Romantic Triangles:

Author-Publisher-Reader Relations in Early Nineteenth Century British Literary Magazines:

with particular reference to the Familiar Essays of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey

by

Christopher J. Skelton-Foord B.A.(Cantab.), M.Litt. (Aberdeen)

A Master's Dissertation, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the Master of Arts Degree of the Loughborough University of Technology

September 1992

Supervisor: Diana Dixon B.A., M.Phil.(Leicester), Dip.Lib.(London), A.L.A. Departme·nt of Information and Library Studies '.

@ C. J. Skelton-Foord, 1992 - iii -

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am glad to acknowledge my debt to my research supervisor,

Diana Dixon, for advice and friendly guidance which have helped to ensure that writing my dissertation remained challenging and enjoyable.

I am grateful to the staff of the British Library Document

Supply Centre; Manchester Central Library; and the University

Li braries of Aberdeen, Cambridge, Leicester, Loughborough,

Manchester, Nottingham, and Staffordshire (especially its

Assistant Humanities Librarian, Cathryn Donley) for their courtesy in making available to me their collections.

Special thanks go to Mrs Hilary Dyer and Professor John Feather for their kind assistance at Loughborough, to Brandon High and

John Urquhart for their encouragement and example, and to the School of English Studies, Journalism and Philosophy at the University of Wales College of Cardiff, whose award of a Corvey Senior Studentship in Bibliography from October 1992 provided me with the reassuring focus of knowing that my research into the production and reception of literature in the Romantic a~e could progress a stage further.

Finally, I am very pleased to thank my sister, Cathryn, and my parents, Pat and Ben. Their continuous supply of generosi ty, interest, and support has been invaluable. - iv -

DECLARATION

This dissertation has been composed, and is a record of work undertaken, by myself. It has not been presented previously in application for any other degree.

All quotations are acknowledged by quotation marks or by single- line spacing and indented paragraphs. The sources of all information used and illustrations reproduced are given.

Dwsk('1-tllr ~ r \ Signed ...... ·~r~,::· ...... ~ ~ .. Date - v -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Acknowledgements iii

Declaration iv List of Plates with their Sources vi

Abstract viii

Introduction 1 References to the Introduction 5

CHAPTER I Literary History Literary Development 6

Redefining the Kingdom 6 Towards the "New" Magazines and the Familiar Essay 13 References to Chapter I 24

CHAPTER II The Literature of Symbiosis 27

Critical Theory and the Romantic Periodicals 27 Writing, Culture, and the Market Place 33 References to Chapter 11 40

CHAPTER III Charles Lamb 43

"Who is Elia?" 43 Reading in Con-text 54 References to Chapter III 63

CHAPTER IV William Hazlitt 66

Vocation and' the Magazine Essay 66 Style and the Reader 76 References to Chapter IV 84

CHAPTER V Thomas De Quincey 87

Prisoner of the Press 87 Fashioning a Readership 98 References to Chapter V 106

Conclusion 109

Bibliography III - vi -

LIST OF PLATES WITH THEIR SOURCES

Page

1. Watercolour drawing of Charles Lamb 12

By G.F. Josepb, ARA, lB19. British flusellB Print Room. IPbotograph by Derrick E. ~itty.) Reproduced from Lord David Cecil. A Portrait of Charles Laob. London: Constable, 1983, half-title page.

2. Miniature of Wil1iam Hazlitt at 13 22

By John Hazlitt. Maidstone liusellB and Art GaUery. Reproduced froo John Kinnaird. Wi11iam Hazlitt: Critic of Po.er. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 9.

3. Portrait of William Wordsworth at 28 34

By Wi1liao Shuter, 1798. Coroel! University Library. Reproduced frow Lord David Ceci!. A Portrait of Charles Lamb. London: Constable, 1983, facing p. 48.

4. Portrait of Thomas De Quincey 37

By Sir John Watson Gordon, c. 1845. National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced from Richard Caseby. The Opium­ Eating Editor: Thomas De Quincey and The V1stEorland Gazette. Kendal: Westmorland Gazette, 1985, frontispiece.

5. Aquatint detail from "The South-Sea House" 45

By Sutherland, after Pugin and Rowlandson. Rudolph Ackernann's The Microcosm of London, 1818-1811. IPhotograph by Derrick E. Witty.) Reproduced fro. Lord David Cecil. A Portrait of Charles Lamb. London: Constable, 1983, facing p. 33.

6. Portrait of Samuel Tay10r Coleridge at 23 56

By Peter Vandyke, 1795. National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced from Lord David Ceci1. A Portrait of Charles Lamb. London: Constable, 1983, facing p. 49.

7. Replica, signed 1825, of William Hazlitt 67

from the cbalk-drawing by William Bewick, 1822. National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced from Jobn Kinnaird. ,'illiam Hazlitt: Critic of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 281.

8. Portrait of Charles Lamb at 29 as a Venetian Senator 71

By William Hazlitt, 1804. National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced from ~innifred F. Courtney. Young Charles Lamb 1775-1802. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982, frontispiece.

9. Miniature of William Hazlitt at about 35 83

By John Hazlitt. Maidstone Museum and Art Gallery. Reproduced from William Hazlitt: Selected Writings. Ronald Blythe, ed. Harnonds.·orth: Penguin, 1987, front cover. - vii -

LIST OF PLATES WITH THEIR SOURCES

Page

10. Photograph of Town End "Dove Cottage", Grasmere 97

Reproduced from Richard Caseby. The Opil11Il-Eating Editor: Thomas De Quincey and The Westmorland Gazette. Kendal: Vestmorland Gazette, 1985, p. 107.

11. Chalk detail of Thomas De Quincey 103

From a sketch of De Quincey, his daughters, and his granddaughter hy lames Archer, RSA, 1855. Reproduced from Richard Caseby. The Opium-Eating Editor: Thomas Oe Quincey and The Westmorland Gazette. Kendal: West[orland Gazette, 1985, p. 114. - viii -

ABSTRACT

This five-chapter account of the production and reception of literature in British magazines examines selected familiar essays from the first half of the nineteenth century by Charles Lamb (1775-1834), William Hazlitt (1778-1830), and Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), many of which appeared during the 1820s. Literary­ critical and historical analyses of the essays and their publication are provided, with reference to the wider bibliographical and biographical contexts of the three authors.

Chapter One delineates the development of essay writing in periodicals from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, considering the growth of the publishing industry and the reading public, and the nature of Romanticism. The discussion identifies James Boswell's "The Hypochondriack", familiar letters, and the pre-1820 essays of Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt from The Reflector and The Examiner as precursors of the familiar essay. Details of the inception of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and Blackwood' s and the London magazines are provided.

Chapter Two defines a symbiotic relationship between authors, publishers, and readers, in the contexts of early nineteenth century pronouncements on the magazine trade and modern critical theory concerning the reading of literature. Editorial and publishing practices, and the notion of writing for a living are also considered.

Chapter Three critical examines some of Lamb's magazine essays, collected as Elia and The Last Essays of Elia, by exploring the li terary persona of Elia, the autobiography which informs the essays, the importance of The London l1agazine to Lamb's career, and the fluidity of the author-reader relations. Reference is also made to Lamb's earlier and later magazine contributing, his literary relationship with Coleridge, and his letters.

Chapter Four explores Hazli tt's notions of authorship and his literary style, as revealed in his essays, particularly the "Round Table" series from The Examiner, and the "Table-Talks" from the London and New Monthly magazines. He challenges the reader with dichotomies of thought: common sense/common place, genius/skill, and Montaigne/Dr Johnson. Hazlitt's Shakespearean drama criticism, and, how his essays and lectures went to make up his books are both related to the discussion.

Chapter Five explores the constraints of the magazine market upon De Quincey, the importance to his career of the Edinburgh magazines of Blackwood's, Tait's, and Hogg's, and intricacies of author-publisher-reader relations in his familiar essays, especially Confessions of an English Opium-Eater from the London. His literary relationship to Wordsworth, and bibliographical problems in the De Quincey canon inform the context. - 1 -

INTRODUCTION

How was magazine literature produced and received in Britain during the early nineteenth century? This study seeks primarily to answer that question, demonstrating how the relationship between authors, publishers, and readers was sometimes conducive, sometimes antagonistic to the work of the magazine essayist and to the way in which his work was read. It has been undertaken in the hope that Romantic Triangles will be of interest and of use to students and researchers in the fields of: English literature, librarianship, periodicals bibliography, and publishing history.

The title indicates clearly the scope of this study. However, in the belief that literary history generally neither respects nor knows chronological boundaries, I have felt free to progress from the late eighteenth century (and sometimes earlier) and into the mid-nineteent~ century whenever a wider historical perspective is useful in developing and complementing my central thesis.

Nevertheless, there is an emphasis in my discussion upon literature published during the unusually productive decade of the l820s.

My choice of authors, li terary genre, and periodicals has not been arbitrary. Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey produced essays which, in addition to including the greatest of their time, reveal, more importantly (for our purposes), very interesting problems and successes of literary - 2 -

magazine production. To my knowledge, there has been no previous

study focusing on all three writers extensively from this

perspective. Recently two scholars of very different cri tical

persuasions on Romanticism have identified the importance of, and

connection between, our three writers. Marilyn Butler in

Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries suggests that:

all three authors are middle-aged men of not quite first­ rate achievement themselves, but mediators between the public and the literary genius, for their experience goes back to the heyday of the Lake Poets. [1]

Thomas McFarland writes, with greater acclamation in his Romantic

Cruxes, of how

the lives and works of all three of the great essayists recapitulate fundamental features of the Romantic experience ... To retrace their paths will always be to ascend into the great Romantic range, with the elevation and boulder-strewn slope of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in line of sight ahead. [2]

Far from wishing to minimise the significance of both Coleridge and Wordsworth, who act as occasional touchstones in my own discussion, I have attempted - and this has been the secondary aim of my study - to consider Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey as authors in their own right. This I have undertaken partly in order to counteract the critical undervaluation, which still prevails, of essay-writing alongside poetry, drama, and the novel. I examine familiar essays in particular (with some reference to the essayists' other literary production), for, it is through this sub-genre that magazine writers chose to engage in the most extensive and intricate of stylistic - 3 -

relationship-making (and relationship-breaking) between authors, publishers, and readers. Throughout, I have allowed a knowledge of modern literary-critical theory to inform my evaluation; not to be provocatively anachronistic, but in order to suggest some of the complexities of literary thought which Romanticism and the literary magazines encouraged from contemporary writers.

My bibliography provides details of some eighteen Romantic periodicals, primarily relevant to the writings of Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey. However, this study gives greatest consideration

to five of these - Blackwood' s Edinburgh Magazine, The Examiner,

Hogg's Edinburgh Weekly Instructor, The London Magazine, and

Tai t' s Edinburgh Magazine - as they contain most of the essays which I consider in detail. For the purposes of bibliographical \ ease and comprehensiveness, I have chosen to include references, whenever practical, to the three standard editions of:

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. LV. Lucas, ed. 7 vols.

London: Methuen, 1903-1905;

The Complete J"orks of William Hazlitt. Centenary Edition. P. P.

Howe, ed. 21 vols. London: Dent, 1930-1934; and

The Collected Wri tings of Thomas De Quincey. New and Enlarged Edition. David Masson, ed. 14 vols. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889-1890.

This has not been a t the expense of examining the contemporary publishing context. Bibliographical details of the essays in - 4 -

their magazine format are included in the text, and, where the

magazine version differs significantly from the standard edition

(most frequently with De Quincey), references are made directly

to the respective source. A list of references follows each

chapter individually.

I quote liberally from the" works and letters of the essayists,

and more sparingly from modern commentators. My methodology has

sought to embrace, chiefly, literary criticism and publishing

history, both of which are more meaningful when considered in

relation to the lives and times of their authors. My debts to

other writers are acknowledged generally in the bibliography, and more specifically in the references, both of which aim to be

comprehensive. However, with the distinguished exceptions of

A.S. Collins's The Profession of Letters, John O. Hayden's

The Romantic Reviewers 1802-1824, Jon P. Klancher's The Making of

English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832, and Joanne Shattock's

Politics and Reviewers, there exist very few reliable studies specifically concerned with the production and reception of

literature in this era. Consequently, I have undertaken to write a study where I felt it possible to provide a new (and necessary) view of one aspect of literature of the Romantic age.

The early nineteenth century was one of great literary commitment and a nascent sense of professional authorship. Above all, it is to these qualities of Romantic writing which I have endeavoured to ensure Romantic Triangles might do some justice. - 5 -

REFERENCES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. BUTLER, Marilyn. Roman ti cs, rebels and reactionaries, 1987, p. 174. 2. McFARLAND, Thomas. Romantic cruxes, 1987, p. 122. CHAPTER ONE

LITERARY HISTORY LITERARY DEVELOPMENT

'Though hampered in its development for a century by tbe rule of the Spectator tradition, the familiar essay came into its kingdom about 1820, after the leaders had served a long apprenticeship under the ruling dj~asty. Then, aided by the new periodicals, the temper of the age, and their o,~ personalities, they becm joint rulers in the kingdom of the essay; and under their beneficent rule it ,as· legal for the essayist to express freely his inmost thoughts, his preferences and his prejudices, his sympathies, his antipathies, his reminiscences and his dreams. '

- ~Ielvin R. Watson, Magazine Serials and the Essay Tradition

Redefining the Kingdom

The Essay, one cri tic designates much earlier this century, is:

"a tempting label for any piece of writing which does not easily come within any of the better defined categories". [1] For our purposes, however, far more useful to say that in the li terary magazines of the early nineteenth century there appeared the

Essay, the Review, and, as WaIter Bagehot in 1855 defines them in

"The First Edinburgh Reviewers", also, "the review-like essay and the essay-like review". [2] Broadly speaking, the eighteenth century periodicals separated out into the Review and Magazine periodicals of the nineteenth century during its first two decades, and Bagehot's amphibious creations were the mainstay of

- in particular - the Reviews.

Ostensibly reviewing a book, a contributor to the Reviews would in fact use the chosen volume to launch into a discourse on - 7 -

original notions of his own: the book title being simply the

"peg" on which to "hang" the essay. [3] Indeed, as a commentator has very recently suggested: lames Mill in The Westminster Review of 1824 is uncovering how the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews

"under the guise of reviewing books have introduced the practice of publishing dissertations", [4] as he himself writes his own dissertation on the nature of periodical literature - under his guise of reviewing The Edinburgh Review. (Wheels within wheels ... )

Periodicals themselves elusively defy hard and fast definitions.

Ascertaining in periodicals study what is the text - article, number, volume, editorial run, or title(s) [5] - is problematic in itself, and this is compounded by the customary practice of republishing collected periodical essays as books, or, what has been astutely termed, "the rescue of the text ... into book form, which is physically more stable, and - equally important - rescue from the periodical into a recognised genre, i.e. fiction or poetry or essay". [6] lames Mill's son, J.S. Mill prefaces his own Dissertations and Discussions of 1859 "reprinted chiefly from the Edinburgh and the Westminster Reviews", with his hope that the prospect of this "beneficial" practice might, moreover, prove

some guarantee against the crudity in the formation of opinions, and carelessness in their expression, which are the besetting sins of writings put forth under the screen of anonymousness, to be read only during the next few weeks or months, if so long, and the effects of which it is seldom probable that anyone will think it worth while to expose. [7] - 8 -

Authorship could be hazardous. Admittedly, things had improved

since the mid-eighteenth century when Thomas Gardner of The

Universal Visitor and Nemorialist (1756) could insist that his

contributors, Christopher Smart and Richard Rolt, sign a contract

agreeing to write exclusively for the magazine for ninety-nine

years. [8] However, to earn one's living by wri ting for the

early-nineteenth century periodicals still meant a remorseless

grind of working to deadlines and living to copy-dates.

Normally, we think of a production chain running, vi th some

variation or ellipsis, from:

Author---> editor---> publisher---> printer---> seller---> reader.

Leigh Hunt, though, single-handedly wrote and produced The

Tatler: A Daily Journal of Literature and the Stage from

September 1830 to February 1832, writing all its book reviews and

attending himself all the plays he criticised: a colossal

quotidian workload which, he writes, "nearly killed me". [9]

Generally, however, a real esprit de corps existed among fellow contributors to the periodicals, especially The London Nagazine under John Scott, its first editor. Reviewers, typically, considered their literary critical station an important, indeed, a noble one. In October 1820, The Nonthly Review depicted the critic as one who "shares the common lot of all who work for the improvement of their fellow-men". The reviewer hoped always to shape the attitudes of both writers and readers, to exercise a - 9 -

"direct effect '" on the extravagant mistakes of genius, and on the corruptions of contemporary taste". [10] The Edinburgh and the Quarterly Reviews in particular did exert an immense influence upon Romantic literature; indeed, Lord Henry Brougham's review of Lord Byron's Hours of Idleness in The Edinburgh Review provoked Byron to compose in 1809 his great satirical poem,

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. [11]

Periodical authors and editors, then, wielded power. John Scott openly acknowledges this. As a jus t man, though, he sough t to instil a responsible sense of duty among his contributors to the

London:

It is not more easy for a hornet to sting a horse, than for a man with a pen in his hand, who has access to a Newspaper, Magazine, or Review, to wound the feelings of people who are far his superiors, or to inflict a grievous injury on humble, industrious individuals, who, without pretensions to much talent, are very credi tably discharging subordinate, yet necessary offices, appertaining to the Literature, the Fine Arts, or the Public Amusements of the country. [12]

Francis Jeffrey, editor of The Edinburgh Review for over twenty- five years and among its most prolific contributors, was one of the most famous and exacting editors of the Romantic age, displaying awesome authority, as Lord Cockburn recalls in his biography:

Without altering the general tone or character of the composition, he had great skill in leaving out defective ideas or words, and in so aiding the original by lively or graceful touches, that reasonable authors were surprised and charmed on seeing how much better they looked than they thought they would. [13] - 10 -

What more could one ask of an editor? Jeffrey created a corporate voice for his Review, that contrasted noticeably with the reckless, high-spirited practices of Blackwood' 5 Edinburgh

Magazine, which, notoriously, would allow the same contributor, under two different pseudonyms, to produce articles at variance on the same subj ect. It is in this aspect, as The Monthly

Magazine's editor, George Griffi ths r'elates in late 1820 to a contributor, William Taylor, that a significant difference between these two types of periodical is to be found:

The Revie\; ought to be ah;ays consis ten t; and one wri ter should not advance opinions on established points which he may deem just, but which others are not prepared to maintain, and may even be disposed to contradict; while in a Magazine there is no necessity for homogeneity, and each writer may sport what he pleases, without reference to other papers, past, present, or future. [14)

The Romantic age was a golden one for publishers. Prior to the abolition in 1641 of the Star Chamber and its strict printing laws, more than six periodicals never appeared in anyone year in the British Isles. [15) Yet between 1790 and 1832, Britain published more than four thousand separate title runs. [16)

Typically, monthly journals cost between two and three shillings, quarterlies between four and six (half the price of comparable books), and the ten most important titles achieved a publication figure varying between five and fifteen thousand per issue, [17) wi th the two most prestigious Reviews, the Edinburgh and the

Quarterly selling equally well by 1819, enjoying print runs at the top of this range. [18) Publishers, like reviewers too, often felt a strong sense of vocation. However, they would from time to time be guilty of the ignominious practice of "puffing" - - 11 -

that is, contriving for books which they published to be

(exaggeratedly) well reviewed in their own periodicals. (Henry

Col burn and The Monthly Magazine were notorious in this respect.)

