MEDICINE AND THE BODY IN THE ROMANTIC PERIODICAL PRESS Jessica ROBERTS School of Arts and Media University of Salford, Salford, UK Thesis Submitted for the Consideration for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, June 2014 Contents Introduction 1 Chapter Outline 4 Methodology 6 The Body Politic 19 The Body in the Romantic Period 24 Chapter One: The Public Nature of Health and the Politics of Sickness in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner and Reflector 29 1.1 The Public in the Romantic Period 33 1.2 Public Health 37 1.3 Leigh Hunt and Medicine 45 1.4 Public Health at Home and Abroad in the Examiner 54 Chapter Two: Bodily Monstrosity in Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf 78 2.1 The Black Dwarf 87 2.2 Monstrous Political Bodies in the Black Dwarf 100 2.3 Monstrous Creatures in the Black Dwarf 117 Chapter Three: William Lawrence, Richard Carlile, and the Physiology of Free Speech 126 3.1 William Lawrence’s Lectures 129 3.2 Richard Carlile and the Republican 145 3.3 The Physiology of Free Speech 153 Chapter Four: Blood and Money in William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register 169 4.1 Blood in the Romantic Period 173 4.2 The Economy in the Romantic Period 183 4.3 Blood Metaphors in the Romantic Period 188 4.4 Periodical Circulation 205 Chapter Five: Radical Contagion in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 210 5.1 Contagion in the Romantic Period 216 5.2 Colonial, Poor, and Radical Disease 225 5.3 Blackwood’s against Radical Contagion 232 5.4 Circulation and Contagion 248 Conclusion 250 List of Works Cited 255 List of Illustrations Fig 1. The Cow Pock, or, the Wonderful Effects of the New Innoculation! 60 Fig 2. A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion 73 Fig 3. The Prince of Whales 74 Fig 4. Coriolanus Addressing the Plebeians 79 Fig 5. The Black Dwarf 87 Fig 6. Political Lecture on Heads 97 Fig 7. The Tree of Liberty Must Be Planted Immediately 99 Fig 8. Britannia Between Death and the Doctors 109 Fig 9. Doctor Sangrado Curing John Bull of Repletion 110 Fig 10. Physical Aid 111 Fig 11. Author in Jail 148 Fig 12. A Free Born Englishman 161 Fig 13. Ourang Outang Candidate for Westminster 165 Fig 14. Wax Injected Human Left Arm 176 Fig 15. Bank Restriction Note 195 Fig 16. The Man in the Moon 207 Fig 17. A Young Viennese Woman 226 Fig 18. National Conveniences 244 Fig 19. French Liberty, English Slavery 245 Fig 20. Petit-souper, a la Parisienne 246 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Vickie and Patrick Macintosh, Richard Roberts, and Bruce and Mary Hunter-Inglis for all of their practical and emotional support. I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, Sharon Ruston and Janice Allan, whose time, enthusiasm, and advice has been invaluable. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the Working Class Movement Library. Abbreviations DNCJ Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism DNB Dictionary of National Biography OED Oxford English Dictionary Abstract This thesis focuses on the body in political debate during the Romantic period. My original contribution to knowledge is an analysis of a corpus of periodical writing in intense detail, and I track the way in which periodical writing utilises a medical vocabulary and the reasons for this appropriation. I identify the key concern of each popular periodical, and reveal the way in which the editors attempt to achieve their goal by using language borrowed from medical discourse. I also uncover the ways in which periodical writing influenced medicine, by outlining how medical practice was politicised by social and cultural demands. Political essays and letters are the main focus of the thesis, but I also analyse poetry included in the periodical press, paying attention to formal attributes such as article placement. Illustration and marginalia are also considered. I argue that political, social, and cultural agendas shaped the direction in which medical discourse moved. Periodicals have been selected as my primary texts due to their immediacy and highly political nature, and I have selected titles that were prominent in both the literary and political spheres. I conclude that the body becomes a site of political contention in the Romantic period, and is used as an allegory in discussions of systems, power, and resistance. Roberts 1 Introduction This thesis argues that the ways in which bodies are viewed changes in the early nineteenth century due to simultaneous advances in medicine and interrogations of society caused by the revolutions in America and France. In this period, both human and political bodies become the focus of heightened scrutiny and they are subject to manipulation and control to a greater extent than was previously conceivable. The body thus becomes central to political debate. In my thesis, I identify the main political project of a selection of radical periodicals and one conservative magazine, and reveal how the writers use concepts of the body in their writing for their cause. My research is concerned with