BARS

Issue No. 40 July 2012 ISSN 0964-2447

Editor: David Higgins School of English University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT [email protected]

Reviews Editor: David O‘Shaughnessy Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies IN THIS ISSUE: University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL Editor's Column ...... 1 [email protected] Notices ...... 1 Events ...... 5 BARS Conference Reports . . . . 8 Copley Award Reports . . . 13 President: Nicola J. Watson Early Career and Postgraduate English Department Column ...... 16 Faculty of Arts Reviews ...... 18 The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK 7 6AA [email protected]

Secretary: Kerri Andrews Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Strathclyde McCance Building 16 Richmond Street Glasgow G1 1XQ [email protected]

Treasurer and Membership Secretary: Angela Wright School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics University of Sheffield Jessop West 1 Upper Hanover Street Sheffield S3 7RA [email protected]

Editor’s Column Notices

Welcome to the first 2012 number of the BARS Bulletin and Review. I am sorry to say that it BARS WEBSITE will be David O‘Shaughnessy‘s final Bulletin as

Studies Reviews Editor. David has done great service to www.bars.ac.uk

the Association in this important role, and I am

personally grateful for his hard work, Anyone wanting to place advertisements, or professionalism, and good humour. An with other requests regarding the website should invitation for applications to take over from him contact our website editor, Padmini Ray Murray, has gone out via the mailbase. The role may either by email ([email protected]) prove particularly attractive to an early career or by post at the Department of English Studies, academic looking to develop their contribution University of Stirling, FK9 4AL. to Romantic studies. Please send a short CV (two sides maximum) and covering email (500 words maximum) explaining why you are a BARS MAILBASE suitable candidate to me at d.higgins@

leeds.ac.uk by 1 August 2012. If you have any

Romantic Romantic As a BARS member, you are entitled to receive questions about the role, please feel free to messages from the electronic BARS mailbase. contact David (d.p.o-shaughnessy This advertises calls for papers, events, @warwick.ac.uk). resources and publications relevant to Romantic Apart from an excellent range of reviews, this studies. If you would like to join, or post a issue contains the usual notices and calls for message on the mailbase, please contact Neil for for papers. There are also reports on conferences

Ramsey, the co-ordinator, by email likely to be of interest to members – including ([email protected]) with your full name the very successful BARS Early Career and and email address. Information about the Postgraduate Conference at Newcastle mailbase, along with copies of archived University – and a new section of reports from messages, can be found on the mailbase website: recipients of the Stephen Copley Postgraduate www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/bars.html Research Awards. These Awards are one of the significant ways in which the Association supports Romantic studies and I hope that members will agree that it‘s valuable to learn BARS MEMBERSHIP more about the excellent use to which they are put. Members can ask for notices to be placed on the As always, I would love to hear from members mailbase, on the website, and in the Bulletin. with ideas for material that could be included in The website has a page dedicated to new books

the journal. I would like to maintain the range published by members, and you should let the Association

and quality of conference reports, while also editor know if you would like your recent work

adding other material: details of large research to be listed. Similarly, if you are editing a collection of essays or a special issue of a projects, accounts of public engagement activity, reviews of plays and exhibitions, and so on. journal, or working on a collaborative project, Please do email me with any ideas, and have a we can usually place notices calling for great summer. contributions on the website as well as in the David Higgins Bulletin. Editor The annual subscription for BARS

membership is £25 (waged) and £10

British

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(unwaged/postgraduate). Members receive and cannot be made retrospectively. Applicants copies of the BARS Bulletin and Review twice a must be members of BARS (to join please visit year and can join the electronic mailbase. our website). The names of recipients will be Membership is necessary for attendance at announced in the BARS Bulletin and Review, BARS international conferences. For a and successful applicants will be asked to membership form, please contact the BARS submit a short report to the BARS Executive administrator, Fern Merrills, at: Committee and to acknowledge BARS in their [email protected] thesis and/or any publication arising from the research trip. Reports will also be published in the Bulletin. BARS DAY CONFERENCES Please send the following information in support of your application: BARS day conferences, in almost every case, 1. Your name and institutional affiliation. are organised through the host institution. BARS 2. The title and a short abstract or summary of assists by advertising conferences, advising on your PhD project. the format, and giving early warnings of any 3. Details of the research to be undertaken for likely clashes with other planned events in our which you need support, and its relation to your files. Part of the point of BARS is to act as a PhD project. supportive system nationally, and its 4. Detailed costing of proposed research trip. involvement in planning would partly be to help 5. Details of current or recent funding (AHRC ensure that conferences are as evenly distributed award, etc.). across regions as possible in the course of any 6. Details of any other financial support for one year. BARS cannot underwrite day which you have applied/will apply in support of conferences, but it can sometimes make a the trip. financial contribution of to help the organising 7. Name of supervisor/referee (with email department with costs. address) to whom application can be made for a Individuals or groups who would like to run a supporting reference on your behalf. day conference are invited to contact Dr Angela Applications and questions should be directed Wright ([email protected]). In the to the bursaries officer, Dr. Daniel Cook, event of possible clashes, BARS will assist by University of Wisconsin-Madison liaising between conferences distributed across ([email protected]). Reports by recent bursary the year, or across regions. BARS will actively holders appear later in this number of the solicit proposals. Proposals are also invited for Bulletin. interdisciplinary conferences.

NORTH EAST NINETEENTH STEPHEN COPLEY CENTURY POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH

AWARDS This is a new postgraduate research group for work on the long nineteenth century by PhD Postgraduates working in the area of Romantic students and early career researchers in the studies are invited to apply for a Stephen Copley North East of England. North East Nineteenth Postgraduate Research Award. The BARS Century (NENC) aims to create and sustain a Executive Committee has established the awards network of scholars by running monthly reading in order to support postgraduate research. They group sessions and a website, through which are intended to help fund expenses incurred members can discuss any aspect of working in through travel to libraries and archives necessary this period, and can keep updated about relevant to the student's research, up to a maximum of CFPs and other similar events. We hope to £300. Application for the awards is competitive,

2 promote the work being undertaken in the NORSE ROMANTICISM: universities of this region, and to enable collaborative links with other postgraduate THEMES IN BRITISH students and institutions. The group is currently LITERATURE, 1760–1830 jointly organised by the Universities of Northumbria and Newcastle, but includes Romantic Circles is pleased to announce the members from across the region. For more publication of a new edition, Norse Romanticism: details, please see the website: Themes in British Literature, 1760–1830: www.northeast19thcentury.org http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/editions/norse

NINETEENTH-CENTURY This collection of texts illustrates how the ancient North was re-created for contemporary COLLECTIONS ONLINE national, political and literary purposes. The anthology features canonical authors (such as This Spring, Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is Thomas Gray, William Blake, William delighted to announce the forthcoming release of Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, and the first four archives in Gale‘s multi-year Ann Radcliffe). Standard editions of these Nineteenth Century Collections Online authors‘ works generally lack the contextual programme. Scholars of the Romantic period – framework and necessary commentary that and Romantic literature especially – will be explain the way in which they repurpose Norse particularly interested in the release of the material. There are also more unusual selections second archive in the programme, Corvey of lesser known writers, whose texts have not Collection of European Literature: 1790-1840. previously been available to modern readers. This unique collection of monographs includes a The range of material presented in the edition wide range of Romantic literature published in has the scope and breadth to allow for new English, French and German. Sourced from research into the Norse-inflected writing during Corvey Abbey in North Rhine-Westphalia, the period. Germany, the Corvey Collection is one of the The anthology shows how a number of writers most important collections of works from the used the Norse tradition to address issues of period. With a special focus on rare works, more political and cultural concern, and to provide than 7,700 titles will be included, comprising new aesthetic models for their poetry. approx. 5 million pages. Importantly, the interest in Norse literature and With the Corvey Collection of European mythology came at a time when the need to Literature, scholars can research and explore a recover ancient literary heritage came under range of topics, including Romantic literary tremendous pressure. Before the discovery of genres; mutual influences of British, French and Beowulf (and the realization of its importance), German Romanticism; literary culture; women the Norse past was taken up in an attempt to writers of the period; the canon and Romantic substitute for a missing Anglo-Saxon tradition. aesthetics. In England, the need for Anglo-Saxon heroic To pre-register for a trial to this unique verse was given an increased sense of urgency collection, please email as Celtic antiquaries began to publish heroic [email protected] traditions associated with Wales, Ireland and not For more information about the Nineteenth least Ossian‘s Scotland. The Norse material also Century Collections Online programme visit appealed to romantic-era writers for its ideals of www.gale.cengage.co.uk/ncco Liberty, while the dark Norse imagination was exploited as a vehicle for the creation of Gothic terror. Therefore, the anthology contains texts that will be of relevance to researchers and

3 students pursuing a number of different HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS, A projects. The introduction, headnotes and extensive TOUR IN SWITZERLAND, annotations place the texts in relation to their original Norse sources. The extensive editorial EDITED BY PATRICK VINCENT AND matter also discusses the perception of the Norse FLORENCE WIDMER-SCHNYDER Middle Ages, as these were shaped by sometimes fanciful antiquarian and Geneva : Slatkine Press, ISBN: 978-2-05- romanticizing discourses in the period. The 102265-1, 494 pages electronic edition is a unique resource that makes it easy to compare and search for the Hailed by her contemporaries as possibly her characters, themes and ideas that were central to best book, Helen Maria Williams‘s A Tour in the Norse revival in English letters. Switzerland offered readers across Europe an original travel narrative which, more than two hundred years later, has lost none of its THE CHARLES LAMB freshness or interest. Williams (1759-1827) was a controversial British author, salon hostess and SOCIETY: NEW WEBSITE radical thinker. While she is best known for her eight volumes of letters defending the French www.charleslambsociety.com Revolution, A Tour in Switzerland was widely reviewed and translated into four languages, The Charles Lamb Society‘s new website is now notably in French by the economist Jean- live online. Please visit to find out more about Baptiste Say. Published on the eve of the French the Society‘s work, and for details of how to invasion of Switzerland in 1798, her book become a member. provides rare insight into the mind of a well- The new website will become an important informed, curious and politically engaged new resource for the study of Charles and Mary Revolutionary-era woman writer and Lamb and their circle. It includes detailed exemplifies recent critical assertions that travel biographical articles on the Lambs written by writing offered women an important medium of Duncan Wu and Jane Aaron; information about public expression. the Society, its history, events, and biannual The Tour describes Williams‘s five-month journal, The Charles Lamb Bulletin; as well as stay in Switzerland with her partner John useful lists of printed and online resources for Hurford Stone and the exiled politician further study. Benjamin Vaughan in 1794. If her descriptions The Society is also in the process of digitizing of the Alps are written in a lively style mixing the back catalogue of The Charles Lamb science and sensibility, her reports on Bulletin; this will be made available on the new Switzerland‘s institutions and inhabitants are site soon. deeply ironic and highly partisan, serving to deconstruct the Swiss myth of natural liberty. A hybrid text, Williams adds a review of post- Thermidorian Parisian society and a political synopsis on the Swiss republics all the way up to late 1797. This edition brings together a newly edited and annotated text that includes variants in Say‘s French translation along with an introduction, chronology, map and five appendices which provide new details on Williams‘s tour and help situate the book‘s place within the debate on Swiss republicanism.

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Indian Pluralism and Warren Events Hastings’s Orientalist Regime 18-20 July 2012 University of Wales Conference Centre, Gregynog, Powys. Contested Views: Visual Culture and the Revolutionary and Plenary speakers include Dr Natasha Eaton (King‘s College, London); William Dalrymple; Napoleonic Wars Professor Carl Ernst (North Carolina), Professor P. J. Marshall (King‘s College, London), 19-20 July 2012 Professor Daniel White (Toronto). Tate Britain, Clore Auditorium 10.00 –17.45 The aim of this conference is to provide a more Plenary Speakers: Mary Favret, Gillian Russell, complete and multidisciplinary picture of the Susan Siegfried, Paul White amateur Orientalists of the Hastings circle and the politico-cultural significance of their work. In July 2012, in advance of commemorations of Jones sought similitude between West and East, the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, Tate and part of this overarching project was to stress Britain will be hosting a two-day conference the compatibility of Hindu and Islamic exploring the profound impact of the mysticism. There was an imperialist ideological Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on visual dimension here; it was a means of aligning the cultures from the outbreak of pan-European regime‘s need to appear both neo-Brahmanical conflict in 1792 to the present day. This and neo-Mughal. The establishment of international event will gather speakers from a authoritative texts of the Bhagavadgīta and of range of disciplines and will foster knowledge Hāfiz bolstered the authority of the colonial and understanding of the ways in which the regime, encouraging socio-political stability. ‗First Total War‘ has been mediated in visual Nor was this political instrumentality reductive; cultures in Britain and continental Europe and the Hastings circle revered these Hindu and throughout the world. Muslim texts, admiring their potential to Organised by Satish Padiyar (The Courtauld transcend differences of birth, of culture, and of Institute of Art), Phil Shaw (University of religion. Jones‘s fascination with Sufi poets such Leicester), and Philippa Simpson (Royal as Sa‗di, Jami, Hāfiz and Amir Khusrau, and Museums Greenwich) for the Tate Research with Indo-Persian linguistic and ethnological Centre: British Romantic Art affinities entailed both his intellectual Attendance is free, but booking is essential: investment in pluralism, and his fervent belief in www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate- the syncretic co-existence of Hinduism and britain/conference/contested-views Islam. His choice of reading and that of his This event is supported by The Courtauld Asiatic Society friends frequently seem very Institute of Art Research Forum, Tate Britain, similar to that which would have been found in and the AHRC. enlightened Mughal libraries. The interdisciplinary research of delegates might explore the literary, linguistic, and scientific contributions of key members of the Hastings circle/Asiatick Society. The Persianist Francis Gladwin, for example, was the most published author in late eighteenth-century Calcutta, and his work deserves to be better known. They might investigate the publications

5 and contributions to academic journals and CALLS FOR PAPERS newspapers of figures such as Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Charles Wilkins, Richard Johnson, Charles Hamilton, David and James Anderson, Melancholy Minds and Painful Jonathan Scott, Reuben Burrow, Samuel Davis, Bodies: Genealogy, Geography, Henry Vansittart, Antoine Polier, Claude Martin, Sir Robert Chambers, William Chambers, Pathogeny William Kirkpatrick, and John Gilchrist. Delegates might consider the extent and cultural University of Liverpool, 9-11 July 2013 implications of these amateur Orientalists‘ marriages to, or cohabitation with, Indian One of the major developments in the study of women; their working relationships with Indian melancholia over the last thirty years has been officials and businessmen; their collaboration the rise to aesthetic and cultural prominence of with each other, with ‗President‘ Jones, and varieties of negative emotions proposed and especially with Indian informants and scribal discussed as melancholy, including different communities, Hindu pandits, and Muslim conceptions, analyses, and portrayals from grief munshis and moulavis. This is not to mention: to insanity. Most recently, Lars von Trier‘s film poetical and political Islam; high-caste sipahis Melancholia (2011) happens to be the and ‗barracks Islam‘; the politics of language melodramatic adaptation of the concept fuelled and of ‗language-money‘; Sufi mysticism and by cinematic symbols. Correspondingly, often Sufi militarism; political, commercial and observed as ‗a central European discourse‘, military significance of gosains and bairagis melancholia has resurfaced to embody (Śaivite and Vaishnavite monks), colonial complementary or paradoxical notions not mimicry of Mughal patronage….. merely in the literary analysis of texts and For further details please contact Dr Michael J. contexts, but it has also emerged to retrieve its Franklin, Department of English, Swansea historical categorization. The cultural and social University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP. history of emotions entwined with modern [email protected] medical and psychiatric lexicalization has opened new pathways to provide relative definitions of melancholia. However, theories about the choice of analogies for melancholy, whether aesthetic, cinematic, religious, or medical, somehow fail to distinguish the connections between contrary factors involved in melancholia. It is also noteworthy that theories of characterization, no matter of what kind, tend to reformulate and evaluate contrary factors for the sake of preserving ‗superiority‘ according to prevalent taste at each moment in time. In Britain, for example, individual and collective melancholia has been appreciated as a sign of genius and national pride at one time and announced as a national malady at another. Analogous is the contemporary history of behavioural rather than cognitive attributes to grief, e.g. tearfulness. Pain, in comparison, is bodily and often mental distress which in the past was closely perceived in relation to melancholia, but today research on pain is

6 divorced from depression let alone melancholy. Abstracts and panel proposals of up to 300 Thus, we miss the ‗melancholy-pain bridge‘ in words per 20-minute papers are welcome plus a contemporary scholarship of mental and short biographical note. If you wish to attend physical suffering. On the other hand, while pain without presenting a paper, please email the is seen through the lens of universality, with organisers with your CV and a statement as to management models stretching from Chinese how your research relates to the conference. medicine to Latin America, melancholia has Postgraduate students can apply for Dr Wasfia rarely been investigated beyond the Western Mhabak Memorial Grant by sending your borders with regard to its genealogy, pathology, abstract, 1000-word research statement, and CV pathogeny, and management. Whether this to the conference board. geographical focus is a matter of re-establishing A selection of papers expanded and edited pre-eminence or in want of psycholinguistic after the conference will be considered for reference, thereby centred on a gap in universal publication in the International Journal of scientific communication, it invites intriguing Literature and Psychology (issues 2014). and challenging enquiries. Further particulars: http://paranoiapain.liv.ac.uk We welcome contributions from different fields in humanities, social and life sciences in Submission Deadline: 28 February 2013 the following categories and other relevant Email your proposal to: [email protected] areas: - Diversity in the geography of melancholia and pain Midlands Romantic Seminar - The relationship between Western theories of emotions and Oriental conceptions The Midlands Romantic Seminar (MRS) is - The European hypothesis of melancholia-pain issuing a call for papers for a one day seminar to in non-European cultures take place at Nottingham Trent University on - Orientalism, grief, and abstinence Friday 26 October 2012 on the subject of - Emotionality as negativity ‗Romantic Legacies‘. A broad understanding of - Gender attributes and tearfulness Romanticism and literary, cultural, political and - Art history, muscle tension, and the painful historical legacies is intended, and an posture interdisciplinary audience and contributions are - Interpretation, assumption, semantic relation welcomed. A plenary paper from guest speaker Damian - Fear, Pain, and melancholy dominance Walford Davies (Aberystwyth University) will - Depression and pain be followed by papers received in response to - Paranoia, melancholia, and pain this CFP, and a round table discussion of the - Misconceptions; cyclothymia and bipolar material presented to close. Depending on the disorder level of response, the seminar might run over the - Melancholy appropriation, ethnicity, course of an afternoon, or the whole day. Tea, multicultural perspectives coffee and biscuits will be provided. A - Cosmology and elegiac pain management programme will be confirmed after the deadline - Cinematic symbols for papers. - Literary emotionality, fictive superiority Abstracts of 250 words for papers lasting - Embodied cognition around 20 minutes should be forwarded to Carol - Anaesthetics, the relationship between medical Bolton [email protected] or Tom Knowles management and other models [email protected] by - Lyric manifestation of melancholy and pain Tuesday 31 July 2012. Please don‘t hesitate to get in touch if you require further information.