Yet to this day, of course, publishers are still committing this same peccadillo.

The explosion in periodical publishing at this time "as remarkable. So too was the concomitant burgeoning of an early nineteenth century reading public, which was expanding in the wake of the mechanization of the British publishing industry, ini tiated by the inventions of Lord Stanhope' s iron printing press and Nicholas-Louis Robert's French-patented paper-making machinery, both in 1798. [19] Edmund Burke estimated that 80,000 readers - mostly in London - constituted the reading public of the 1790s; [20] and, if William Hazlitt can be taken seriously in his assessment of the public in "On Living to One's-Self", they developed into a "mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal"! [21] Wha t, then, were the influences on their development?

The most important Zeitgeist was (French) revolutionary feeling throughout Britain post-1789, which led to a democratization, in thought and public accessibility, of contemporary literary expression. "[L]iterature has fairly become popular, - since it no longer rests in mighty fountains of knowledge, and vast reservoirs of learning", [22] commented John Scott in ~e London

Magazine. Charles Lamb in "Readers against the Grain" likewise - 12 -

(

Plate 1 Watercolour drawing of Charles Lamb - 13 -

observes how: "Times are altered now. We are all readers .. , We

read to say that we have read". [23] (So, some degree of

intellectual snobbery, of course, still appertained to the

literary periodicals profession.)

Hazlitt, then, was justified in declaring in his essay "The

Periodical Press" that: "Knowledge is no longer confined to the

few". [24] For, throughout the late-eighteenth and early-

nineteenth centuries, the growth in Sunday school education; the

popularity of circulating libraries (especially among women); and

of book clubs; cheap reprints of classic English novels and poetry; the fashion for remainder sales; and Lord Brougham's

foundation in 1826, specifically for the masses, of the Society

for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, meant tha t li tera ture

could no longer remain the preserve of only the middle- and upper-classes.

Romantic literature, above all, spoke to its readers - and it did so quite like no other literature had ever done before.

Towards the "New" Magazines and the Familiar Essay

Taken as a whole, in fact, the familiar essays of the early nineteenth century more closely resemble, in their allusiveness, digressions, subjectivity, their "personali ty", the personal essays of the seventeenth century, than the periodical essays of - 14 -

the eighteenth. The influence of the Essais of the great sixteenth-century French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, can be felt too in our British Romantic, as opposed to British Augustan, essays. With their balance, poise, and measure, Augustan essays typically concern themselves with the gentleman in society.

Romantic writing believed in the free spirit and the individual, and in what Mario Praz terms in The Romantic Agony: "the supreme beauty of that beauty which is accursed". [25] Thomas McFarland wonderfully locates fifteen hallmarks of Romanticism in his

Romantic Cruxes which quite epitomise the spirit of this age:

external nature, imagination, egotism, love of the particular, flight into the medieval, flight into the Orient, flight into drugs, a preoccupation with dreams, wi th melancholy, solitude ,. suicide, an ubi qui tous awareness of process and current, a longing for the infinite and unattainable, an omnipresent involvement with the organic, and a profound commitment to symbol. [26]

The Augustan periodical essay, in contrast, aims always to point a moral, often by means of satire - and personal sentiment remains subsidiary to this purpose. It is usually shorter too than the type written by the Romantics.

The very beginning of the nineteenth century can, thus, provide a useful boundary line measuring an important (if arbitrary) division we make in the continuous spectrum of literary history.

Before 1800, magazines were what their name suggests, miscellanies of largely non-li terary informa tion, represen ta ti ve of which is The Gentleman's Magazine (1731-1907). After 1800, - 15 -

creative literature increasingly filled their pages, although it was not until the late· 1820s-early 1830s that lists of births, deaths, marriages, and other chronicles finally disappeared from them for good. [27] The Tatler (1709-1711), The Spectator (1711-

1715), The Rambler (1750-1752), and The Idler (1758-1760) we see as the most important landmarks in the terrain of the eighteenth­ century magazine kingdom. The genius behind· the first two,

Steele, developed the phenomenon of the single-essay periodical in the later numbers of the thrice-weekly Tatler, which then reached its summit in the Spectator, which Richard Steele and

Joseph Addison published daily, excepting Sundays. Heavy, moral didacticism characterises, in spite of their ti tIes, Dr Samuel

Johnson's Rambler and Idler, which, however, remain fascinating sources for intelligent and original commentary directly on the literary business of being an author writing for a public in the

Augustan age. [28]

Entering the final quarter of the eighteenth century and into the early years of the nineteenth, we find interesting prototypes of the familiar essay in: James Boswell's essay serial "The

Hypochondriack", which appeared between 1777 and 1783 in the

(original) London Hagazine (1732-1785); the fami liar letter; and pre-1820 essays by Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, which were published by Leigh' s brother, John Hunt, in The

Examiner (1808-1881) and The Reflector (1810-1811). Under the mask of anonymity, but without employing the stylised device of a fictional persona, Boswell writes contemplatively and - 16 -

autobiographically - confessionally, indeed - with his own self constantly centre stage, avowing that "The Hypochondriack writes from the primary motive of pleasing himself". [29] Lacking all the fluidity and spontaneity of expression of the familiar essayis ts, Boswell revea Is, none the less, something of the full- blooded Romantic temperament, as he quotes from Pope in the seventieth number of his essay serial:

"I live to pour out all myself as plain As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne."

Perhaps, indeed, I have poured out myself with more freedom than prudence will approve, and I am aware of being too much an egotist. [30]

The archetypal Romantic, we might think. However, the familiar letters of eighteenth century literary figures, particularly Lord

Bolingbroke, the Earl of Chesterfield, William Cowper, Thomas

Gray, Lady Mary Montagu, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and

Horace Walpole, [31] display yet greater intimacy and freedom from restraint written, as they were, for personal correspondence and not publication. The inauguration in 1783 of the English mail-coach (which provides the title for one of

Thomas De Quincey' s most famous essays, in Blackwood' s in 1849) acted, of course, as a great spur to letter writing. This medium impressed would-be familiar essayists, notably Hazli tt, who, in his essay "Letters of Horace Walpole", extolled letters as "the honestest records of great minds". Indeed, most significantly, letters, he considered, provided access to "the mysteries of authorship". [32] - 17 -

In April 1810, the twenty-six year-old Leigh Hunt, critical of the contemporary "old Magazines" with their "pattern-drawing, doll-dressing, and a song about Phillis", announced in grand style in the "Prospectus" to The Reflector that "Hiscellaneous

Literature" would be the principal feature of his new magazine:

The Reflector will be an attempt to improve upon the general character of Magazines, and all the town knows, that much improvement of this kind may be effected wi thout any great talent, Reform of periodical writing is as much wanted in Magazines, as it formerly was in Reviews, and still is in Newspapers, [33]

Hunt's Reflector essays are, indeed, of a much greater length than those of the eighteenth century, yet in style they remain strongly reminiscent of the Spectator tradition, Lamb's contributions too, under a weird and wonderful collection of pseudonyms ("Cri to", "Edax", "Hospi ta", "Innuptus", "Mori turus" ,

"Pensilis", "Semel-Damnatus", and "X,Y,i,") show little of the breath-taking originality of his Elia essays of the l820s, For our purposes - that is, in examining the literary development of the essay - they are, quite simply, transitional,

1815 marks the inception in The Examiner of the famous "Round

Table" series, to which the three "knights" and "friends" Thomas

Barnes, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt were to contribute,

However, it was only the latter two who actually did so, up until

January 1817 and the demise of the column, Originally, the purpose of "The Round Table", as devised by Hunt, was to imitate the Spectator and Tatler essay tradition, but with the crucial - 18 -

difference that "assumed characters" \;ere not to be adopted by the writers, who, in their determination "to be as original as we can in our productions", would "talk, just as we think, walk and take dinner, in our own proper persons". [34] The approach was quite revolutionary. What is more, the incipient landing of

Buonaparte at Frejus called Hunt's attention away from these belletristic concerns, which were then foisted solely upon

Hazlitt. Thus, Napoleon's manoeuvres proved an important catalyst in the development, under Hazlitt's pen, towards the

Romantic, familiar essay.

However, from our late-twentieth century perspective, we can identify principally four periodicals two Reviews and two magazines - of outstanding quality and literary-historical import during the first third of the nineteenth century. And so, it is to The Edinburgh Review (1802-1929), The Quarterly Review (1809-

1962), Blach'ood' 5 Edinburgh Magazine (1817-1980), and The London

Hagazine (1820-1829) that we now finally direct our scrutiny.

It "as Sydney Smith's idea which led to his founding, with

Francis Horner and Francis Jeffrey, of The Edinburgh Review from

"the Athens of the North" a momentous achievement which a commentator has described as "the greatest event that had happened in the profession of literature for at least half a century". [35] The Edinburgh owed its immediate success partly to its practice of being highly selective in the books it chose to review, a practice which set it apart from the contemporaneous - 19 -

Critical and Honthly Reviel

Jeffrey relates in 1816:

We are of opinion, then, that the writers who adorned the beginning of the last century have been eclipsed by those of our own time; and that they have no chance of ever regaining the supremacy in which they have thus been supplanted. [36]

However, it was not literature but politics, in the form of Sir

Wal ter Scott' s opposi tion to the Whiggish principles which the

Edinburgh had begun increasingly to espouse, I,hich led to his leaving the Edinburgh to establish the Tory Quarterly in London.

Keen rivalry between these "two greatest periodicals in the history of English journalism and the two greatest critical influences on English Romantic literature", [37] did not, however, prevent the same contributors from writing for both of them. Poli tics, though, distorted li terary critical sense in both Reviews: the Edinburgh's abuse of Walter Scott and Robert

Southey was matched only by the Quarterly's attacks on Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt.

Popular as the Reviews were, publishers fel t that there was a demand among the reading public for something more "light, and bright, and sparkling", [38] to borrow Jane Austen's own descriptive epithet on Pride and Prejudice (1813). Thus,

Blackr{ood' 5 was established as "a real Magazine of mirth, misanthropy, wit, wisdom, folly, fiction, fun, festivity, - 20 -

theology, bruising, and thingumbob", [39] and its great success

confirmed their belief. Often outrageously scurri lous in its

reviews, Haga, as it was affectionately termed, provided, above

all, entertainment. The "Translation from an Ancient Chaldee

Manuscript" in the first issue in October 1817 (following six

numbers of its abortive predecessor, The Edinburgh Honthly

Hagazine) launched Blackl"ood' 5 in legendary and sensational

style. The "Manuscript", hurriedly suppressed and withdrawn from

a second edition upon Sir WaIter Scott's advice in the face of a

commotional barrage of libel writs, purported to be one recently

discovered at the great library of Paris relating the history of

the Edinburgh Honthly, but was actually an ingenious allegory, in

mock-Scriptural language and loaded with extravagant slander,

directed against prominent Whigs. Needless to say, Haga

weathered the storm,. its reputation well and truly made.

Arranging its layout according to a melange of essays, letters,

poetry, and reviews was another bold novelty:

A Berkshire Rector has been pleased to wonder Why we've dismissed the primitive arrangement, He hates, he says, from verse to prose to blunder, Our quick transitions seem to him derangement.

Begging our good friend's pardon, we prefer To mix the dulce with the utile, And think it has in fact a charming air Such different things in the same page to see ... [qO]

Haga's editorial approach, indeed, sought to encourage much needed amusement, variety, and vitality in literary magazine - 21 -

writing; it stimulated the development of a characteristically

genial spirit in many of the familiar essays at this time.

London took its lead once again from Edinburgh when The London

l1agazine was established in 1820 to rival Blackwood's, just as

the Quarterly had been set up eleven years earlier to counter the

success of the Edinburgh. "We have been induced to revive the

Title of a once well-known but discontinued Magazine, and to

appropriate it to our new undertaking," announced John Scott in

the "Prospectus" to the London,

in consequence of its occurring to us as singular, that, while secondary towns of the Kingdom give name and distinction to popular Journals, the METROPOLIS should remain unrepresented in the now strenuous competition of Periodical Literature. [41]

But so strenuous, indeed, was the rivalry that it resulted in

Scott's fatal wounding by J .H. Christie of Blackwood's in the

duel which Scott occasioned through his written sallies

denouncing the vituperation against writers such as Hazlitt,

Hunt, and Keats in Blackwood's. John Scott provided just

fourteen months of exemplary editorship, dying, as a very

distinguished critic makes the case, "a martyr to honest book-

reviewing". [42] Under subsequent editors - Taylor, Southern,

Knight and St. Leger - the London moved into decline. However,

such brilliant literary scoops as Lamb's Elia essays, Hazlitt' s

Table-Talk, and De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opillm-

'Eater have assured the magazine its mighty reputation in

publishing history. At its height, the magazine recognised the - 22 -

Plate 2 Miniature of William Hazlitt at 13 - 23 -

value of promoting, in Hazlitt's words, the combination of "these two styles, the li terary and conversational promis[ing] a greater variety and richness, and perhaps a greater sincerity, than could be attained by a more precise and scholastic method", [43] that is, than by the method the Reviews habitually employed.

The London lasted only a decade, but with it the genre of literary magazine writing finally came of age. - 24 -

REFERENCES TO CHAPTER ONE

1. ZEITLIN, Jacob, ed. Introduction. Seven teenth cen tury essays from Bacon to Clarendon. New York: C. Sribners' Sons, 1926, p. v. Cit. Marie Hamilton Law. The English familiar essay in the early nineteenth century, 1965, p. 7. 2. BAGEHOT, Walter. The first Edinburgh reviewers. [The national review, October 1855.) In: The collected works of Walter Bagehot, 1965-1986, 1, 312. 3. SHATTOCK, Joanne. Politics and reviewers, 1989, p. 110. 4. [MILL, James). Periodical literature: Edinburgh review. The Westminster review, 1824, 1, 206. Cit. Lyn Pykett. Reading the periodical press. In: Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden, eds. Inves tiga ting Vie torian journalism, 1990, p. 12. 5. PYKETT, Lyn. Reading the periodical press. In: Ibid., p. 11. 6. BEETHAM, Margaret. Towards a theory of the periodical as a publishing genre. In: Ibid., p. 25. 7. MILL, John Stuart. Preface. Dissertations and discussions, 1859, 1, iii. 8. GRAHAM, Wa1 ter. English li terary periodi ca1s, 1966, pp. 173-175. 9. HUNT, Leigh. The autobiography of Leigh Hunt, 1850, 3, 215. Cit. James R. Thompson, Leigh Hunt, 1977, p. 77. 10. The monthly review, 1820, 93, 132-133. Cit. John O. Hayden. The Romantic reviewers 1802-1824, 1969, p. 244. 11. HAYDEN, John O. The Romantic reviewers 1802-1824, 1969, p. 15. 12. [SCOTT, John). The London magazine, 2, 626. Cit. Josephine Bauer. The London magazine 1820-29, 1953, p. 219. - 25 -

13. COCKBURN, Lord Henry Thomas. Life of Lord Jeffrey, 1852, 1, 302-303. Cit. Josephine Bauer. The London magazine 1820-29, 1954, p. 43. 14. ROBBERDS, J. W. A memoir of the life and ,.. ri tings of the late William Tay10r of Norwich. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 181,3, 2, 1,92. eit. John O. Hayden. The Romantic reviewers 1802-1824, 1969, p. SS. 15. GRAHAM, Walter. English literary periodicals, 1969, p. 15. 16. KLANCHER, Jon P. The making of English reading audiences, 1790-1832, 1987, p. ix. 17. Ibid. , p. SO. 18. HAYDEN, John O. The Romantic reviewers 1802-1824, 1969, p. 27. 19. HAYDEN, John O. Introduction. British literary magazines: the Romantic age, 1789-1836, 1983, p. xv. 20. COLLINS, A.S. The profession of letters, 1973, p. 29. 21. On living to one's-self. Table-talk. The complete works of Wil1iam Hazlitt, 1930-1931" 8, 97. 22. [SCOTT, John 1. The London magazine, 1820, 1, 187. Cit. Josephine Bauer. The London magazine, 1820-29, 1953, p. 35. 23. Readers against the grain. The works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1903-1905, 1, 273. 24. The periodical press. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 16, 219-220. 25. PRAZ, Mario. The Romantic agony, 1960, p. 31. 26. McFARLAND, Thomas. Romantic cruxes, 1987, p. 13. 27. GRAHAM, Wa1 ter. English li terary periodicals, 1969, p. 279. 28. Ibid., p. 121. 29. BOSWELL, James. The hypochondriack, number 16. The hypochondriack, 1928, 1, 214. CH. Me1vin R. Watson. Magazine serials and the essay tradi tion 1746-1820, 1956, p. 71. - 26 -

30. The hypochondriack, number 70. Ibid., 2, 301. Cit. Melvin R. Watson. Magazine serials and the essay tradition 1746-1820, 1956, p. 72. 31. BARNETT, George L. The evolution of Elia, 1964, p. 26. 32. Letters of Horace Walpole. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 16, 141. Cit. Melvin R. Watson. Magazine serials and the essay tradi tion 1746-1820, 1956, p. 70. 33. [HUNT, Leigh). Prospectus. The reflector, 1810, 1, iii-viii. Ci t. Mel vin R. Watson. Magazine seria Is and the essay tradition 1746-1820, 1956, p. 75. 34. [HUNT, Leigh) in: HAZLITT, William. The round table, 1817, 1 (1). Cit. Marie Hamilton Law. The English familiar essay in the early nineteenth century. 1965, p. 39. 35. COLLINS, A.S. The profession of letters, 1973, p. 130. 36. [JEFFREY, Francis). Scott's edition of Swift. The Edinburgh review, 1816, 27, 2. 37. HAYDEN, John O. The Romantic reviewers 1802-1824, 1969, p. 38. 38. To Cassandra Austen, 4 February 1813. Jane Aus ten's letters: to her sister Cassandra and others. R. W. Chapman, ed. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 299. 39. Noctes Ambrosianae. B1ackwood' s Edinburgh magazine, 1822, 12, 106. Cit. J .H. Alexander. Blackwood's: magazine as Romantic form. The Wordsworth circle, 1984, 15, 65. 40. B1ackwood's Edinburgh magazine, 1817-1818, 2, 611. 41. [SCOTT, John). Prospectus. The London magazine, 1820, 1, i. Ci t. Josephine Bauer. The London magazine 1820- 1829, 1953, p. 57. 42. HOUSE, Humphrey. A famous literary periodical. In: All in due time, 1955, p. 247. 43. Advertisement to the Paris edition of Table-talk. The

complete t.. orks of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 8,333. CHAPTER TWO

THE LITERATURE OF SYMBIOSIS

'In estinmting the advance in the profession of letters it is always hard to decide what proportionate share in it the different parties had. Sometimes the public seem to push on the publishers, sometimes tbe publishers to draw on the public, and sometimes the authors to arouse the publishers and the public too.'

