Home Search Every Field Editorial Search Authors' ROMANTIC FEUDS: TRANSCENDING THE 'AGE OF PERSONALITY' Responses By Kim Wheatley (Ashgate, 2013) xii + p. 374 Guidelines Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet on 2013-10-16. For Click here for a PDF version. Reviewers Click here to buy the book on Amazon. About Us
Masthead The myth of the lonely, autonomous Romantic Genius has lately taken its lumps. Questioning its historicity, contemporary scholars of nineteenth-century literature often stress the creativity of groups. William St. Clair, Sharon Lynne Feedback Joffe, Scott Krawczyk and Julie A. Carlson have examined the productivity of Romantic literary families or kinship coteries. Tim Fulford, Peter J. Kitson, and Debbie Lee have revealed the scientific network as an engine of Romantic cultural production. David Higgins has shown how the concept of Romantic genius was shaped and popularized by the periodicals of the era, which influenced such figures as Wordsworth and the painter Benjamin R. Haydon. And creative groups could be as small as two. Magisterial studies of pairs of Romantic friends, mentors, protégés, rivals, and frenemies include Stuart Curran's Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (1976), Paul Magnuson's Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (1988), Susan Oliver's Scott, Byron, and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter (2005), and Peter Cochran's Byron and Bob (2010).
Kim Wheatley has also helped to bury the solitary Romantic Genius. In Shelley and His Readers (1999), Wheatley examined Percy Bysshe Shelley's highly interactive relationship with periodical reviewers, especially those of the Tory Quarterly and Whig Edinburgh Review. Despite the quarterlies' vicious style and "paranoid politics," Shelley evidently envisioned their staff writers as his target readers. Now Wheatley has produced another illuminating, provocative study of critic-writer dialogue, on a larger scale. This book reveals the creativity of the network of editors, reviewers, and authors that participated in several of the Regency's literary feuds. She concentrates on the "personalities," or vicious gossip, that led Coleridge to declare the era an "age of personality." Arguing that the personality-driven Romantic feud functions as a literary genre, Wheatley reads it as a collaboratively produced story. The feuds that embroiled the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews and Blackwood's beginning in 1817 are here called "multi-authored narratives" (2), "collective [. . .] writing" (17), and "collective act[s] of the imagination" (95). To see the crucial and creative role that literary feuds played in the making of British Romanticism, Wheatley argues, we must transcend our own animosity toward Regency critics.
Since collaboration implies cooperation rather than conflict, animosity and collaboration make strange bedfellows. Yet mating the two is not without precedent. Acknowledged Romantic collaborations, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge's on Lyrical Ballads, were fraught with conflict, and Wheatley persuasively demonstrates that the Regency literary feud was a collaborative genre. She construes ad hominem criticism and public retaliation as provocative gestures that spark and elongate dialogue. She finds editors, reviewers, and writers responding to such provocations with inventive reinterpretations of biographical narratives and literary texts. Most importantly, the periodicals develop themes from the Romantic literary tradition, including the sublime and the Romantic ideal of transcending the topical or particular. In turn, Romantic imaginative literature often utilizes the quarterlies' rabid rhetorical style, making criticism a catalyst of literary technique, and vice versa.
To prove these points with a series of case studies, Wheatley examines several feuds that will be largely familiar to Romanticists. Her first case study, the Wat Tyler affair, began as a quarrel between Poet Laureate Robert Southey and some of his critics, and became a multivocal drama in which Southey flickers between particular and transcendent personae, in both criticism and imaginative writing. In 1817, the unauthorized publication of Southey's 1795 radical drama Wat Tyler goaded Whig commentators to attack the Tory poet for his youthful sedition and subsequent self-reinvention. In trying to contain these attacks, Wheatley shows, Southey denied that he was retaliating even as he did so, amplifying the feud. Thus provoked in their turn, his critics continued the feud, "disfigur[ing] and refigur[ing]" the Laureate (23). William Hazlitt, for example, turns Southey into three characters: his (Southey's) own "bastard son," the monstrous product of his youthful radicalism and middle-aged conservatism; the chivalric defender of the daughter of the hero of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381; and a "magdalen," or Fallen Woman, a "lost" waverer with an "effeminate soul" (Hazlitt, qtd. 23, 29, 36-7).
Defending Southey in four Courier articles, Coleridge argued that he transcended politics to reveal a "deep soul" (34- 5). But this hardly ended the feud. Leigh Hunt's radical Examiner rejoined with an imaginative "Death and Funeral of the Late Mr. Southey," and in a novel called Melincourt, Thomas Love Peacock satirized him as the hypocritical "Mr. Feathernest," who represents not just Southey himself but also the Quarterly, his frequent employer, whose prejudices he promotes. By pursuing a feud, Southey exposed himself to caricature, and even as he was made to suffer for the sins of his periodical and his party, Peacock was transformed as well. Incorporating into his novel the Quarterly's "hysterical language" (25), he ends up speaking to the public in the Quarterly's corporate voice. The feud also gave Southey's longtime enemy Lord Byron a chance to transcend literary feudalism. In his parody of Southey's A Vision of Judgment, Bryon nobly refrains from attacking the Laureate on personal grounds.
