

This jest resurfaces in a later letter to Drury about a providential intervention that has spared everyone from Hobhouse’s ‘plots against the public’ (BLJ II. p. 19). As Marchand tells us, the punning ‘miscellingany’ for ‘Miscellany’ was Charles Skinner Mathews’s smart put-down. Byron would make further gibes about Hobhouse’s book foundering in the ‘Gulph of Lethe’ (BLJ II. p. 59) in 1811. Hobhouse’s literary career remained a source of mirth for months: in a letter to Hodgson of 1811

14 Beinecke Gen MSS 892. Box I Folder 16 f 2v. 172 J. STABLER from Athens, Byron expressed hyperbolic concern about missing packets of Hobhouse’s letters: ‘unless the French government publish them, I am afraid we have little chance of recovering these inestimable manuscripts’ (BLJ II. p. 36). The use of definite articles for ‘the Drury’ and ‘the Hobhouse’ bespeak an affectionate school or college familiarity—Byron picked up this form again in his letter to Hodgson of 16 July 1809, when he continued to apostrophize: ‘Hodgson! send me the news’ (BLJ I. p. 216). His almost clumsy attempts to cling onto schoolboy terms of endearment are prominent in these early letters. While Hobhouse was the butt of jokes between Byron, Hodgson, and Drury, homosocial banter about the perils of marriage divided the group of friends along different lines. As their social circle was reduced by marriage, such jocularity was gradually restricted to those who remained bach- elors. Byron and Hodgson regularly exchange regrets about Drury (who married in 1808). ‘Talking of marriage puts me in mind of Drury’, Byron remarked in a letter to Hodgson in 1810, ‘I will never forgive Matrimony for having spoiled such an excellent Bachelor’ (BLJ II. p. 27) ‘That husband H. Drury, has never written to me’ Byron protested in letter to Hodgson a year later (BLJ II. p. 54). A little later, Byron writes again to Hodgson about Drury ‘He is sadly spoiled by marriage, but what will it not spoil’.15 We sense Byron’s delight at returning to an old vein of humour with Hoppner, the English consul in Venice in 1819:

What you say of the long evenings … reminds me of what Curran said to Moore—“so—I hear—you have married a pretty woman—and a very good creature too—an excellent creature—pray—how do you pass your evenings?[”] it is a devil of a question that—(BLJ VI. pp. 237–38)

An exaggerated masculine flinching from the terms and conditions for domestic life remains a recurrent motif across Byron’s writing. Moore dutifully censored Byron’s compendium of sexual conquests when his letters touched on English society and Byron’s remarks on William Beckford were cut entirely from the letter to Hodgson in Moore’s edition and partially expurgated in Rowland Prothero’s 1902 edition:

15 University of St Andrews Special Collections. MM Holloway Autograph Collection. Album 2, Literary, ms39022/2 f29. Compare with BLJ II. pp. 77–78 where this comment is redacted by Moore. 11 ‘FOAM IS THEIR FOUNDATION’: THE POETICS OF BYRON’S LETTERS 173

Nothing of note occurred in our way down, except that at on Hartford Bridge we changed horses at an Inn where the great Apostle of Pederasty Beckford! sojourned for the night. We tried in vain to see the Martyr of Prejudice, but could not; what we thought singular, though you perhaps will not, was that Ld. Courtney travelled the same night on the same road only one stage behind him ! – – – – – 16

As with his compulsion to underscore puns, B takes great pains with double entendre. In 1809 Beckford had nearly completed work on his retreat at Fonthill Abbey. Any real sympathy for Beckford as a victim of prejudice, however, seems cancelled out by Byron’s laboured underlining. Why Beckford’s homosexuality is so much more amusing than Byron’s own bisexuality not clear unless we read Byron’s chortling as a way of being aghast at the idea of public exposure.17 Byron’s letters from Falmouth ‘do the police in different voices’; they contemplate (from a safe distance) various spectacles of transgression: the public flagellation of a local thief and the different penance of Beckford, who was never openly charged with committing homosexual acts, but had to withdraw into semi-retirement for the rest of his life. Ostensibly following the fate of various literary satires, Byron’s early letters are shadowed by an acute apprehension of other sorts of public correction. Ellice is not party to the jeering about the woe that is marriage, presumably because he had been domesticated much earlier when he married the widow of Byron’s cousin.18 Instead, Byron shares with Ellice mild jocularity about the weather (‘We are waiting here for a wind & other necessaries’). If he could have known that Ellice would turn out to be one of the boldest defenders of the humour of Don Juan, Byron might not

16 Beinecke Gen MSS 892 Box 1 Folder 16 2r. 17 For Byron’s fascination with Beckford, see Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I stanzas 22–23 written after he stayed in the villa in Montserrat once rented by Beckford. Byron offered to amend the stanzas to avoid ‘any improper allusion’ in a letter to Dallas 26 September 1811 (BLJ II. p. 107). 18 Byron congratulates him cautiously in a letter of 4 July 1810 (BLJ I. p. 254). 174 J. STABLER have been so restrained.19 In 1809, however, he confines the letter to Ellice to a description of the public whipping and the local cuisine:

nothing of moment has occurred in the town save the castigation of one of the fair sex at a Cart’s tail yesterday morn, whose hands had been guilty of “picking & stealing” and whose tongue of “evil speaking” for she stole a Cock, and damned the corporation; she was much whipped but exceedingly impentitent. – I shall say nothing of Falmouth because I know it, & you don’t, a very good reason for being silent as I can say nothing in its’ [end of side 2]

favour, or you hear any thing that would be agreeable. –– The Inhabitants both female & male, at least the young ones, are remarkably handsome, and how the devil they came to be so, is the marvel! for the place is apparently not favourable to Beauty. – – – The Claret is good, and Quakers plentiful, so are Herrings salt & fresh, there is a fort. 20

To Hodgson this becomes:

The Town contains many Quakers and salt= [end of side 2]

=fish, the oysters have a taste of copper ow= =ing to the soil of a mining country, the women (blessed be the corporation therefore!) are flogged at the carts’ tail when they pick and steal, as happened to one of the fair sex yesterday noon, she was pertinacious in her behavior and damned the mayor.21

19 Colvin, ed., Maria Edgeworth, Letters from England, p. 339. 20 NLS MS. Ellice Papers 109, 25 June 1809. According to Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) ‘persons guilty of petty larceny are frequently sentenced to be tied to the tail of a cart, and whipped by the common executioner, for a certain distance’. 21 Beinecke Gen MSS 892 Box 1 Folder 16 f1v and f2r. 11 ‘FOAM IS THEIR FOUNDATION’: THE POETICS OF BYRON’S LETTERS 175

There were indeed many members of the Society of Friends in this part of Cornwall, but ‘Quakers and salt-fish’ might also hint at heterosexual encounters; the linguistic copiousness of Byron’s early letters often imparts a tone of arch suggestiveness. The taste of salt runs through all Byron’s Falmouth observations; it can mean ‘lecherous’ and a ‘salt eel’ is slang for the rope’s end which was used to discipline sailors. The detail of the tang of copper in the local oysters is, however, a sharp, isolated reminder of subjective experience. For the greater part of his Falmouth letters, Byron categorizes and judges according to shared cultural frames of reference; the taste of copper captures the piercing immediacy of original experience, an early indication of his brilliance as a travel writer. Hodgson’s clerical training might be the reason for Byron’s allusions to the catechism:

Question. What is thy duty towards thy Neighbour? Answer. My duty towards my Neighbour is to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would they should do unto me: […] To keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering.22

The Anglican liturgy was a shared language, though Byron splices it with toasts from London clubs and theatres.23 His letters are studded with allusions from high and low culture, and it is a feature of his correspondence that favourite allusions pass back and forth like counters in a continuous game. In one of Byron’s later letters to Hobhouse, for example, he skirts round the topic of reliable friendship with an allusion that also finds its way into In Don Juan Canto XIV Stanza 48:

Let no man grumble when his friends fall off, As they will do like leaves at the first breeze: When your affairs come round, one way or t’other Go to the coffee-house, and take another.24

Byron’s prose note to this stanza refers the reader to ‘Swift’s or Horace Walpole’s letters I think’. McGann’s commentary rejects Byron’s attribu-

22 The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, not dated), pp. 202–03. 23 See the toasts to ‘the Corporation’ in Henry Fielding, Pasquin Act 1 (London, 1736), p. 9 and Frederick Reynolds, The Delinquent Act V scene 1 (London, 1805), p. 67. 24 All references to Don Juan are from Jerome J. McGann, ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works Vol. V (Oxford: Claredson Press, 1986). 176 J. STABLER tion (‘neither Swift nor Walpole’ (CPW V. p. 761)), but the allusion can be traced to Walpole, filtered through one of those collections of women’s letters that Byron enjoyed:

This alludes to a story Mr Walpole had told her of an English gentleman who going to console some one for the death of a friend said, when have the misfortune to lose a friend, I always go directly to the St James’s Coffee- house and get an other.25

The bon mot appears in Byron’s letter to Hobhouse 3 March 1820: ‘So—Scrope is gone—down—diddled—as Doug. K. writes it—the said Doug. being like the Man who when he lost a friend went to the St. James’s Coffee House and took a new one’ (BLJ VII. p. 50). This is repeated, presumably because Hobhouse did not respond, in Byron’s letter of 29 March 1820 (BLJ VII. p. 63). A little belatedly, the sought-for reaction arrives in Hobhouse’s letter of 21 April 1820: ‘Of Scrope Davies I have heard nothing since his departure nor have I been to the St. James Coffee House to find another friend’.26 The little exchange shows how much allusion depends on reciprocity: the coffee house analogy solicits a response from Hobhouse; only when Hobhouse signals that he has registered the allusion is it complete. Alongside the coterie in-jokes and the shared language of allusion and coded reference, the three Falmouth letters also provide further evidence of a young man’s delight in lampooning paternalistic institutions. Byron sketches the fortifications of Falmouth to Hodgson, in keeping with the interest of any nineteenth-century traveller on the nation’s military pre- paredness. In place of a straight factual account, however, Byron produces a miniature drama of the absurd:

St Mawes is garrisoned by an able-bodied person of fourscore, a widower, he has the whole command and sole manage= =ment of six most unmanageable pieces of ordnance admirably adapted for the destruction of Pendennis a like tower of strength on the opposite side of the channel.27

25 See Letters of the Marquise du Deffand to Walpole (London, 1810), I, p. 117n. 26 Peter W. Graham, ed., Byron’s Bulldog: The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), p. 291. 27 Beinecke Gen MSS 892 Box 1 Folder 16 f1v. 11 ‘FOAM IS THEIR FOUNDATION’: THE POETICS OF BYRON’S LETTERS 177

To Ellice this is reshaped as:

there is a fort called St. Mawes off the harbor, which we were nearly taken up on suspicion of having carried by storm, it is well defended by one able=bodied man of eighty years old, six ancient demi=culverins that would exceedingly annoy anybody – except an enemy; – and parapet walls which would withstand at least half a dozen kicks of any given man grenadier in the kingdom of France. – Adieu believe me Your obliged & sincere Byron [end of side 3]

Mirth at the expense of the constabulary is an English tradition at least as old as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Byron extracts comedy from the Georgian equivalent of the Home Guard (or Dad’s Army), firstly sketching the ludicrous possibility that they might accidentally destroy the fortifications of their own side, and then imagining the risibly effortless advance of an invading enemy. The anecdotes provide the classic comedy stereotype of the senex alongside the timeless satirical deflation of military glory but they also reconfigure the idea of vain antagonism and accidental destruction associated with the satire Byron had left behind at Cawthorn’s. Byron’s Shandean zest for the technical terminology of ‘ordnance’ and ‘demi-culverins’ highlights the kinship between the letters and his habits of annotation. Byron’s love of historical particularity and his compulsion to measure the gap between ideal and material reality is a repeated spur to prose ‘observations’. When the novelist Charles Lever wrote to John Blackwood in 1863 to propose a piece of journalism on ‘Life in Italian Cities’, he was certain that ‘that there is nothing so graphic about Italy as the sketches in Byron’s letters … Perhaps it was the very blending of Dirt and Levity in himself which led him to the exact appreciation’.28 Byron’s letters are ‘graphic’ in the fullest sense and, like his prose notes, they often end with the succession of dashes which deliver the last word with a flourish of triumphant fact over bogus sentiment.

28 Mrs Oliphant and Mrs G Porter, William Blackwood and His Sons: Annals of a Publishing House, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1783), III, p. 227. 178 J. STABLER

Those runs of dashes (there are three after ‘apparently not favourable to Beauty’ in the letter to Ellice and five after the detail about Beckford and in the letter to Hodgson) remind us that the holograph manuscript is very much part of its poetics. While most of Byron’s readers encountered his writing in print, his correspondents encountered his bold pen strokes and distinctively forward-leaning script. The material conditions of paper and ink contribute markedly to the gusto of each letter. There is, as Andrew Nicholson argues, ‘a tactile intimacy, between Byron and his writing materials, even a respect for them, even a fury’.29 In 1814 Byron wrote to Moore and admitted throwing a bottle of ink out of the window: Moore later re-told the incident:

His servant had brought him up a large jar of ink, into which, not supposing it to be full, he had thrust his pen down to the very bottom. Enraged, on finding it come out all smeared with ink, he flung the bottle out of the window into the garden.30

That plunge into the ink pot is characteristic of Byron’s impulsive habits of composition and the actuality of writing to the moment is often shared with his correspondents as in the letter which he sends having just stepped from his bath ‘dripping like a Triton’ (BLJ IX. p. 184). Although Byron complains about the deficiencies of Italian pens, he values the rhythm of dipping the pen and moving across the page. In the letters from Falmouth, anecdotal detail is poured from margin to margin until Byron runs out of space. Four sides to Hodgson; three to Drury; three to Ellice. Later in life, Byron told Moore that he consciously becomes something else while writing: ‘like all imaginative men, I, of course, embody myself with the character while I draw it, but not a moment after the pen is from off the paper’, he wrote in March 1822 (BLJ IX. pp. 118–19). Three months later he returned to the same topic:

when I once take pen in hand—I must say what comes uppermost—or fling it away—I have not the hypocrisy to pretend impartiality—nor the temper (as it is called) to keep always from saying—what may not be pleasing to the hearer—or reader […] you [Murray] know that they [the poems attacked by

29 Andrew Nicholson, ‘Byron’s Prose’, The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 193. 30 Thomas Moore, ed., The Works of Lord Byron: with his Letters and Journals, and his Life, 17 vols (London: John Murray, 1832–33), III, p. 105. 11 ‘FOAM IS THEIR FOUNDATION’: THE POETICS OF BYRON’S LETTERS 179

the Edinburgh Review] were written as fast as I could put pen to paper. (BLJ IX. p. 168).

The letters from Falmouth appear to flow as fast as Byron can put pen to paper, though the fact that there are three of them indicates that the anecdotes were refined. Apart from the plethora of dashes, the letters are very lightly punctuated, but Margaret Oliphant’s assertion that Byron’s letters allow ‘no pause’ for thought needs some qualification. Deliberation, even ponderousness, is manifest in Byron’s correspondence on the subject of bereavement. Writing to Hodgson about the death of Mrs Byron and two of their friends, Byron uses dashes to gesture to, move way from, and return to a bewildering sense of loss. The letter’s form and content describe the way the mind circles around raw grief, trying to bring jarring emotions into alignment. Initially Byron traces his own state of mind before moving into an attempt to empathize with Hobhouse:

You may have heard of the sudden death of my mother, & poor Matthews, which with that of Wingfield (of which I was not fully aware till just before I left town, & indeed hardly believed it) has made a sad chasm in my connections. – Indeed the blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from the shock, & though I do eat & drink & talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every morning [end of side 1]

convince me mournfully to the contrary.— I shall now wave the subject,—the dead are at rest, & none but the dead can be so. – – –

You will feel for poor Hobhouse,—Matthews was the “God of his idolatry” and if Intellect could exalt a man above his fellows, no one could refuse him pre-eminence. – I knew him most intimately, & valued 180 J. STABLER

him proportionably, but I am recurring – so let us talk of life & the living. –– 31

The allusion to Romeo and Juliet is one way of approaching the depth of feeling between men; ‘proportionably’ is another painful calibration of degrees of friendship in order to gauge loss. Again, dashes gesture to what is unsayable but, unlike the onward momentum of the Falmouth letters, the pace of the prose here appears painfully halting; the writing turns and returns, each paragraph attempting a fresh start which then breaks down as the present is engulfed by the recurrence of bewilderment. Byron’s letter writing is often continuous with a proving of existence and a pondering of the worth of existence. His probing dashes form bridges between one idea and the next so that ink appears to track the movement of thought. Not quite the same thing as Moore’s ‘variety’, Byron’s letters provide us with a poetics of the variant whereby different ways of describing or looking at things are tried and re-tried another way, and choice remains open and provisional. One of the things Auden detected and praised in Byron’s letters was an ‘acute sense of the reality of time’.32 This was registered negatively in Margaret Oliphant’s biographical distaste for ‘those hasty chapters of his experience’:

His letters, which in our opinion are never very attractive, have an air of haste for which there could be no necessity, save in his nature. Everything is mentioned in the curtest manner, not a pause, not an indication of interest beyond the most cursory and trifling. His friends, his occupations, the (fine) people he meets, the news of the time, all come in hurriedly to the breathless record’.33

Oliphant could not have registered the ‘breathlessness’ of the record without also being able to hear ‘breath’. What Oliphant means by ‘the news of the time’ is doubtless topical events, but the phrase also draws

31 University of St Andrews Special Collections. MM Holloway Autograph Collection. Album 2, Literary, ms39022/2 f29. Compare with BLJ II. pp. 77–78. 32 Edward Mendelson, ed., The Complete Works of W H Auden 1949–1955 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), III, p. 211. 33 Mrs Oliphant, The Literary History of England, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1882), III, p. 20. 11 ‘FOAM IS THEIR FOUNDATION’: THE POETICS OF BYRON’S LETTERS 181 attention to Byron’s awareness that the filling of the page measures the passage of time. As Haydon’s loss of New Year’s Eve suggests, to read Byron’s letters is to be absorbed in the timekeeping of another consciousness, one that knowingly tries to create a being more intense as it writes. Byron’s pell- mell epistolary comedy is as insistent in its attesting of experience as his freighted circling of grief and loneliness. Both forms of inscription are pitted against the hour and this accounts for the ‘haste’ to which Oliphant objected when she described Byron’s letters as ‘lively and superficial’, giving ‘little idea of anything but the froth of a restless nature. They are a mere record of events, and full of the hurry-scurry of society, the chatter of a noisy circle’ (III. p. 70; pp. 29–30). ‘Froth’ is superbly dismissive, but it is perhaps endorsed by Byron’s use of ‘foam’ as the only trace of human existence in The Deformed Transformed (‘foam is their foundation’ (II iii 57)) or the end of Don Juan Canto XV, stanza 99:

The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lash’d from the foam of ages.

In its registering of the transient existence shared by women and men, the ebb and flow of Byron’s prose, sweeping to the edge of the page and back again, captures waves of thought and the span of human attention more overtly than his intricate verse patterns; his letters are, however, neither unmediated nor unpremeditated. They record this world’s perplexing waste, but also hold an archive of thousands of acts of attention. The poetics of Byron’s letters is something between bricolage and bubbles, stream- ing around externalities, calculated out-pourings of one mind towards another, building endlessly shifting, iridescent shapes which gleam as wet ink for an instant before setting into the imperfect record of what was. CHAPTER 12

Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the Limits of Letters

Madeleine Callaghan

Byron, Shelley, and Keats experiment with genre and form to create poetry fascinated by and indebted to artifice. Theirs is a poetry that seems a long way from the spontaneity of the letter. Letters, in their apparent freedom from artfulness, prevent the poet from exploiting the possibilities of such structures through subversion of and adherence to formal and generic conventions. With their responsibility to communicate with a specific addressee, letters seem more private than public, less artistic than personal. To read them like poetry leads to the feeling that to perform an analysis of the letter is to, as Frank and Anita Kermode put it, ‘pry into a Secret which was intended to be kept from us’.1 Letters, unlike poetry, seem to offer private, personal forms of expression, unlike poetry, where impersonality seems the by-product of artistic polish. Antipathy to permeating poetry

1 Frank and Anita Kermode, ‘Introduction’, Oxford Book of Letters, ed. Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xvii, quoting Lord Bolingbroke, 9 April 1730, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), III, p. 388.

M. Callaghan (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 183 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_12 184 M. CALLAGHAN with the personal, present despite the existence of what can often seem confessional in the work of all three poets, is encapsulated by Shelley’s insistence that the man and the poet are of ‘two different natures’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 310).2 Yet his letters, like those of Byron and Keats, are attuned to the limits and possibilities of letters in a manner analogous to his and their self-conscious poetry.3 Focusing on Byron, Shelley, and Keats, this chapter will explore the ways in which the three poets write poetry that reflects on their letters in fascinatingly oblique ways. It will trace the dynamic connection between the letter and the poem, revealing the poetry as fired by and intimately in touch with the preoccupations of the letters. For Byron, Shelley, and Keats, letters as well as poetry offer spaces where each can affirm ‘the life we image’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III. 6. 49).4 Gérard Genette’s argument that ‘we can use the correspondence of an author (any author)—and this is indeed what specialists do—as a certain kind of statement about the history of each of his works: about its creation, publication, and reception by the public and critics, and about his view of the work at all stages of this history’ offers a perceptive though carefully open claim about the relationship between letters and poetry.5 Following from Genette’s sense that various letters behave differently in terms of their relationship with individual poems, this chapter will show Byron, Shelley, and Keats as using their correspondence in strikingly different ways in connection with their works. Focusing on the connection between the epics written by each of the three poets, written at various stages in their careers, and the letters that inform and inflect the development of each, we see each poet working out, in miniature, the preoccupations that dominate their literary works.

2 Shelley’s letters are quoted from The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), hereafter Letters: PBS with volume and page numbers. 3 Michael O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 4 Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome McGann, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). All quotations from Byron’s poetry are from this edition unless specified otherwise. 5 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin and foreword by Richard Macksey, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 374. 12 BYRON, SHELLEY, AND KEATS, AND THE LIMITS OF LETTERS 185

Shelley Shelley’s early antipathy to Christianity is well documented, and the young poet wrote reasoned critiques of organised religion in his prose and poet- r y. 6 Yet it is in the letters to Elizabeth Hitchener that the reader can trace Shelley’s attempt to convert his correspondent to his version of rational atheism, argument by argument, letter by letter. Despite Shelley’s later antipathy to her, referring to her in a letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg as ‘The Brown Demon’, ‘our late tormentor’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 336), she had been the recipient of some of his most passionate epistles, crowned as the ‘sister of my soul’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 150) before the breakdown of their relationship. When they met, Shelley was fascinated by her intelligence and willingness to engage in debate. Flexing his intellectual muscles, Shelley aimed to win her from Christianity, having found a sparring partner that he seemed to view as more worthy of his efforts than his young and enamoured wife.7 His very first letter to Hitchener affirms that ‘Truth is my God, & say he is Air Water, Earth or Electricity but I think your’s is reducible to the same simple Divinityship’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 98). Opening their correspondence in the vein in which it would continue, Shelley looks forward to ‘subject[ing] myself to the danger’ of being convinced by her ‘orthodoxy’ even as he establishes his own proselytising bent. Claiming to support the subordination of ‘all poetical language’ to ‘the inculcated moral’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 98), the letters fashion themselves as performing their own conversion narrative that seems calculated to contrast with the Pauline epistles.8 In his letter of 11 June 1811, Shelley wrote to Hitchener to outline ‘my intentions & my views’, and his tone insists on its rationality and certainty:

6 See, for example, The Necessity of Atheism (1811) or ‘A Sabbath Walk’ from the Esdaile Notebook, Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Nora Crook, 3 vols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), II, pp. 8–10. 7 F. L. Jones notes that ‘Harriet Grove had received similar books from Shelley; but whereas Harriet was puzzled, Miss Hitchener read them and discussed them in lengthy letters’. See Letters: PBS I, p. 97, n.1. 8 Teddi Chichester Bonca suggests that Shelley sought to ‘cultivate as disciples’ several of his female peers and relations. Teddi Chichester Bonca, Shelley’s Mirrors of Love: Narcissism, Sacrifice, and Sorority, SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 25. 186 M. CALLAGHAN

My wish to convince you of his non-existence is twofold: First on the score of truth, secondly because I conceive it to be the most summary way of eradicating Christianity. I plainly tell you my intentions & my views. I see a being whose aim, like mine is virtue. Christianity militates with a high purpose of it. Hers is a high pursuit of it. She is therefore not a Christian, yet wherefore does she deceive herself? wherefore does she attribute to a spuri- ous, irrational, (as proved) disjointed system of desultory ethics, insulting intolerant theology that high sense of calm dispassionate virtue which her own meditations have elicited. (Letters: PBS I, p. 100)

Openly avowing his intention as ‘eradicating Christianity’, Shelley blindsides Hitchener with disarming honesty. Clearly stating his aim, Shelley removes himself from assuming the role of the satanic tempter, choosing to argue against Christianity from the vantage point of ethical argument. Taking virtue and Christianity as opposing poles, Shelley makes his argument by claiming to have the same beliefs as his addressee, with Christianity cast as the irrational and confounding factor in their mental connection. In this light, Christianity becomes a system of belief that must be reasoned away in order to pursue virtue without religion’s limiting ‘system of desultory ethics’. Shelley’s letter demands: ‘What then is a God, it is a name which expresses the unknown cause, the supposititious origin of all existence’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 100) and sees him expose ‘a God’ as a hollow name, a name to which he pins the crimes of the Old Testament’s Jehovah in lurid detail and describes the moral need to reject the tyranny of such worship: ‘Did I now see him seated in gorgeous & tyrannic majesty as described, upon the throne of infinitude—if I bowed before him, what would virtue say?’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 101). Moral rectitude, for Shelley, demands resistance to any such deity; the question of God’s existence becomes less compelling than how humanity ought to respond to His strength. Hitchener’s shaken response where she claims, ‘You reason almost too clearly for me on the subject of Deity; but the feeling has taken deep root’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 102), craves both indulgence and continued communion. Shelley found what he sought: a convert, if one not entirely able to divest herself of her emotional belief in God. By 1817, though Shelley’s friendship with Elizabeth Hitchener had ended, his intellectual war against tyranny, manifested through religion, had not ceased. The philosophical, theological, and political themes of Shelley’s letter to Hitchener coalesce in Cythna’s magisterial speech that seeks to unshackle man from the self-made ‘lasting chain’ that condemns 12 BYRON, SHELLEY, AND KEATS, AND THE LIMITS OF LETTERS 187 him to ‘slavery’ (Laon and Cythna VIII. XIV: 119).9 Shelley had outlined a stern doctrine of the separation between the aesthetic and the rational, the imaginative and the factual, in his letter to Hitchener, despite a shad- owing sense of regret at his self-imposed rule:

I recommend reason.—Why? is it because since I have devoted myself unre- servedly to its influencing, I have never felt Happiness. I have rejected all fancy, all imagination. I find that all pleasure resulting to self is thereby annihilated. I am led into this egotism, that you may be clearly aware of the nature of reason, as it affects me. I am sincere. (Letters: PBS I, p. 101)

Shelley’s letter creates a binary out of reason and imagination, where Happiness is roundly rejected as a property of the self, the self that Shelley seeks to smother in favour of a rational and thereby collective identity. The rejection of fancy and imagination, as the poet avows, destroys joy, as reason becomes a cold standard that must exclude the apparent frippery of pleasure, even as the ‘I am sincere’ seems to beg for approbation for his sacrifice or long for freedom from his choice. Hitchener’s reply furnishes the latter, asking ‘must not then the children of virtue seek to be happy themselves lest they give pain to those who in others happiness find their own?’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 102). Though Shelley does not reply to this component of her letter, his poetry reveals a subtle response to her question. Shelley’s later epic shows him finding in fancy and imagination a delight that forms a vital complement to reason. Shelley’s intense letters to Elizabeth Hitchener, in particular, his letter of June 11 1811, viewed in relation to canto VIII of Laon and Cythna; or the Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century in the Stanza of Spenser, show Shelley transforming his letter’s arguments against the existence of God and delineation of the problem of ‘Xtianity’ (see, e.g. Letters: PBS I, p. 47) into sophisticated, succinct, and aesthetically powerful poetry in his ‘symbolic romance-epic’.10 Though his letter to Hitchener inveighs against ‘all fancy, all imagination’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 101), these elements become allied with reason in Cythna’s rhetorically brilliant speech against God.