- A.S. Collins, The Profession of Letters

Critical Theory and the Romantic Periodicals

"We apprehend that magazines {;ill soon form the only literature of the co un try}" [1) Excited eulogies to periodical writing, like this one by the editor of The London Magazine in 1821, are typical of their age, and convey something of the exuberance of a literary genre enjoying a stunning renaissance. The rise of the literary magazine in the early nineteenth century had indeed been meteoric. The writer Vicesimus Knox records that as recently as the 1790s periodical writing had seemed quite effete:

Diaries of belles and beaus, extraordinary intelligence, cross readings of newspapers, are now worn thread-bare. Indeed, every mode of humour, which the Spectator adopted, has been imitated so often as to have lost something of its grace. [2)

Yet by 1823, William Hazlitt could exhort in The Edinburgh Review

- far from disinterestedly, of course - a remarkable new progeny for a revived genre: - 28 -

Therefore let Reviews flourish - let Hagazines increase and multiply - let the Daily and Weekly newspapers live forever! We are optimists in literature, and hold, with certain limitations, that, in this respect, whatever is, is right! [3)

As its name defines, however, periodical literature is ephemeral

to the extent that (in its immediate day and age, certainly) the

shelf life of an individual issue will probably be confined to match the journal's interval rate of publication (daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly). This, as James Hill discussed in The

Westminster Review of January 1824, could largely determine the

na ture of the writing: which is, to court "unpostponed

popularity" through "patronis[ing) the opinions which are now in

vogue, the opinion of those who are now in power". [4) Not only

are we talking here of literature as sycophancy, but also - as

Thomas De Quincey intimates in his 1840 essay on style in

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine by deploring the inevitabi li ty of

periodical readers' acquiring "an art of catching at the leading words and the cardinal or hinge joints, of tranSition, which proclaim the general course of a \,riter's speculation" [5)

literature as ostentatious attention-grabbing.

Writers, while acknowledging their income to the periodicals, nevertheless spoke out against, in particular, the Reviews, for the predatory and parasitic undermining of Literature which they represented. Here is Thomas Carlyle, contributing to The

Edinburgh Review in 1831: - 29 -

Far be it from us to disparage our own craft, whereby we have our living! Only we mus t note these things: that Reviewing spreads with strange vigour; that such a man as Byron reckons the Reviewer and the Poet equal; tha tat the last Leipzig Fair, there was advertised a Review of Reviews. By and by it will be found that all Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review ... [6]

Moreover, if we look back to the state of periodicals in the mid- eighteenth century, we find something very similar. The Magazine

of Magazines (1750), magpie-like, appropriated to itself the

treasures of other periodicals, reaching its reductio ad absurdum

in 1758 with The Grand Magazine of Magazines, which in turn drew upon other magazines of magazines to select its material! [7]

Li terary symbiosis, then, characterises this genre and this age.

Recently, two American commentators, John R. Nabholtz [8) and Jon

P. Klancher, [9] have discussed the dynamics of Romantic author- reader periodical relations, which seek to elevate both essayist and reader to the heights of protagonist wi thin the text. And in his Shakespearean Constitutions, Jonathan Bate also considers how

the text may interrogate the interpreter in such a way as to make him see the limitations of his own positions. If I may be allowed to appropriate Geoffrey Hartman's appropriation of Hamlet,

INTERPRETER. Who's there? BOOK. Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.

The strong reader whether actor; cri tic, director, artist, political polemicist, or whatever expands the range of signification within the text; the strong text expands the horizon of the reader. We make the classic our own, bring it into our world; but we also give ourselves up to it, enter into its world. Without this reciprocity, appropriation will become misappropriation. [10) - 30 -

This seems to me especially true of periodicals. All readers

with financial means, strong and weak alike, have the significant

power of - to appropriate Hamlet once more - to buy or not to

buy. But periodical readers are also granted, typically, the

creative capacity to shape and edit their own texts: in what they

read ·and what they choose not to read of a journal issue, and in

what order. Reciprocally, periodical' essayists would imply or

"absorb" a reader figure into their texts who might or might not

relate closely to the actual reader. Determining a content,

format, and style potentially appealing to the author' 5 assumed

audience could help guarantee continued sales of the periodical.

In a post-French Revolution society sharply divided between the

radicals and the reactionaries, the Thomas Paines and the Edmund

Burkes, audience-targeting might also incorporate subtle

audience-making on the part of the committed, propagandist

author.

And "ho "ere the audience? Potential contributors make up the

readership of today's cri tical journals. Similarly, the early

nineteenth century periodical sought at times to preserve the

social framework for textual intimacy between readers and writers which had been a feature of publishing for a financially

privileged clique of readers in the eighteenth century. Jean-

Paul Sartre recalls a seventeenth-century France where

the reader, if not strictly identical with the writer, was a potential "ri ter He read because he could "rite; with a little luck he might have been able to write what he read. The public was active; productions of the mind were really submitted to it. [11] - 31 -

And Sartre anticipates remarkably the ideas of another French twentieth century literary thinker, Roland Barthes, whose 5/Z advocated in 1970 that "the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text". [12]

As Klancher has recently pointed out, "Further Remarks on the

Utili ty of Periodical Performances" in The Bee (1790) speaks of the "liberty given for every individual to become a writer" [13] just at the time when a cultural revolution was exploding these tight, small-scale author-reader periodical relations of the late eighteenth century. By 1831, James Montgomery was declaring in

The Metropoli tan: "Authors write best for the public "'hen they write for themselves". [14] In doing so, he confirmed the archetypally and self-regardingly Romantic ethos which had replaced the genteel reading and writing communi ty spirit of seventeenth century France - and of eighteenth century Britain,

Publishers began producing journals during the Romantic age to fill a perceived, existing gap in the market. The Preface to the opening issue of The Honthly Hagazine in February 1796 announced as its aim "the propagation of those liberal principles which have been either deserted or virulently opposed by other

Periodical Miscellanies". [15] Isaac D' Israeli, father of the

Prime Minister, lamented that the book-selling profession did not accord with the advancement of literature, for, should the bookseller have "an ambition to create [public taste], he will be - 32 -

anticipating a more cultivated curiosity by half a century", [16]

Coleridge, however, considered regretfully that publications were not being "directed, each to its appropriate class of readers", to which Hazlitt' s rhetoric responded: "Do not publications generally find their way there, without a direction?" [17] For first issues of new periodicals, the answer to this is: no, not always. Once a periodical had found its niche, though, its pattern of publication in numbers attempted to retain a regular audience by creating with its readers a serial contract in which protracted satisfaction constantly looked forwards to the next issue. However, it needs to be remembered that a lot of eighteenth century literary periodicals, The Adventurer (1752-

1754) in particular, [18] were never set up to be published indefinitely, but with a fixed length run clearly in mind.

Who were the readers, then? Throughout the mid-eighteenth century, literary patronage was dying out and a new master, the

Public, was in the ascendancy, But by the early Victorian era, the public were referred to disparagingly as "the million", due to the considerable growth in literary culture, Romanticism was the impetus for a new age to confront a series of interrelated dichotomies: writers engaged themselves in a profession or trade to produce serious or mass culture for an audience or public for whom reading was reception or consumption. Late-twentieth century literary criticism has now hijacked these dichotomies to construct from them theories of "reader response" and

Rezeptionkritik, which pervade the stuff of my arguments. - 33 -

Writing. Culture. and the Market Place

Periodical writings were frequently considered "not proper

Literature" . This assessment influenced - and resulted from -

their speed and haste of production and the scope and socio-

intellectual character of their readership. Key texts on

Romantic readership are Wordsworth' s "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"

(1800 and 1850 editions) and the 1815 "Essay, Supplementary to

the Preface". (Lyrical Ballads is seminal, and its first edition

publication date of 1798 has established itself as the date

heralding the birth of Romanticism.) In November 1815, a Honthly

Review reviewer of Wordsworth's "Essay" crudely defines a

distinction between the masses and an educated readership:

the people, whom [Wordsworth) emphatically separates from the public; meaning, we presume, those who are hereafter to be taught to read, to mox erudiendum vulgus, the unborn children of Joseph Lancaster, as contradistinguished from the progeny of the universi ties or the literary swarm of the metropolis now in existence. [19)

This, of course, is most unfair to Wordsworth. The people

Wordsworth already takes to be "his Readers", and to them he offers devout respect and reverence. [20) Indeed, a thoroughly democratic principle in the "Preface" seeks the conversion of his middle-class readers from the divisiveness and artifi ciali ty of the current public taste for poetic diction, to, "the real language of men". [21) Admi ttedly, Wordsworth in his poetry purifies this language of its rusticity (and therefore of what makes it "real"?), but it is also rendered free of professional - 34 -

Pl"te 3 Portrait of William Wordsworth at 28 - 35 -

(that is to say, educated) jargon. [22] However, could writing

for the masses have any real critical standing, anyway?

The physical and generic format of published wri ting was very

important in determining its social and cultural acceptability in

the early nineteenth century. In the 1770s, the cataloguer

Samuel Paterson pronounced that

Every newspaper, nowadays, is a magazine; so every magazine is a newspaper: the former comprehending (besides a jumble of mixed, and, generally, improper matter for a newspaper) all the intelligence of the day; the latter an incoherent assemblage of joco-serious bits and scraps ... together with an exact register of all the news and falsehoods of the week, or of the month. [23]

This was no longer the case thirty years later. With the establishment in 1802 and 1809 respectively of the illustriously

reputable Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, the opening decade of

the nineteenth century felt sharply the distinction between a

·newspaper press, which smacked strongly of trade, and the

Reviews, which did not. The solicitor William Wright aptly pronounced: "An editor of a Review like the Quarterly is the office of a scholar and a gentleman; but that of a newspaper is

not, for a newspaper is merely stock-in-trade, to be used as it

can be turned to most profit". [24] As the periodical press

developed throughout the Romantic age, and literary magazines,

notably Blackwood' 5 Edinburgh Magazine (1817), The London

11agazine (1820), and Tai t '5 Edinburgh Magazine (1832), established themselves as miscellanies for the more "trifling" purposes of fiction reviewing and original, literary creation, so - 36 -

the quarterly Reviews retained their cultural pre-eminence and their editors strove to keep them a serious political-literary medium.

Reviewing for the quarterlies escaped a "stock-in-trade" image, yet at the same time rescued budding writers from the spectre of impecuniosity, partly because the activity was so thoroughly grounded in the emergence of the cash-nexus society, albeit imbued by the exciting, entrepreneurial side of capitalism which was developing in tandem with the British printing press industry. Although at its inception The Edinburgh Review off-set remuneration against respectabili ty, as its editor Francis

Jeffrey's remark "all gentlemen, and no pay" [25] conveys, in fact, by establishing very handsome payment for their contributors, the publishers ensured the Reviews some gravity.

The need to earn a living kept Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and

Thomas De Quincey writing for the periodicals. Lamb abandoned composing lyrical poetry for economic reasons. A letter to his friend Thomas Manning, which sought to confirm Manning's agreement for them to collaborate on some essay writing, states the case unequivocally: "I want some occupation, and I more want money ... Mutton is twelve-pence a pound". [26] To write mean t to eat. Hazlitt's essay "On Living to One's-Self", moreover, actually grounds the necessity of writing for a living in the pleasant domestic scene of Hazlitt before his hearth at

Winters low Hut wherein the fruits of literary labours past have - 37 -

Plate 4 Portrait of Thomas De Quincey - 38 -

been translated into "a partridge getting ready for my supper". [27] A friendly but real rivalry existed between

Hazlitt and Lamb, who were, after all, trying to survive by their li terary originality. On 12 April 1830, Hazlitt wrote confidentially to John Scott, the editor of The London Hagazine:

Do you keep the Past and Future? You see Lamb argues the same view of the subject [as I do]. That' young master' will anticipate all my discoveries, if I don't mind. [28]

De Quincey, repeatedly charged for debt, felt most keenly of all the pressures of surviving from his magazine output, as Carlyle's sympathetic description of him suggests:

Poor little fellow! It might soften a very hard heart to see him so courteous, yet so weak and poor; retiring home with his two children to a miserable lodging-house, and writing all day for the King of Donkies, the Proprietor of the Saturday Post. [29]

Establishing a reputation as a periodical author could be difficul t. Review and essay wri ting, until the late l850s, was frequently an "anonymous and consequently inglorious" [30] profession, as the writer Thomas Campbell put it in 1802. It was the Periodical with its authoritative, corporate voice that mattered, not the succession of authors who contributed to it.

The Edinburgh set the pattern for unSigned, or pseudonym-signed, articles which the other Reviews and subsequently the magazines, adopted. Contributors unidentified (but not always unidentifiable, by any means) were encouraged to conform, via the device of the editorial "we", to a journal's house style,

"inasmuch, as having no fixed and certain colours of their own, they imbibe like the cameleon, the hues of their domiciles". [31] - 39 -

The London Review, which the seventy-seven year-old Richard

Cumberland founded in 1809, is notorious for its policy of

identifying its contributors in order to challenge the practice

of perfidious criticism to which reviewers were tempted by the

mask of anonymity. With great gusto Cumberland set his case in

his Introductory Address:

The Man, who in the genuine spirit of criticism impartially distributes praise or blame to the work he reviews, has no more need to hide his name than the tradesman has, who records himself over his shop-door; for whom has he to fear, or of what to be ashamed? Learning has no truer friend; genius no better counsellor, no safer guide. [32]

The Review lasted just four numbers. Anonymity seemed

entrenched; the nom de plume held sway. Indeed, it was not until

Charles Lamb, who champions the art of autobiography in his

unpublished review of the first volume of Hazli tt's Table-Talk

(1821), that anonymity began to breed familiarity in the Romantic

essay. Appealing to history and, in particular, the famous

"Isaac Bickerstaff" of Steele' s Spectator, Lamb talks of a class

of essayists who

substituted for themselves an ideal character; which left them a still fuller licence in the delivery of their peculiar humours and opinions, under the masqued battery of a fictitious appellation. [33]

It is to that most famous of all fictitious appellations that we now turn: Elia. - 40 -

REFERENCES TO CHAPTER TWO

1. [SCOTT, John.] The lion's head. The London magazine, February 1821. Ci t. Josephine Bauer. The London magazine 1820-29, 1953, p. 13. 2. KNOX, Vicesimus. On some peculiarities in periodical essays. In: Win ter evenings, or Lucubra tions on 1i fe and letters, 1823, 2, 22. Cit. Marie Hamilton Law. The English familiar essay in the early nineteenth century, 1965, p. 29. 3. The periodical press. The complete works of Wi1liam Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 16, 220. Cit. Joanne Shattock. Politics and reviewers, 1989, p. 2. 4. [MILL, James.] Periodical literature: Edinburgh review. The Westminster revie,;, January 1824, 1, 207, 206. 5. De Quincey as critic, 1973, p. 81. 6. CARLYLE, Thomas. Characteristics. Essays. 4 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1857, 3, 19. Cit. John Gross. The rise and fall of the man of letters, 1970, p. 1. 7. GRAHAM, WaIter. English literary periodicals, 1966, pp. 170-171. 8. NABHOLTZ, John R. "My reader my fellow-labourer", 1986. 9. KLANCHER, Jon P. The making of English reading audiences, 1790-1832, 1987. 10. BATE, Jonathan. Shakespearean constitutions, 1989, pp. 209-210. 11. SARTRE, Jean-Paul. For "horn does one write? In: What is literature?, 1983, p. 65. Cit. Jon P. K1ancher. The making of English reading audiences, 1790-1832, 1987, p. 18. 12. BARTHES, Ro1and. S/Z, 1975, p. 4. 13. Further remarks on the utility of periodical performances. The bee, 1790-1791, 1, 170. Cit. Jon P. Klancher. The making of English reading audiences, 1790- 1832, 1987, p. 22. - 41 -

14. MONTGOMERY, James. A view of modern English literature. The metropolitan, 1831, 1, 22. Cit. Jon P. Klancher. The making of English reading audiences, 1790-1832, 1987, p. 45. 15. Preface. The monthly magazine, 1796, 1, iii. 16. D'ISRAELI, Isaac. Miscellanies of literature, 1840, p. 86. Cit. A.S. Collins. The profession of letters, 1973, p. 165. 17. COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor. Lay sermons. R. J. Whi te, ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, pp. 36-37; and HAZLlTT, William. Review of Coleridge's The statesman's manual. The Edinburgh review, 1816, 27, 450. eit. Jon P. K1ancher, The making of English reading audiences, 1790-1832, 1987, p. 47. 18. GRAHAM, WaIter. English literary periodicals, 1966, p. 127. 19. Review of William Wordsworth's "Essay, supplementary to the preface". The mon thly review, 1815, second series, 78, 229. Cit. Jon P. Klancher. The making of English reading audiences, 1790-1832, 1987, p. 149. 20. WORDSWORTH, William. Essay, supplementary to the preface. The prose works of fvi1liam Words worth , 1974, 3, 84. 21. WORDSWORTH, William. Preface to Lyrical ballads (1850). The prose works of William Wordsworth, 1974, 1, 119. 22. Ibid., 1, 125, 139. 23. GRAHAM, WaIter. English literary periodicals, 1966, p. 133. 24. LANG, Andrew. The life and letters of John Gibson Lockhart. 2 vols. London: John C. Nimmo, 1897,1, 367. Cit. Joanne Shattock. Poli tics and revi ewers, 1989, p. 6. 25. COCKBURN, Lord Henry. The li fe of Lord Jeffrey, 1852, 1, 133. 26. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 1, 271. eit. George L. Barnett. Charles Lamb, 1964, p. 15. - 42 -

27. On living.to one's-self. Table-talk. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 8, 90. 28. HAZLlTT, W. Carew. Four genera tions of a li terary family, 1897, 1, 140. Cit. Marie Hamilton Law. The English familiar essay in the early nineteenth century, 1965, p. 44. 29. The collected letters of Thomas and lane Welsh Carlyle. Duke-Edinburgh edition. Charles Richard Sanders, Clyde de L. Ryals and Kenneth J. Fielding, eds. 18 vols. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1970-, 4,291. Cit. Thomas MCFarland, Romantic cruxes, 1987, p. 94. 30. BEATTIE, William. Life and letters of Thomas Campbell. 3 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1849-1850, 1, 406. Cit. A.S. Co1lins, The profession of letters, 1973, p. 126. 31. The Edinburgh review, 1805, 6, 23. Cit. Josephine Bauer. The London magazine 1820-29, 1953, p. 43. 32. CUMBERLAND, Richard. Introductory address. The London review, 1809, 1, ii. Cit. Walter Graham. English literary periodicals, 1966, p. 240. 33. LAI1B, Charles. Haz1itt. [Previously unpublished review of the first volume of Table-talk (1821).] In: Lamb as critic, 1980, p. 300. CHAPTER T H R E E

CHARLES LAMB

' ... but thou, methinks, most glad, My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou has pined And hunger'd after Nature, many a year, In the great City pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain And strange calamity!'