Turning from Southey's adversaries to the foes of Coleridge, particularly Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh, Wheatley shows how Jeffrey's anonymous attacks on Coleridge provoked retaliation that informed a spectrum of imaginative writing. The feud began soon after Jeffrey visited Coleridge and Southey in Keswick. Though they received him there with very civil hospitality, he attacked them in his journal as soon as he returned to Edinburgh. In the Biographia, Coleridge called Jeffrey out on this duplicity, though not by name. Jeffrey responded in a signed rejoinder, an unusual choice given the Regency periodicals' conventions of editorial anonymity and corporate voice. Defending Jeffrey, Hazlitt deflated Coleridge's apparent pretensions to sublimity by depicting him as a downed hot air balloon. By this means, Wheatley suggests, Hazlitt grounded the high-flying, transcendent Romantic self.
In her third chapter, Wheatley turns to a trio of radical writers who resisted critical reduction and demonization: Hunt, Hazlitt, and Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. The urge to retaliate against the Quarterly's public bullying led these three to collaborate with their Tory critics in forging new, entertaining literary texts and compelling public personae. In criticizing his critics, Wheatley writes, Hunt produced a "minor masterpiece of Cockney classicism," Ultra-Crepidarius, while Hazlitt joined in with his "masterly" Letter to the Quarterly editor William Gifford. Most intriguingly, Morgan's novel Florence Macarthy takes up arms against Gifford and another Quarterly critic, John Wilson Croker, First Secretary of the Admiralty. Morgan turns herself into a Gothic heroine persecuted by Tory villains (102). In so doing, she prompts us to recall that Southey was once caricatured as an imperiled young woman. But as Wheatley shows, Morgan transcends both of her identities--as heroine and radical-- by making the autobiographical Florence a creature of "surfaces" or pretensions, suggesting that the "autonomous self" is an illusion (132-5). Consequently, even as Morgan battles the canonical Romantic poets' Tory nemesis, she also critiques Romantic ideology.
Wheatley saves her most exciting and significant material for last. In Chapter 5, adapted from an article that appeared in the European Romantic Review of October 2009, Wheatley examines the feud conducted within and beyond the pages of the Quarterly by Admiralty bigwig John Barrow and explorer John Ross. The Quarterly's treatment of the Arctic has been oversimplified by the generalization that a hegemonic propaganda machine run by John Murray cranked out jingoistic promotions of Arctic exploration. Within the community of explorers, however, there were divisions. As Second Secretary to the Admiralty and a protégé of Croker, First Secretary and frequent Quarterly contributor, Barrow wrote for the Quarterly eighteen "highly biased" articles on Arctic themes between 1816 and 1840, spanning most of his professional career and adult life. In these articles, which were published anonymously, Barrow frequently identifies himself, though not by name, and makes himself both minstrel and hero of what Wheatley terms an Arctic chivalric romance. Interpolating romance conventions into journalism, Barrow treats the long-coveted Northwest Passage as a holy grail and vindictively portrays Ross as a bumbling nemesis largely responsible for Britain's failure to achieve it. As his white knight against this villain Barrow sets another explorer, Edward Parry. Anticipating (wrongly) that Britain would find a way through the ice, Barrow aims to end his chivalric romance with a generically appropriate marriage of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
In this quest narrative, then, Barrow comes across as a Romantic protagonist. Charmed by the "mysticism of the ice," he writes of the sublime in terms that Wheatley finds reminiscent of Shelley's "Mont Blanc." Barrow proves a quintessentially Romantic questor as he strives to transcend human limits (170). Using the magisterial first person plural in keeping with the quarterlies' convention, but making his personal authorship clear to readers, Barrow casts himself as the hero of the British Arctic narrative (165). His transfiguration blurs the boundaries between critic and poet, and arguably makes Barrow a neglected Romantic prose bard.
In a book that is enjoyable as well as persuasive, Wheatley presents the "game" of literary feuding as an engrossing spectator sport. Just one additional item might have made this book more accessible. Given the complexity of the feuds that Wheatley examines, it could have used a timeline or a tree: something to help the reader grasp the chronology of each feud and the authors, editors, and journals involved in each. But this is a minor criticism of a monograph that is as constructive and passionate as its inspiring feuds. As in Shelley and his Readers, Wheatley demonstrates that literary conflict can differ from other kinds in facilitating creativity.
Rebecca Nesvet is a Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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