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Romantic writing‘, according to Robertson – through the increasing authoritarian Conference developments in Europe and the US‘s growing promise as a Western outpost of liberality. Next, Dr David Stewart (Northumbria) spoke Reports on ‗Hazlitt, Print and Ephemerality‘, highlighting Hazlitt‘s idea of the mutual exclusiveness of literary fashion and merit. Ephemerality was skilfully brought into view as The 11th Hazlitt Day School problematic in its proximity to nothing, as was Hazlitt‘s overall disappointment with the living University College London,R 9 June 2012 poets as agents of spurious longevity. As contemporary culture resembles a glittering yet Thanks to the organisational efforts of Uttara empty nothing, high art, according to Hazlitt, Natarajan and Gregory Dart, the annual Hazlitt materialises in posthumous reputation with ‗the Day School has now completed its move from spirit of man surviving himself in the minds and Oxford to London. And very successfully so, for thoughts of other men, undying and on 9 June 2012 it drew an audience as eclectic imperishable‘ (Lecture VII: ‗On the Living and substantial as the range of papers delivered. Poets‘); or, the ‗dust and smoke and noise of About sixty participants, including established modern literature‘ only momentarily clouds the scholars, lay readers, journalists, and graduate ‗pure, silent air of immortality‘ (‗On Reading students learned about Hazlittean topics as Old Books‘). In this claim, impressively worked diverse as semantics, pugilism, and horology – out by Stewart, a historicity in Hazlitt‘s to name only a few. It all took place in the aesthetics that detaches both author and reader stimulating atmosphere of University College from the potentially selfish motives of the London, and it ended in a convivial wine present and future showed itself. reception in the institution‘s English Department. After a break for tea and coffee, Professor An assortment of the day‘s papers is intended to John Strachan (Northumbria) delivered the first appear in the 2013 issue of the Hazlitt Review. of two plenary lectures of the day, entitled Professor Fiona Robertson (Birmingham City ‗Hazlitt, Reynolds, and the Rhetoric of Fighting‘. University) quickly dispelled any Saturday- Strachan, using ample visual material in order to morning fatigue in her audience through her illustrate the nature and compelling illegality of paper centring on Hazlitt‘s 1826 essay ‗On pugilism at the time, situated Hazlitt‘s 1822 Depth and Superficiality‘. Drawing on the work essay ‗The Fight‘ among the landmark events on her forthcoming monograph entitled The and personalities of the day, as well as the United States in British Romanticism (OUP literary responses they drew. For instance, the 2012), Robertson addressed Hazlitt‘s treatment light-weight boxer Jack Randall (mentioned by of aesthetic judgement and political situation Hazlitt in the opening scene of ‗The Fight‘) and between Britain and the US, as well as that of John Hamilton Reynolds‘s 1820 sonnet to related paradoxes in logic. Hazlitt‘s definition of Randall provided a lively backdrop against depth as ‗resolving the concrete into the which Hazlitt‘s achievements of creating a abstract‘ emerged as the most telling linguistic mock-epic atmosphere – so similar to much of conceptualisation of geographical circumstance, today‘s sports journalism – came to pass. and the paper‘s conclusion that a ‗negative Subsequently, the ‗charm of pugilism‘ as a catalogue‘ of attributes ‗underpins Romantic combination of fair competition from a ‗classical accounts of the US‘ was clearly and impulse‘ with ‗sublime, high Romantic convincingly elaborated. Much of the following imagination‘ oscillated with the vividly discussion then centred on the eventual conveyed, utter brutality of the affair, all of loosening of such perspectives – of the placing which Hazlitt‘s account of the December 1821 of the US in ‗unexpected situations in British fight between Tom Hickman and Bill Neat

8 encompasses. Ultimately, Strachan‘s lucid free the mind from the potentially selfish explication of nineteenth-century boxing and its motives of influencing the past and future, rhetoric sparked some controversy on the subject Robinson took on board Schelling‘s premise of matter in the following discussion – but what free artistic creation resembling divine creation could have been more Hazlittean than that? and merged it with his grounding in Godwinism Lunch followed, and afterwards Dr James in a theory of perfectibility. The men‘s opposed Grande (King‘s College London) spoke about ‗hatred‘ of past political evils (Hazlitt) and ‗fear‘ ‗Dissenting Legacies: Hazlitt and Godwin after of future ones (Robinson) reflected this 1828‘. Grande, drawing on his experience of conceptual divergence on nevertheless common working on the digital edition of Godwin‘s diary metaphysical ground. (http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), In the concluding lecture, Dr Marcus Tomalin explained that Godwin‘s record of his later years (Cambridge) impressively explicated not only – when the success of Political Justice and his the material circumstances behind Hazlitt‘s 1827 early novels had faded – is no less detailed and essay ‗On a sun-dial‘, but also delivered a series valuable than his record of the 1790s. The of insightful observations and original puns on audience learned how Hazlitt features in the varying degrees of naturalness behind the Godwin‘s commentary after the disintegration of time-telling devices of Hazlitt‘s reference. From, their friendship following the former‘s attack on at the bottom, hour-glasses, French clocks, and the latter in his 1826 ‗On the Qualifications repeaters of varying degrees of refinement via Necessary to Success in Life‘, in which it was the full hunter watch, the open face watch, and alleged that Godwin ‗in conversation has not a church bells to the wooden and, most favourably, word to throw at a dog‘. Grande compared the iron sundial – Tomalin gave a captivating in- Hazlitt's account of sixteenth-century history in depth account of Hazlitt‘s (perhaps not all-too- Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age serious) horological hierarchy. The underlying of Elizabeth with Godwin's unpublished criteria of appreciation, however, were easily ‗Prospectus of a History of the Protestant reconciled with overall Hazlittian principles: Reformation in England‘, showing how both where the time can be told as openly and with as writers saw in the Reformation and the little human intervention as possible, or where vernacular Bible the individual mind‘s freeing (as in the case of the church bell) it serves the from ideological fetters and, subsequently, the denotation of the end to the labourer‘s workday, foundation for the pursuit of liberty and truth the related device‘s ethical value increases. through the exercise of reason. He contrasted All in all, the 11th Hazlitt Day School proved a these accounts with William Cobbett's rich, insightful day of scholarly discourse, lively bestselling, pro-Catholic History of the exchange of reading and research interests, as Protestant "Reformation", before thinking about well as friendly socialising. In the name of the Hazlitt and Godwin in relation to the Repeal of organisers, I very much hope that we will be the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828: a able to carry out an equally thriving Day School decisive break in dissenting history, but one in 2013, to which new and returning Hazlitt neglected by both writers. readers are, of course, warmly invited. Please It was then my turn to demonstrate, on the see www.williamhazlitt.org for details and basis of my work with the Crabb Robinson updates. collection at Dr Williams‘s Library, how Philipp Hunnekuhl Robinson‘s critical appreciation of Hazlitt‘s Queen Mary, University of London writing stood untainted by deepening cracks in their friendship. I attempted to accentuate the similarities between Hazlitt‘s and Robinson‘s metaphysics, stressing the notion of other- centredness of an independent, truth-generating mind that both men had sustained faith in. While Hazlitt, however, turned historicist in order to

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Romantic Connections: Networks ‗Coleridge: The Teacher and the Talker‘, which explored Coleridge‘s interest in and influence of Influence, c. 1760-1835 over male education from the 1820s. Aherne examined the role of Aids to Reflection as a Newcastle University, 1 June 2012 ‗thinking tool‘ alongside Coleridge‘s legendary This year‘s BARS Early Careers and status as a ‗talker‘. He suggested that talk could Postgraduate conference was something of a be treated as an object between Coleridge and meta-event; networking researchers discussed his audience, creating a space between speaker Romantic networks, considered the ways that and listener which was interacted with by both the Romantics influenced each other and but inhabited by neither. Aherne argued for a ourselves, and asked how that influence is unified reading of Coleridge‘s verbal fragments reflected by twenty-first century academics. (represented by volumes such as Henry Nelson Thirty papers were given by postgraduate and Coleridge‘s Table Talk), suggesting that those postdoctoral students from diverse universities excerpts communicate with each other in a across Europe and America, including the host tesselatory fashion. institution, Newcastle University. Newcastle University‘s Beatrice Turner The evening before the conference, delegates followed with a paper entitled ‗A Bare and were invited to attend the penultimate instalment Solitary Branch: Hartley Coleridge Re-writes his in Gary Kelly‘s Leverhulme Lecture series. The Family Tree‘. Turner suggested that Hartley was paper, ‗Sixpenny Romanticism‘, anticipated the figured as a textual being from infancy, noting extra-canonical interests demonstrated at the the repeated descriptions of him by both his conference. Kelly examined the economic father and Wordsworth as being an ‗ideal‘ or implications of the rise in readership in the early ‗fairy‘ child. She explored the impact of this nineteenth century, and provided an overview of textualisation on Hartley‘s adult life and own the booming sixpenny book trade. He noted that career, and reflected on his self-conscious a sixpence remained a symbolic coin from long inability to remove himself from the texts of his before the Romantic era; it remained a common father‘s generation. Turner suggested that the price point well into the twentieth century. Romantic child becomes akin to Frankenstein‘s Discussion continued in the on-campus theatre, monster; made up of so many literary parts, the the Northern Stage, and set the tone for a child encapsulates the creative methods of the conference which lived up to its title. Romantic poets. My own paper, entitled ‗The Delegates returned to Newcastle‘s Research transition of debt between Lord Byron and Beehive the following morning to be welcomed Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘, closed the panel. by co-organiser Matthew Sangster, who The ‗Connections Roundtable‘ began, introduced the conference. Sangster highlighted subsequent to an all-important coffee break. the self-aware nature of the conference, and Speakers Kerri Andrews (Strathclyde), Jeff expressed the hope that historical Romantic Cowton (Curator at Dove Cottage), Matthew connections would enable attendees to begin to Grenby (Newcastle), and Gary Kelly (University forge modern networks. The day consisted of of Alberta) each gave a short presentation of three sets of three parallel panels, and as such their personal connections experiences, any report cannot avoid being somewhat particularly through collaboration and project subjective. I apologise for those papers which do affiliation. Andrews, who is in the process of not receive the attention here that they beginning a new collaboration with Hannah undoubtedly deserve. More‘s letters as its focus, suggested that, The morning session I participated in, ‗The daunting as it may be, initiating contact with a Coleridge Connection‘, demonstrated the variety more experienced academic can be a liberating of approaches possible to the conference theme, and awarding experience, and Grenby and Kelly and was ably chaired by the Jennifer Orr each agreed that establishing these sorts of (Oxford). Philip Aherne (King‘s College connections can be fruitful (although Kelly also London) opened the session with his paper noted the difficulties which can arise from such

10 relationships). Jeff Cowton highlighted the that he positions imagination as central to his public outreach work which has been undertaken pedagogical theory. by the Wordsworth Trust and the Jerwood The final session, ‗Romantic Lineage‘, Centre in recent years, extending the notion of appropriately returned delegates to the twenty- connection beyond literature and the institution. first century. It began with Joanna Malecka The early afternoon session, ‗Paradigms of (University of Glasgow), whose paper ‗A Mirror Communication‘, complemented this discussion. Gallery: Carlyle‘s (Re)vision of German Rose Pimental‘s (University of St. Andrews) Romantic Writing in the Richter Essays‘ paper, ‗Transforming Spaces: Stoicism and the explored Carlyle‘s interpretations of his Bluestockings‘, interrogated the interpretation of Germanic inheritance through his readings of stoicism by eighteenth-century women writers. Richter. Paige Tovey (Durham University) Pimental observed that in Ancient Greek, a explored the Romantic, and particularly ‗stoic‘ was a porch, a liminal space between the Wordsworthian, inheritance of Gary Snyder domestic and the public spheres. Transposing through her paper, ‗Countless Cross- this definition to Enlightenment intellectual life, Fertilizations: Gary Snyder as Post-Romantic she suggested that stoicism, an early part of Poet‘. Tovey interrogated the ways Snyder female classical education, operated as a liminal explored formations of the poet, arguing that, space in women‘s approaches to eighteenth- despite Snyder‘s rejection of a traditional poetic century literary life, allowing them to enter into lineage, a Wordsworthian inheritance is clear in that conversation without rejecting the more his work. Finally, Stephanie John‘s (University traditional, domestic female role. Bill Hughes‘s College, Cork) paper, ‗Visions of the Poet: (University of Sheffield) ‗Sociability, Authorship, Creativity and Romantic Antagonism, and Dialogue: Communicative and Communities on Film‘ investigated the ways Strategic Action in English ‗Jacobin‘ Literature‘ that Romantic authors have been represented in followed, and complemented similar themes of films like Ken Russell‘s Gothic and Jane dialogism, and investigated the ways a broad Campion‘s Bright Star. John explored the spectrum of Jacobin literature was descended academization of such films, and interrogated from works of eighteenth-century satirists like the notion of the feminization of period drama. Swift. Clare Webster‘s (Newcastle University) She questioned the cultural impetus behind paper ‗Sara‘s Willing Suspension of Disbelief: representations of Romantic poets, and analysed Love and Drama in The Eolian Harp‘ continued the cross-decade differences between them. this exploration of Romantic dialogic form. Jon Mee‘s closing keynote appropriately Webster suggested that Sara, as a representation returned the conference to the economic factors of will, is as necessary to the poem as affecting the Romantic era, in this case the Coleridge‘s imagination; only by combining the Literary Fund. Mee‘s talk provided an overview two can the poet create. The ‗One Life‘ passage of the development of the Literary Fund acted to separate Sara from the rest of the poem, throughout the 1780s and 1790s, and in ironically proposing unity whilst acting in a particular interrogated its impact on popular dualistic manner. Hongxia Xu‘s (Edinburgh radical culture between 1792 and 1795. University) paper, ‗The Textual History of The conference organisers, Matthew Sangster, ‗There was a Boy‘ and Wordsworth‘s Changing Matthew Ward and Helen Stark, should be Concerns of Education‘ translated this dualistic congratulated for organising a conference that idea from author to text. She examined the truly fulfilled its topic. It was clear that no reasoning behind the placing of the ‗There was a Romantic writer can truly be said to have Boy‘ passage of Wordsworth‘s Prelude in the worked alone. It is, perhaps, a good reminder for ‗Poems of the Imagination‘ section of his the solitary postgraduate or early career collections, rather than with the poems of researcher that we, too, are part of a network of childhood, ultimately suggesting that influence. Wordsworth is a teacher of the imagination, and Jo Taylor Keele University

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Spaces of Work 1770-1830 discussed Drury Lane theatre as a site of myriad forms of labour, drawing on the evidence of the University of Warwick, 28 April 2012 letters of Mary Tickell, a women party to the many intricacies of the day-to-day running of This interdisciplinary conference examined the the theatre. To conclude the day, a plenary intersections of work and space in Britain from address from Dr Jennie Batchelor—read by the years 1770-1830. We hoped to interrogate Professor Jacqueline M. Labbe—embedded the unconventional approaches to the concepts of female Romantic-period writer in the material both space and work, and anticipated that the conditions of her craft, bringing the examination interdisciplinary focus of the conference would of spaces of work down to the minute level of yield productive overlaps between various the writing desk and the work conducted there. spaces and types of work. Dr Karen Harvey The day‘s focus on space and work proved a opened proceedings with a keynote address fruitful intersection. Most papers questioned examining the intersection of ‗vocations and easy distinctions between types of work and locations‘ in terms of men‘s roles in the home spaces, such as the domestic and professional. through the long eighteenth century. Harvey Moreover, papers developed the theorization of revealed a complicated and diverse topography types of work that critics have not of male work at the level of rooms, the house, conventionally understood as ‗work‘—shopping and the estate. By examining the active roles of and female accomplishments, for instance. The men in oeconomy—in managing the economic interdisciplinary nature of the conference also and moral resources of the home—Harvey brought to attention under-analysed spaces. For complicated received notions of, for example, example, due to Romanticism‘s traditionally feminized domesticity, gendered shopping rural focus, literary critics of this period have patterns, and the public/private spheres. Harvey only recently begun to interrogate urban spaces. drew from many sources, including journals, So Kate Smith‘s interrogation of the urban shop account books, and house plans, compellingly and the act of shopping from both a historical analysing their textual spaces and thereby and literary point of view was particularly useful. expanding the notion of the spaces through The overlap of work, space, and power was which work can be understood. The morning evident throughout; a few papers considered, for panel included Dr David Fallon‘s examination instance, access to knowledge in this context, of two booksellers‘ apprentices, William Upcott raising questions about what kinds of knowledge and Michael Faraday, and drew out the complex are valuable, who has access to knowledge, in interrelations of space, work, and interpersonal what spaces, and through what kinds of work. relations in fashioning subjectivity and Through the day, a range of spaces and work knowledge acquisition. Dr Kate Smith were examined within diverse disciplinary and recuperated the activity of the shopping lady as theoretical approaches, prompting us to think skilful labour in the context of the urban shop. about what is meant by both concepts and how Meanwhile, Ada Sharp explored the labour of they can come to bear on each other in the managing feelings in terms of familial roles and investigation of a range of issues such as gender, private and public spheres through a reading of class, and culture. Mary Brunton‘s novel Self-Control. Joseph Morrissey and Kate Scarth In the afternoon session, Deborah Brown used University of Warwick Charlotte Smith‘s novel Desmond to demonstrate how representations of country estate management offer commentary on wider political preoccupations. The ‗mercantile vernacular‘ architecture of London‘s Thames- side warehouses and wharfs were examined by Spike Sweeting in terms of security, discipline, and work-place hierarchies. Dr Robert Jones

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improved sense of editorial approaches to Clare‘s texts more generally. Due the research Copley Award that I undertook at the British and Deansgate libraries, I was also able to more clearly identify the divisions and running order of the poems in Reports these original editions – in so doing I was able to get a clear sense of the way in which Clare was presented as a poet to his contemporary readers – this was important given the deep anxieties in Adam White (Manchester) Clare‘s letters about the way in which his work I used the Stephen Copley Bursary to make trips was received. I am grateful to the British to the British Library and the Deansgate Library Association for Romantic Studies and the (Manchester), carryingR out vital research related Stephen Copley Bursary for the research funding. to my PhD thesis – ‗―The Fancy Painting Eye‖: the Aesthetic in John Clare‘s Poetry‘ – which Andrew McInnes (Exeter) was submitted in late 2011. Clare‘s poetry is the I used the Stephen Copley Bursary to fund travel subject of an ongoing editorial debate and it is to and accomodation at Oxford from 24 to 28 evident that the current preference in Clare January 2011 to make use of the Abinger Studies is for the uncorrected, ‗raw‘ versions of Collection at the Bodleian Library. I researched the poems from manuscript, as contained in the Godwin's diary entries on and correspondence nine-volume Oxford English Texts edition. My about the composition and publication of his thesis argues for Clare‘s self-conscious Memoirs of the Author of 'The Rights of Woman' ‗literariness‘ and unlike much modern (1798) and St. Leon (1799) to develop the scholarship my preference is for using second chapter of my thesis on these two texts. ‗modernised‘ or corrected (regular spelling and His diary entries showed the speed at which he punctuation) versions of Clare‘s texts. However, worked on both texts. His correspondence due to the complicated nature of the editorial revealed the range of reactions to his biography debate, it was necessary for me to consult the of Wollstonecraft: from cautiously expressed original editions of the poems published in sympathy to outrage to concern. Most revealing Clare‘s lifetime – this enabled me in most cases was his correspondence with Thomas Holcroft in my thesis to quote texts of poems which Clare on St. Leon, who levelled some harsh but fair would have authorised (as opposed to modern criticisms on the development of the novel and reprints) and that readers have had access to its narrative and character weaknesses. I also since publication. researched Mary Shelley's abortive biography of During my visit to the British and Deansgate Godwin, from her excerpts of his Memoirs of libraries I consulted editions of the four volumes Wollstonecraft to her tortured accounts of his published in Clare‘s lifetime – Poems and Wollstonecraft's friendship and love affair. Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, The This was most helpful in the drafting of my fifth Village Minstrel, The Shepherd’s Calendar, and chapter on Mary Shelley's engagement with The Rural Muse. I checked the relevant poems Wollstonecraft's life and writing, particularly her in these collections against each of the relevant sympathetic account of Godwin's revolutionary quotations used in my thesis. I did not find a writing which she contrasts with her own post- great deal of difference between the poems in revolutionary context. I plan to make use of her the original editions and most of the corrected assertion 'We are children of a calmer time' to versions found in modern editions of Clare‘s explore Shelley's authorial irony here and poetry. The key thing was, however, that the elsewhere: her writing forces us to evaluate each series of close comparisons and checks that I of the terms in this declaration, first as she is in undertook at both of these libraries enabled me fact the child of two great revolutionary writers; to proceed on a surer footing in regard to the second, that the 1830s constitute a 'calmer time' quotations in my thesis, as well as getting an in view of the rise of authoritarian governments