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "This Lime-Tree Bover my Prison'

"... please to blot out gentle-hearted, and substitute: drunken dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question."

- Charles Lamb, Letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Who is Elia ?"

Charles Lamb's list of self-deprecating epithets written in 1800

suggests the capriciousness with which he dealt with his own

psychic fragility. During the winter of 1795-1796 he had, he wrote to Coleridge in his earliest extant letter, spent six weeks

"in a mad house at Hoxton". [1] In 1825, a nervous attack would

necessitate his early retirement as clerk from the East India House - where fixed working hours, leaving him time to write only

intermi ttently (but regularly), had helped determine the familiar

essay as his choice of literary form. With good reason Lamb took

care to avoid self-absorption, preferring "to lose myself in

other men's minds". [2] In both his life and his art, deep empathy characterises his achievement, yet reality always invades - 44 -

upon the mock-heroic dream structures he creates. To Mary his sister, whose horrific bouts of insanity exceeded anything he had to suffer, he showed steadfast loyalty; to his readers, he extended his humanity through li terary personae which touch the quick of his own remarkable personality.

Lamb began contributing to newspapers in 1801, and 1 February

1802 saw the inauguration of his periodical essay-writing career, with "The Londoner, No.1'· (the first and last of its series) in

The l10rning Pas t. However, not until The Reflector was established in 1811 did Lamb have the opportunity again to publish essays, and ones which would initiate the development of a new, familiar genre of writing. The best of these include: "A

Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People" (which subsequently appeared under Elia' s signature, in non-epistolary form, in the London of September 1822), "Edax on Appetite", and

"Hospita on the immoderate Indulgence of the Pleasures of the

Palate". A commentator [3] has recorded that, following 1811 and up until August 1820, Lamb published only three more essays:

"Confessions of a Drunkard" (The Philanthropist 1813; and The

London l1agazine, August 1822), "On Christ's Hospi tal and the

Character of the Christ's Hospital Boys" ( The Gentleman' 5

11agazine, June 1813), and "On the Melancholy of Tailors" (The

Champion, 4 December 1814). In fact, though, during this period

Lamb also contributed "Table-Talk" paragraphs to The Examiner in

1813, and some other pieces for the same journal between 1818 and

1820. However, "The South-Sea House" (plate 5) of August 1820 - 45 -

Plate 5 Aquatint detail from "The South-Sea House" - 46 -

did mark the beginning of Lamb's brilliantly successful spell wi th The London Magazine. Indeed, with the sole exception of

"Valentine's Day" (published in both The Examiner of 14 February

1819 and The Indicator of 14 February 1821), the twenty-eight essays which went to make up the Elia volume of 1823 had all previously appeared in the London. August 1825 saw Lamb's final

London contribution, "Imperfect Dramatic Illusion"; and this essay, along with twenty-four others (mostly from the London) were collected in 1833 as The Last Essays of Elia. Being a

Sequel to Essays published under the Name. Between August 1825 and 1834, Lamb contributed, to less popular success, to Hone's

Every-Day Book, The New Monthly Magazine, Hone's Table Book,

The Spectator, The Athenaeum, and The Englishman's l1agazine; and it is from the pages of some of these periodicals that the few non-London essays for his 1833 collection were drawn.

Lamb's own life-story informs much of his writing. "We are in a manner marke~', [4] he wrote to Coleridge in May 1800, referring to his Ancient Mariner-, or Cain-like, burden of gui 1 t which he felt he carried with his sister, for all to see, following Mary's act of matricide on 22 September 1796, resulting from her sudden, violent fi t of madness. In his excellent critical study of

Lamb's autobiographical writing, Confessions of a Prosaic

Dreamer, Gerald Monsman depicts a writer who "shows his need for a form in which he can confess himself without self­ incrimination". [5] Thus, the ludicrous "type" characters, with something to confess like an inordinate appetite or drunkenness, - 47 -

abound in Lamb's pre-Elian, epistolary contributions to the

Reflec tor and other magazines. Through dramatic irony, however, the characters expose their own self-deception to the reader, and the confession is thereby distanced from the author.

This distance could be crucial. In The Quarterly Review of April

1822, a contributor threatens to bring Lamb into disrepute over his "Confessions of a Drunkard" - first published, anonymously, in The Philanthropist of 1813 - when he asserts: "we have reason to know [it] is a true tale". [6] Lamb did indeed have an alcoholic tendency. Nevertheless, to counter this damaging claim, and to cater to the public's taste for confessional writing following De Quincey's hugely-popular Confessions of an

English Opium-Eater printed in The London Hagazine of September and October 1821, [7] Lamb's "Confessions" were re-published in the London of August 1822, while he was away in Paris, this time signed by Elia and carrying an additional footnote in which Lamb archly points out that Elia had, indeed,

set to work, and with that mock fervor, and counterfeit earnestness, with which he is too apt to over-realise his descriptions, has given us - a frightful picture indeed - but no more resembling the man Elia, than the fictitious Edax [another of Lamb's pseudonyms] may be supposed to identify itself with Mr. L., its author. [8]

Lamb was fond of appropriating personae. Indeed, he possessed the aplomb to write the "Autobiography of Mr. Munden H. However, he often regretted that the personae might appropriate him. He wanted his indelicate essay on cuckoldry, HA Vision of Horns", to - 48 -

be ascribed in the London to Jack Homer rather than "my known

signature", Elia. [9] However, Taylor and Hessey, publishers of

the London, prevailed successfully that he bestow upon it an Elia

signature in this instance, lest, Lamb wrote to Sarah Hutchinson,

"it would be thought an offensive article". [10] Lamb, nevertheless, chose finally to exclude it from his subsequent collection, The Last Essays of Elia.

With "The South-Sea House" in mind, the very first essay to which he set the Elia signature in the London of August 1820, Lamb

described his art as "a tissue of truth and fiction impossible to be extricated". [11] At the South-Sea House, where Lamb himself spent a few months at the very beginning of his career, what characterises each of the clerks who work there is an imaginative hobby-horse which they indulge to escape their present tedium.

In "Oxford in the Vacation", Lamb's trip to visit George Dyer at

Cambridge becomes Elia's trip to Oxford to discover Dyer at work in Oriel College, researching into the origins of the two universities. For Lamb, a sensi ti ve imagination can transform and exalt fact into fiction, after the manner in which Captain

Jackson, in Lamb's London essay of the same name, can, thanks to his "riotous imagination", [12] combat the reality of his impoverishment by inducing himself and his guests at the dining table to conceive a feast. In the London's "Dream-Children; A

Reverie", Elia likewise resorts to creating in Alice (the dream­ daughter he never has) so strong a likeness to the Alice he once courted but never married, that - 49 -

when suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes \,i th such a reality of re­ presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood . there before me, or whose that bright hair was. [13]

When Elia, in "Blakesmoor in H--shire", returns to find the mansion he used to visit as a child completely destroyed, he discovers that his recollection of it can be more potent than the reality of its no longer existing. His imagination reconstructs its physical existence from the planks and panels of his childhood emotional experiences at Blakesmoor. Thus, Elia learns that from "extinguished habitations there may be a hope - a germ to be revivified", [14] and a commentator sensitively concludes that "this is what the reader does with each encounter with the essay, an imaginative reliving of experience from the black-and- white 'fragments' of paper and print". [15]

Lamb, then, to what extent is he Elia? Certainly, in Lamb's personal letters we find many germs which are subsequently revivified to appear in magazine format. "Amicus Redivivus",

"Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of

Modern Art", "A Death-Bed", "A Dissertation upon Roast Pig",

"Distant Correspondents", "The Tombs in the Abbey", and "The Two

Races of Men" [l6] all developed from epistolary origins to become essays of Elia, and three of them carry sub-titles indicating as much. Particularly pertinent to these questions of authorial identity and magazine context is "The Convalescent" in the London of July 1825, in which Elia/Lamb writes of his

"nervous fever". [17] Significantly, only the arrival from his - 50 -

editor of a letter requesting another article (presumably, what

is to be "The Convalescent") can rouse him from the huge

proportions of his self-centred hypochondria and deflate him to

"my natural pretensions - the lean and meagre figure of your

insignificant Essayist". [18] The perfect cure for the Romantic

ego.

In witty banter with his London Magazine readers, Lamb used

subtle stylistics, exploiting to the full the textuality of

magazine writing, to discriminate between a representation of

himself ("Hr. L.", or "L---"), Elia, and another editorial voice

of his own creation. Thus, we find a London footnote for "Oxford

in the Vacation", excluded from the book version of Elia, which

reads:

Such was that sill'y joke of L---, who, at the time the question of the Scotch Novels was first agitated, gravely assured our friend [George Dyer] ~ who as gravely went about repeating it in all companies that Lord Castlereagh had acknowledged himself to be the author of Waverly! - Note - not by Elia. [19]

"L---", "Elia", and "not Elia": Lamb teases us with all three

personae amid spectacularly fluid author-reader relations.

Sometimes, indeed, what seems beyond the essay in Lamb's own

biography enters the fray to extend the emotional significance of

his art. Published in the London in January 1822, "Dream-

Children; A Reverie" elegises "John L, (or James Elia)" [20] -

Lamb's elder brother who had died two months earlier - as Elia

---_._------51 -

relates to John and Alice, his dream-children, stories of his own

youth. The fact that the boy with the same name as Lamb's dead

brother is, like the girl, "only what might have been" [21)

invests the demise of John Lamb with the regret which Lamb feels for what can no longer be for himself too. The essay closes as

the dream-children fade away to the shores of Lethe, and Elia awakens to "my ba"chelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, wi th the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side". [22) The poignancy of Lamb's missed opportunity to marry is set within the context of a faithful relationship between himself and his sister, Mary (cousin Bridget), epitomising the reason why he is a bachelor and yet suggesting too how a deeper sibling affection is the consolation for his sacrifice.

At the opening of the second Elia essay, the reader finds himself absorbed - reflexively - into the text, caught in the act of reading "Oxford in the Vacation" and wondering over the identity of Elia:

CASTING a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article - as the wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye ... never fails to consult the quis sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet - methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, Who is Elia? [23)

Elia then takes his playful author-reader exchange one step further [24) as he envisages the reader drawing upon his recollection of the first Elia essay, "The South-Sea House", in order to determine Elia's occupation: - 52 -

Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half­ forgotten humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the self-same college. [25]

Childlike, effeminate (he opens "Old China" unabashedly

acknowledging his "almost feminine partiality" [26] for painted

tea-cups) , frivolous, good-hearted, modest, prejudiced,

sensitive: certainly, Elia is someone we get to know intimately

from his essays. Lamb had borrowed "Elia", the name of a

deceased Italian clerk from the South-Sea House, in order to make

of it, in one sense, PL-ia" (or, Lamb's writings), [27] and in

another sense to suggest Elia' s counterfeit existence: "Elia" is

anagrammatically "a lie", phonically "a liar". [28] A recent

scholarly article entertains other possible pronunciations, while

noting en passant that Leigh Hunt's Christian name might also be

pronounced ·'lie". [29] Elia's remarkable essay "A Chapter on

Ears" carried in the London of March 1821, but not in its book

form, a postscript and a footnote (this time by Elia rather than

Lamb's editorial voice) merrily refuting "Boldero"'s insinuation,

"under the assumed signature of Leigh Hunt .. [30] in The Indicator

of 31 January 1821, that a "Mr L--b", rather than Elia, was

responsible for Elia's essays. Of course, Leigh Hunt's claim was

no lie - but what a lot of mileage, we might think, does Lamb get out of his, and Hunt's, pseudonyms! However, Elia' s authorship,

and the shenanigans of 'pretending to defend it, was the key-stone

for a familiar rapport between Lamb and his readers in The London

Magazine. Indeed, the success of the E11a essays depends upon - 53 -

Lamb's eliciting a companionable, participatory response from the

reader. Typically, Elia' s voice is disarmingly amicable,

courteous, and frank; invariably, the reader acquiesces to Lamb's silky stratagems; for its first six years, The London Magazine was a success.

It seems pertinent that, for a writer who operates according to subtle literary sleight of hand, the notion of fraudulence should pervade the first two Elia essays. In August 1820, Elia ironically commemorates with the "South-Sea House" essay the centenary of ,·the breaking of that famous BUBBLE" [31] of South

Seas trading financial speculation in 1720; and, moreover, he does so by implying - with a footnote - its literary parallel in the hoax of the Ossian poetry, perpetrated by the infamous James

Macpherson. [32] However, there is nice poetic justice (and an obvious type of defensive logic) in the fact that the slippery

Elia should invest the idea of closely examining into the circumstances surrounding the financial deception as an improper disturbance of historical records:

Layers of dust have accumulated ... that seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger '" with less hallowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous HOAX. [33]

Clearly, there is solidarity among deceivers. Indeed, Elia goes so far as to admit in "Oxford in the Vacation" that, as a child, he "could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot". [34]

Indeed, history itself is personified as but another paradoxical - 54 -

hoax: "Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art every thing!" [35] Yet, as a commentator makes the point, we also hear in "Oxford in the Vacation" how Elia too has been cheated: "defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution" [36] (and here Lamb's own regrets enter once again). Thus, as an adult, Elia will take advantage of a visit to the university in order to stroll around Christ Church

College passing himself off as "nothing short of a Seraphic

Doctor". [37]

Reading in Con-text

Lamb loved and revered scholarship and was a notorious bibliophile. "New Year's Eve" in the London of January 1821 suggests the compensatory pleasure which books offered the bachelor Elia:

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Mus t knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading? [38]

Sui tably, the climax of the "Oxford" essay is marked by Elia' s arrival at the Bodleian Library, where, inside, the shelves

"solace" him. Yet, sensing "all the souls of all the writers" reposing around him, Elia is unwontedly reluctant to reach out and touch, lest he "profane the leaves". [39] Certainly, Lamb treasured his own book collection. In a let ter to Wordsworth - 55 -

of 9 April 1816, we discover a germ of the essay "The Two Races of Men", published in the London of December 1820, as Lamb jokes about how he might combat losing his books to his friends: "I think I shall get a chain, and chain them to my shelves More

Bodleiano, and People may come and read them at chain's length". (40) Indeed, in a discussion of "The Two Races of Men" a critic ingeniously records how

when in the essay Elia locates his study in Bloomsbury, Lamb again slyly echoes this mock-epic comparison of his library to a nationally famous collection. At the time Lamb \,as living in Covent Garden at 20 Great Russell Street ... but it is the British Museum that is located on a much better known Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury! (41)

Of all Lamb's book-borrowing friends, Coleridge was the \,orst offender. In an amusing but curtly reprimanding letter to

Coleridge, Lamb complained:

Why will you make your visits, which should give pleasure, matter of regret to your friends? You never come but you take away some folio that is part of my existence ... my third shelf (northern compartment) from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out its two eye-teeth. (42)

Books were integral to Lamb's sense of self, and their absence is anthropomorphised in a graphic and disturbing image. Yet, at the close of the "Two Races", Elia possesses the charity to inveigle that the reader "shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against

S.T.C." [43], or "Comberbatch", alias Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the men who borrow. For, such men will enrich the books they borrow with extensive marginalia thereby tripling their - 56 -

Plate 6 Portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at 23 - 57 -

value for the owner. Lamb, certainly, was one who profited from his eavesdropping on Coleridge's critical exchanges, via copious annota tions, with the deceased authors in Lamb's own library. It was a unique relationship.

Characteristically, 'however, mutual consideration, rather than vicariousness, colours Lamb's author-reader relations.' Thus, his critique of Wordsworth's "The Cumberland Beggar" within a letter of 30 January 1801 to the poet, singles out passages which "don't slide into the mind of the reader". "An intelligent reader,"

Lamb considered, "finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think upon this subject". In the greatest narra tives, "There is implied an unwri tten compact between Author and reader". [44] What counts is subtlety and co-operation, to the extent that Lamb favoured the reading of Shakespearean drama over watching it in performance for the imaginative and intellectual freedom which the activity extended to the reader.