9 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Neil Fraistat, Nora Crook Stuart Curran, Michael J. Neth, and Michael O’Neill, 3 vols (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), III, p. 257. Hereafter CPPBS. Laon and Cythna will be quoted from this edition. 10 See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Norton, 2002), p. 101n. 188 M. CALLAGHAN

Imagination and beauty are not subjugated to moral efficacy but united with it to maximise poetic achievement. Laon and Cythna sees Shelley unshackle himself from his earlier self-abnegating and anti-imaginative credo while retaining his faith in rational discourse. In Laon and Cythna, just as in his letter to Hitchener, Shelley insists on questioning the very premise of God. Rather than adopting the near hec- toring tone of the letters, Cythna’s oratorical strength lies in her imaginative conjuring of that which her listeners unquestioningly worship. Exposing the problem of personification that he had reviled in his letter: ‘Imagination delights in personification; were it not for this embodying quality of eccentric fancy we should be to this day without a God’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 101), the poetry explores even as it denounces this human urge. Cythna begins to unravel the origins of God, fashioning an explanation of God’s hold over the imagination and will, an explanation that recalls the disquisitions engaged in by the poet in his letters to Hitchener:

What then is God? Some moon-struck sophist stood Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood The Form he saw and worshipped was his own, His likeness in the world’s vast mirror shewn; And ’twere an innocent dream, but that a faith Nursed by fear’s dew of poison, grows thereon, And that men say, God has appointed Death On all who scorn his will to wreak immortal wrath. (Laon and Cythna, VIII. VI: 46–54)

Here, at one of the ideological and aesthetic apexes of Shelley’s epic, Cythna, ‘the apple of Shelley’s revolutionary eye’,11 instead of eschewing the happiness of fancy and imagination, uses it as a means to clothe virtue and reason with ‘adamantine eloquence’ (Laon and Cythna, IV. XIX: 168). ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, written contemporaneously, saw Shelley compare the poet with the ‘sage’ (‘Hymn’, 26),12 whose drive

11 Carlos Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), p. 81. 12 Quoted from Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed., intro. and notes Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 115. Aside from the letters and Laon and Cythna, Shelley’s poetry and prose will be quoted from this edition. 12 BYRON, SHELLEY, AND KEATS, AND THE LIMITS OF LETTERS 189 to name and conceptualise the experience of Intellectual Beauty had led to them inventing ‘the name of God, and ghosts, and Heaven’ (‘Hymn’, 27) to worship. This stanza makes a myth of mythmaking. Personification, though glorious in its creative and imaginative power, becomes a form of dangerous narcissism. Though it is ‘an innocent dream’, the dream, when combined with faith nourished by fear, creates the intellectual imprisonment that is religion. Cythna’s dispassionate tone does not simply censure poet or sage’s dream. Rather, she delights in the sibilance that launches the stanza after her question, where the power of the ‘moon-struck sophist’ is not entirely rejected or dispelled by the darkness of the consequences of his imaginings. Cythna puts ‘all fancy, all imagination’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 101) to new use: to untangle humanity’s belief in God rather than enchant them with a new myth. Where Shelley’s letter was limited by its own rejection of imagination in favour of reason, the poetry ripples with aesthetic beauty strengthened and solidified by his radical though reasoning content. The poetry, with no fanfare, revises the letter’s almost rueful rejection of pleasure as it reconsiders and then repudiates Shelley’s earlier anti-imaginative stricture.

Keats Praise of John Keats’s achievement as a letter-writer abounds.13 Timothy Webb rightly stresses ‘the full range of Keats’s remarkable achievement as a letter-writer’, and this essay follows Webb’s counsel against seeing the letters as a means of mining what ‘they can tell us about Keats the man or Keats the poet’.14 Rather, this analysis will emphasise the development from Keats’s letter to J. H. Reynolds of 3 May 1818 to The Fall of Hyperion in the context of Keats’s appraisal of Milton and Wordsworth. Some critics have compared the letters favourably with the poetry,15 and B. Ifor Evans goes so far as to claim that Keats’s ‘verse is always several stages behind the letters and the

13 See, for example, Grant Scott, ‘Introduction,’ Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott, revised edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. xxi. 14 Timothy Webb, ‘“Cutting Figures”: Rhetorical Strategies in Keats’s Letters’, Keats: Bicentenary Readings, ed. Michael O’Neill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 144–69 (p. 147). 15 David Perkins, ‘Keats’s Odes and Letters: Recurrent Diction and Imagery’, Keats-Shelley Journal 2 (1953), pp. 51–60 (p. 51). 190 M. CALLAGHAN letters are the truest criticism of the verse’.16 However, if the poetry is ‘behind the letters’, examination of their relationship reveals that the ideas contained in the letters reach their highest aesthetic pitch in The Fall of Hyperion. Keats’s letters are adapted to his addressees,17 and his letter to J. H. Reynolds of 3 May 1818 offers an example of an instance when the poet is conscious of flying ahead of his addressee’s understanding or patience, breaking off from his literary or intellectual discourses in wry, self-ironising fashion:

If you cannot find this said Rat-trap sufficiently tractable—alas for me, it being an impossibility in grain for my ink to stain otherwise: If I scribble long letters I must play my vagaries. I must be too heavy, or too light, for whole pages—I must be quaint and free of Tropes and figures—I must play my draughts as I please, and for my advantage and your erudition, crown a white with a black, or a black with a white, and move into black or white, far and near as I please. (Letters: John Keats I, p. 279)

With his tongue firmly in his cheek, Keats offers a formula for writing long letters, where epistolary excellence achieves the status of a game played to his ‘advantage’ and to Reynolds’ ‘erudition’. The ‘deftly performative’ quality of the letters is displayed in abundance.18 Yet when he turns to poetry, play becomes deeply serious. The letter to Reynolds calmly discusses Milton and Wordsworth, but The Fall of Hyperion explores the painful pleasure of the young poet’s relationship with his predecessors. If the letter suggests the direction that Keats’s epic experiment might take, it is The Fall of Hyperion that places the claims of the letter under intense scrutiny. Reynolds had written to Keats to express his pain and doubt in the direction of his life, agonies to which Keats responds with sympathy and with poetic acumen:

You say “I fear there is little chance of any thing else in this life.” You seem by that to have been going through with a more painful and acute zest the same labyrinth that I have—I have come to the same conclusion thus far. My Branchings out therefrom have been numerous: one of them is

16 Quoted in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 1, p. 8. Hereafter Letters: John Keats. 17 Webb, ‘“Cutting Figures”: Rhetorical Strategies in Keats’s Letters’, p. 146. 18 Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Keats the letter-writer: Epistolary poetics’, Romanticism Past and Present 6.2 (1982), pp. 43–61 (p. 44). 12 BYRON, SHELLEY, AND KEATS, AND THE LIMITS OF LETTERS 191

the consideration of Wordsworth’s genius and as a help, in the manner of gold being the meridian Line of worldly wealth,—how he differs from Milton.—And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether Milton’s apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or no than Wordsworth. (Letters: John Keats I, p. 278)

Keats’s letter to Reynolds sits in judgement of Milton and Wordsworth, choosing between the two figures to decipher the precise character of their achievements and finally decide between the claims of both. If Wordsworth’s greatness is affirmed to Keats by his own experience of struggle, Keats must, like Milton and Wordsworth, submit to judgement and the agony of ‘larger experience’ (Letters: John Keats I, p. 278), where poetry becomes less the record of an experience than the experience itself. Dramatising what the letter had delineated, The Fall of Hyperion focuses on the struggle of writing poetry. Keats must find his own voice even as his poem charts territory previously explored by Milton and Wordsworth. Experiencing in his poetry the doubt and uncertainty he had conjectured in his letter to Reynolds where ‘[w]e are in a Mist—We are now in that state—We feel the “burden of the Mystery”’, Keats affirms that ‘[t]o this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive when he wrote “Tintern Abbey” and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages. Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them’ (Letters: John Keats I, p. 281). The Fall of Hyperion attempts to prove ‘upon our pulses’ that which his letter sketches: the tension of jug- gling poetic influences as the poet becomes a unique artist. Poetry becomes the proving ground where the poet must succeed or fail before his audience. The task of the reader comes to the fore, where we are called upon to participate in the poetic vision in the role of auditor, but unlike Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, where the musician is ‘unseen’ (Shelley: Major Works, p. 680), here, Keats places himself in our line of vision. Such attention to his reader suggests Keats’s consciousness of his dual role as both poet and critic as he negotiates between the twin poles of Miltonic and Wordsworthian influence:

Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave. (The Fall of Hyperion I. 16–18)19

19 John Keats, John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3rd ed. ([1988]; London: Penguin, 2006). Keats’s poetry will be quoted from this edition. 192 M. CALLAGHAN

Where Milton addressed his muse at the opening of Paradise Lost, Keats’s self-reflexive epic addresses the reader. Almost formulated as a challenge to the recipient of these lines, the stakes are overtly acknowledged: Keats must be judged, just has he had judged his predecessors. The reader’s role anticipates Moneta’s later role, which, as Stuart Sperry claims, shows Keats assigning her the ‘role of interrogator and judge on the one hand and intercessor and redeemer on the other’.20 Despite Keats’s frequent claims to avoid courting his reader,21 the compact between reader and poet is in the foreground, as if he were writing to ‘the more select classes of poetical readers’ that Shelley had sought in Prometheus Unbound (Shelley: Major Works, p. 232). Keats, like Wordsworth, must explore ‘those dark Passages’ and ‘make discoveries, and shed a light in them’ (Letters: John Keats I, p. 266), a task that almost overwhelms the younger poet. The letter sees Keats affirm the spirit of his own age against Milton’s: ‘He [Milton] did not think into the human heart, as Wordsworth has done—Yet Milton as a Philosopher, had sure as great powers as Wordsworth—What is then to be inferr’d? O many things—It proves there is really a grand march of intellect—, It proves that a mighty providence subdues the mightiest Minds to the service of the time being, whether it be in human Knowledge or Religion’ (Letters: John Keats I, p. 282). Wordsworth seems subsumed into the collective mind in Keats’s précis of the workings of the ‘grand march of intellect’, where Keats performs a sleight of hand that implies that he, too, could go beyond Milton’s poetic power. But the real danger of such an aspiration is not downplayed:

I heard, I looked: two senses both at once, So fine, so subtle, felt the tyranny Of that fierce threat, and the hard task proposed. Prodigious seemed the toil; the leaves were yet Burning—when suddenly a palsied chill Struck from the pavèd level up my limbs, And was ascending quick to put cold grasp Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat.

20 Stuart Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 326. 21 For example, Keats writes: ‘I have not the slightest feel of humility towards the Public— or to any thing in existence—but the eternal Being, the principle of Beauty,—and the Memory of great Men’ (Letters: John Keats I, p. 266). 12 BYRON, SHELLEY, AND KEATS, AND THE LIMITS OF LETTERS 193

I shrieked; and the sharp anguish of my shriek Stung my own ears—I strove hard to escape The numbness, strove to gain the lowest step. Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart; And when I clasped my hands I felt them not. (The Fall of Hyperion I. 118–30)

Rather than reinforcing a sense of the self-styled poet-apprentice’s weakness, Keats draws the reader’s eye to the scale of ‘the hard task proposed’. Keats forces recognition of the deep seriousness of the epic challenge, where the poem’s struggle to ascend to the status of Miltonic ‘adventurous song’ becomes almost insurmountable and mortally dangerous.22 Keats figures himself as striving heroically against failure. Though the pressure of Milton’s influence is clear, the reader is also returned to Spenser, and the Faerie Queene’s quest to earn the rewards of Romance. Spenser’s presence in the backdrop offers a more ‘flexible line of tradition’ than Milton’s or Wordsworth’s more imposing examples.23 The struggle seems embedded in becoming a capable poet, to paraphrase Daniel Hughes’s argument on Prometheus Unbound, as Keats must, like the Knight Redcrosse, fight for his status as hero of his own epic.24 Not Milton, not Spenser, nor Wordsworth makes Keats’s epic task impossible. Rather, Keats deliberately stages the struggle to become an epic protagonist in his fragmented epic poem, witnessing what the letter suggests: the scale of the task to rival his great peers and predecessors, Wordsworth and Milton.

Byron Byron’s letters, as Timothy Webb eloquently emphasises, reveal ‘the range, the linguistic bravura, the grasp of various literary traditions, the mastery of more than one kind of discourse, the fluency and linguistic fertility, the mixture of abuse and sharp criticism with an understanding and forgiving

22 John Milton, Paradise Lost, John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 1998), 1, p. 13. 23 Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 12–13. 24 Daniel Hughes, ‘Prometheus Made Capable Poet in Act One of Prometheus Unbound’, Studies in Romanticism 17.1 (1978), pp. 3–11; for Keats’s intellectual and poetic engagement with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, see Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism. 194 M. CALLAGHAN humanity, and the energy and seemingly unquenchable creative vitality’,25 and his correspondence with John Murray offered Byron the ideal opportunity to showcase such mastery to his audience, an audience of both his addressee and also the coterie with whom Murray shared Byron’s correspondence.26 Cantos I and II of Don Juan had been published in July 1819, and despite Shelley’s intense admiration of Byron’s achievement in the poem (see Letters: PBS II, pp. 197–99), his enthusiasm was matched by trepidation in the Murray circle. Byron could not but attend to their concerns as he began canto III. The letter of August 12 1819 stands as one of Byron’s detached though serious defences of Don Juan, which eventually sharpen into a warning to Murray that ‘I have read over the poem carefully—and I tell you it is poetry’ (BLJ VIII, p. 192).27 However, in the August 12 1819 letter, Byron negotiates the concerns of the Murray coterie employing a humour and charm that barely disguises the seriousness with which he took his ‘Donny Jonny’ (BLJ VI, p. 207). Opening his letter with an anecdote about his unusually strong emotional reaction to Alfieri’s tragedy, Byron quickly passes to ‘answer your friend C. V. who objects to the quick succession of fun and gravity’ (BLJ VI, p. 207). Sparkling with wit, Byron pivots from idea to image through his interrogation of Francis Cohen’s (C. V.’s) experiences, demanding his responses to questions which range from the innocuous, ‘[d]id he never play at Cricket or walk a mile in hot weather?’ to the highly personal, ‘did he never inject for a Gonorrhea?—or make water through an ulcerated Urethra?’, before finally paying a compliment to the thoroughly and unwittingly beaten critic: ‘but make him my compliments—he is a clever fellow for all that—a very clever fellow’ (BLJ VI, p. 207). This show of amusing though pointed muscularity is barely concluded before Byron mimes his detachment from his poem, allowing that Don Juan is based on ‘no plan’ as he feigns a shrewd rather than an emotional approach to his poem where ‘[i]f it don’t take I will leave it off where it is with all due respect to the Public—but if continued it must be in my own way’ (BLJ VI, p. 207). However, for Byron, freeing himself from the strictures of

25 Timothy Webb, ‘“Unshadowing the Rialto”: Byron and the Patterns of Life’, The Byron Journal 39.1 (2011), pp. 19–33 (p. 19). 26 Andrew Elfenbein stresses how Byron wrote both to Murray and to his coterie and beyond. See ‘How to Analyze a Correspondence: The Example of Byron and Murray’, European Romantic Review 22.3 (2011), pp. 347–55 (p. 352). 27 Byron’s letters are quoted from Lord George Gordon Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: Murray, 1973–96), abbreviated as BLJ. 12 BYRON, SHELLEY, AND KEATS, AND THE LIMITS OF LETTERS 195

Murray’s ‘illustrious Synod’ (BLJ IV, p. 96) became an act of poetic liberty to affirm his independence from the popular creed:

Why Man the Soul of such writing is it’s licence?—at least the liberty of that licence if one likes—not that one should abuse it—it is like trial by Jury and Peerage—and the Habeas Corpus—a very fine thing—but chiefly in the reversion—because no one wishes to be tried for the mere pleasure of proving his possession of the privilege.——But a truce with these reflections;— you are too earnest and eager about a work never intended to be serious; do you suppose that I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle? (BLJ IV, p. 208)

The crux of Byron’s complaint against the Murray cabal’s advice, which had been coming thick and fast in Murray and Hobhouse’s letters, with the former combining flattery with fears (see, e.g. Murray’s letter of 28 May 1819),28 and the latter writing a tactful though emphatic letter advis- ing ‘a total suppression’ of Don Juan, is his insistence on his right to write his epic according to his own scope and inclinations.29 Though Murray had ‘grown great’ (BLJ III, p. 7), Byron reminds Murray that while he is a bookseller, his Lordship is the poet.30 Borrowing and rewriting his own line from Don Juan Canto I, where he wrote ‘[t]his liberty is a poetic licence’ (Don Juan I. 120, 956), Byron’s claim in his letter has an air of incredulity and imperiousness that fades as quickly as it appears. Carefully informing Murray that he has no intention of abusing his ‘licence’, Byron quickly calls a ‘truce’ and disclaims the seriousness of Don Juan, proclaim- ing his intention as ‘to giggle and make giggle’. But the final quoted line’s formulation as a question acts both to quieten Murray’s fears and to force Murray to think about what Byron achieves in his epic. The role of the poet and the liberty and licence of poetry, raised briefly in Byron’s ‘most obliging’ (Letters: John Murray, p. 284) letter, become vital to the poetic performance of Canto III.

28 The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 273. Hereafter Letters: John Murray. 29 John Cam Hobhouse, Byron’s Bulldog: The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron, ed. Peter W. Graham (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1984), pp. 256–62. 30 John G. Murray discusses Murray’s status as Byron’s ‘obedient servant’ in John G. Murray, A Poet and his Publisher, Presidential Address (London: The English Association, 1976), p. 6. 196 M. CALLAGHAN

Bernard Beatty’s sense that Don Juan and works of a similar cast are ‘concerned with licence and its constraints’ seems particularly apt for Byron’s preoccupation in the Trimmer Poet stanzas of Don Juan Canto III.31 Byron sketches a savage and humorous portrait of ‘their poet, a sad trimmer’ (Don Juan III. 82, 649), who seems a conflation of Southey and Byron,32 with a tense alloy of guilt and contempt underpinning the grimly humorous passage. To write ‘honest simple verse’ and ‘keep one creed’ (‘Dedication’, Don Juan, 17. 130 and 135), Byron’s boasts of the Dedication, are undermined by the trimmer poet’s chameleon-like ability to adapt to the situation, where liberty becomes a negative form of licence:

Thus, usually, when he was ask’d to sing He gave the different nations something national; ’Twas all the same to him—‘God save the king,’ Or ‘Ça ira’, according to the fashion all; His muse made increment of any thing (Don Juan III. 85, 673–80)

Though censuring the adaptable quality of the ‘sad trimmer’, the ‘mobilité’ displayed deliberately mirrors Byron’s own performance in his epic where his poetry,33 with its ‘deliberate manhandling of language’, makes similar poetic capital of ‘any thing’.34 Pure contempt is avoided as ‘Byron never forgets, or lets us forget’, writes Peter Manning, ‘that Don Juan is a text shaped within the literary market, subject to the pressures of opinion and the means of distribution’,35 and the trimmer poet becomes the model of a poet almost too responsive to the market. The slyness of this passage is to denigrate the apparently confessional quality detectable in Don Juan, particularly in the light of Murray and his circle’s aversion

31 Bernard Beatty, ‘Introduction’, Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron, ed. Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe, and Charles E. Robinson, Liverpool English Texts and Studies 42 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 1–9 (p. 1). 32 ‘But the portrait is contemporary, and is modelled partly on Southey and partly on Byron himself’. Byron, ‘Notes to Pages 489–507’, Lord Byron: The Major Works, pp. 1048–49. 33 M. K. Joseph, Byron the Poet (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), p. 78. 34 Gavin Hopps, ‘Byron and Grammatical Freedom’, Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron, ed. Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe, and Charles E. Robinson, Liverpool English Texts and Studies 42 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 165–80 (p. 169). 35 Peter J. Manning, ‘Don Juan and the Revisionary Self’, Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 221. 12 BYRON, SHELLEY, AND KEATS, AND THE LIMITS OF LETTERS 197 from ‘the abuse of his wife’ in more biographical sections of the first and second cantos.36 The licence that Byron had demanded is tested to its limits as ‘licence’ comes to seem dangerously capable of misleading or disfiguring poetry:

Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung, The modern Greek, in tolerable Verse; If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young, Yet in these times he might have done much worse: His strain displayed some feeling—right or wrong; And feeling, in a poet, is the source Of others’ feeling; but they are such liars, And take all colours—like the hands of dyers. (Don Juan III. 87, 785–92)

Byron’s barbed reference to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111 shows him draw upon his predecessor’s description of a poet forced to move in circles with the masses and his subsequent degradation.37 The allusion breathes an aristocratic hauteur,38 and compounds the distance between the poet and his audience by subtly indicating Byron’s higher status than that of his reader and, accordingly, John Murray, bookseller. Despite the feigned detachment from poets, who are such ‘liars’, Byron reveals an anxiety of how to reconcile his mobilité with his insistence on the ethical requirement of the poet. Byron had claimed to Thomas Moore that: ‘I could not write upon any thing, without some personal experience and foundation’ (BLJ V, p. 14), and in his letter on the Bowles/Pope controversy, he had angrily opined against poetic lies.39 Yet here, poets are united by their commerce in falsehood, where his use of ‘they’ rather than ‘we’ cannot help or pardon Byron from blame. Brian Nellist’s sense that ‘[t]he telling, the “I”

36 Francis Cohen, quoted in The Letters of John Murray, p. 279. 37 William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 111’, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 764. 38 J. Michael Robertson, ‘Aristocratic Individualism in Byron’s Don Juan’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 17.4 (1977), pp. 639–55. 39 ‘If the essence of poetry must be a lie, throw it to the dogs, or banish it from your repub- lic as Plato would have done. He who can reconcile poetry with truth and wisdom is the only true “poet” in its real sense. The “maker”, “the creator”—why must this mean the “liar”, the “feigner”, the “tale teller”? A man may make and create better things than these.’ Lord George Gordon Byron, ‘Letter to John Murray Esq.’, Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 149. 198 M. CALLAGHAN and “me” of the writing, in this case the “we,” has become a foreground in Don Juan in a way it simply was not in the tales, and it is the necessary result of that concern to tell the truth which in the letters Byron found peculiar about this poem’ seems apt, as Byron intensifies his brief thoughts on the liberty of licence (BLJ VI, p. 208) into nuanced and pointedly explorative poetry in Don Juan.40 Though Keats bemoans ‘[w]riting’ as having ‘this disadvan[ta]ge of speaking. one cannot write a wink, or a nod, or a grin, or a purse of the Lips, or a smile’ (Letters: John Keats II, p. 205), writing and speaking, thought and action, cannot be divided so cleanly; poetry offers possibilities as much as interdictions through expert exploitation of aesthetic effects. Poetry becomes a means of re-conceiving of the concerns, insights, and preoccupations of letters where neither genre takes precedence, but they remain, instead, in oblique dialogue. Laon and Cythna, The Fall of Hyperion, and Don Juan show each poet alert to the preoccupations of their letters to refashion their concerns in poetry alive to its epistolary counterparts.