13 against struggles for independence and reform; John Duke of Roxburgh, the Address of Allan and thirdly, that even if this time is 'calmer', if Ramsay‘. that is necessarily a good thing. In the case of Thomson, there is a paucity of manuscript sources extant, rendering those that Melanie Buntin (Glasgow) are accessible all the more valuable. I was able My thesis aims to challenge critical to view an autograph manuscript of an early constructions of eighteenth-century Scottish poem by Thomson and to consult the papers of literature which have relied on the notion of George, 1st Baron Lyttleton, a friend and patron revival predicated upon nationalist sentiments of Thomson‘s. Among these papers was a stimulated by the Union of 1707. For these manuscript containing verses written to critics, ‗revival‘ constitutes a literary restoration Thomson by Lord Lyttleton: ‗Upon Reading Mr of the Scots vernacular and older Scottish forms Thomson‘s Seasons‘. This text emphasised the and is primarily politically motivated. My reciprocal and complex dynamics of the primary foci are Allan Ramsay (1684-1758) and poet/patron relationship and has suggested new James Thomson (1700- 1748) through whose directions for my research in this area. In corpora I explore the wider forms of addition to these manuscripts, I was able to Augustanism in Scottish literature, often consult other sources, including the draft overlooked as a result of the perceived literary manuscript of Sir J. Mackintosh‘s Sketches of oppositions between these contemporaries. My Distinguished Characters for a History England thesis evaluates Ramsay‘s and Thomson‘s which contains a sketch of Thomson. As this contribution to an emerging British poetic which was written in 1811, at the height of Thomson‘s incorporates competing discourses of national, Romantic period popularity, it will prove an regional and political identity and aims to invaluable primary source in my evaluation of delineate the forms and scope of the influence Thomson‘s influence on and reception in the late these two important Scottish writers had on eighteenth century. British Romanticism. My research trip to the British Library was The Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research thus even more rewarding than I had expected, Award I received was used to partially fund a not only in terms of yielding fascinating primary research trip to the British Library from 13 source material, but in terms of helping to February 2012 to 17 February 2012 to consult clarify and enhance my thinking in several manuscript sources relating to Allan Ramsay complex areas. I am sincerely grateful to the and James Thomson. In the case of Allan BARS Executive Committee for awarding me Ramsay, there is a wealth of primary material the funding that facilitated my trip. housed in collections at the National Library of Scotland and at Edinburgh University Library Jeongsuk Kim (Sussex) which I can access with relative ease from my The Stephen Copley bursary enabled me to base in Glasgow. However, the British Library travel to Pisa in Italy to investigate the interior houses a number of autograph manuscript of Byron‘s house, Casa Lanfranchi, which is sources which proved even more valuable to my now open to the public as the Archivio di Stato research than I had anticipated. I was able to di Pisa. The main purpose of this research trip access a notebook of Ramsay‘s, offering insights was to obtain pictures of the house, especially into his poetic and editorial practices and Leigh Hunt‘s room. These are essential for the processes. Furthermore, the trip proved timely in second chapter of my thesis on the terms of the chapter I am currently writing for interrelationship between private space my thesis. This chapter explores the effect of (cottage/house) and public space (city of London) different audiences and the dynamics of in terms of visual culture in the nineteenth patronage upon poetic productions and I was century. able to view the autograph manuscript of The Archivio di Stato di Pisa was kind enough Ramsay‘s address to a patron, ‗To his Grace to allow me to undertake my research, and in particular Dr. Christine Pennison, an archivist at

14 the archive, provided great assistance through Andrew Lacey (Newcastle) both her interpretation of and guidance to the Over the course of my three-day (13-15 April house. Unfortunately, however, the archive did 2011) study visit to the Jerwood Centre, not possess any record of Hunt; the interior of Grasmere, I consulted eight of William the house had been drastically renovated in the Wordsworth‘s manuscripts, and I found my mid nineteenth century. They were not even sure study richly rewarding. The manuscripts which would have been Hunt‘s room among consulted variously contained drafts and fair those on the ground floor. I was only allowed copies in the hands of both William and Dorothy access to two of the three rooms. The first room Wordsworth of work towards Lyrical Ballads was located on the right side of the front of the (1798- 1805) and The Excursion (1814). The building and was divided into two sections. following four manuscripts yielded findings of There were two windows with reinstalled bars direct significance to my project (a dual-subject, facing the main street and the river Arno, which four-chapter thesis, provisionally entitled ‗The Hunt described in his letter published in Lord Philosophy of Death in the Poetry of William Byron, Leigh Hunt and the Liberal (1925). The Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley‘, second room was inside the house across the containing one chapter each on Lyrical Ballads main hall. This room was slightly larger than the and The Excursion): first, and was separated into three sections. Each DC MS. 19 (‘Small notebook of miscellaneous section had a window with bars towards the descriptions and notes by DW, and also garden where Hunt‘s children had played. Most fragments of essays and verse by WW in his interestingly, the biggest section of the room hand’): Contains a revealing draft revision of a was painted with the image of an idyllic Italian poem from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads landscape. The walls and the ceiling were (‗There was a Boy‘). covered with trees and a blue sky with billowing DC MS. 20 (‘Notebook of verse and prose by clouds. According to Dr. Pennison, the image DW’): Contains an illuminating draft variant of was painted around 1930 anonymously. lines towards a poem from the first edition of Nevertheless, this visual image is reminiscent of Lyrical Ballads (‗Lines Related to ‗The Hunt‘s decoration of one of those rooms with a Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman‘‘). fresco of classical temples and trees. DC MS. 28 (‘The Recluse and The Excursion: Furthermore, the vaulted ceiling with a blue sky interleaved on Coleridge’s Poems on Various certainly suggests the decoration of Hunt‘s Subjects’): Contains an illuminating draft ‗prison-house‘ in Surrey Gaol where he painted variant of an episode from Book VI of The a blue sky with dotted clouds on the ceiling. The Excursion (the life of Wilfred Armathwaite). main reason that I very much wanted to come to DC MS. 29 (‘Homemade notebook of verse by Pisa was to take pictures of these rooms. My WW in the hands of WW and DW’): findings will concretize the image of the Contains a revealing draft revision of a poem decoration of the ‗prison-house,‘ which I regard from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (‗The as a springboard for the emergence of Hunt‘s Waterfall and the Eglantine‘). rich interaction with the public visual world Permission to reproduce pending, all four of before he returned to Hampstead Cottage. these findings will be of direct use to my thesis. Even though it is difficult to know which Each has enriched my understanding of Hunt‘s room was, and though both the rooms Wordsworth‘s process of poetic creation and were partially hidden by bookshelves and files revision, and each provides a valuable insight of documents, these photos will undoubtedly into the developing thought behind support me to concretize the argument in my Wordsworth‘s writing on death of the period. thesis. The trip was rewarding and invaluable Significantly, I also believe one of my findings and I would like to thank the BARS Executive has hitherto gone unnoticed, making it an Committee for their generous support. original contribution to Wordsworthian textual scholarship. I am currently seeking clarification on this point.

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I also consulted DC MS. 15 (‗The Christabel Notebook‘), DC MS. 16 (‗Red leather pocket book of verse by WW in the hands of WW and Early Career and DW‘), DC MS. 25 (‗Notebook of journal entries by DW and verse by WW, each in the hand of Postgraduate the author‘) and DC MS. 33 (‗Notebook of verse by WW in the hands of WW and DW, mainly Column taken up with Peter Bell MS. 2‘). Although these manuscripts were not directly useful to my project, they have given me a better sense of the textual history of Lyrical Ballads. In addition to my work on Wordsworth, my study visit also Romantic Connections: Networks of afforded the opportunity to consult the first Influence, c.1760-1835 edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s Alastor; or the Spirit of Solitude (1816) held in the Jerwood ‗Romantic Connections: Networks of Influence, Reading Room, thus allowing me to clarify a c.1760-1835‘, this year‘s BARS Postgraduate minor editorial point. Again, this will be of and Early Careers Conference, was held at direct use to my thesis. Newcastle University on Friday 1 June 2012. As I am grateful for the generous financial Matthew Ward explained in a previous column, assistance of BARS, and to the Wordsworth we chose our theme to speak to the increasingly Trust‘s Assistant Curator, Rebecca Turner, who innovative ways in which academics are making provided invaluable help over the course of my connections between individuals, projects, and visit. It was a privilege to work with such institutions. With this in mind, we were valuable artefacts in such beautiful surroundings, delighted to welcome four speakers to our and my work on Wordsworth has certainly roundtable on academic and literary connections. benefited. Kerri Andrews (Strathclyde) began by

describing the approaches she has taken in putting together a project to digitise Hannah More‘s letters and discussed the logistical and methodological issues that have to be surmounted as the plans move forward. Jeff

Cowton, curator of the Wordsworth Trust, gave some fascinating insights into the huge range of projects currently being undertaken at Dove Cottage and encouraged delegates to creatively engage with the Trust‘s holdings, the largest

collection of Wordsworth manuscripts in the world. We were treated to a tour of William Godwin‘s many connections by Matthew Grenby (Newcastle), who wittily explored what links the U.S. Capitol and Coffee (a secret I

won‘t give away here, but which will be revealed in the new edition of Godwin‘s letters). Finally, Gary Kelly (Alberta) spoke candidly both about the benefits of digital projects and about the problems he has encountered in

putting them together. The refreshing frankness of our speakers provided many enlightening insights into the various investigations in which they are involved and into the increasingly-

16 interconnected directions in which the field is Newcastle University were generous hosts and moving. the smooth running of the conference was The conference was officially ‗launched‘ the ensured by Sinead Devlin from the Faculty and previous evening (31 May) with an eye-opening Rowena Bryson from the School of English. lecture from Gary Kelly on ‗Sixpenny We'd like to thank the BARS Executive for Romanticism‘ in which we were treated to helping to finance and underwrite the conference; handling original ‗sixpenny‘ Romantic texts Oxford University Press, Ashgate, Edinburgh while exploring the world of cheap print in the University Press, and Four Courts also early nineteenth century. This kickstarted an generously provided support. We are very event which merged scholarship, enthusiasm, grateful to all those who assisted us in the and conviviality. Sixty delegates attended – an organisation and to all those who attended and increase on the London numbers from last year – created such a warm and welcoming atmosphere, and thirty speakers gave papers in three sets of particularly our guest speakers, who were triple-parallel sessions on topics ranging from generous contributors throughout the day. boxing to empire, theatrical localities to Helen Stark utopianism, and on writers from Elizabeth Newcastle University Inchbald and Samuel Thompson to Robert Browning and Gary Snyder. The papers spoke particularly well to each other in the panel on ‗Politics and the Personal‘, which covered Hannah More‘s treatment of dialect (Cato Marks), the relationship established between Frances Burney and Charlotte Smith in their negotiation of cross-Channel marriage (Sophie Coulombeau), the portrayal of the mother in representations of the Peterloo Massacre (Alison Morgan), and monstrosity in periodical discourses (Jessica Evans). The papers given by David Snowdon, Catherine Redford, and Imke Heuer in the panel on ‗Competition and Masculinity‘ provoked fruitful and engaging discussion which ranged from the meaning of boxing in the ‗Lancaster style‘ to the interconnectedness of literary debts and rivalry. For an account of the some of the papers that I was unable to attend, see Jo Taylor‘s report above. Jon Mee rounded off the day with a fascinating and entertaining plenary lecture titled ‗―If any thing can be called a man‘s property it is the produce of his mind‖: The Literary Fund and Claims of Literature (1802)‘. Jon brought together the strands of the conference perfectly as he explored the many connections and interests which come together in an organisation such as the Literary Fund and unpicked the complex implications of shifts in the Fund‘s Committee and its ideologies. He also introduced our delegates to some excellent toasts, which proved to be very useful at dinner!

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been redeemed by Burns‘ (124)), that the chapter on Scott begins and ends with an Reviews account of the Wordsworths‘ 1803 tour of the Scottish Borders, and that her numerous readings of Wordsworth almost invariably take their cues from Heaney. Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments: The In many ways, the central figure in Stafford‘s Province of Poetry. Oxford and New argument is Heaney. Stafford begins by taking York: Oxford University Press, 2010. her bearings from Heaney‘s 1995 Nobel Lecture, ‗Crediting Poetry‘, for it is here, ccording to Pp. 356. £32/$55. ISBN 9780199558162. Stafford, that Heaney most persuasively suggests that ‗the question of poetry‘s role in the In order to understand the place of poetry, Fiona modern world is inseparable from its origins in a Stafford observes at the outset of Local particular culture and environment‘ (1). Integral Attachments, we must first understand the poetry to poetry‘s role is what Heaney calls its of place. This chiasmus, with its telling ‗adequacy‘, its ability to be ‗equal to and true at emphasis on place rather than poetry, lies at the the same time‘ (qtd 12)—that is to say, equal to heart of her account of Romanticism, here telling the truth of the matter (documentary understood as the period ‗when local detail adequacy) as well as to telling it in terms of ceased to be regarded as transient, irrelevant, or what Heaney calls ‗the sheer in-placeness of the restrictive, and began to seem essential to art whole poem as a given form within language‘ with any aspiration to permanence‘ (30). (lyric adequacy; qtd 15). ‗Completely adequate Stafford‘s formulation is integral to what she poetry‘ may thus be said to be the ‗poetry of calls ‗the paradoxical power of creative work to ―resolved crisis‖‘ (97), and has unmistakably be both local and universal‘ (2). Whereas Romantic origins. Samuel Johnson characterized ‗local poetry‘ in Stafford‘s consideration of ‗completely terms of its preoccupation with ‗some particular adequate poetry‘ is arguably the most landscape, to be poetically described‘ (qtd 72), complicated and pressing concern of Local Stafford reads in the Romantics a valorization of Attachments, and is nowhere more effectively the local as an essential attribute of any art that delineated than in her reading of Wordsworth‘s aspires to permanence. The ‗place‘ of poetry, in ‗Resolution and Independence‘. Taking her this account, has everything to do not only with bearings from Heaney‘s formulation of ‗the its immediate physical location but, beginning resolution and independence which the entirely with the Romantics, its vital place in modern realized poem sponsors‘ (qtd 13), she reads in society. Wordsworth‘s lyric a poem ‗adequate to Local Attachments is organized in an contemporary conditions and adequate in its introduction and seven chapters, which address form and language‘ (118). That is to say, the writings of Burns, Wordsworth, Scott, Lamb, Wordsworth‘s 1802 poem of crisis demonstrates Keats, Dickens, Heaney, and others. Although documentary adequacy in the truthfulness with there are individual chapters given over to which it confronts its immediate world, and lyric Wordsworth, Scott, Burns, and Keats, Stafford adequacy in its mastery of a stanza form has organized her argument in such a way that it appropriate to the stately speech of the leech is far more than a series of encounters with gatherer (rhyme royal with a concluding individual authors. The central figures—Heaney, Alexandrine). Stafford‘s nuanced reading of Burns, and Wordsworth—appear and re-appear ‗Resolution and Independence‘ is one of the at various junctures, lyrically reverberating in highlights of Local Attachments. It is here that nearly every chapter. Thus it is that Burns is she concentrates all three of her principal writers integral to Stafford‘s reading of Wordsworth (underscoring the poem‘s tribute to Burns) and (she goes so far at one point as to suggest that makes her most persuasive arguments for ‗fully Wordsworth‘s ‗whole direction as a poet had adequate poetry‘ (96). In the ensuing chapters,

18 claims regarding adequate poetry are David Fallon and Jon Mee, eds, occasionally merely assertions or lingering Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader. questions. Although the chapter on Scott asks Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Pp. xii ‗What constituted an adequate poem at moments of upheaval?‘ (169), Stafford‘s analysis of what + 201. £19.99 (pb). she terms ‗border writing‘ does not provide a ISBN 9781444330441. compelling answer. Her claims regarding Burns‘s ‗lyric adequacy‘, however, are deftly Although the editors do not state the point, it is supported in her readings of his late songs, clear that this collection of ‗revolution debate‘ which represent for her an ideal of ‗local work‘ texts is designed as a successor to Marilyn (223). My one real reservation about Local Butler‘s pioneering anthology Burke, Paine, Attachments has to do with what it doesn‘t do: Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, first as strange as it is that there is no treatment of published in 1984 as a companion to her equally John Clare in a study of Romanticism‘s local innovative Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. attachments, stranger still is the absence of any The great virtue of Butler‘s book was its range rationale for this exclusion. of authors and its masterly, concise Upon receipt of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, introductions and commentaries. The 21 writers Charles Lamb wrote Wordsworth, ‗My in her selection included both the ‗core‘ attachments are all local, purely local‘ (qtd 273). sequence of the controversy (Richard Price, Lamb‘s remark might well serve as an epigraph Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary for Local Attachments: ‗purely local‘, such Wollstonecraft and William Godwin), the attachments adhere to their particular place; ‗all important intervention of women writers (in local‘, they put their own specificity in the addition to Wollstonecraft, we have Helen Maria service of a larger cultural good. Such Williams and - on the counter-revolutionary side attachments attest to what Stafford calls ‗the - Hannah More) and several lesser known (or necessary connections between the poet and his lesser studied) radical and conservative ―first place‖‘ (38) and to what she succinctly polemicists and pamphleteers (Horne Tooke, formulates as ‗the adequacy of local work‘ (297). John Thelwall, Daniel Isaac Eaton, William In Local Attachments, Fiona Stafford offers a Cobbett, Thomas Spence, Joseph Priestley and compelling account of the ‗place of poetry‘, one the Anti-Jacobin circle). Butler‘s expansion of which shows it to be simultaneously intensely the number of textual participants in the culture local and necessarily, improbably vast—‗the wars of the 1790s influenced most subsequent very world which is the world / Of all of us‘. anthologists. Her attention to print culture Charles Mahoney accorded with the breaking down of ‗Romantic University of Connecticut ideology‘ and the turn to a materialist notion of a public sphere within which there is textual dialogue, interaction and performance rather than Romantic transcendence – this is nowhere more clear than in the heated political prose of the 1790s which by definition was ‗engaged‘ and responsive to other texts. Of course this dislodging of older definitions did not in itself solve the vexed question of the precise relationship between literary Romanticism and its political context – to what extent is the former conditioned by the latter? Butler addressed this issue obliquely by placing passages from Wordsworth‘s Preface to Lyrical Ballads at the end of the book like a segue to literary history, at the same time characterising

19 the text‘s tone as abuzz with the ‗anti- recreate a dynamic context in which texts aristocratic animus‘ of its polemical genesis. respond to each other and compete for narrative What her book proposed and demonstrated was dominance (and it might be added that the that key Romantic texts could not be fully radical anthology of political texts was basically understood, appreciated or (more trickily) a Romantic invention, perhaps best known in its interpreted without a wider comprehension of demotic guise as Pig’s Meat). Given Burke‘s what used to be called the political ‗background‘ enduring influence on notions of Englishness but which could now be understood as a and constitutionality, the editors rightly discursive field within which writers competed emphasise that challenges to his ‗polarised‘ for mastery of tropes and rhetorical effects. version of revolution (bloodless intellectuals In the last twenty years the field of Romantic versus feeling communities) lay at the heart of anthologies aimed at undergraduates has the controversy. As the student riots of 2010 expanded massively and literary and non-literary showed, the anti-Jacobin stereotypes of violent texts now sit happily alongside each other. mob rule and irresponsible rabble-rousing still Duncan Wu‘s tome-like Romanticism: An have currency in the mass media. This Burkean Anthology (also published by Wiley-Blackwell) bias makes the political history of the is probably the most successful of this new revolutionary 1790s an even more vital source generation of inclusive miscellanies, though of inspirational and instructive texts. As Alfred there are many others including Simon Cobban once said (cited by the editors), the Bainbridge‘s Romanticism A Sourcebook debate on the French revolution was ‗the last (Palgrave 2008) and Broadview‘s The Age of real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in Romanticism: Second Edition (2010). All these this country‘ – there is no better books are designed as undergraduate course recommendation for this anthology. readers and are (or should be) competitively Ian Haywood priced in paperback form. What sets Mee and University of Roehampton Fallon‘s Romanticism and Revolution apart in this crowded marketplace is its limited focus and the generous portions of text this more Philip Connell and Nigel Leask, eds., circumscribed coverage allows. A comparison Romanticism and Popular Culture in with Butler‘s Revolution Controversy shows that Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: her broad vision has been abandoned in favour of longer excerpts from the five ‗core‘ writers: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Price, Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Pp. xiii + 317. £56.00. This is both a gain and a loss: the opportunity ISBN 9780521880121. for more in-depth study of the chosen excerpts is certainly to be welcomed – on average there is The superb introduction to Romanticism and about twenty pages per text; yet the decision to Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland is titled focus only on the ‗first wave‘ of responses after William Hazlitt‘s ―What is the People?‖, (roughly up to 1793) is not fully explained and which question begs the formation of the rules out important radical texts such as Paine‘s Romantic polis as both metaphysically abstract Age of Reason and equally important entity and socio-politically specific body. conservative writers such as Hannah More. The Teasing out the historical and critical tendency generous excerpts from Wollstonecraft‘s two to elide ‗people‘ with ‗popular,‘ and thus to see Vindications are an asset but the absence of either term as being at one with itself, the editors Helen Maria Williams is conspicuous. and their contributors trace a rather more varied The interested student will of course read and volatile Romantic public sphere than beyond the pages of this book and a mastery of previously imagined. The volume addresses the material in this anthology will certainly form diverse popular forms through which Romantic a sound basis for further study. As the editors culture viewed itself – broadsides, ballads, note, one of the points of an anthology is to theatrical performances, periodicals, chapbooks,