[45] Pedantic over-reading, however, would destroy the delicacy, irony, and wit of Elia' s essays. Indeed, Lamb constructs a warning against this in a letter of 7 December 1822 to John

Taylor, second editor of The London Jo1agazine, in which he offers

- only to immediately withdraw it - a Preface to the very soon to be published E1ia. Essays which have appeared under that signature in the London Magazine (1823): - 58 -

DEDICATION

TO THE FRIENDLY AND JUDICIOUS READER, who will take these Papers, as they were meant; not understanding every thing perversely in the absolute and literal sense, but giving fair construction as to an after-dinner conversation; allowing for the rashness and necessary incompleteness of first thoughts; and not remembering, for the purpose of an after taunt, words spoken peradventure after the fourth glass. The Author wishes (what he would will for himself) plenty of good friends to stand by him, good books to solace him, prosperous events to all his honest undertakings, and a candid interpretation to his most hasty words and actions. [46]

Indeed, that the initial word of the first of these Elia essays is a vocative "READER" suggests the vi tal degree to which the reception of Lamb's art "as intrinsic to its very production. In

"Oxford in the Vacation", the second essay, the reader is italicized in print, as if each individual reader is being personally addressed (significantly, with a familiar pronoun), as

Elia explains how George Dyer's appearance of being miles away from reality belies how "at that moment, reader", he is:

devising some plan of amelioration to thy country, or thy species peradventure meditating some individual kindness or courtesy, to be done to thee thyself, [47]

In short, Elia is a tease from beginning to end, In his first essay he proffers the suggestion that his history of the South-

Sea House may have been pure fancy: "Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this "hile ... "; [48] and he continues to contribute to The London Magazine even a couple of years after his obituary has been published there - by one ·'Phil-Elia". - 59 -

Indeed, Phil-Elia/Lamb's "A Character of the Late Elia. By a

Friend", which was published in the London of January 1823, appeared as the "Preface. By a Friend of the Late Elia" to

Lamb's second collected volume, The Last Essays of EIia (1833).

Elia, quite simply, was not bound by the physical laws of space and time. As he explains in "Elia to his Correspondents", he

hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again, in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him. (49)

Another presiding voice of the London which, however, was not resurrected after his vane-rusted mortality had crowed its last in "Janus Weatherbound;or the Weathercock Steadfast for Lack of

Oil" in January 1823 was that of "Janus Weathercock", alias

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. The absence of Wainewright's literary brilliance - under the personae of Egomet Bonmot, the

Roue, Cornelius van Vinkbooms, and Janus Weathercock - Lamb regretted candidly in a letter of IS April 1822 to J.A. Hessey, joint-publisher of the London:

What is gone of the Opium Eater, where is Barry Cornwall, & above all what is become of Janus Weathercock - or by his worse name of Vink-- something? He is much wanted. He was the genius of the Lond. Mag. The rest of us are single Essayists.

You must recruit. You will get too serious else. Janus was characteristic. He talkd about it & about it. Th5 Lond. Mag. wants the personal note too much. Blackw owes everything to it. [SO)

------60 -

The great Hazlitt had also left the London. A sense of loyalty,

however, would keep an increasingly-disillusioned Lamb contributing like "a poor, worn mill-horse, in the eternal round

of the damn'd magazine", [51] (he wrote to Leigh Hunt) up until

September 1825, when Henry Southern, its third editor took over.

'But Lamb was to miss his departed fellow Londoners: not only

because of their companionship, as he made clear to John Taylor:

"The Lond. Nag. is chiefly pleasant to me, because some of my

friends write in it", [52] but also because they provided con-

texts which stimulated Elia' s appearances. Janus Weathercock,

indeed, expires on a note of valediction to Elia, whom he does

not know wi 11 reappear pos t mortem. Li terary influence and

dialogue from one contributor to another, often across. several

numbers of the London, served to give the magazine both an

operatic coherence and an engaging house-style. Indeed, the

letter accompanying Lamb's presentation in January 1823 of a copy

of his first Elia volume to a Wordsworth not favourably inclined

towards Hazlitt, begins by drawing attention to the book's

obvious absence of magazine context:

"I beg your acceptance of ELIA, detached from any of its old companions which might have been less agreeable to you". [53]

Moreover, Elia's fame, or infamy, could not be contained to just

the London, but reverberations of it, as Jonathan Bate has

shown, [54] were jealously recorded in rival periodicals, notably

Blackwood's and the Quarterly. Thus, in Robert Sou they 's "Theo-

philanthropism in France and the Spread of Infidelity" in - 61 -

the Quarterly of January 1823, the Poet Laureate makes a

parenthetic comment on the secular nature of Elia' s writing, which instances a London reply from Lamb in the form of his

"Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esquire", attempting to defuse this small but possibly deadly (to Elia's sales) bomb-shell which

Sou they had dropped, Lamb's .response, in turn, prompts another reactionary rejoinder from editor "Christopher North" in

Blackwood's of October 1823, full of scathing rhetoric:

Are you, or are you not, a friend to the 1i berty 0 f the press? of human thought? feeling? opinion? Is it, Charles, enormous wickedness of Southey thus to characterize your Essays? [55]

Disputations between Blackl,ood' s and the London had already occasioned the tragic death of John Scott, but the literary sparring was to continue.

Once Lamb finally extricated himself from The London Magazine in

1825, his desire to write returned, and the following year he contributed Elia' s series of "Popular Fallacies" to Henry

Colburn's The New Monthly 11agazine. "A Death Bed", signed "L.", subsequently appeared in William Hone's Table Book in 1827, but to all intents and purposes, deprived of his regular audience,

Elia away from the London was a fish out of water. Lamb, indeed, had grown decreasingly fond of Elia throughout his career, and an ironic note sounds progressively louder in the essays. In 1831 when he contributed to The Englishman's Magazine, Lamb was requesting of its publisher, Edward Moxon (who, two years later - 62 -

married Lamb's ward, Emma Isola), to "leave out the sickening

Elia at the end". [56) When the magazine folded unexpectedly in

October, Lamb once again felt a new lease of literary life, freed from the necessity of copy-dates:

while I thought I must furnish one of those accursed things monthly, it seemed a Labour above Hercules's 'Twelve' in a year, which were evidently Monthly Contributions. Now I am emancipated, I feel as if I had a thousand Essays swelling within me. [57)

Before he died at the end of 1834, four follow-up articles appeared under the title "Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art" in The Athenaeum of January and

February 1833.

Elia had allowed Lamb the creative outlet his personality needed, while closely protecting his author's sensitivity. And, in a rare moment in "New Year's Eve", we hear, not Elia, but Lamb, speaking out his apology:

If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader - (a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia. [58) - 63 -

REFERENCES TO CHAPTER THREE

1. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 1, 2. 2. Detached thoughts on books and reading. The works of Charles and Hary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 172. 3. WATSON, Melvin R. Nagazine serials and the essay tradition 1746-1820, 1956, p. 81. 4. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 1, 188. 5. MONSMAN, Gerald. Confessions of a prosaic dreamer, 1984, p. 27. 6. The works of Charles and l1ary Lamb, 1903-1905, 1, 433. 7. BATE, Jonathan. Introduction. Elia and The last essays of E1ia, 1987, p. xvii. 8. The works of Charles and l1ary Lamb, 1903-1905, 1, 432. 9. BATE, Jonathan. £lia: restoring the London connection. The Charles Lamb bulletin, 1988, n.s. 62, 186. 10. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 2, 452. 11. Ibid., 2, 282. 12. Captain Jackson. The works of Charles and l1ary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 192. 13. Dream-children; a reverie. Ibid., 2, 103. '14. B1akesmoor in H--shire. Ibid., 2, 157. 15. NABHOLTZ, John R. "Ny reader my fellow-labourer", 1986, p. 34. 16. AARON, Jane. A double singleness, 1991, p. 179. 17. The convalescent. The works of Charles and Nary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 183. 18. The convalescent. Ibid., 2, 187. 19. Oxford in the vacation. The London magazine, 1820, 2, 367. Cit. Jonathan Bate. Elia: restoring the London connection. The Charles Lamb bulletin, 1988, n.s. 62, 183. 20. Dream-children; a reverie. The works of Charles and Nary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 103. 21. Dream-children; a reverie. Ibid., 2, 103. - 64 -

22. Dream-children; a reverie. Ibid., 2, 103. 23. Oxford in the vacation. Ibid., 2, 7. 24. NABHOLTZ, John R. "Ny reader my fellow-labourer", 1986, p. 22. 25. Oxford in the vacation. The works of Charles and Nary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 7. 26. Old china. Ibid., 2, 247. 27. McFARLAND, Thomas. Romantic cruxes, 1987, p. 46. 28. BATE, Jonathan. Introduction. Elia and The last essays of Elia, 1987, p. x. 29. BATE, Jonathan. Elia: restoring the London connection. The Charles Lamb bulletin, 1988, n.s. 62, 185. 30. A chapter on ears. The London magazine, 1821, 3, 266. Cit. J ona than Ba te. Elia: res toring the London connection. The Charles Lamb bulle tin, 1988, n.s. 62, 184. 31. The south-sea house. The works of Charles and Nary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 2. 32. NABHOLTZ, John R. "Ny reader my fellow-labourer", 1986, p. 13. \ 33. The south-sea house. The works of Charles and Nary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 2. 34. Oxford in the vacation. Ibid., 2, 8. Cit. Gerald Monsman. Confessions of a prosaic dreamer, 1984, p. 48. 35. Oxford in the vacation. Ibid., 2, 9. 36. Oxford in the vacation. Ibid., 2, 9. Cit. Gera1d Monsman. Confessions of a prosaic dreamer, 1984, p. 48. 37. Oxford in the vacation. Ibid., 2, 9. 38. New year's eve. Ibid., 1903-1905, 2, 30. 39. Oxford in the vacation. Ibid., 2, 10. 40. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 2, 187. 41. MONSMAN, Gera1d. Confessions of a prosaic dreamer, 1984, p. 110. 42. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 2, 284-285. 43. The two races of men. The works of Charles and Nary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 27. - 65 -

44. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 1, 239. Cit. Janet Ruth HelIer. Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the reader of drama, 1990, p. 119. 45. HELLER, Janet Ruth. Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the reader of drama, 1990, p. 123. 46. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 2, 350. Cit. William Flesch. "Friendly and judicious ,. reading. Studies in Romanticism, 1984, 23 (2), 164. 47. Oxford in the vacation. The works of Charles and Nary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 11. 48. The south-sea house. Ibid., 2, 7. 49. E1ia to his correspondents. .The London Magazine, 1821, 4, 465-466. Cit. Joe1 Haefner. The two faces of the London magazine. The Charles Lamb bulletin, 1983, n.s. 44, 79. 50. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 2, 323. 51. Ibid., 2, 456. Cit. George L. Bamett. Charles Lamb, 1964, p.121. 52. Ibid., 2, 306. 53. Ibid., 2, 360. Cit. Jonathan Bate. Elia: restoring the London connection. The Charles Lamb bulletin, 1988, n.s. 62, 193-194. 54. BATE, Jonathan. Elia: restoring the London connection. The Charles Lamb bulletin, 1988, n.s. 62, 191-192. 55. Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine, 1823, 14, 505. 56. The letters of Charles Lamb, 1935, 3, 318. 57. Ibid., 1935, 3, 325. 58. New year's eve. The works of Charles and Nary Lamb, 1903-1905, 2, 29.

------CHAPTER F 0 U R

WILLIAM HAZLITT

"1 can read no prose now, though Hazlitt sometimes, to be sure - b,t then Hazlitt is lurth all modern prose-ITiters put together."

- Charles Lamb's reported tribute to ~illiam Hazlitt shortly before Lamb's death

Vocation and the Magazine Essay

The essays of William Hazlitt are those of a man who knew [,hat he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. His was an uncompromising art, as the preface to A View of the English Stage

(1818), a selection of his drama reviews from The Champion, The

Examiner, The Morning Chronicle, and The Times, makes clear:

My oplnlons have been sometimes called singular: they are merely sincere. I say what I think: I think what I feel. I cannot help receiving certain impressions from things; and I have sufficient courage to declare (somewhat abruptly) what they are. [1]

His output into the Romantic periodicals was phenomenal. Twenty- one volumes make up the standard edition by P.P. Howe of Hazlitt's complete works - essays which, for Virginia Woolf, read as a true literary corpus, not "independent and self-sufficient, but fragments broken off from some larger book". [2] 11any of these essays were, however, initially published in periodicals.

They earned Hazlitt his keep, and, typically, he would approach magazine publishers with his suggestions for articles whenever he - 67 -

Plate 7 Replica, signed 1825, of Wi11iam Hazlitt - 68 -

found himself in financial straits. The February 1821 issue of

The London Magazine alone contains four Hazli tt essays, one of which is the leading article. [3] Also, as far as he was concerned, writing for the journals fulfilled an essential socio­ political function. The press was a major vehicle for democracy, and, despite his cynical dismissal in "On the Pleasure of Hating" of ail contemporary political stances, "the insolent Tory, the blind Reformer, the coward Whig", [4] Hazli tt was fiercely libertarian. Indeed, in "On the Living Poets" he identifies the

French Revolution itself as the origin of the Lake school, at whose head was Wordsworth. Romantic poetics he read as specifically radical poetics. [5] And it was the radical potential of writing for the magazines of the early nineteenth century which elevated Hazlitt' s sense of his own literary and journalistic career into one of professional vocation. It was the conscientiousness wi th which he undertobk this vocation that ensured a persecution by the Tory magazines, especially

Blackwood's, which nearly broke him.

In response to the scathing condemnation of himself as both an essayist and as a man which Blackwood's heaped upon him in 1818,

Hazli tt immediately came out fighting with a stinging rebuff to his Blackwood's critics (known collectively as "Z") in "A Reply to 'Z'''. He probably intended it to appear in the Whiggish

Edinburgh Hagazine and Li terary Miscellany, [6] bu tit remained unpublished. January of 1819 (the year he separated from his first wife) saw the publication of what should have been

--_. ------69 -

the July 1818 issue of the Quarterly, containing a hostile review of Hazlitt' s Lectures on the English Poets. Haz li tt then set about responding to each individual criticism which had appeared in The Quarterly Review of three of his books, The Round Table,

Characters of Shakespear' s Plays, and Lectures on the English

Poets, which had collected together. some of his magazine articles. He personally addressed the Quarterly's editor - "you are a nuisance, and should be abated" [7] - in his vigorous invective, A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. which, again, did not appear in the periodical press, but was published by John

Miller and priced at three shillings. [8]

1820 to 1823, which corresponds to the heyday of The London

Magazine, witnessed Hazlitt' s greatest and most prolific successes as a familiar essayist within, in particular, the pages of the London and the New Monthly. It also saw the debacle of his profoundly unhappy sexual obsession at forty-three with Sarah

Walker, the teenage daughter of his landlord, and his subsequent nervous breakdown. The infatuation he recorded, to predictable opprobrium from Blackwood' s, in the anonymous - but notoriously his Liber Amoris (1823). According to John Kinnaird's reckoning, [9] more than half of Hazlitt's 116 familiar essays between 1818 and his death in 1830, were penned during these momentous four years. Many of the fifty-two essays (toel ve of which are by Leigh Hunt) which originate from The Examiner and were collected as The Round Table in 1817, are lacking the intimate digressions which hallmark the familiar essay genre. - 70 -

However, Hazli tt's twenty-two "Table-Talks" signed "W.H.·' from

the London, which were collected in book form in 1821-1822 along

with "Table-Talks" from the New Honthly and some other

unpublished essays, demonstrate his personal voice at its best.

But, as was the case with Lamb - Hazlitt' s senior by three years

- a period as a literary critic preceded the dazzling career as a

familiar essayist. "On Criticism" from Table-Talk discloses that what Hazlitt particularly disliked in literary critics was their propensity to do justice, above all, to themselves rather than to

the writer under discussion, A duty to the reader, too, should be paramount:

The cri tic takes good care not to baulk the reader's fancy by anticipating the effect which the author has aimed at producing. [10]

Hazli tt's greatest pronouncements on personal voca tion, though,

reveal a pride in himself not as familiar essayist or critic,. but as: a metaphysician, concerning An Essay on the Principles of

Human Action (1805); a painter, videlicet the sensitive 1804 portrait of Charles Lamb in the costume of a Venetian senator

(reproduced on the next page); and as biographer of his political hero, in The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1828-1830). With a characteristic candidness which rendered him vulnerable, Hazlitt admits in "On the Pleasure of Painting", from the London of

December 1820, that in comparison with creating his visual art,

"I have not much pleasure in writing these Essays, or in reading them afterwards". [11] Indeed, in his lecture "On the Periodical - 71 -

Plate 8 Portrait of Charles Lamb at 29 as a Venetian Senator - 72 -

Essayists" of 15 December 1818 to the Surrey Institute, he goes

so far as to imply that there is nothing he can do as an essayist

that Montaigne has not already done before him:

There is no one to whom the old Latin adage is more applicable than to Montaigne, 'Perean t is ti qui an te nos nostra dixerunt, ' There has been no new impulse given to thought since his time. [12]

Significantly, what might be termed the literary-publishing

"genealogy" of Hazlitt' s - and De Quincey's - familiar essays is

far more complex than Lamb's. A letter from Hazlitt to The

Examiner of 1817 gives birth to the 1823 familiar essay, "My

First Acquaintance with Poets", published in the short-lived

Liberal. One long paragraph only from his "Illustr.ations of the

Times Ne\,spaper - On Modern Lawyers and Poets" in The Examiner of

22 December 1816 is transplanted to The Round Table to become "On

Poetical Versatility"; [13] and the essay \,hich immediately follows it in The Round Table, "On Actors and Acting", is a revision of his piece in The Examiner of 5 January 1817. Lamb's two volumes of Elia essays consist of a selection from his magazine publications, and the alterations for the" book format are usually minor and inconsequential. Hazli tt, however, used his magazine essays and lecture transcripts as a basis for his books. Fewer than half of the essays which consti tute his most famous volume, The Spiri t of the Age (1825), are reprints or al terations of published magazine articles. "Jeremy Bentham",

"Rev. Mr. Irving" (in two parts), "Sir Walter Scott", and "Lord

E1don" appeared in the "Spirits of the Age" series in the - 73 -

January, February, March, April, and July 1824 issues of The New

Monthly Magazine; "Mr. Crabbe" is a shortened version of his May

1821 article for the "Living Authors" series in The London

Magazine; and "Mr. Canning", a brilliantly witty portrayal of poli tical pedantry, originates from The Examiner of July 1824.

