A History of Romantic Literature BLACKWELL HISTORIES OF LITERATURE General editor: Peter Brown, University of Kent, Canterbury

The books in this series renew and redefine a familiar form by recognizing that to write literary history involves more than placing texts in chronological sequence. Thus the emphasis within each volume falls both on plotting the ­significant literary developments of a given period, and on the wider cultural contexts within which they occurred. ‘Cultural history’ is construed in broad terms and authors address such issues as politics, society, the arts, ideologies, varieties of literary production and consumption, and dominant genres and modes. The effect of each volume is to give the reader a sense of possessing a crucial sector of literary terrain, of understanding the forces that give a period its distinctive cast, and of seeing how writing of a given period impacts on, and is shaped by, its cultural circumstances.

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Seventeenth‐Century English Literature Thomas N. Corns Victorian Literature James Eli Adams Old English Literature, Second Edition R. D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain Modernist Literature Andrzej Gąsiorek Eighteenth‐Century British Literature John Richetti Romantic Literature Frederick Burwick A HISTORY OF ROMANTIC LITERATURE

Frederick Burwick This edition first published 2019 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Frederick Burwick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Name: Burwick, Frederick, author. Title: A history of romantic literature / Frederick Burwick. Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2019. | Series: Blackwell histories of literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019006655 (print) | LCCN 2019018043 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119044376 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119044406 (ePub)| ISBN 9781119044352 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Romanticism–Europe–History. | European literature–18th century–History and criticism. | European literature–19th century–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN751 (ebook) | LCC PN751 .B87 2019 (print) | DDC 809/.9145–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006655 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: Conrad in Prison, ‘The Corsair’ (canto 2.ix.ll. 366–77). Pencil and watercolour by Mather Brown (1814). Private collection of Frederick Burwick Set in 10/12pt Galliard by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents

Illustrations viii Introduction 1 I Revolution (1789–1798) 22 The ‘Revolution Controversy’ 22 Newington Green Circle and Richard Price 25 Mary Wollstonecraft 26 Anna Laetitia Barbauld 29 Abolition Movement 30 Thomas Beddoes, Pneumatic Institution 38 Slave Trade, Opium Trade 41 Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestockings 47 Helen Maria Williams 51 William Blake 54 Anna Seward 63 Dissenters 64 Historical Nodes 66 Corresponding Societies and Treason Trials 67 Erasmus Darwin 70 Charles Lloyd 72 John Thelwall 74 John Horne Tooke 75 Nonconformists 77 William Blake: Vision and Prophecy 78 George Crabbe 81 Thomas Holcroft 83 Gothic, Domestic Violence, Sadism 92 The Irish Rebellion 99 Coleridge at Cambridge 100 William Frend 101 John Tweddell and James Losh 103 Freedom of the Press 105 vi Contents

Letters of Junius 107 George Dyer 115 Mary Hays 120 Elizabeth Hamilton 127 Mary Robinson 127 Coleridge and Wordsworth 128 Joanna Baillie 136 Maria Edgeworth 139 Charlotte Smith 139 II Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) 158 The French Consulate and Great Britain 158 Coalitions 159 Toussaint L’Ouverture 168 Peace of Amiens 168 The ‘Dejection’ Dialogue 171 The Growth of The Prelude 177 Back to Nature 188 Coleridge: Conversation Poems 190 Continental Romanticism 205 Jane Porter 211 Thomas Bewick 213 Moral Causality 214 1805: Connections and Coincidences 215 The Periodical Press 219 Exaltation and Exploitation of the Child 226 The Lecture 229 Lord Byron: ‘Fools are my theme, let satire be my song’ 234 The Novel 237 Interconnections: Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, George Crabbe, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld 239 III Riots (1815–1820) 297 Waterloo 297 Corn Laws: Cobbett, Bamford, Wroe, Elliott 309 Lord Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos III and IV 313 Lord Byron: Manfred 318 Percy Bysshe Shelley 328 Samuel Rogers 333 Coleridge: Principles of Genial Criticism and Biographia Literaria 334 Coleridge: ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’ 339 Keats: Networking 349 Keats: Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion 351 Keats: ‘Eve of St. Agnes’ and Lamia 353 Keats: The ‘Great Odes’ 358 Contents vii

Belatedness 366 Wordsworth, Shelley, Reynolds: Peter Bell, First, Second, Third, and Fourth 367 Wordsworth: Benjamin the Waggoner 375 Cato Street Conspiracy 376 Leigh Hunt 381 March of the Blanketeers 383 Satire and the Gagging Acts 385 Shelley: Mask of Anarchy 388 Beau Brummell 388 Blake: Jerusalem 389 Shelley: Prometheus Unbound 393 IV Reform (1821–1832) 413 Trial of Queen Caroline 413 Shelley, Swellfoot the Tyrant 419 Shelley, Witch of Atlas 425 Byron, Don Juan 427 John Clare, The Village Minstrel 431 De Quincey, Confessions 433 Maria Edgeworth, Tomorrow 435 Charles Lamb: Essayist, Critic, Playwright 439 William Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age 447 Deaths: Keats, Napoleon, Shelley, Castlereagh, Byron, Radcliffe 451 Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Improvisatrice 453 Samuel Rogers: Italy 455 George Dyer 457 Mary Russell Mitford, Foscari 458 Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations 466 Panic of 1825 468 Felicia Hemans 470 Thomas Love Peacock, Misfortune of Elphin (1829) 472 Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s Jest Book 475 Parliamentary Reform 478 Abolition 478 Deaths: Blake, Hazlitt, Scott, Goethe, Coleridge Crabbe, Lamb, Thelwall 479 Conclusion 489

Index 492 Illustrations

Cover. Mather Brown, Conrad in Prison, The Corsair (1814) by Lord Byron. [Source: Pencil and water‐colour sketch in private collection of Frederick Burwick.]

Part I. Revolution Fig. 1. James Gillray, Anti‐saccharites, – or – John Bull and his Family leaving off the use of Sugar (27 March 1792). [Source: The Works of James Gillray, from the Original Plates. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851.] 34 Fig. 2. Thomas Rowlandson, ‘THE DEVONSHIRE, or Most Approved Method of Securing Votes’ (1784). [Source: 1783 – 1784: Political caricatures, in Rowlandson the Caricaturist: a Selection from his Works, 2 vols. Ed. Joseph Grego. London: Chatto and Windus, 1880.] 36 Fig. 3. James Gillray, The Loss of the Faro Bank; or – the Rook’s Pigeon’d. (2 February 1797). [Source: The Works of James Gillray, from the Original Plates. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851.] 37 Fig. 4. James Gillray, Scientific Researches. New Discoveries in Pneumatics (23 May 1802). [Source: The Works of James Gillray, from the Original Plates. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851.] 40 Fig. 5. William Blake, The Good Farmer (ca. 1780–85), [Source: Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.] 58 Fig. 6. František Severa, Claviceps purpurea [ergot]: 1 blighted rye; 2 sclerotia; 3 germinating sclerotium. [Source: A. Tschirch, Heilpflanzen. Leipzig, 1909.] 59 Illustrations ix