40 Brian Nellist, ‘Lyric Presence in Byron from the Tales to Don Juan’, Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 39–77 (p. 73). CHAPTER 13

‘The Varied Pauses of His Style’: Shelley’s Letters from Italy

Michael O’Neill

Introduction, Gender, Friendship When after his move to Italy in early 1818 Shelley stared at the blank paper on which he was to write a letter—to his friends in England, say, often Peacock or Leigh Hunt, or to fellow emigrants such as Byron—he paused on the verge, in however subliminal a way, of a range of interconnected if often unwritten stories: poems that had been or were to be composed or published, whose full richness no letter could depict; imagined communities; a new culture and landscape to be broached; intermittent states of personal loneliness and isolation; utopian political hopes increasingly tinged with pessimism; bouts of domestic complications, loss, and criss-cross personal dynamics that were almost unspeakable, barely writable. Certainly his letters from Italy compose a fascinatingly individual and impressive contribution towards the genre of the Romantic letter. They answer, in their capacity to modulate tone and perspective, to his own description in A Defence of Poetry of Plato as a poet in his prose: like Plato in his philosophical dialogues, Shelley, in his letters, ‘forbore to

M. O’Neill (*) Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 199 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_13 200 M. O’NEILL invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style’.1 Initially, readers familiar with the letters of Shelley’s fellow Romantic poets may be wrong-footed by what his letters from Italy offer. For all their occasional moments of poetic pride, they do not display ‘openly and unforgettably’, in Alan G. Hill’s words, ‘Wordsworth’s faith in his own genius and in the permanent value of what he was doing for English poetry’.2 Nor do they seem intent, for all their invariable courtesy of tone, on the endlessly unravelling yet beguiling wooing of the addressee or later reader typical of Coleridge’s epistolary productions. Nor do they have the reckless, exhilarating brio of Byron’s diverting performances of self. They do not seek to rival the heartfelt, sensuous, cerebral intensity and immediacy of Keats’s letters; they do not attempt perpetually to strike off immortal dicta about the art at which the author excels. Their models are various, including close to home; epistolary fiction, such as and especially Frankenstein, a novel to whose pacing as well as its emotional and intellectual structuring Shelley made a significant quasi-editorial contribution; as well as letters by Mary Wollstonecraft in which sensibility, awareness of natural beauty, and questioning intelligence unite in ways that will have stayed with the young poet after he read to Mary Godwin in 1814 from her mother’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). An example might be Wollstonecraft’s sense of ‘imperious sympathies’ with nature after times when ‘melancholy and even misanthropy’ have assailed her owing to her disillusion with humanity, a disillusion expelled by ‘some involuntary sympathetic emotion’ that made her feel she ‘was still a part of a mighty whole’.3 Such emotional double- ness is typical of Shelley’s letters, too.4

1 Shelley’s poetry and prose (apart from his letters) are quoted from Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), here p. 679. 2 Letters of William Wordsworth: A New Selection, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. xxii. 3 Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark ([1796]; London: Cassell, 1889), p. 21. 4 Nora Crook is among those who, following G. M. Matthews (acknowledged by her), have explored the influence of Wollstonecraft’s work on Shelley’s poem for the dead Fanny Godwin, ‘Thy little footsteps on the shore’; see her fascinating essay ‘Shelley’s Women’, a chapter relevant to the present discussion, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 65–82 (at p. 81). 13 ‘THE VARIED PAUSES OF HIS STYLE’: SHELLEY’S LETTERS FROM ITALY 201

Shelley’s letters are more watchful than we might expect of the poet who could write, ‘I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’ (‘Ode to the West Wind’, 54), or who reflects with despondency on his troubled lot in ‘Stanzas, Written in Dejection, Near Naples’. When a depressed note breaks from Shelley in his letters, it often shrouds pain with wit, brevity, laconicism: examples might include ‘With no strong personal reasons to interest me, my disappointment on public grounds has been excessive. But I cling to moral and political hope, like a drowner to a plank’.5 The Neapolitan Revolution in 1820 prompts this remark, whose gloominess contrasts with the more upbeat tone of his ‘Ode to Naples’, and the bleak- ness seems motivated by a feeling that his addressee, Byron, would endorse the poet’s political weariness. At the same time, the letter also resists what it supposes will be Byronic cynicism about the chances of political amelio- ration, gracefully if self-abasingly casting the letter writer as a ‘drowner’, as if proleptically conceding his fate, who clings to ‘a plank’. The letters addressed to women during the Italian period do not lend themselves easily to the kind of criticism of Shelley’s character which, for instance, those written to Elizabeth Hitchener or to Harriet Shelley have encouraged, sometimes with justice. That said, even if Shelley’s dismissal of Hitchener as a ‘Brown Demon’ (Letters: PBS I, p. 336) is unattractive, there is no overlooking the brilliant if unstable mix of philosophical speculation and emotional ardour in the letters addressed to her. The letters to Harriet, after Shelley’s relationship with Mary Godwin had begun, belong to a passage of extreme emotional turbulence in the poet’s life and possess a painful interest of their own; there can be little doubt that an affecting strain of ineradicable sadness in subsequent letters derives from an unspo- ken sense of guilt at his responsibility for her fate. The Italian letters cannot be said, even, to uncloset secrets about the poet’s dealings concerning women important to him. There is evidence of deep feelings for women other than his wife, notably Claire Clairmont, as when he writes to her on 1 December 1821: ‘Do not think that my affection & anxiety for you ever cease, or that I ever love you less although that love has been & and still must be a source of disquietude to me’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 367). Yet the central point of the letter is to demonstrate the speaker’s constancy of ‘affection & anxiety’ amidst the ‘disquietude’

5 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, p. 291 (hereafter referred parenthetically as Letters: PBS with volume and page numbers). 202 M. O’NEILL that his ‘love’ for the addressee causes him: presumably because of complications involving both Mary Shelley and Byron, the distinctly uncoopera- tive father of Claire’s child, Allegra. Shelley found himself having to act as intermediary between Claire and Byron, a near-impossible task which drew from him commendable resources of tact and patience. Perhaps the nearest thing to an illicit love letter (missives to Emilia Viviani run it close) is the final note he dashed off to Jane Williams on 4 July before setting off on his ill-fated return voyage to Lerici from Pisa. Even here the note is elegiac, retrospective, consciously literary. ‘How soon are those hours past, & how slowly they return to pass so soon again, & perhaps for ever, in which we have lived together so intimately so happily!—Adieu, my dearest friend—I only write these lines for the pleasure of tracing what will meet your eyes’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 445). The phrase ‘perhaps for ever’ attracts to itself the self-aware ambivalence that chequers the script: the hours are those which return ‘so slowly’ that they may ‘perhaps’ never return, and yet, enshrined in memory, they may persist ‘perhaps for ever’—and, again, the syntax suggests, the ‘hours’ pass and return.6 The impression is of literary stylization of experience into what feels like a companion piece to the poems for Jane Williams written in 1822. In the final sentence Shelley, like a figure from an epistolary novel, explicitly underscores the fact that he is writing, and makes of his ‘tracing’ a gallant compliment as he imagines the written characters meeting the woman’s eyes; there, ‘meet’ is especially evocative as it proposes a coming together of author and correspondent (the word ‘correspondent’ earning its full meaning).7 One might compare what Shelley does here with a later poetic imagining of a meeting made possible by absence. In the 13th of the American poet John Berryman’s Sonnets to Chris (‘I lift—lift you five

6 I am grateful to Nora Crook for discussion of this point and for her overall comments on a draft of this essay. 7 In the OED there is a relevant observation made under ‘correspond (v)’: ‘The etymology implies that the word was formed to express mutual response, the answering of things to each other; but before its adoption in English, it had been extended so as to express the action or relation of one side only, without however abandoning the mutual notion, which is distinct in the modern sense of epistolary correspondence’. It is that ‘mutual notion’ that Shelley’s letter eloquently brings to the fore. For thought-provoking reflections on the political implications of the concept and practice of ‘correspondence’ in relation to letter writing in the Romantic period, see Mary A. Favret’s important study, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and The Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 13 ‘THE VARIED PAUSES OF HIS STYLE’: SHELLEY’S LETTERS FROM ITALY 203

States away your glass’), the poet contrives a wry victory over separation, with its more than mock-triumphant last line and a half, when the lovers raise their glasses to one another ‘As you plotted’: ‘I blow my short ash red, / Grey eyes light! and we have our drink together’.8 The affinity between the sonnet and the letter suggests that it would not be amiss to claim for the latter the status of a prose poem. Janet Gurkin Altman notes that the epistolary form lends itself both to ‘a strong sense of closure’ and ‘just as easily to open-endedness’,9 and it is Shelley’s elusive achievement in this letter to Jane Williams to make us wonder what might happen next in their relationship and also to feel that we have just read an elegy for that relationship. Shelley’s more usual register in writing to women is affectionate, advi- sory, full of near-fraternal or husbandly concern. Intent on showing that Shelley demonstrated a ‘nightmare’-inducing ‘fidelity … to his in-laws’ life/writing against family in his ongoing fidelities to persons, causes, boundaries, and texts’, a fidelity ingeniously linked to his characteristic modes of figuration, Julie A. Carlson offers a valuable account of the poet’s intellectual and emotional risk-taking.10 I’d wish to add to her account the suggestion, on the evidence of the letters, that Shelley did not sacrifice persons on the altar of ideas.11 Letters to Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley are inflected with an acute sense of the character and needs of the addressee; thus, to Mary, Shelley writes with a self-knowledge that is assured of answering comprehension as he imagines an ideal community, then wryly backs away from it: ‘Where two or three are gathered together the devil is among them, and good far more than evil impulses love far more than hatred—has been to me, except as you have been it’s object, the source of all sort[s] of mischief’ (Letters: PBS II, p. 339). The remark pays Mary Shelley the compliment of being the writer’s most significant love-‘object’ and of conceding that ‘mischief’ has arisen from his attempt to enact ‘good rather

8 Quoted from John Berryman, Collected Poems: 1937–1971, ed. and intro. Charles Thornbury (London: Faber, 1989), p. 77. 9 Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), pp. 154–55. 10 Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 261. 11 See Carlson, p. 271 on Shelley’s alleged ‘lack of respect for “persons”’. Carlson, it should be noted, distinguishes her account of Shelley from the condemnation of his ‘lived practices’ typical of ‘humanist-feminists’ (p. 272). 204 M. O’NEILL than evil impulses’. Again, to Claire Clairmont, he writes with a continual steady fondness, which, as suggested above, might be construed as showing traces of an illicit closeness, but which, to this reader, stops just short of confessing or betraying such a state: ‘You know, however, whatever you shall determine on, where to find one affectionate Friend, to whom your absence is too painful for your return ever to be unwelcome’ (Letters: PBS II, pp. 241–42). These are the tones of deep attachment rooted in the need not to be ‘companionless’ (Shelley, The Sensitive Plant, 1. 12), rather than those of erotic need or yearning.12 Emotional problems (often with men) are hinted at obliquely or with circumspect care, as in the intermittent glances towards difficulties with Byron. Such glances work equivocally and, in the case of this passage from a letter to Hunt (on the brink of setting out from Plymouth) to join Shelley and Byron in setting up The Liberal, with conscious awareness of the complexity involved in human intimacies that go wrong:

Perhaps time has corrected me, and I am become, like those whom I formerly condemned, misanthropical and suspicious. If so do you cure me; nor should I wonder, for if friendship is the medicine of such diseases I may well say that mine have been long neglected—and how deep the wounds have been, you partly know and partly can conjecture. Certain it is, that Lord Byron has made me feel bitterly the inferiority which the world has presumed to place between us and which subsists nowhere in reality but in our own talents, which are not our own but Nature’s—or in our rank, which is not our own but Fortune’s. (Letters: PBS 2, p. 405)

Shelley paves the way for his admission of ‘what I thought with regard to Lord Byron’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 405) by a stroke of rueful self- incrimination in the ranks of ‘those whom I formerly condemned’, the ‘misanthropical and suspicious’, deploying a tactic one often finds in his moments of self-interrogation: a wry deflation of a formerly over-optimistic rating of his own capacity to live up to ideals. The ideal of ‘friendship’ emerges as the more desired for the ‘wounds’ and ‘diseases’ which its vio- lation can occasion; and Shelley delicately acknowledges his recipient’s continued kindness to him in an appeal worded almost like an imperative,

12 For Shelley’s practical help in ensuring that ‘Claire was able to maintain what she most valued in life, the prospect of independence’ (p. 53), see Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys, 1798–1879 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 52–53. 13 ‘THE VARIED PAUSES OF HIS STYLE’: SHELLEY’S LETTERS FROM ITALY 205

‘do you cure me’. That said, the final sentence has an obdurately testamentary sound, Shelley invoking and implying the need to examine resonant abstractions (Nature and Fortune) in order to explain the falsely insisted-on (as he sees it) disparity between Byron’s status and his own.13 There is a refusal to accept the assumptions and presumption of ‘the world’ that suggests the mature 29-year-old poet shares the views of his younger self, even if his mode of expression has a less evangelizing tone and bears witness to considerable experiential damage. Though the passage allows handsomely for the idea that Byron is a far greater writer than Shelley (the result of ‘Nature’s’ capricious gifts), there is also, it seems to me, a resistance to the idea of being his fellow poet’s inferior, which coils within itself a last-ditch resilience of spirit: ‘you would have’, the sentence implies with justified pride, ‘to be a great poet fully to understand the pain inflicted by unfair assessments of achievement’. If Shelley obeys the epistolary imperative of recognizing his addressee’s unique otherness, he also can move into a special imaginative space in which the letter is transformed into something close to dramatic revelation of his feelings to a wider, virtual audience, or to no audience at all. Here he is, explaining and refusing to explain Epipsychidion to John Gisborne:

The Epipsychidion is a mystery—As to real flesh & blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles,—you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton, as expect any thing human or earthly from me. I desired Ollier not to circulate this piece except to the Σύνετοι [cognoscenti], and even they it seems are inclined to approximate me to the circle of a servant girl & her sweetheart.—But I intend to write a Symposium of my own to set all this right. (Letters: PBS 2, p. 363)

The final flourish is amusingly high-handed; it is evident that to ‘set all this right’ is known by the writer to be a tall order. And yet Shelley does himself trade in the ‘human or earthly’, as his witty reference to going to

13 For insightful and incisive comments on epistolary exchanges between Shelley and Byron, see Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), which includes discussion of an article probably written by Mary Shelley, ‘Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet’ (published in 1830), in which the author captures well the modes of self-presentation pursued by both poets in their letters: Byron cynical, ironic and unconvinced; Shelley keenly logical, persuaded of Shakespeare’s genius, and determined to prove it. 206 M. O’NEILL

‘a ginshop for a leg of mutton’ indicates, for all his asserted ignorance of the appropriate match. The letter’s fluidity of tone and perspective allows the writer to stand firm in the face of the biographical reductivism that would confineEpipsychidion , a remarkable love poem that has affinities with Dante’s Vita Nuova and Plato’s Symposium even as it is sui generis, to ‘the circle of a servant girl & her sweetheart’, while humorously conceding that such a fate, even at the hands of the sunetoi, the initiate, is virtually unavoidable. The letter writer mystifies in claiming his poem is ‘a mystery’, but he does so in the knowledge that the vast majority of its readers will misrepresent his poem as carnally self-indulgent. The pathos of this knowledge emerges as a primary effect of the letter, and of many of Shelley’s letters, where a seemingly unanswerable if knowingly subjective defence allies itself to a burdened recognition. Slandered about his relationship with Claire Clairmont, he writes to Mary on 7 August 1821, encouraging her to refute the slander in a letter to R. P. Hoppner, the British Consul-General at Venice, who had apprised Byron of his belief in what had been said of Shelley. Shelley rehearses the familiar story in a near-bored manner: ‘Elise says that Clare was my mistress—that is all very well & so far there is nothing new: all the world has heard so much & people may believe or not believe as they think good’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 319). How reassuring Mary found this sentence it is hard to say, though she robustly defends her husband in a letter of 10 August 1821 to Mrs Hoppner, where she asserts: ‘I am perfectly convinced in my own mind that Shelley never had an improper connexion with Clare’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 337n). The further allegations that Claire had a child by Shelley, that Shelley gave her ‘the most violent medicines to procure abortion’, and that, ‘this not succeeding’, she had a child which was then sent by Shelley to ‘the foundling hospital’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 319) are stated and refuted by Shelley (and Mary), Shelley objecting especially to the notion that he was capable of having ‘committed such unutterable crimes as destroying or abandoning a child—& that my own’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 319). It is near impossible for us to know what actually happened, but it would be a brave reader who argued for Shelley’s guilt in the face of his sickened response: ‘imagine my despair of good—imagine how it is possible that one of so weak & sensitive a nature as mine can run further the gauntlet through this hellish society of men’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 319). The moment reminds us that a letter offers an opportunity for self-fashioning: here, in extremis, one might hear, reprised, the vehemently self-approving, self-exculpating 13 ‘THE VARIED PAUSES OF HIS STYLE’: SHELLEY’S LETTERS FROM ITALY 207 accents of Shelley’s Maniac, who depicts himself as ‘a nerve o’er which do creep/The else unfelt oppressions of this earth’ (Julian and Maddalo, pp. 449–50). Simon Haines judges the ‘self-pity’ of these lines to be ‘unattractive’,14 but self-pity is not an end in itself for Shelley; rather, it serves as a springboard for vindication of the self’s capacity for authentic motive and conduct.

Tragic Confession Shelley’s letters reveal a restrained refusal to lament over grief and sorrows in a short life brimful of both (one thinks of the deaths of children and of Harriet Shelley). And yet, as suggested above, a tragic note in Shelley’s letters gives many of them a special distinctiveness and distinction, especially in the final year of his life when such a note comes more into the foreground. Its relative scarcity gives it a powerful charge, as in this sentence explaining to himself as much as to Byron why he admires cantos 3 to 5 of the latter’s Don Juan: ‘We are damned to the knowledge of good & evil, and it is well for us to know what we should avoid no less than what we should seek’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 358). When an awareness of the tragic occurs, as it does here, for all Shelley’s light handling, it has an affecting ability to catch his recipient and subsequent readers off guard. ‘The history of letter writing is a story about time and what times does to people’, Jonathan Ellis writes eloquently,15 and yet much that holds us here in Shelley’s statement is his use of a present tense that implies the original transgression in the Garden of Eden is permanently reiterated in human experience. It is among the moments in his letters that unites Shelley with a biblical tradition of prophecy and a Pauline tradition of apocalyptic epistolarity (discussed further below). His disappointment over the fate of his literary works can find expression in an almost toneless version of self-address. In a passage such as the following, in a letter to his closest literary ally Leigh Hunt, a letter interspersed with enquiries about ‘how my writings sell’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 380), he concludes with this request: ‘And if there is time to write before you set off, pray tell me if Ollier has published Hellas and what

14 Simon Haines, Shelley’s Poetry: The Divided Self (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 139. 15 Jonathan Ellis, ‘Last Letters: Keats, Bishop and Hopkins’, Letter Writing among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 231–46 (p. 239). 208 M. O’NEILL effect was produced by Adonais? My faculties are shaken to atoms & torpid. I can write nothing, & if Adonais had no success & excited no interest what incentive can I have to write?’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 382). Shelley shifts in these sentences from outgoing enquiry (‘pray tell me’) to what has the effect of overheard soliloquy: ‘My faculties are shaken to atoms & torpid’. The shaking and the torpor admit of no dissent, and reveal the writer’s characteristic syntactical energy, at odds with the confession of torpor. The next sentence builds on this energy, as, avoiding querulous self-pity, Shelley plays his variation on the Romantic topos of eloquence produced by the sense of writer’s block. A modified chiasmus enfolds his sense of literary disappointment: ‘I can write nothing’ is the A term of this chiasmus, itself more positive than it seems, as though Shelley really could ‘write nothing’ (emphasis added). Adonais fills the space of the B term, the word ringing out with a pride that recalls a Shakespearean hero asserting his identity (‘I am Antony yet’), before we return to the writing subject, this time asking a question that is more a statement than interrogation: ‘what incentive can I have to write?’ More powerfully and more expansively confessional is a letter, written on 18 June 1822, when the poet has 20 more days to live. In this letter to John Gisborne, Shelley writes one of the great Romantic prose poems. The letter shows how carefully Shelley read epistolary novels such as Julie; ou, la nouvelle Hêloïse by Rousseau, paying heed to the control and construction of emotional intensity evident in such work; an example might be letter 54 of part 1, cited by Shelley in the course of praise both of Goethe’s Faust and Calderón (Letters: PBS 2, p. 407). When one reads the letter one is struck by its evocation of Saint-Preux’s erotic longing and self-conscious engagement with writing as a consequence of his admission of Julie’s palpable absence.16 The letter of June 1822 begins by describing how he has saved Mary from dying of bleeding following a ‘severe miscarriage’: ‘I took the most decisive resolutions, by dint of making her sit in ice, I succeeded in checking the hemorrhage and the fainting fit’. It moves on to his concern about Ollier and the poems lodged with him. Of Epipsychidion, he remarks with a written equivalent to a facial grimace: ‘the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 434).

16 For discussion of the significance for Shelley of Rousseau’s epistolary novel, see Donald H. Reiman, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: A Critical Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), esp. pp. 73–79. 13 ‘THE VARIED PAUSES OF HIS STYLE’: SHELLEY’S LETTERS FROM ITALY 209

And, quietly, an underlying logic proposes itself: Shelley, close to taking a last look, is bidding farewell one by one to people has loved. Epipsychidion he now sees as a poem that sums up, in ‘idealized’ form, his habit of ideal- izing. In a moment of guarded, affecting revelation, he says: ‘I think one is always in love with something or other’, the jokiness of ‘something or other’ unable wholly to blunt the strangely cheerful yet also mournful sense of destiny in ‘I think one is always in love’. The reason for mournfulness is the inevitability of making a category mistake: ‘The error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal’. ‘Error’ it may have been, but it is the ‘generous error’ (Major Works, p. 92) of which the Preface to Alastor speaks; the looking always to confuse boundaries, to find ‘in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal’, is the mainspring of Shelley’s poetry. The letter is playful, and enjoys its references to Hogg’s anti-idealistic teasing and joshing. Hogg had apparently adapted a quotation from Horace’s Ars Poetica about the ability to use common words with dignity to the suggestion that Shelley had made something ‘honoris’ out of something quite common (Letters: PBS 2, p. 434). This is a poet who is equal to those with a counter-vision, able to dismiss with ‘supreme indifference’ the latest gossip which will, he predicts, make Byron ‘half mad’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 434). There may be a desperate serenity here, but there is also loneliness. After hoping that the Gisborne and perhaps Hogg would join him, Shelley almost casually tears a veil from his mind: ‘I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 435), he writes, the two uses of ‘feel’ imagining concord, but evoking a chimeless mismatch. Mary is one, who, for whatever reason (‘proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse’ or ‘The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her’ are offered as possibilities (Letters: PBS 2, p. 435)), does not, and Shelley seems half to sympathize with her predicament. After what feels like a caesural break, a ‘silence’ that is ‘both tactful and tactical’, in Madeleine Callaghan’s fine phrase about a comparable effect in another letter to John Gisborne (of 30 June 1820),17 he then turns to the

17 Madeleine Callaghan, ‘“Any Thing Human or Earthly”: Shelley’s Letters and Poetry’, Letter Writing among Poets, ed. Ellis, pp. 111–25 (p. 116). See also the same author’s groundbreaking study, Shelley’s Living Artistry; Letters, Poems, Plays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), which, among other things, ‘places under scrutiny the relationship 210 M. O’NEILL solace offered by Jane and Edward Williams and moves easily from the expense of the boat to its promise of escape: ‘it is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel’, he writes of the boat whose sea-unworthiness may have been a reason for his untimely death: ‘Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind’—one notices how the syntax has grown unshackled and energized; all is heading towards a transformative ‘until’: ‘until earth appears another world’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 435) as, in Daisy Hay’s evocative reading of the letter, ‘Shelley is caught in his own words, not as an idealized shadow of himself, but as an animate, joyous being, reveling in the delights of the boat which will kill him’.18 The conditional comes back, at the passage’s close, even as the previously mocked impulse to idealize returns with a knowing, euphoric, and sombre vengeance: ‘Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, “Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful”’ (Letters: PBS 2, pp. 435–36). The rhythm there, quintessentially Shelleyan, combines onward momentum, covert yearning, and a latent sense of the tragedy likely to be hidden inside all pursuits of desire, here suggested by the allusion to Faust. Faust says to Mephistopheles in a tone that shivers with a self-destructive ecstasy:

If ever to the moment I shall say: Beautiful moment, do not pass away! Then you may forge your chains to bind me, Then I will put my life behind me … (1700–03)19

Faust tells the story of Shelley’s poetic career. One is persuaded by the force of his allusion to it, more intensely than any autobiographical revelation might. between individual private letters and the artistic work’ (p. 4). See also for valuable commentary on ‘Shelley’s “Familiar Style”’, Anthony Howe’s chapter of that title in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. O’Neill and Howe, with the assistance of Callaghan (pp. 309–24): the chapter concerns itself with readings of Rosalind and Helen, Julian and Maddalo, and Letter to Maria Gisborne, but it is full of suggestive implications for reading the letters. 18 Daisy Hay, ‘Shelley’s Letters’, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. O’Neill and Howe, with the assistance of Callaghan, pp. 208–22 (at p. 219). 19 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans with intro David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 52. 13 ‘THE VARIED PAUSES OF HIS STYLE’: SHELLEY’S LETTERS FROM ITALY 211

Tenaciously if obliquely the letter with its abysses and ascents—‘I stand, as it were, upon a precipice, which I have ascended with great, and cannot descend without greater, peril and I am content if the heaven above me is calm for the passing moment’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 436)—has spiritual kinship with the fusion of moods at work in the poem Shelley was working on at the time, The Triumph of Life. This poem operates between states and at thresholds, set on the ‘sunlit limits of the night’ (80). In it, as in the letter, the drive towards unveiling new potentialities continually undermines itself and yet possibly salvages something from its own self-wreckage. In it, as in the letter, everything tends towards era- sures and cancellations; the reader wonders or hopes that these cancellations and erasure may prefigure new inscriptions. Shelley does not wholly surrender to loss. His terza rima may lay bare a winding path that mimes the swift journey into a present-day purgatorial underworld. But it also bears witness to artistic power and energy.20 So, too, is Shelley’s prose in his letter, at once written to the moment and studied and stylized, if flu- idly so, in its unfolding.