20 songs, to merely start the list – yet with more antiquarianism. This antiquarianism represents a than an eye merely to reclaiming overlooked British tradition that, by discovering its lost, aspects of Romantic cultural identity. As the distinctly English past, defines the ‗people‘ as editors state: ‗The chapters gathered here inevitably and naturally constituted by this past. collectively acknowledge the irremediably It thus also rescues ‗Englishness‘ from obscurity protean, particularized character of ‗the over against other, equally viable traditions. popular,‘ while mapping some of the strategies Leith Davis thus traces in the writing of through which writers and artists of the Charlotte Brooke the civilizing function of an Romantic period sought to accommodate, enduring Gaelic antiquarianism that supported incorporate, or exclude the realm of popular as much as it wrote against the metropole, a experience and tradition‘ (7). Remaining faithful support that claimed Ireland‘s right to autonomy in Romantic culture to both this ‗character‘ and by, paradoxically, conserving its identity. For the time‘s strategies for its containment is one Kirsteen McCue the popularity of song in print hallmark of this volume‘s success. Another is its among the four nations refigured the supposed attention to how Romanticism‘s complex decline of oral culture by refashioning of a rural, mediation of culture materialized and galvanized antiquarian past as the native soil upon which a a diverse array of ideological interests to polite nineteenth-century public might stake its produce subsequent understandings of ‗the legitimacy. Romantic.‘ Focusing this volume‘s efforts, then, The implicitly fraught politics of such is ‗not just the changing nature of ‗popular mediations, taking their cue from this volume‘s culture‘ in Britain and Ireland, but the intentionally uneasy isolation of Ireland as part relationship between that culture and the realm of Britain‘s national-cum-imperial archipelago, of polite arts and letters that would later come to emerges in the next trio of essays by John be identified with the concept of Romanticism‘ Barrell, Kevin Gilmartin, and Ian Haywood, (4). each of which examine how popular politics After surveying recent criticism, the editors reforms public manners. For Barrell, popular offer an expansive definition of ‗the popular‘ radicalism redeploys the pastoral elegy as the (borrowed from Roger Chartier via Michel de site of an ongoing public education that risks Certeau) as the manifestation of what subjects sentimentalizing the urgency of a collective do with cultural objects ‗in inverse proportion to politics. A similar risk inheres in Gilmartin‘s the control exerted by the institutions of the essay, which explores as the early nineteenth- school, the church, and the law‘ (13). This century conservative public writer‘s constitutive marks popular culture as neither autonomous possibility her co-dependence on both the fall of from nor subsidiary to dominant values, but Jacobinism and the rise of other forms of instead marks its imbrication of, within, and by political protest. In Haywood‘s essay, Shelley‘s these values – a way of both thinking them and The Mask of Anarchy keeps its enemies closer thinking them otherwise. As such, contributors via a potent mix of the visual and the textual to map the matrix of aesthetic, political, social, produce an allegory of potent feminine economic, and cultural forces that express the resistance and power that, by popularizing interplay between revolution and reaction, political discourse, might sing that much more transgression and tradition, formation and powerfully to the broadest audience. A reformation, low and high, popular and elite, subsequent trio of essays addresses this defining British and Irish culture of the audience‘s urban interpellation. For Ina Ferris, Romantic period. Thus careful to avoid Robert Chambers‘s 1825 Traditions of essentializing Romantic popular culture, Edinburgh exemplifies how civic antiquarian contributors nonetheless risk shaping our history was re-written as an urban ‗tradition‘ understanding of the field. Nigel Leask opens that popularized the city as a simulacrum of with an essay on ballad poetics and oral tradition popular culture itself. Gillian Russell‘s account as they trace the ‗birth‘ of Romantic popular of Keats‘s urban theatre-going, both legitimate culture from the spirit of an emergent popular and illegitimate, allegorizes the quest of the

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‗natively‘ unrespectable writer-citizen for a class Alex Benchimol, Intellectual Politics consciousness that, to materialize its aspirations, and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic at once requires and abandons the theatre of Period: Scottish Whigs, English popular culture. Such acts of social will inform Gregory Dart‘s essay on Benjamin Haydon‘s Radicals and the Making of the British The Mock Election (1828), which visualizes a Public Sphere. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. stoic political defiance of the urban trauma of Pp. 236. £55. ISBN 9780754664468. debt and thus of economics, circumstance, and history. This tragi-comedy ironically elides the The story of our ‗contested cultural modernity‘ political itself to produce something more can be told in many ways, but in one form or enduringly popular: the cult of a personality another, these accounts are inflected by the need surviving beyond politics. to come to terms with the long shadow of the The volume ends with Mina Gorji‘s account of Enlightenment, whose legacy of promise and William Hone‘s The Every-Day Book (1825-26), complicity remains central to political and an almanac/encyclopedia that anthologized theoretical debates today (11). Which is to say, English literature as the cultural sum of its these assessments of what we have come to various antiquarian parts, thus popularizing an think of as the long history of the unfinished otherwise disparate group of writers from project of modernity are bound up with our Spenser to Keats as exemplars of a homely related judgements on the dream of a public vernacular that spoke of a common English sphere, in which, as Jürgen Habermas famously heritage. Fittingly, this hegemony isn‘t quite so put it ‗the private people, come together to form stable in Philip Connell‘s final essay, which a public, readied themselves to compel public returns to the introduction‘s account of authority to legitimate itself before public Wordsworth‘s appropriation of ‗the popular‘ in opinion‘ (25). As Benchimol notes, the Lyrical Ballads in order to address the post- revisionary debates generated by Habermas‘s Romantic popularization of a Wordsworth who work have been partly responsible for the ‗both anticipated, and challenged, the unstable sociological turn in Romantic criticism, which fault-line dividing ‗popular‘ and ‗polite‘ culture has attuned us to the vital role that debates about in nineteenth-century society‘ (279). Connell‘s literature played as a potent site for many of the account shows how the popularizing effects of broader cultural and political struggles of the Romantic popular culture organized the public age. Aligning his study with the groundbreaking as a political and ideological entity both at one work of critics such as Jon Klancher and Kevin with and against itself. Something similar might Gilmartin, Benchimol casts fresh light on these be said for this volume, whose parts jostle with dynamics, not by unearthing new aspects of one another to produce an admirable sum that these stories but by adopting the opposite refuses to add up, for this is precisely the nature approach, fusing an exceptionally broad focus of popular culture as it relates to the public it at with close attention to key works by some of the once defines and contests. It is very much via leading participants in these debates. the ‗accommodations, incorporations, and The originality of Benchimol‘s approach lies exclusions‘ of ‗the popular,‘ as a way of in his insistence that ‗the intellectual politics and defining what ‗the people‘ stood for or against, cultural conflict played out in the British public that we have come to understand ‗Romanticism‘ sphere of the early nineteenth century reflected at all. the culmination – and opposition – of two very Joel Faflak distinctive institutional trajectories, rooted in the The University of Western Ontario modern national cultural histories of Scotland and England‘ (65). Benchimol tackles this double focus by splitting the book into four chapters tracking the history of these developments in both of these national contexts. Chapters 2 and 4, which focus on cultural

22 leadership in Scotland, centre on Francis have been, the time for academic speculation Jeffrey‘s efforts to position the Edinburgh had given way to the need for a more practical Review as a leading voice in the challenge faced and tough-minded form of intellectual practice by early nineteenth-century thinkers to adapt the directed by critical engagement in socially philosophical legacy of earlier Enlightenment relevant fields of inquiry. theorists to the challenges of an industrial age, It was simultaneously a declaration of and at the same time, to assert his generation‘s independence from the influence of their former intellectual independence by gently qualifying mentors and a manifesto for new forms of the ideas of his mentors. Benchimol takes the cultural authority required in a post- full measure of these complexities by focusing Enlightenment age. But, as Benchimol notes, by on three reviews by Jeffrey that responded, first 1810 this evenhandedness had tilted increasingly to Dugald Stewart‘s Account of the Life and towards pessimism about the middle class‘s Writings of Thomas Reid (1802), and then in capacity ‗for any further intellectual and moral 1810, to Stewart‘s Philosophical Essays, progress‘, even as growing Luddite agitations followed by an important review of Madame de cast the sustained viability of the industrial order Stael‘s De La Literature in 1813, which into question (113). Having traced Jeffrey‘s provided Jeffrey with an occasion to reflect philosophical influences back into the mid- more directly on the literary implications of eighteenth century, Benchimol concludes his these issues. The first two of these reviews were study by pursuing the culmination of this post- more significant events than some readers might Enlightenment perspective forward through a have recognized. In 1800-1801 Stewart had reading of Thomas Carlyle‘s embrace, in a series given a series of important lectures on political of landmark essays in the Edinburgh, of German economy that had been attended by ‗the Literature as a means of rejecting reason in ambitious coterie of students‘ associated with favour of the primacy of a philosophical the founding of the Edinburgh in 1802 – Jeffrey, approach that privileged interiority as the only Henry Brougham, and Francis Horner – who means of warding off the alienation of industrial would also become some of the leading Whig modernity. Making these connections across politicians and liberal intellectuals of the early generations enables Benchimol to cast some of nineteenth century (102). the most familiar aspects of Romantic aesthetics Stewart‘s vision had itself been shaped by the in an exceptionally nuanced historical light. influence of the extraordinary generation of Adopting an even longer historical perspective, thinkers that had passed through Edinburgh the other chapters track the origins and impact of University in the 1730s and 1740s – William plebeian radicalism from its seventeenth-century Robertson, Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson, John roots through the impact of Wilkite radicalism Home, and Alexander Carlyle – and by and across two generations of Romantic contemporaries such as David Hume and Adam reformers. In doing so, Benchimol demonstrates Smith. Collectively, they had forged a vision of another, very different account of the role of commercial modernity grounded in a liberal print culture in shaping decisive chapters in the Presbyterian insistence on the centrality of social history of modernity. Having situated the rise of morality as a counterbalance to the cacophonous eighteenth-century radicalism in the longer realities of the marketplace. Stewart‘s emphasis, context of Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers, both in his lectures and in his Account of the Life Benchimol shifts his focus to the ways that and Writings of Thomas Reid, on the importance Wilkes‘s strategic use of the North Briton as an of ‗an ‗enlightened‘ guidance of liberal organ of dissent reflected a new understanding capitalism‘ by a caste of suitably educated of ‗how journalism could be used to politicize a cultural leaders reflected their optimism (107). mass audience through its manipulation of Jeffrey, however, used the occasion of his political symbolism‘ (83) – an insight that would review to qualify Stewart‘s vision by adapting it emerge in more extreme ways in the work of to the demands of his own post-Enlightenment 1790s reformers such as Thomas Paine and John age by insisting that, as correct as Stewart may Thelwall, and even more so, in the journalistic

23 efforts of nineteenth-century radicals such as their own visions of an alternative William Cobbett and T. J. Wooler. A valuable national social order. It was out of reading of Thomas Spence‘s The Restorer of the extended ideological conflict Society to its Natural State (1801) as an with economic, political and important and often neglected transitional text intellectual elites initiated and bridging two very different eras in radical sustained by plebeian radical leaders journalism enables Benchimol to develop his like Spence, Wooler and Cobbett history of the growth of early nineteenth-century that a coherent sense of cultural popular radicalism in ways that implicitly opposition was established for use parallel Francis Jeffrey‘s very different struggle by popular radical movements later to forge a post-Enlightenment vision during in the century (207). these same years. Nor were the two unrelated. Benchimol tracks this shift in radical journalism Read alongside each other, as the structure of through a series of readings of Cobbett‘s ‗Perish Benchimol‘s book invites us to do, the two very Commerce‘ articles of 1807-08 and ‗Paper different histories which form the subject of Against Gold‘ articles of 1810-11 (165), which Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the launched a sustained attack on the social Romantic Period constitute an eloquent and inequalities that had been licensed by the wide-ranging assessment of both the dangerous abstractions of the ‗Scotch extraordinary complexity and the enduring feelosofers‘ whose work on political economy influence of these two very different struggles to was central to Jeffrey‘s vision (168). If forge a post-Enlightenment vision at the limits Cobbett‘s reputation never fully recovered from of convention definitions of the public sphere. the impact of his departure to America in 1817, Benchimol‘s insights could not have been more T. J. Wooler‘s use of radical journalism in the timely. Beset by enduring economic woes which Black Dwarf, much of it animated by a have in turn prompted a utilitarian shift in rhetorical style drawing on Wooler‘s role within research funding towards market-driven applied tavern debating societies, represented yet knowledge, our own age is poised at the another advance in understandings of print as a unsettling intersection between them. basis for new forms of cultural praxis. Paul Keen Benchimol takes the measure of this struggle to Carleton University forge an activist mode of radical journalism by concentrating on Wooler‘s extraordinary series of articles in the weeks before and after Peterloo, which ranged from an active leadership role on the eve of the meeting to gothic melodrama, dark satire, and radical oratory designed to mobilize downhearted reformers in the wake of the massacre. As Benchimol notes,

the economic arguments of the Chartists and Socialists in the middle and later nineteenth-century were clearly a strategic advance on the more emotive plebeian discourse of ‗Old Corruption‘. But in recognizing this strategic step forward, cultural historians should not overlook the way these later formulations built upon the cultural politics of the plebeian public sphere to articulate

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Erin Mackie, Rakes, Highwaymen, and For many critics, the polite modern gentleman Pirates: The Making of the Modern represents post-1689 hegemonic masculinity Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century. secured not through rank but through virtue, civility, and complementary relations between Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins individuals. Mackie argues that the modern University Press, 2009. Pp.231. $57.00. gentleman does not alone embody hegemonic ISBN 9780801890888. masculinity, but is ‗one among a set of culturally prestigious masculine types—notably the rake, Jessica Richard, The Romance of the highwayman, and the pirate—through which Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century hegemony is secured‘ (5). Through the book, Mackie‘s ‗examinations of the three criminal British Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave types concentrates on how and why they attain Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 201. £50.00. and preserve their prestige, and thus on the ISBN 9780230278875. means by which dominant culture gains access to powers and structures of authority that, in Mackie opens her study by stating that it ‗grows order to sanction its own legitimacy, it officially out of the observation that the modern polite renounces‘ (5). Much of the illicit figure‘s English gentleman shares a history with those attraction and prestige comes from his use of other celebrated but less respectable eighteenth- modes of masculinity that have been, at least century masculine types: the rake, the officially, disowned by the masculinity of the highwayman, and the pirate‘ (1). These figures new patriarchy. For instance, the prestigious are all involved in the ‗reformulation of criminal embodies an out-dated, indeed patriarchy‘ that began with the reformulation of criminalized, aristocratic ethos of absolute aristocratic ascendancy associated with the authority in which his individual will is political settlement of 1689 (3). They also ‗share sovereign and social relations are hierarchical. a historical status as modern masculine figures‘ Dominant culture disavows such behaviour, and (3) – they are all masculine figures in the new the illicit figure is imbued with a ‗nostalgic patriarchy‘s emphasis on gendered subjectivity. allure‘ that romanticizes him, granting him Moreover, they all make culturally successful glamour and prestige (11). Society safely labels claims on prestige. the nostalgic and romanticized figure as ‗other;‘ Mackie‘s first chapter introduces the he is removed from ethical accountability and he subsequent specific discussions of the can be brought back into mainstream culture ‗in highwayman, the rake, the pirate, and the heavily stylized and reified form‘ (12). gentleman and also outlines the historicization Masculine power thus continues to ‗rely on of masculinity and criminality more generally. modes of privilege, aggression, and self- In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authorization‘ even while officially renouncing criminal figures and the modern polite them (2). gentleman were often juxtaposed as they were From this introductory chapter, Mackie goes invested in the same set of developments in the on to examine each of her prestigious masculine status of aristocratic ideology, the ethos of figures in more detail. Chapter 2 ranges over the absolutism, and the conceptualization of gender. long eighteenth century from Rochester‘s Such once conventional comparisons have been rambler to Richardson‘s Lovelace to explore lost in scholarship partly because of a division how the rake‘s criminality and masculine between histories of manners (which look at prestige operate in relation to subjective ideas of the modern gentleman) and those of authenticity and performativity. The chapter is labour and dissent (which consider criminality) particularly interested in how the rake‘s prestige – Mackie forges the missing links between these has persisted and how both his contemporaries discourses. This introduction is a rich resource and later scholars usually overlook his egregious of current theory and criticism on masculinity, criminality. Chapter 3 considers the manners and criminality. highwayman as a social stereotype and as a

25 performer of personal subjectivity by focusing Richard centres her study on the ‗dynamic on John Gay‘s Macheath (1728), Boswell‘s tension between chance and control in journalistic use of Macheath, and William gambling‘ (12). Many daily experiences had Harrison Ainsworth‘s depiction of Dick Turpin both unknowable and predictable outcomes— in the novel Rookwood (1834). This chapter this was a function of the eighteenth-century looks specifically at the generic and formal cultural and economic shift to capitalism. While features influencing the evolution of the modern other critics focus on gambling as ‗a way of highwayman as he balances cultural prestige controlling contingency,‘ Richard wants to with judicial and moral illegitimacy. The showcase the ‗ecstasy of gambling‘ that is also chapter‘s final section on Rookwood would be of apparent in eighteenth-century texts (6). This particular interest to Romanticists – here Mackie book also revises scholars‘ propensity to outlines how Ainsworth ‗produces the modern articulate a repression of chance in the myth of the romantic highwayman‘ (73). eighteenth century due to the rise of rationality Chapter 4 looks at the early modern pirate and and the rules of probability. Richard sees both Maroon—interestingly juxtaposed with their late chance and control working together to modern incarnations—to investigate how they optimistically reflect the opportunities promised were organized in opposition to and in by a gambling-based capitalizing economy. As complicity with dominant colonial cultures of her title indicates, Richard is also interested in plantation slavery and the navy. Chapter 5 will ‗the romance of gambling.‘ This phrase reflects be most relevant to Romanticists. This chapter how the gambler ‗practices a mode of engaging integrates the two dominant concerns of this with the world that we can call romance, a mode study: it looks at discourses of masculine that, with rhythms of repetition that promise prestige and criminality in the reform of control, celebrates the chance incalculable event, manners in Frances Burney‘s Evelina, and the the heroic achievement against all odds‘ (5). role of these discourses in the articulation of Through gambling figures, novels explore the radicalism and dissent in William Godwin‘s role of chance and control in early capitalism Caleb Williams. By thus integrating histories of and in the formal development of the novel; for manners and dissent through this study, Mackie example, the eighteenth-century novel continues meticulously and persuasively revises notions of to use many of the tropes of prose romance, such eighteenth-century masculinity, criminality, and as improbable or chance occurrences. culture more generally. Chapter 1 lays out the foundational argument, Romance, prestige, and a tinge of the illicit crossing the divide between public economic also colour Richard‘s investigation of development and private gambling. It looks at eighteenth-century gambling. Richard opens her how gambling, specifically in the form of state study by emphasizing gambling‘s myriad lotteries, founded the national debt. Richard then meanings in the eighteenth century. Beyond its turns to how Samuel Richardson and Frances stereotypical coding as decadent and corrupt, Brooke use gamblers to interrogate the role gambling was also polite, symbolizing, for gambling, and specifically chance and control, instance, social cohesion. Gambling is pervasive plays in the economy, in individuals‘ lives, and across eighteenth-century experiences and in novelistic strategies. Chapter 2 looks at mid- genres expressed in both metaphor and actual century fiction and games manuals to investigate wagering. Of course, gambling exists across the episodic nature of gambling and the tension space and time, but eighteenth-century gambling between chance and control. The rest of the was a particularly compelling emblem of book will be of more interest to Romanticists. identity as it had a foundational role in the Chapter 3 shifts forward to include Frances eighteenth-century development of public credit; Burney‘s Cecilia and Ann Radcliffe‘s The moreover, forms of early finance capitalism that Mysteries of Udolpho. Richard describes two transformed the British economy and culture types of men with gambling identities: the man were inspired by and dependent on gambling of feeling and the sublime gambler. The sublime gambler revels in the multiple, simultaneous