Fig. 7. William Blake, Europe (1794). Plate 9. [Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.] 61 Fig. 8. William Blake, America (1793). Plate 9. [Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.] 62

Part II. Napoleonic Wars Fig. 9. Adolph Northen. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow (1872). [Source: Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. London, 1891.] 164 Fig. 10. Joanna Baillie, ‘George Crabbe’s Lines on Richard Monday,’ The Parish Register. [Source: Manuscript in private collection of Frederick Burwick.] 264

Part III. Riots

Fig. 11. The Dying Gladiator, late 3rd century bc. Capitoline Museums, Rome. [Source: photograph by Jean‐Pol Grandmont.] 315 Fig. 12. John Doyle, Samuel Rogers at his Breakfast Table. Engr. Charles Motton ca. 1823. [Source: The Poetical Works of Samuel Rogers, with a Memoir. New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1853.] 333 Fig. 13. Benjamin Haydon, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (1814–1820). [Source: Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, Norwood, OH.] 350

Introduction

This History of Romantic Literature provides a richly integrated account of shared themes, interests, innovations, rivalries, and disputes among the writers of the age. It examines the literatures of sensibility and intensity as well as the aesthetic dimensions of horror and terror, sublimity and ecstasy. Because Romanticism infiltrated religious, philosophical, scientific, and ideological dis- course as thoroughly as it did literature and the arts, its impact was pervasive and pan‐European. Indeed, its critical and theoretical grounds were first formulated in France and Germany. Its effect on political and economic thought was com- plex: in spite of being associated with liberalism and radicalism, its tenets were adopted by conservative critics as well. Thomas De Quincey, for example, upheld Tory policies, even while extolling freedom of the imagination through his opium experiences. The authors crafted a poetry and prose of emotional extremes, and a writing style prioritizing spontaneity, improvisation, and originality. Not entirely with- out paradox, they also found their originality in folk traditions and the antiquar- ian revival of literary forms and themes of the medieval past. In examining Romanticism as historical movement, I have adhered to recent theories of assemblage; that is, I have addressed the social networking among authors, the informal dinners and teas, the clubs and salons, and the more formal institutions that emerged to establish and manage relations between readers and writers. Those who shared ideas convened at universities, religious meetings, workers’ societies (unions were illegal), protest groups, and publishing houses.1 Rather than deal with the authors as if they wrote alone and isolated from society, I endeavour to identify and describe their interactions with their com- munities and with one another, as well as their response to major events of the day. Letters, diaries, and memoirs are useful sources in reassembling the exchange of ideas. Further, I find it frequently relevant to integrate the authors’ own

A History of Romantic Literature, First Edition. Frederick Burwick. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 2 Introduction notions of history and historiography. Robert Southey, Sir Walter Scott, and other dedicated historians of the day responded to the organic and cyclical model of Giambattista Vico, Edward Gibbon’s closely related thesis of empire mortality, and the influential Geistesgeschichte of Johann Gottfried Herder.2 From the historians of the Higher Criticism in Göttingen came the theory of confluence of man, myth, and moment discussed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and appropriated by George Bancroft, the American historian.3 In this Introduction I will survey prominent theories of history, leading into the ­authorial networks and historical nodes which direct the historical narrative in the subsequent sections of this volume. The task I have assumed as historian is to assemble apparently scattered and random events such as the bank crisis of 1825, and demonstrate how the circumstances arose and how authors were affected. The task is to weave the seemingly coincidental into a coherent narrative of the networking that informed the rise and progress of Romanticism. The literature of the period is inseparable from economic conditions and the prevailing political and religious turmoil. I recognize that the continuity and cohesion of history require attention to minor as well as major figures and to their involvement in social and political circumstances. I also recognize that simultaneous events render a strictly linear chronology impossible; furthermore, the authors under scrutiny repeatedly turn to their contemporaries but also reach into the past for their ideas. Coleridge, who frequently draws from the past to interpret the present, identifies the letters of Junius as a crucial forerunner of Thomas Paine and John Horne Tooke. This History will observe the succession of time, but with frequent diachronic leaps forwards and backwards. Framing the literary history of Romanticism within the cultural history, I shall relate relevant contexts to the emergent liter- ary texts: for example, the Peterloo Massacre (16 August 1819) and Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’; or Lord Elgin’s appropriation of the Greek marbles (1801–1812) as reflected in the poetry of Byron, Keats, and Felicia Hemans; the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) as described by Byron, Wordsworth, Charlotte Eaton, and many more. Not just the political and military events, but also the current developments in physics and astronomy, in music and art, prompted literary response in poetry and prose. In documenting such influ- ences on the poets, playwrights, novelists, and journalists, I shall also emphasize differences among their respective literary genres. In order to sustain attention to the active agency of literature in responding to, reshaping, and redirecting the course of cultural developments, I shall trace an over‐arching historical ­trajectory, but I shall avoid adhering to a rigidly chronological sequence. Rather, I shall reiterate the causes and consequences of significant events from perti- nent perspectives of individual authors. Designating as ‘Romantic’ the period from the advent of the French Revolution (1789) to the passing of the Great Reform Bill (1832), I shall examine these 43 years in four parts: Revolution (1789–1798), Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), the Riots (1815–1820), the Reform (1821–1832). Introduction 3

Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement associated with ­revolutionary changes that engaged all of Europe and the newly founded United States from the 1780s to the 1830s. As influential in music and the vis- ual arts as it was in literature, Romanticism attained such an extensive range of influence that succinct and cogent definitions of its essential characteristics were rendered inadequate. Histories of the movement, seeking to argue unifying characteristics, have focused either on the individual figures who impressed upon the age their ideas and attributes, or on the ‘spirit of the age’ defined by shared or recurrent traits among leading figures of the time. Not simply a matter of stressing the overarching trends of the age to influence the individual over the individual’s contribution to the age, the challenge lay in ascertaining and elucidating the relevant components of the ‘spirit’. The concept of a ‘spirit of the age’, repeatedly invoked during the late eight- eenth and early nineteenth centuries, may itself have been little more than a convenient fiction. It suggested that a movement was underway in which a large portion of the population shared the same convictions. The concept remains useful today only to the extent that it is bolstered by historical context, the ­causality of its origin and dissemination, the mediating thoughts and deeds of its participants. Prescinded from the vibrant intellectual exchange of the circles that met at Joseph Johnson’s bookshop, or William Frend’s weekly teas, or the evenings hosted by William Godwin, the shared ideas might well suggest a dynamic community consciousness and that sort of merging of the minds ­designated as the Zeitgeist. In his Spirit of the Age (1825), Hazlitt described prominent individuals in whom the ‘spirit’ may have been manifest, but he gives little account of how they interacted in acquiring or sharing the spirit. In Germany, the notion of Zeitgeist was adopted by Johann Gottfried Herder, G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Ernst Brandes, among others. No mere belated importation, a ‘spirit of the age’ had a venerable history in England. Frequently used to claim a widespread concurrence of reform ideals, the concept had been formulated many centuries earlier. William of Ockham, among the Franciscans in London in the 1320s, asserted that the conformity of divine right to natural right was confirmed as a ‘qualitas temporum’.4 Rather than relying on second‐ hand histories of an age, Francis Bacon argued, one should read the original documents: ‘they should be so tasted, their argument, style, and method should be so observed, that the genius of their age [Genius illius temporis] should be waked from the dead as if by some incantation’.5 The consilience that once brought a people together is stored in their written records, especially in their literature. Reviving the ‘Genius illius temporis’ is no act of occult resurrection, nor is it a mere retrieval of ideas that once flourished. The spirit of the age resides in the writing of the age, not entombed in a single text nor in the record of a single author. With the revolutions in America and France, those advocating change adopted ‘spirit of the age’ as their slogan and justification, while conservative factions applied the phrase to the disruptions 4 Introduction they sought to repress. The text was always animated only among the commu- nity that responded, positively or negatively, to its content. Zeitgeist exists as a shared discourse. Ideas may gain power as they are spread from small gatherings and become embedded in the thought of more and more members of a society. In the analysis of literature, the concept of a residing spirit need not possess the coercive power of a national movement. Indeed, it may emerge among a relatively small group. The very fragmentation, factionalization, dissent, and diversity may be the relevant factors in defining an age. Whether manifest in small coteries or vast cohorts, the ‘spirit’ must be analysed through its partici- pating members. As Simon Search insisted in The Spirit of the Times (1790), the first anniversary of the French Revolution needed to be commemorated through a British decla- ration of unity with the citizens of France who boldly struggled to throw off the yoke of tyranny.6 Strident if not aggressive in his call for constitutional reform, Search lost followers after the Birmingham riots of 1791, and many grew cau- tious after Britain declared war against France in February 1793. Following Edmund Burke, who in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) warned against the dangers of undermining the existing government, Thomas Townshend defined a counter‐revolutionary movement. In Considerations on the theoretical Spirit of the Times (1793), Townshend argued the advantages of the existing British Constitution over any possible experimental alternative.7 The Spirit of the Times, as Simon Search defined it, was the British response to the revolutionary fervour underway in France. In 1794, Gilbert Wakefield informed his followers that the ‘Spirit of the Times’ could best be served though the ‘Spirit of Christianity’. To avoid arrest, he distanced himself from ‘clandestine plots against the government, and all associations with republicans and levellers for the overthrow of our government’. Recognizing the ‘spirit of times’ as a widespread clamour for liberty and freedom from persecution, Wakefield proposed that reform is to be achieved through the ‘Spirit of Christianity’. Unfortunately that spirit was almost extinguished even within the Church of England. ‘I am expecting,’ he cautions, ‘that alarming catastrophe, which the signs of the times indicate, in my mind, to be rapidly approaching.’ Individuals must therefore be ‘prepared to act or suffer, to live and die, in the service of Christianity; which is no other than the cause of liberty, and the ­consequent happiness of the human race’.8 The Revolutionary Spirit of the Times was the title of the sermon preached by Basil Woodd at Bentinck Chapel, St Mary‐Le‐Bone (8 March 1797). 9 As chaplain to George Townshend, the Earl of Leicester, Woodd supported the government of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. He identified the ‘Revolutionary Spirit of the Times’ as ‘the rod of God’s anger, and the staff of his indignation’. Much like the ‘Cudgel in the Sack’ (Knüppel aus dem Sack) in the folktale, no matter who wielded it, the rod of divine anger would always strike only the evil‐doer. The ‘Spirit of the Times’ did not always belong to those who claimed it. Woodd’s sermon was prepared for a special fast day in the aftermath of the failed insurrection. Introduction 5

William Tate, an impassioned advocate of Irish republicanism, miscalculated the ‘spirit of the times’, which he thought would reinforce his march on Bristol. With a French legion of 1,400 men, Tate and the French leader Jean‐Joseph Castagnier sailed from Brest in Brittany on 18 February 1822, and anchored near the Welsh port of Fishguard on 22 February. Their plan depended upon gaining the support of the poor country folk of Wales, who were expected to welcome their French liberators. Supposing that the disaffected local populace would embrace the revolutionary ‘spirit of the time’, Tate intended to spark an uprising against the English. By appealing to their Celtic pride and patriotism, the French would swell their numbers as they marched on Bristol, and then on to London. Instead, Tate encountered resistance and hostility. His troops were attacked: 33 were wounded or killed, and on 24 February 1,360 were captured. Tate was forced to capitulate in an unconditional surrender.10 Among the German philosophers, Johann Gottfried Herder was the first to discuss the concept of Zeitgeist. In 1769, he wrote a critique of the work by the philologist Christian Adolf Klotz, Genius saeculi (1760). In translating the term as Zeitgeist, he nevertheless retained the original Latin sense of genius as ‘guard- ian spirit’ and saeculi as ‘of the century’.11 Emphasizing Zeit as the agency of process and change, Herder argued that ideas remain static until they are enlisted as ingredients of persuasion and become effective causal instruments of change. In order to animate the causality of ideas in history, the Geist must act. The Geist or Genius is the mind of the many. Zeitgeist is therefore ‘the sum of the thoughts, attitudes, strivings, drives, and life‐forces, expressing themselves within any causes and effects in a definite course of events’.12 In the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), Immanuel Kant declared that the data of the senses, the phenomena, were all that we could know of the world. Even the self was accessible only as phenomena. We escape solipsistic entrapment, he affirmed, by engaging in a phenomenological dialectic that enables us to comprehend the interactions of mind and nature. Nevertheless, we can only know the phenomenon and can never penetrate to the noumenon. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit (Phenomenologie des Geistes, 1807), Hegel elaborated the phenomenological dialectic, but repudiated the transcendental dialectic through which Kant proposed a comprehension of non‐empirical ideas which would include the Zeitgeist. Both Hegel and Goethe regarded the Zeitgeist as a mirror in which individuals beheld their own reflection, not the reflection of society at large. In Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1822, 1828, and 1830; published 1837), Hegel described the cultural Geist as a collective social identity constantly revising itself as it adapts to changing trends. He acknowledged the impossibility of individu- als transcending their own period: ‘no one can leap beyond his own time, for the spirit of his time [der Geist seiner Zeit] is also his own spirit’.13 Art reflects the experience of the artist and the culture of the time in which it is created. Even in rebelling against the prevailing norms, the artist remains a product of the times. The opposite predicament constrains the historian, who is bound by the spirit of his own time in the very attempt to interpret the spirit of an age past. 6 Introduction