Power, Allusion, Utopian Politics The word ‘power’ has, in Shelley’s work, positive and negative meanings. One might invoke the positive sense by asserting that Shelley’s letters themselves hold power in reserve. Yet when power manifests itself politically as tyrannical or oppressive and reveals its negative aspects, he is unafraid to speak truth to it. So, in his long, unpublished letter to Leigh Hunt, protesting against the imprisonment of the radical bookseller Richard Carlisle (Shelley’s spelling of ‘Carlile’), he argues that the charges of blasphemy levelled against Carlisle are trumped-up and hypocritical: ‘the prosecutors care little for religion’, he writes, going on to add the damning qualification, ‘or care for it only as the mask & the garment by which they are invested with the symbols of worldly power’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 143): a notably severer use of the ‘mask’ image than that which finds expression in A Defence of Poetry, where the poet argues that the belief systems adopted by Dante and Milton were ‘merely the mask and the

20 The discussion of this June 1822 letter draws on material in my piece, ‘Reading Shelley’, Shelley Studies 22 (2014), pp. 13–15. This piece, in turns, draws on ideas articulated in my plenary lecture at a Shelley conference held in September 2007 at University College, Oxford. 212 M. O’NEILL mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised’ (Major Works, p. 691); there, the all-important word is the verb ‘walk’, implying the ongoing presentness of writers who operate historically and transhistorically. Shelley responds to imaginative power in others, especially Byron: writing about Marino Faliero, which he had yet to read, he writes: ‘I have not yet seen it, though I am most anxious to observe this new phasis of your power’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 283). ‘Phasis’ rather than ‘phase’: as befits the author of (say) ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, Shelley’s emphasis is placed on the latest appearance or showing forth of Byron’s power (an aspect of the word’s etymology; see OED) rather than its latest stage. A poet’s powers may exist in an antithetical relationship with his powers as a man: ‘The poet & the man are two different natures: though they exist together they may be unconscious of each other, & incapable of deciding upon each other’s powers & effects by an reflex act’ Letters:( PBS 2, p. 310). The generalization gives the ‘poet’ in Shelley a freedom to escape any ‘reflex act’—perhaps spurred by rational consciousness—directed by the ‘man’. Such a freedom depends on there being an understood assumption that there is a gap between ‘poet’ and ‘man’, and this assumption, explicit here, is often an intuited belief. This is not to say that Shelley is seeking escape from moral valuation21: more, that he makes a tenacious case for distin- guishing between poetry and biography. Shelley’s modes of self-presentation differ accordingly from those preferred by Byron, a performative Proteus to his fingertips, as Richard Lansdown points out, citing George Wilson Knight’s view that ‘there is no more Shakespearian writing in England than the prose of Byron’s Letters and Journals’.22 When Byron quotes from Shakespeare in a letter of 6 April 1819 to Murray, he identifies in dizzyingly mobile succession with Coriolanus sneering at the ‘sweet voices’ of the plebeians, with Shylock who will ‘sell with ye’ but not ‘pray with thee’, and then, as if in partial apology for treating his publisher with an unusual degree of condescending contempt, he associates himself with Macbeth as he writes that he ‘was obliged to reform my “way of life” which was conducting me from the “yellow leaf” to the Ground with all deliberate speed’.23 The wit that

21 As is argued in Carlson, p. 268. 22 Byron’s Letters and Journals: A New Selection, ed. Richard Lansdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. xvii. 23 Lansdown, p. 311. 13 ‘THE VARIED PAUSES OF HIS STYLE’: SHELLEY’S LETTERS FROM ITALY 213

flickers throughout the letter is exuberantly tied to Byron’s sense that Shakespeare has written scripts which enable the Romantic poet to play a part. Shelley’s allusions to Shakespeare tend to be more detached, quietly playful in the pleasure they take in adapting the playwright’s words to surprising contexts. Writing to Hunt about The Cenci (a play full of subtle allusions to Macbeth),24 he speaks mischievously of the work as ‘totally different from anything you might conjecture that I should write’. He then adapts Macbeth’s words to his wife before the killing of Banquo in Act 3: ‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chick, till you approve the performance’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 108). With a dexterity that invites and proleptically compliments an answerable rapidity on Hunt’s part, Shelley suggestively alters Macbeth’s words ‘applaud the deed’ to ‘approve the performance’. A poet’s words, for Shelley, are not quite deeds; they reside in what elsewhere he calls ‘the world of shadows’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 407), even as they may aspire after deed-like efficacy. His letter to Ollier of 6 September 1819, after he had received what with scorn for the rulers and their soldiery, he calls ‘news of the Manchester work’, the Peterloo Massacre, movingly expresses his double-mindedness about art’s capacity to enter history: though ‘the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins’, ‘indignation’ is clearly not enough in itself, and he continues: ‘I wait anxiously [to] hear how the Country will express its sense of the bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers’, before adding, in self-allusive fashion, a riven quotation from The Cenci (in lines that themselves allude to King Lear): ‘“Something must be done … What yet I know not”’ (3. 1. 86–87) (Letters: PBS 2, p. 117). Biblical allusions often work with transformingly secular yet spiritual intent. Sometimes they operate obliquely and are mediated through other sources, as when Shelley asserts, in an almost doctrinal statement of belief, ‘Let us believe in a kind of optimism in which we are our own gods’, gloss- ing it with an allusion to Coleridge’s The Friend (no. 5, 14 September 1809), in which the older poet exclaims, ‘What an awful Duty, what a Nurse of all other, the fairest Virtues does not HOPE become’.25

24 See D. Harington-Lueker, ‘Imagination versus Introspection: The Cenci and Macbeth’, Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), pp. 172–89, which argues that ‘in Macbeth Shelley’s protean imagination could have found the outlines of a psychology of evil that would complement his own’ (p. 178). 25 See Robinson, The Snake and Eagle, p. 36, from which Coleridge is quoted. 214 M. O’NEILL

it is best that we should think all this for the best even though it be not, because Hope, as Coleridge says is a solemn duty which we owe alike to ourselves & to the world—a worship to the spirit of good within, which requires before it send that inspiration forth, which impresses its likeness upon all that it creates, devoted & disinterested homage. (Letters: PBS 2, p. 125)

Especially in its final section this passage feels like a witty, funny, wryly self-aware, and deeply serious act of ‘worship’; however indirectly, it pays ‘homage’ to the Pauline epistle, a significant exemplar for the modern would-be epistolary ‘Preacher’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 191), with whom in his letter to Hunt of 1 May 1820 Shelley identifies. The Epistle to the Romans argues with its own sophistical ingenuity that ‘we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it’ (8: 24–25). It is Shelley’s epistolary and allusive genius to play respect- fully yet in a heterodox way with Paul’s lucid, inescapable accents, with his noble coupling of hope and—a posture often adopted by Shelley—of patient waiting. Humour comes to the Preacher’s rescue not only in turns upon himself, as when he teases himself for turning into ‘the Preacher’, but in the expression of preaching itself. Without invalidating his revolutionary social and political observations, Shelley often infuses them with a near-sardonic self-awareness, as in his 1 May 1820 letter: there, before he outs himself as ‘the Preacher’, he moves from grumbling about his publisher’s ‘demerits’ to a quietly startling analysis of the status quo:

The system of society as exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations with all its superstructure of maxims & of forms before we shall find anything but dissappointment [sic] in our intercourse with any but a few select spirits. The remedy does not seem to be one of the easiest. But the generous few are not the less held to tend with all their efforts towards it. If faith is a virtue in any case it is so in politics rather than religion; as having a power of producing that a belief in which is at once a prophecy and a cause. (Letters: PBS 2, p. 191)

The writer recognizes the intransigence of his position and the improb- ability of finding a ‘remedy’ to the ills endemic to the ‘system of society as it exists at present’. But, allowing for laughter at his radical self, Shelley invokes the concept of ‘faith’, adapted from the religious function it 13 ‘THE VARIED PAUSES OF HIS STYLE’: SHELLEY’S LETTERS FROM ITALY 215

performs in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where we are saved ‘through the righteousness of faith’ (4:13) and are ‘justified by faith’ (5:1), to a political end, as it becomes the medium through which the ‘generous few’ sense that they can serve as historical agents, can bear witness to ideas in such a way that the very bearing witness helps to bring about their actualization.

Natural Description, ‘Self-Reflection’ When Mary Shelley published a selection of letters in her 1839/1840 collection of Shelley’s prose Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, she gave pride of place to the poet’s descriptive richness, while drawing attention to the way in which description goes beyond observa- tional notation: ‘he always, as he says himself, looks beyond the actual object, for an internal meaning, typified, illustrated, or caused, by the external appearance’.26 Mary probably alludes here to Shelley’s comment in a letter to Peacock in which he defines with metapoetic (or metapros- aic), forensic clarity his modus scribendi: looking at Tasso’s handwriting, he comments that, by contrast with the ‘small firm & pointed character’ of Ariosto’s hand that displays ‘a strong & keen but circumscribed energy of mind’, Tasso’s serves ‘as the symbol of an intense & earnest mind exceeding at times its own depth and admonished to return by the chillness of the waters of oblivion striking upon its adventurous feet’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 47; quoted in Essays 2, p. 150). Those ‘adventurous feet’ bring Tasso’s metrical vigour to mind and suggest the sensitivity of Shelley’s alertness to the dynamics of inner poetic tension. He goes on to make the quasi-Coleridgean observation (and this is the passage to which his wife alludes):27 ‘You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present & tangible object: and as we do not agree in physiognomy so we may not agree now. But my business is to relate my own sensations and not to attempt to inspire others with them’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 47; quoted in Essays, 2, p. 150). Shelley mimes in the assonantal chime of ‘seek in what I see’ his quest to find ‘a manifestation

26 Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mrs Shelley, 2 vols (London: Moxon, 1840), p. xxi; hereafter Essays. 27 See Biographia Literaria, chapter XV, where Coleridge writes that one way in which ‘images’ ‘become proof of original genius’ is when ‘a human and intellectual life is trans- ferred to them from the poet’s spirit’, Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Stephen Potter (London: Nonesuch Press, 1950), p. 257. 216 M. O’NEILL of something beyond the present & tangible object’, a mode of phrasing that grants the object tangibility yet sets its sights on a different kind of ‘manifestation’, one that is visionary rather than visual. Fascinating too is Shelley’s stubborn defence of his necessary subjectivity and commitment to ‘relate my own sensations’: that matters more to him, he declares, than any effort ‘to inspire others with them’. Venice obliges his impulse to be descriptively accurate and symbolically suggestive by being a literal place that is a metaphor for imaginative delight. ‘Venice is a wonderfully fine city. The approach to it over the laguna with its domes & turrets glittering in a long line over the blue waves is one of the finest architectural delusions in the world. It seems to have—and literally it has—its foundations in the sea’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 42). The phrase ‘wonderfully fine’ recovers an unhackneyed meaning for ‘wonderfully’: Venice is full of wonder, being ‘one of the finest architectural delusions in the world’ by virtue of the correspondence between its apparent illusoriness and reality. The following sentence in its parenthetical ‘and literally it has’ mimics the dawning awareness that here seeming and being are one. Everywhere, there are licencings for imagination: gondolas, ‘things of a most romantic & picturesque appearance’, seem like ‘moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 42). The passage is effectively a poem in a state of prosaic chrysalis; the writing’s uncanny quality of ‘self-reflection’, in Benjamin Colbert’s phrase, is evident not only in his letters involving ‘literary tourism’ but in his epistolary output as a whole.28

Coda: Language and Literary Criticism Shelley’s letters delight in what he calls ‘those delicate and evanescent hues of mind, which language delights and instructs us in precise proportion as it expresses’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 277).29 Language does not merely reflect pre-existing reality; as it ‘expresses’, it creates anew. The transformative potential of language is evident in Shelley’s letters from Italy, the main focus of this chapter. He may abjure the ‘determinate forms’ associated

28 Benjamin Colbert, ‘Shelley, Travel, and Tourism’, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. O’Neill and Howe, with the assistance of Callaghan, pp. 594–608 (p. 595). 29 Now thought not to be a letter, as Mary Shelley assumed it was in printing it as a letter in her 1840 edition, but a separate piece of ‘epistolary’ prose, ‘On Learning Languages’, tentatively dated by E. B. Murray to 1816, in his edition of The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, volume 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993): title given on p. 164. 13 ‘THE VARIED PAUSES OF HIS STYLE’: SHELLEY’S LETTERS FROM ITALY 217 with poetic structures in his letters. But they display a continual swiftness of mind that prompts thought and awakens feeling. Accepting some of John Taaffe’s ‘strictures on Adonais’, Shelley abruptly moves from apology to robust self-assertion, in a way that continues to throw the modern- day reader rather as one might surmise it threw his correspondent: ‘The introduction of the name of Christ as an antithesis to Cain is surely any thing but irreverence or sarcasm’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 306). Surely, to use his own word, Shelley couples the names to give a sense of the double nature of his version of himself: at once taking on the sins of the world and haunted by an original, ineradicable guilt. He offers Maria Gisborne ‘An Exhortation’ as ‘a kind of an excuse for Wordsworth’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 195), his phrasing dispraising and exculpating: Wordsworth is only offered ‘a kind of an excuse’, but he deserves both to be excused and for it to be recognized that he needs to have an excuse supplied on his behalf. Shelley’s language, here and elsewhere in his letters, flatters his reader’s critical intelligence; his epistolary prose is light on its feet, mercurial, a messenger from the poet’s godlike thought that is also an incarnation of such thought. He invites Henry Reveley to ‘write me uncorrected letters; just as the words come, so let me have them’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 131). His own style gives this illusion of uncorrected flow, even as it evinces the coin-‘clipping’ which he wittily stigmatizes as ‘penal according to our statute’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 131). Shelley’s literary criticism in his letters is delicate, angular, sharp, courteous, a source of continual aesthetic joy. Here he rises to the majesty of his original, the close of the Iliad: ‘The battle at the Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, & the high & solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness & inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable with any thing of the same kind’ (Letters: PBS 2, p. 250). It is impossible to imagine a better, more succinct, more poignant summary of the epic’s moving, surprising close, when relentless, unsparing bloodshed turns to accommodation with the enemy as Priam negotiates with Achilles, his son’s killer. Then, in a turn, a dextrous flick of the writerly wrist, Shelley evokes his own reading experience of Calderón, shaping a rapid, chiastic interplay out of the Spanish author’s synaesthetic waltz of figures: ‘I am bathing myself in the light & odour of the flowery & starry Autos’ Letters:( PBS 2, p. 250). There is more to life and literature than epic tragedy, full as such tragedy is of import and solemn seriousness; there is the meta- phorical play of mind that Shelley values because it gives us the world in which we live, but renews it too. Such a double gift is among Shelley’s 218 M. O’NEILL epistolary bequests. They remind us, his incomparable letters, that ‘even at the crises of his personal life’, as Edmund Blunden puts it in his tribute to the poet at the close of his biography, ‘Shelley studied the art of writing and above all writing poetry with an absolute faithfulness and impersonal surrender’.30

30 Edmund Blunden, Shelley: A Life Story ([1946]; London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 301. CHAPTER 14

John Keats’s Epistolary Intimacy

Andrew Bennett

To read a work of literature, or to read a work as a work of literature— rather than reading it simply as, say, a description of a person, place or thing; an anecdote concerning an event or a series of events; an analysis of an object or idea; a set of instructions or directive; a request, petition or plea; a promise; or an expression of hope, fear, love or aggression—is to attend to the individuality of the people, places, events, speech acts and ideas that the work describes while at the same time taking each of these particulars as standing for a set of undefined others. It is to understand these objects, ideas, people and feelings not just as and in themselves but also as representing a type, class or mode of being. ‘Why else would one read it?’, Jonathan Culler asks of the literary work. But as Culler also points out, literary works characteristically resist any definitive account of what it is that they may be said to exemplify: novels, poems and plays ‘decline to explore what they are exemplary of’, Culler comments, even while they characteristically present the individual situations, affects and conditions of the objects, ideas and people that they present as ‘in some way…

A. Bennett (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 219 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_14 220 A. BENNETT exemplary’.1 As Culler argues, the ‘power’ of the work may in fact be said to reside in and emerge from a ‘special combination’ of singularity and exemplarity (of the singular within the exemplary, of the singular indeed as a form of exemplarity)2: its power may be understood to be a function of the way that it registers and represents the undecidable space between the individual and the general in thematic as much as in formal and rhetorical terms. As Jacques Derrida observes, what is categorized as ‘literary’ involves uncertainty over whether, in speaking of something, ‘I am speaking indeed of something (of the thing itself, this one, for itself)’ or if I may instead be said to be offering an example—an example of something or an example of the fact that I can speak of something: it is this that accounts for the ‘pleasure’ [jouissance] of reading as well as its ‘immeasurable frustration’, Derrida remarks.3 In this essay, I want to suggest that the conflicted energies of such configurations of the literary make the personal letter—that singularly particularist form of writing—stand out as an almost uniquely difficult case. For what, we might ask, is a letter? Or in what sense can a letter be thought of as ‘literary’? Epistolarity theory—as opposed to the theory of the epistolary novel—is seriously under-developed in this respect, on account, not least, of what appears to be its generic instability.4 The per- ception culminates in the question of whether such writing may be said to constitute a genre at all in Derrida’s assertion that the letter is ‘not a

1 Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 33. 2 Culler, p. 35. 3 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 142–43. 4 Compare Timothy Webb’s comment on ‘our slowness in evolving a poetics of the letter’ (‘“Cutting Figures”: Rhetorical Strategies in Keats’s Letters’, Keats: Bicentenary Readings, ed. Michael O’Neill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 146. As Webb suggests, while ‘attention to the uncanonical, the “unliterary” and the autobiographical has produced significant advances in our approach to the reading of letters’, nevertheless, this critical interest has tended to focus primarily on the biographical or on the letters as ‘keys to unlock the poetry’ rather than in terms of the autonomy of the letters as literary texts or on ‘the significance of their generic identity’ (pp. 146–47). See also Nichola Deane, ‘Keats’s Lover’s Discourse and the Letters to Fanny Brawne’, Keats-Shelley Review 13 (1999), pp. 105–14 (p. 105). For the classic account of the theory of the epistolary novel, see Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982). Epistolarity theory is in fact more developed in cultural studies: see, for example, Esther Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence (New York: Routledge, 2013). 14 JOHN KEATS’S EPISTOLARY INTIMACY 221 genre but all genres, literature itself’.5 Such radical scepticism towards, and totalizing conception of, the generic status of the letter underpins an analysis in which the incontestable fact that a letter ‘can always not arrive at its destination’ is itself generalized into the grounding configuration of writing as such.6 In more pragmatic terms, Hugh Haughton has recently commented that letters have tended to get ‘short shrift’ from literary critics and theorists: seeming to ‘slip between genres’, they tend to be seen as ‘supplementary texts, hovering uneasily in the borderland between a “document” and a “work”’.7 But I want further to refine such thinking by translating the document/work binary into the question of a certain interpersonal intimacy: I want to suggest that we can conceive of the personal letter as, in principle, a performance of the kind of individualized, direct, unmediated contract between one person and another that we call ‘intimacy’. And yet, at the same time, we might consider the letter to have the potential, at least, to speak to wider concerns and to a different, more diverse and multiple audience. To outline a theory of the personal letter in terms of intimacy would be to start with the following assumptions: the standardized and ideal version of the personal letter is necessarily governed by something like an implicit and constitutively non-reciprocal contract between sender and addressee, or between writer and primary reader—both poles of which are predominantly single (and at least severely numerically circumscribed). The conventional one-to-one relationship of writer to reader inscribes within it strategies of mutuality and epistemological veracity in which private revelation, personal contact, spontaneity, sincerity and certain assumptions concerning representations of truth-telling, subjectivity and personal identity allow for affective states of sympathy and sympathetic identification to develop that are, however, also necessarily open to

5 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 48. The point is glossed/complicated a little later when Derrida comments of ‘the epistolary genre in literature’ that ‘it does not exist, rigorously speaking, I mean that it would be literature itself if there were any, but stricto sensu I no more believe this either’ (p. 88). 6 Derrida, The Post Card, p. 123. 7 Hugh Haughton, ‘Just Letters: Corresponding Poets’, Letter Writing Among the Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 57. See also Ellis, ‘Last Letters: Keats, Bishop and Hughes’, Letter Writing Among the Poets, p. 238, on the ‘famous protean qualities’ of letter writing and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of defining it as a genre. 222 A. BENNETT frustration, anxiety, wider dissemination, distance and indeed failure.8 While the personal letter is in this sense precisely not designed for public consumption and while the implicit contract on which it is based specifically excludes multiple and indeterminate readers, the principle of a direct and strictly circumscribed audience that defines the personal letter is always necessarily open to the possibility of contamination or (inter-)penetration. It is always possible to contravene, disrupt or transgress the assumed privacy of the personal letter, either through textual features that interfere with a direct revelation from one individual to another (self- conscious linguistic play or generic foregrounding, rhetorical exuberance, the appearance of a certain failure in transparency or sincerity, effects such as irony or indirection, obfuscation, mendacity) or as a consequence of the inherent possibility that a letter intended for one reader (or for a strictly limited number of readers) can be read by any number of others. (The problem in this respect is not so much the inherent possibility of a letter failing to arrive at its destination as a proliferation of destinations to which it does indeed arrive, in an unforeseen and apparently unpredictable way). In this sense, we can say that the personal letter—the kind of ‘document’ that, in its constitutively individualized privacy and foregrounded intimacy (involving a certain inwardness and close connection), is implicitly non-‘literary’—can always become a ‘work’; we can say that it carries with it the possibility of a certain literariness (characterized by fictionality, an open-ended plurality and indeterminacy of potential readership, rhetorical exuberance, generic self-reflexivity and formal experimentation, disingen- uousness, or an absence of affective and epistemological transparency, unequal power, non-reciprocity). For its part, on the other hand, the (non-epistolary) literary work may be said to be governed by an implicit contract that involves a non-binary mirror-image of these

8 See Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email, p. 71: ‘Immediacy, intimacy, transparency, spontaneity, naturalness, exclusivity and sympathy all contribute to the effect of presence’ in epistolary discourse; see also Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven, ‘Introduction’ to idem, Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, ed. Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 1: ‘The most historically powerful fiction of the letter has been that which figures it as the trope of authenticity and intimacy, which elides questions of linguistic, historical, and political mediation, and which construes the letter as femi- nine’; see also John W. Howland, The Letter Form and the French Enlightenment: The Epistolary Paradox (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 43, on the way that the ‘human’ qualities of spontaneity, authenticity, and self-expression found its ‘most congenial form’ in the eighteenth-century letter (quoted in Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email, p. 14). 14 JOHN KEATS’S EPISTOLARY INTIMACY 223 conditions (a contextually determined fictionalizing of them) in what we might call an ‘intimacy effect’—an effect that is intended as primarily rhetorical, structural or formal. Despite the implication of conventional intimacy generated through formal and narratological dimensions of the novel, in other words, to read Jane Austen, for example, as directing a personalized message about Fanny Price to you and you alone would be to misread Mansfield Park. Similarly, in spite of their grammatical and rhetorical effects, to think that even second-person note-like lyric poems such as John Keats’s ‘This living hand’ or (to take a familiar post-Roman- tic example) William Carlos Williams’s ‘This is Just to Say’ are addressed to and intended to be read only by you would be directly to transgress the implicit contract involved in and evoked by such poems as works of literature. As we surely know through our implicit or explicit induction into the norms governing the institution of literature, no reading could be more wrong, however right it feels, than one that accepts at face value the effect of intimacy generated by such texts—that attempts actually to ‘see’ the hand that the speaker in Keats’s poem says he is holding towards ‘you’ or that carefully weighs up whether or not to forgive the speaker in Williams’s poem for eating the plums that were once in the icebox and that are now no more (you definitively have not been deprived of your fruit-based breakfast, and it is therefore not in your power to forgive the speaker for the transgression to which he confesses: you are overhearing the confession, not hearing it, despite what is attested by its grammar). In this sense, reading a novel or poem involves a willing but temporary suspension of one’s knowledge that the specificity of address and the appearance of intimate contact that the text generates are precisely part of a fiction, an intimacy effect, and nothing more. While it might be argued that it is not in fact by chance, the Romantic period happens to throw up a notable test-case for this sketch of a theory of literary epistolarity in the form of the collected letters of John Keats. Despite the public outcry in 1878 when Keats’s excessively intimate letters to Fanny Brawne were published, from the early twentieth century onwards his letters have been singled out for their unique and uniquely ‘literary’ status as a body of work. T. S. Eliot set the tone in a 1933 lecture when he declared that Keats’s letters are ‘certainly the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poet’ and indeed that his ‘greatness’ is ‘manifested more clearly in his Letters than in his poems’.9 In

9 T. S. Eliot, ‘Shelley and Keats’, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 100. 224 A. BENNETT his pioneering introduction to a 1951 selection of the letters, Lionel Trilling similarly describes them as collectively having ‘an interest which is virtually equal to that of their writer’s canon of created work’,10 while more recently Jonathan Ellis has declared Keats to be ‘arguably the greatest poet letter writer’ in English,11 and Daniel Karlin has argued that while the ‘hybrid or sub-genre’ of letters is usually thought to be of lesser literary merit than poems, Keats ‘belongs to a small group of poets…whose letters can claim equal status with their poetry’.12 In a notable essay on the letters, John Barnard concurs with T. S. Eliot when he remarks that, taken as a whole and compared with the poems, the letters can even be considered ‘the greater literary achievement’.13 We might speculate that part of the reason why Keats’s letters are singled out among Romantic letters— and among letters in general—for their special aesthetic value (part of the reason why they have been seen as singularly ‘creative …in their own right’)14 has to do with the way in which they so markedly evoke an intimacy that challenges and disrupts the border between the individuality of the personal letter as ‘document’ and its potential generality as a literary ‘work’. Keats’s letters, I will argue, configure the culturally coded expectations of epistolary intimacy in a way that exposes its fictionality or constructedness. Seen as ‘almost the ideal literary letter’,15 Keats’s letters may be considered as exemplary, in fact, just in the way that they provoca- tively challenge our conventional sense of intimacy and the assumptions of personhood on which it is founded. The letters perpetually hover between the singularity of intimacy and the generality of an intimacy effect, just as they famously oscillate between the unique particularity of

10 Lionel Trilling, ‘The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters’, The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism ([1955]; New York: Viking, 1959), p. 3. 11 Ellis, ‘Last Letters’, Letter Writing Among the Poets, p. 231. 12 Daniel Karlin, ‘Editing Poems in Letters’, Letter Writing Among the Poets, p. 42, p. 45n. Karlin lists Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elizabeth Bishop as other such poets. 13 John Barnard, ‘Keats’s Letters: ‘Remembrancing and Enchaining’, The Cambridge Companion to John Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 121. 14 Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Keats the Letter-Writer: Epistolary Poetics’, Romanticism Past and Present 6 (1982), p. 44 (pp. 43–61). Wolfson is one of relatively few critics to have sought to develop (primarily via considerations of thinking and speculation, of performance, absence, and self-scrutiny), an analysis of Keats’s ‘epistolary poetics’. 15 Nichola Deane, ‘Letters, Journals and Diaries’, Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 584. 14 JOHN KEATS’S EPISTOLARY INTIMACY 225 experiential record on the one hand and generalized reflections on poetry, philosophy, morality and life itself, on the other, in what a recent editor refers to as their ‘seamless integration of everyday life with the life of the mind’.16 In as much as that the letters can be favourably compared to Keats’s poetry or are considered an intrinsic part of his oeuvre—in so much as they are conceived of as ‘literary’—we might surmise that they are judged so partly because of their ability deftly to switch from document to work and back again. The letters evoke both the inwardness conventionally equated with intimacy and a self-reflexive undoing of intimacy’s tropes, in an expression of what, in his study of the poetics of late- Romantic anonymity, Jacques Khalip has aptly characterized as a kind of ‘unmoored subjectivity’.17 Although the word itself is hardly used in Keats’s letters, intimacy is figured in them as both an effect and an explicit concern.18 The twelve closely packed foolscap pages of Keats’s letter to his brother George and