26 possibilities of ecstatic gambling episodes. literary texts at the fore, Gardner aims to Meanwhile, the sentimental gambler wagers to illustrate the interdependency of poetry and show that his real feelings are spent elsewhere— culture through the examination of texts by both he cares for people, not money. Chapter 4 also canonical and non-canonical writers and seeks to considers Burney (this time Camilla) to establish reasons for the similarities found interrogate the female gambler who extends and within them. In addition Gardner also explores complicates understandings of women‘s roles in the work of caricaturists such as Cruikshank a credit economy founded on gambling. Chapter alongside other squibs to demonstrate the 5, on Maria Edgeworth‘s Belinda, considers breadth of the shared discourse of this period. gambling through the lens of empire and Gardner aptly situates this work in the arena of education to see how it both inspired the credit Romantic scholarship that is shifting away from economy and was a leisure activity in everyday the self and towards a more inclusive approach culture. Finally, Chapter 6 demonstrates how to Romantic poetry in which it is regarded as Jane Austen borrows heavily from prose contributing to both popular culture and political romance in Persuasion. While lacking any direct events. reference to gambling, Richard argues that the Divided into three sections, the book deals novel is replete with the tropes and language of with the three events mentioned above in gambling. Austen investigates characters‘ chronological order, with Peterloo being the first personal choices in a transforming economy to be considered. As with all three sections, where chance trumps control; for example, Anne Gardner begins with an outline of the event and and Wentworth‘s marriage relies on romance, on the principal players involved. This background wagering on improbable events. Richard information, written with a deftness of touch and presents an immensely engaging argument that accessibility of style, provides an invaluable explores gambling through an impressive introduction to readers unfamiliar with such breadth of topics; this work would be of interest events. However, whilst the historical to anyone looking at the rise of the novel background provided is of interest, I would especially as tied to culture, finance, and the prefer a more detailed close reading and economy. consideration of the literariness of the selected Kate Scarth poems. Such an interesting collection of texts, I University of Warwick believe, warrants a closer exploration. Gardner focuses on the immediate poetic responses to Peterloo by Percy Shelley and John Gardner, Poetry and Popular Samuel Bamford together with the pamphlets of Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the William Hone. Following a somewhat brief Queen Caroline Controversy. consideration of the shifting stance of Bamford from youthful radical to middle-aged Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, conservative, Gardner‘s chapter on Hone, with 2011. Pp. 296. £55. well chosen illustrations, admirably ISBN 9780230280717 demonstrates the popularity and influence of Hone‘s pamphlets. In addition the consideration John Gardner‘s lively and engaging monograph of Hone‘s forgery of the third canto of Byron‘s explores the narratives of Peterloo, the Cato Don Juan, effectively illustrates Gardner‘s wider Street conspiracy and the Queen Caroline affair. argument of the blurring between ―high‖ and By regarding these three events as inextricably ―low‖ culture‖ during this period. Similarly the linked, Gardner claims that this new approach links between Shelley‘s Mask of Anarchy and enables a more complete understanding of the poems in the radical press are evidence of the political moment of 1820 and, by extension, the intertextuality of this era, although I am poetry inspired by such turbulent times. Through sceptical of Gardner‘s assertion that Shelley was a historicist approach which, in homage to familiar with the post-Peterloo radical weeklies Jameson, places the political interpretation of and Hone‘s pamphlets, as he was in Italy

27 throughout this period. The investigation into representations of 1819–1821 is to be welcomed the common currency of Shelley‘s ‗slop- and strengthens our understanding of the links merchant from Wapping‘ in Peter Bell the Third between poetry and these political events. The combines rigour with an entertaining journey wide range of material used in this book is one through the literary and political underworld of of its strengths, although, as Gardner himself Regency London. acknowledges, in relation to Peterloo and Queen The comparative brevity of the section on Cato Caroline, it is only the tip of the iceberg, thereby Street aptly illustrates the scarcity of literary highlighting the need for more work to be done texts produced in response to the conspiracy, an in this area. issue considered by Gardner, particularly in Alison Morgan comparison with the wealth of material University of Salford produced after Peterloo. However the chapter on Byron‘s Marino Faliero, which, Gardner argues, is concerned with Cato Street, is strengthened by Anne Markey, ed., Children’s Fiction, new evidence of the links between Byron‘s 1765-1808 by John Carey, Margaret friend, John Cam Hobhouse, and the Cato Street King Moore, Lady Mount Cashell, conspirators. This leads Gardner, albeit tentatively, to suggest that there are parallels Henry Brooke. Dublin: Four Courts between the character of Marino and Hobhouse, Press, 2011. Pp. 189. €40.50 (hb). ISBN resulting in an intriguing reading of the drama. 9781846822872; €17.95 (pb) ISBN In the final section, Gardner provides a 978184682288-9. plethora of contemporaneous material on the Queen Caroline affair, effectively highlighting Children’s Fiction, 1765-1808 has been the conflicting opinions of loyalists and radicals, assembled from an Irish perspective. The embodied in Byron‘s own vacillations towards authors of the selected texts have a demonstrable the putative Queen. Gardner understandably interest in Irish causes. As editor Anne Markey questions the support of radicals, including points out, Irish authors (or at least their Shelley, for a morally questionable aristocrat Irishness) have largely been neglected in and interestingly points to the politicisation of discussions of eighteenth-century children‘s women as a product of the appalling treatment books as cultural documents, Maria Edgeworth of Caroline by both her husband and the British being ‗the only Irish writer of early children‘s government. Gardner then turns his attention to fiction to have attracted sustained and informed Shelley‘s Swellfoot the Tyrant, demonstrating its critical commentary‘ (9). With the exception of primary concern with Caroline rather than Toby Barnard‘s essay in the festschrift to Malthus, as argued by Michael Scrivener. Again, librarian and bibliographer Mary Pollard, through the example of a specific trope (that of children‘s books in early modern Ireland have pigs!), Gardner convincingly argues for the received relatively little scholarly attention, and intertextuality of Shelley‘s work and its this is intended to begin to fill that gap. indebtedness to a range of texts, although the Markey‘s intent goes beyond the Irish context claim that Shelley would have been familiar however; she argues that these works ‗help stake with radical weeklies from the 1790s, such as out a claim for the importance of children‘s Daniel Isaac Eaton‘s Politics for the People fiction … for anyone concerned with literature, lacks conviction and highlights the need for Irish or otherwise‘. (29) Her choice highlights further research to be undertaken into Shelley‘s the diversity of the moral tale, ranging from knowledge of the radical press. fables through rags-to-riches stories to travel Poetry and Popular Protest is a highly narratives. enjoyable read with broad appeal and Gardner Two of the works included here appeared in effectively combines scholarly investigation multiple editions into the 1860s; multiple with a lightness of touch. Its demonstration of retellings of the third were published. Their the interdependency of a range of cultural authors all wrote for other markets beyond their

28 publications for children. Margaret King Moore, fable makes fascinating reading, but one is left the Countess of Mount Cashell, was a former at a loss as to how these reflect Irish experience. pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. Henry Brooke, On a practical note, the use of endnotes rather who attended Trinity College, Dublin, was a than footnotes and the lack of an index are lawyer and the son of a wealthy Anglican rector. annoying. It would also have been helpful to John Carey, the only Roman Catholic author have the notes numbered rather than merely represented here, was a middle-class asterisked. Words and phrases likely to be schoolteacher educated on the Continent. After unfamiliar to a modern audience are glossed, but the failure of the Irish rebellion of 1798, Moore the choice of what to annotate appears produced political pamphlets arguing against the somewhat erratic and is much more extensive union of Britain and Ireland. Brooke argued in for Carey‘s text than for those of Moore or print for a relaxation of the Penal Laws, and Brooke, although the introduction deals at some Carey, whose brother Matthew had fled to length with the work of each author. America in 1784 after also urging the repeal of Bibliographically, variations in the title pages of the Penal Laws, inserted some political the early editions of Learning Better than House statements into later editions of Learning Better or Land are addressed in some detail in the notes, than House or Land (1808), a book Markey but no mention is made of the fact that the describes as a Catholic ‗emancipation narrative‘. facsimile title pages and illustrations for all three (15) In reviewing the book, contemporary critics works have been enlarged from the originals. appear to have missed Carey‘s political agenda, But overall, the volume is a useful assessing it as a straightforward moral tale. But contribution. The parallel Markey draws as Markey reminds her readers, by setting his between Ireland‘s juvenile status in relation to story in America, Carey was illustrating what he Britain and the ‗unequal power relationship‘ perceived as a more egalitarian society. An ‗central to the dynamics‘ (28) of children‘s amendment to the fourth edition informed his literature may feel a bit strained, but the texts readers that: ‗the American Constitution admits remain of interest both to scholars of children‘s no distinction on account of religion‘. (14) literature and those of Irish studies and the Markey‘s intent is to offer insights into Irish discussion highlights current academic debates. cultural production reflecting ‗broader adult The editors of this series of critical editions of anxieties‘ and to ‗encourage and facilitate Irish prose fiction published between about 1680 further research‘ (9) into the Irish dimension of and 1820 are to be commended for including these works. But only her analysis of Carey‘s them among the works they have chosen to work really places it in its Irish context. reprint. Although she notes that Moore‘s Jill Shefrin correspondence with Godwin included a Trinity College, University of Toronto discussion of ‗the baneful effects of tyranny on young minds‘, (17) Stories of Old Daniel (1808) are discussed, first, in the broader context of English-language juvenile fiction and, second, in terms of Moore‘s relationship with her publisher, William Godwin, and his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. The excerpt from The Fool of Quality (1765) is described as exemplifying an ‗intriguing continuum between adult literature and children‘s fiction‘. (22) Although the novel was not written for children, the fable of the three silver trout was excerpted from it and ‗took on a life of its own‘, (23). Two of the many English retellings are reprinted following the excerpt. Markey‘s analysis of the changes to the

29

Eugene Selzig, ed., Romantic autobiographical texts identifies the necessity of Autobiography in England. Surrey: writing as a bridge between trauma and recovery. Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 219. £55. ISBN Women‘s autobiography is given more than a tokenistic presence here, and is not only 9780754663669. considered in Part 1, ‗The Variety of Female Life Writing‘, but also outside of the gender In his introduction to this edited volume, Eugene binary, in Part 3, ‗Genres and Modes‘, usefully Stelzig states that he aims ‗to map the highlighting both continuity and disjuncture debateable, unsystematic, and hybrid practice of between men‘s and women‘s autobiographical Romantic autobiography in England from a writings. Kari Lokke‘s study of Dorothy variety of perspectives and in a variety of genres Wordsworth‘s Journals reveals Dorothy‘s desire and modes, and by a broad spectrum of to resist the Romantic impulse to incorporate the practitioners‘ (4). This collection more than other through a close reading of her descriptions meets its aim of eclecticism and demonstrates of daily minutiae. Sharon M. Setzer does much through its breadth and variety of approaches, to read fresh meaning in the writings of Mary the richness of Romantic autobiography as a Robinson, who, after her affair with the Prince field for study. of Wales, found her selfhood appropriated by Despite this variety, there are some common the British press, which painted her as a themes which emerge throughout the volume, multifaceted and duplicitous character. Whilst I one of which is a recurring emphasis on what am not fully convinced by Setzer‘s analysis of Miriam L. Wallace calls ‗communal and Wordsworthian ‗spots of time‘ in Robinson‘s relational‘ (66) subjectivity; that is, a selfhood Memoirs, the attention that she pays to the which is not given or innate, but rather made, nuanced writing of a woman whose life story through various intersubjective activities. has too often been misrepresented by gossip is Wallace shows that through Mary Hays‘s use, in admirable. Female Biography, of the written lives of others Mary Wollstonecraft‘s Letters Written During to promote an educated feminine subject, Hays a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and participates in a discourse which places human Denmark is the subject of Christine Chaney‘s relations squarely at the centre of selfhood. worthwhile analysis in Chapter 13, where she Elsewhere, Frederick Burwick similarly deploys Michel Beaujour‘s idea of the literary recognizes the influence of other subjects on life self-portrait, as a category distinct from writing as he examines the role of appropriated autobiography to great effect. The Letters can be memories in Thomas De Quincey‘s considered as such, Chaney argues, because they autobiographical writings, wherein ‗construction fulfil Beaujour‘s criteria of having a lack of both of self drifts into confusions of identity and continuous narrative and temporal closure; alterity‘ (127), and Sue Brown considers how instead Wollstonecraft‘s meditations upon Joseph Severn felt obliged to ‗rearrange his past selfhood emerge through ‗a system of cross- to live up to the image others had created for references, anaphoras, superimpositions, or him‘ (137). correspondences among homologous and The contributors reject models of substitutable elements‘ (201). The approach is autobiography which posit that texts are lingual fruitful and allows Chaney to explore the transmissions of ordered and coherent selves, workings of the intimacy which Wollstonecraft rather suggesting that life writing has a role in creates through her writings, yet Chaney shaping the life it professes to record. Joshua underplays the author‘s intentions in her analysis. Wilner considers ‗the precarious stability of a By insisting that the sentimental effects of subject that only comes into being as the rhetoric are ‗no ―calculation‖ on her part‘ (203), function of a recursive structure of self- Chaney reduces Wollstonecraft‘s artistry to a dramatization‘(113) as part of his study of mere accident. It is true that much of the text structures of expectation in The Prelude, and implies that selfhood is a ‗found object‘ on the Diane Long Hoeveler‘s study of Mary Shelley‘s journeys through Scandinavia, but in

30 underestimating the editorial role of scholarship‘s continued enchantment with post- Wollstonecraft as has been carefully detailed by structuralist habits of mind. Mary Favret, Chaney risks downplaying the In addition to the French heavyweights listed politics of Wollstonecraft‘s radical style. above, there are countless other philosophical As with many studies of autobiography, the influences here – most notably Adorno, a thinker issue of genre looms large, and Chaney is not praised for his interest in ‗engaged withdrawal alone in paying critical attention to life writing or strategic reticence‘ (3). While this is pretty which does not conform to the retrospective and close to a notion of ‗determinate negation,‘ more evaluative framework of, for example, often than not Khalip has pre-chewed the Rousseau‘s Confessions. Chaney, along with Frankfurter to blend him with the deconstructive Kevin Binfield in his study of labouring class notion that individuals are self-dismantling autobiography and Stephen C. Behrendt who constructions – Transformers for eggheads to explores ‗staged presence‘ in autobiography, play with, in essence. That said, the presence of considers so-called ‗incidental‘ life writing even this declawed Adorno, as well as which occurs during the contemplation of other occasional appearances from the wonderful subjects. For Behrendt, such textual presence Denise Riley, enlivens what could have been a serves to imbue narrative with a first person very long walk. derived authenticity and to demonstrate the The strongest chapter is probably the one in universality of events or feelings which are which Khalip proves himself a fine reader of rendered specific in the text. His essay provides Hazlitt‘s elaborate phenomenology of identity new ways of thinking about texts which have slippage and its uses for radical politics. ‗Being traditionally resisted classification as is always other insofar as the other is always autobiography, and its fresh approach is in good heterogeneous,‘ Khalip writes. ‗In this sense, company within this thought provoking and otherness cannot be construed as intrinsically considered collection which reaches outside of incommunicable since alterity is a feature that is the canon and pushes the boundaries of what we in advance of, indeed anticipates, the self‘s know as autobiography itself. actions‘ (36). In a section on Hume, the book Mary Addyman implies that French theory might be a cover for University of Warwick liberal economics. The Scottish philosopher, according to Khalip, discovers that while anonymous freedom from self renders the Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: subject a ‗reflexive entity . . . subject to Romanticism and Dispossession. exchange and transfer,‘ the same subject Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Pp. 248. increasingly feels that such access to the market ‗depends on loss‘ (138). This embryonic £53.50. ISBN 9780804758406. attention to the human cost of anonymity‘s supposed political gains marks out Anonymous Jacques Khalip‘s Anonymous Life: Romanticism Life as something rare and much more and Dispossession is an impressively learned, compelling than the usual slick demonstrations and ultimately rewarding, attempt to think about of institutionalised reading practices. Although I the political value of social anonymity and rarely agreed with the author‘s larger marginality. Containing discussions of Hazlitt, conclusions, I enjoyed watching a fascinating Keats, Godwin‘s Caleb Williams, the Shelleys struggle emerge. (treated separately), Wollstonecraft and Austen, The Hazlitt and Hume sections contrast with a it covers a lot of ground well in a short space. more conventional reading of Keats‘s Moneta, While sponsored by theorists such as Blanchot, whose non-identity, Khalip has it, renders her Levinas, Derrida and Irigaray, Khalip‘s work liberatingly ‗immune to all solicitations‘ (61). represents a move towards shaking up, if not Later – in sections on Wollstonecraft, Mary quite yet abandoning, much of American literary Shelley and Austen – the problem with this effort to flip female passivity into a ‘68-ers idea

31 of progress becomes clear: ‗the female There is an emotive topography in [for instance] melancholic is perceived as ambivalently that spatial conceptualization of ―inclusion‖ and participating in and challenging what ―exclusion‖‘ (2). Wollstonecraft will call ―making an appearance Stuart Allen in the world,‖ or the project of developing the Bridgewater State University social terms under which one makes oneself known and available to others‘ (135). This does make some political sense, but I was less Laura Mooneyham White, Jane convinced by the view that Persuasion‘s Anne Austen’s Anglicanism. Farnham: Eliot is a melancholic who, by experiencing loss Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 215. £50. ISBN ontologically, ‗contests the Enlightenment pressure to resolutely be and act‘ (139). In fact, I 9781409418634. am not completely sure Khalip believes his own argument at moments like this – and that is Massimiliano Morini, Jane Austen’s exactly what makes his book such a stimulating Narrative Techniques: A Stylistic and read. It is as if he deliberately over-commits to a Pragmatic Analysis. Farnham: Ashgate, set of ideas so that he can no long deny they 2009. Pp. 163. £50. ISBN creak. Towards the end, Khalip seems much less 9780754666073. interested in plonking the abstract, and frankly ineffectual, radicalisms of Left Bank Baby Laura Mooneyham White‘s Jane Austen’s Boomers onto Romantic texts, and starts Anglicanism re-examines Austen‘s work through considering the possibility that the political the lens of her Anglicanism. It is both a valuable consequences of artworks are much harder to exposition of the finer points of Anglicanism in settle. Letting himself sound like a Booker judge Austen‘s period, which will be of interest to for a moment, he tries to persuade us that the scholars and readers of all denominations in ―privateness‘ of the novel comes to promote a Romanticism, as well as a detailed work of readerly experience of isolated yet literary close reading which forces transcendentally attentive knowing—an reconsideration of entrenched Austen readings. experience common to what Benedict Anderson Chapter 1 outlines Austen‘s religious has called the ―imagined community‖ of readers inheritance, drawing attention to highly specific who interpret ―fiction [as seeping] quietly and areas of debate and concern within her Anglican continuously into reality, creating the world, including the problems of absenteeism, remarkable confidence of community in pluralism (whereby a clergyman holds multiple anonymity‖ that underwrites the broadly livings), and non-residence (whereby a sympathetic and remotely atomistic acts of clergyman does not ordinarily reside in his readerly identifications‘ (161). Unsure himself parish). From these matters of material and about this piece of cosiness, Khalip evokes practical concern, the emphasis shifts to the Denise Riley‘s essay ‗The Right to Be Lonely‘ detail of the contemporary Anglican world view, to help him propose that, rather than bring down examining such notions as ‗natural theology‘ the Enlightenment, the literature of anonymity‘s and ‗natural law‘: a broad set of believes that strength might be its wholesale lack of concern understand the natural world as a reflection of with politics as we know it. He does not go far God‘s reason. Even this purely historical in this direction, but it reads like a significant introduction prefigures the main thrust of the moment. I hope that in the future he will step rest of the book: one finds oneself re-thinking back from Continental anti-humanism and do moments of Austen‘s works in light of a more something with Riley‘s idea (nearly quoted in nuanced historical understanding. the book) that language does not produce Taking the focus more specifically to Austen feeling-effects, but is itself imbued with flesh: herself, chapter 2 draws on the evidence of ‗Language is hot and language is historical . . . Austen‘s letters, her prayers, and her familial