As pedantry is a particular bete noire of Hazlitt's -

[Canning) has been all his life in the habit of getting up a speech at the nod of a Minister, as he used to get up a thesis under the direction of his school-master [14)

- so too is that most Romantic of complaints, egotism. And yet, as a commentator recently makes the point, "for an author who was so stridently opposed to egotism, Hazlitt writes a great deal about himself and his opinions". [15) But rarely, I would argue, to the neglect of his readers. Indeed, "On Pedantry" itself, in

The Examiner of 3 and 10 March 1816, advocates how:

The perfection of letters is when the highest ambition of the writer is to please his readers, and the greatest pride of the reader is to understand his author. [16)

Perfect mutual consideration in author-reader relations, within prose which imitates the natural ebb and flow of friendly conversation this is Hazlitt's aim. "On Going a Journey", first published in the New Monthly of January 1822, sets out with

Hazlitt's assertion that he likes best of all to travel on his own, yet as it progresses the reader is skilfully drawn into the narrative as if he were Hazlitt's (valued) travelling companion. - 74 -

"I" gives way innocuously to "we", as Hazlitt constructs playful rhetorical manoeuvres, seemingly to gain the reader's confidence:

Yet if I were to explain to you the circumstance that has so endeared [the daisy) to me, you would only smile, Had I not better then keep it to myself" ,? [17]

The surrounding, liberating countryside invites us "to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal identity" [18] (the convergence of "our" with "personal identity" registers Hazli tt's artistic strategy) and, in due course, his intimate memories are transformed into shared experiences between author and reader,

As Hazlitt recalls, from almost twenty-four years ago, the pleasant circumstances of spending his twentieth birthday over a meal of cold chicken and sherry at a wayside inn, into his recollection enters

a heavenly vlSlon, on which were written, in letters large as Hope could make them, these four words, LIBERTY, GENIUS, LOVE, VIRTUE [19] and the reader is there with him - partaking of his ecstasy,

Hazli tt's familiar essays elicit an affective intellectual activity from the reader while reproducing, remarkably, the cadences - sometimes gentle, sometimes frenzied - of spontaneous musings of someone thinking aloud to himself, Entering into interests beyond the self is an important notion for Hazlitt, In his celebrated essay on Hamlet, Hazlitt explains how it is the readers' very perception of the Danish Prince which brings forth his existence:

------75 -

Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. [20]

Thus, of all Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet, Hazlitt considers, suffers most from being performed. Drama on stage does away with reader-response; an audience is passive, whereas the reader is an active participant in the artistic creation. With the notable exceptions of both Richard HI and The Winter's Tale, Hazlitt is cri tical, even more so than Lamb, of the limi tations of

Shakespeare in performance. An article in the familiar essay mould from the "Round Table" series of The Examiner is married together with the final paragraph of another Examiner essay of 21

January 1816 [21] to produce Hazlitt's literary critical essay on

A Midsummer Night's Dream (for Characters of Shakespear's Plays) which very expertly makes his case:

Poetry and the stage do not agree well together ... Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested ... Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine. [22] - 76 -

Style and the Reader

"The Free Admission", nevertheless, published in the New Honthly of July 1830 as one of the last familiar essays he "rote, is a convincing eulogy on the theatre-going Hazlitt enjoyed as a youth. A recent, extended commentary on this essay demonstrates ho" its intricate rhetorical structure "provides one of the most elaborate examples of Hazlitt's attempt to involve the reader in the expository process". [23] Repetitions of "you" progress to

"he" then to "I" then to ""e", "ith pronouns functioning in a "ay similar to the one "e discovered in "On Going a Journey", until, once a union has been firmly secured bet"een author and reader,

Hazlitt brings home to us the transitoriness of human existence:

"What favourite actor or actress "ill be taking their fare"ell benefit a hundred years hence?" [24] We are brought to realise that our free admissions to the theatre are over no", and all that is left to us, is, to participate vicariously in the imagined pleasures of audiences yet to come:

At the entrance of our great theatres, in large capitals over the front of the stage, might be "ritten MUTABILITY! [25]

Thus, each reader's engagement "i th this essay forever forges connections bet"een other readers and audiences across the plane of time.

Hazlitt is a formidable stylist. His preferred method "as, frequently, to open with a conclusive and often provocative - 77 -

statement which he subsequently clarifies and justifies for the

reader. But sometimes, the structure would be cyclical. "On

Poetical Versatility" begins and ends neatly with related

Shakespearean quotations; "The Indian Jugglers" in Table-Talk, which closes with Hazlitt' s "Death of John Cavanagh" extracted

from The Examiner of 7 February 1819, sandwiches the essayist's contemplations on the art of essay-writing between anecdotes of juggling and fives-playing! Typically, his rhetorical thought processes extend across long paragraphs, which demand strenuous application from the reader who wishes to pick up on all the nuances of Hazlitt's tightly-packed and very allusive prose.

Heticulously selected words and a propensi ty for making definitions characterise his style. In order to conclude a review in The Edinburgh Review of 1816, he quotes from Hobbes:

"it is by means of words only that a man becometh excellently wise or excellently foolish". [26] His essays suggest he agreed with the sentiment.

Shakespeare he admired for the poet's magnanimous genius which

"shone equally on the evil and on the good", [27] and Sir Walter

Scott is praised in that "He is a writer reconciling all the diversities of human nature to the reader". [28] Hazlitt' sown writings, too, reveal a predilection for antipathies, paradoxes, and disavowals. However, what he loved most of all was to thwart the reader's (complacent) expectations, to jolt him into new thinking. Three essays in the "Round Table" series - "On the

Love of the Country" (The Examiner, 27 November 1814) ,

------~------­ - 78 -

"On the Love of Life" (The Horning Chronicle, 4 September 1813; expanded in The Examiner, 15 January 1815), and "On Good-Nature"

(The Examiner, 9 June 1816) reveal this vein of Hazli tt's familiar essay writing at its most entertaining. In each article, the proposition which the title implies is startlingly challenged, even inverted. "On the Love of the Country" teaches us that: "Were it not for the re·collections habitually associated with them, natural objects could not interest the mind in the manner they do"; [29] the love of life equates, essentially, with no more than a fear of death; and the good-natured man is,

Hazlitt powerfully argues, typically indolent, selfish, and passive. Good nature costs nothing. Reciprocally, though:

If the truth were known, the most disagreeable people are the most amiable. They are the only persons who feel an interest in what does not concern them. They have as much regard for others as they have for themselves. They have as many vexations and causes of complaint as there are in the world. [30]

Hazlitt is fond of exposing such truths. And in so doing, as a critic perceptively notes, his specific aim is for the reader

"to participate in the argumentative process by imaginatively living through the powerful opposing evidence". [31] With men other than himself, though, Hazlitt will equate verbal, stylistic facili ty with artful deception - to great essayistic effect i'n his 1806 "Character of the Late Mr. Pi tt", where, according to

Hazli tt, the Prime Minister's anti-revolutionarism suggests his poli tical amorality. Consistent with this viewpoint, William

Pitt the Elder is championed in the "Character of Lord Chatham", - 79 -

written the following year. The Earl "spoke as a man should speak, because he felt as a man should feel". [32] Like William

Cobbett in Table-Talk, whom Hazlitt praises for speaking and thinking in "plain, broad, downright English", [33] Lord Chatham possessed the common touch. Indeed, honesty of expression and integrity of thought are the qualities Hazlitt most prizes in an.

English familiar style.

"Common Sense", published in The Atlas of 11 October 1829, defines a key fundamental dichotomy in Hazlitt's thinking on essay .riting:

Common sense and common place are also the antipodes of each other: the one is a collection of true experiences, the other a routine of cant phrases. All affectation is the death of commOn sense, which requires the utmost simplicity and sincerity. [34]

Hazlitt rigorously exposed the emptiness of platitudes and cliches, especially in the work of professional writers. and thinkers. Indeed, his particular concern expressed some thirteen years previously in "On Common-Place Critics" (The

Examiner, 24 November 1816) - is that readers should not receive short shrift from writers whose lack of originality compels them to think by proxy and to talk by rote.

In "The Indian Jugglers" of 1819 a similar dichotomy emerges, this time expressed as artistic genius versus mechanical skill, and corresponding to the archetypal Romantic distinction between involuntary and voluntary power. Hazlitt is immensely

._------~----.------80 -

appreciative of the jugglers' perfect dexterity: mis-catching a

knife cuts fingers; a lapse in an essayist's style certainly does

not carry such a penalty. Hazlitt thus wonders what there is

that he can do to match the quality of the juggling routines:

··What abortions are these Essays! ... Yet they are the best I can

do'·. [35] It transpires that the creative essay he invents to

describe the jugglers' skill is one of the greatest he ever

"rote. It is, moreover, an inspired notion to finish with his obituary for John Cavanagh, the London fives-player. Hazlitt uses this ball-player as an example not of mere skill (like that

of the jugglers') but of true genius, and as a means to cock a

friendly snook at magazine writing, since Cavanagh plays neither

··foul like the Quarterly, nor let balls ljke the Edinburgh

Review'. [36]

Lamb, we discussed, held the world of the literati in high

regard. William Hazlitt, however, is provoca ti vely irreverent where scholarship is concerned. ·'The object of books is to teach us ignorance··, [37] declares the aphoristic number 40 of ··Common

Places" in the Hunts' Literary Examiner of 1823. In actual fact, what Hazlitt specifically opposed was bookishness and bookmakers.

At times, however, the whole caboodle seems to come under fire, as in ··On the Ignorance of the Learned", originally from The

Edinburgh Magazine of July 1818, where the essayist pronounces

that:

The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers. [38] - 81 -

Indeed, the titles alone of both this essay, and of its companion

Table-Talker "On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority",

indicate the direction of Hazlitt' s satiric thrust. Personal writings, in other words familiar essays which rely upon common

sense rather than common place, make an emotional appeal to

readers with which learning or "the knowledge of that which none

but the learned know" [39) cannot compete for pure reading

pleasure. The viewpoint of the reader is paramount.

In "On the Periodical Essayists", Hazlitt severely criticises Dr

Samuel Johnson's written style (which is in stark contrast to his spoken style, as recorded in James Boswell' s Life of Samuel

Johnson of 1791). Hazlitt portrays Johnson as the embodiment of scholarly authorship and devoid of any personal, stylistic rapport with his reader: "the author is always upon stilts". [40)

Johnson's archetypally balanced and chiselled Augustan prose is, for Hazlitt: mechanical, predictable, and artificial. A "general indisposition to sympathise heartily and spontaneously with works of high-wrought passion or imagination" [41) firmly characterises Johnson as an enemy of true familiar essay style, as Robert W. Uphaus [42) usefully points out in his critical study of Hazlitt.

At the other end of the essay-writing spectrum lies, of course,

Montaigne, "who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man": [43) high praise reminiscent of Hazlitt on Lord

Chatham and William Cobbett. Montaigne was "the first author who - 82 -

was not a book-maker", [44] thus a real 'reader's author' - and the type which Hazlitt most wanted to be.

'·On the Conversation of Authors" published in The London Hagazine of September 1820 declares:

An author is bound to write - well or ill, wisely or foolishly: it is his trade He understands the art and mystery of his own profession, which is book-making: what right has anyone to expect or require him to do more - to make a bow gracefully on entering or leaving a room, to make love charmingly, or to make a fortune at all? [45]

Hazlitt certainly never made a fortune, his love life was catastrophic, and the various other comings and go.ings of his life were as uncompromising and strident as his greatest familiar essays.

But - his art and mystery were always more than just book-making.

------

------~- - 83 -

Plate 9 Miniature of William Hazlitt at about 35 - 84 -

REFERENCES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1. Preface. A view of the English stage. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 5, 175. 2. WOOLF, Virginia. Wi11iam Haz1itt. In: The common reader: second series, 1948, p. 180. Cit. John R. Nabholtz. Modes of discourse in Hazlitt's prose. The Wordsworth circle, 1979, 10, 97. 3. SIKES, Hersche1 M. Haz1itt, the London magazine, and the "anonymous reviewer". Bulletin of the New York public library, 1961, 65, 161. 4. On the pleasure of hating. The plain speaker. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 12, 135. 5. On the living poets. Lectures on the English poets. Ibid., 5, 161-163. 6. WARDLE, Ralph M. Hazlitt, 1971, p. 235. 7. A letter to William Gifford, Esq. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 9, 17. 8. WARDLE, Ralph M. Hazlitt, 1971, p. 244. 9. KINNAIRD, John. William Hazlitt, 1978, p. 271. 10. On criticism. Table-Talk. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 8, 218. 11. On the pleasure of painting. Table-talk. Ibid., 8, 6. 12. On the periodical essayists. Lectures on the English comic writers. Ibid., 6, 94. 13. NABHOLTZ, John R. "l1y reader my fellow-labourer", 1986, p. 48. 14. Mr. Canning. The spiri t of the age. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 11, 150. 15. UPHAUS, Robert W. William Hazlitt, 1985, p. 80. 16. On pedantry. The round table. The complete works of fvilliam Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 4, 83. 17. On going a journey. Table-talk. Ibid. , 8, 182. 18. On going a journey. Table-talk. Ibid. , 8, 185. 19. On going a journey. Table-talk. Ibid. , 8, 186. - 85 -

20. Hamlet. Characters of Shakespear's plays. Ibid. , 4, 232. 21. WARDLE, Ralph M. Hazlitt, 1971, p. 200. 22. The midsummer night's dream. Characters of Shakespear' s plays. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 4, 247-248. Cit. Janet Ruth Heller. Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the reader of drama, 1990, p. 105. 23. NABHOLTZ, John R. "Ny reader my fellow-labourer", 1986, p. 61. 24. The free admission. The complete works of flilliam Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 17, 368. 25. The· free admission. Ibid., 17, 368. 26. Co1eridge's lay sermon. Ibid., 16, 114. Cit. John R. Nabhol tz. Modes of discourse in Hazli tt's prose. The Wordsworth circle, 1979, 10, 98. 27. On Shakespear and Milton. Lectures on the English poets. Ibid., 5, 47. 28. Sir Walter Scott. The spiri t of the age. Ibid., 11, 65. 29. On the love of the country. The round table. Ibid. , 4, 18. 30. On good-nature. The round table. Ibid., 4, 10l. 31. NABHOLTZ, John R. "Ny reader my fellow-labourer", 1986, p. 44. 32. Character of Lord Chatham. Poli tical essays. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 7, 297. 33. Character of Cobbett. Table-talk. Ibid., 8, 50. 34. Common sense. Ibid., 20, 291-292. Cit. Robert W. Uphaus. William Hazlitt, 1985, p. 88. 35. The Indian jugglers. Table-talk. Ibid., 8, 79. 36. The Indian jugglers. Table-talk. Ibid., 8, 87. 37. Common places. Ibid., 20, 126. Cit. Robert W. Uphaus. William Hazlitt, 1985, p. 81. 38. On the ignorance of the learned. Table-talk. Ibid. , 8, 70. Cit. John Kinnaird. Wi1liam Hazlitt, 1978, p. 289. - 86 -

39. On the ignorance of the learned. Table-talk. Ibid. , 8, 73. 40. On the periodical essayists. Lectures on the English comic writers. Ibid., 6, 101. 41. On Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Lectures on the English comic writers. Ibid., 6, 30. 42. UPHAUS, Robert W. William Hazlitt, 1985, pp. 82-84. 43. On the periodical essayists. Lectures on the English comic writers. The complete works of William Hazlitt, 1930-1934, 6, 92. 44. On the periodical essayists. Lectures on the English comic writers. Ibid., 6, 93. 45. On the conversation of authors. The plain speaker. Ibid., 12, 24.

------~--~~~--- CHAPTER F I V E

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

"1 cannot expect that your literary productions either as a Translator or Author will rise in moral tone to my point, for 1 suppose you must please your Readers, and unfortunately little is required.'

- Mrs Elizabeth De Quincey, Letter to her son, Thomas De Quincey

' ... writers and readers must often act and react for reciprocal degradation,'

- Ihornas De Quincey, Review of Foster's Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith

Prisoner of the Press

Autobiography, biography, journalism, literaiy scholarship, philosophy, poli tics, translation: an impressive melange of genres makes up Thomas De Quincey' s wri tings. By the time he emerged as a familiar essayist at the age of thirty-six, with the instantaneously popular Confessions of an English Opium-Eater first published in The London Nagazine of September and October

1821, his dilettantish but erudite youth and early manhood had already taken in five years at Oxford, close friendships with the literati of the English Lake District, a short spell at the

Middle Temple in 1812 in preparation for a legal career, and the editorship of The Westmorland Gazette from July 1818 to November

1819. In 1830 he would consider a London University professorship, having written for John Wilson (alias "Christopher

North") some of the lectures which gained his friend the Chair in

------88 -

!'loral Phi losophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1820. [1]

However, his career until his death in 1859 was to be that of the belletrist; his reputation made within the confines of the literary magazines of the Romantic and early Victorian age.

Edinburgh sustained that career from 1826 onwards. He wrote mainly political journalism for The Edinburgh Saturday Post between 28 July 1827 and 12 July 1828, [2] having already contributed to The London l1agazine a series of essays on political economy - a hobby-horse of John Taylor's - during 1824.

The Confessions had indeed appeared in the London, but only following a disagreement with Edinburgh's John Blackwood, with whom De Quincey had intended their publication. Blackwood's, however, received the sequel, Suspiria de Profundis (!'larch,

April, June, and July 1845), "On !'lurder Considered as One of the

Fine Arts" (February 1827 and November 1839), and "The English

Mail-Coach" (October and December 1849), among many others.