The historian’s best recourse, then, is to reconstruct as thoroughly possible the original discourse. Similar to Hegel, Goethe repeats the notion that in its effort to observe the ‘spirit of the times’ the self beholds only itself. The spirit of the past is a book with seven seals. When Wagner declares that he longs to fathom the ‘spirit of the time’, Faust explains the impossibility: ‘What you call the spirit of the times/ is in fact your own spirit/ in which the times are reflected.’ (‘Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heißt,/ Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,/ In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln’).14 The self is mirrored and nothing more. Neither Hegel nor Goethe pursues this argument to the point of epistemo- logical solipsism. Hegel argues that in knowing the directly accessible mental contents of personal consciousness and experience, the self is capable of con- structing and interacting with an external world, even though its actual nature cannot be known. Members of society remain independent individuals even as they are swayed by the ‘spirit of the age’. In the opposition between ‘Zeitgeist und eigener Geist’, the former might well be an illusory projection of the ­latter.15 William Tate’s ill‐fated invasion of 1797 was an example of those who confused their own spirit for the ‘spirit of the age’. The German provinces were under French occupation when Ernst Brandes wrote on the Zeitgeist in Germany. Rightly considered a conservative, his ­conservativism was pro‐German and anti‐French. Influenced by Edmund Burke, he railed against the consequences of the French Revolution but also against provincial aristocrats who yielded to Napoleon’s military presence in order to hold onto their fiefdoms. ‘Germany no longer exists,’ he conceded, ‘but the German people are still present.’ The German people were held together by an invisible bond. ‘The most widely shared and most sacred possession is the lan- guage.’ The Zeitgeist resided in their shared language, which sustained their nationalism even without a nation.16 Ernst Moritz Arndt was another influential commentator on the Geist der Zeit. The early volumes (1806, 1809) denounced the French occupation. The later volumes (1814, 1818) were addressed against the resistance to national union. At the University of Greifswald, Arndt gained distinction and in 1806 was appointed to the chair of history. This same year he published his Geist der Zeit, excoriating Napoleon as the false liberator and summoning his country- men to resist French usurpation. The response aroused such fervour that Arndt had to flee to Sweden in order to escape Napoleon’s persecution. In 1818, three years after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Arndt was appointed to teach at the newly founded University of Bonn. Arndt lectured from his latest volumes of Geist der Zeit, in which he criticized the particularist policies of the German principalities.17 The boldness of his demands for shared governance aroused anger within the Prussian government. In the summer in 1819 he was arrested and his papers confiscated. Acknowledged as too subjective in its confusion with ‘eigener Geist’, ‘Zeitgeist’ was cited less during ensuing generations. Other historicizing Introduction 7

­concepts popular in the Romantic Era persisted by relying more on empirical evidence in their methodology. ‘Intellectual history’ or Geistesgeschichte, closely related to Zeitgeist, presumed to reveal an evolutionary and teleological ­trajectory through time. ‘History of ideas’ or Ideengeschichte investigated the inception, propagation, and effects of representative thoughts of an age. Ideas in the ­sciences often make their appearance in a non‐continuous history, as truths of one generation become disproved and replaced, so too the truths of ideas ­governing philosophy, aesthetics, politics, and other systems of valuation. Nevertheless, change too has its patterns and causality. Tracing the progress of ideas may provide, in lieu of a history of persons and events, a histoire des idées, serving as an illuminating metahistory, such as Montesquieu engaged in his account, years before Edward Gibbon, of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734). Montesquieu’s history ­minimized the role of individual persons and events, emphasizing instead an ineluctable causality. The fate of Rome was determined by a principal course of action resulting in an ultimately destructive series of historical events.18 Voltaire, too, addressed the rise and fall of nations in his Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations … from Charlemagne to Louis XIII (1756). Voltaire granted that a shared religious belief could bring a people together, but the accompanying superstitions contributed as well to their failure.19 Lauding the endurance and advanced culture of China, India, and the Ottoman Empire of the Muslims, Voltaire overturned the usual prejudice of Judeo‐Christian historians. Far from being essential for a civilized and moral society, Christianity might well contain the ingredients that undermine progress. Voltaire’s speculation became Gibbon’s truth: Christianity exercised a destruc- tive influence throughout Europe. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), Gibbon declares that ‘the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire’. Furthermore, the same inferences ‘may be applied to the instruction of the present­ age’.20 For Gibbon, as well as for Voltaire, Geistesgeschichte ­enabled the author to discern a pattern in a past culture and then reveal its ­replication in current events. In his historical romances, Sir Walter Scott implicated, without announcing, a similar relevance of past events to present circumstances. In sum- marizing the careers of Voltaire and Gibbon, Byron claimed that Voltaire’s great talent as ‘Historian, bard, philosopher combined’ lie in his devastating power of ridicule, ‘Now to o’erthrow a fool, and now to shake a throne.’ With his vast wisdom, Gibbon’s reanimated the past and exposed parallel abuses in present‐ day Christianity: he ‘shaped his weapon with an edge severe,/ Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer;/ The lord of irony, – that master spell,/ Which stung his foes to wrath’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanzas cvi–cvii). Although ‘Genius’ in its Latin use referred to a guiding spirit or a spirit of the place (genius loci), it soon was used to acknowledge an especially powerful spirit, a person or place of inspiration. During the German Enlightenment, the German 8 Introduction word ‘Geist’, as ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘ghost’,21 absorbed the attributes of ‘Genius’ as ‘Geist’, imbued with exceptional powers, transcending the individual, and attuned to the ‘Zeitgeist’.22 German Idealism and Romanticism appropriated these interpretations. Hegel, for example, posits an ‘objective spirit’ (‘objektiven Geist’), capable of ‘manifesting and interpreting itself at various moments’ (‘der sich in verschiedenen Momenten manifestiert und auslegt’).23 Goethe was among those who appraised such moments of inspiration as self‐delusion.24 Further concepts widely adopted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are vitalism and organicism, which have slight legitimacy in regard to plants and animals, and dubious metaphorical value when applied to religion, politics, culture, and the arts. Vitalism required belief in an essence or spark of life, an élan vital, such as might enable Victor Frankenstein to animate his creature.­ 25 Organic form was adopted as a criterion for measuring or evaluating adherence to natural, rather than aberrant, nurturing and maturation. Just as the squeal of the pig is as much a part of the pig as its tail or its snout, so too the language of human beings is said to conform to the same conditions that govern other aspects of human growth and development.26 The concept of aesthetic vitality was associated by Kant and Coleridge with organic form. Lebenskraft and Bildungstrieb were among the unstable concepts adopted to bolster the instability of vitalism and organicism.27 Giambattista Vico of Naples was a political philosopher, and the innovative historian who applied organic theory to the growth of cities and nations. In The New Science (1725), he asserted that since history, or ‘the world of nations’, had been created by men, it could be understood by its makers. He emphasized that social and cultural phenomena passed through a regular sequence of stages which was cyclical in character. He insisted that ‘the order of ideas must follow the order of things’ and that the ‘order of human things’ was ‘first the forests, after that the huts, thence the village, next the cities and finally the academies’. His ‘new science’ of history sought to discover and apply ‘the universal and eternal principles – on which all nations were founded, and still preserve themselves’.28 Vico acknowledged a struggle between ruling and ­working classes replicated age after age. By establishing a causality of person‐to‐person communication, it is possible to avoid the sleight of hand in attributing to immaterial factors the capacity to influence large groups or entire populations. The causal connections exist in social discourse and are manifest in things and events. Rather than trying to retrieve the outmoded explanations of Zeitgeist and its companion, the his- tory of ideas, the present history would resuscitate these terms to recognize their residency and relevance in discussions and debates, in salons and clubs, gatherings and meeting places where the writers and thinkers of the period congregated. Arthur Lovejoy, philosopher and historian, promoted the history of ideas and demonstrated its methodology in his book The Great Chain of Being (1936), Introduction 9 subsequently augmented in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948). His sense of the history of ideas was already operative in his essay ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms’ (1924).29 Lovejoy maintained that individual works could only be related to the movement at large in terms of various combinations of certain key tenets. Insisting upon the plurality of ‘Romanticisms’, he argued that the endeavour to impose a comprehensive meaning was misdirected and resulted in an inadvertent ‘falsification of the history of ideas’. Although he claimed that a ‘family likeness’ could be recognized among the works of the period, Jacques Barzun shared Lovejoy’s sense of multiple characteristics.30 René Wellek boldly countered Lovejoy and Barzun by arguing that the shared characteristics among the Romantic authors and critics were distinguished by more than mere ‘family likeness’. Wellek presented his concept of Romanticism in 1949, then elabo- rated it in his study of the literary criticism of the Romantic Age in 1955. Wellek asserted that Romantic poetry ‘can be defined as symbolistic and dialectical’. Emerging from the pervasive organic analogy of the age, Romantic criticism established ‘a dialectical and symbolistic view of poetry’, and Romantic poetry developed ‘as a union of opposites, a system of symbols’ (2:3).31 The dialectic involved some variation of the mind/nature or subject/object opposition of idealist philosophy, and the symbolism typically elaborated organic purpose and growth. The issues of the Lovejoy–Wellek debate have in recent decades given way to far different concerns with periodization.32 Predominant among them has been the expansion of the canon to give attention to the women authors of the period.33 Feminine Romanticism frequently engaged the same dialectic and symbolic strategies, as in the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, but with significantly different results than can be traced in the sonnets of William Wordsworth. In a preface to his Poems of 1815, Wordsworth wrote of the ‘romantic harp’ and ‘classic lyre’. Byron, who quarrelled with August Wilhelm Schlegel, joked about the trend of dividing all the arts into Classic and Romantic.34 Aligning his titular metaphors with the Classic and the Romantic, M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) documented the pervasive concern with the shift from the mimetic to the expressive theories of artistic creativity.35 Hans Eichner in ‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates (1972) provided a rich collection of references that reveal how the term was originally used to define the trends of the period.36 Wellek emphasized the early formulations of Romanticism in the writings of the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm. In their jour- nal Athenäum (1798–1800), Friedrich Schlegel had defined Romantic poetry as ‘a progressive universal poetry’ (‘Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie.’ Athenäum Fragment 116). This mode of poetry brings together all the divergent genres and modes of poetic expression and also reu- nites the disparate intellectual endeavours of philosophy and rhetoric, ensuring the dynamic convergence of art and nature, poetry and prose. As he made clear in his Dialogue on Poetry (Gespräch über die Poesie, 1800), Schlegel did not 10 Introduction identify Romantic poetry as being confined to a particular epoch, rather its ­progressive and universalizing energy emerged again and again in literature.