32 setting to elucidate the huge part religion played to ridicule others with wit. The depth of analysis in her day-to-day living, as well as in her firm here is impressive: White draws on structural belief of an ultimate meaning to existence, narratology, contextual data, and a wide range of which could not have failed to have had previous Austen criticism to make salient profound consequences on her sense of identity arguments regarding Austen‘s concern with this and values. In particular, White emphasizes the dilemma. Part 2 continues with a second chapter sheer volume of prayer and church going Austen which examines the role Anglicanism plays in would have undertaken. Equally pertinent for Austen‘s views on imagination. White argues White is the essentially repetitive nature of that for Austen an over-active imagination was contemporary Anglican sermons, prayers, and dangerous and a violation of proper Christian habits of church going, and we are invited to morality, most clearly seen in characters such as consider the effect such a relentless hammering Emma Woodhouse and Catherine Morland. of scripture might have had on Austen‘s White insightfully demonstrates how Austen consciousness. Finally the chapter examines the requires that her heroines undergo a personal presence of Austen‘s Anglicanism in the novels, chastisement of their imaginative fantasies warning us that the relative lack of explicit before being rewarded (presumably by religious material should not be seen as evidence Providence) over and above their now more that religion is not powerfully informing the plot moderate fantasies. Linking these ideas to the and the ideas expressed. Indeed, White argues debates around the perceived dangers of novel that narrating the religious grounding of reading in the period, White argues that for Austen‘s characters would be the equivalent of Austen novel reading could and should enact a speaking of the actual physical ground upon schooling of imaginative fantasy, thereby which her characters walk. The literal earth may arguing against contemporary opponents of the be invoked to progress the plot – such as when novel. Elizabeth Bennet walks to Netherfield in the There is great deal to recommend Jane’s mud – but by and large it is considered so matter Austen Anglicanism. The historical exposition of fact that it is taken for granted. will interest both lay readers and scholars, and Chapter 3 reads Austen Anglican world-view the literary criticism represents a timely into her novels in a more explicit vein than in intervention into debates around Austen‘s plot the previous chapter, shifting from providing resolutions, her narrative style, and her views on evidence of the pervasiveness of religion in her class and gender. writing to emphasis on the specific effects on Massimiliano Morini‘s book Jane Austen’s structure and language Austen‘s Anglicanism Narrative Techniques: A Stylistic and Pragmatic engendered. White draws attention to Austen‘s Analysis attempts to explain how the colossal belief in ‗The Great Chain of Being‘, ‗Natural canon of Austen criticism has differed so widely Law‘, and ‗Providence‘ to bring us to a more in attributing moral, political, and ideological nuanced understandings of the precise (religious) beliefs to Jane Austen. In part 1 of the book meaning of the language she employed, to add Morini argues that Austen‘s narrators – self- resonance to the transgressions of social confident, omnipresent, and persuasive – climbers such as Mrs Elton by understanding actually undermine their own authority in them as transgressions against God‘s plan and various ways. Part 2 shifts the focus onto the Natural Order, and to explain Austen‘s plot Austen‘s dialogue, elucidating the multiplicity resolutions as being informed by her belief in of meaning and ambiguity inherent in Austen‘s Providence to bring the world into order prose. Both sections work towards forming a according to divine will. structural explanation for the myriad conflicting, Part 2 of the book, entitled The Sins of the but equally plausible, arguments put forward Author, utilizes close literary analysis to explore concerning Austen‘s world-view. Whilst the sin Austen herself felt she was most guilty of, primarily concerned with the technical aspects and dramatized in such characters as Elizabeth of Austen‘s prose, Morini‘s book nonetheless Bennet and Emma Woodhouse: the propensity makes a useful interjection into debates

33 surrounding aesthetic ideological production and reads the scene as a struggle for dominance, in the performance of gender amongst other more which all characters engage in a conversational historically grounded concerns. By identifying game of tennis in attempting to score points the mechanisms whereby Austen‘s narrative against each other, making the best use they can style alternatively invite and frustrate inferences of the rhetorical strategies available to them, and about what she ‗really thought‘, the book always attempting to remain within the codes of gestures towards wider historically orientated polite, genteel conversation which set the debates whilst simultaneously providing the boundaries of the game as such. Morini employs reader with a sharpened set of interpretative an interesting methodological approach here: he tools with which to tackle these issues. compares Austen‘s original text with three The first chapter deals with the problem of Italian translations. In doing so, Morini is able to narrative evaluation in Austen‘s works. Morini emphasize the multiplicity of meanings inherent argues persuasively that Austen‘s narrators, in Austen‘s presentation of dialogue by whilst putatively inviting the reader to endorse demonstrating how subtle layers of meaning are their value judgements, actually oscillate lost in translation. In sum, the analysis points to between seeming omnipresence and unsettling the complexity and ultimate impossibility of ignorance, between endorsing a character‘s assigning definitive meanings to Austen‘s actions only to refute them later, and sometimes dialogue. remaining ominously silent. Morini draws on a Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques: A rich body of narratology in making his argument, Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis is an excellent demonstrating in detail and at the micro-level of application of technical narratological theory in the text how Austen‘s narrative techniques work explaining the ongoing difficulties in assigning a to undermine her reader‘s ability to make value belief system to the historical person Jane judgements. Chapter 2 begins to sketch out the Austen. More than this, in its awareness of various techniques Austen employs in her Austen‘s contemporary historical context it different novels, drawing subtle and useful invites scholars of ideology and gender theory to distinctions between the different narrative make use of its insights in furthering the games she plays. The final chapter of the first critiques of Romantic-period class and gender part of the book provides a detailed reading of formations. narrative technique in Mansfield Park, Joseph Morrissey demonstrating Austen‘s narrative opacity in University of Warwick depth. In the second part, Morini provides an overview of theories of conversation, Susan Matoff, Conflicted Life: William emphasising the different rhetorical devices – Jerdan, 1782-1869: London Editor, often defined by gender – people use to gain Author and Critic. Brighton, Portland social advantages. The polite conversation of Austen‘s world is theorized within this context, & Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, and Morini draws-up broad but useful 2011. Pp. 660. £65. ISBN conversational categories into which all of 9781845194178. Austen‘s characters can be more or less accurately placed. Chapter 5 shifts the emphasis This is a very sizeable biography of a figure now from the role of conversation in the construction relatively obscure. In his own lifetime, however, of character to the role of conversation in the William Jerdan was a considerable presence in construction of plot, analysing each of Austen‘s literary society, the editor of the Literary novels as a ‗conversational machine‘. The final Gazette from 1817 to 1850, a friend of the great chapter of the book, entitled Winning the War of and good, and a member and instigator of Conversation in ‘Emma’, brings all the previous numerous clubs, societies and networks. insights of conversation‘s role in Austen‘s works Through this biography Susan Matoff seeks to to bear on the famous ‗Box-Hill‘ scene. Morini bring back to light ‗a complex and one-time

34 highly influential figure in English periodical were the sources of many excellent scrapes, such literature and journalism‘ (x). as Jerdan‘s solving the Literary Fund‘s problem The sources available mean that this is no easy with an unflattering portrait it had commissioned task. In her short preface Matoff baldly states of Sir John Soane by breaking into its offices that ‗William Jerdan is an enigma – a writer who and slashing it to ribbons. left few written clues as to his personal life – no The most compelling relationship in Jerdan‘s diaries or journals, and almost no private letters‘ life in his own account and in the eyes of (ix). He did leave a four-volume Autobiography posterity was his discovery and promotion of (1852-53), but this is a complex source, written Letitia Landon (L.E.L), whose works appeared at a time when Jerdan was suffering from the in and were praised to the skies by the Literary fallout of financial disasters, its narrative Gazette, for which she also produced a great carefully controlled regarding his (scandalous) number of reviews. Rumours circulated at the personal affairs. Contributions to the Literary time of an inappropriately close relationship Gazette were unsigned and much of Jerdan‘s between the editor and his poetical protégée, and other work was pseudonymous or anonymous. Matoff works through the lacunae to marshal While Matoff has uncovered many of his other convincing evidence for this, including records identities and attributed numerous articles of three children and their descendants. through reference to archives, much else While Jerdan made fabulous sums of money remains beyond definitive recovery. The nature during the Literary Gazette’s years of success – of the available materials means that the Matoff estimates that his income in 1828 was conflicted life promised in the book‘s title is almost £2000 – his high living, poor record- difficult to animate through primary evidence keeping and unfortunate speculations led to his and while Matoff makes excellent use of her losing control of the Gazette in 1850 and a sources the Jerdan in her pages is necessarily poverty-stricken old age bringing up his children more public face than inner life. from a third family he begun with a nineteen- This, though, contributes to one of the year-old at the age of fifty-four. His parlous biography‘s great strengths – its wide-ranging circumstances in the last twenty years of his and vibrant portrayal of half a century of long life are a salutary reminder of the London society. In his prime Jerdan was a man difficulties of living by the pen and of both the in the thick of the action. While working as a importance of and the transience of connections. parliamentary journalist he happened to be This book will be a useful point of reference present at the assassination of Spencer Percival for scholars whose subjects‘ lives intersected and helped to apprehend and restrain the with Jerdan‘s, as well as those dealing with (unresisting) killer, John Bellingham. He was a societies, periodicals and sociability in the long close friend of George Canning, who made time period the book covers. Matoff‘s accounts of to meet with Jerdan on his first morning as incidents are detailed and careful. Read from Prime Minister. He was a regular at the theatres beginning to end, the book becomes and at London‘s shows, both of which he wrote occasionally repetitive – the reader is told a on for the Literary Gazette. He had an island number of times about Jerdan‘s bad head for named after him by the Antarctic explorer James figures and his wish to keep politics out of his Weddell. He negotiated contracts on behalf of paper, and some of his acquaintances are more Charles Dickens and was an early champion of fully reintroduced when they reappear than Hans Christian Andersen. He was instrumental perhaps was necessary. However, reading the in the foundation of the Royal Society of whole book also gives a strong and helpful sense Literature and the Royal Geographical Society, of the changes and continuities in literary culture. suggested the motto of the Garrick Club, was an Bridging the divide between the periods active member of the committee of the Literary conventionally denoted as Romantic and Fund and was a member both of the Society of Victorian, it situates a number of key shifts in Antiquaries and of its boozier spin-off, the publishing practices, readerships, popular Society of Noviomagus. These associations magazines, practices of sociability and literary

35 generations which are often occluded by the accounts, which take the form of letters common neglect of the 1820s and 30s. While addressed to Walter Scott (not yet ‗Sir‘), also this is explicitly a chronological and evidential reveal his budding literary talent and his ability biography rather than one which advances a to deploy the nuances of epistolary style to particular critical argument, it succeeds in excellent effect. His accounts of local confirming Jerdan‘s considerable interest and superstitions, traditional song culture, country throws light on a huge number of neglected sport, drunken revelries, ephemeral love affairs, facets of literary culture in the first half of the singular characters, and sublime scenery, set nineteenth century. amongst an acute critique of Highland society at Matthew Sangster the beginning of the clearances, are rich fodder Royal Holloway, University of London for understanding his later works, and his comments on the temporal unevenness of Scotland will be of particular interest to theorists H. B. de Groot, ed., Highland Journeys. of Scottish Romanticism. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University During Hogg‘s lifetime, only a portion of Press, 2010. Pp. 404 Pg. £45. ISBN Highland Journeys appeared in print. The first 9780748624867. five letters of the Journey of 1802 were published in the Scots Magazine, along with an Gillian Hughes, ed., The Collected introductory letter by Scott, between October 1802 and June 1803. After a substantial hiatus, Letters of James Hogg, Volume 3, 1832- the Journey of 1804 was also published in the 1835. Edinburgh University Press, Scots Magazine; however, the Journey of 1803 2008. Pp. 409 Pg. £45. ISBN remained in manuscript. While Hogg intended to 9780748616756 publish the collected Highland Journeys, along with his ‗Essay on Sheep-Farming in the The spectacular trajectory of James Hogg‘s Highlands‘, in book form, the current edition is literary career – his transformation from a the first full realisation of his plan. In examining curious peasant-poet of the Scottish Borders to a the detailed, ‗Note on the Texts‘, one gets a keen celebrated author with serious international sense of the complexity of bringing this edition appeal – is particularly highlighted by together. In order to reconstruct the most examining these two volumes together. Hogg‘s complete text possible, in addition to the Highland Journeys is amongst his earliest published letters, de Groot draws upon Hogg‘s literary endeavours, while Gillian Hughes‘s manuscript notebooks held by Stirling much anticipated final volume of The Collected University Library, a portion of the Journey of Letters of James Hogg, covers the final years of 1803 published by Hogg‘s youngest daughter, his life. Both are products of the extensive Mrs. M. G. Garden, in The Scottish Review archival research and careful textual scholarship, (1888), and an early transcript of a now lost which have become hallmarks of the Hogg manuscript, discovered by Gillian Hughes Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of The in the Library of Washington State University at Collected Works of James Hogg, and both Pullman. De Groot‘s introduction fully contribute substantially to our understanding of addresses the complex composition and one of the most important Scottish Romantics. publication history, and, within the main text, Hogg journeyed to the Highlands during the sub headers guide the reader regarding the summer months of 1802, 1803, and 1804, as part source text. of an ultimately frustrated attempt to lease a Some of the most attractive features of de sheep farm on Harris. When he set out in July Groot‘s edition are the maps that accompany 1802, he was on the lookout for a suitable farm each significant section of Hogg‘s journey, to relocate both himself and his aged parents and allowing the reader to track Hogg‘s progress was generally surveying the state of sheep visually. Overall, the explanatory notes and brief farming in the Highlands. However, his written glossary are thorough yet user-friendly, and the

36 notes are particularly rich with secondary are usefully subdivided from those of April- references. My one slight reservation is December 1832, neatly marking Hogg‘s return regarding the appendices. The information on to Ettrick and making the unusually high volume the chronology of Hogg‘s Highland Journeys of letters in 1832 more manageable. Hogg‘s feud and Janette Currie‘s essay on ‗Hogg‘s Harris with John Gibson Lockhart regarding his Venture‘ might be more usefully placed just publication of Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter after the introduction, such that the reader can Scott (1834), his ultimately frustrated attempt to approach the main text with more clarity. All publish more than just the first volume of his other appendices are supplementary rather than own collected works, and his successful integral and are appropriately placed. The publication of A Series of Lay Sermons on Good unusual number of subsections in the Principles and Good Breeding (1834), a introduction also deserves comment. While ‗Memoir of Burns‘, Tales of the Wars of these subsections allow readers to target areas of Montrose (1835), along with numerous particular interest, such as, ‗The Manufacture of contributions to periodicals and annuals, are all Kelp‘ or ‗Hogg‘s Letters of Introduction‘, the covered in this volume. Clearly, Hogg‘s startling fluidity of the introduction read in its entirety statement in the first letter of 1833, that ‗the best does suffer slightly. days of my writing are over‘, does not entirely One now wonders how Hogg scholarship hold up; however, Hogg‘s approaching death is progressed prior to the publication of The indeed hauntingly ever-present, in references to Collected Letters, and this volume is the reoccurring bouts of illness and a weakened culmination of a project that first began in the constitution. 1970s. As Gillian Hughes points out in her As is the case with the previous two volumes, introduction, the first volume of letters Hughes‘s introduction concisely provides both a (published in 2004) might well be called the biographical and general historical frame of Scott volume, which fits nicely with the reference for the reader: in this case, the epistolary style of Highland Journeys. While the turbulent 1830s, which saw the Reform Bill of second is dominated by Hogg‘s correspondence 1832 and the resultant upsurge in cheap with William Blackwood, the final volume, periodicals, such as Chamber’s Edinburgh covering the period from 1832 through Hogg‘s Magazine. Hogg can be seen as adapting to the death in November 1835, is more varied and the times admirably and also taking advantage of his letters more numerous, despite the smaller time growing fan base in North America. With frame, as Hogg has made his way onto the world Hogg‘s increasing celebrity, he also gained stage. As Hughes summarizes, ‗These letters access to the valuable system of ‗franking‘ portray the close of a journey in authorship that letters, and Hughes‘s section on ‗The Ettrick began with a newly-literate shepherd‘s Shepherd and the Postal System‘ provides an ambitions in 1800 and ended in the insightful discussion of this practice. achievements of a national, and even As the final volume of letters, ‗Undated, international, celebrity‘ (xlii). Doubtful, and Additional Letters‘ are also The volume opens on a high note, with Hogg‘s included, along with the full index, which had self-promotional journey to London in the previously been made available as a work in winter of 1832. The letters sent home to his wife, progress via the Stirling University website. One Margaret, and their children offer a rare glimpse gets the impression of a yet on-going worldwide into their domestic life, and within the scholarly treasure hunt in locating Hogg‘s explanatory notes, Hughes provides extracts surviving correspondence, and Hughes‘s from Margaret‘s responses, including her gentle encouraging openness to the plausible existence chidings for neglecting to have his stockings of further letters should be exciting to the next mended, overindulging in drink, and purportedly generation of Hogg scholars. My one very minor mounting the table to speechify at a Burns reservation regarding this section (which, in fact, dinner (which Hogg, of course, vehemently stems from curiosity rather than scepticism) is denies). The letters from January-March 1832 the lack of clarity as to how the two ‗doubtful‘

37 letters are so defined, as not all letters in the during the nineteenth century by the main text are printed from original manuscript elocutionary movement, which studied public copies. Perhaps a slight addition to the ‗Note on speaking, pronunciation, together with elocution the Texts‘ would have allowed more room for strategies and their political and social influence such discussion. However, that said, the on the audience. For instance, Thomas Sheridan scholarship in this volume is a very apt tribute to was regarded as the most prominent and the on-going reclamation of one of Scotland‘s representative elocutionary theorist of the greatest writers. eighteenth century, together with Dugald Megan Coyer Stewart, a linguistic philosopher; however for University of Glasgow the Romantic movement the major elocutionist, therapeutic practitioner, and theorist of speech in Alexander Dick and Angela Britain was without a doubt John Thelwall Esterhammer, eds., Spheres of Action: whose interdisciplinary elocutionary theory and Speech and Performance in Romantic literary practices, and, above all, their application for a varied audience, are analysed in Culture. Toronto: University of this contribution. Then, another innovative and Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. viii + 306. £42. very pertinent discussion is offered by ISBN 9780802098030. Alexander Dick, who presents a new reading of William Wordsworth‘s elegiac verse, Starting from the premise that language is a specifically the lament. Employed by the form of action, and that during the Romantic romantic poet as an alternative genre to the period much attention was dedicated to the mourning verse, the lament is a performed poem, manner in which people spoke, the editors of which endorses the self of the speaker, with this collection of essays, Alexander Dick and potential subversiveness, through a written text. Angela Esterhammer, introduce the volume as Also adopted by women poets – for example by an examination and critical reflection on how abolitionists such as Helen Maria Williams and that concern affected the development of Amelia Opie, or by Charlotte Smith – the lament Romanticism, both as a literary movement and had significant political as well as gender as a cultural practice. implications. As a consequence, the volume seeks to recover The second part of the volume opens with a the Romantic speaking voice, exploring the noteworthy essay by Frederick Burwick, where function of gesture, dress, and other forms of he investigates the changes promoted by actors – embodiment determining the effect of social from David Garrick, through Sarah Siddons to practices on textual forms such as poetry, John Philip Kemble – and manuals in the use journalism, and the novel. Since language has a and meaning of gesture in Romantic power not only to describe the world but to performances. In particular, he focuses his shape it, the editors point out several ways in analysis on theories of gesture, which pointed which words constitute controlling acts, and out the difference between true and false how the study of language and literature emotions in acting and representation. The becomes accustomed to social and political actors Kemble and Edmund Kean, are then effects of speaking and writing, such that compared – with the help of useful plates – to language can be even translated into political underline their different techniques for power. The volume is divided into two main expressing feelings, gestures and emotions, with sections, ―Public Speaking‖ and ―Body special reference to the devices they adapted in Language‖: the former focusing on language, order to stage madness and the duality of their physical space, media, and institutions, and the characters. Finally, as two suitable latter concentrating on performance and body representatives of these performative strategies, action. Burwick discusses Hannah Cowley‘s comedy A Judith Thompson, for example, introduces in Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783) and Joanna her article the fascinating theories elaborated Baillie‘s tragedy De Monfort (1800).