16 Grant F. Scott, ‘Introduction’, Selected Letters of John Keats, revised ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. xxii. See Timothy Webb’s illuminating comments on the way that Keats’s letters construct or develop their own generic identity as personal or private or intimate texts by self-consciously focusing on ‘minute particulars’—by focusing on the ‘seemingly random clutter’ of ‘every-day life’ in order precisely to present such details as ‘trifles’ that ‘aspire to no greater significance’ (p. 148). According to this reading, the letters may be said to respond to ‘the promptings of the immediate, the unexpected and the improvisational’ in a way that can paradoxically be considered ‘literary’ (p. 151). 17 Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 1. Khalip’s book is about the way that, for second-generation Romantic writers, the self ‘can no longer be assumed a priori as the enshrined origin for sympathetic reciprocity’ and that for these writers ‘subjectivity is already other in that its self- projections are dissimulations of a nothingness or anonymity that fails to guarantee any lasting ground’ (p. 170). He cites Sharon Cameron (p. 4) as suggesting that one way to consider the idea of ‘impersonality’ is not so much as the ‘negation’ of the person but as a ‘penetration through or a falling outside of the boundary of the human particular’: the concept of impersonality, Cameron suggests, ‘disrupts elementary categories we suppose to be fundamental to specifying human distinctiveness’ (Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. ix. 18 Quotations from Keats’s letters are from Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), cited as Letters: JK in the text (except where otherwise noted, I have ignored deletions and silently corrected spelling in line with Rollins’s suggestions). There is in fact no use of the word ‘intimacy’ in the letters; ‘intimate/ly’ appears three times (at Letters: JK I, p. 153 and 2. p. 208 (where it is quoted), and, most tellingly, Letters: JK I, p. 404, where Keats urges George and Georgiana to think of his ‘Pleasure in Solitude’ rather than in ‘commerce’ with a world in which people ‘do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance’ (Letters: JK I, p. 404). 226 A. BENNETT sister-in-law Georgiana written between December 16, 1818, and January 4, 1819, are exemplary. One of a series of ‘journal letters’ that Keats sent to the couple after they sailed to America in June 1818 with a plan to purchase land and seek a living in the ‘back settlements’ of Kentucky (Letters: JK I, p. 287), Keats’s letter opens with the ‘worst news’ possible—with news that is not in fact news because it is fully expected and because, as Keats hopes, George and Georgiana will already have been informed of it in another letter from a mutual friend, William Haslam:

My dear Brother and Sister, You will have been prepared, before this reaches you for the worst news you could have, nay if Haslam’s letter arrives in proper time, I have a consolation in thinking the first shock will be past before you receive this. The last days of Poor Tom were of the most distressing nature; but his last moments were not so painful, and his very last without a pang—I will not enter into any parsonic comments on death—yet the common observations of the commonest people on death are as true as their proverbs. I have scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature o[r] other—neither had Tom. (Letters: JK II, p. 4)

Keats can’t quite bring himself to say the news that their brother died fifteen days earlier, hoping that he doesn’t need to because he says it in every sentence without exactly saying it.19 The letter’s opening sentences dwell self-reflexively on communication, and on how one can communicate a truth that cannot be spoken and that is, essentially, one way or another, anyway already known. As such, the opening is concerned with the question of intimacy—with an intimacy whereby something can be understood without being spoken—and involves imagining, forward and back in time and across space, the seemingly intimate presence of others. ‘The distance between us is so great, the Posts so uncertain’, Keats complains in a letter written later in the year (Letters: JK II, p. 229), one of a series of complaints about the physical and practical fragility of correspondence that conditions his relationship with his brother and the woman he habitually refers to as his ‘sister’; ‘I in my carelessness never thought of knowing where a letter would find them on the other side,’ he

19 In his previous journal letter to the couple, Keats also comments on how he balks at communicating bad news about Tom: writing on October 14, 1818, he explains that he has delayed writing to them about Tom because ‘I could not bring myself to say the truth, that he is not better, but much worse—However it must be told’ (Letters: JK I, p. 391). 14 JOHN KEATS’S EPISTOLARY INTIMACY 227 had already confessed to Tom some weeks after the departure of George and Georgiana (Letters: JK I, p. 351). But as it crosses the Atlantic Ocean, the December-January journal letter is woven through and around a complex temporality that involves and interanimates (a) a future in which it will arrive, (b) a past reflected on from that future moment, (c) the now of writing and (d) the moment at which another letter will have arrived (in the temporal space between the writing of this letter and its delivery)— one that will already have expressed what Keats’s letter must but cannot articulate. The thought of the letter from William Haslam offers Keats a form of consolation that is notable for the fact that it can do nothing to assuage the pain of Tom’s death but might nevertheless go some way towards ameliorating the harm caused by his own letter in announcing it. Keats gains a certain consolation, in other words, from thinking that by the time George and Georgiana are reading his letter, they will already know that Tom is dead, so that the news that his letter brings with it might, in that sense, not be news at all. And Keats’s letter is about consolation in other ways. He offers consolation to George and Georgiana by reporting that Tom’s last moments were without pain and consoles them while saying he will not (‘I will not enter into any parsonic comments on death’) by affirming his and Tom’s belief in a kind of non-denominational and indeed non-theistic life-after-death. Finally, while we cannot know to which proverbs on death Keats alludes,20 simply the reminder of such sayings and the gesture towards a universalizing sensus communis—the common observations of the commonest people—is itself intended as a consoling move (both for Keats and for his two readers). Such consolatory gestures foreground the way that intimacy is contingent both on the play of language, rhetoric, and intertextuality and on the ineluctable fact of the vast distances, both geographical and (given the vagaries of the early nineteenth-century transatlantic postal system)

20 One might make a stab at guessing that he might be thinking of common or folk versions of the consolatory sayings of far-from-common writers such as, for example, Epicurus, ‘Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not’; Shakespeare, ‘All that live must die, passing through nature to eternity’; Thomas Browne, ‘death is the cure of all diseases’; Robert Burton, ‘A true saying, Timor mortis, morte pejor, the fear of death is worse than death itself’; Milton, ‘Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity’; or Bacon, ‘It is natural to die as to be born’. That Keats was fond of proverbs is attested to by the list of almost one hundred proverbs, proverbial sayings and commonplaces that Rollins helpfully includes in the index to the Letters: JK II, pp. 425–26). 228 A. BENNETT temporal.21 The letters to George and Georgiana Keats are frequently concerned with these two aspects of epistolary intimacy: the fragility and uncertainty of contact over time and space (it is a very real possibility that an early nineteenth-century transatlantic letter will not arrive at its destination) and the mutual ‘consolations’ of letter writing (‘I comfort myself in the idea that you are a consolation to each other’, Keats writes in November 1819 (Letters: JK II, p. 231)). After breaking (or not breaking) the news of their brother’s death in the opening sentences of the December-January letter, Keats swiftly moves on to the work of updating his readers with news from England, before breaking off to imagine, in a lengthy and phil- osophically probing passage, their lives. ‘How are you going on now?’ he asks:

The goings on of the world make me dizzy—there you are with Birkbeck— here I am with brown—sometimes I fancy an immense separation, and sometimes as at present, a direct communication of spirit with you. That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality—there will be no space and consequently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other—when they will completely understand each other— while we in this world merely comprehend each other in different degrees—the higher degree of good so higher is our Love and friendship… (Letters: JK II, p. 5)

The letter generates a sense of intimacy, in other words, in the assertion that an ‘immense separation’ has its own consolation in paradoxically producing a ‘direct communication of spirit’: it is precisely the absence of bodies that allows for intimate communication founded on mutual ‘understanding’.22 The passage hints that it is the supplement of writing— a consolatory supplement that is necessitated by the vast distances involved and the absence of any form of modern telecommunications—that

21 On the difficulties in communicating between England and America in the period, see Denise Gigante, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 171, pp. 238–41; on the ‘revolutionary transformation in America’s postal network’ from around 1845 onwards, see David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), ch.1 (p. 10). 22 On this point, see Gigante, The Keats Brothers, p. 196; as Gigante points out, when George returned to England briefly in the winter of 1819–20, the brothers were to feel ‘vaguely estranged’ (p. 316); by September 1820, Keats can comment to Charles Brown that ‘I seldom think of my Brother and Sister in america’ (Letters: JK II, p. 345). 14 JOHN KEATS’S EPISTOLARY INTIMACY 229 produces this ‘communication of spirits’. The letter, in this sense, is an intimacy machine, a tele-technology that generates the effect of intimacy—but also therefore produces intimacy itself. In a later section of the letter, written on January 4, Keats returns to the question of intimate contact across time and space. ‘I have no thought pervading me so constantly and frequently as that of you’, he says in the context of apologizing (as he often does in these letters) for not writing as frequently as he has promised and had intended (Letters: JK II, pp. 20–21). ‘I bid you good by’, he says almost at the end of the letter: ‘I have been thinking of these sheets so long that I appear in closing them to take my leave of you’, he says: ‘but that is not it’, he continues hastily. ‘I shall immediately as I send this off begin my journal’ (Letters: JK II, p. 30). He won’t be taking leave of George and Georgiana, in other words, because he will immediately start writing to them again. Writing has the power to make the absent addressee present in this fiction of closeness, of intimate presence, and the sense of proximity, of closeness or intimacy imagined from a distance is emphasized again and again in these letters across an ocean. And yet, as Keats concedes in one letter, it is not necessarily the letter’s content or subject-matter but just the fact that it is written that can generate this effect: ‘After all it is not much matter what it may be about; for the very words from such a distance penned by this hand will be grateful to you’, he writes (Letters: JK I, pp. 400–01). Communication as communication—phatic communication—is the point of communication, its very purpose and aim: just to establish and enact communication itself, to confirm that there is such a thing. In an entry from March 12, 1819, in another journal letter, Keats quotes a lengthy passage from William Hazlitt’s famously excoriating public attack on the Tory critic William Gifford before abruptly dropping the topic to give George and Georgiana a ‘picture’ of himself as he sits by his fire ‘at its last click’ in the evening before retiring to bed. ‘These are trifles’, he comments, ‘but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me’ (Letters: JK II, p. 73). Knowing such details—like knowing ‘in what position Shakespeare sat when he began “To be or not to be”’— becomes interesting precisely ‘from distance of time or place’, he remarks, before closing this part of the letter with the thought of an almost lover- like intimacy of bodily presence23:

23 Compare a letter to his actual lover, Fanny Brawne, of July 8, 1819, where he opens by writing of his ‘delight’ at receiving a letter from her and comments that he is ‘almost aston- 230 A. BENNETT

I hope you are both now in that sweet sleep which no two beings deserve more than you do—I must fancy you so—and please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing over you and your lives—God bless you—I whisper good night in your ears and you will dream of me. (Letters: JK II pp. 73–74)

There is, perhaps, nothing more intimate, nothing more loving and lover-like, than whispering in someone’s ear. And yet Keats also explicitly acknowledges the fact that underlies the intimacies in all of these letters: temporal and geographical distance paradoxically increases intimacy in an example of what Esther Milne refers to as ‘the intimacy of absence’.24 The point is made even more forcefully in a passage from a letter to George and Georgiana of October 1818 when Keats breaks off to directly address Georgiana. He writes that he can confide in Georgiana more easily in writing than if he was talking to her, in a passage that enacts the implicit fiction of epistolary intimacy (a fiction revealed here because the address to Georgiana will also, by default, be read by George, from whom, however, it is explicitly excluded): ‘If you were here my dear Sister I could not pro- nounce the words which I can write to you from a distance: I have a tenderness for you, and an admiration which I feel to be as great and more chaste than I can have for any woman in the world’ (Letters: JK I, p. 392). Lover-like—as he often markedly is when writing to Georgiana—Keats has to insist that he is not her lover, such is the degree of epistolary intimacy in a paragraph that also directly confronts the paradox that he can only be lover-like if he is not a lover, if he is not in bodily, personal, intimate contact and only in touch through the lover-like uncertainties embedded within the dilatoriness, delay and deferral of the postal system.25 ished that any absent one should have that luxurious power over my senses which I feel’ (Letters: JK II, p. 126). As Esther Milne argues, in letters and postcards, the reader can construct an ‘imagined, incorporeal body for their correspondents’ that is potentially threatened by ‘the actual body encountered in face-to-face communication’ (p. 2). 24 Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email, p. 55; see also Milne’s consideration of the way that letter writers ‘aim for a sense of immediacy and presence by foregrounding the body of the writer’ and by attempts to make the ‘materiality of the letter’ itself stand for ‘the correspondent’s body’ (p. 53); a ‘primary fantasy’ of letter writing, she argues, is that it can be experienced as ‘more authentic and intimate than communicating face-to-face’ (p. 72). 25 See Keats’s lover-like poem addressed to Georgiana written in December 1816, ‘Nymph of the downward smile’ (published as ‘To G. A. W.’); he also wrote a fraternally loving acros- tic to Georgiana (‘Give me your patience Sister’) soon after her marriage to his brother that he included in a letter to the couple in June 1818 (Letters: JK 1. pp. 303–04; the letter went 14 JOHN KEATS’S EPISTOLARY INTIMACY 231

In the December-January journal letter, Keats comments to his brother and ‘sister’ that if he was writing to friends whom he knows less well and whose identity has therefore been ‘less impressed upon’ him, he would feel that they were ‘so much the farther from me in proportion’. He does not feel so far from George and Georgiana, he remarks, because he can remember their ‘Ways and Manners and actions’:

I know you manner of thinking, you manner of feeling: I know that shape your joy or your sorrow would take, I know the manner of you walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laughing, punning, and every action so truly that you seem near to me. (Letters: JK II, p. 5)

While Keats often writes ‘you’ when he means ‘your’ in his letters, its repetition in this passage seems to have a particular resonance: he knows the (plural) ‘you’ because he knows ‘your’ ways of thinking and feeling, of walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laughing, punning and every other action: to know how someone looks and acts, thinks and feels, is to know that person, to know ‘you,’ he insists. The verbal-grammatical glitch itself performs the intimacy of this connection by not only referring to ‘your’ habits but actively addressing ‘you’ in doing so.26 And it is this, perhaps, that allows Keats to finish this line of thought by imagining George and Georgiana imagining him:

You will remember me in the same manner—and the more when I tell you that I shall read a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten o Clock—you read one at the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room… (Letters: JK II, p. 5)

It is this imaginary closeness, this unreal, non-existent intimate bodily proximity, that the letter grasps at, both in theory, so to speak, and in its existence as a letter that conveys the idea across an ocean and in doing so attempts to bring into being proximity, to enact or perform a certain inwardness—not least in its understated move into the imperative mood as

missing and he included it again in a later letter: see 2. p. 195). ‘I like her better and better’, he comments to Benjamin Bailey in June 1818, giving her his highest compliment: ‘she is the most disinterested woman I ever knew’ (Letters: JK I, p. 293). 26 See Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email, pp. 58–59, on deixis as a strategy of epistolary intimacy. 232 A. BENNETT he commands: ‘You will remember me’.27 But like Keats’s you/your equivocation or error, the non-reciprocal grammar of this order might indicate that what is at work here is a pretend intimacy, an intimacy effect. Keats’s American relatives are not in the same room or even in the same time-zone, and the letter may or may not safely arrive at its destination. Passing between them, joining them, the letter is itself a signifier of the ‘immense’ temporal and geographical distances separating them. The letter only joins them together because they are separated and its existence itself signifies this distance.28 As the passage acknowledges, intimacy in the conventional sense is, fundamentally, an intimacy effect, an effect generated in and by language and rhetoric, by a certain textuality. But the passage foregrounds a further structure of fragility that profoundly underlies Keats’s insistence on intimacy: the fragility of personal identity or subjectivity. The idea that Keats alludes to here concerning the way that other people ‘press’ on him is echoed prominently at other moments in his letters and is linked to the question of intimacy, not least through etymology. The word ‘intimate’ stems from the Latin verb ‘inti- mare’, ‘to put or bring into, drive or press into, to make known’, from intimus, ‘inmost’ (OED ‘intimate’, v.); to be intimate, in other words, with its modern English adjectival senses of ‘inmost, most inward, deep seated’ and of ‘proceeding from, concerning, or affecting one’s inmost self; closely personal’ (OED ‘intimate’, adj. and n., 1, 2), involves an assumption of a certain presence that also, and especially for Keats, entails some kind of emotional, affective, and even physical pressure (‘to drive or press into’). In other words, intimacy is bound up with a bounded and carefully tended but also friable sense of personal identity. Keats’s letters allude at several key moments precisely to the way that identity is generated by, or put under, a certain pressure in and through intimacy. In a letter to George and Georgiana of October 1818, for example, Keats contrasts his feelings for his younger sister with his feelings for his brother and sister-in-law. The fifteen-year-old Fanny’s ‘character is not formed’, he comments, and therefore ‘her identity does not press upon me as yours does’ (Letters: JK I, p. 392). There is a suggestion in this of the ‘pressure’ that is put on him by his intimacy even (or especially) with those to whom

27 Compare the moment towards the end of the letter where he refers to the next letter from George and Georgiana that will, he says, be ‘the key by which I shall open your hearts and see what spaces want filling, with any particular information’ (Letters: JK II, p. 29). 28 See Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email, 59, on the letter as a paradoxical asynchronous mode of communication that can also insist on a shared moment. 14 JOHN KEATS’S EPISTOLARY INTIMACY 233 he is most close, a suggestion that the fully formed identities of adult family members somehow ‘press’ on his own identity, his own sense of self. A sense of ambivalence towards the way that people and things ‘press’ on Keats’s sense of selfhood had already appeared in an earlier letter, in fact: writing to Benjamin Bailey in November 1817, he says that he wishes Bailey could know ‘all that I think about Genius and the Heart’ and that his friend is ‘thoroughly acquainted with my innermost breast in that respect’. This intimate confession of his ‘innermost’ heart is followed by a remark, ‘in passing’, of ‘one thing that has pressed upon me lately’: his sense that ‘Men of Genius’ influence others while not themselves having any sense of self, any ‘individuality’ or ‘determined Character’ (Letters: JK I, p. 184). Keats confesses to an idea of anonymity that he can’t escape (‘I must say’, he says) and that ‘presses’ on him in a way that is not a little unnerving for someone so urgently desirous of being an autonomous, self- sufficient man of genius. The pressure of other people, the way their presence presses upon Keats’s own sense of self, is elsewhere more explicitly figured as oppressive: writing to Charles Dilke in the weeks before the death of Tom, for example, Keats complains that the ‘identity’ of his sick brother ‘presses upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out’ (Letters: JK I, p. 369). Most notably, perhaps, the idea returns in a very different but very telling context when he writes to Richard Woodhouse about his ideas of authorship in a famous letter that configures what Keats calls the ‘camelion Poet’ as ‘the most un-poetical of any thing in existence’: in a letter that has so forcefully marked our sense of a Keatsian poetic identity, he claims that ‘not myself goes home to myself’ when he is in a room full of people so that ‘the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me’ (‘I am in a very little time annihilated’, he remarks) (Letters: JK I, p. 387).29 The formulation expresses Keats’s sense that his identity is

29 The idea recurs, but less evocatively, in a letter of March 1819 when Keats complains about the irksome feeling of being in an ‘indolent’ mood but ‘surrounded with unpleasant human identities’ that ‘press upon one just enough to prevent one getting in to a lazy position’ but ‘not enough to interest or rouse one’ (Letters: JK 2. p. 77). In a despairing mood towards the end of his life when he is waiting in Naples to travel to Rome, Keats complains to Charles Brown of the ‘load of WRETCHEDNESS which presses upon me’ (Letters: JK II, p. 351), while earlier on, in his ‘Chamber of Maiden Thought’ letter of May 1818, one can hear the word in his comment that the world is ‘full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression’, and can hear it again in a letter written a few days later in which he comments on being so ‘depressed that I have not an Idea to put to paper’ (Letters: JK 1. p. 281, p. 287; italics added). See also his comment in a letter that he had failed to post to Tom and George: ‘my conscience presses heavy on me for not sending it’, he tells them (Letters: JK I, p. 206). 234 A. BENNETT both formed and deformed, both pressed on and pressed out—‘annihilated’ even—by the presence of other people (or just by the thought of their presence) in a way that modulates and determines [fundamentally] his sense of authorship and of what it means to be a writer. To be a writer involves the need to escape the intimate presence of other people and, or because, one is the kind of person (a kind of non-person) that is particularly vulnerable to the pressure of these other identities. Writing of the poet’s ‘anonymous life,’ Khalip comments that Keats’s ‘vulnerability’ involves a consciousness that ‘can only conceive of its own intelligibility through others’ so that his ‘projection outward’ involves a ‘compulsive need to originate [himself] through others’ even as those others threaten to ‘annihilate’ his fragile sense of personal and authorial identity, his sense of self.30 Writing poems, with their inbuilt potential for the generation of an intimacy effect that allows for the construction of an absent, annihilated or ‘obliterated’ self (a non-self or fiction of selfhood, indeed), is one way to achieve such a sense of ‘anonymous’ identity.31 The practice of writing letters, with its inbuilt construction or performance of intimacy at a distance, is, paradoxically, another way—even while a personal letter is (always) signed and always founded in a certain assumption of intimate contact. Letter writing is something like the ideal format for a nobody like John Keats, for whom the unsustainable pressure of other people’s identities can itself characterize intimacy. Both individual or personal and impersonal or general, both document and work, the letter enables Keats to enact or perform, indeed to generate, a sense of intimacy that is contingent upon a certain absence and that is thereby in effect precisely premised on its own impossibility.

30 Khalip, Anonymous Life, p. 45. 31 For Keats’s telling use of ‘obliterate’, see his letter to George and Tom Keats of December 1817 in which he explains his theory of ‘Negative Capability’: ‘with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration’ (Letters: JK I, p. 194). CHAPTER 15

‘don’t imagine it an a propos des bottes’: Keats, the Letter and the Poem

Anthony Howe

The way we typically organize a poet’s written legacy, in discrete, standard editions of poetry, (usually) letters and, where relevant, prose, enforces a generic framework that tends to conceal certain forms of writing, especially those with a hybrid character. The prose poetry of Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, for instance, is not entirely at home in an edition of Shelley’s prose, placed alongside—in the main—earlier political writing composed before Shelley even thought of himself seriously as a poet. The text’s prose status, however, has undoubtedly shaped the reception of a work that has been read too often as an argument without reference to its qualities as a literary performance.1 Shelley’s earlier political prose is much closer, chronologically and intellectually, to Queen Mab, a poem, but a poem in which the words organized in verse form are outnumbered by the words of Shelley’s scientific and philosophical prose notes. This prose is

1 For a notable exception, see Michael O’Neill, ‘Emulating Plato: Shelley as Translator and Prose Poet’, The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 239–55 (pp. 239–40).

A. Howe (*) Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 235 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_15 236 A. HOWE very different, deliberately so, to the prose of A Defence, each representing a varying estimate of the philosophical significance of poetic expression. Yet such fine generic complexities become lost in our oversized holding pens—poetry/prose—and, as a result, Shelley’s remarkably subtle thinking about written form, as it develops through his changing experimental practice, is obscured. If prose poetry and author-annotated poems are harder to see because of the taxonomic bluntness of our editorial conventions, then so is the subject of the present essay, letters that include poetry as part of their textual makeup, and in which the text’s prose and verse elements interact in critically significant ways. As Daniel Karlin notes, ‘an author who writes or copies a poem into a letter is doing something different from writing a letter accompanying a separate textual entity, whether manuscript or print’. In the former case, the verse element ‘belongs integrally to the process of composition of another text’.2 This is not to say, of course, that all poems found in personal correspondence will resonate tellingly within their letter frames. Typically, the poetry component of such texts is collected out of letters and into editions of poetry, the original letter context lost, except, perhaps, for some directly relevant extracts transcribed into editorial notes. This wheat and chaff process of collection responds to traditional assumptions about the superiority of verse and has become naturalized, yet it can distract from the processes of composition and reflection as they actually occurred. This is not to argue that poems should be read as part of an indistinct, unevaluated, textual mishmash. This would risk overlooking the often very clear, and artistically important, generic distinctions through which poets take their stand in relation to tradition. We must also consider the related decisions poets make about publication. Yet there are also cases, I would contend, in which poems are impoverished, perhaps even rendered meaningless, by their dissociation from the letters into which they were written. This loss, I would suggest, is not always simply one of biographical and historical information (which can be corrected by editorial notes) but also one of literary form.