Politics, for De Quincey, divided neatly into the two main causes espoused by Tories and Whigs, the mutual survival of whose parties, he believed, ensured the equilibrium of the State, He was a Tory, yet - unlike Hazlitt, for instance - partisanship did not prevent De Quincey from contributing familiar essays to magazines from both sides of the political divide during the l830s. The radical Tai t 's Edinburgh l1agazine published the

Sketches of Life and l1anners and the Literary Reminiscences, which ran, overlapping each other, between February 1834 and - 89 -

February 1841. During the following years some of De Quincey's other essays appeared in the (Christian, liberal) North Bri tish

Review, which began in 1844. 1849 marked another break with the

Tory Maga [3] and the beginning of De Quincey's association with

Hogg's Edinburgh Weekly Ins tructor, where instalments of "A

Sketch from Childhood" and the "Sir William Hamilton" articles appeared in 1852. The principal work of De Quincey's final decade was to revise and arrange his writings for a collected edition, Selections Grave and Gay, published in fourteen volumes by James Hogg between 1853 and 1860. [4]

However, that De Quincey's works do frequently exist in a number of often radically different "versions" or revisions from literary magazine publication to book format to collected edi tion( s}, presents considerable bibliographical problems and, as a scholar very recently argues, has resulted in "his critical undervaluation and neglect in favor of contemporary prose writers whose works are more tidily available". [5] On library shelves alongside the James Hogg edition stand both the twenty-three volume Boston edition by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields (1850-1859), and the standard fourteen volumes of The Collected r,rritings of

Thomas De Quincey edited by David Masson and published in

Edinburgh by Adam and Charles Black (1889-90). All three have features to recommend them.

Thomas De Quincey wrote the Li terary Reminiscences (which are best known by the title of their 1854 revised verSion, - 90 -

Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets) probably in 1837-

1838, [6) but the demands of magazine serial publication meant that the final essay did not appear in Tai t' s until February

1841. Quite simply, there were times when, with his many revisions, he produced too much for his literary magazine publishers. Living in Grasmere, in December 1823, he wrote to Wordsworth how:

Mere correction of proofs indeed, and corresponding with London on business, is almost enough to fill up my time: for, if all that I have lately written - were published at once, it is a literal fact that I should more than fill the London Mag. myself. [7)

But writing was, notoriously, a painstaking process for De

Quincey. Blackwood's from time to time refused finished articles, notably two sequels, written in 1828, to the successful

"On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts": and this he could ill afford happening. A letter of 1838 to John Wilson following another rej ection from Blackwood' s conveys how De Quincey was sometimes frustratingly unable to judge what his publishers would consider marketable:

Never was I in so much force for writing: but as respects Maga, I am thoroughly disheartened; for I do not perceive the law or principle on which Bl[ackwood]. rejects or receives. [8)

The opium Confessions were his most famous creation, and so De

Quincey often attempted to use their reputation to ensure future literary sales, subtitling his Sketches of Life and Manners in

Tai t' s as "from the Autobiography of an English Opium Eater", and - 91 -

writing under the persona of the Opium-Eater in the "Noctes

Ambrosianae" for Blackwood' s. Like Lamb's essays, De Quincey's are self-referring, and the Confessions is the key-note most frequently sounded.

Magazine writing was all too often an alienating experience for

De Quincey.· He valued direct, personal dealings with editors and publishers willing to encourage work from him page by page throughout the copy and proof correcting stages, but instead he had often to contend "ith the haphazard and impersonality of correcting without access to his original draughts and communicating only via the messengers "ha collected and delivered his writings. The difficul ties .of bridging the gulf between manuscript and print oppressed him, as "Walking Stewart" in

Tait's of October 1840 spells out:

In these sketches (written "ith so much hurry as, in no one instance that I remember, to have allow'ed me time for once reading over a single paragraph of what I had written,) I have usually thought it best, in the few cases "here I had afterwards an opportunity of correcting the press errors, simply to restore the words which it was probable or apparent that I had originally written; or which, at least, I must have meant to write. [9]

He possessed an extraordinary capacity to explore in writing both his psychological and physical torments, which had a certain notoriety. The far-from-unkindly Charles Lamb, at home on 6 July

1824 in company with Crabb Robinson and J .A. Hessey (of the

London), quipped that "Pain and Fuss" a pun on the real literary partnership of Payne and Foss ought to publish

------92 -

De Quincey' s writings. [10] It was, in particular, working to

deadlines that De Quincey the procrastinator found so uncongenial. The constant grind of magazine toil, compounded by

the pains of his opium addiction and his recurring financial

crises would leave him deeply despondent. Another desperate

letter to John Wilson of 25 February 1825 tells how "the war with

the wretched business of hack author, with all its horrible

degradations - is more than I am able to bear". [11] But he

survived. He was, in some respects, an academic manque,/ and,

lacking the time to research for his magazine writings, he would

attempt nevertheless to pass off some of his essays as

scholarship. For instance, "The Toilette of the Hebrew Lady"

from Blackwood' 5 of March 1828 was an abridged translation of

just one chapter from a German archaeological treatise - and much

less than the synopsis of the whole work, which he suggested it

to be. [12] As he acknowledged more than once, having to produce work very rapidly did, however, have its advantages:

hurry and severe compression from an instant summons that brooks no delay, have often a tendency to furnish the flint and steel for eliciting sudden scintillations of originality. [13]

But, as a journalist, he also objected to compromising the truth.

The speed of production required by the li terary magazines, he complains in the General Preface to his Selections Grave and Gay, drives the contributor into

hurried writing, possibly into saying the thing that is not. They won't wai t an hour for you in a Magazine or a Review; they won't wait for truth. [14] - 93 -

What is more, De Quincey the creative intellectual, philosopher, and friend of poets (eventually honoured in his lifetime by both

British and American collected editions of his works) could not readily adapt to the shoddy ways and means of the hack writer all the time that posterity might still bestow upon him a "literary" reputa tion. Indeed, in the Confessions of an English Opi um-Ea ter he admits that "1 imagine myself writing at a distance of twenty

- thirty - fifty years ahead of this present moment", [15) for the satisfaction of future, not present, readers.

The literary magazine market made him feel disadvantaged. All the contributor has is language, which is a weak and ambiguous tool against - and De Quincey did often envisage himself pitted against - the established, power structure which is the Press. A letter addressed "To the Press" of 18 September 1856 registers vividly this sense of an incapacity

in consequence of the very imperfect means for communicating with the Press which I now possess or ever have possessed (being at all times reduced to the single resource of writing - which, to evade misinterpretation and constant ambiguity, requires a redundancy of words - and, after all that is done on my part, requires in addition a Reader that is not only singularly attentive, but also that has a surplus stock of leisure time. [16)

The odds were against him. Nevertheless, it has been reliably estimated that De Quincey managed to contribute at least 215 articles to the periodical press between 1821 and 1859; [17) and all fourteen volumes' worth of the standard edition of his writings, excluding his novel Klosterheim (1832), appeared in

---~-- --~~~------94 -

periodicals. He felt more keenly than Lamb and Hazlitt did the

formal restrictions of magazine format, but, by addressing

journal publishing problems to his reader's attention he

succeeded in challenging his boundaries. "This article, for

instance," he writes in the first "Sir William Hamilton" essay,

"cannot prolong its life into another volume; but it may rise again - it may receive a separate birth de novo - in the future volume". [18] And indeed it did .

. In a very recent study of De Quincey's autobiographical art,

Edmund Baxter posits that the essayist "is trapped within (not

the text but) the 'unseen' machinery which goes to produce the published work". [19] But, at times De Quincey is described as circumscribed even by the articles themselves. The second

"Sir William Hamilton" instalment for Hogg's opens: "Here I am, viz., in vol. XV. [sic] Never ruffle your own temper, reader, or mine, by asking how, and with what right. I am here". [20]

And as Edmund Baxter mentions similarly, Bertram, the hero of

Walladmor (1825), De Quincey' s pseudo-novel trans la tion, is also imprisoned - infamously and provocatively, semiotically - wi thin his own text, when a footnote to the second volume of

Ilalladmor identifies the book Bertram is reading in jail as

the first volume of Walladmor! [21] This work had been commissioned from De Quincey by Taylor and Hessey, following the interest aroused by De Quincey's October 1824 London Magazine review [22] of the German novel Walladmor, which purported to be a German translation of the latest Waverley production by

------95 -

Sir Wal ter Scott. Thus, De Quincey subtitles his novel as

"Freely Translated into German from the English of Sir Walter

Scott and now Freely Translated from the German into the

English", and his preface suggests that "Willibald Alexis" (the

pseudonymous German hack-writer of the German novel) might now

care to translate De Quincey's English version back into German!

An amalgam of translation, revision-making, and biography informs

De Quincey's palimpsest, familiar essay-writing. Revising

magazine articles became an obsession for him. He described it

as a "labour and suffering" [23] to revise the Confessions - and

for his various editors and publishers too, De Quincey's

fastidiousness could be very frustrating. The biographical

essays for his Literary Reminiscences first published in Tai t' s

were in themselves recollections, or re-visions, of his personal

experiences with literary friends, and De Quincey (typically) set

about their composition prepared to relive his relationship with

his biographical subjects.

The four-part essay series on "Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (September, October, November 1834, and January 1835), which

interrupted the publication of De Quincey's Sketches of Life and

Manners in Ta it , 5, can, in retrospect, be seen as a type of

preface to the main 1837-1841 run of Literary Reminiscences,

which began, proper, with "Literary Novitiate" of February 1837.

However, instead of finding in the "Coleridge" essays an

expression of De Quincey's youthful hero-worshipping, we read of - 96 -

misconceptions and - most damagingl)' of all plagiarism in

Coleridge's thought and writings. These fierce criticisms had

been born of later disagreements between the two erstwhile

friends, and, possibly, De Quincey's jealousy of a more famous writer with a similar philosophical and psychological bent .,.

and a more infamous opium-addiction.

The shocking disclosures, emanating from De Quincey's intimate

knowledge of early nineteenth-century literary society of the

Lakes, were scurrilously titillating - and laid De Quincey open

to charges of having betrayed former friends by exposing personal

detai ls whi ch ought perhaps to have remained suppressed - but

they were a lso true,. by and large. De Quincey the youth had

adulated Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads had exercised such a

profound influence on the development of De Quincey's own mind,

and he had eagerly sought to tread in his mentor's footsteps,

even taking over in 1809 the Town End "Dove Cottage" in Grasmere

(photographed as plate 10) upon its vacation by William and

Dorothy, Wordsworth' s sister. However, in the Tai t' s Edinburgh

Hagazine essays of 1839, De Quincey depicts Wordsworth' s

personality as fundamentally imbued by - of all faults - pride.

De Quincey's confessed disappointment that Wordsworth never saw

fit to refer to him in his writings [24] may well touch part of

the cause for his disenchantment. Nevertheless (as De Quincey

relates), it is the case that when he left Grasmere,

disillusioned with Wordsworth, to return to city life - his

Arcadian retreat to the Lake District presented as a type of - 97 -

Plate 10 Photograph of Town End "Dove Cottage", Grasmere - 98 -

pastoral, [25] positioned strategically in the narra ti ve between two periods of dwelling in the "real" world - he re-enters urban society no longer just a friend of the famous, but himself a successful writer in the world of the literary magazines,

Fashioning a Readership

De Quincey seeks to translate this intimate relationship of life to art into a purposeful blurring of the boundaries between real events and magazine reading in "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts". This masterpiece in black comedy, which reads as if it were a lecture intended for the Society of Connoisseurs in

Murder, has as its covert aim the actual implicating of the reader into the sinister crimes described, as, indeed, the essay proceeds by implying that one can indeed be a connoisseur of both art and of murder. De Quincey' s audaci ty is remarkable. His quotation, in translation, from Lactantius sets a tone of learned authority: " ... merely to be present at a murder fastens on a man the character of an accomplice ... " [26] Evidently, though - and to the essayist's pique - Blackwood' 5 Edinburgh Magazine, must have considered De Quincey to have both overreached himself and risked an unfavourable reception from Blackwood' 5 readers, for, appended to the article is a "Note of the Editor" (not by

De Quincey) which declares:

------_._------_._------99 -

We cannot suppose the lecturer to be in earnest, any more than Erasmus in his Praise of Folly, or Dean Swift in his Proposal for Eating Children. However, either on his own view or on ours, it is equally fit that the lecture should be made pUblic. (27)

Yet, as a commentator has made the point, the "Advertisement" to

the essay - cast in the form of a letter "To the Editor" characterises its own audience, suggesting at the outset, with its "Sir, We have all heard ... ·', (28) a (flattering) sense that

the Blackwood's readership comprises a clique of individuals with fashionable knowledge in common. Indeed, "On Murder" panders to

the reader's vanity by playing upon the received notion of a socio-intellectual divide between newspaper, and li terary magazine, readers:

As to old women, and the mob of newspaper readers, they are pleased with anything, provided it is bloody enough. But the mind of sensibility requires something more. (29)

The author too, of course, is privy to this select, sensitive group. Indeed, the Confessions, in particular, operates by crea ting a sense of shared knowledge (and, consequently, camaraderie) between an author and reader from the same social circle. Thus, when De Quincey locates the disreputable lawyer's house "in a well-known part of London", he adds, almost confidentially:

Many of my readers wi 11 have passed it, I doubt not, within a few hours of reading this. For myself, I never fail to visit it when business draws me to London. (30)

------100 -

On many occasions in these opium Confessions in fact, De Quincey

is soliciting sympathy from his readers. His vocative mode is usually polite and urbane, and, moreover, as John C. Whale observes, [31] repetitions of De Quincey' s adj ecti ves of address

- "courteous", "logical", "humane", "generous" - serve as much to suggest the nature of the author who is uttering them as they do

to construct an identity (and role) for the reader. The author hopes for indulgence on the part of his reader, and is ever artful in presenting himself in a favourable light.

Interrogatives in the narrative, as if from the reader, are met

by reasoned and reasonable answers from De Quincey. Sometimes,

the author employs attack as the best means of defence, as in

this passage from the unrevised Confessions:

I hope sincerely, that the quantity of claret, port, or "particular Madeira," which, in all probability, you, good' reader, have taken, and design to take, for every term of eight years, during your natural life, may as little disorder your health as mine was disordered by the opium. [32]

More often, the author instructs, informing his reader (in

Suspiria de Profundis) how he ought to read the text - "Here pause, reader! Imagine yourself seated in some cloud-scaling swing ... " [33] - and what the reader should bear in mind (to De

Quincey's advantage) of the author's process of composition:

The reader must not forget, in reading this and other passages, that, though a child's feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks, I decipher what the child only felt in cipher. [34]

.--.--'- -.---- - 101 -

Footnotes such as this one serve to draw attention to the formal textuali ty of his magazine wri ting. In the second "Sir William

Hamilton" article from Hogg's, the text itself actually manoeuvres the reader towards a footnote, and, by so doing, humorously, but very cleverly, exploits the physical layout of the page and both the influence that layout has upon the reading process and the relationship it implies to the writing process:

"Civilationl And what may that be?" Look below, reader, into the foot-note, which will explain it. Whilst you are studying that, I'll be moving on slowly overhead; and, when you come up from that mine to the upper air, you'll easily overtake me. [35]

Of course, the reader never can "overtake" the author: that is the joke. But, certainly, periodical writing allows of a situation whereby the reader may read articles from an essay sequence whose end the au thor has yet to "reach" himself. If this is reminiscent of the playfulness of Elia, it is also a more steely type of wit, with an edge of malice at times, in which the author, by virtue of his communication (albeit imperfect) with the editors and publishers of literary magazines, can retain the upper hand - as De Quincey's seventh "Sketch from Childhood" in

Hogg's sets out:

I fear that there is no contenting this person called the reader. Strike high or strike low, move fast or not at all, finish the paper or leave ita torso - no course pleases him; and he writes letters against me to the editor of the gloomiest tendency: where, however, I have the advantage of him, for the editor kindly shows me the letters in all their naked wickedness. [36] - 102 -

Or, perhaps De Quincey is just parodying here a type of paranoid bravado of the writer who knows he must earn his living by the pen.

Typically, De Quincey insists upon his authority as a writer.

The autobiography he presents in the opium Confessions·is that of a philosopher, one concerned with intellectual pursuits ever since his school days. It is subti tIed, indeed, "being an extract from the life of a scholar". The startling combination of scholarship and drug addiction is thus reconciled to the purpose of convincing the reader of the veracity of the confessions: an addict would know from experience the effects of opium ("Now, reader, assure yourself, meo periculo, that no quantity of opium ever did, or could, intoxicate"), [37] and a scholar one can trust. Particularly, it would seem, since De

Quincey can, in any respect, cite so many "distinguished" and

"eminent" [38] fellow opium-eaters, including: William

Wilberforce; Dr Isaac Milner, Dean of Carlisle; Thomas, first

Lord Erskine, Lord Chancellor; and Coleridge, [39] whose names, however, have been suppressed from Blackwood's.

De Quincey requires a reader who will not be so shocked by the drug addiction as not to read the Confessions. Therefore, he justifies the opium-taking by describing how his addiction grew out of simply an attempt to relieve tooth-ache, and subsequently, stomach-ache. (Opium in the early nineteenth century could be purchased conventionally over the chemist's counter. )

------~------103 -

Plate 11 Chalk detail of Thomas De Quincey - 104 -

Nevertheless, the Confessions of an English Opium-Ea ter were, of

course, read by many who were attracted by the tale's thrill of

extravagant immorality. The rhapsodic style of the closing

dream-visions, telling of a drug-induced, phantasmagoria of

oriental persecutions, represented too an outstanding innovation

in English prose.