38

Marjean D. Puriton also investigates women new directions; it will not settle neatly into playwrights, with specific attention to the issue homogenous categories or clean definitions; it is of cross-dressing and the performance of gender, enriched by otherness, strangeness, and connecting the Romantic period with resistance. While guiding the complete beginner postmodern feminist and queer theories of safely into this moving vortex, this valuable perfomativity. As Puriton points out, in the volume reminds the more advanced reader why middle of the nineteenth century the role of Romantic literature and culture are so cross-dressing had changed considerably both compelling. The editors begin with detailed within and beyond legitimate theatre, and, as a historical, literary, and cultural timelines. These consequence, ―the signification of cross-dressing set the conceptual tone for the volume, which is took on different references in the context of the concerned with ‗the fact that the difficulties of emergent separate-sphere ideology that the stage defining the period are symptomatic of the helped simultaneously to construct and to history of debates over how to define the period‘ destabilize‖. Three comedies are then explored, (xiii). In other words, this handbook is acutely – The Widow’s Vow by Elizabeth Inchbald aware that it is speaking at a particular moment (1786), The Old Oak Chest; or the Smuggler’s in the history of the study of Romanticism and Sons and the Robber’s Daughter by Jane Scott one of its tasks is to unravel that history. (1816), and Catherine Gore‘s Quid Pro Quo; or, Faflak provides a clear overview of key The Day of the Dupes (1844) – in order to historical landmarks including the Act of Union, display the ways in which the meanings and the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the functions of the cross-dressed performer shifted Enclosure Acts, the Slave Trade Act, Catholic profoundly in the Romantic period. Emancipation, and the Regency crisis (chapter This interesting and much inspiring volume 1), followed by Chaplin‘s introductory list of collects highly valuable contributions, which not key literary figures, genres, and movements only throw a new light on the study of Romantic (chapter 2). From this stage onwards, the reader drama and performance, but expand the analysis is led to question the prominence that was from literature to cultural, social and political previously granted to ‗canonical‘ male writers studies, opening up this field of research to a and presented with the comparative popularity more comprehensive speculation on theory and and success of their female contemporaries. material practice linked to the sphere of human Joanna Baillie for example is rightly introduced action and speech in the Romantic period. as ‗a prolific and highly influential playwright‘ Serena Baiesi who achieved ‗considerable literary success‘ University of Bologna (16); Hannah More is an ‗extremely successful writer‘ who made a ‗considerable fortune‘ (26); Sue Chaplin and Joel Faflak, eds., The Charlotte Smith is ‗important‘ and ‗influential‘ Romanticism Handbook. London and (32). The relative importance and poetic merit of New York: Continuum, 2011. Pp. 284. ‗the Big Six‘ is implicitly challenged throughout the volume. £17.99 / $29.95 (pb). ISBN The movement into chapter 3 is a considerable 9781441190024. jump in terms of complex critical engagement. Rhian Williams demonstrates how an The Romanticism Handbook is clearly presented appreciation of Romantic nature poetry can be and well set out in easily-digestible chapters of active benefit in today‘s world of ecological with manageable cross references, a useful crisis. She combines ‗ecological mindfulness‘ glossary, and a broad-ranging annotated with close reading (54) and shows, with bibliography. The constituent chapters are reference to Cowper, Coleridge, Clare, and coherent in their aims and the editors convey a Keats, that close reading of nature poetry can clear message: that Romanticism is socially, avoid practical criticism‘s legacy of isolationism politically, and culturally sprawling; as a and myth. She joins the rest of the handbook‘s discipline, it is alive and continues to develop in contributors in asking for ‗a loosening of canon

39 formation‘ (57) but Williams‘s is perhaps the decades, and so the volume presents an accurate most successful attempt, due to the sensitivity of picture of how the field looks today, it is her engagement with the primary texts important to be wary of prejudicing themselves. undergraduate students against traditionally Next, Chaplin provides an appraisal of six central concepts and to avoid ring-fencing critical texts that significantly transformed the certain groups because they happen to be white study of Romanticism ― de Man, McGann, and male. By perhaps over-emphasizing the Mellor, Fulford and Kitson, Bate, and Sedgwick. importance of previously under-studied writers These texts were carefully chosen to reflect the and themes, we can lose sight of complex themes of the volume: identity, ideology, themes such as imagination, truth, and beauty Gothicism, colonialism, eco-criticism, and which have troubled and enchanted gender. Perhaps most notable about this Romanticists for so many years. selection is the prominence it gives to the Gothic Jessica Fay and to marginalised figures ― women, slaves, St John’s College, Oxford and the lower classes. Adeline Johns-Putra delves into these issues more broadly in chapter Kevin Hutchings, Romantic Ecologies 5, which reiterates ‗key critical concepts‘, and Colonial Cultures in the British- beginning again with canon, class, and gender. Atlantic World, 1770-1850. Montreal, The following two chapters are especially useful for undergraduate students of London, and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s Romanticism and for those devising University Press, 2009. Pp. 240. £ 55. Romanticism modules respectively. Faflak plots ISBN 9780773535794. the theoretical trends ― Liberal Humanism, New Criticism, Poststructuralism, New One can safely assert that Kevin Hutchings‘s Historicism, Postcolonialism and beyond ― contribution to the development of through which Romantic texts have passed. contemporary humanities is substantial. His Simon Kӧvesi follows with a thought-provoking latest book, Romantic Ecologies, addresses a discussion of why issues of canonicity are number of significant, if not crucial, issues from important and how they are perpetuated by the perspective of our contemporary world, university reading lists. related to ecocriticism, political history and, last In chapters 8 and 9, Elizabeth Fay and Carol but not least, gender studies. It is particularly Bolton discuss themes of ‗Sexuality and Gender‘ noteworthy that the Canadian scholar succeeds and ‗Race and Ethnicity‘. Fay makes interesting in unifying and harmonizing apparently links between sexual identity and gender divergent fields of research under the generous performance in terms of the theatre. Bolton aegis of post-colonial studies, thereby furnishing clearly and straightforwardly introduces the important critical tools. Hutchings‘s position is reader to the contexts of eighteenth-century modestly non-assertive, but it should be noted racial theory and the slave trade. Peter Kitson that his dense book fashions itself as a provides an apt conclusion with his summary of stimulating and convincing synthesis of an current critical endeavour, including Orientalism, overwhelmingly complex picture of transatlantic Empire, and Sensibility. He ends by pointing patriarchal policies, aimed at controlling nature towards the global, digitized future of and climate, on the one hand, and human beings Romanticism of which the final online-only (be they slaves or women), on the other. chapter is an example. Taking its cue from such influential works on Two themes dominate this study: green romanticism as Jonathan Bate‘s Romantic gender/otherness, and canonicity. In fact the Ecology (1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000) volume might be summarized as a handbook to or Onno Oerlemans‘s Romanticism and the the ‗gendered re-canonisation‘ (104) of Materiality of Nature (2002), Hutchings‘s Romanticism. Although the broadening of the discourse strives, albeit in a cautious manner, ‗to canon has been a vital development of the past imagine non-human creatures and natural

40 environments as they exist apart from their In sum, Kevin Hutchings‘s strong points relationship to culture‘ (11). He adds a caveat: consist not only in a theoretical reshuffle of a he is aware of the fact that ‗these imaginings are new and challenging field of humanities (let us themselves products of human consciousness, not forget that ecocriticism, as an independent, representational artifacts reflecting the fully-fledged trend only emerged in the 90s, discursive or ideological practices that shape our thanks mainly to Lawrence Buell‘s 1995 subjectivity‘ (11). The book is well-balanced, academic hit, The Environmental Imagination), succeeding in attaining a middle path between but also in an extended and overall persuasive arid and didactic theory and astute and vivid debate of the environmental issues and cultural literary exegesis. policies which became dominant in the Hutching‘s study is divided into seven main transatlantic world of the romantic era, the latter chapters, to which its author adds a well-written being achieved by scrupulous, rigorous and introduction (aimed at emphasizing the well-applied literary analyses. Once again, relationship between political and literary Hutchings has proved that a biunivocal elements in late 18th- to mid 19th centuries) and relationship may successfully be established an afterword (aimed at pointing out the cultural between texts and contexts, between facts and exchanges between colonialism and ecology). implications, between man and nature. The first two chapters are mainly theoretical, Catalin Ghita and they shed light on a welter of colonial issues, University of Craiova such as slavery and the intellectual associations between the ideas of race and animality in Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, Spanish Britain and North America. Hutchings proves America and British Romanticism, conclusively not only that the colonizing white 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest. peoples saw themselves ‗as emancipators of subject peoples‘ (48), but also that ‗both Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Africans and Native Americans were subject to Press, 2010. Pp.ix + 254. £70. various forms of colonial abuse, justified by the ISBN 9780748638680. notion that they were, at best, not fully human and, at worst, akin to animals‘ (69). Chapters 3 Romantic studies has discovered a renewed and 4 are devoted to two important English interest in geography, although it is now romantics: William Blake and Samuel Taylor broadening out from concerns with the Coleridge, whose respective works, Visions of picturesque and British regional localities to the Daughters of Albion and To a Young Ass, are examine Romantic-era texts in relation to the read in terms of social and political manifestos, transnational and transoceanic. This includes set against sexual constraints and physical examining not only the more familiar terrain of brutality. Chapter 5 and 6 focus, respectively, on the British empire, but equally the remoter William Richardson‘s The Indians, A Tragedy regions of the Pacific, Eastern Europe or, in and Thomas Campbell‘s Gertrude of Wyoming, Heinowitz‘s new book, Spanish South America. illuminating several aspects related to the often Written as part of the Edinburgh University intriguing cultural politics of Native America. Press Series Studies in Transatlantic Literatures, The final chapter of the book takes into account Heinowitz argues that South America was an Sir Francis Bond Head‘s and George Copway‘s object of intense scrutiny for British writers positions vis-à-vis the colonization of America across the Romantic era. Her study explores this and the baffling image of the idealized ‘Natural interest in work by writers as diverse as Robert Man‘. Hutchings concludes his study by Southey, Helen Maria Williams, Byron (who expressing the hope that his latest work has toyed with the prospect of settling in Venezula), initiated ‘a productive dialogue between Samuel Rogers, and even the quintessentially ecocriticism, on the one hand, and (post)colonial English Felicia Hemans. and transatlantic modes of literary theory and Although it reaches well beyond the borders of historiography on the other‘ (185). the British empire, the question of imperialism

41 nonetheless remains central to Heinowitz‘s France and its aftermath. Sheridan‘s Pizarro study. She claims that an informal empire (1799) develops an identification of the Incas, prevailed between Britain and Spanish South but does so in order to establish a connection America, that although Britain‘s interest in the between Revolutionary France and the brutality continent was commercial, its commercial of the Spanish empire. Yet, its condemnation of interests were themselves tantamount, and at empire also drew attention to British imperial times expressed as a desire for, territorial tyranny and subtly enabled the support of possession. This was particularly the case from revolutionary sympathies. Southey‘s Madoc the 1780s onwards, as Britain positioned itself to (1805), conversely, responds to the possibility of take over from Spain as the world‘s leading French dominance of South America, by empire. British writers thus not only pondered mounting a defense of British colonialism of the the commercial or possible colonial region. The book concludes by looking at the relationships between Britain and the continent, Spanish American bubble of the 1820s, wherein but the region equally served as an imaginative the region was finally opened to full commercial zone for questioning British imperialism more relations with Britain, only to lead to financial generally, the texts she looks at foregrounding disaster and a reversal of the trend to identify the ‗anxieties, ambivalences and contradictions‘ with the native inhabitants as they were cast as of British imperial rhetoric in its established commercially backwards. colonies (2-3). The broader theme of sympathy for native Underlying these responses to the region were Americans was also called into question by the two enormously influential late eighteenth- Peninsular War, which fostered dual loyalties in century histories by William Robertson and Britain to both Spain, now resisting Napoleonic Abbé Raynal. Both works attacked Spanish France, and to the liberty of Spain‘s American imperialism for its abuse and enslavement of the colonies. Given the enormous Romantic indigenous population, but they also sought to enthusiasm for Spanish liberty at this time the exonerate contemporary Spain for its adoption study might have probed further the significance of liberal commercial practices adopted from of this shift of sympathies towards Spain and its Britain. They thus overturned the Black Legend complication of British identification with of Spanish colonial rapacity to describe an Spanish South America. Diego Saglia has dealt appealing similarity between Spanish and with the Romantic response to the war at length, British rule. Romantic writers sought to counter but his work is largely absent from Heinowitz‘s this claim of Spanish and British equivalence by study. The Peninsular War also raises further the referring instead to intimate parallels between question of Brazil. That Heinowitz employs the Britain and the American victims of Spanish phrase Spanish South America is in order to rule. In doing so they drew on Jean-François mark out a space that does not include the Marmontel‘s sympathetic account of native Portuguese colony Brazil. It is completely South America, Les Incas (1777), which directly understandable that the study needed to draw inspired a number of literary accounts, such as geographic limits, it also declines to consider Helen Maria William‘s Peru (1784). Britain Britain‘s response to the Caribbean, but it would was justified in its ascendancy over the Spanish have been valuable to have some comparative colonies, these writers repeatedly claimed, sense of the differences in British responses to because of its moral and cultural kinship with Brazil and Spanish South America, given that the indigenous population, a view that Portugal was a long standing ally of Britain. nonetheless easily slid into fantasies of Nonetheless, the study has opened up a fresh domination or exploitation of the continent. area of inquiry in Romantic studies that The book progresses through a series of demonstrates the extent to which authors of the studies of select literary works on Spanish South era identified with empire and global politics. America that read these issues of imperialism in Neil Ramsey relation to gradual shifts in the broader political University of Western Sydney environment, particularly war with revolutionary

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Susanne Sklar, Blake’s Jerusalem as which (as Sklar also advises) a copy of Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Jerusalem is kept within reach, as one moves Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press, through Sklar‘s chronological reading of text and images. This admittedly takes some time, 2011. Pp. 310. £70. ISBN but is worth it, as Sklar actually manages to free 9780199603145. Jerusalem from the widespread critical concern that this ‗perfectly mad poem‘ (8), as Southey In recent years we have seen the rise of what we famously denounced it in 1811, is out of control might call a religious turn in Blake studies. This with regards to structure, narrative, and plot. By is of course an anachronism, since the presence inserting the reader as the missing link in of Christian themes, motifs, and sources of Jerusalem, Sklar manages to put her finger inspiration in Blake‘s works is hardly a recent exactly on the blind spot of most Blake criticism, discovery. Meanwhile, two parallel movements namely that Blake‘s works can only with great have recently occurred in Blake studies: one difficulty be approached and discussed on a representing an increased awareness of Blake‘s solely intellectual basis. This does not mean that religious context – historical as well as they not make sense when approached by the intellectual –within English departments, and intellect or (that dreaded word in Blake criticism) one representing a growing interest in Blake reason, but rather that a dose of something else amongst theologians. To the first group we is required also: a willingness to actually enter count publications such as Robert Rix‘s William the works on their own premises. As Sklar puts Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity, it in the introduction: ‗The poem is meant to be Magnus Ankarsjö‘s William Blake and Religion, heard – and its luminous images are meant to be and Jonathan Roberts‘s Blake. Wordsworth. seen‘ (2). Have text-based only readings of Religion, and to the latter studies such as Jerusalem perhaps had their time? Christopher Rowland‘s Blake and the Bible and Whereas the premise for Sklar‘s study (i.e. the the present publication, Susanne Sklar‘s Blake’s function of each individual reader in the Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre. Add to this the narrative of Jerusalem) does eventually make discoveries of Blake‘s possible connections with itself obsolete, in that it only represents Sklar‘s the Moravians by Keri Davies and Marsha Keith own reading of Jerusalem, and not the reader‘s, Schuchard, and enter a productive and lively there is still every good reason to engage with discourse on Blake and religion that moves Sklar‘s book. With great perception she outlines forward with every new publication. some of Blake‘s religious contexts and forebears Sklar‘s monograph represents a reading of (in particular she shows a comprehensive and Jerusalem as ‗visionary theatre‘, i.e. approaches sensitive understanding of the German mystic the illuminated work as a stage that is ‗with, Jakob Boehme, 1575-1624) as well as unfolding around, and before us‘ (3). This in practice the many biblical references in Jerusalem, of means that Sklar reads Jerusalem in a similar which many modern readers (including this one) way to the well-known Ignatian tradition of most probably do not pick up the full imaginative prayer and meditation, in which one interpretative potential. The double perspective imaginatively enters a gospel scene to on both Jerusalem‘s text and images works well experience the narrative from within – in Sklar‘s in the text, and the introductory chapters contain version, the text is a theatre, and we enter it both a wealth of interesting material – the chapter on ‗holistically‘ and ‗sequentially‘, ‗thinking like Blake‘s Jesus figure, especially, serves as a both an actor and a director‘ (251). First, the reminder of how overlooked this topos is in immediate reaction of the reader of Sklar‘s book Blake criticism, and just how much more work might be one of mild schizophrenia, as one is needed on it. Sklar‘s translation of the figure attempts to imaginatively enter into two texts at of Jerusalem from passive onlooker to active the same time, Jerusalem as well as Sklar‘s female force also comes as a welcome reminder book. But the schizophrenia soon resolves itself, of how particular figures in Blake‘s mythical as one falls into a slow rhythm of reading in cast do from time to time need a make-over: in

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Sklar‘s reading, Jerusalem is ‗a multinational nature, and identity. Labbe summarizes that ‗by spiritual corporation, travelling from the Thames investigating in detail, the poetry, philosophies to Spain to Poland to Turkey, Libya, France, and cross-fertilizations of the two poets, this Ethiopia, Peru, and America, teaching ‗the ships study will establish a complex inter-weaving of of the sea‘ to sing (J79), bringing ‗blessings of themes, ideas and philosophies that, taken gold and pearl and diamond‘ to the children of together, create a more nuanced, and more all nations (J24)‘ (74). Finally, as might be historical, understanding of Romanticism‘ (4). evident from this last quotation, Sklar‘s book is Labbe‘s analysis features the period 1784-1807, written in a lucid and refreshing language, covering the formation of Wordsworth‘s work, aiming at opening and making Jerusalem come concluding with Wordsworth‘s shift to a more alive to the reader. Does it work? Suffice to say confident tone, and Smith‘s death. that this reader, at least, is ready to go back and This publication explores the current state of reread Jerusalem as soon as possible. evidence of the exchanges between Wordsworth Elisabeth Engell Jessen and Smith. However, Labbe maps out a University of Oxford relationship more complex than this familiar narrative might suggest, supporting her case with new, detailed analysis of the poetry Jacqueline M. Labbe, Writing produced by both writers during their period of Romanticism, Charlotte Smith and interaction. Poem by poem, Labbe identifies William Wordsworth, 1784-1807. repeated phrases or changes in each poet‘s work, implying a close readerly exchange. Arguing for Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, similarities between the poets‘ approach to 2011. Pp. 232. £50. ISBN generic manipulation, this book emphasises the 9780230285491. consistencies in their use of experimental subjects and amalgamated forms. The first ‗I was afterwards detain‘d by Mr Wordsworth chapter examines the hybridity of poetic form. (whom I could not take leave of, till he Labbe reminds the reader of genre categories embark‘d) till it was too late to have the pleasure delineated by Newbury and Blair, and examines I intended.‘ Charlotte Smith‘s letter of to what extent Smith and Wordsworth abide by November 1791, situates Smith and Wordsworth these. Whilst some conventions were carefully alongside one another in a way that may observed, detailed analysis of Lyrical Ballads discomfort those unused to relating major and Elegiac Sonnets demonstrates the increasing canonical figures to the ‗separate critical space‘ elasticity of poetical forms. This desire to of lesser known women writers (9). Over the last experiment with genre is evinced paratextually, two decades we have observed an extensive Labbe explains, in the titles alone. Both authors, work of recovery in women‘s writing, rather than appearing hesitant in their generic encouraging an increasing fascination with experimentation, firmly place the responsibility women‘s relationship to Romantic aesthetics. of comprehension upon the reader, who should The model of Romanticism has itself been ‗know what constitutes the poetic‘, despite repeatedly challenged, yet women writers are poetic experimentation (22). still not truly included as essential contributors Chapter 2 is a detailed examination of the to these debates; they are not read alongside the poets‘ engagement with the 1790s, a decade of most canonical of (male) Romantic poets. This war. Labbe describes a tension between the publication is a bold and important attempt to attempts to transcend temporal events and the address that lack. immediate experience of revolutionary trouble. Labbe argues for a reciprocal influence Smith and Wordsworth attempt to lift various of between Smith and Wordsworth, present in their poetic speakers out of immediate distress to poetic form and content. She examines a gain objectivity and grasp a pattern or solution selection of traditionally Romantic subjects for contemporary difficulties. However, Labbe employed by both poets – self-reflexivity, explains that these attempts to transcend reality

44 only return the speaker with more brutality to Anne Frey, British State Romanticism: their situation: ‗the more they load [the poems] Authorship, Agency and Bureaucratic with figures to enhance the power of the real Nationalism. Stanford: Stanford suffering they describe, the more the poems depart from the world of the real‘ (73). This in University Press, 2010. Pp. 216. $55. turn leads to a disruption in poetic form and ISBN 9780804762281. content, as the text probes the possibility of poetic failure. Income tax was first introduced into Britain in Given her authorship of the influential study, 1799 by William Pitt to cover the costs of the Romantic Visualities, Labbe is on familiar Napoleonic Wars. Except for a brief interlude ground in the third chapter. It discusses the during the Peace of Amiens, the tax was levied anchoring of poetry in landscape, analysing the throughout the wars until it was abolished a year distinctions within spatial terminology. She after the Battle of Waterloo. It was not a popular draws attention to the temporal and spatial tax. A letter to the Times, written shortly before signals evident in the poem titles. Both poets tie it was repealed, complained of the ‗despotic their compositions to location; Labbe explores spirit of this inquisitional impost, its horde of the tension between spontaneity, creation in the petty tyrants!‘ (135). This was the language used landscape, and a more writerly process. In the to describe the incursions of the government into final chapters, Labbe decries the negative impact the private lives of its citizens in the 1790s that of autobiographical reading, and offers John Barrell has discussed in The Spirit of alternative, more complex readings of the Despotism. But this was not the 1790s, it was constructed self, sketching the variety of 1816, and the national landscape had been speakers both authors use to specific purpose transformed by war, by Union with Ireland, and and effect, and the impact of this upon poem, by a shifting sense of what the coordinates of reader and poet. The book concludes with a nationhood. discussion of possible systems or processes In Anne Frey‘s account government invasions behind the organisation of poetry collections. into the private domain were becoming This publication begins with the suggestion of normalized in the early nineteenth century, fertile reading, and concludes with the clear and acknowledged as a necessary consequence of the increasingly emphatic delineation of the State‘s increasingly bureaucratized relationship between Charlotte Smith and administrative procedures. The centralized William Wordsworth, and their impact upon the government of king, lords, and commons formation of Romanticism. The task Labbe governing from the metropolitan centre had, by undertakes may seem bold, but the time is ripe the late Romantic period, begun the inexorable for a repositioning of supposedly minor writers transformation into the bureaus and departments amongst the canonical, to enable a more fruitful which oversaw an increasingly diverse range of understanding of all. activities at a more specialized, local level, Deborah Brown penetrating ever more deeply into individual University of Chichester lives. Instead of a discussion of the inquisitorial nature of government taxation practices, Frey offers a reading of Austen‘s Persuasion, which concludes with the lines, ‗she gloried in being a sailor‘s wife, but she may pay the tax of quick alarm for that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.‘ Pointing out that Austen was working on Persuasion as the income tax was being debated in parliament, Frey argues that, for Austen, membership of the

