i

Richard Polwhele and Romantic Culture

Richard Polwhele was a writer of rare energies. Today known only for The Unsex’d Females and its attack on radical women writers, Polwhele was a his- torian, translator, memoirist, and poet. As an indigent Cornish gentleman cler- gyman and JP, his extensive written output encompassed sermons, open letters, and even headstone verse. This book recovers the lost Polwhele, locating him within an archipelagic understanding of the vitality and complexity inherent in the loyalist tradition with British Romantic culture via a range of previously unexamined texts and manuscript sources. Torn between a desire for sociability and an appetite (and capacity) for a good argument, Polwhele’s outspoken contributions across a range of discip- lines testify to the variety and dynamism of what has previously been considered provincial and reactionary. This book locates Polwhele’s work within key pre- occupations of the age: the social, economic, and political valences of literary sociability in the age of print; the meaning of loyalism in an age of revolution; the meaning of place and belonging; enthusiasm, religious or otherwise; and the self-​fashioning of the provincial man of letters. In doing so it argues for a broader definition of Romanticism than the one that has typed Polwhele as an unpalatable embarrassment and the anachronistic voice of provincial High Tory reaction. This volume will be of interest to those working in the field of late eight- eenth and early nineteenth-century British Literature, with a particular focus on politics and on the nature of literary production and identity across the non-​metropolitan areas of the British Isles.

Dafydd Moore is currently Professor of Eighteenth-Century​ Literature at the University of Plymouth, England. He has published extensively on James Macpherson, including Enlightenment and Romance in the Poems of Ossian (2003), Ossian and Ossianism (4 vols, 2004), and The International Companion to James Macpherson and Ossian (2017). ii

Routledge New Textual Studies in Literature

The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Anna Mercer

Richard Polwhele and Romantic Culture The Politics of Reaction and the Poetics of Place Dafydd Moore iii

Richard Polwhele and Romantic Culture The Politics of Reaction and the Poetics of Place

Dafydd Moore iv

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Dafydd Moore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​65157-​2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​12812-​0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK v

For Jenny vi vii

Contents

Acknowledgements viii List of Abbreviations x

Introduction: Locating Richard Polwhele 1

1 Loyalist Sociability and Its Discontents in the Eighteenth-​Century Province 23

2 Loyalism and the Patriotic Poem in an Age of Revolution 54

3 Archipelagic Attachments: Politics and Place 83

4 Archipelagic Anglicanism: Controversialism and Loyalist Paranoia 118

5 Provincial Oracles and Acknowledged Prophets: Epistolary Memoir and Romantic Self-​Fashioning 154

Conclusion 184

Select Bibliography 190 Index 203 viii

Acknowledgements

Close acquaintance with Richard Polwhele, a man who weaponised name-​ dropping to an extent that was startling by the standards of even his age, does sensitise one to the temptations of self-​indulgence in the acknowledgement of others. However, this book is the product of quite a few years of reading, thinking, and writing about Polwhele, and has collected quite a number and variety of debts in the process. I have been exceptionally fortunate in the scholarly atmosphere I have enjoyed at the University of Plymouth and owe thanks specific and general to Peter Hinds, James Daybell, Anthony Caleshu, David Sergeant, Min Wild, Annika Bautz, Simon Payne, Joanne Sellick, Jason Lowther, Julie Thompson, and particularly Bonnie Latimer. Beyond Plymouth, Nick Groom, Adam Rounce, Shelley Trower, Bryccan Carey, Mary-Ann​ Constantine, Elizabeth Edwards, Martyn Powell, Michael Brown, Elizabeth Tingle, Sebastian Mitchell, Murray Pittock, and Fiona Stafford have helped in all sorts of ways, some they would know about and others they would not. I owe particular thanks to Robert Jones, without whose nagging about (but also belief in and invalu- able advice on) this book it probably would not have been finished in any- thing like this form. My readers and editors at Routledge have provided rigour and much needed external perspective and deadlines. All errors are of course my own. I’ve been fortunate to be able to speak and gain the benefit of the opinions of others at conferences, symposia, and seminars at the Universities of Aalborg, Aberystwyth, De Montfort, Bristol, Exeter (Exeter and Tremough), Leeds, Kings College London, Plymouth, and at the gatherings of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century​ Studies, the American Society for Eighteenth-​ Century Studies, and the British Association for Romantic Studies. Many of these institutions, but particularly the University of Plymouth, have been an unusually generous funder of these expeditions. The last time that I wrote such a reckoning of accounts, I had a long list of libraries and archives to acknowledge (and a longer list of friends and relatives of whose hospitality I had availed myself to match). As this series acknow- ledges, research into the corners of eighteenth-century​ letters inhabited by the likes of Polwhele has been revolutionised by the advent of digital resources. However, such ready access only throws more emphasis and importance on the insights to be gained from undigitised MS collections, or specific copies of ix

Acknowledgements ix specific books. Reading Polwhele’s marginal comments on his own work was a particular highlight of a visit to the National Art Library, for example. I’d specifically like to acknowledge the assistance of colleagues at the Cornwall Records Office, Devon Records Office, National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the West Country Studies Library of Exeter Library, the Devon and Exeter Institution, the Wellcome Institute, the Bodleian Library, and the university libraries of Plymouth and Exeter. It is fair to say that this book has rarely commanded my undivided attention, and a number of colleagues beyond the confines of the project have helped me make the time I hope it deserved. Over the years many colleagues at different times – ​but especially David Coslett, Steve Butts, Rachel Goodsell, Lisa Petford, Cheryl Hurrell, Susan Matheron, Adrian Dawson, and Rupert Lorraine –​ have done more than they know to keep the show on the road. Closest to home, my children Lucy and Daniel have shown patience and occasional interest. The latter was a not-unwilling​ research assistant in the exploration of rather more of the churchyards of South West Cornwall than I suspect he thought strictly necessary (he was right). However, and as ever, my biggest and most longstanding debt for this (as for everything else) is to my wife Jenny, the real writer in our household. xnewgenprepdf

Abbreviations

BSC Biographical Sketches in Cornwall, 3 vols (Truro: W. Polybank, 1831) EMPC The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Considered by Bishop Lavington; with Notes, Introduction and Appendix by R. Polwhele (London: A.J. Vaply, 1820) ESGE Essays by a Society of Gentlemen at Exeter (Exeter: R. Trewman, 1795) GM The Gentleman’s Magazine ILA The Influence of Local Attachment with Respect to Home, a Poem in Seven Books: A New Edition with Odes and with Other Poems, 2 vols (London: Johnson, Dilly, Cadell and Davies, 1798) PCG Poems, Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall, 2 vols (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1792) RP&V Reminiscences in Prose and Verse, 3 vols (London: J.B. Nichols, 1836) T&R Traditions and Recollections: Clerical, Literary and Domestic, 2 vols (London: J.B. Nichols, 1826) 1

Introduction Locating Richard Polwhele

POLWHELE! whose genius, in the colours clear Of lyric grace and philosophic art, Traces the sweetest feelings of the heart, Scorn for thy Muse the envy-​sharpen’d spear, In darkness thrown, when, shielded by desert She seeks the immortal fane. To virtue dear Thy verse esteeming, feeling minds impart Their vital smile —​ their consecrating tear. Fancy and judgment view with gracious eyes Its kindred tints, that paint the silent power Of local objects, deeds of high emprise To prompt; while their delightful spells restore The precious vanish’d days of former joys, By Love or glory wreath’d with many a flower.1

In this poem Anna Seward contemplates two versions of Richard Polwhele. One is able to ‘paint the silent power | Of local objects’ and ‘restore | The precious vanish’d days of former joys’; the other is intent on wielding ‘the envy-​sharpen’d spear, | In darkness thrown’. Posterity is familiar with the latter Richard Polwhele, while the former has disappeared from view. This book re-​establishes both aspects of Polwhele as subjects for critical enquiry and in doing so traces a lost narrative of British Romanticism. This narrative has unexpected resonances, affinities and turns, and casts important light on the ideological contours of the period. Adequately tracing it also offers an illumin- ating challenge to the discourse of literary revisionism. Seward may have had in mind the specific poem responsible for the idea of Polwhele handed down by posterity, The Unsex’d Females.2 A 206-​line satire on the kinds of women writers and female preoccupations that offered, as Polwhele saw it, a threat to the fabric of British society, it has become an axiomatic point of reference for scholars interested in radical women, radical science, indeed even radical dress sense.3 It is an irony that Polwhele’s name is today almost exclusively associated with writers, and in particular Mary Wollstonecraft, whose views he despised. This book does not seek any straightforward rehabilitation of Polwhele. The deplorably misogynistic 2