paradigm shifts in medical science, and I reveal how strands of political, economic, and cultural commentary are influenced by language and discourse borrowed from medicine. I focus on the symbiotic relationship between medicine and literature. As I reveal, not only does medical discourse influence fiction and political writing, but this literature influences the way in which scientific debate and discovery develops in the early nineteenth century: in the way that an author sought to persuade the nervous middle class to abandon their hypochondria for political reform, as well as how a practitioner responds to criticism in the periodicals by focusing his lectures on the differences between human and animal life, and in the way that periodical authors write for and against medical legislation. I also argue that political, social, and cultural agendas influenced medicine. I use periodicals as my primary texts due to their immediacy and highly political nature, and have selected titles that were prominent in both the literary and political spheres. Radical periodicals produced by editors Leigh Hunt, Thomas Wooler, Richard Carlile, and William Cobbett provided a space for highly seditious and controversial writing challenging government discourses and power. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine provides a conservative contrast, which, I reveal, similarly comments on debates ostensibly about Roberts 2 medical science but that are, conversely to other journals that I have discussed, about the control of radicals and the labouring classes. I have chosen the early nineteenth century as the focus of my analyses, and often refer to this time as the Romantic period, by which I mean the era between the American and French revolutions and the Victorian period of industrialisation, the Reform Act of 1832, and the increased authority of the medical practitioner. This period was characterised by a preoccupation with the rights of man and the changing power of humankind, like the revolutionary 1790s preceding it. Although there was no unified movement that can be identified as Romanticism, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, there was a sense that the revolutions had proven the political autonomy of the people and this impetus must be galvanised and maintained in Britain, if not for revolution but for the increasing emancipation of the people. There was a sense that literature, philosophy, and scientific progress were the mode of delivering this catalyst. As Sharon Ruston asserts in Creating Romanticism (2013), Romanticism was created not just by literary and philosophical ideas, but scientific ones, too (3). While I do not seek to define Romanticism or Romanticisms, I identify a clear distinction between the period under review — approximately 1800–1835, which is a late estimate by traditional boundaries of the Romantic period — and those preceding and following it. The British government continued to be concerned with political radicalism and French sympathisers in Britain in the early nineteenth century, and medical science and politics became significantly linked. Medicine interrogated the political nature of the human subject. The human body became a focal point for both discourses, and debates about the human soul and the need for a creator-God emerged at the same time that authorities feared a revolution could occur in Britain. Views of the human body that denied the existence of the soul or the need for a higher power threatened the ruling classes. What it meant to be human was Roberts 3 investigated from many perspectives: from the points of view of medicine, but also from the standpoints of politics, religion, and philosophy. This is a thread that runs through my thesis: threats to human and political bodies are identified in similar terms, taken from the discourse of physiology, and the political system is subsequently modelled on this discourse. I do not use the term “discourse” uncritically: theorist Michel Foucault’s model of discourse in Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) centralises the importance of power — and resistance — to systems of thoughts, attitudes, and practices, and this is largely what my thesis is about. The shaping, creating power of language was self-consciously employed by both radical and conservative writers to resist authority. Concepts and metaphors taken from medical science were, in this way, of use in the discussion of politics. The French Revolution demonstrated to radicals that society could be reorganised to the advantage of the people, just as the human body could be altered for the better by increasingly effective surgical techniques. These techniques offered metaphors for political writing. Society was redescribed in terms of systems, similar to systems that were understood in a new way, such as the circulation. As such, I argue that the concept of the “body politic” took on new connotations: the structure of the state was not seen as immutable, and radicals in particular used the language of medicine to invoke the idea of changing society.