45 nation involved a series of obligations, or In each of her five chapters Frey examines the ‗taxes,‘ that fused the private and public spheres. work of a ‗State Romantic‘ – a writer who Anne‘s marriage to a naval officer at the identifies the state as ‗the agency that conclusion of Persuasion recognizes the determines how individuals think, feel, and increasing importance of the professional classes perceive the world‘ (4-5) – to determine how to the administrative procedures of government, each author imagines his or her role as an while simultaneously suggesting the emotional accessory to state power. Coleridge, in Frey‘s costs of integrating administrative functionaries account of his late writings on Ireland, relies like into familial life. For Austen, Frey suggests, Wordsworth on the bureaucracy of the Anglican these highly personal taxes are necessary Church to organize the nation into an ‗organic invasions of privacy that allows the individual to form,‘ and argues that as Catholics, the Irish will experience integration into the community, and remain ―fragments‖ that cannot be assimilated into the nation as a whole. into Britain. In the Heart of Midlothian, Scott, Buttressing Frey‘s discussions of late- similarly committed to a united Britain, argues Romantic conservatism are Foucault‘s writings that novels can serve the State by providing on governmentality, which argue that, beginning specialized local knowledge to which a rigid in the late eighteenth century, European legal system, based in the metropolis, has no governments developed ways of regulating its access. Austen, meanwhile, is more sceptical citizens, based on a secularized version of that an organic state can be adequately imagined, Christian pastoral care. The modern state, (it is, Frey argues, too ‗sublime‘), but suggests recognizing that the success of the nation as a that the obligations of a local community can whole depended on the success of individual hold smaller groups together, which on citizens, developed bureaucratic practices that aggregate might serve the larger, imperceptible, could oversee the well-being of individual nation. In Frey‘s reading of ‗The English Mail- members, as pastors had taken care of the Coach,‘ De Quincey denies himself as author spiritual needs of individual congregation any claim to individual agency, placing the members. Acknowledging that society works responsibility for his words in the hands of a best when its citizens operate independently, the glorious British mail system. contradictory function of the modern liberal British State Romanticism offers clear, state was to allow citizens to pursue their own coherent, and compelling readings of texts by interests, while simultaneously ensuring that familiar authors in service of a sophisticated those interests, in fact, served the state. argument about the growth of the bureaucratic Frey does not merely describe these new state in Britain. It presents a timely challenge to administrative structures, however, or the way bottom-up theories of national identification, they are represented in literature. Rather she such as Linda Colley‘s, by reminding us that asks how conservative writers imagined their state institutions played an important role in role as authors within this emerging idea of the interpellating its subjects into modern Britain. bureaucratic state. Wordsworth, for example, the Moreover, it offers a framework for subject of Frey‘s second chapter, had once understanding how literature might serve the believed that his poetry derived organically from ideological apparatuses of the state, and how the the people, and that the poet, endowed with ‗a categories of early Romanticism were more lively sensibility… a greater knowledge of reconfigured to serve a new national agenda in human nature, and a more comprehensive soul,‘ the late Romantic period. could play a nurturing role, helping to improve Ian Newman the tastes and morals of the people. By the time University of California Los Angeles he wrote the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, however, Wordsworth had come to believe that only the Anglican church, a state apparatus, could play such a role, and worries that his poetry might usurp the state‘s pastoral authority.

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Orrin Wang, Romantic Sobriety: meaning instead of resemblance, knowledge Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, instead of the uncanny. To try to do so is to History. Johns Hopkins University indulge in aestheticism‘ (137). It seems that we are being invited back to the (really quite recent) Press: Baltimore, 2011. Pp. 384. £39. time when Romanticism was regarded as ISBN 1421400669. something to be approached only when wearing heavy-duty (and very, very plain) gardening Orrin Wang‘s Romantic Sobriety brings together, gloves. in three parts, writing on ‗Periodicity,‘ ‗Theory‘ This mention of spooks leads inevitably to and ‗Texts,‘ some of which dates from 1999. In Chapter 5‘s reading of Derrida‘s ‗Ghost the Introduction, Wang outlines his book‘s two Theory.‘ While Wang thinks The German distinguishing features. ‗The first involves … Ideology is right to mock Stirner‘s wish to Romanticism as an event equally fascinated by exorcise ghosts, he also approves Derrida‘s the rejection of sensation, equally caught up in a observation that ‗Marx cannot quite prevent the Romantic sobriety‘ (1). According this actions of ghosts and phantoms from definition, Romanticism is that which repeatedly contaminating key moments of his own prose‘ defines, resists and polices feeling—as in (141). Marx is told off once for trying to draw a Tintern Abbey‘s ‗These wild ecstasies shall be line between spectral capitalism and its spectre- matured / Into a sober pleasure‘ (20). ‗The free predecessor, and again for carelessly second … has to do with a methodology that spilling a drink all over his typescript. understands such semantic generation as The first two sections essentially reassert necessarily involving the aporias of a deconstructive ‗rigour‘ against Marxist tropological condition‘ (2). In other words, ‗naivety.‘ It is quite a relief, then, that halfway Romanticism is the name for a concern with the through the book Wang largely abandons the relationship between sense and sensation. Paul word ‗troping‘ and starts to read poetry and De Man has both a supreme understanding of fiction, occasionally with brilliance. Sometimes these issues, Wang argues, and can help clarify resorting to language more at home with ‗a number of choices facing the postmodern left Deleuze than de Man or Derrida, in Chapter 7 today‘ (2). The first two sections of the book, (‗Lyric Ritalin: Time and History in ―Ode to the consequently, reflect on language, philosophy, West Wind‖‘) he describes the world of ‗To politics and the institutional context of the study Autumn‘ as ‗at once a ghost town and an of Romanticism. idealized community,‘ and the poem proper as ‗a The soberest of all the sober, Wang‘s Paul de wry acknowledgement of the pleasures and Man is a product of Romanticism and an entrapments of consumer life‘ (185). In the ‗ascetic‘ (6) critic of anyone‘s failure, past or following chapter, Don Alfonso‘s sighting of present, to live up to his example. In Chapter 5 Don Juan‘s shoes by Julia‘s bed reveals to the (‗The Sensation of the Signifier‘), Wang places cuckold his ‗forlorn fate in a world of dead Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in a magical objects‘ (202). long line (also featuring Jerome McGann) of Chapter Nine (‗Gothic Thought and Surviving those who have unsuccessfully attempted to Romanticism in Zofloya and Jane Eyre‘) reverts ‗constrain or do away with the cognitive and slightly to the deconstructive plea that, rather ethical lapses of a solipsistic Romantic than claim ‗there has been too much talk about a sensation‘ (136). The only way to lasting politics of ideology, … [Jane Eyre actually sobriety is to admit, and discuss in a circle, the asserts] that there hasn‘t been enough‘ (248). full extent of the problem. From this perspective, Chapter Ten (‗Coming Attractions: Lamia and Michaels‘ ‗neo-vulgar Marxist use of class‘ (113) Cinematic Sensation‘), however, is right on the and general political urgency is nothing more money. Drawing on recent research on crowds at than denial. Wang spells out the implications of Romantic art exhibitions, Wang presents Lamia this lesson for Romantic Studies: ‗There is no as a tale about ‗how visuality becomes the simple way to have subjects instead of ghosts, preeminent recourse for negotiating between

47 sensation and its abstraction in modernity‘ (263). seemingly insignificant detail, a particular Wang cites Levinson‘s work on Corinth as a pit idiosyncrasy of this author: he takes a small of commerce and prostitution, and argues that brush from his pocket and brushes each page, Lamia‘s commodified and visualised body is the back and front, before handing it over. Morrison centre of the poem. ‗[O]ne way to order the states: ‗In a life in which chaos so often reigned, notoriously wayward narrative of Keats‘ poem it was a vivid token of the pride he took in what would be to consider the story a series of staged he wrote‘ (3). visual encounters with the titular character, a set The prologue to this biography is a gripping, of looks that then organizes all the other viewing beautifully written opening. In the hands of a occurring throughout the work‘ (266). The less accomplished biographer, the tone and style passages on Lamia‘s ‗social optics‘ are, surely, here could fall into easy sentimentality and the strongest in the book: ‗forcing Lamia to certainly Morrison takes a risk in deploying the become the creature that they want, [her viewers] trope of the dishevelled stranger who turns out are also troped as forms of psychic, and then to be a famous writer – an intense, tortured, existential, pain‘ (270) eccentric ‗Romantic‘ genius with a brilliant Stuart Allen manuscript tucked into his oversized coat. But of Bridgewater State University course Morrison knows what he is doing: he constructs this compelling representation of de Quincey precisely in order to foreground, Robert Morrison, The English Opium interrogate and deftly play with the myth of the Eater. London: Pheonix, 2009. Pp. 488. English opium eater. £25. ISBN 0753827891. Morrison‘s is the first de Quincey biography in over thirty years and the first since the

publication in 2003 of the complete works of de Robert Morrison‘s The English Opium Eater Quincey under the editorship of Grevel Lindop. begins on a spring morning in 1850 with an This fact alone renders the work of considerable elderly man walking seven miles to Edinburgh. critical interest to scholars and Morrison does He has a somewhat dishevelled appearance: his not disappoint. As well as bringing new insights cape is far too big for his small frame; he has to bear on the well-known details of his lost virtually all his teeth; his hair is grey and subject‘s life (Morrison, for instance, receding. Nevertheless, he has an air of dignity convincingly casts doubt on the authenticity of and quiet purpose as he walks three hours to the de Quincey‘s account of his encounter with the office of publisher James Hogg. Learning that young prostitute ‗Ann of Oxford Street‘), his Hogg has moved to a temporary office across relation to the Romantic movement and the town, he walks a further mile to discuss with the breadth and influence of his writing, the publisher a contribution to the monthly biography also narrates intimate moments that magazine Hogg’s Instructor. Hogg immediately reveal not only the chaos of de Quincey‘s recognises his rather unkempt visitor as the domestic and professional life, but the sheer author of Confessions of an English Opium banality of material hardship and drug addiction. Eater and he greets Thomas de Quincey, and his The subject that emerges at these moments (and proposal (‗The Sphinxes Riddle‘), with Morrison‘s attention to the wider global enthusiasm. Having reached an agreement with economic and political context is also exemplary) Hogg, de Quincey walks another mile up hill is not a flawed addict-genius, but a desperate back to the publisher‘s main office where he man in the grip of a potent drug that was also a delivers the manuscript to Hogg‘s son. In spite highly lucrative commodity over which wars of the writer‘s fatigue, a long and animated were fought by a powerful commercial imperial discussion ensues during which de Quincey force. The craving for and influence of opium appears to become possessed by his subject: the (and alcohol, de Quincey regularly consumed famous riddle posed by the Sphinx to Oedipus. over a pint of whiskey a day) produced one of During the conversation, de Quincey delivers his the greatest drug memoirs of the last two manuscript and here Morrison lights upon a

48 hundred years; its influence has been Politics, a forum I edited in 1986 (25.2) in the extraordinary and Morrison is right to remind shadow of Jerome McGann‘s ‗Keats and the the reader of the historical and cultural reach of Historical Method in Literary Criticism‘ (MLN Confessions of an English Opium Eater. And yet 1979). The Victorian cleansing of Keats‘s drug addiction and poverty often necessitated for Cockney stigma having bequeathed, for better or de Quincey multiple petty, banal deceptions and worse, an apolitical ‗Aesthetic Keats‘, McGann compromises; the biography reveals these summarily arraigned the aesthetics as an escape destructive, creative, wretchedly desperate from political thinking. Wanting to appeal this strategies sympathetically yet unsentimentally as verdict, I conceded that the conjunction Keats an essential aspect of the fraught, slippery and Politics flirted with metaphysical conceit, ‗persona‘ of a subject situated at particular compared to the meditations, activities, historical, cultural and political moment. frequently activism, of several contemporaries. Morrison‘s erudition, his commitment over The path of re-examination was no ready matter 400-plus pages to narrating with clear sight and of dialing back, however, though there were judgement a life so complex and conflicted, and some handy channels: early sonnets to liberal around which such a potent mythology has heroes Hunt and Kosciusko; the anti-monarchal grown, is remarkable. Moreover, in presenting verse at the top of Endymion III lashed by such a wealth of detail, Morrison‘s draws Blackwood’s ‗Z‘ (not ‗Blackwell‘s‘ as one 2011 extensively from de Quincey‘s letters many of essayist gives it [353n6]) and the slapdown of which remain unpublished. In the process of this Hunt-ephebe as proxy for the whole researching this biography, he has put together a ‗Cockney School of Politics, as well as the database of transcriptions of all the letters Cockney School of Poetry‘ (August 1818); the available in public archives and many of those in proto-Marxist stanzas in Isabella on capitalism private collections worldwide. This in itself is an and labor so admired by William Morris and extraordinary achievement. Scholars will be in G.B. Shaw; Keats‘s hatred of tyranny, and Morrison‘s debt for some time to come. confidence that he would have banded with the Sue Chaplin rebel angels in Milton‘s Heaven; his impulse to Leeds Metropolitan University become a journalist on ‗the Liberal side of the question‘ (September 1819). Yet Keats was no devoted political writer, even by the measure of Emily Rohrback and Emily Sun, eds., political sympathies that Francis Jeffrey could Reading Keats, Thinking Politics. mark off and satirize in Lyrical Ballads. Studies in Romanticism (50.2), Special Rising to the challenge, Morris Dickstein, th William Keach, David Bromwich, Paul Fry and 50 Anniversary Issue. Boston: Boston Alan Bewell produced carefully measured University, 2011. Pp. 229-372. $6 (pb). essays that are now landmarks. (Anne Mellor‘s ISSN 00393762 bracing review of McGann‘s The Romantic Ideology at the back of the volume was a lucky Founded in 1961, Studies in Romanticism has addition.) Bewell‘s artfully gymnastic been keeping pace with, often setting the pace conclusion turned out to speak a consensus: for the enduring interests and stimulating whatever the angle (cultural vectors, post- transformations of the field. Our quarterly date, Waterloo despair), ‗Keats‘s inability to speak in everyone reads this elegantly produced an assured political voice and his discomfort publication; sooner or later almost all of us write with the political languages that were available for or find our work studied in its pages. It is to him as a poet constitute, in themselves, a famously hospitable: newcomers enjoy political viewpoint‘, especially on victims, encouragement and attention alongside seasoned outsiders, silent constituencies (25.2, 229). critics. One happy punctuation has been the Across the next twenty-five years politically guest-edited special-topic issues. nuanced work emerged from (among others) This 50th-anniversary one revisits Keats and Nicholas Roe, Marjorie Levinson, John Barnard,

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Daniel Watkins, James Chandler, Jeffrey Cox, commitment even as it complicates the very idea and myself, tuned to the inflections of material of political action‘ i.e., ‗instrumental . . . contexts (gender, race, class, post-Waterloo intervention in the world of human affairs‘ (351- despair) on Keats‘s poetic practice and its 52). So, too, ending. Jonathan Mulrooney‘s reception. ‗How Keats Falls‘ sees the Hyperion poems as Reading Keats, Thinking Politics – this nice refusing an ideology of political progress in double-grammar giving the activity to both history‘s ruins, to focus on the ‗traumatic loss‘ Keats and his readers – polishes up ‗aspects of that ‗eschews recompense or consolation in Keats‘s poetry irreducible to its material favor of an affective experience‘. From context‘ (231). I appreciate irreducible for ‗political . . . upheaval‘ (251) emerges a lyric respecting Keats‘s complexities and, more mode of ‗deeply political‘ engagement with broadly, for releasing literary imagination from history as a ‗vale of Soul-making‘ (269). Such contextual strictures, material or otherwise. This refusal of master-argument is Noel Jackson‘s impressive gathering of critics is good company: political gauge for ‗The Time of Beauty‘: ‗the attentive to recent theoretical developments, most utopian or messianic forms of political adventurously thoughtful about Keats, his place thought‘ (311) are deferred for ‗an aesthetic in Romanticism and in the modern world. Yet I politics of the present‘ (317), plumbing found myself thinking that Thinking Politics was ‗ephemeral moments of ―Beauty that must die‖‘ so elastic that its definitional force was (314; quoting Ode on Melancholy). Rei attenuated. Any oppositional vibration could be Terada‘s prompt is the reciprocal neutral gaze of accommodated: how one looks at something; Hyperion and the stars, ‗openly absorptive, yet how one acts or doesn‘t; how one begins, withhold[ing] realization‘ (278). ‗Looking at the imagines, or suspends a process; impersonality Stars Forever‘ constellates a meditation on that refuses or elides political partisanship. The ‗political process‘ (279) in the spectacle and touchstones the editors array in their spectatorship of regime-change, wending from Introduction are telling: ‗Negative Capability‘, post-Waterloo disappointments, to Hegel‘s opposition to the ‗egotistical sublime‘, the ‗tarrying with the negative‘ (a phrase Zizek existentialism of the ‗vale of Soul-making‘. Not embraces) of spiritual vision (Phenomenology of inevitably political markers; not a new map in the Spirit), to Skinner‘s cognition theory, to Keats studies. Deleuze‘s cinematic theory (for 15 pages, set in The six essays are curious exercises: a double-column parade with Keats), to post-war appealingly inquisitive, yet oddities in ‗politics‘- deconstructions of activity and inactivity. It -marked with ‗political possibilities‘ without may be fate that a Magdalena (Magdalena Ostas) claiming ‗authorial intention‘ (232). The first would supply an essay on The Eve of St. Agnes, and last focus on a ‗politics of indolence.‘ In ‗Keats‘s Voice‘. This is no self-expression but a ‗The Politics of the Spider‘ Jacques Rancière‘s set of ‗aesthetic, social, and political stresses‘ interprets ‗diligent Indolence‘ (a paradox and that drive poet, narrative persona, and characters icon drawn from Keats‘s playful letter of into ‗a poetics and‘ (yes) ‗a politics‘ of shared February 1818 to Reynolds) as a political experience. Leveling this multi-toned meta- aesthetic that unsettles the divisions and the Romance to ‗essential tonelessness‘ (338) and teleology of labor, at once reflecting ‗the erasing Keats‘s care with the Spenserian stanza disorder of the conditions and spirits of the (340), Ostas sifts down to an ‗evacuation of . . . revolutionary age‘ (241) and advancing ‗the inwardly individuated identity‘ from which sensorium of an egalitarian community‘ (243). emerges a selfhood ‗precisely as a political Is this a special pleading for ‗politics‘? It‘s a entity‘ of common experience (348). question, too, for Brian McGrath‘s closing essay, Lyric poetics; momentary intensities of ‗Keats for Beginners‘, which reads (via Hannah sensation and affect; spectatorship (indolent, Arendt) a ‗politics of beginning‘ (369) in impersonal, passive, receptive); the spirit of Keats‘s ‗poetics of beginning‘ (poem, phase, existential suffering: this is a well-known idea): a mode of openness that enables ‗political Keatsian grammar. But is ‗thinking politics‘ the

50 inevitable key? or the latest venture in politicizing Keatsian signatures? Was it a vision, or a waking dream? I leave it to you to decide, while I recall Clarence DeWitt Thorpe‘s important re-assessment of Keats amid the political turmoils of 1931 (‗Keats‘s Interest in Politics and World Affairs‘, PMLA 46.4). After shaking down the corpus for under-reported political thinking (Thorpe shows quite a bit-- often vigorous, indignant and passionate), his conclusion is that ‗Keats‘s maturing poetic genius‘ (vide the Hyperion project) ‗was turning his powers toward the imaginative recreation of the most intense human experiences, conceived wholly apart from partisan dissension or political creeds‘ (1245). It could be political thinking. Or not: not that there‘s anything wrong with that. Susan J. Wolfson Princeton University

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