I seek and find the Romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived. (Da suche und finde ich das Romantische, bei den älteren Modernen, bei Shakespeare, Cervantes, in der ­italiänischen Poesie, in jenem Zeitalter der Ritter, der Liebe und der Märchen, aus welchem die Sache und das Wort selbst herstammt.)37

The Romantic manner and matter, indeed the very word ‘Romantic’, derived from the romance. Schlegel traced their persistent popularity from the prose and metrical romances of classical antiquity to the chivalric and Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages and the heroic romances of Renaissance narrative fiction. The characteristics of the romance tradition he applauded in the current experi- mentation in ‘romantische Poesie’. The Romantic referred originally to a literary resurgence of the wild narratives that had been popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe, from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–1596). Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula (1508) spawned many imitators who contributed new adven- tures. Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516) and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) were ranked as masterpieces of Renaissance poetry. A quest narrative with love, adventure, and quixotic battles were the constituent elements, so often repeated that the romance welcomed, as well, ironic, satiric, or burlesque treatment of the legends and fairy tales of romance. Miguel de Cervantes famously satirized romance in Don Quixote (1605–1615). Romance narrative turned increasingly to prose, and in the eighteenth‐century revival attracted a broader range of readers. As a literary genre, these fantastic tales of the heroic, marvellous, magical, and supernatural merged with another evolving narrative mode, the Roman as it was called in Germany and France, the novel as it was called in England. Henry Fielding in his Preface to Joseph Andrews (1742) identifies his genre as a ‘comic epic in prose’, a work of prose fiction combing elements of comedy, epic, and romance. The relevance of romance to the emergent romantic literature was widely recognized by the middle of the eighteenth century. ‘Romantic’ was a word appropriated into the contemporary discourse of the sublime in nature. More important to its literary relevance, the word designated tales of adventure and excitement. The first of the major treatises on Romantic literature was Thomas Warton’s ‘Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe’ (1774);38 the second was James Beattie’s ‘On Fable and Romance’ (1783);39 the third was Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785).40 Reeve was especially helpful in guid- ing readers through the many centuries of romance, appraising the content and advising the reader on choosing which to read. With the publication of Horace Introduction 11