2 Introduction views he expressed in The Unsex’d Females on the subject of female educa- tion, writing, and role in society are but one element of a lifelong campaign to assail any groups and individuals whom Polwhele perceived as undermining the prevailing cultural, religious, and political establishment. He believed that this Establishment, whatever its flaws, represented an optimum –​and div- inely appointed – ​way of disposing human affairs, and he defended it in the bluntest and most combative terms possible. Amongst his opponents Polwhele at various times counted Methodists, Evangelical Anglicans (including Hannah More, who exemplifies female literary propriety in The Unsex’d Females), and proponents of universal education of any stripe. Yet it also included representatives of those sections of society he would otherwise seek to defend: an enervated gentry, preferment-​seeking or otherwise negligent Anglican clergy, and anyone else Polwhele identified as endangering the British constitutional and religious settlement through the abdication of their responsibilities. He was also peculiarly adept at falling out with friends and collaborators. Indeed, despite his significant activities and in some cases significant successes as a poet, historian, and translator, nothing topped Polwhele’s ability to cause and take offence. In other words, while there is more to Polwhele than the anti-​ Jacobin misogynist of popular repute, he was an anti-​Jacobin misogynist, and quite a lot of that ‘more’ is equally unpalatable. Staring this in the face and coming to terms with Polwhele without explaining it away or otherwise acting as an apologist involves recognising the moral assumptions frequent within acts of scholarly recuperation. What do we do with the fact that, as Judith Pascoe has observed, the misogynist Polwhele produced poems that offered ‘veiled critiques of masculine power structures’?4 Pascoe’s response, hinted at by that ‘veiled’, is to not quite believe the evidence of her own eyes. The opposite response, to emphasise the unsuspectedly pro- gressive nature of Polwhele’s thinking, to see him as proof that a right-​thinking liberal lurks within even the most Right-​leaning of writers if only we look hard enough, would be disingenuous. This book argues that, by resisting the temptation to over-​estimate or over-​generalise such moments, we reveal a more contingent and multi-​faceted literary Loyalism than that assumed in literary accounts of a period still predominantly constructed through the consideration of more familiar and radical characters. In accounting for the entirety of Polwhele’s long career, this book sits at the confluence of two critical positions: first, the consideration of range and com- plexity of loyalist literary activity and culture – ​its characteristic preoccupa- tions and methods – ​as exemplified by Polwhele. It contemplates some abiding assumptions of Romantic-era​ literary studies from a different angle, indeed from the point of view of a historical cul-​de-​sac, given the predominant interest in more radical or at least progressive perspectives. Second, it contributes to the ongoing effort to establish a genuinely archipelagic approach to the lit- erary culture of the period, here by insisting on the specificity of Polwhele’s experience as defined by a life and career based in West Cornwall. Both critical perspectives share a suspicion of overly whiggish interpretations of history, whether the post hoc rationalisation in question be the inevitability of the 3

Introduction 3 Anglo-​British State or secular liberalism. The spirit and motive with which the historical contingency and therefore fragility of what previously seemed permanent and inevitable is revealed differs in each case. Those advocating the dismantling of Anglo-​British hegemony do not tend to look to the end of secular liberalism with a similar enthusiasm; while those questioning assumptions within the unruffled narrative of secular Modernity tend to do so more as part of the exercising of a richer historical imagination than out of hostility to the world as it came to pass. Nevertheless, both are interested in understanding the traces of alternative narratives within histories that have been retrospectively simplified. The salutary act of historical imagination that allows us to meet Polwhele on something like his own terms without either demonising or apologising for him serves as a necessary reminder of the vul- nerability of values he would not recognise but which most modern readers hold dear. This introduction expands on these two critical agenda, suggesting the ways in which a full reckoning with Polwhele contributes to a more com- plete understanding not only of the political cultures of literary Romanticism but also of the revisionist dynamics we are accustomed to deploy to further that understanding. But before that, a brief consideration of Polwhele’s life and career can serve to demonstrate the value of reading Polwhele in the overlap between the loyalist and the archipelagic because it draws attention to the fate of the minor gentry in late eighteenth-century​ Cornwall and the cultural and social attitudes such a fate might foster.5 Polwhele was born on 6 January 1760 at Truro into a secure and locally significant landed family. They claimed their descent from one Drogo de Polwhele, Chamberlain to Queen Matilda, who had acquired land in Cornwall in 1140. Whether or not that was true, the family was well established at its seat at Polwhele, just northeast of Truro, and had been ‘prominent and active in county affairs’ on a continuous basis from the fifteenth century onwards.6 The family provided a number of Members of Parliament and Lord Lieutenants of the County and was related (albeit often distantly) to some of the more important eighteenth-​century Cornish families. During the English Revolution the Polwheles had been prominent Royalists and had forfeited significant property for their pains. Their profile was such that Parliamentarian troops had destroyed the family monument in the Parish Church of St Clement. Polwhele’s father Thomas had been deputy-lieutenant​ of the County, and in the 1830s the family still merited mention in Burke’s Landed Gentry. But the Polwheles had endured a difficult century. Richard’s friend John Nichols sums up the change across two generations neatly in his pen portrait of Richard’s great-​uncle, the Rev Edward Collins. With reference to Collins’ 1723 publica- tion of Two Assize Sermons to Richard Polwhele Esq, High Sheriff of Cornwall, Nichols observes:

In 1801 the Rev Richard Polwhele published an Assize Sermon, dedicated to Edward Collins Esq. High Sheriff. Thus Richard Polwhele was in 1723 Sheriff, and Edward Collins his Chaplain; but in 1801 Edward Collins was Sheriff, and Richard Polwhele his Chaplain.7 4

4 Introduction Polwhele was educated at Truro Grammar School where he was taught by the family friend John Wolcot. Wolcot and Polwhele remained friends even though the former would later find fame, notoriety, and fortune as the anti-​ministerial satirist Peter Pindar (that their friendship should survive Peter Pindar’s anti-​ government satire but flounder in the face of Pindar’s attack on the Church of England is significant). Polwhele’s father died in 1777, an event that had a lasting effect on Richard emotionally and practically. In his will Thomas left not only significant bequests to the Collins family but also the majority of the remaining estate (including Polwhele itself) to his wife Mary, without condi- tion or covenant, for the duration of her life. Richard had to make do with a small annuity and the unspecified residue of the estate in the meantime. We do not know what led to this unusual state of affairs but it meant that Richard was, for most of his life, short of disposable income (a situation that continued even after his mother’s death in 1803).8 He went up to Christ Church Oxford in 1778, leaving on a financially related technicality without taking a degree and was ordained in 1782. From that time on, he combined his literary activities with scraping a living from a series of small curacies and benefices, initially in the Exeter area and then, from 1794, in West Cornwall, where he also served as a Magistrate for 30 years and, according to Burke, acted as Deputy Warden of the Stannaries.9 Despite assiduous networking and vociferous Church and King politics, Polwhele found clerical preferment unforthcoming. This seems partly because on more than one occasion taking an interest in Polwhele’s advancement narrowly proceeded the untimely demise of members of the Deanery of the Diocese of Exeter before they could exercise their patronage; and partly because assumptions made about his background and family meant that he was overlooked for more lucrative benefices (or at least that is what he records being told). His clerical career is a salutary lesson in the importance of being the right person in front of the right person at the right time in the eighteenth century.10 His impecuni- ousness was not helped by what he and his acquaintances frequently had cause to refer to as his ever-​increasing family: he had 15 children, 3 with his first wife Loveday, who died in 1793, and 12 with his second, Mary.11 In 1821 he retired to Polwhele, one of eight estates still within the family’s possession in 1828 (he also retained the benefice of Newlyn East until his death).12 He died, aged 78, at Truro in March 1838. If the material circumstances of Polwhele’s life provide an insight into the vagaries of Ecclesiastical patronage in the period, they also testify to the fortunes of agrarian Cornwall in the late eighteenth century and the precar- iousness of the provincial gentry. Polwhele land apparently lacked the min- eral deposits that made some of his peers rich, and Richard lacked either the ability or the inclination to invest in the mining ventures of others.13 His Estates seem to have provided little by way of income, and he was dependent on his clerical living, and on what he could make from writing. One of his sur- viving memorandum books testifies to the coexistence of these two worlds. It combines the estates-​related concerns of a member of the landed gentry with the preoccupations of one who writes for money: tree-planting​ schemes sit 5