* * *

2 Daniel Karlin, ‘Editing Poems in Letters’, Letter Writing Among Poets, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 31–46 (p. 31, p. 35). 15 ‘DON’T IMAGINE IT AN A PROPOS DES BOTTES’: KEATS, THE LETTER… 237

Keats habitually moves between prose and verse in his correspondence and often reflects directly upon connections between these different elements. Such juxtapositions can in themselves illuminate a poet’s ways of thinking about poetry as a distinct mode of writing, perhaps especially so in the Romantic period, when traditional distinctions between poetry and prose were breaking down under pressure from theoretical interventions such as Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Moreover, by framing a poem with the occurrences of daily life, the usual territory of the familiar letter, the poet brings into revealing proximity his public and private modes of self-projection. The ideas and preoccupations that motivate his art—his reaching out to an unknown audience and to the future—find correspondences and elucidations in more intimate acts of address. Poetry-containing letters are, in many cases, disorderly, indirect works of criticism which, in this capacity, have eluded our categorical sense of things. To give them fair hearing might be timely as we enter the age of the digital edition, a form under little pressure to cut, extract, frame and distinguish. This essay sets out to identify and think through some of the severed connections upon which our current standard editions are based. Keats, in some ways a special case due to the unique nature of his letters, is the primary focus, but it is hoped that editors, as well as literary critics, will find things of more general use. The importance of reading a poem together with its host letter becomes especially clear where a writer explicitly signals a connection between the letter and poem texts. This is the case with Keats’s sonnet ‘Why did I laugh tonight?’,3 which is part of the very long journal-letter to George and Georgiana Keats, written between February and May 1819. Keats introduces the sonnet as follows:

I am ever affraid [sic] that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet—but look over the last two pages and ask yourself if I have not that in me which will well bear the buffets of the world. It will be the best comment on my sonnet […]

3 The sonnet appears to have been copied into the letter from a draft holograph which no longer exists. The only version of the sonnet we have in holograph, therefore, is part of the letter text. Karlin discusses the implications of editing in this situation in detail. My analysis owes a debt to Karlin’s work. 238 A. HOWE

Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell: No God, no Deamon of severe response Deigns to reply from heaven or from Hell. – Then to my human heart I turn at once - Heart! thou and I are sad here and alone; Say, wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain! O Darkness! Darkness! Ever must I moan To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain! Why did I laugh? I know this being’s lease My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: Yet could I on this very midnight cease, And the world’s gaudy ensigns see in shreds. Verse, fame and Beauty are intense indeed But Death intenser – Deaths is Life’s high mead.4

Keats had considered not sending his poem because its gloomy—even suicidal—thoughts might worry his relatives. The letter context, however, allows him to qualify the sonnet’s intensity, to place it in a mediat- ing textual environment in which the comings and goings of life offer perspective. The genuine but temporary gloom of the sonnet is modified by the sentiments immediately preceding the point of its inclusion in the letter, the ‘last two pages’, where we find more hopeful musings: ‘there is an ellectric [sic] fire in human nature tending to purify [;] there is continually some birth of new heroism’ (Letters: JK II, p. 80). The letter thus critically frames the sonnet, raising questions about the permanence implied by both its tone and form. The moment of poetic conception, in this case a moment of intense introspection, is taken in reflection through the process of letter writing. Important poetry, the letter-poem text implies in its form, is not simply an articulation of self and its intensifica- tion of the present moment; it involves, also, a recognition of the poem’s status as fragment, of the meaning inherent to the white space the poem occupies. Immediately before writing ‘Why did I laugh tonight?’ into the letter, Keats admits, enigmatically, that he is ‘writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness’ (Letters: JK II, p. 80). This recognition, that writing is not an all-encompassing act of expression but a ‘straining at’ within a ‘great darkness’, is abetted, for Keats, by the action of writing poems into letters. The letter brings the

4 Keats’s letters are quoted from The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2. p. 81. Subsequently quoted in the text. 15 ‘DON’T IMAGINE IT AN A PROPOS DES BOTTES’: KEATS, THE LETTER… 239 poem’s enveloping and unutterable context to mind in a move akin to that of Romantic irony.

* * *

Keats again draws attention to the letter-poem relation in his letter of March 13, 1818, to Benjamin Bailey, in which he includes a version of the sonnet later published, in a significantly revised version, as ‘The Human Seasons’5:

I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance—As Tradesmen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardor of the pursuer— being in itself a nothing—Ethereal thing[s] may at least be thus real, divided under three heads—Things real—things semireal—and no things—Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakspeare— Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit—Which by the by stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds, insomuch as they are able to “conse[r]crate whate’er they look upon” I have written a Sonnet here of a somewhat collateral nature—so don’t imagine it an a propos des bottes.

Four Seasons fill the Measure of the year; Four Seasons are there in the mind of Man. He hath his lusty spring when fancy clear Takes in all beauty with an easy span: He hath his Summer, when luxuriously He chews the honied cud of fair spring thoughts, Till, in his Soul dissolv’d they come to be Part of himself. He hath his Autumn ports And Havens of repose, when his tired wings Are folded up, and he content to look On Mists in idleness: to let fair things Pass by unheeded as a threshhold brook. He hath his Winter too of pale Misfeature, Or else he would forget his mortal nature. (Letters: JK I, pp. 242–43).

5 In Leigh Hunt’s Pocket-Book for 1819 (1818). There is a ‘definite possibility’, according to Jack Stillinger, that the changes were Hunt’s. Jack Stillinger, The Texts of Keats’s Poems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 179. 240 A. HOWE

If the poem is not ‘a propos des bottes’ (literally ‘about boots’), by which Keats means that it is not unrelated to the surrounding prose, then in what way or ways are the two linked or ‘collateral’? The connection, to me at least, is not immediately obvious. Keats is confessing his concerns about the value of poetry which might, he fears, be no better than an amusing diver- sion, ‘a mere Jack a lanthern’, even where the performance is brilliant. The next idea (‘As Tradesmen say every thing is worth what it will fetch’) feigns to do away with this problem by tying the value of poetry to its market value. In this sense Byron’s poetry would have the most ‘value’ as it sells the most copies. But Keats didn’t believe this, and any such idea is banished before the thought is finished. The value of a mental pursuit, in the second half of the sentence, is associated with the ‘ardor of the pursuer’. This requires a little unpicking. The two clauses (‘As Tradesmen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardor of the pursuer’) are placed in direct relation by the phrase ‘so probably’. The syntax thus suggests a continuity of thought between the ‘Tradesman’ and the idea of ‘ardor’, but, not uniquely in the letters, grammar and meaning are not entirely in harmony. Keats is saying something like this: ‘a given thing, according to the laws of the market, has a relative monetary value depending upon what a buyer is prepared to pay for it. Similarly, in the valuation of mental pursuits such as poetry, the value of a given unit is relative, depending upon the “ardor” of the mind that produces it’. Thus, the connection between the two clauses lies purely in the idea of relative value, and no substantive connection is being made between trade and poetry, however tempting it has been to see one.6 Any work of the mind, the letter continues, is ‘in itself a nothing’ (it has no physical reality), but a ‘nothing’ can have great ‘worth’, depending upon the quality, or intensity (‘ardor’), of the human background from which it emerges. Keats now quickly segues into a brilliant reorganization of traditional and Enlightenment ontology in which physically non-existent things are classified under three headings. Some are simply ‘real’, apparently regardless of the individual mind’s relation to them. This appears to be something like objective reality, although an unusual, if entirely Keatsian, one as it

6 When Terence Hoagwood claims that the ‘passage assimilates to the fictional symbolism of money not only poetry but likewise the structure of “every mental pursuit”’, he mistakes the nature of the connection Keats is making. There is no assimilation of poetry to money (symbolically or otherwise) because the only relevance of the ‘Tradesmen’ to poetry is entirely to do with relative value. Terence Hoagwood, ‘Keats, fictionality and finance’,Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 127–42 (p. 131). 15 ‘DON’T IMAGINE IT AN A PROPOS DES BOTTES’: KEATS, THE LETTER… 241 includes ‘passages of Shakspeare’. Then there is a level of reality that requires the mind to meet the object half way; here ‘semireal’ things become fully real through a ‘greeting of the Spirit’. The final kind of reality depends entirely upon the individual mind; here the object becomes real through an ‘ardent pursuit’. The recollection here of ‘ardor of the pursuer’ (a phrase Keats associates with mental pursuits, specifically poetry) in ‘ardent pursuit’ suggests that it is in this category that Keats is placing the bulk of poetry (certain ‘passages of Shakspeare’, and perhaps other great work, excepted).7 Where later theories of poetic value tend to emphasize the moment of reception, and the reader’s productive role (e.g. Bennett’s ‘greeting’ idea), Keats, here at least, suggests an author-centred poetics. It is the poet’s cast of mind and thus the poem’s point of origin that interests him. If this originary state is one of ‘ardent pursuit’, it dignifies and consecrates the pursuer, it ‘stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds’. Keats retains questions of value, and their determination, at the level of the poet rather than releasing them to the published poem. Evaluation thus comes to depend, precariously (all the more where there has been editorial intervention), upon the transparency of the poem in the direction of the mind from which it emerged. Keats thus disempowers the reader as ultimate arbiter by asserting the limitations of the poem as a conduit for its originating consciousness. Here the surrounding letter, by giving a fuller sense of that consciousness, potentially takes on a validating role within Keats’s implied poetics. But what, the question remains, have Keats’s speculations in the letter got to do, specifically, with the sonnet? The poem identifies four stages of life—roughly: youth, manhood, middle-age and old-age—and attributes each with a different philosophical and emotional attitude. Perhaps there is some co-laterality between these four states of apprehension and the three modes of reality described in the letter. In particular, the young man’s ‘lusty spring’, when he ‘Takes in’ beauty with ease, chimes with the letter’s ‘ardent pursuit’. This suggests, what we might in any case suspect, that the youth of the sonnet has autobiographical elements; he is an aspir-

7 Andrew Bennett, in his reading of the letter, notes that ‘most literature […] is likely to be in the middle [category]. Reading may be understood as precisely such a “greeting”, reading involves active participation in the making of the text’. Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 53. This seems right in general, but it does not appear to be what Keats is saying. If ‘Poetry’ is an instance, as I take Keats to be saying, of a ‘mental pursuit [that] takes its reality and worth from the ardor of the pursuer’, then surely it is being associated not with the second category but with the third, ‘Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit’. 242 A. HOWE ing poet full of potential but also of illusions. The next stage, ‘Summer’, or manhood, is more reflective: the grown man ‘chews the honied cud of fair spring thoughts’, until in ‘his Soul dissolv’d they come to be/Part of himself’. This sounds at first like a more promising situation for the poet, if that is what he is: rather than lustily grabbing whatever comes his way he ruminates and assimilates. Yet this mode of apprehension remains tied to self, ‘himself’, the final word. Although, in its capacity as metaphor, ‘chews the honied cud’ suggests an advance in thoughtfulness, it also cannot help but bring to mind the inanity of bovine mastication. Maturity is no guarantee of originality and only a few write above the level of the herd, whatever their age. Such poetry may derive value from its ‘ardor’, but it remains, in the Keatsian scheme of things, of the second order. It sounds more like the ‘wordsworthian or egotistical’ mode of poetry than the ‘camelion’, Shakespearean, mode to which Keats aspired (Letters: JK I, pp. 386–87). Whoever edited the poem for publication had the right instincts in cutting its most Wordsworth-derivative phrase, ‘in his Soul dissolv’d’ etc..,8 but the sonnet remains mired in Keats’s necessary failure as a Wordsworthian. It cannot find a narrative of development and thus become a secure work of poetics because the poetics, for Keats at least, is wrong. What might have been a poem of progress, an account of the poet’s growth, doesn’t get much further than a marking of changes. The generalized subject ends not as a wise seer, one who has perfected his apprehensions of the world, but as an object for contemplation himself, an anthromorphed memento mori. The sonnet both extends and interrupts the letter, which continues:

Aye this may be carried—but what am I talking of—it is an old maxim of mine and of course must be well known that evey [sic] point of thought is the centre of an intellectual world—the two uppermost thoughts in a man’s mind are the two poles of his World he revolves on them and every thing is southward or northward to him through their means. (Letters: JK I, p. 243)

The problem, again, is one of restricted vision. A ‘point of thought’—a poem perhaps—stands in relation to something larger, an ‘intellectual world’ that it does not contain and cannot fully express. The poet is forever

8 Unfortunately, the revised version is worse: ‘He has his Summer, when luxuriously/ Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves/To ruminate’. Keats’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 132. This edition is used for Keats’s poetry unless otherwise stated. 15 ‘DON’T IMAGINE IT AN A PROPOS DES BOTTES’: KEATS, THE LETTER… 243

‘straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness’. Poetry, in its egotistical mode at least, is not so much a mode of seeing but an education in how little we do see. The great poet, for Keats, overcomes this by having ‘no Identity—he is continually […] filling some other body’ (Letters: JK I, p. 387). In escaping the occlusions of self, he apprehends— and comes to recreate—what the egotistical poet can only mark as unknown. The attempt to understand this distinction, very loosely between Wordsworth and Shakespeare, is key to Keats’s most adventurous theoriz- ing in his letters, whether in the ‘camelion poet’ passage or the description of ‘Negative Capability’ (Letters: JK I, p. 193). Yet it is not only during such famous articulations that Keats does his thinking. The effort is also carried through the immersive letter form and the relations between the letters’ constituent parts. ‘Aye this may be carried’, Keats writes immediately after his sonnet. He means, presumably, something like: ‘this is ok, it will do—Hunt will knock it into shape then knock it out in one of his magazines’. But it is also carried with the letter and, in another sense, by the letter, which approximates the surrounding ‘intellectual world’ within which it stands as a ‘point of thought’. Letters, for Keats, bespeak, in their very form, the broader contexts that thought senses but cannot directly confront. The manuscript letter, a striking instance of crossing or cross-hatching, emphasizes the point. After writing out a sheet of letter prose, Keats turned his page 90 degrees, and wrote across his original text, a common practice to save on paper and delivery costs. The sonnet is written at right angles (not collaterally) to an earlier part of the letter that ranges through subjects from Tom’s illness to the desperate state of the Devonshire weather. When we read ‘I have written a Sonnet here of a somewhat collateral nature’ in a printed edition of the letters, the ‘here’ seems redundant. In manuscript, however, it becomes an emphatic gesture: ‘here, onto this stuff of life, from the deadly serious (a dying brother), to the light- hearted (jokes about the weather), I inscribe a sonnet’.

* * *

The journal-letter to George and Georgina Keats of September 1819 contains one of Keats’s most striking reflections on the purposes and possibilities of written correspondence: 244 A. HOWE

You see I keep adding a sheet daily till I send the packet off—which I shall not do for a few days as I am inclined to write a good deal: for there can be nothing so remembrancing and enchaining as a good long letter be it composed of what it may—From the time you left me, our friends say I have altered completely—am not the same person—perhaps in this letter I am for in a letter one takes up one’s existence from the time we last met—I dare say you have altered also—every man does—Our bodies every seven years are completely fresh-materiald—seven years ago it was not this hand that clench’d itself against Hammond—We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch it: till there’s not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for St Anthony’s shirt. (Letters: JK II, p. 208)

Sheer extension of paper and ink—apparently regardless of content— has its own affective charge and function. The repeated branchings out and intertextual dartings of these compendious and generically diverse letters are acts of love. This particular letter contains, among other things, an amusing verse skit on the subject of pining lovers (collected as ‘Pensive they sit’), snippets from letters Keats has received from Dilke and Reynolds, an extended quotation from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a short expostulation of his own on political history, extracts from earlier letters from Scotland not sent at the time (including two poems) and a separate section (in effect a separate letter) addressed to Georgiana in the gossipy tone Keats often used with his sister-in-law. The letter’s most significant verse inclusion is a draft of lines 1–114 of ‘The Eve of St Mark’, a fragment of narrative verse centring on a young reader, Bertha, who appears mysteriously transfixed by an old, illuminated book. Aside from Keats’s brief, and often-quoted, introduction of it to George and Georgiana,9 the poem, which was not seen in print (labelled ‘unfinished’) until 1848, has been little discussed in relation to the letter into which it was copied and, to a small extent, reworked. In one respect this is understandable given that Keats first drafted the poem back in February; its inclusion in this particular letter, we might therefore assume, is arbitrary. Where ‘Pensive they sit’ emerges from the flow of the letter and is integral to it, ‘The Eve of St Mark’ appears to be copied in primarily because George and Georgiana hadn’t yet read it, and this was a conve-

9 ‘Some time since I began a Poem call’d “the Eve of St Mark” quite in the spirit of Town quietude. I th[i]nk it will give you the sensation of walking about an old county Town in a coolish evening’ (Letters: JK II, p. 201). 15 ‘DON’T IMAGINE IT AN A PROPOS DES BOTTES’: KEATS, THE LETTER… 245 nient moment to bring them up to date. The poem also serves to bulk up Keats’s transatlantic bundle, to help it become a ‘good long letter’, part of an emotional statement dependent on the physical presence of the written artefact. On the other hand, Keats presents ‘The Eve of St Mark’ as still in the process of composition: ‘I know not yet whether I shall ever finish it—I will give it as far as I have gone’ (Letters: JK II, p. 201). Although in the end he didn’t ‘finish’ the poem, it remains in mind, an ongoing concern. The letter version of the poem is also slightly different to the original draft: Keats makes several changes to the poem as he transcribes it into the letter, although they mainly suggest spontaneity or carelessness rather than considered emendation.10 The most significant aspect of the poem’s recollection in the letter is imaginative and critical rather than textual. In returning to mind, the poem, while being reshaped itself, takes on a shaping influence within the letter’s prose. It finds new connections with Keats’s new circumstances, especially relating to the physical loss of George and Georgiana and the increased dependence upon the written word this entailed. Letter and poem become commentaries upon one another through a mode of criticism entirely Keatsian in its bearing. ‘The Eve of St Mark’ is ‘unfinished’, not only in being a fragment but in being an ongoing preoccupation that extends through the letter and beyond, into the intriguing comic turn of the Keatsian endgame.

10 Amy Lovell claimed that ‘Sunday [19th September 1819] seems to have been largely spent in going over and revising the fragment of the Eve of St. Mark’. Amy Lovell, John Keats, 2 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), II, p. 325. If this is so, then the changes do not reflect the level of revision Lovell implies. David B. Pirie considers the emendations to be of ‘great interest’ but does not elaborate. David B. Pirie, ‘Old Saints and Young Lovers: Keats’s Eve of St Mark and Popular Culture’, Keats: Bicentenary Readings, ed. Michael O’Neill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 48–70 (p. 69). All of the major editors list the changes as variants but offer no further comments. The most striking change comes in the first couplet, the letter version of which reads ‘Upon a Sabbath day it fell; / Thrice holy was the sabbath bell’. The draft holograph (now in the British Library), on which most editions are based, has ‘Twice holy’. The emendation must be intentional because ‘Twice holy’ is part of a refrain, and Keats changes it each time in the letter version. The reason for ‘Twice’ is clear: it is both a Sunday and St Mark’s Eve. ‘Thrice’ is harder to explain: Keats indicates that he copied the poem into the letter on Monday 20th, but if Lovell is right, that Keats had been working on the poem the previous day, then the third Sabbath could be Sunday 19th. Of course, this would have meant nothing to George and Georgiana, who had not seen the holograph, and so had nothing with which to compare their version. 246 A. HOWE

The imaginative connection between ‘The Eve of St Mark’ and the letter to George and Georgiana begins, as Stuart Sperry notes, with geogra- phy.11 Keats drafted the poem in Chichester and wrote the letter into which he copied it in Winchester, also a provincial English Cathedral city. In encountering another version of the poem’s originating experience— that of early nineteenth-century life in an ‘old county Town’—the poet returned to the concerns of a work that had apparently lain dormant for some months. Also connecting letter and poem is a concern with the life of the mind and its conventional distinction from an external world of action. Keats’s own predicament, the fact that he is ‘Kepen in solitarinesse’,12 is mirrored in the state of Bertha, who is isolated from the ‘staid and pious companies’ (15) that pass by her window.13 Since originally drafting ‘The Eve of St Mark’ Keats had become more alone in the world, and thus more like its heroine. His return to her, therefore, is likely to have more to it than the architectural and social continuities between Winchester and Chichester. Both letter and poem also raise the possibility that the isolated, readerly life is not merely a compensation for human presence but may in some ways be preferable to it. Epistolary exchange, Keats hopefully claims, is immune to the flux and decay characteristic of regular human interaction. In a letter ‘one takes up one’s existence’ from the previous exchange; our daily encounters, on the other hand, are repeated estrangements generated by our failure to see that we are endlessly becoming ‘not the same person’. Keats’s distancing from George and Georgiana, in these terms, is only a more pronounced version of the perpetual alienation that lies at the centre of all familiarity. Yet it has the advantage of creating a reflexively aware connection within the always distancing, always imagined space that hosts all human re-encounters. Letter writing, in its exaggeration of the self’s incommunicability, confronts us with the grounding fallacy by which we imagine ourselves as ontologically stable entities. If the letter suggests, counterintuitively, that our encounters through the written word may be more immediate than those carried out in person, the poem, relatedly, raises the possibility that the isolated life of the

11 Stuart Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 224–25. 12 The phrase is part of the Chaucerian imitation included in the letter and usually printed as a coda to ‘The Eve of St Mark’. Keats uses it to describe himself in a letter to Reynolds (21 September 1819; Letters: JK II, p. 166) but also in the letter to George and Georgiana currently under discussion (Letters: JK II, p. 209). 13 I quote the poem from Letters: JK II, p. 201–04. 15 ‘DON’T IMAGINE IT AN A PROPOS DES BOTTES’: KEATS, THE LETTER… 247 imagination may exceed more regular forms of social integration. The poem, in other words, permits its reader to conclude that Bertha’s enrap- tured state of reading is a richer mode of being than that experienced by the plodding, slow-vowelled ‘patient crowd and slow’ (20) outside her window. Bertha, as Barbara Everett has it, is the model of the emancipated reader.14 Others would disagree. Jack Stillinger reads Bertha as a warning about the dangers of the sequestered, indwelling imagination. She is, after all, a ‘poor cheated soul’ (69), one who, as Stillinger puts it, ‘by ignoring the life in the village outside her room […] is cheating herself of reality’.15 These very different readings are understandable given the poem’s tonally ambivalent descriptions of the act of reading:

A curious volume, patch’d and torn, That all day long, from earliest morn, Had taken captive her fair eyes Among its golden broideries: (25–28)

We often speak of reading as a captivating experience, but to be ‘taken captive’ is to move beyond the safety of the idiomatic. Notably, Bertha’s readerly ‘captivity’ also blurs into the very different kind of imprisonment in the story about St Mark she is reading:

Untir’d she read the Legend page Of holy Mark from youth to age, On Land, on sea, in pagan-chains, Rejoicing for his many pains. (89–92)

If Everett responds to something meaningfully present in the poem— Bertha’s imaginative liberation from mercantile plod—then so, surely, does Stillinger. Bertha’s entangling within the volume’s ‘golden broideries’, to borrow Andrew Bennett’s word, has an ‘obsessional’, as well as an

14 Barbara Everett, Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 140–41. 15 Jack Stillinger, ‘The Meaning of “Poor Cheated Soul” in The Eve of St Mark’, The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 94–98 (p. 95). 248 A. HOWE emancipatory, quality.16 As a devotee of the Gothic, and a passionate advo- cate of imaginative intensity, Keats would have relished the idea of a book that can remove us from the practicalities and pains of the moment. The modern, sceptical, ethically and politically empathetic poet, on the other hand, would not be unequivocally comfortable with a mystical alignment in which imprisonment and torture are things to be rejoiced at. This ambivalence about reading as prospective modifier of suffering extends from poem to letter and back again. On one hand the letter is an embodiment of Keats’s bereftness; proximity, voice and touch are lost to him. Its bundled physicality, despite his wishfulness otherwise, is a travesty of what is no longer there. On the other hand, the fact that the relationship has become entirely text-based is a poignant opportunity for such an imaginatively articulate correspondent. We are able to take up and put down our existence with our pen. We remain the ‘same person’, shielded by distance from the pressing of entropy. Keats appears to have written the ‘remembrancing and enchaining’ passage of the letter on Tuesday September 21st, the day after he copied ‘The Eve of St Mark’ into his letter. The odd choice of ‘enchaining’ in the letter to indicate the meliorative potential of epistolary exchange as a form of human connection may therefore also owe a debt to the poem, with its ‘pagan chains’. ‘Enchaining’ goes beyond Keats’s apparent needs, hitch- ing his primary meaning (our correspondence strongly connects us) to a lumber of negative connotations. Otherwise puzzling, the choice of word begins to make more sense in the proximity of ‘The Eve of St Mark’. The poem’s anxieties about writerly isolation seem to shake loose Keats’s more immediate personal concerns in being thrown upon writing and reading as the sole conduits of love. He wishes dearly to believe that letter writing can compensate, or even exceed, social intimacy, but his argument, for all its rhetorical flair, smacks of desperation in its bare bones. He wants to be the Bertha who discovers an intensified existence through her reading, but underlying this is the fear that he is in fact Stillinger’s Bertha, imprisoned and isolated from the grounding ‘reality’ outside her window. The poem, with its honest uncertainty on the question, stands as unconscious to the letter and its needy revisions of hard fact. Stillinger’s case that Bertha represents some kind of moral failure misses the poem’s ambivalence; it turns a Keatsian meditation into a Johnsonian

16 Keats, Narrative and Audience, p. 197. 15 ‘DON’T IMAGINE IT AN A PROPOS DES BOTTES’: KEATS, THE LETTER… 249 parable. Stillinger is quite correct, however, to identify the ethics of escape as key to the poem. Again, poem and letter operate collaterally in this respect. The letter begins with a grim focus on the real world: addressing George, Keats discusses the brothers’ various financial problems, the pressing fact that they are ‘certainly in a very low estate’. The poet does not, however, allow himself to ‘dwell upon’ such facts, stating that ‘when misfortunes are so real we are glad enough to escape them’ (Letters: JK II, p. 185). One of the letter’s functions, alongside its ‘enchaining’ role, is to provide the means of just such an escape, both for writer and reader, as it moves from its gloomy initial paragraphs to a series of jokes, anecdotes, quotations, musings and comic poems. Belaboured by grief, money problems and indifferent health, Keats is compiling textual fragments up against an encroaching ‘reality’ of which he would quite happily be ‘cheated’. In the case of the ‘Four Seasons of Man’ sonnet, the letter context off- sets the misrepresentations inherent to the lyric moment. The letter writer releases the poet into an encircling life in which the self’s intensities are tested and moderated. With the ‘Eve of St Mark’, the situation appears quite different. The comic act of assemblage, rather than a gesture towards an elusive wholeness, is an acknowledged deceit, a distraction from the louring inevitability of what Stillinger calls ‘reality’. Keats is entirely honest about this, but his honesty does not change his predicament. Letter writing, rather than fully revealing the self, sequesters it, traps it in writing. Keats has indeed become ‘enchained’ in correspondence. Yet the poem, which owes as much to Pope’s Rape of the Lock as it does Chatterton, manages its own kind of comic escape through its radical refusal to be finished. In addition to pervading more than one letter, it reappears in another comic poem of late 1819, The Cap and Bells (or The Jealousies). This ottava rima experiment owes much to Spenser’s Muiopotmos and must have been influenced by Byron’s recently published Beppo and Don Juan (cantos I− II). The poem centres on a fairy Emperor, Elfinan, and his pursuit of a young human woman, Bertha Pearl, who lives in another English Cathedral city, Canterbury. Its key events take place on ‘April the twenty-fourth’ or ‘St Mark’s eve’ (LV), thus serving a kind of prequel to ‘The Eve of St Mark’, one that explains how Bertha comes across her captivating ‘volume’ in the first place. The Cap and Bells contains two books, both of which recall Bertha’s ‘curious volume’ in ‘The Eve of St Mark’. The first is Bertha Pearl’s 250 A. HOWE

‘sampler’, mysteriously procured for Elfinan by Hum, a magician and advisor. The sampler is decorated with

broider’d tigers with black eyes, And long-tailed phesants, and a rising sun, Plenty of posies, great stags, butterflies Bigger than stags, – a moon, – with other mysteries (L)

The second book, this time produced by Hum from a golden casket, is ‘an old/And legend-leaved book, mysterious to behold’ (LVII), which Elfinan is to leave in Bertha’s room where, he is told, it will act as a ‘potent charm’ on Bertha, a literary love potion of sorts that will see Elfinan gain his end. This would appear to be the ‘curious volume’ that the earlier Bertha reads ‘all day long’, transfixed by its ‘saintly imag’ries’. This intriguing continuity between the poems is a further refusal, beyond its initial fragmentariness, to finish ‘The Eve of St Mark’, to admit its circumscription as a ‘point of thought’. It also provides a further context in which Everett’s reading is disturbed by a version of Stillinger’s. Read backwards from The Cap and Bells as prequel, Bertha’s book is an imposition, an attempt to cheat her, not out of reality, but into love, another state of intensified imbalance. ‘The Eve of St Mark’ and The Cap and Bells have at their symbolic centre a book, ‘patch’d and torn’ in the former, ‘old/And legend-leaved’ in the latter. Part of the significance of this symbol relates to the problems and possibilities, as Keats saw them, of imaginative reading. We sense in this a degree of anxiety about that central Keatsian proposition, that imagination is the preeminent mode of human existence. What happens, as we move between our heightened readerly and sublunary selves, to identity as a continuous or consistent phenomenon? Similar anxieties surface in similar imagery in the letter about (among many other things) letter writing to George and Georgiana. Here the self is compared to the ‘relict garments of a Saint’, still the same under the banner of the signifier (St Anthony’s shirt, John Keats, etc.), but utterly different through physical and emotional processes of decay and renewal. Like Bertha’s book we are the real thing and the fraud at the same time. Keats, in ‘adding a sheet daily’ to his bundle, which would no doubt arrive at its destination in a ragged state, is like the ‘careful Monks’ who ‘patch it and patch it’. Both are concerned to preserve fragile identities through a combination of devotion and deceit. 15 ‘DON’T IMAGINE IT AN A PROPOS DES BOTTES’: KEATS, THE LETTER… 251

Such a reading, which responds to the intellectual and emotional cross- hatching of letter and poem, is unfamiliar because it would be impossible for readers of most standard editions of the poetry.17 It thus involves a recognition of how the translation of writing into print can obscure the very thing it seeks to illuminate. In so doing it follows and shows up the remarkably interpenetrative, restless quality of Keats’s imagination. He was almost incapable of bringing a poem and a letter together without interesting things happening, and much of this interest remains to be discovered among the shadows cast by our towering, and un-Keatsian, proprieties.