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) the connotations of ‘romance’ moved from fantastic to the eerie. The adventure narrative of romance became allied with the Gothic, notably in Ann Radcliffe’s The Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and her posthumously published ‘St. Alban’s Abbey. A Poetical Romance’ (1826). Just as Ariosto and Tasso used the romance to transport readers into strange exotic territories, the romance of the Romantic Era was an occasion to explore foreign nationalism and character. In his Tales of Terror (1808), Matthew Gregory Lewis offered several instances of this venture into alien terrain: ‘The Pilgrim of Valenica. A Spanish Romance’, ‘The Sprite of the Glen. A Swedish Romance’, ‘Albert of Werdendorff; or the Midnight Embrace. A German Romance’. Even remote regions of native lands can seem dangerously strange, as in Richard Polwhele’s The Fair Isabel of Cotehele, a Cornish Romance (1815). Thomas Moore performed the opposite manoeuvre in rendering conditions in his native Ireland outlandish in his Lalla Rookh; an Oriental Romance (1817). Louisa Stuart Costello in her ‘Romance’ from Songs of a Stranger (1825) cele- brated the fantasy rescue by a knight in shining armour. Not the archetypal romantic hero but the sublime romantic place is the subject of Henry Kirke White’s ‘The Genius of Romance’(written 1804, published posthumously 1807), and his delight in nature where ‘high romance’ lingers ‘o’er every wood and stream’. In ‘The Romance of Youth’, John Hamilton Reynolds addresses the ‘romantic’ as an exuberant but fleeting stage in the trajectory of life (from The Garden of Florence, 1821). As a traditional genre, Romance lent its name and attributes to the designa- tion Romantic. It remained a distinct though contributing entity in the move- ment which it had partly defined. Romance and Romanticism, genre and the literary movement, are often intertwined, as they are in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (1800, published in 1816), in Keats’s ‘Eve of St. Agnes’ (1819), and in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818). The generic heritage does not mean that Keats’s ‘Eve of St. Agnes’ is more Romantic than his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, but the revival of the romance does reveal the trend in the late eighteenth ­century to escape the restraints on form that had been imposed by critics earlier in the ­century. Not until John Murray had published in England Madame de Staël’s De L’Allemagne (1813) and Coleridge that same year began to introduce the discriminations of Classic and Romantic from A. W. Schlegel’s lectures, did reference to Romanticism gain wider circulation in the critical vocabulary of the age. Along with the revival of medieval romance, authors of the late eighteenth century shared with the antiquarians a fascination with numerous other forms of the past. Not yet disciplined in archaeological science, the members of the Antiquarian Society of London were amateur historians and collectors of artifacts­ of bygone centuries. Although the fascination with antiquity was widespread, those so captivated with the past that they neglected the present were subjected to ridicule – a topic treated in the satiric sketches by Thomas Rowlandson, 12 Introduction

George Cruikshank, and James Gillray. Sir Walter Scott, himself an antiquary, nevertheless spoofs the errant passion in his novel The Antiquary (1816). Antiquarians were obsessed with collecting artefacts of past eras. Medieval and Gothic romance conjured the supernatural hauntings of the past. The Millenarians, however, studied the past in order to inform their projections for the future. Current revolutionary turmoil they interpreted as fulfilment of the apocalypse prophesied in the Book of Revelation. The advent of a new order in society provided, as well, a platform for reform. Every genre of poetry and prose was tuned to the popular modes of histori- cizing and reviving the past. Bishop Thomas Percy’s The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) inspired several decades of collecting, but also imitating, the folk tradition. Robert Burns as well as Scott participated in the ballad revival, which was given further impetus in William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (1827). In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Francis James Child, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (10 vols., 1882, 1898), attempted to establish ‘authentic’ texts for 305 ballads. The poets of the Romantic Era had already appropriated manner and matter of many of the bal- lads. For example in John Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (1819) readers would recognize the Thomas Rymer ballad of the minstrel who met an elfin lady under a tree and fell under her thrall. While Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was the poem to adhere most closely to the form and conventions of the ballad, the entire collection of Lyrical Ballads (1798) was intended to reflect the lives of rustic villagers, as in Wordsworth’s ‘Simon Lee’, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, or ‘The Female Vagrant’. The Sonnet Revival involved the return to a form that had been introduced by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, brought to artistic perfec- tion by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare, and made the vehicle of new themes in the poetry of John Donne and John Milton. During the century following Milton, the sonnet ceased to be a favoured form among the poets. In the 1780s the sonnet revival commenced with Charlotte Smith and William Lisle Bowles, for whom the octave/sestet structure of the Petrarchan sonnet served well a nature/mind dialectic. Mary Robinson in her Sappho and Phaon (1796) crafted the Petrarchan sonnet into a remarkably effec- tive narrative stanza. While Samuel Taylor Coleridge acknowledged his debt to Bowles, William Wordsworth carried the dialectics of the Petrarchan form even further with the dramatic effect of the volto in the eighth or ninth line. Romance, ballad, sonnet, and other forms of literary expression could provide the nexus which brought writers together, whether to share or to compete. A tumultuous event of history created another such nexus as it attracted active literary response. Such events included the Fall of the Bastille, the Treason Trials of 1794, the Battle of Waterloo, the Peterloo Massacre, and Queen Charlotte’s Trial; each was met by a wide array of literary responses – in newspapers, jour- nals, and on the stage. As historical nodes they represent a collective centre for converging interests as like‐minded individuals come together. Whether joining Introduction 13 simply to share ideas or compelled to join company in response to dire events, trends and tendencies of the time merge in historical moments large enough, with sufficient social or political ramifications, to attract the attention of contem- porary media. My task in this History of Romantic Literature is to discern these nodes, to trace their interconnections, and to provide a narrative intelligibility. Not always the result of a siege, revolt, or national crisis, the criss‐crossing and convergence of literary, philosophical, or artistic pathways also occurred within small social gatherings that initiated large‐scale consequences. One example would be the dinner at Josiah Boydell’s home in November 1786, at which the Shakespeare Gallery and a grand Shakespeare edition were conceived. George Steevens agreed to prepare the plays in a richly illustrated quarto edition, and the leading artists of the day were to be commissioned to paint crucial scenes from the plays; these paintings for the gallery exhibition were also to be engraved in a grand two‐volume edition of 100 folio prints as well as 96 quarto plates for Steevens’s edition. Although Boydell’s hopes to further the development of a British school of history painting were not fulfilled as he intended, the gallery prompted the opening of a Bible Gallery, a Milton Gallery, and also provided considerable stimulus to stage productions and commentary on Shakespeare.41 Coteries were formed by the adherents and the antagonists of the Cult of Sensibility.42 Another circle of friends identified themselves as Della Cruscans, poets of Mediterranean sophistication whose poetry was rhetorically ornate yet, so they claimed, stylistically pure and polished. Including his own poetry along with contributions by Bertie Greatheed, Hester Thrale Piozzi, William Parsons, Hannah Cowley, and others, Robert Merry edited three volumes of Della Cruscan poetry: The Arno Miscellany (1784), The Florence Miscellany (1785), and The Poetry of the World (1788).43 Retracing these connections enables read- ers to understand as well attributes of dialogue in Hannah Cowley’s plays, and Robert Merry’s collaboration as a popular author of prologues and epilogues for the London stage.44 Because certain authors, works, and events were significant in more than a sin- gle context, certain parts of this literary history will be repeated. The causal con- nections exist in social discourse and are manifest in events large and small. Even small events occasionally expand into large consequences, as in Coleridge’s con- nections with William Frend at Jesus College, Cambridge, then those of Frend in turn with the circle that included George Dyer, Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, and Mary Hays. Similar to the ramifications of Frend’s Tea Party, 27 January 1795, Wordsworth, Lamb, Keats, and other participants recorded the after‐effects of Benjamin Haydon’s ‘Immortal Dinner’, 28 December 1817.45 The most prominent networking in the period took place between authors and publishers. Few publishers were more intricately involved with significant authors of the 1790s than Joseph Johnson. At the close of this decade, Coleridge was invited by the proprietor, Daniel Stuart, to contribute to the Morning Post,46 and he continued until August 1803 when Stuart sold the newspaper. Coleridge was again at work for Stuart at The Courier from 1809 to 1811. Periodicals had 14 Introduction their advent earlier, and by the end of the eighteenth century they had gained considerable influence as arbiters of literary merit. Too, for the first time in British history newspapers assumed a role as purveyors of social and political commentary. The Daily Universal Register, founded by John Walter in 1785, expanded circulation and became The Times in 1788 with daily issues from Monday to Saturday. In 1821, The Sunday Times went into circulation. The relationships of authors with their publishers, editors, and reviewers reveal ­further interconnections relevant to their writings, sometimes essential to inter- preting or comprehending. A harsh review of Hours of Idleness (1807) prompted Lord Byron’s reply, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which he satirized bad poets as well as incompetent critics and gleefully recounted the contention between the two parties, rivalry that sometimes led to violence. John Scott, as editor of the London Magazine, defended Leigh Hunt and John Keats against the negative reviews of the ‘Cockney School’ printed in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The quarrel ended in a duel in which Scott was fatally shot by Jonathan Henry Christie in 1821. Assuming proprietary control over the production and mar- keting of Byron’s poetry, John Murray corresponded with Byron concerning his present or projected poems. Perhaps no author ever worked more closely with publishers than did Sir Walter Scott, who first met James and John Ballantyne as school mates in Kelso. In 1796, the Ballantyne brothers established a printing press in Kelso and began publishing Scott’s first works. The first of his poems to gain a wide readership was The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805). After the Ballantyne brothers moved to Edinburgh, Scott became a business partner. When Scott turned from his poetic romances to his historical novels, the Ballantynes’ business became more lucra- tive. The wealth was entirely wiped out in the banking panic of 1825. Because of his financial share, Scott was determined to pay off the company’s debts rather that declare bankruptcy.47 In spite of failing health, he continued to pro- duce a novel a year for the next seven years. In recounting the events of the 1820s, leading up to the much delayed Reform Act, changes in style and temperament obtrude even while older patterns persist. George Dyer in the 1820s, as historian of Cambridge and the privileges of its scholars, drifted away from the fiery advocate of social change he had been as a member of William Frend’s circle in the 1790s. Another seeming ­disjuncture in time occurs when Samuel Rogers, whose career commenced 30 years earlier with The Pleasures of Memory (1792), published the first volume of Italy (1822), acclaimed as the best work of his career. The ‘spirit of the age’ was not a constant.­ The years of Revolution (1789–1798), Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), the Riots (1815–1820), the Reform (1821–1832) are only conditional markers of time, but time’s passage, whether early, middle, or late, impressed its own ­conditions on the Romantic Movement as surely as did the individual poets. An Introduction to a book often assumes the function of surveying the ­contents. I have chosen, instead, to emphasize the conceptual assumptions Introduction 15