Introduction 5 next to details of print runs, subscription prices and records of reviews out to, and payments received from, the London periodicals.14 Polwhele’s family circumstances illuminate his fierce Church and King politics in not altogether straightforward ways. On the one hand, a longstanding family tradition of Royalism instantiates his own vehement Loyalism (not for nothing does he print letters received by the family from Charles II at the start of Traditions and Recollections). On the other hand, those same circumstances offer a way of understanding his frequently ambivalent attitude towards the class of which he would have felt himself a part by pedigree and history. If Polwhele sometimes gives the impression of being on the outside looking in, with his nose pressed up against the door of the eighteenth-​century Establishment, it was a door that

had only recently shut in his face.

To turn to the first of this book’s central themes – ​the necessity of coming to terms with the range and flexibility of an ultra-loyalism​ that defies conven- tional categorisation –​ the apparently straightforward Unsex’d Females is a worthwhile place to start. Appraising the critical heritage of the poem, and identifying some of its assumptions and elisions, provides an occasion to iso- late further the challenges as well as the opportunities for our understanding of the literary culture of the period arising from a more complete reckoning with Polwhele. The poem takes its title from fellow anti-Jacobin​ Thomas Mathias’s The Pursuits of Literature (though it is also inspired, if that is quite the right word, by William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’. It articulates in condensed form many of the central tenets of reactionary conservatism’s view of the threat posed to Britain by French revolutionary ideas, or ‘Gallic freaks’. In the words of one of its more pre- dictably enthusiastic reviewers, it is ‘at once, politically useful and poetic- ally beautiful’, offering at a moment of ‘awful crisis of church and state’ a ‘vindication of all that is dear to us as Britons and as Christians’.15 Its par- ticular concern is with the impact of revolutionary ideas on female behav- iour, education (particularly concerning Botany) and fashion, and the threat that this more assertive model of female behaviour poses to patriarchal British society. It identifies nine women as ‘unsex’d’: Mary Wollstonecraft (an account of whose writings and personal life take up much of the poem), Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Emma Crewe, Angelica Kauffman, and Ann Yearsley. Nine are offered as a counter image to represent an ideal of female intellectual endeavour and artistry: Hannah More, Elizabeth Montagu, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Diana Beauclerk, Anna Seward, Elizabeth Carter, and the Hesters Chapone and Piozzi. The line-up​ of the first list has been the subject of some critical discus- sion, since not all of those included are a ready fit for a category defined by Wollstonecraft or Hays. Ultimately even though the overall tone of the poem is, in Gina Luria Walker’s phrase, ‘deliciously vindictive’, Polwhele’s purpose seems as much a warning to those displaying tendencies he finds troublesome 6

6 Introduction

as it is immediate condemnation.16 Such warnings are often combined with interpersonal score settling. Polwhele’s footnote makes clear that it is Yearsley’s ‘ingratitude’ to her patron (and old acquaintance of Polwhele’s) Hannah More that has attracted his attention; as more than one critic has pointed out, Yearsley’s politics were entirely suited to Polwhele. The same may be true of Smith, who by this time had broken from her and Polwhele’s mutual friend William Hayley. Polwhele’s note is effusive about her poetry and even novels, admitting that he has ‘observed only a few slight symptoms’ of ‘the Gallic mania’ in Smith.17 There has also been consideration given to the definition of ‘unsex’d’ with which Polwhele was working as a way of unlocking the poem.18 Most agree that Matthias/​Polwhele meant something different (indeed opposite) to Lady Macbeth, whose use of the word is the likely original source of the phrase. The rather scandalous details of Wollstonecraft’s personal life (to the likes of Polwhele at least), or the sexualised nature of Linnaean botany (to the details of which The Unsex’d Females pays almost pornographic attention), suggest inappropriate oversexualisation.19 Instead, Polwhele emphasises a chaste, ‘modest’, and passive female sexuality as the essence of femininity and labels the disruptive sexuality of these women as monstrous and without a gender.20 Polwhele’s most notorious claim makes this point, and charac- teristically, it comes not in the poem itself but one of its accompanying notes. He announces that Wollstonecraft’s death post-​partum represents the reassertion by the Almighty of divinely sanctioned gender roles, and the reinforcement of a binary biological distinction that Wollstonecraftean feminism would otherwise seek to deny but cannot ultimately evade. As Polwhele puts it, ‘she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of woman and the diseases to which they are liable’. A snappy, rhetorically flexible title, and a high hit rate in terms of reac- tionary bête noirs, has led to the poem entering literary general knowledge and anthologies of the period as ‘a misogynist classic’.21 The poem frequently functions as a literal (as here) or figurative footnote, a point of reference for more detailed enquiries in relation to figures he identifies as ‘unsex’d’, or the cultural dynamics for which the poem can stand metonymically.22 This means that he pops up in some unlikely places: Terry F. Robinson’s account of ‘the pairing of voguish attire with Jacobinical politics’; or Sarah Burdett’s analysis of changing theatrical representations of Margaret of Anjou; or even Margaret Morlier’s discussion of Elizabeth Barrett’s literary engagement with George Sand.23 Polwhele’s characteristic sentiments have made him a bogeyman for the kinds of efforts to broaden the canon of Romanticism from which he might otherwise have benefited. It also means that he is often woven into readings of Romanticism with little consideration of what a fuller or more nuanced representation of Polwhele might reveal. Approximation is the common fate of literary and cultural bellwethers. In fact Polwhele and The Unsex’d Females fare better than many, while the contradictions between –​ and misassumptions within – ​critical characterisations 7

Introduction 7 of Polwhele usefully help to identify the difficulty in locating figures such as Polwhele within default ways of thinking about the period. On the one hand, he is assumed to have been a Grub Street hack seeking to make a name for himself, a ‘London curate’, a ‘quarrelsome curate with literary aspirations’.24 This is occasionally accompanied by the assumption, or at least clear impli- cation, that Polwhele is an isolated outsider desperate to break in: ‘it appears that Polwhele was considered a marginal writer both by those who shared his values and those who did not. In an era of circles, Polwhele appears to have been somewhat out of the loop’.25 However, he is also depicted as a foremost instrument of anti-Jacobin​ Church and King hegemony, an authoritative voice of a repressive cultural establishment, albeit one feeling itself under siege.26 The Unsex’d Females was hugely popular or largely ignored, depending on who you read, and, perhaps, the larger point to be made. Polwhele represents a fault line in scholarly understandings of the literature of Reaction, which cannot quite make up its mind whether to condemn it for being mindlessly fashionable or irrelevantly marginal. In reality, Polwhele seems to have been all these things. He was no Grub Street hack, but the scion of a Cornish family of quality who eventually retired to the family estate. He enjoyed a wide circle of literary acquaintance and was consistently published by a range of firms in Bath, London, and Edinburgh. Indeed, if anything, getting into print was a little too easy for him.27 The Influence of Local Attachment garnered him a widespread reputation; his translation of Theocritus was standard well into the nineteenth century; and his topographical histories of Devon and Cornwall were widely respected. His longstanding admirer and correspondent Walter Scott attempted to engage him to produce something similar for Scotland.28 Looked at in one light, his career is a testament to the possibilities of provincial engagement with a national lit- erary culture. Yet he remains in the final analysis (including his own), a nearly man who from his time at Oxford was never quite able to break confidently into that national culture. On the rare occasion he managed to scrape the cultural capital together to gain purchase on the world of letters, it seems he was let down by a lack of financial capital. He could not accept Scott’s poten- tially transformative offer because he could not afford the time away from his duties and family in Cornwall. If, as we shall see, Polwhele was more a real-life​ Tristram Shandy than J. Alfred Prufrock (and more vicious than either), he remained, nevertheless –​ in important ways – ​on the outside looking in. Thus the critical response to The Unsex’d Females identifies a tension within Polwhele’s status that we will see repeatedly in this book and which makes him difficult to accommodate within some of the normative categories for writers in the period. Coming to terms with the totality of Polwhele involves acknowledging an occluded dimension to literary scholarship’s understanding of the period. Traditional Romantic studies took the radical energies of its main players as axiomatic (or their apostasy as problematic). Similarly, the commitment to a radical, progressive Romanticism has been a key part of both the historical turn with Romantic studies and the recovery of the lost voices of the Romantic period. In the close-on​ 40 years since Marilyn Butler drew 8

