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Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century Kairoff, Claudia T Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century Kairoff, Claudia T. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Kairoff, Claudia T. Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.12865. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/12865 [ Access provided at 1 Oct 2021 16:31 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century This page intentionally left blank Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century • claudia thomas kairoff The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2012 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kairoff, Claudia Thomas. Anna Seward and the end of the eighteenth century / Claudia Thomas Kairoff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0328-1 (acid-free paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-0328-5 (acid-free paper) 1. Seward, Anna, 1742–1809—Criticism and interpretation. 2. England—Intellectual life—18th century. I. Title. PR3671.S7Z74 2012 821′.6—dc22 2011019914 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. “Anna Seward and the Sonnet: Milton’s Champion” was originally published in Aphra Behn Online 1 (2011) and is reprinted here with permission of the editors. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. For Peter D. Kairoff Elizabeth T. and David J. Butler Robyn L. and John J. Thomas III and Holly D. Thomas This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1 Under Suspicious Circumstances: The (Critical) Disappearance of Anna Seward 15 2 “Fancy’s Shrine”: Lady Miller’s Batheaston Poetical Assemblies 32 3 The Profession of Poetry 51 4 British Patriot 70 5 Wartime Correspondent: The French Wars and Late-Century Patriotism 98 6 Seward and Sensibility: Louisa, a Poetical Novel, in Four Epistles 117 7 Louisa and the Late Eighteenth-Century Family Romance 138 8 Milton’s Champion 158 9 Corresponding Poems 179 10 The “Lost” Honora 199 11 Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin: Digging in The Botanical Garden 227 12 Anna Seward, Samuel Johnson, and the End of the Eighteenth Century 240 Notes 267 Bibliography 283 Index 295 This page intentionally left blank Preface When I began working on this study in 2004, I thought I had chosen—to borrow the phrase from Jane Austen—“a heroine whom no one but myself will much like” (Letters 209). Anna Seward (1742–1809) had been the subject of curiously pejorative biographies, had been overlooked by most scholars of the later eighteenth century, and was being dropped from both eighteenth-century and Romantic-era literary anthologies. While thanks to editors like Paula R. Feldman and writers like Stuart Curran, she is now included in studies of early Romantic-era women writers, she fi ts among them rather uneasily.1 Her sonnets, collected and pub- lished in 1799, marked her participation in a revival of that verse form that was among the harbingers of what we now call the Romantic era. But most of Seward’s writings adhere to traditions established much earlier and practiced by writers like John Milton and Alexander Pope. Even Seward’s sonnets, owing to her champion- ship of Miltonic style and subjects, differ widely from sequences such as Charlotte Smith’s, which focus nearly exclusively on mysterious, irreparable grief. Seward, trained as a child to recite Milton and as a young poet to emulate Pope, was es- sentially an eighteenth-century poet, albeit a very late inheritor in that line of succession. Welcome recognition of her status is her recent inclusion in British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, the important anthology edited by Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia. To state that a poet born in 1742, whose last important work was published in 1804, was an eighteenth-century writer will seem laughably obvious to readers outside the academy. But any literary specialist will recognize that because 1780, the year of Seward’s fi rst publication, marks the inauguration of the Romantic era, she is likely to be grouped with writers such as Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose early productions are now considered integral to the development of Romanticism. That Seward was primarily a writer of the late- eighteenth century in fact increases her importance to students of the ensuing pe- riod. Seward participated eloquently in the literary, cultural, and political debates x preface of her lifetime. She is a transitional fi gure—a writer who matured during mid- century but emerged into public view just as many tenets widely held during her youth, such as patriotic pride in Britain’s expanding empire, were being tested— and as such her opinions are critical to understanding the spectrum of responses to contemporary issues. Although she was a writer grounded in late-seventeenth and early eighteenth-century principles, she nevertheless incorporated sensibility into her conception of literary greatness and later extolled the late-century “dis- covery” of an “ancient” British epic, James MacPherson’s Ossian and of the authentic “medieval” poems of Thomas Rowley, aka Thomas Chatterton, and championed the Scottish dialect poems of Robert Burns as well as the ballads collected by her protégé Walter Scott. She is thus an invaluable guide to the tra- jectory of British poetry in her century, of developmental continuities sometimes overlooked in our emphasis on the revolutionary. Like her near contemporaries Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) and Hannah More (1745–1833), Seward is important because she culminated certain eighteenth-century trends, adapted to new circumstances, and attempted to transmit her values into the next century. As my familiarity with Seward and her work progressed, a second theme emerged when I began organizing my study around the question of the chief reasons for her disappearance from literary history. Seward had a reputation as a provincial, amateur poet, but what I encountered instead was a strong-willed woman who chose to make her debut in Bath not because she was afraid to sub- ject herself to the London critics but because she wished to control her entrance into the literary marketplace. She fi rst assured herself of a discriminating read- ership and then began publishing verse and criticism. Likewise, after scrutiniz- ing Seward’s modern image as a retired, domestic muse, I discovered a woman proud of her national reputation as the voice, not of retired feminine sentiments, but of robust patriotic prophecy. Instead of fi nding Louisa an endorsement of self-abnegation, I detected a subtext of anger toward the patriarch who nearly destroys the hero’s and heroine’s lives. Wherever I looked, Seward materialized as a poet determined to establish her critical authority and to wrest some control over her personal circumstances. I hope I have succeeded in re-presenting Seward as an eighteenth-century poet worthy of study and as a personality far more attrac- tive to twenty-fi rst century readers than her former characterizations made her to nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers. As I concluded this study, Seward was once again becoming the subject of critical appraisal. First, the passionate nature of her poems about her beloved foster sister, Honora Sneyd, has led to speculation about her sexual orientation. Another topic has been Seward’s writings about the fi ne arts. A music lover, Seward also preface xi admired painting and landscaping. All these arts are celebrated in her verse, and she also created her own works in embroidery and netting. Most recently, Seward’s poems about Coalbrookdale, the site where she deplored early industry’s banish- ment of the muses from a formerly pristine valley, have drawn attention from eco- critics. Seward is emerging as an informed if conservative commentator on the scientifi c activities of Erasmus Darwin and his circle. While completing my fi nal chapter I had the pleasure of reading two new articles, one by David Wheeler arguing that Seward’s invocation of “the genius of the place” in “Colebrook Dale” marks her as an eighteenth-century poet and one by Melissa Bailes explaining Seward’s critique of Darwin’s theories and her creation of a Linnaean classifi ca- tion of poets that deplores stylistic hybridity in favor of distinct categories. Bailes, like Wheeler, concludes that Seward is not to be mistaken for a Romantic-era poet; her insistence on poetic order in fact helps to explain her resistance to poets like Smith and William Wordsworth. A crucial new resource for Seward scholars has just been published: the fi rst new biography of Seward since Margaret Ashmun’s The Singing Swan (1931). Teresa Barnard’s Anna Seward: A Constructed Life uses previously neglected sources to answer many questions about Seward’s life that have become objects of speculation, such as her sexual orientation. Two sets of unedited manuscript letters record Seward’s life during the 1770s, a decade made turbulent by her com- mitment to a chaste but devoted relationship with a vicar choral of Lichfi eld Cathedral, John Saville. As Barnard describes them, those letters enable a more precise understanding of the context of Seward’s published writings.
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