­concerning assemblage and collaboration, self‐reflexive historicizing, and reforming genres (romance, ballad, sonnet, etc.) as new wine in old bottles and old wine in new bottles. Nevertheless, I see the value of explaining my division of the period into four historical parts. Rather than outlining the contents of each, I will sample the contents in order to indicate historical shifts taking place over the 43 years from the Fall of the Bastille to the Great Reform Bill. Part I on Revolution opens with the pamphlet wars between those who upheld traditional hierarchies and those who sympathized with the French Revolutionary aims of curtailing aristocratic power and expanding individual rights. Leading authors in this debate, Edmund Burke vs. Mary Wollstonecraft are introduced, as well as the ideological hubs in which the issues were defined and developed. One important hub was the publishing house of Joseph Johnson, who arranged for the printing of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and who pub- lished and supported many radical thinkers, including women writers, either in book‐ and pamphlet‐length works or in his periodical, The Analytical Review. Other hubs were the churches, meeting houses, and academies of religious Dissenters. The latter, as non‐Anglican Protestants, addressed the rights they were denied under English law. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among revolu- tionary sympathizers who also took up the Unitarian opposition to the existing Toleration Act (passed by Parliament in 1689) as a necessary measure in grant- ing freedom of worship to Nonconformists. While the Act successfully con- firmed the Glorious Revolution, it left the dissenting Protestants excluded from the universities and public office. In this opposition, Coleridge joined William Frend, his Cambridge tutor. The attention to religious discrimination adds a crucial dimension to debates over rights. Another figure in the opposition was George Dyer, significant not only for his defence of Dissenters’ rights but for his advocacy of charity and benevolence (also discussed in Part IV). In Part I attention is also given to gender discrimination as cause in the revo- lutionary struggle for rights. In addition to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Hays, who networked with Johnson and Frend, contributed to the reassessment of the roles of women. Because Hays’s novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) incorporated letters from the members of this network and recorded their topical concerns and manners of interacting, it can be read not only for its narrative but also for its documentary value. Along with revolutionary thinking by and about Dissenters and women, this Part attends to the revolutionary thinking of Abolitionists, charting the Societies and their activities, writings, and plays, that incrementally achieved the end of the slave trade and, by the end of the reform movement, of slave‐holding itself. The impact of slavery on the daily lives of Britons far from West Indian or East Indian plantations is shown by attention to the economic dependence on prod- ucts grown and traded there: sugar in the West, opium in the East. In surveying the political discourse of the 1790s, Part I considers the Revolution Controversy, Abolition, the Slave and Opium Trades, Religious Dissent, Nonconformism, and Women’s Rights. Foundational to revolutionary aims and all aspects of 16 Introduction