8 Introduction attention to the fact that the nation that gave rise to ‘English’ Romanticism was also ‘most deeply and lengthily committed to the conservative crusade’, field-​defining work has, generally speaking, continued to take as its subject the radical response to Revolution and remains, on the whole, more interested in exploring, nuancing, and expanding this progressive, liberal Romanticism, than in grappling –​ and understanding the interconnections –​ with its Conservative alter-​ego.29 The situation is rather different in Historical studies, where ‘the ideological ambiguities of loyalism’ and the ‘highly problematic nature of the relationship between the government and the many but varied effusions of loyalism throughout the 1790s’ have long been a topic of debate.30 It is some time since Kevin Gilmartin noted that, while historians and political theorists ‘have undertaken a substantial critical reassessment of conservatism in the period, their work has yet to be felt in the political framework of Romantic studies’, which too often remains wedded to a distortingly simple oppos- ition between Burkean reaction and Paine-​ite radicalism.31 Or, as Matthew Grenby has observed, when scholarship has attempted to ‘revise the notion of a heavily polarised debate’ by questioning the ‘oppositional relationship between conservative and radical’ it has tended to do so in order to expand the category of the radical and distract from the fact that ‘loyalty, patriotism and even quite specifically targeted anti-​Jacobinism, were much more signifi- cant elements in British society –​ affecting more people more deeply –​ than any radical impulse had ever managed to become’.32 In Grenby’s analysis, lit- erary history has failed quite to grasp that ‘much of the evidence pointing to a continued revolutionary underground enduring until the re-​emergence of a confident and vocal radicalism after about 1807 derives from the reaction to that perceived threat by the establishment rather than from the threat itself’, a reaction that ‘in retrospect, seems totally out of proportion to the level of danger’.33 Grenby’s attempt to establish the anti-Jacobin​ novel as ‘perhaps the most historically meaningful literary response to the French Revolution and its aftermath’ and Gilmartin’s efforts to consider the ‘range and com- plexity of counter revolutionary expression’ to grapple with the ‘constitutive tensions’ within a discourse torn between revision and tradition, between an ‘unyielding confidence in the viability of the old regime, and a realisation that new social forces and cultural forms must be enlisted in its defence’ remain amongst a small minority of works devoted to the subject.34 As a measure of the centre of gravity in the field, Gilmartin’s is the only work devoted to loyalism cited amongst the 15 suggestions of further reading in Jon Mee’s chapter of the Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism dedicated to ‘the Revolutionary Decade’.35 This book suggests a slightly different focus, one that pinpoints a neglected dimension to the literature of the period and the literary historiography that has overlooked it. Something similar can be observed in the treatment of the other bastion of loyalist thought during the period, the Anglican Church. Historians of Religion are nowadays reluctant to read the eighteenth-century​ Anglican Establishment through the interpretative framework of its nineteenth-century​ detractors.36 They are much more likely to consider phenomena such as 9

Introduction 9 the Methodist or practical Evangelical movement as evidence of ‘complex debates within seventeenth and eighteenth-century​ Anglican circles’ and in turn to understand such debates as part of a longstanding theological dis- course grounded within the intimate relationship between ‘political theory and political theology’ that was relevant well into the nineteenth century.37 Similarly, attention has turned to the fact, for example, that during the eight- eenth century eight pages of sermon material was printed for every one page of fiction, and there is greater awareness that the ‘centrality of religion to the nation’s political, cultural and social life fits uneasily into the prevailing grand narratives of the period’.38 Misty Anderson has argued that the assumption of ‘progressive secularism as the narrative of modernity’ has led to an interpret- ative bias within literary studies that ‘makes expressions of religious belief as such into a misrecognition of other social and material impulses, which are the real historical content to be explored in literary reading and writing’.39 A similar point has been made by Philip Connell, who notes that, given its Arnoldian founding myth, it is hardly surprising if literary criticism has been slow to acknowledge its own birth within an ‘Anglican Enlightenment’ that was as much about ‘Protestant apologetic’ as it was ‘incipient secularism’.40 When literary scholars have engaged with the depth of work in this field, Romantic scholarship’s predominant interest in non- ​or anti-Establishment​ figures has tended to assert itself. Laura Davies and Emma Salgård Cunha’s volume devoted to highlighting the importance of religious experience and its complexity in the period, and the literariness of religious genres, is made up of ten articles almost exclusively devoted to Dissenting or otherwise alternative or marginalised religious experience.41 Jon Mee’s interest in the potential of a fuller awareness of theological discourse for the ‘revivification of the crit- ical purchase of the term enthusiasm [to] help us understand nuances in […] writing that has become dead to us’ operates in similarly non-conformist​ and radical circles.42 The current study attempts to use such acute insights in rela- tion to a figure from what literary studies tends to consider in unproblematical terms as a coherent Anglican Establishment.

In parallel, this book argues that understanding Polwhele in relation to the variety, flexibility, and vitality ofloyalist thought is also an archipelagic gesture, since it insists on the significance of locations and experiences pre- viously ignored by more totalising narratives of the period. Again, though, Polwhele makes for an uncomfortable revisionist travelling companion. As such, placing Polwhele within an archipelagic understanding of the period highlights and offers a qualifying perspective on some of the central tenets of archipelagic studies. The archipelagic approach attends to the experience of those from the nations and regions of the ‘United Kingdom’ that were previously elided within the Anglo-​British and metropolitan history of English Literature. It seeks to recover the ‘discarded dialogues’ of previous literary cultures and, by ‘strip[ping] away modern Anglo-​Centric and Victorian imperial paradigms to recover the long, braided histories played out across the British-​Irish archipelago’, reformulate 10