For, a potentially unresolvable ambiguity lies at the centre of

De Quincey' s purpose: conflicting impulses exist which require

sensitivity and considerable literary skill to create of them a portentous author-reader relationship. Thomas De Quincey succeeds in pouring out his soul in Rousseau-like confessions,

"hi le appearing always to respect the social propriety of his li terary magazine audience. [40) Constantly concerned with "who is listening" to him, his self-justification is, however, quite masterly:

You will think, perhaps, that I am too confidential and communicative of my own private history. It may be so. But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to inquire who is listening to me; for, if once I stop to consider what is proper to be said, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper. [41)

Public and private impulses seem at odds: his readers, indeed, are "the public (into whose private ear I am confidentially whispering my Confessions)". [42) An expression of De Quincey's

- and one very reminiscent of Wordsworth's - which is central to his own art as a magazine writer, speaks of: - 105 -

the spontaneous overflow of real unaffected passion, deep, and at the same time original, and also forced into public manifestation of itself from the necessity which cleaves to all passion alike of seeking external sympathy. [43]

That De Quincey could channel this most personal and impulsive of currents so very successfully through the difficult arena of the early nineteenth-century literary magazines justifies, I believe,

Crabb Robinson' s high praise of him on 27 April 1857: "As a writer he is indisputably one of our best·'. [44] - 106 -

REFERENCES TO CHAPTER FIVE

1. CAFARELLI, Annette Wheeler. Prose in the age of poets, 1990, p. 245, note 8. 2. LlNDOP, Grevel. The opium-eater, 1985, p. 285. 3. DEVLIN, D. D. De Quincey, Wordsworth and the art of prose, 1983, p. 3. 4. Selections grave and gay, from writings, published and unpublished, of Thomas De Quincey, revised and arranged by himself. 14 vols. Edinburgh: James Hogg, 1853-1860. 5. CAFARELLI, Annette Wheeler. Prose in the age of poets, 1990, p. 155. 6. Ibid., p. 155. 7. LINDOP, Grevel. The opium-eater, 1985, p. 268. 8. EATON, Horace A. Thomas De Quincey, 1936, p. 38l. 9. Wa lking Stewart. TaU's Edinburgh Magazine, 1840, 7, 636. Cit. Edmund Baxter. De Quincey's art of autobiography, 1990, p. 19. 10. The letters of Charles and Nary Lamb, 1935, 2, 429. 11. EATON, Horace A. Thomas De Quincey, 1936, p. 305. 12. LINDOP, Grevel. The opium-eater, 1985, p. 289. 13. JAPP, A.H. Thomas De Quincey: his life and writings, with unpublished correspondence [1877 J . 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: John Hogg, 1897, 2, 173. Cit. John C. Whale. Thomas De Quincey's reluctant autobiography, 1984, p. 13. 14. General preface. The collected wri tings of Thomas De Quincey, 1889-1890, 1, 6. 15. Confessions of an English opium-eater. Ibid., 3, 414. 16. De Quincey at work, 1936, p. 69. 17. DEVLIN, D. D. De Quincey, Wordsworth and the art of prose, 1983, p. 2. 18. Sir Wil1iam Hamilton, Bart. Hogg's Edinburgh weekly instructor, 1852, 8, 404. - 107 -

19. BAXTER, Edmund. De Quincey's art of autobiography, 1990, p. 165. 20. Sir William Hamilton, with a glance a this logical reforms. Hogg's Edinburgh weekly ins tiuctor, 1852, 9, 273. 21. Walladmor, 1825, 2, note 125. Cit. Edmund Baxter. De Quincey's art of autobiography, 1990, p. 116. 22. Walladmor: Sir WaIter Scott's German novel. The London magazine, 1824, 10, 353-382. 23. Prefatory notice to the new and enlarged edition of 1856 [of the Confessions of an English opium-eater). The collected writings of Thomas De Quincey, 1889-1890, 3, 220. 24. Literary and lake reminiscences. Ibid., 1889-1890, 2, 419. Cit. Judson S. Lyon. Thomas De Quincey, 1969, p. 110. 25. CAFARELLI, Annette Wheeler.· Prose in the age of poets, 1990, p. 166. 26. On murder considered as one of the fine arts. The collected wri tings of Thomas De Quincey, 1889-1890, 13, 11. 27. On murder considered as one of the fine arts. Ibid. , 13, 11, note. 28. On murder considered as one of the fine arts. Ibid. , 13, 9, note. Cit. John C. Whale. "In a stranger's ear". In: Robert Lance Snyder, ed. Thomas De Quincey, 1985, p. 48. 29. On murder considered as one of the fine arts. Ibid. , 13, 46. 30. Confessions of an English opium-eater. Ibid., 3, 41. 31. WHALE, John C. Thomas De Quincey's reluctant autobiography, 1984, p. 165. 32. Confessions of an English opium-eater [1822 unrevised version). Confessions of an English opium-eater and other writings, 1985, p. 51.

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33. Suspiria de profundis. Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine,

18~5, 57, 50l.

3~. Suspiria de profundis. Ibid., 57, 28~, footnote. 35. Sir William Hamilton, with a glance at his logical reforms. Hogg's Edinburgh weekly instructor, 1852,

9, 273-27~. 36. A sketch from childhood. Ibid., 8, 338. 37. Confessions of an English opi um-ea ter. The collected writings of Thomas De Quincey, 1889-1890, 3, 382. 38. Confessions of an English opi um-ea ter [1822 unrevised version). Confessions of an English opi urn-ea ter and other I,ritings, 1985, p. 3. 39. Ibid., p. 235, note.

~O. WHALE, John C. "In a stranger's ear". In: Robert Lance Snyder, ed. Thomas De Quincey, 1985, p. 35.

~l. Confessions of an English opium-eater. The collected

wTitings of Thomas De Quincey, 1889-1890, 3, ~13-~1~. ~2. Confessions of an English opium-eater. Ibld., 3, ~10.

~3. Autobiography. Ibid., 1, 19~. Cit. John C. Whale.

Thomas De Quincey's reluctant autobiography, 198~, p. 36.

~~. ROBINSON, Henry Crabb. 27 April 1857. On books and their writers, 1938, 2, 767. Cit. Annette Wheeler Cafarelli. Prose in the age of poets, 1990, p. 152.

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CONCLUSION

Crabb Robinson' s superla ti ve seems worlds away from the note of mediocrity (and normali ty) which we heard sugges ted in Marilyn

Butler's description of "middle-aged men of not quite first-rate achievement", in our Introduction, However, to have argued for

Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey the type of literary greatness we find in other, more famous Romantics - Jane Austen, Sir Walter

Scott, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron would have been, I think, both unrealistic and self-defeating. I have attempted, rather, to show that the achievement of these middle-aged men was extraordinary, above all things; that the

Cinderella status, so often accorded to them as prose writers, and inseparably bound up with their medium of the literary magazines, is thoroughly misleading. The early nineteenth century was a golden age for magazines, an era when contemporary literary, social, and political thought of the very highest import appeared between the covers of fashionable, constantly talked-about periodicals.

Today, however, as we read Blackwood' 5 and the London from large tomes in library basements, it is too easy to forget that the familiar essays they contain were written by people. And the personal elements of these writings need, I believe, to remain to the fore in our thinking. The whole movement we call Romanticism was one of enormous upheavals in the intellectual and socio­ political life of Britain, Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey wrote

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amid these changes, but, more pressingly, they wrote amid great upheavals in their own personal lives. With all three essayists, we receive very vividly a sense of the pain and personal cost it was for each to be a periodical wri ter. Although it is, I believe, important to remember, that despite their very eloquent complaints, essentially, periodicals made them, rather than marred them. Author-publisher-reader relations the stories which, I have attempted to demonstrate, are as much within the lines of the familiar essays themselves as between them - form a fascinating and crucial aspect of Romantic literature.

To an extent, we all invent authors for ourselves. Reading their writings and their letters enables us to construct an image of how we think they really might have been as personalities. And I am conscious that I have depicted Lamb as a man who projected a self-image of whimsy, wistfulness, and sentimentality as a means of sheltering himself from his own dark spectres of mental strain; Hazlitt as a thinker, a robust intellectual, for whom' to reveal belligerently things as they really are is what makes a great author; and De Quincey as a prose-poet of rare sensitivity, whose poverty and attempts to draw solace from a laudanum bottle meant that while he might scale visionary heights, he would also experience the depths of despair.

Your own reading of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas

De Quincey might, I·hope, justify my inventions.

------BIB L I 0 G RAP H Y

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The Westminster review. Numerous volume runs and title changes. 1824-1914.

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The complete works of Wi1liam Hazlitt. Centenary edition. P.P. Howe, ed. 21 vols. London: Dent, 1930-1934. The letters of William Hazlitt. Herschel Moreland, Wi1liam Hallam Bonner and Gerald Lahey, eds. New York: New York University Press, 1978. The round table: a collection of essays on literature, men, and manners. 2 vols. in 1. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1817. Selected writings. Ronald Blythe, ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.

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Confessions of an English opium-eater and other "Titings. Grevel Lindop, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. De Quincey as critic. John E. Jordan, ed. Routledge Critics Series. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. De ·Quincey a t work: as seen in one hundred and thirty new and newly edited letters. Willard Hallam Bonner, ed. Buffalo, N.Y.: Airport Publishers, 1936. Klosterheim; or, The masque. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1832. Recollections of the lakes and the lake poets. David Wright, ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. [{alladmor: freely translated into German from the English of Sir Wlater Scott and not, freely translated from the German into English. 2 vols. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825.

Other Primary Works

BOSWELL, James. The hypochondriack. Margery Bailey, ed. 2 vols. Palo Alto: Stanford University, 1928. BURKE, Edmund. Reflections on the revolution in France. Connor Cruise O'Brien, ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. COCKBURN, Lord Henry. The life of Lord Jeffrey, wi th a selection from his correspondence. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1852. COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor. Biographia literaria. J. Shawcross, ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. HUNT, Leigh. The autobiography of Leigh Hun t, wi th reminiscences of friends and contemporaries. 3 vols. London: Smith Elder, 1850. HILL, John Stuart. Dissertations and discussions, poli tical, philosophical, and historical, reprinted chiefly from the Edinburgh and the Westminster reviews. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker, 1859. WORDSWORTH, Wi lliam. The prose works of Wi lliam Wordsworth. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. - 114 -

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Bibliographical and Reference Works

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Background, Critical, and Genre Studies

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BARTHES, Roland. SjZ [1970) . Richard ~li ller, trans. London: Cape, 1975. BATE, Jonathan. Shakespearean consti tutions: poli tics, theatre, criticism 1730-1830. Oxford: C1arendon Press, 1989. BAUER, Josephine. The London magazine 1820-29. Anglistica, volume 1. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1953. BEETHAM, Margaret. Towards a theory of the periodical as a publishing genre. In: Laurel Brake,' Aled Jones and Lionel Madden, eds. Investiga ting Victorian journalism. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 19-32. BELSEY, Catherine. Critical practice. New Accents Series. London: Methuen, 1986. BRAKE, Laurel and Anne HUMPHERYS. Critical theory and periodical research. Victorian periodicals review, 1989, 22 (3), 94-95. BUTLER, Marilyn. Romantics, rebels and reactionaries: English literature and its background 1760-1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. CLIVE, John. Scotch reviewers: the Edinburgh review, 1802-1815. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. COLLINS, A. S. Authorship in the days of Johnson: being a study of the relation between author, patron, publisher and public 1726-1780 [1927). Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelly, 1973. The profession of letters: a study of the relation of author to patron, publisher and public, 1780-1832 [1928). Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelly, 1973. CRUSE, Amy. The Englishman and his books in the early nineteenth century [1930). New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1968. D' ISRAELI, Isaac. l1iscellanies of li terature. London: Rout1edge, 1840. FEATHER, John. A history of British publishing. London: Croom Helm, 1988. - 116 -

FEATHER, John. The provincial book trade in eighteenth-century England. Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. GRAHAM, WaIter. English literary periodicals [1930]. New York: Octagon Books, 1966. GREIG, James A. Francis Jeffrey of The Edinburgh review. Edinburgh and London: 01iver and Boyd, 1948. GROSS, John .. The rise and fall of the man of letters: aspects of English literary life since 1800. London: Weidenfe1d and Nico1son, 1970. HAEFNER, Joe1. "Incondi te things": experimentation and the Romantic essay. Prose studies, 1987, 10 (2), 196-206. The two faces of the London magazine. The Chades Lamb bulletin, 1983, n.S. 44, 69-81. HAYDEN, John O. Introduction. In: British literary magazines: the Romantic age, 1789-1836. A1vin Sullivan, ed. Historical Guides to the World's Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983, pp. xv-xxv. The Romantic reviewers 1802-1824. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. HELLER, Janet Ruth. Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the reader of drama. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1990. HOUGHTON, WaIter E. Periodical literature and the articulate classes. In: Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff, eds. The Victorian periodical press: samplings and soundings. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982, pp. 3-27. HOUSE, Humphrey. A famous literary periodical. In: All in due time: the call ec ted essays and broadcas t talks. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955, pp. 245-251. JACOBUS, Mary. The art of managing books: Romantic prose and the writing of the past. In: Romanticism, writing, and sexual difference: essays on The prelude. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, pp. 126-158.

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KLANCHER, Jon P. The making of English reading audiences, 1790- 1832. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. KLINGOPULOS, G.D. The spirit of the age in prose. In: Boris Ford, ed. From Blake to Byron; the new pelican guide to English literature, volume 5. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, pp. 187-208. KNOX, Vicesimus. Winter evenings, or Lucubrations on life and letters. 3 vols. London: Richardson, 1823. LAW, Marie Hami 1 ton. The English familiar essay in the early nineteenth century; the elements old and new which went into its making as exemplified in the writings of Hunt, Hazlitt and Lamb [1934). New York: Russe11 & Russe11, 1965. MARR, George S. The periodical essayists of the eighteenth century; with illustrative extracts from the rarer periodicals [1923). New York: Augustus M. Ke11y, 1971. McFARLAND, Thomas. Romantic cruxes;· the English essayists and the spirit of the age. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. MILNE, Maurice. The 'veiled editor' unveiled: William B1ackwood and his magazine. Publishing history, 1984, 16, 87-103. NABHOLTZ, John R. "My reader my fellow-labourer"; a study of English Romantic prose. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1986. PARRINDER, Patrick. Authors and authority; English and American cri ticism 1750-1990. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991. PRAZ, Mario. The Romantic agony [1933). Angus Davidson, trans. New York: Meridian Books, 1960. PYKETT, Lyn. Reading the periodical press: text and context. In: Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden, eds. Investigating Victorian journalism. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 3-18. ROBINSON, Henry Crabb. On books and their wri ters. Edith J. Morley, ed. 3 vols. London: Dent, 1938. - 118 -

SARTRE, Jean-Paul. Wha t is li tera ture? [1948) . Bernard Frechtman, trans. and David Caute, intro. London: Methuen, 1983. SHATTOCK, Joanne. Politics and reviewers: the Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the early Victorian age. Leicester: Leicestershire University Press, 1989. Spheres of influence: the quarterlies and their readers. Yearbook of English studies, 1980, 10, 95-104. THOMPSON, James R. Leigh Hunt. Twayne's English Authors Series, 210. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977. TILLOTSON, Kathleen. Novels of the eighteen-forties. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. WATSON, Melvin R. J1agazine serials and the essay tradition 1746- 1820. Louisiana State University Studies Humanities Series, 6. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1956.

On Charles Lamb

AARON, Jane. A double singleness: gender and the wri tings of Charles and Nary Lamb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. BARNETT, George L. Charles Lamb: the evolution of Elia. Indiana University Humanities Series, 53. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964. BATE, Jonathan. Elia: restoring the London connection. The Charles Lamb bulletin, 1988, n.s. 62, 182-195. Introduction. Elia and The last essays of Elia. Jonathan Bate, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. ix-xxii. CECIL, Lord David. A portrait of Charles Lamb. London: Constable, 1983. FLESCH, Wi lliam. .. Friendly and judicious" reading: affect and irony in the works of Charles Lamb. Studies in Romanticism, 1984, 23 (2), 163-181. - 119 -

FRANK, Robert D. Don't call me gentle Charles!: an essay on Lamb's Essays of Elia. Corvallis: Oregon S ta te University Press, 1976. !10NSMAN, Gera1d. Confessions of a prosaic dreamer: Charles Lamb's art of autobiography. Durham, D. c. : Duke University Press, 1984. RANDELL, Fred V. The world of E1ia: Charles Lamb's essayis tic Roman ti cism. Port Washington, N. Y . : Kennikat Press, National University Publications,· 1975. WHALLEY, George. Lend your books to such a one. The Charles Lamb bulletin, 1975, n.s. 9, 55-60.

On William Hazlitt

ALBRECHT, W.P. Haz1itt and the creative imagination. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1967. BROMWICH, David. Haz1itt: the mind of a critic. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. HAZLITT, W. Carew. Four genera tions of a 1i terary family. 2 vols. London: Redway, 1897. KINNAIRD, John. Wil1iam Haz1itt: critic of power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. NABHOLTZ, John R. Modes of discourse in Haz1itt's prose. The Wordsworth circle, 1979, 10, 97-106. SIKES, Herschel M. Hazlitt, the London magazine, and the ··anonymous reviewer". Bulletin of the New York public library, 1961, 65, 159-174. STAPLETON, Laurence. Wil1iam Hazlitt: the essayist and the moods of the mind. In: The elected circle: studies in the art of prose. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973, pp. 93-118. UPHAUS, Robert W. Wi1liam Haz1i tt. Twayne' s English Authors Series, 413. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985. WARDLE, Ralph M. Haz1itt. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1971. - 120 -

WOOLF, Virginia. William Haz1itt. In: The common reader: second series. London: Hogarth Press, 1948, pp. 173-185.

On Thomas De Quincey

BAXTER, Edmund. De Quincey's art of autobiography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990. CAFARELLI, Annette Wheeler. Thomas De Quincey: the allegory of everyday life. In: Prose in the age of poets: Romanticism and biographical narrative from Johnson to De Quincey. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, pp. 151-191. CASEBY, Richard. The opium-eating editor: Thomas De Quincey and The Westrnor1and gazette. Kendal: Westmorland Gazette, 1985. DE LUCA, V. A. Thomas De Quincey: the prose of vision. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. DEVLIN, D. D. De Quincey, Wordsworth and the art of prose. London and Basingstoke: Macrni1lan, 1983. DINGWANEY, Anuradha and Lawrence NEEDHAM. "A sort of previous lubrication": De Quincey's preface to Confessions of an English opium-ea ter. Quarterly journal of speech, 1985, 71 (4), 457-469. EATON, Horace A. Thomas De Quincey: a biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1936. LINDOP, Grevel. The opium-eater: a life of Thomas De Quincey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. LYON, Judson S. Thomas De Quincey. Twayne's English Authors Series, 83. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969. SACKVILLE WEST, Edward. A flame in sunlight: the life and work of Thomas De Quincey. New edition with preface and notes by John E. Jordan. London: Bod1ey Head, 1974. - 121 - wllALE, John C. "In a stranger's ear": De Quincey's polite magazine context. In: Robert Lance Snyder, ed. Thomas De Quincey: bicentenary studies. Papers from the Annual Convention of 1981 of the Modern Language Association, New York. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985, pp. 35-53, Thomas De Quincey's reluctant autobiography. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1984.