PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT, ROMANTICISM AND CULTURES OF PRINT Romanticism and the Letter Edited by Madeleine Callaghan · Anthony Howe 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 pub- lisher 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 col- leagues and PhD students at the University of Sheffield. We would par- ticularly 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 (along- side 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, includingThe 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 pub- lished 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 con- nections 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 proj- ect 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