10 Introduction

both our sense of what counts and our scholarly priorities.43 It takes as axio- matic ‘the intrinsic merits of places far from the centres of political, social and cultural power’ in part through a process of ‘recentralizing, since the writer who depicts a small familiar society as if it were the whole world is challenging conventional ideas about the centre of power by placing London, Edinburgh, or Paris in the margins’.44 This shifts attention away from an (English) centre-​ (Celtic) periphery model towards the dynamic interactions and differences between nations and regions, working to ‘disrupt’, in Kathleen Wilson’s ele- gant formulation, ‘the presumed equivalences between “metropolitan” and “national” politics so aggressively asserted by eighteenth-century​ Londoners and rather uncritically adopted by their historians’.45 Such attention to a less generalised, more sharply delineated experience pays different dividends in different fields. For Wilson it is the insight that different ‘institutional and extra institutional practise forged alternative definitions of political community and citizenship’, while for literary studies it affords the opportunity for ‘a salu- tary defamiliarisation of some of the fundamental categories that structure literary history’.46 Attention to the different and specific cultural and insti- tutional contexts for literary production away from the metropolitan centre turns what might otherwise seem recherché or anachronistic into evidence of distinct and different cultural moments and milieu. Late eighteenth-century​ Devon and Cornwall were certainly distinctive amongst the regions of the wider British state. Forming a remote peninsula they nevertheless, in an era dominated by war and the threat of invasion, held a strategic importance that belied their distance from the centre of power. And this was not limited to obvious military assets such as the naval yard at Plymouth Dock. Polwhele spent most of the 1790s looking after small, poor parishes tucked away in a corner of the Lizard peninsula. Yet the headlands of those parishes command the shipping lanes into the crucial western Channel port of Falmouth, and their secluded coves and beaches were a potential front line against French invasion and an actual front line in the efforts of the authorities to combat smuggling. The social, political, and religious infrastruc- ture of Cornwall was unique, at least to England, and as late as the eighteenth century the county existed in a state of ‘feudal anarchy’ in which clergymen and magistrates such as Polwhele represented the precarious authority of the State.47 Conversely, eighteenth-​century Devon and, in particular, Cornwall count amongst the first significantly industrialised landscapes and economies within Britain and Ireland. Yet even that was in some measure unique since Cornwall had an ambiguous relationship with the instruments of capitalist modernity. The technical innovations associated with Cornish mining were not accompanied by similar innovations in corporate and financial govern- ance, a failing that would in the end prove costly.48 Indeed the region also experienced some of the nation’s earliest post-industrial​ economies. Polwhele’s time in Exeter coincided with the city’s transition from an industrial to a service economy; the period when, in a less kind assessment, what had been at the start of the century the fifth largest city in the Kingdom began ‘slipping back into the embrace of rural England’.49 Over the course of a 60-​year career Polwhele 11

Introduction 11 responds and testifies to the particularity of his far West Country locations, but he does so as an engagement in broader debates and controversies of the day. From a succession of run-down​ rectories in South West Cornwall he wrote on religion, education, and reform; produced histories, biographies, and autobiog- raphies; and in his poetry was recurrently and intensely interested in questions of place and of the past, in loyalty and belonging, what he in his most famous poem referred to as the influence of local attachment. Recovering the vitality and complexity of writings simultaneously informed by local pressures and the national scene reveals the contingent nature of what are often still generalised as ‘romantic’ categories of attitudes, beliefs, and politics. Polwhele is far from unique or uniquely important in this regard.50 However, by establishing Polwhele as a subject of critical enquiry in these terms this book does more than fill a gap, it reveals, and to some extent re-orientates,​ the centre of gravity in the archipelagic perspective. Archipelagic criticism is rooted in the assertion and valuing of specific and previously overlooked identities in the face of an ignorant, neglectful, and at times downright biased mainstream status quo. This can be a fraught activity. In 2001 Murray Pittock identified the vicious circle whereby ‘the self-​ congratulation of elements in a local elite are identified as provincial brag- gadocio by the metropolitan eye, which as a result sees no reason to alter its own perspectives’ leading to ‘the prevalence of caricature born either of an exaggerated sense of self-​worth or an ignorant desire to dismiss’.51 Almost more damaging are what he later termed ‘facile gestures towards inclusion’.52 Furthermore, archipelagic approaches share with many revisionist endeavours an understandable tendency to position themselves as a deficit model. It seems at times as if commentators are competing with each other to establish, as the key principle of scholarly interest and method for achieving critical pur- chase, just how marginalised from the ‘Eng Lit’ mainstream their field of enquiry has been. Welsh critics identify a disproportionate interest in Irish and Scottish literature at the expense of an interest in the Welsh experience, while Alan Kent notes the exclusion of Cornishness from the alternative canon of Celticism established by Irish, Scottish, and, of course, Welsh criticism.53 This ‘onedownmanship’ is not just a feature amongst the Celtic nations. Nicholas Roe welcomes the ‘sharper awareness of the decentred energies of Romantic culture’ and argues that ‘regionalism […] is a key critical dynamic of Romantic studies now’, while also implying an overemphasis on the Celtic nations when he suggests that ‘canonical marginality and regional cultures are in fact most urgently in need of reassessment within England’.54 It would be easy to begin a study of Polwhele in similar terms. The West Country as defined by Roe’s collection does not stray significantly West of the Tamar. Polwhele does not merit a single mention in Kent’s otherwise comprehensive account of the litera- ture of Cornwall, with the result that Humphrey Davy is probably the Cornish poet of the era best known to modern scholarship. However, drawing attention to Polwhele’s exclusion from this attempt to create a Cornish tradition is for this book about more than just setting the record straight. Rather it provides a commentary on, and corrective to, aspects of the archipelagic method. 12

12 Introduction Kent’s detailed account of Cornish literature creates a radical dissenting and labouring class tradition for the region. The politics and ecclesiology of the Church and King man Polwhele, not to mention his very artifical and learned poetic style, can not easily be accommodated within such a tradition. This could be seen as an example of the ‘induced sense of regionalism’ that is some- times held up as a critique of the archipelagic approach.55 Drawing attention to Polwhele’s Cornish experience is part of a more nuanced approach that is alive to the potential arbitrariness of its own acts of description and definition. This has happened elsewhere, perhaps most notably in the shift away from a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ to the Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen Enlightenments, as scholarship has come to terms with the differences between the likes of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid in relation to the political, intellec- tual, and confessional differences between the East, West, and North East of eighteenth-​century Scotland. In a similar vein, historians have unpacked the simple binary between metropolitan and provincial, and identified (and argued about) the relative importance of distinctions between the provincial urban and provincial rural.56 Literary studies have taken much from those historical accounts of the provincial urban, but have tended to look for evidence of pro- vincial culture in urban or at least nucleated settings. Exceptions to this rule were either established as objects of critical enquiry before the advent of the archipelagic approach (notably ‘the Lake poets’) or owe their status to other critical emphasises, for example, gender or the importance of labouring class writers. This means that all too often the ‘metropolitan’ perspective is replaced with one that re-articulates​ metropolitan assumptions about the means and features of literary culture. By way of contrast, Polwhele offers an insight into a more thoroughly rural provincial experience. When he articulates, as he does on occasion, a sense of marginality, it is more often to lament his psychological distance from estranged friends in Exeter than his booksellers in London. He tends to consider his distance from the metropolis in more practical terms, a logistical problem to be overcome with the help of John Nichols (father and son) and the London-​Helston Stage. In short, this study of Polwhele both draws attention and offers a measure of corrective to the fact that every act of specificity and inclusion is likely to comprise its own generalisations and exclusions. Polwhele’s activities and career also draw attention to a further and connected absence in much of the work emphasising the polycentric (the word is Peter Clark’s in this context) Enlightenment associational world. Efforts to establish the vibrancy of a local, usually urban, culture often miss a larger point to do with the ways in which that local culture played a part in, and changed the complexion of, a broader constituency. The significance of John Brewer’s claim that provincial intellectuals saw ‘themselves not as distant extensions, much less poor imitations, of metropolitan culture, but as integral and important parts of a national, even international, culture’ has not been fully explored because the focus on the whole has been on the constituent elements of that culture rather than the whole of which it is an integral part.57 13

Introduction 13 For example, David Chandler’s consideration of eighteenth-​century Norwich is refreshing in its eschewal of simple acts of critical rehabilitation in favour of an ‘empirical study of the actual mechanisms and patterns of literary pro- duction on the ground’ as he posits an ‘increasingly intricate and decentralised national network of literary production’ in late eighteenth-century​ Britain.58 However, because the most urgent focus of studies such as Chandler’s is usu- ally but one node of that network (in his case Norwich), the ways in which that larger network is created and maintained and the extent to which it is both lib- erating and limiting are less frequently explored by archipelagic critical studies. This book’s understanding of the ambitions and frustrations of Polwhele as a writer whose activities spanned the country from a rural rectory in Cornwall does more than attempt a course between metropolitan high-handedness​ and provincial chippiness: it highlights the unquestioned assumptions in previous work and offers a more radically dispersed perspective on this ‘decentralised national network’.