17 Cox’s edition, by placing poems and letters together in chronological order, provides the best available reading conditions, among editions of the poetry, for a poem such as ‘The Eve of St Mark’, which Keats did not publish and which is commented upon by its containing letter in ways that go beyond the easily detachable facts of composition. CHAPTER 16

‘The house of misery’: Space and Memory in the Later Correspondence and Literature of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Angela Wright

I said in a letter to Peacock, my dear Mrs Gisborne, that I would send you some account of the miserable months of my disastrous life. From day to day I have put this off, but I will now endeavour to fulfil my design. The scene of my existence is closed & though there be no pleasure in retracing the scenes that have preceded the event which has crushed my hopes yet there seems to be a necessity in doing so, and I obey the impulse that urges me.1

Thus wrote Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to Maria Gisborne on 15 August 1822 in the wake of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death in the Gulf of Spezia on 8 July of the same year. Mary Shelley referred to ‘obey[ing] the impulse’ that compelled her to write, an impulse that forced her to ‘retrac[e] the scenes’ that preceded the death of her beloved Shelley. Ever

1 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ‘To Maria Gisborne, Pisa August 15th 1822’, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), I, pp. 244–51, p. 247.

A. Wright (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 253 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_16 254 A. WRIGHT conscious of her own literary inheritance, the references to the ‘scene of my existence’ being closed and to the impulse to write recall William Godwin’s characterisation of Caleb Williams in his 1794 novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. Godwin charged the narrative of his eponymous protagonist with one theatrical metaphor after another, beginning Volume I with the portentous words ‘My life has been a theatre of calamity’, alluding to lifting the curtain upon scenes, and advancing Acts in the drama.2 Mary Shelley obeyed the same impulse here; whilst acknowledging that ‘the scene’ of her existence was closed, she nonetheless felt compelled to write a lengthy letter to Maria Gisborne which offered detailed accounts of the days leading up to the death of Shelley. The act of writing letters, rehearsing scenes that precede a calamitous event, can in itself become a form of valuable catharsis. This essay explores the ways in which Mary Shelley’s correspondence rehearses the scenes of her tragic circumstances as much to herself as to her addressee, and inves- tigates how letters became to her a way in which she tested the contours of her grief, replaying the scenes and spaces that came before and after the death of Percy Shelley. Always intrigued by the forms and shortcomings of correspondence, Mary Shelley tested her views on letter-writing both in her frequent correspondence and in her fiction. Her letters and literature, I argue, work in close symbiosis, illustrating everywhere how they inform and converse with each other, from Frankenstein (1818) through to the grief-laden The Last Man (1826) and beyond. Mary Shelley knew a thing or two about tardy correspondents who responded only belatedly, if at all, to her letters, but she demonstrated a relatively high level of tolerance towards the shortcomings of her correspondents. On 3 November 1814, for example, she wrote to Percy Shelley from 5 Church Terrace: ‘I received your letter tonight I wanted one for I had {not} received one for almost two day but do not think I mean any thing by this my love—I know you took a long long walk yesterday so you could not write but I who am at home who do not walk out I could write to you all day love—ʼ.3 When Shelley was absent, letters served as an extension of her conversations with him, and even if his letters were less frequent than hers, she resolved to continue putting pen to paper

2 William Godwin, Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (London: Crosby, 1794), I, p. 2. 3 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ‘To Shelley’, [5 Church Terrace, Pancras, 3 November 1814] in Letters I, pp. 4–5, p. 4. 16 ‘THE HOUSE OF MISERY’: SPACE AND MEMORY IN THE LATER… 255 for him. Absence, conjuring the lack of both physical presence and response, did not preclude the assertion of her thoughts to the addressee. Such persistence and resolve in corresponding became an engrained habit with her. Much later, but still prior to the death of Percy, Maria Gisborne was wittily berated for her poor correspondence, when Mary told her, ‘although I think that you are two or three (letters) in my debt, yet I am good enough to write to you again, and thus to increase your debit—nor will I allow you, with one letter, to take advantage of the Insolvent act, and thus to free yourself from all claims at once’.4 The language of accoun- tancy, so dominant here, playfully scolds Maria Gisborne for her slower rate of correspondence, indicating that, in the manner of Defoe’s character, Robinson Crusoe, Mary kept a faithfully recorded account book. This book, the letter implied, would account very carefully for the disburse- ment and receipt of letters. Her letters, in consequence, record absence and silence almost as much as they anticipate an audience. Whether the absence of a reply from a correspondent is always a draw- back is, however, debatable. The advantages and limitations that surround the urge or ‘impulse’ to dramatise one’s life in correspondence were tested to full effect in Mary Shelley’s first novel.Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) demonstrates the fragility of letters, by whom they are read, whether they are responded to and how they are used and appropri- ated by others. For some critics, the epistolary frame of the novel, containing letters from the explorer Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Walton Saville, seems oddly out of joint with the spirit of the rest of the work. Mary Favret, for example, situates the epistolary pleas from Frankenstein’s father to hear from his son in the vein of ‘a Rousseauian social contract; as signs of “relation between persons and communities”, they were proof of civilization’.5 She goes on to observe the failure of the father’s requests, observing that ‘Victor never writes his family, Walton’s missive never ends, and something monstrous escapes’, comparing this with the failure of the eighteenth-century epistolary form.6

4 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ‘To Maria Gisborne’, [Casa Magni, presso a Lerici June 2nd 1822] in Letters I, pp. 234–37, pp. 234–35. 5 Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 176. 6 Favret, p. 176. Favret proceeds to argue that: ‘At the same time, this novel performs what the now stagnant epistolary form once promised. Frankenstein invites us to maintain correspondence even as it forces us to accept deformity, to dismiss authority and to listen to the voices of destruction. Ultimately it asks us to understand what Mikhail Bakhtin has called the “dialogic discourse of the novel”’. 256 A. WRIGHT

We never get to see whether Robert Walton’s sister responds to him in the opening and concluding letters of Frankenstein. If she does, Margaret Saville deliberately excludes those letters from the epistolary frame of the novel, meaning that we have few, if any, clues as to how she receives the letters of her brother, letters which confess his innermost thoughts and feelings. Frankenstein begins with no fewer than four letters addressed from Walton to his sister, the silent addressee Mrs Saville. We learn in the second sentence of the novel, and of Letter I, that she is his ‘dear sister’, but little concerning her feelings other than Walton’s reference to her ‘evil forebodings’ concerning his enterprise in the first letter. Robert Walton’s letters continually emphasise his desires, ambitions and feelings, but the question that he poses to his sister Margaret in that very first letter, ‘Do you understand this feeling?’, is swiftly supplanted by assertions of what he wills her to feel and think: ‘you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation’ he pleads at one point. Further on in Letter I, he tries to convince himself of the merit of his enterprise: ‘And now, dear Margaret, do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose’.7 More statements than questions, Walton tries to persuade himself that he has convinced his sister of the merit of his voyage. Mrs Saville remains silent throughout Frankenstein. Never responding, we learn of no other emotion felt by her than the ‘evil forebodings’ that are mentioned in the very first sentence. Irrational, prophetic, Walton’s letters seem to construct his sister as a character who relies upon instinctual feeling. As the opening letters unfold, however, we learn from Walton’s self- corrections that it is his own irrationality that he fears: he ‘bitterly feel[s] the want of a friend’ to help ‘regulate’ his mind, he informs Margaret in Letter II, and in Letter III he tries to convince her that he ‘will be cool, persevering, and prudent’.8 Walton’s expositional letters demonstrate that he is not fixed in his purpose; he reminds Margaret of his earlier ambitions to create poetry, and how they have now transformed into greater quests for glory in the sea-faring life that his father explicitly denied him upon his deathbed. Confessional, intimate, literary and performative, Walton’s letters are as much addressed to himself as they are to his sister, a characteristic which places him close to what Betty T. Bennett has called the ‘confessional tendency’ of his creator, Mary Shelley.9

7 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818 ed.), eds. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), pp. 49–50. 8 Frankenstein, p. 53, p. 56. 9 Betty T. Bennett, ‘Introduction’ to Letters, Vol. I, p. xv. 16 ‘THE HOUSE OF MISERY’: SPACE AND MEMORY IN THE LATER… 257

The absence of Margaret Walton Saville’s response is nonetheless important; there are moments in one’s life when one ‘put[s] off’, as Mary Shelley herself did in the letter which I began by quoting, articulating in correspondence form how one feels. Almost as much as a response, silence from a correspondent can speak volumes and exert considerable imaginative authority. The refusal to respond, whether intentional or not, can prompt an originating correspondent to become increasingly detailed, confessional and pleading in their quest to solicit a response. Thus it is with Robert Walton, who abandons the formal dating and locating of his letters as Frankenstein progresses, becoming increasingly intimate and easy with rehearsing the scenes which he writes more for himself than for his sister. So too, we can interpret the silence of Margaret Walton Saville— whose initials, as Anne K. Mellor was the first to point out, echo those of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley—as a positively eloquent gesture.10 This eloquence only makes itself felt through the small note ‘Walton, in continuation’ much further on in the novel, but in that editorial gesture, we glimpse someone who reserves judgement, or who feels unable to put into words precisely how they feel about this extraordinary series of tales.11 So it was, too, for Mary Shelley in the wake of Shelley’s death. Fearing the worst after Shelley and Edward Williams had set off on the ill-fated sailing excursion in the Don Juan, Mary and Jane Williams had arrived at Byron’s palace in Pisa around midnight. Mary was pale, distraught and still unwell after a recent miscarriage. ‘Both Lord Byron and the lady have told me since, that on that terrific evening I looked more like a ghost than a woman—light seemed to emanate from my features; my face was very white; I looked like marble’.12 Her appearance and conduct prompted Byron to reflect that he had ‘seen nothing on the stage so powerful, or so affecting’.13 Following the death of Shelley in July 1822, ‘Mary Shelley was in extremis’, Emily W. Sunstein remarks, since the premature death of Shelley left

10 Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 52–69. 11 Frankenstein, p. 231. 12 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822, in Letters I, pp. 244–51, p. 247. 13 Byron, as quoted in Lady Blessington’s Conversations with Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 53. cit. Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 259. 258 A. WRIGHT her ‘incredulous, fearful, remorseful for what’ was ‘left unsaid and undone’.14 The early unutterable stage of that grief is captured in a letter that Mary Shelley wrote to Thomas Medwin from Pisa on 22 July 1822. There, she observes to Medwin that ‘I ought to say something more about that which has left us in desolation—but why should I attrister you with my despair’.15 The letter is striking for its uncharacteristically scant detail, merely mentioning ‘desolation’ and, later, concentrating upon the state of Jane Williams rather than herself. Sparse and controlled, it nevertheless offers a nascent articulation of a grief with which Mary Shelley would struggle for decades to come and shows us by its contrasting sparsity how detailed and articulate other, later accounts of Shelley’s death were in her correspondence. It was in the series of letters to Maria Gisborne in late 1822 that Mary Shelley began to work through her grief concerning the death of Shelley. I began this essay by quoting the beginning of the first letter, a letter that runs to eight pages of the modern Johns Hopkins edition of the letters. There, in the first of this suite of letters to Maria Gisborne, Mary Shelley began by outlining and accounting for some of her regrets about what she had not said to Shelley. In order to do this, she began by first describing her distrust and instinctual dislike of the Casa Magni, where they were living at the time of the accident:

I was not well in body or mind. My nerves were wound up to the utmost irritation, and the sense of misfortune hung over my spirits. No words can tell you how I hated our house & the country about it. Shelley reproached me for this—his health was good & the place was quite after his own heart— What could I answer—that the people were wild & hateful, that though the country was beautiful yet I liked a more countryfied place, that there was great difficulty in living—that all our Tuscans would leave us, & that the very jargon of these Genovese was disgusting—This was all I had to say but no words could describe my feelings—the beauty of the woods made me weep and shudder—so vehement was my feeling of dislike that I used to rejoice when the winds & waves permitted me to go out in the boat so that I was not obliged to take my usual walk among tree shaded paths, allies of vine festooned trees—all that I before doated on—& that now weighed on me. My only moments of peace were on board that unhappy boat, when

14 Sunstein, p. 223. 15 Mary Shelley to Thomas Medwin, Albaro, [Pisa] July 29th 1822 in Letters I, p. 242. 16 ‘THE HOUSE OF MISERY’: SPACE AND MEMORY IN THE LATER… 259

lying down with my head on his knee I shut my eyes & felt the wind & our swift motion alone.16

The letter is bold, honest and uncompromising for the stark way in which it regretfully articulates an irrational and, some might say, unjustifi- able dislike for ‘our desolate house’ and its environs.17 Clearly unaware of the severity of Mary Shelley’s illness, as Charlotte Gordon records, ‘To the Williamses, Mary’s complaints seemed increasingly outrageous and self- centred. Neither could imagine why she would treat the sweet-tempered Shelley with such unkindness’.18 Mary admits that she ‘was not well in body or mind’, linking her irrational dislike of the house to that illness that caused her a miscarriage later on 16 June.19 ‘A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’, argues Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, but for Mary Shelley in this account, Casa Magni constitutes quite the opposite.20 There is no proof nor are there any illusions of stability either in her dislike of the house or in the bold way by which she draws Maria Gisborne’s attention to the fact that she and Shelley sleep in separate rooms. The body of images conjured by the Casa Magni, to Mary Shelley’s eyes, speak only of a difficult period in the relationship between Mary and Percy Shelley, and of the consequences of those difficulties. Mary even ventures as far as to draw a plan for Maria Gisborne—‘The floor on which we lived was thus’—she notes, detailing by numbers in squares that she and Shelley had rooms on opposite sides of the large dining hall.21 The drawn plan’s articulation of marital discord is further amplified by her

16 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822, in Letters I, pp. 244–51, p. 244. 17 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822 in Letters, ibid. 18 Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 437. 19 Of her instinctual dislike for Casa Magni, Mary goes on to observe that ‘My ill health might account for much of this—bathing in the sea somewhat relieved me—but on the 8th June (I think it was) I was threatened with a miscarriage, & after a week of great ill health on Sunday the 16th this took place at eight in the morning’. Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822, in Letters I, pp. 244–51, p. 244. Shelley’s quick thinking in attempting to prevent Mary from bleeding to death after this miscarriage by placing her in a bath of ice is well documented. 20 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 17. 21 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822 in Letters, I, p. 244. 260 A. WRIGHT honest linking of her poor physical and mental health to her irrational hatred of the house. She fully acknowledges the irrational nature of this antipathy towards the house, portraying it as an uncanny space that affects the thoughts, feelings and logic of its inhabitants. In the wake of news that Byron and Claire Clairmont’s daughter Allegra had died, Percy Shelley had waking nightmare visions in which he halluci- nated that a spectral child was floating upon the waves that lapped the Casa Magni with hands clasped. He also had hallucinations of his own self and conversations that he held with himself about his life. Mary observed of those hallucinations in the first letter to Maria Gisborne:

All this was frightful enough, & talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately—he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him—“How long do you mean to be content”—No very terrific words & certainly not prophetic of what has occurred. But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs W. saw him. Now Jane though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination & is not in the slightest degree ner- vous—neither in dreams or otherwise. She was standing one day, the day before I was taken ill, at a window that looked on the Terrace with Trelawny—it was day—she saw as she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket—he passed again—now as he passed both times the same way—and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground) she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him no more she cried—“Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall? Where can he be gone?” Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this & it proved indeed that Shelley had never been on the terrace & was far off at the time we saw him.22

As with the drawn plan of the bedrooms in Casa Magni, this section, which treats of Shelley’s hallucinations, has the same precise attention to topographical detail, measuring the terrace and the location of the windows in relation to the terrace. Those topographical details, however, do nothing to neutralise the terror of the circumstances. The house, in Mary Shelley’s recollection in this letter, seems to infect its inhabitants with the ‘sense of misfortune’ that Mary Shelley felt from the moment

22 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822 in Letters, I, p. 244. 16 ‘THE HOUSE OF MISERY’: SPACE AND MEMORY IN THE LATER… 261 that she entered it. Even Jane Williams, a woman who, unlike Mary Shelley, ‘has not much imagination & is not in the slightest degree ner- vous’, becomes coloured by it, observing an apparition of Shelley haunt- ing the terrace before he sets out for the ill-fated voyage upon which he and Edward Williams die. Fifty years later, as Charlotte Gordon observes, Henry James would describe Casa Magni as the ‘pale faced tragic villa’, according the house itself a pivotal part in the tragedy staged there, and awarding it the status of a principle character in that tragedy.23 Something in James’s language also conjured the ways in which Mary Shelley was so frequently described by observers such as Byron as being pale, almost hewn of marble herself at this time. The house and Mary Shelley, in James’s lexis, became almost interchangeable as characters, pale and passive obser- vants of an unfolding tragedy. Mary Shelley concluded this particular letter to Maria Gisborne in the wake of Shelley’s death by resolving that her lengthy epistle concluded her own attempts at writing. ‘Well here is my story—the last story I shall have to tell—all that might have been bright in my life is now despoiled—I shall live to improve myself, to take care of my child, & render myself worthy to join [Shelley]’.24 Of course, we know that this, thankfully, was not the case. Even in the following letter to Maria Gisborne, dated 27 August 1822, she seemed to soften her resolve, conceding even then that ‘I can conceive but of one circumstance that could afford me the semblance of content—that is the being permitted to live where I am now in the same house, in the same state, occupied alone with my child, in collecting His manuscripts—writing his life, and thus to go easily to my grave. But this must not be’.25 Her struggle to keep afloat financially returned her to England and to a variety of large and small publishing commitments. But in many of those pieces, we see the traumatic imprint of the time at the Casa Magni that immediately preceded the death of Shelley. Even in those early letters to Maria Gisborne, exploring the contours and chambers of Casa Magni had begun to open up spaces in which to explore her grief. The preoccupation that we see with that fateful house in the letter of 15 August 1822 to Maria Gisborne was revisited in March 1824 in the form of a short essay that Mary composed and published in The London Magazine entitled ‘On Ghosts’. This piece begins by lamenting the passing

23 Gordon, p. 432. 24 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822 in Letters, I, p. 250. 25 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, c.27th August 1822 in Letters, I, p. 252. 262 A. WRIGHT of the ‘antediluvian world, strode over by mammoths, preyed upon by the megatherion, and peopled by the offspring of the Sons of God’. In our world of ‘hedged-in cornfields and measured hills’, an age characterised by the explorations of Mungo Park, where the only land to be discovered is ‘the interior of New Holland’, the only uncharted sea is the ‘North West Passage’, Mary Shelley asks ‘What have we left to dream about?’.26 As she muses upon these new discoveries, she repeatedly asks: ‘Yet is it true that we do not believe in ghosts?’. 27 The question becomes almost a plea, for perhaps in spite of the Humean scepticism that she evinces early in the essay, Mary Shelley wishes to be haunted by the ghost of Shelley. Her questions on belief in ghosts, and the summoning of those ghosts, are resolved in part through her solitary explorations and reminiscences of a house at night. ‘But let it be twelve at night in a lone house’; she advises, ‘take up, I beseech you, the story of the Bleeding Nun; or of the Statue, to which the bridegroom gave the wedding ring, and she came in the dead of night to claim him, tall, white and cold […] and let all these details be assisted by solitude, flapping curtains, rushing wind, a long and dusky passage, an half open door’ and then ‘another answer may be given’.28 Alluding to the tale of ‘The Bleeding Nun’ from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), a Gothic romance that she and Shelley had read together in 1815, and which they revisited when Lewis paid a visit to the Villa Diodati during the Summer of 1816, and furthermore to the stories from Fantasmagoriana, the collection of ghost stories translated by Jean- Baptiste Eyriès which she, Shelley, Polidori, Byron and Claire Clairmont read in 1816, Mary Shelley insists that the atmospherics of time and physical surroundings can convince us of the presence of ghosts. It is not the tale itself, Mary argues, which will lead us to believe in ghosts, but the space in which we read that tale, the time of night at which we consume it. Having established these accordant circumstances, Mary Shelley next begins the authorial intrusion that she had advocated only the year before in her essay ‘Giovanni Villani’ for The Liberal. There, she had argued that a judicious assertion of the authorial self in a composition was at times desirable. ‘To sit down for the purpose of talking of oneself, will sometimes

26 Mary Shelley, ‘On Ghosts’, London Magazine 9 (March 1824), pp. 253–56. Repr, in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 334–40, p. 334. 27 ‘On Ghosts’, p. 335. 28 ‘On Ghosts’, pp. 335–36. 16 ‘THE HOUSE OF MISERY’: SPACE AND MEMORY IN THE LATER… 263 freeze the warmth of inspiration’; she argued, ‘but, when elevated and carried away by the subject in hand, some similitude or contrast may awaken a chord which else had slept’.29 The repeated questions about belief in ghosts that she muses upon in ‘On Ghosts’ and the method by which she becomes excited about the flapping curtains, rushing wind, long and dusky passage’ both transport her to the point where she at last feels comfortable in inserting her own experiences and, more particularly, her own loss. And thus begins a tentative and enduring exploration of her grief, founded not upon the image of the ‘lost friend’ Shelley, but upon the atmosphere in which she was able to evoke his ghost. It is a passage that deserves, for its evocative articulation of grief, to be quoted at length:

Some years ago I lost a friend, and a few months afterwards visited the house where I had last seen him. It was deserted, and though in the midst of a city, its vast halls and spacious apartments occasioned the same sense of loneliness as if it had been situated on an uninhabited heath. I walked through the vacant chambers by twilight, and none save I awakened the echoes of their pavement. The far mountains (visible from the upper windows) had lost their tinge of sunset; the tranquil atmosphere grew leaden coloured as the golden stars appeared in the firmament; no wind ruffled the shrunk-up river which crawled lazily through the deepest channel of its wide and empty bed; the chimes of the Ave Maria had ceased, and the bell hung moveless in the open belfry: beauty invested a reposing world, and awe was inspired by beauty only. I walked through the rooms filled with sensations of the most poignant grief. He had been there; his living frame had been caged by those walls, his breath had mingled with that atmosphere, his step had been on those stones, I thought:—the earth is a tomb, the gaudy sky a vault, we but walking corpses. The wind rising in the east rushed through the open casements, making them shake;—methought, I heard, I felt—I know not what—but I trembled.30

Solitude and twilight are two of the preconditions that Mary Shelley established earlier in her essay for experiencing the supernatural, but here, in spite of the conducive atmosphere, she experiences difficulty in reviving the ghost of the beloved. This is a passage that thrives upon negation, the pausing of the chimes of the Ave Maria, the ‘moveless’ bell’, the ‘shrunk-up

29 Mary Shelley, ‘Giovanni Villani’, The Liberal, No. 4 (1823), pp. 281–97. Excerpt reprinted in The Mary Shelley Reader, pp. 329–33, p. 330. 30 ‘On Ghosts’, p. 336. 264 A. WRIGHT river’ which reluctantly traces its course and ‘no wind’: none of these evoke the ghost of her ‘friend’.31 But experiencing this absence by walking through the ‘vacant chambers by twilight’, Mary Shelley at last begins to feel something through the morbid transformation of the house which he inhabited, imagining his ‘living frame’ ‘caged by those walls’. Only at that moment, when she makes the imaginative leap towards metaphorising that grief, when the earth becomes ‘a tomb, the gaudy sky a vault, we but walking corpses’, do the accordant circumstances of wind rushing through casements fall into place. Here, as in her letter of 15 August 1822 to Maria Gisborne, the house becomes a powerful agent of the uncanny, its very emptiness an imaginative conduit for experiencing ghosts. Mary Shelley’s letters, especially in the wake of Percy Shelley’s death, often anticipate the literary achievements to follow. Like the letters from Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Walton Saville, many of her letters are contemplative rehearsals of regret that are addressed more to herself than to her correspondent. In the second letter to Maria Gisborne after Shelley’s death, Mary wrote movingly of Percy’s relationship with their surviving son Percy Florence, but those comments soon morphed into a near-wish for mother and son’s premature death:

My boy too is alas! no consolation; when I think how He loved him, the plans we had for his education, his sweet & childish voice strikes me to the heart. Why should he live in this world of pain and anguish? And if he went I should go too & we should all sleep in peace. At times I feel an energy within me to combat with my destiny—but again I sink—I have but one hope for which I live—to render myself worthy to join him—such a feeling sustains one during moments of enthusiasm, but darkness & misery soon overwhelms the mind when all near objects bring agony alone with them.32

Persistence or suicide: in the wake of such intense and extensive loss in her life, it is hard to tell which of the two fates that Mary Shelley would have preferred for herself and for her surviving son. The process of grief

31 In relation to this passage of ‘On Ghosts’, Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth Denlinger, who curated the superb exhibition ‘Shelley’s Ghost’, reflect in the accompanying book that ‘It is too much to say that Mary ever looked for, let alone saw, Shelley’s ghost, but his death created a sudden void. She and her infant son were in Italy and facing an uncertain future, and images of Shelley that were almost palpable in their intensity and immediacy rushed in to fill the empty space’.Shelley’s Ghost (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2010), p. 98. 32 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, c.27th August 1822 in Letters, I, p. 252. 16 ‘THE HOUSE OF MISERY’: SPACE AND MEMORY IN THE LATER… 265 was the task of the remainder of her life, but one which she began to confront first through her letters to Maria Gisborne, then through the essay ‘On Ghosts’ and next through her novel of environmental catastrophe The Last Man (1826). The elegiac, autobiographical nature of The Last Man is well-known with several of the central characters sharing the characteristics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. As Mary Shelley began to craft her tale of a ‘last man’ who outlives his beloved family and indeed, the rest of the human race, she reflected closely upon the consonances that the theme held with her own life. On 14 May 1824 she alluded to the theme of her new novel in her journal: ‘The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me’. She linked these emotions to a contingent ‘failure of [her] intellectual powers’ conceiving of her mind as ‘a blank—a gulph filled with formless mist’.33 The Last Man was the novel that temporarily filled that void. Its cathartic qualities become clear in the ‘Introduction’: ‘My labours have cheered long hours of solitude’, she wrote, ‘and taken me out of a world, which has averted its once benignant face from me, to one glowing with imagination and power’.34 She refers to the depression and pain that the materials caused her, but reflects that ‘such is human nature, that the excitement of mind was dear to me, and that the imagination, painter of tempest and earthquake, or worse, the stormy and ruin-fraught passions of man, softened my real sorrows and endless regrets’.35 Mary Shelley’s affinities with her character Lionel Verney are clearly established in the journal entry of 14 May 1824. As Lionel discovers house after house of corpses in England and upon the continent, his scrutiny of the unlit windows of countless homes (their inhabitants now dead) becomes an extension of the powerful feelings towards the Casa Magni that Mary Shelley had first confessed to Maria Gisborne in her correspondence. Lionel’s sorrow, and desperation to discover life, serves as a powerful metaphor for Mary Shelley’s own desolation:

To this painful recognition of familiar places, was added a feeling experienced by all, understood by none—a feeling as if in some state, less visionary

33 Journal entry May 24th, 1824 in The Journals of Mary Shelley, eds. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), II, pp. 476–77. 34 ‘Introduction’ to The Last Man, ed. Anne McWhir (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1996), p. 5. 35 Introduction, p. 5. 266 A. WRIGHT

than a dream, in some past real existence, I had seen all I saw, with precisely the same feelings as I now beheld them—as if all my sensations were a duplex mirror of a former revelation. To get rid of this oppressive sense I strove to imagine change in this tranquil spot—this augmented my mood, by causing me to bestow more attention on the objects which occasioned me pain.36

Lionel views his past life like one might view the past in a magic lan- tern: with distance, wonder and a sense of stark objectivity. Nonetheless, he must pay attention to ‘the objects which occasioned me pain’, focus- sing upon the ‘dark casements’ and abandoned hearths of his family and friends’ homes. Lionel’s reluctant attention to ‘the objects which occasioned me pain’ echoes the task that Mary Shelley began, reluctantly, in her correspondence with Maria Gisborne. It was a task that forced her to revisit and reappraise her instinctual dislike of the Casa Magni. Revisiting that house so painstakingly was fraught with misery, a chore that must be undertaken, but it began the process of allowing her to view her feelings in what Lionel described as a ‘duplex mirror’, and reopened her imagination to the important task of remembering Shelley well, rather than with horror. In ‘The Choice’, a poem that appears at the end of her journal of Sorrow, Mary swears to her dearly departed Percy that ‘My trembling hands shall never write thee—dead’, committing herself to keeping him alive through her writings.37 This she did as much through correspondence as she did through essays, short stories and The Last Man. ‘Oh! grief is fantastic’, observes Mary Shelley’s character Lionel Verney. ‘[I]t weaves a web on which to trace the history of its woe from every form and change around; it incorporates itself with all living nature; it finds sustenance in every object; as light, it fills all things, and, like light, it gives its own colours to all’.38 Lionel here emphasises the creative, transformative potential of grief which offers its ‘own colours to all’. So it was with the grief of Mary Shelley. Always a keen correspondent, her letters in the wake of Shelley’s death offered a creative platform from which she was

36 The Last Man, p. 285. 37 ‘The Choice’, Abinger Dep.d.311/4, l.118. 38 The Last Man, p. 348. 16 ‘THE HOUSE OF MISERY’: SPACE AND MEMORY IN THE LATER… 267 later able to ‘trace the history’ of her grief ‘from every form and change around’, through short stories, essays, The Last Man, and her editorial projects. From the visceral, immediate despair of her 1822 letters to Maria Gisborne, to the essay ‘On Ghosts’ (1824), The Last Man (1826), her poetry and her posthumous editing of Shelley’s poetry, Mary Shelley’s imaginative explorations of the Casa Magni ‘softened’ her ‘real sorrows and endless regrets’ and allowed her to remember well. Index1

A Pride and Prejudice, 23, 139 Agar, Emily, 41, 41n37, 43 Sense and Sensibility, 23, 24, 136, Aikin, John, 6 138 Letters from a father to his son, on Susan, 23 various topics, relative to literature and the conduct of life, 6 B Altman, Janet Gurkin, 6, 7, 203 Bachelard, Gaston, 259 Analytical Review, 17 The Poetics of Space, 259 Annual Anthology, 125 Bailey, Benjamin, 231n25, 233, 239 Ariosto, Ludovico, 166, 215 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 6 Auden, W. H., 7n22, 96, 180 ‘To Mr Coleridge,’ 6 Augustine of Hippo, 62 Barker, Juliet, 46 Austen, Cassandra, 133–135 Barker, Mary, 68, 69, 73, 75, 76n24, Austen, George, 23 78, 78–79n27, 79 Austen, Henry, 23 Barnard, John, 224 Austen, Jane, 5, 12, 16, 22–24, 100, Beatty, Bernard, 196, 196n31 134–146, 223 Beaumont, Lady Margaret, 53, 57 Emma, 16, 23, 24 Beaumont, Sir George, 52, 58 First Impressions, 23 Beckford, William, 172, 173, 173n17, Mansfield Park, 23, 24, 141, 223 178

1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2020 269 M. Callaghan, A. Howe (eds.), Romanticism and the Letter, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9 270 INDEX

Bedford, Grosvenor, 113 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 20, Behrendt, Stephen C., 11, 14 166, 173n17, 184 Bell, Andrew, 102 The Deformed Transformed, 181 Bennett, Andrew, 13, 241, 241n7, Don Juan, 169n10, 173, 175, 181, 247 194–196, 198, 207, 249, 257 Bennett, Betty T., 151 Lara, 41 Beresford, James, 38 Manfred, 41 The Miseries of Human Life; or, The Marino Faliero, 212 Groans of Samuel Sensitive and Timothy Testy, 38 Berryman, John, 202 C Sonnets to Chris, 202 Cadell, Thomas, 23 Bigold, Melanie, 30 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 208, 217 Bishop, Elizabeth, 96, 97n55 Callaghan, Madeleine, 10, 155, 209 Blackwood, John, 177 Campbell, Thomas, 38, 40 Blackwood’s Magazine, 2 Gertrude of Wyoming, 40 Blake, William, 6, 17, 120 Cardell, Kylie, 8 Blunden, Edmund, 218 Carlile, Richard, 158, 161, 211 Boswell, James, 15 Carlisle, Anthony, 112, 211 Life of Johnson, 15 Carlson, Julie A., 203 Bowles, Caroline, 101, 113, 114, 123, Carter, Elizabeth, 30 197 Chatterton, Thomas, 249 Braithwaite, Helen, 17 Chesterfield, 4th Earl of (Philip Brawne, Fanny, 220n4, 223, 229n23 Dormer Stanhope), 1, 166 Bray, Joe, 12, 13, 143n12 Clairmont, Claire, 201, 203, 204, Brougham, Henry, 107 206, 260, 262 Brown, Charles, 155, 228n22, Clare, John, 87, 206 233n29 Clarkson, Catherine, 79, 80 Brown, Ford K., 46 Clarkson, Oliver, 10 Burney, Frances, 23 Clarkson, Thomas, 96 Burton, Robert, 244 Cohen, Francis, 194 Anatomy of Melancholy, 244 Colbert, Benjamin, 216 Burton, Sarah, 118 Coleridge, Hartley, 3n6, 5n16, 8n24, Butler, Lady Eleanor, 36, 37 83, 87, 96, 98 Byron, Allegra, 202, 260 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 4–7, 8n24, Byron, Lord George Gordon, 4, 6n17, 11, 83–98, 100, 111–113, 118, 10, 12, 14, 19–22, 38, 41, 69, 120, 122–126, 131, 200, 213, 99, 120, 152, 153, 163–181, 214 183–202, 204–207, 209, 212, Aids to Reflection, 96 213, 240, 249, 257, 260–262, ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ 6, 126 265 Biographia Literaria, 89, 94, 95, Beppo, 249 215n27 INDEX 271

‘Dejection: An Ode,’ 89, 93 E The Friend, 94, 95, 213 Edgeworth, Maria, 17, 31, 35, 37, ‘Kubla Khan,’ 88 163 ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson,’ 77, 89, Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 37 93 Egerton, Thomas, 23 ‘Lewti,’ 125 Eliot, T. S., 7n22, 223, 224 ‘This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,’ Ellice, Edward, 167, 173, 174, 177, 92, 125 178 Coleridge, Sara, 46 Ellis, Jonathan, 8, 92, 164, 165, 207, Cooke, George Frederick, 120 224 Corp, Harriet, 38–39n35, 39 Elmsley, Peter, 113 Antidote to The Miseries, 39, Evans, B. Ifor, 189 42n39 Eyriès, Jean-Baptise, 262 Cottle, Joseph, 105, 106, 113, 119 Fantasmagoriana, 262 The Courier, 95 Ezell, Margaret, 34 Cowper, William, 6, 7, 17 Cox, Jeffrey N., 148, 251n17 Crabbe, George, 59 F Craib, Ian, 48, 56 Favret, Mary A., 7, 202n7, 255, Croker, John Wilson, 38 255n6 Crosby, Benjamin, 23 Fenwick, Isabella, 46, 59 Cruttwell, Richard, 105 Fielding, Henry, 169 Culler, Jonathan, 219, 220 Tom Thumb, 169 Fletcher, William, 170 Fleury de Chaboulon, Pierre D Alexandre, 42 Dante Alighieri, 103, 211 Memoirs of the history of private life, Vita Nuova, 206 home, and the reign of Napoleon Darlington, Beth, 46 in 1815, 42 Davenant, William, 89 Fox, George, 102, 165 Davies, Scrope, 176 Freeling, Francis, 5 De Quincey, Thomas, 2, 3, 45, 127 Freer, Alexander, 52, 52n15 de Selincourt, Ernest, 46 Fricker, Edith, 112 de Staël, Germaine, 40, 112 Fuseli, Henry, 17, 18 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 14, 220, 221n5 ‘The Nightmare,’ 18 Dickens, Charles, 129, 131 Dilke, Charles, 233, 244 Drury, Henry, 167, 169, 171, 172, G 178 Gaull, Marilyn, 18 Dryden, John, 5 Genette, Gerard, 8, 184 Dusautoy, James, 102 Gibbon, Edward, 166 272 INDEX

Gifford, William, 107–110, 229 Hodgson, Francis, 167, 169–172, Gillman, James, Jr., 87 174–176, 178, 179 Gisborne, John, 205, 208, 209 Hofland, Barbara, 37 Gisborne, Maria, 13, 217, 253–255, Hogarth, William, 130 258–261, 259n19, 264–267 Hogg, James, 59 Godwin, William, 12, 17, 18, 89, 90, Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 185, 209 254 Holmes, Richard, 24, 25 Things as they are; or the adventures Homer, 103 of Caleb Williams, 254 Iliad, 217 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 208 Hoppner, R. P., 172, 206 Faust, 208, 210 Horace, 175, 209 Gooch, Robert, 104 Ars Poetica, 209 Gordon, Charlotte, 259, 261 Howe, Anthony, 13, 166, 200n4, Gray, Thomas, 1 210n17 Griffiths, Eric, 47, 52 Hunt, Leigh, 3, 12, 24, 26, Griggs, E. L., 91, 111, 112 119, 130, 131, 147–162, Gross, Jonathan, 166 199, 204, 207, 211, 213, 214, Guiccioli, Teresa, 166 243 The Examiner, 158, 161 The Indicator, 158, 160–162 H The Story of Rimini, 153 Haggis, Jane, 8 Hunt, Marianne, 148 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 16, 37 Hutchinson, Sara, 57, 59, 68, 77, Hamond, Elton, 102 79n27, 93 Hanson, John, 165 Hyde, Lewis, 30–32 Haslam, William, 226, 227 Haughton, Hugh, 221 Hay, Daisy, 148, 161, 210 J Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 56, 131, Jack, Ian, 139, 140 163, 181 James, Felicity, 124, 128, 131 Hayley, William, 112 Jarrell, Randall, 60 Hayward, Abraham, 58 Jeffrey, Francis, 107 Hazlitt, William, 27, 53, 57, 85n5, Jewsbury, Maria Jane, 58 86n12, 120, 131, 229 Johnson, Joseph, 3, 6, 12, 16–20, 24, My First Acquaintance with Poets, 53 31 Hemans, Felicia, 59 Johnson, Reverend William, 11, 68, Herbert, George, 11, 56 69, 75 Hill, Alan G., 63n4 Johnson, Samuel, 15, 16, 26, 130 Hitchener, Elizabeth, 5, 185–188, 201 A Dictionary of the English Hobhouse, John Cam, 4, 22, 171, Language, 15 172, 175, 176, 179, 195 Jones, Robert, 59, 62, 78, 80 INDEX 273

K Lamb, Mary, 7 Kadushin, Charles, 30, 32, 40 Landon, Letitia, 48 Kant, Immanuel, 96 A History of the Lyre, 48 Karlin, Daniel, 224, 236, 237n3 Lansdown, Richard, 164, 212 Keats, George, 225–232, 237, Le Faye, Deidre, 135 243–246, 245n10, 249, 250 Leadbeater, Mary, 12, 29–44 Keats, Georgiana, 226–232, 237, Annals of Ballitore, 35 243–246, 245n10, 250 Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Keats, John, 10, 13, 14, 24, 26, 27, Peasantry, 35 124, 127, 149, 151, 155, 157, Extracts and Original Anecdotes 159, 183–198, 200, 219–251 for the Improvement of Youth, The Cap and Bells (or The Jealousies), 35 249, 250 Poems by Mary Leadbeater, 35 ‘The Eve of St Mark,’ 244–246, Tobit, 38 246n12, 248–250, 251n17 Leadbeater, William, 35 The Fall of Hyperion, 189–191, 193, Leadbetter, Gregory, 11 198 LeFanu, William, 38 ‘Four Seasons of Man,’ 249 Leighton, Angela, 93 ‘Pensive they sit,’ 244 Lever, Charles, 177 ‘This living hand,’ 223 Lewis, Matthew, 262 ‘Why did I laugh tonight?,’ 237, The Monk, 262 238 The Liberal, 204, 262 Keats, Tom, 226n19, 227, 233, 243 Lloyd, Martha, 134 Kermode, Anita, 1, 183, 183n1 The London Corresponding Society, Kermode, Frank, 1, 183 4 Khalip, Jacques, 225, 225n17, 234 London Magazine, 261 Kinnaird, Douglas, 22 Longman, Thomas Norton, 106 Kittredge, Katharine, 40 Losh, James, 55 Knight, George Wilson, 212 Lovell, Robert, 105, 111, 113 Knowles, Herbert, 101 Lucas, E. V., 118, 119

L M Lackington, George, 24 Manning, Peter J., 196 Lamb, Charles, 6, 7, 12, 59, 84, 86, Manning, Thomas, 120, 121, 126, 112, 117–131, 157 128–131, 129n12 ‘Lines addressed, from London, to Marchand, Leslie A., 164, 171 Sara and S.T.C. at Bristol, in Martineau, Harriet, 76, 76n25 the Summer of 1796,’ 7 Mathews, Charles Skinner, 171 ‘Ode on the Departing Year,’ 125 Maturin, Charles, 95 ‘Oxford in the Vacation,’ 121 Bertram, 95 ‘To Sara and Her Samuel,’ 7 McCleery, Alistair, 16 ‘To the Poet Cowper,’ 6 McFarland, Thomas, 122 274 INDEX

McGann, Jerome J., 175, 184n4 P McMillan, Buchanan, 25 Palmer, John, 2, 5 Medwin, Thomas, 258 Park, Mungo, 262 Melbourne, Lady Elizabeth, 166 Parry, William, 170 Milne, Esther, 220n4, 230, 230n23, Pater, Walter, 59 230n24 Paulin, Tom, 91 Milton, John, 103, 189–193, 211, Peacock, Thomas Love, 25, 120, 227n20 154n19, 199, 215, 253 Paradise Lost, 192 Perry, Seamus, 84, 91 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 30, 33, Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 62, 166 62n3, 63n4, 64, 68n14, 69 The Monthly Magazine, 6 Phillips, 38 Moore, Thomas, 38, 41, 45, 120, Plato, 197n39, 199, 206 163, 164, 172, 172n15, 178, Symposium, 206 180, 197 Polidori, John William, 262 More, Hannah, 33, 36, 40 Pollard, Jane, 65 Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 40 Ponsonby, Sarah, 36, 39 Morning Post, 121 Poole, Thomas, 84, 92 Moxon, Edward, 59 Pope, Alexander, 1, 5, 130, 166, 197, Murray, John, 6n17, 11, 249 12, 16, 20–24, 104, 106, 107, Rape of the Lock, 249 110, 165, 166, 178, 194–197, Pound, Ezra, 131 212 Pratt, Lynda, 11 Priestly, Joseph, 12, 17 Proby, Fanny, 41 N Prothero, Rowland E., 172 Nasio, J.-D., 52 Nellist, Brian, 197 Nelson, Horatio, 165 Q Newlyn, Lucy, 27 Quarterly Review, 11, 107 Nicholson, Andrew, 178, 197n39 Quillinan, Edward, 47 Quinney, Laura, 56

O O’Connell, Mary, 12, 166 R Oliphant, Margaret, 179–181 Rawes, Alan, 166 Ollier, Charles, 12, 16, 24–27, 160, Reiman, Donald, 159 161, 205, 207, 208, 213 Reveley, Henry, 217 Ollier, James, 25 Reynolds, J. H., 189–191, 244, O’Neill, Lindsay, 12, 32 246n12 O’Neill, Michael, 10, 149, 153, Richardson, Samuel, 5 155n22, 200n4 Rickman, John, 113, 129 INDEX 275

Ricks, Christopher, 52 Adonais, 208 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 51, 58, 75, The Cenci, 159, 161, 213 78–79n27, 87, 163 A Defence of Poetry, 191, 199, 211, Robinson, Howard, 2 235 Robinson, Mary, 127 ‘England in 1819,’ 158 Roe, Nicholas, 148, 148n3, 149 Epipsychidion, 205, 206, 208, 209 Rossetti, Christina, 47 Essays, Letters from Abroad, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 208 Translations and Fragments, Julie; ou, la nouvelle Hêloïse, 208 215 Russell, Gillian, 33 Julian and Maddalo, 207 Laon and Cythna; or The Revolution of the Golden City, 16, 25, 187, S 188, 198 St George, Colonel Richard, 34, 35 ‘Love’s Philosophy,’ 160, 161 Schmid, Susanne, 33, 34 The Mask of Anarchy, 148, 158, 161 Scott, Walter, 5, 41, 59 ‘Ode to Naples,’ 201 The Abbot, 41 ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ 201 Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, 5 Peter Bell the Third, 158 Seward, Anna, 30, 36 Prometheus Unbound, 192, 193 Seward, Edmund, 113 Queen Mab, 235 Shakespeare, William, 197, 205n13, The Sensitive Plant, 204 212, 213, 229, 231, 243 ‘Stanzas, Written in Dejection, Near Hamlet, 75 Naples,’ 201 Macbeth, 213 The Triumph of Life, 211 Much Ado About Nothing, 177 Shelley, Percy Florence, 158, 264 Romeo and Juliet, 180 Shelley, William, 154, 155 Shelley, Harriet, 201, 207 Smith, Charlotte, 112 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (née Smith, Elizabeth, 37 Mary Godwin), 13, 24, 25, 120, Fragments in Prose and Verse, 37 147–162, 202, 203, 206, 208, Smith, Juliet, 37 209, 215, 253–267 Smollet, Tobias, 23 ‘The Choice,’ 266 Sotheby, William, 38, 93, 95 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Southey, Cuthbert, 114 Prometheus, 24, 200, 254–257 Southey, Herbert, 54, 102–105 ‘Giovanni Villani,’ 262 Southey, Robert, 11, 40, 41, 54, 59, The Last Man, 254, 265–267 69, 83, 86n12, 87, 92, 94, ‘On Ghosts,’ 261, 263, 264n31, 99–115, 120, 196 265, 267 ‘Consolation,’ 102–105 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1, 5, 10, 12, 16, Essays, Moral and Political, 109 24–26, 120, 147–162, 183–218, History of the Peninsular War, 110 235, 236, 253, 254, 257–262, Joan of Arc, 105, 106 264–267 Madoc, 40, 41 276 INDEX

Southey, Robert (Continued) Trench, Elizabeth Melesina, 42 ‘Not to the grave, not to the grave Trench, Melesina, 11, 12, 29–44 my soul,’ 113 Campaspe, an Historical Tale; and ‘Oliver Newman,’ 102 Other Poems, 36 ‘On the state of Public Opinion, and Ellen: A Ballad, 36 the Political Reformers,’ 108 Laura’s Dream; or, the Moonlanders, ‘Parliamentary Reform,’ 107, 108 36, 38 ‘Robin Hood,’ 102 Mary Queen of Scots, an Historical Speck, W. A., 99 Ballad: with Other Poems, 36 Spence, Thomas, 107 Trench, Richard, 36 Spenser, Edmund, 103, 193, 249 Trilling, Lionel, 224 The Faerie Queene, 193 Trimmer, Sarah, 38, 196 Muiopotmos, 249 Tumbleson, Ralph, 139–140, 140n7 Sperry, Stuart, 192, 246 Tyson, Gerald, 17 Stabler, Jane, 10, 13, 14, 149, 157 Stanley, Liz, 31 Stauffer, Andrew, 165, 166, 168 V Staves, Susan, 30 Vendler, Helen, 56 Stillinger, Jack, 247–250 Vesey, Elizabeth, 33 Sunstein, Emily W., 257 Viviani, Emilia, 202 Sutherland, Kathyrn, 23 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Swift, Jonathan, 175, 176 166

T W Taaffe, John, 217 Walpole, Horace, 1, 166, 175, 176 Tasso, Torquato, 166, 215 Warter, John, 114 Taylor, Henry, 114 Watt, James, 47 Taylor, John, 26, 27 Webb, Timothy, 12, 14, 148, 149n8, Taylor, William, 100 151–153, 166, 189, 193, 220n4, Telford, Thomas, 112 225n16 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 52 Westwood, Daniel, 12 Thelwall, John, 84, 88 White, Henry Kirke, 41, 101 Thomson, Heidi, 149, 159 Remains, 37–44, 38n34, 41n37 Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, 135 Wilberforce, William, 114 Tighe, Mary, 38, 39 Williams, Edward, 210, 257, 261 Psyche, 39 Williams, Helen Maria, 5 The Times, 16 Williams, Jane, 202, 203, 210, 257, Tobin, James, 57 258, 261 Tomalin, Claire, 18 Williams, William Carlos, 223 Traitorous Correspondence Bill, 4 ‘This is Just to Say,’ 223 Trench, Charles, 36 Wilson, Frances, 51, 53 INDEX 277

Windham, William, 39 125–131, 157, 189–193, 200, Wolfson, Susan J., 10, 11, 14, 156, 217, 237, 243 224n14 The Brothers, 71 Wollstonecraft, Everina, 19 Descriptive Sketches, 65 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5, 12, 17–20, Essay upon Epitaphs, 56 200, 200n4 ‘Forsake me not,’ 57 Letters Written during a Short Lyrical Ballads, 73, 125, 128, 131, Residence in Sweden, Norway, 237 and Denmark, 200 Memorials of a Tour on the Thoughts on the Education of Continent, 80 Daughters, 18 ‘A Night-Piece,’ 67, 75 Woodhouse, Richard, 233 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality,’ Woolf, Virginia, 95 93 Wordsworth, Catherine, 54, 56, 59 Poems (1815), 67 Wordsworth, Dora, 47, 59 Poems, in Two Volumes, 57 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 11, 50, 51, 53, The Prelude, 11, 49, 53, 55, 61n2, 65, 67–80, 100, 119 62, 65, 68, 71, 78, 104, 130 Alfoxden Journal, 11 Scenery of the Lakes, 75, 79 Wordsworth, John, 54 The Tuft of Primroses, 60 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 65, 67 Wrangham, Francis, 45, 46 Wordsworth, Mary, 52, 61–80 Wright, Angela, 13 Wordsworth, Thomas, 54, 56, 57, Wynn, Charles, 113 59 Wordsworth, William, 3, 5, 10–12, 45–80, 86, 88, 90n24, 93, 96, Y 100, 103, 104, 119–121, Young, Edward, 96