­public discourse is Freedom of the Press. Part I examines strategies used by prosecutors and defendants during trials for sedition, treason, and libel. It sur- veys efforts to protect newspapers and periodicals, such as the founding of the Friends to the Liberty of the Press, as well as the legislative efforts to restrict public assembly, to censor theatrical performances, and to curb publications criticizing law, parliament, and church. Part II on the Napoleonic Wars is organized by the concept of ‘coalitions’, which refers literally to the military alliances but also to the assemblages of writ- ers and performers who responded to the conditions of living during wartime. That is, the concern is not limited to the combat of wartime experience, but attends as well to the blockades that disrupted trade, travel, and everyday life. Part II introduces the reader to English authors’ actual experiences on the Continent and their literary negotiations of Continental philosophy and the arts. The Peace of Amiens, as a brief respite in a period of extended conflict, opened the possibilities of travel and renewed the commentary on national dif- ference. Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803), an historical novel about Polish uprisings, is filled with reflections on the Polish refugee crisis. Part II also acknowledges the changing patterns of alliance and circulation caused by block- ades and reflected in translations and travel literature. The new interest in German literature and philosophy was transmitted through Germaine de Staël’s Germany, and through literary reviews, especially in the Foreign Quarterly Review. The popularity of German drama on the London stage was not unre- lated to nationalist opposition to Napoleon and to the rise of dictators in subju- gated nations. Coleridge’s ‘conversation poems’ along with his ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802) and Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798) and ‘Immortality Ode’ (1807) are discussed as interconnected efforts to fathom how the mind takes active control of perception, memory, and communication. German philosophi- cal treatments of this topic provide a context, and later in the section, the German borrowings in Coleridge’s lectures are sorted out. A section on the periodical press calls attention to how periodicals of all kinds served as hubs of social networking; the section is a conceptual umbrella for examples given ­elsewhere, such as the periodicals of Hunt. Part II concludes with an intricate set of readings of an assemblage of authors – Jane Austen, Walter Scott, George Crabbe, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld – which turns on the concept of genre manipula- tion. Austen’s allusiveness and irony transforms the ‘novel of manners’ into a sharper critique that observes the miscommunications and recoveries that char- acterize social life. Following Scott’s own technique of theorizing based on empirical grounding, I enlist Scott’s remarks on novelists. I attend to Scott’s transformation of the opposition between history and romance into more nuanced gradations of historical fictions. Crabbe and Baillie are shown to approach characterization through psychological criteria rather than through traditional markers of birth and rank. Smith exercised rare ingenuity in bringing psychological effects into the structure of the sonnet as well as bringing history and natural history into her novels. Barbauld is presented as disrupting Introduction 17

­expectations about the national narrative with her ‘pessimistic’ portrayal of Britain’s future in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812). As texts historicizing their own context, these works are shaped by the combat/blockade events in this episode of history. Opening with an overview of literary responses to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Part III traces the search for a new aesthetics which might adequately represent a political climate ebullient with victory (in spite of bloodshed), and chastised by widespread poverty and unemployment (in spite of ending years of war). This search was conducted through intensive networking and correspond- ences among scholars, poets, and thinkers. Again, the literary developments are seen to arise from historical conditions. Following detailed commentary on the controversial representation of the events at Waterloo, Part III analyses Corn Law literature, re‐examines the intersection of religious, philosophical, and ­critical dis- courses in the decisive year of 1815, and discusses many canonical texts published in this period. Satire became a particularly popular genre, and reviews acquired increasing importance as instruments of political and aesthetic discourse. Part III treats Riots literally and figuratively. Literally, it deals with prominent conflicts over grain scarcity and taxes, industrialization (spurring Luddite destruction), and political injustice, represented by the Spa Field Riots, the March of the Blanketeers, Peterloo, and the Cato Street Conspiracy. Commentary proceeds with the premise that all riots are not the same, but must be distin- guished by cause and effect. The Corn Laws were ill‐advised economic replica- tions of the wartime blockades that created food insecurity. The food riots were very different from the demonstrations for extending civil rights. The most notorious of the latter was Peterloo. Part III summarizes and explains the par- ticular laws put in place by the government after that encounter but goes on to show how writers circumvented the restrictive censorship by relying on parody. Riot found its literary counterpart in the mental/imaginative/emotional unrest expressed in works by Byron, Shelley, and Keats. A similar parallel prompts reflections on the war prophesied by ‘ancestral voices’ in ‘Kubla Khan’. The delayed publication of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’, like that of Wordsworth’s postponement of Peter Bell and Benjamin the Waggoner (or, more radically, withholding The Prelude for 45 years), raises problems of con- ception and prenatal reception. The public–private interplay of their reception is analysed in a section on the parodies (by Reynolds and Shelley) of Peter Bell, one of which was actually published before the original. The dedications of these poems to other poets is presented as inherent historicity, but also in their unpub- lished circulation as networking and a ‘market sampling’. Restricted by censorship and subjected to constant scrutiny, editors and ­publishers sought networking among like‐minded authors. The shared resist- ance to oppressive legislation prompted an ethic of solidarity, as became apparent­ with the interactions of the Hunt circle concerned with the fate of his journals, The Examiner, The Reflector, The Indicator, and The Liberal. When Leigh Hunt was jailed for printing Lamb’s jeu d’esprit ridiculing the Prince Regent’s bulky physique, he was visited in his decorated cell by a loyal network of other 18 Introduction

­contributors. Part III concludes with readings of Blake’s Jerusalem and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in both of which the authors manipulate mythic narra- tives to construct optimistic poetic resolutions. Part IV, on Reform, begins by detailing the enormous public interest in the Trial of Queen Caroline and discussing the networking of taking sides publicly. Raising the question of whether the King was above all moral responsibility, the trial exposed the kind of privilege that reformers sought to curtail. Among the literary responses to this question were Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820) and the referential sarcasm in Byron’s Don Juan. Sustaining the emphasis on Reform, Part IV cites further examples of the literary engagement with, or reaction to, greed and corruption in global trade, industrial production, and unconstrained investment schemes. The year 1825 was the publication year of Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age. In this introduction I have already discussed the concept of Zeitgeist as a uniform and pervasive ideal and as a self‐reflexive postulate. As re‐assessed by Hazlitt in his 25 portraits of prominent figures, the ‘spirit of the age’ is not manifest in uniformity, but rather in paradox and contradiction. The financial bubble of 1825, so disastrous for Sir Walter Scott, was seen as further evidence of the need for economic reform. At a time when unions and collective bargaining were outlawed, theatres in industrial centres offered a cov- ert solidarity, with plays advocating reform of wages, working hours, and child labour. The drama was also concerned with the historical self‐consciousness of the age and the obsession with national character and identity. Particularly revealing in this regard are the historical dramas in which Lord Byron and Mary Russell Mitford, in their contrasting interpretations, relate the fate of the Venetian Doge Francesco Foscari and his son. Both plays raise questions about the responsibility of rulers to their people. Published at the end of 1821 in the same volume as Cain and Sardanapalus, Byron’s Foscari presents a bleak vision of Venetian politics and history. The state humiliates and condemns an unselfish leader who put loyalty before all family ties, who allowed the destruction of his own family in the name of the state. Mitford manipulates history to create a drama to inspire reform. Her Foscari are noble martyrs to the cause of liberty and social reform. Mitford’s play, published in 1826, was presented in the ­context of the current uprisings in Romantic‐era Italy.

Notes

1 Manuel DeLanda. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. See also: Bruno La Tour. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Jon Mee and Jennifer Wilkes. ‘Transpennine Enlightenment: Knowledge Networks in the North.’ Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies 38.4 (2015): 599–612; and Jon Mee. ‘Coteries in the Romantic Period.’ European Romantic Review 27:4 (August 2016): 515–521.