The five chapters of this book explore five different dimensions to Polwhele’s career. The first chapter considers Polwhele’s activities as member of an East Devon literary coterie from which he was eventually to split amongst scenes of some acrimony. Previous references to this episode, such as they are, have seen it either as proof of the inevitable gap between ideal and reality within the associational world or as an inverse character reference and proof that even Polwhele’s friends could not stomach him for long.59 It is true that a particu- larly flammable (if familiarly academic) combination of self-​importance and insecurity plays its part in this sorry tale. Yet it also reveals something more profound about the cultural politics of literary sociability at the end of the eighteenth century, albeit something that might not be so apparent amongst the better socially adjusted. If the chapter is the most obviously biographical section of the book, its primary concern is with the nature of conservative soci- ability and the tensions within what is often seen as a monolithic discourse of loyalism. The chapter pays detailed attention to this schism through an examination of printed materials, a series of noisy if minor rows in the London periodicals, and previously unexamined archival holdings. Drawing on, amongst other things, Daniel Woolf’s notion of the ‘archaeological economy’, the chapter traces the causes of the row not to the personalities involved but to the social and political self-​fashioning of the group.60 It argues that Polwhele’s fraught relationship with this group highlights a tension within the discourse of lit- erary sociability during the period arising from the particular relationship and tensions between print culture and coterie publication. In this it relies on, but also offers a qualification to, a critical trend exemplified most recently by Betty Schellenberg that emphasises the co-​extensive nature of print and coterie lit- erary production.61 Polwhele’s travails evidence the truth of these insights while also demonstrating just how uncomfortable bedfellows the priorities of a pro- fessional print culture and the conventions of an amateur coterie world could 14

14 Introduction prove to be for a gentlemanly writer lacking independent means. Polwhele emerges as an unlikely (if self-interested)​ class warrior in all this, and the final third of the chapter identifies three broader implications of the reading of this dispute advanced in the chapter for the rest of the book. Firstly, it will argue that the class politics of this debate mirrors his wider interest in the nature of the gentry. Secondly it will suggest the importance of the staging of this argument for understanding the late eighteenth-​century literary marketplace: both the distributed nature of literary culture in the period and the import- ance of London within that national network of activity (thus transcending the either/​or nature of most centre-periphery​ disputes). Finally, it will argue that Polwhele’s later poetry of retirement, his privileging of the rural over the urban, and his emphasis on epistolary sociability can all be read as a response to, and a form of self-​fashioning following, his retreat from this group. The second chapter considers the range of Polwhele’s career as a writer of heroic verse. It argues that his response to the American War of his teenage years bequeathed patterns of thought in relation to questions of loyalty, virtue, of national destiny and national decay, and of the idea of the poet in relation to all these, to which he returned repeatedly from the year of defeat at Saratoga in 1776 to the year of victory at Waterloo in 1815. The would-​be poet of Patriot Opposition may become a voice of Tory Reaction, but the Polwhele who was unable to conceive of a modern Tyrteaus even as he presented him as a model of civic and poetic virtue in 1786 was also at a loss when it came to locating an enabling heroism in Cornwall’s legendary history in 1815. This chapter shows how Polwhele’s blend of nostalgic Toryism, Ossianic bardism, and locally influenced social commentary creates a body of work that sits at the dynamic fault line between reaction and reform within loyalist thought, one alive to the redundancies of the former but unable to commit to the promise of the latter. The chapter emphasises the particularities of the local in rela- tion to national issues, as the intricacies of Cornish political and economic life bear on Polwhele’s vision of national decline. In offering an archipelagic approach to nuancing loyalist discourse it speaks to ongoing debates about the continuities and fissures within political thought either side of the French Revolution and demonstrates the continued importance of the dialectic of retirement and engagement within the patriotic verse of the period. The third chapter examines the works for which Polwhele was best known (and most highly regarded) during his lifetime: his poem The Influence of Local Attachment (1797) and his topographical history of Cornwall. The first half of the chapter picks up where the previous one left off, and argues that Polwhele’s poetry of place is best seen as a fusion of earlier eighteenth-​ century ideas about retirement with a more characteristically later century interest in personal experience and the illumination of place through memory. Recovering the importance of Polwhele and his topographical poetry (some- thing about which many of his contemporaries were in no doubt) offers a different understanding of the Romantic nature poem and confounds some of the easy political assumptions about the Romantic engagement with place. The second half of the chapter argues that Polwhele’s historiographical method is 15

Introduction 15 most pressingly understood in terms of sentimental history and anecdote and as a result of Polwhele’s desire to memorialise a culture he still inhabits. It reads the method and manner of what Polwhele refers to as ‘the romance of everyday life’ as both Romantic gesture and in terms of more recent sociological understandings of the everyday. For example, it argues that the resistance of Polwhele’s History of Cornwall to the blandishments of eighteenth-​century sociological primitivism (a discourse that, following de Certeau’s distinction in The Practice of Everyday Life we might recognise as a strategic principle of organisation) leads to the establishment of a teeming, at times incoherent but, in de Certeau’s terms, significantlytactical representation of his culture, with all that this implies about a relationship with power and authority.62 This leads to a reassessment of Polwhele’s cultural politics and to a reassessment of the easy categories of radical and reactionary. Despite the notoriety of The Unsex’d Females, the broader contours of Polwhele’s activities as a controversialist have remained unexamined. Chapter 4 argues that Polwhele’s most sustained polemical sphere was that of religion, and his interest in social, literary, and gender issues is predominantly a subset of an overarching concern with threats to the fabric of a British cul- ture underpinned by Established Anglicanism. It argues that his identification of this threat, and his subsequent assault on Methodism (despite the latter’s overt anti-Jacobinism)​ cannot be appreciated without an understanding of the particularity of Polwhele’s position within the larger contours of Anglican theological debate, as understood through the lens of the complex confes- sional context of South West Cornwall. As noted above, there have been various correctives to the idea that to be engaged in religious controversy was a recherché activity in this period, as the ecclesiastical response to the threat of revolution has been nuanced in terms of the fate of Latitude and rise of the Practical Evangelicalism within eighteenth-century​ Anglicanism.63 At the same time, archipelagic readings advise us to attend to the particularities of indi- vidual experience in informing responses to issues otherwise seen in monolithic and metropolitan ways.64 As in Chapter 2, Polwhele’s reactionary analysis of the threat posed to the Establishment is alive to the role played by compla- cency and enervation within that Establishment, and the dangerous vacuum that such abrogation of responsibility creates. The chapter establishes the means and methods of Polwhele’s polemic by close attention to the forms and rhetoric of his argument. It demonstrates how Polwhele combines a range of textual forms (including sermons, open letters, gravestone inscriptions, secret histories, and the anecdotal forms of the sentimental history), many of which it has been customary to think of as symptomatic of a progressive or oppos- itional mindset.65 This recruitment of progressive tactics to a reactionary cause is repeated in Polwhele’s combination of the archipelagic with the anecdotal. Polwhele’s devotion to George Lavington’s The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Considered (1749) might seem hopelessly dated (Lavington died when Polwhele was two years old), but his anti-​Methodist paranoia results from a combination of an attention on local circumstances and a confidence (or dread) that those local circumstances are replicated nationally. In other 16

16 Introduction words, Polwhele, for all his apparently old-​fashioned views and values, creates an imagined national community and deploys what it is more usual to think of as a modern, secular imaginative construct in order to offer an essentially reli- gious defence of traditional social order. By combining these various insights this chapter establishes Polwhele’s most challenging work within its most pressing intellectual context and identifies the ways in which his anti-​Jacobin and reactionary religious paranoia represented itself through the literary forms of modernity. This evidences the claims of historians that ‘in its strategy and its tactics militant loyalism copied and improved upon those adopted by its radical opponents’ and contributes to the critical trend, noted earlier, of questioning the whiggish, secularising narrative of literary histories.66 The later years of Polwhele’s life were marked by an interest in what would today be considered life writing, both his own and that of others. Yet the casual observer’s expectation that these are simple acts of self-aggrandisement​ does not match the experience of reading them. The final chapter of this book considers this paradox in a range of biographical and autobiographical texts. It assesses what these testaments to a literary life lived close to what Defoe called ‘the utmost angle of the nation’ contribute to our knowledge about networks of (in this case conservative) literary sociability; the distributed nature of lit- erary correspondence and production; and the staging of provincial literary identity in the Romantic period. As noted earlier, the archipelagic revisionism of national literary networks has had a tendency to focus on individual places and individuals (the nodes of networks) rather than the interconnections (or edges) between those nodes, an emphasis that overlooks the central precepts of otherwise useful cross-disciplinary​ approaches such as social network or actor-​ network theory. The chapter considers the practical and symbolic reasons, and methodological convictions, that explain Polwhele’s interest in the letter as the means of unlocking the character of his subjects and their relationships with others, including himself. The chapter examines the consequences –​ intended and otherwise –​ of Polwhele’s staging of himself as a man of letters. It identifies the ways in which Polwhele’s activities contribute to current understandings of the ‘debatable practice’ of Romantic autobiography and the vogue for literary anecdote in the early nineteenth century (often seen as encapsulated in the work of Polwhele’s friend and the publisher of his works in this mode, John Nichols).67 It concludes by suggesting that the encounter with this work of Polwhele’s provides another version of the way in which his career transcends the binaries that still tend to structure archipelagic approach. On the one hand it suggests the importance of a non-urban,​ decentralised and dispersed version of the associational world; on the other it provides testament to the limitations, frustrations, and cultural inferiority complex that haunts it. By way of conclusion, the book considers the case of Polwhele’s successful completion of James Beattie’s poem The Minstrel (1814). The poem is a final example of the ways in which Polwhele’s career defies expectation and easy categorisation: backward looking and derivative while at the same time experi- mental and innovative; consistent with the interests that stretch from The Fate of Lewellyn to Fair Isobel of Cotehele and at the same time different in tone 17

Introduction 17 and conclusion. In drawing attention to what one can and one cannot say about Polwhele from such a reading, the book ends with some reflections about the ways in which revisionist literary studies succeed or otherwise in capturing the value of the recondite, the awkward, and the uncomfortable; and the questions of complicity that the inclusion or exclusion of the likes of Polwhele from the Romantic canon raises.

Notes

1 ‘To the Rev Richard Polwhele, Author of the Influence of Local Attachments’ in The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, 3 vols, ed. Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1810), vol 3, p.50. 2 Asia Haut speculates that Seward may have seen the poem in draft in ‘Reading Flora: Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, Henry Fuseli’s Illustrations, and Various Literary Responses’, Word Image 20.4 (2004), 240–​256 (p.255). This is not impos- sible, as we shall see, but it is not necessary. Polwhele had articulated enough of his other grudges in verse by this stage in his career, and Seward’s own note suggests that it is to be read as a warning against responding to waspish reviews in kind. 3 The seminal example of this is Janet Todd’s ‘The Polwhelean Tradition and Richard Cobb’, Studies in Burke and His Time 16 (1974–1975),​ 271–​277. See also the other examples cited in the notes that follow. 4 Judith Pascoe, ‘ “Unsex’d Females”: Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith’ in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740–​1830, ed. Tom Keymer and Jon Mee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211–​226 (p.211). 5 The most succinct and comprehensive account of Polwhele’s life and career is that of W.P. Courtney (rev by Grant P. Cerny) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 30 November 2004: www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​22483]. Most of the details of what follows are found therein. He was subject of a number of contemporary accounts, the most sig- nificant of which are noted by Courtney, and the family is listed in John Burke’sA Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry, 4 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1836), vol.1, pp.424–​427. 6 C. Henderson, ‘The Polwheles of Polwhele: The History of an Estate’, The West Briton and Cornish Advertiser, 9 February 1928, p.8. 7 J.B. Nichols, Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (London: J.B. Nichols, 1818), vol. 3, p.839. 8 The Will of Thomas Polwhele gentleman of Polwhele (Parish of Truro) 1776 (National Archives ref. PROB 11/1034/​ 18).​ I am grateful to Simon Payne and colleagues from the School of Law at the University of Plymouth for guiding me as to the import of Thomas’s will. It is perhaps notable that Polwhele named none of his six daughters Mary (despite it also being the name of the mother of four of them). 9 Burke, Genealogical and Heraldic History, vol. 1, p.424. Medieval Stannary law governed the mining of tin (and the activities of tinners) in Devon and Cornwall, though by this time its officers were broadly ceremonial (as they are today). 10 On the hazards of clerical patronage see Daniel Reed, ‘The Shadow of Patronage: Lewis Stephens and “The Ecclesiastical Climbers” ’, JECS 41.2 (June, 2018), 241–​256. 11 Amongst them two sons followed him into the Church (including one who succeeded him in the living of St Anthony-in-​ ​Meneage); while four pursued military 18

18 Introduction careers, two, Edward-​Collins and Francis, in the Royal Navy (the former seeing action at Trafalgar) and two, Richard and Thomas, in the Indian Army (retiring as Lieutenant-​Colonel and General respectively). 12 Burke, Genealogical and Heraldic History, p.427. 13 Investors were called ‘adventurers’ for a reason. As readers of Winston Graham will be aware, the Cornish ‘cost book’ system of accounting offered the poten- tial for high short-​term returns but was highly risky and demanded high levels of personal liquidity. It was more akin to playing poker than anything we might rec- ognise as investment. Ross Poldark would have been a slightly older contemporary of Richard Polwhele and from a similar social background. Safe to say though that the parallels probably stop there. 14 Wellcome Library MS.3949. 15 The Anti-Jacobin​ Review and Magazine 3 (1799), p.33. 16 Gina Luria Walker (ed.), The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader (Calgary: Broadview Press, 2005), p.248. 17 The Unsex’d Females (New York, 1800), p.23n. 18 See Katherine Bonhamner, ‘Thinking Gender with Sexuality in 1790s Feminist Thought’, Feminism Studies 28.3 (Autumn, 2002), 667–690.​ She cites Claudia Johnson’s Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p.23. 19 Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Samantha George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing 1760–​1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). George sees Polwhele’s hostility to Linneaus as not only a resist- ance to the sexualising of plants but also the opposition of reactionary localism to Enlightenment universalism. 20 See Robin Ikegami, ‘Femmes-Hommes,​ She-​Bishops, and Hyenas in Petticoats: Women Reformers and Gender Treason 1789–​1830’, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26.2 (1997), 223–​239 (p.237). 21 Adam Komisaruk, ‘Mystifying What Matters: Erotic Antiquarianism in Erasmus Darwin’s Portland Vase’, Eighteenth-​Century Life 38.3 (Fall, 2014), 1–29​ (p.24, n2). Probably the most influential anthologisation of The Unsex’d Females comes in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London: Routledge, 1990); but see also Gina Luria (ed.), The Unsex’d Females: A Poem / ​[by] Richard Polwhele. The Female Advocate; or, An Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation [by] Mary Ann Radcliffe (New York: Garland, 1974); Paul Keen (ed.), Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture 1780–1832​ (Ontario: Broadview, 2004). 22 See, for example, Louise Joy, ‘Emotions in Translation: Helen Maria Williams and “Beauties Peculiar to the English Language” ’, Studies in Romanticism 50.1 (Spring, 2011), 145–171;​ Mary Anne Myers, ‘Unsexing Petriarch: Charlotte Smith’s Lessons in the Sonnet as a Social Medium’, Studies in Romanticism 53.2 (Summer, 2014), 239–​263; William Stafford, English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: Unsex’d and Proper Females (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Eleanor Rose Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 23 Mary Robinson, ‘Becoming Somebody: Refashioning the Body Politic in Mary Robinson’s Nobody’, Studies in Romanticism 55.2 (Summer, 2016), 143–184​ 19

Introduction 19 (p.173); Sarah Burdett, ‘ “Weeping Mothers Shall Applaud”: Sarah Yates as Margaret of Anjou on the London Stage, 1797’, Comparative Drama 49.4 (Winter, 2015), 419–444;​ Margaret Morlier, ‘The Hero and the Sage: Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnets “To George Sand” in Victorian Context’, Victorian Poetry 41.3 (2003), 319–​332. 24 Greta Lafleur, ‘Precipitous Sensations: Herman Mann’sThe Female Review (1797), Botanical Sexuality, and the Challenges of Queer Historiography’, Early American Literature 48.1 (2013), 93–123​ (p.93); Judith Barbour, ‘Polwhele, Richard’, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Ian McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.652. 25 The editors of the Oxford Text Archive edition of The Unsex’d Females suggest, without any real evidence [accessed 5 February 2018: http://ota.ox.ac.uk/​ text/​ 3251.​ html]. 26 See, for example, Anne Stott cites Polwhele as a leading light in The Anti-​Jacobin Review in ‘Hannah More and the Blagdon Controversy, 1799–​1802’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51.2 (April, 2000), 319–​336 (p.330), something borne out by Emily Lorraine De Montluzin, The Anti-​Jacobins, 1798–​1800: The Early Contributors to the Anti-​Jacobin Review (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988); Stephen C. Behrendt considers him a spokesman for ‘cultural standards’ under threat in ‘New Romanticisms for Old: Displacing Our Expectations and Our Models’, The Midwest Quarterly 41.2 (Winter, 2000), 145–​158. 27 Courtney, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 28 Scott and Polwhele’s relationship, including this episode, is considered in Dafydd Moore’s ‘ “Too Frivolous to Interest the Public”?: Walter Scott, Richard Polwhele and Archipelagic Correspondence’, Romantik: A Journal for the Study of Romanticisms 2 (2013), 103–126.​ 29 Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–​1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p.5. 30 David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English State in the 1790s’ in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 146–​168, p.147. See also Philip’s introduction and John Dinwiddy’s ‘Interpretations of Anti-Jacobinism’​ in the same, as well as, for a sample of the longstanding historiographical tradition: Robert Dozier, For King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688–​1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Politics during the Ancient Régme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Thomas Philip Scofield, ‘Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution’, Historical Journal 29 (1986), 601–622;​ J.J.Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 31 Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–​1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.10. 32 M.O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin​ Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.3, pp.4–5.​ Grenby makes the same comparison with the historiography of the period. 33 Ibid., p.6. 34 Ibid., p.2; Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution, p.10. 35 See David Duff (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 20

20 Introduction

36 Misty G. Anderson, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century​ Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief and the Borders of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p.26. 37 Robert Hole, ‘English Sermons and Tracts and Media of Debate’ in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 18–37​ (p.30, p.37). See also Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order 1760–1832​ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) as well as Brian Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-​Century England Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation, and Reform, 1660–​1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and Their Diocese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and the special issue – ​‘Writing Religion 1660–1830’ –​ ​of the Journal for Eighteenth-​ Century Studies 41.2 (June, 2018). 38 William Gibson and Robert Ingram (eds), Religious Identities in Britain 1660–​ 1832 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p.1. The figures on sermon publication come from Gibson, ‘The British Sermon 1689–1901:​ Quantities, Performance and Culture’ in The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689–​1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3–​26, p.6. See also Jeremy Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume II Establishment and Empire, 1662–​1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 39 Anderson, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-​Century Britain, p.15, p.27. See also more broadly, Isobel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 40 Philip Connell, ‘Afterword: Writing Religion and the Genealogy of the Literary Aesthetic’, Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies 41.2 (June, 2018), 321–​330 (p.322). 41 Daniel Reed, ‘The Shadow of Patronage: Lewis Stephens and “The Ecclesiastical Climbers” ’, JECS 41.2 (2018). 42 Jon Mee, Romantic Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.19. 43 Murray G.H. Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.24; John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–​1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.2. It is traditional to trace this back to J.G.A. Pocock and his ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 601–​628. The field is now exten- sive and the works cited in this introduction are but a fraction available. For a wider (if now slightly dated) survey see Dafydd Moore, ‘Devolving Romanticism: Nation, Region and the Case for Devon and Cornwall’, Literature Compass 5 (2008), 949–​963. 44 Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p.82, p.86 [her emphasis]. Stafford does not reflect on the suggestively Polwhelean provenance of her title. 45 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–​1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998 [1st publ 1995]), p.288. 46 Ibid., p.288; Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorenson (eds), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.10. 47 Philip Peyton, Cornwall: A History (Fowey: Cornwall Editions, rev edn, 2004), p.170. 21

Introduction 21

48 Peyton notes how the Cornish tin mining industry’s ‘cost book system’ was based on traditional practices of land tenure and employment. The accounting treatments of what were very simple co-​operative concerns did not distinguish capital and revenue expense or build capital reserves, with dividends amounting to the total operating surplus paid out usually bi-​monthly. This militated against long-​term investment decisions that might have overcome the region’s lack of coal reserves or led to industrial diversification; made the industry less robust than it might have been in the face of short-term​ disruptions to business; and starved the business of capital by making it unappealing for inward investment (Cornwall, p.216). 49 Robert Newton, Eighteenth-​Century Exeter (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1984), p.104. 50 See, to pick just one example, Elizabeth Edwards, English Language Poetry from Wales 1789–​1806 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013). 51 Pittock, Scottish Nationality (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), p.147. 52 Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, p.8. 53 For example, Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘On the Trail of a “Rattleskull Genius” ’ in A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), pp.4–5;​ or Alan M. Kent, The Literature of Cornwall: Continuity, Identity, Difference 1000–​2000 (Bristol: Redcliffe, 2000), p.15. 54 Nicholas Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), p.4, p.5. See also Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Creating and Consuming Culture in North East England, 1660–1830​ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp.2–​3, 10–​11. 55 John Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry 1688–​ 1900 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), p.135. See also Roberto M. Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) for the perils of a ‘naïve form of regionalism’ (p.4) that sets itself up as more natural than the nation when it is no such thing. 56 See Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–​1770 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–18000:​ The Origins of the Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth-Century​ (London: Harper Collins, 1997); David Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces 1700–​1870 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). In The Sense of the People Wilson argues for a continuity between provincial town and country life, but the point is that it would not occur to most literary historians to have to make that case. 57 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p.498. 58 David Chandler, ‘ “The Athens of England”: Norwich as a Literary Center in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 43.2 (2010), 171–​192 (p.173). 59 Clark suggests that the frequency with which these clubs descended into acrimony is a ‘depressing object lesson in how difficult it is to realise ideals’ British( Clubs, p.488). 60 See Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 61 See Betty Schellenberg, Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture 1740–​1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 22

22 Introduction

62 For the reifying tendencies of other histories of Cornwall, see Emma Mitchell, ‘The Myth of Objectivity: The Cornish Language and the Eighteenth-Century​ Antiquarian’, Cornish Studies 6 (1998), 62–​80. 63 See Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760–1832​ (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), as well as much of the work cited above, particularly David Eastwood and Misty Anderson. 64 For the ‘cultural distinctiveness of Cornish Methodism’, see Kayleigh Milden, ‘ “Are You Church or Chapel”: Perceptions of Spatial and Spiritual Identity within Cornish Methodism’, Cornish Studies 12 (2012), 144–​165. 65 For the progressive if not subversive tendencies of secret history and anecdote, see Lionel Grossman, ‘Anecdote and History’, History and Theory 42.2 (May, 2003), 143–​168; Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725:​ Secret History Narratives (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009); Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.183–​185. 66 H.T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p.283. 67 The phrase ‘debatable practice’ is that of James Treadwell in his Autobiographical Writing and British Literature 1783–1834​ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.8. References MS Eng.lett.c.36.f.74–79 Letters of Polwhele to John Bowyer Nichols. DRO Z19/41/1 Minute Book, Exeter Library Society. Z19/40/10a Letter, Swete to Stovin, 14 October 1792. Z19/40/10a Letter, Swete to Downman, 12 November 1792. Z19/40/10a Letter, Swete to Polwhele, 19 April 1794. Z19/40/10a Letter, Swete to Downman, 7 November 1796. Z19/40/10a Letter, Swete to Gough, 14 September 1797. Z19/40/10b Letter, Swete to the Editors of the Critical and Monthly Review, nd March 1798. Z19/40/10b Letter, Polwhele to Swete (undated, in response to Letter, Swete to Polwhele), 28 March 1798. Z19/40/10b Letter, Polwhele to Swete, 18 April 1798. Z19/40/10b Letter, Polwhele to Swete, 17 June 1798. 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