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Lyrical Ballads and Currie's Works of Robert Burns

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Lyrical Ballads and Currie's Works of Robert Burns LITERATURE, MEDICAL SCIENCE AND POLITICS, 1795-1800: LYRICAL BALLADS AND CURRIE’S WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS DANIEL SANJIV ROBERTS Robert Mayo’s now classic recognition of the contemporary aspects of Lyrical Ballads1 has been followed in recent years, alongside the advent of materialist and historicist criticism, by a greater attention to the work’s links with various radical critiques of society, with what the 1798 “Advertisement” to the anonymous volume provocatively termed, in opposition to conventional and artificial modes of poetic representation, “a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents”.2 In the following essay, I shall explore a link between Lyrical Ballads and the early and influential edition of Robert Burns’s Works issued by James Currie in 1800 from Liverpool. In a previous article I broached this connection in relation to the early reading of Lyrical Ballads by Thomas De Quincey,3 but here I shall develop the argument towards a greater concentration on the reciprocal relations between the two works. I shall suggest moreover that Wordsworth’s idea of the poet’s “natural” sensibility in his later additions to the “Preface” is worked out in tension with Currie’s portrayal of Burns’s “diseased” sensibility as a hypochondriac. Although the Liverpool circle of William Roscoe and James Currie is now little-known outside Liverpool city history, in the early nineteenth century they were among the most articulate and well-known liberal opposition figures in England, opponents of the slave-trade for which Liverpool was famous, besides having among their number various notable medical practitioners, art patrons and literateurs – including Roscoe and Currie in particular, on whom this article will focus.4 We may commence our narrative of Coleridge’s connection with this group from 13 May 1796, when Coleridge quoted a poem of Roscoe’s in The 1 Robert Mayo, “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads”, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, LXVIIII/3 (June 1954), 486. 2 Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, London, 1798, ii (italics in quotation added). 3 “De Quincey’s Discovery of Lyrical Ballads: The Politics of Reading”, Studies in Romanticism, XXXVI/4 (Winter 1997), 511-40. 4 For a good account of the political importance of the Liverpool group, see J.E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England 1793-1815, Cambridge, 1982. 116 Daniel Sanjiv Roberts Watchman.5 Roscoe had recently published his much acclaimed Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici of which Coleridge was certainly aware,6 and in turn Roscoe must have viewed Coleridge sympathetically, for on 20 July 1796, following Coleridge’s decision to discontinue The Watchman, he wrote to a mutual acquaintance, the Rev. John Edwards, a Unitarian minister at Birmingham, suggesting that Coleridge should move to Liverpool and offering to help revive Coleridge’s budding career as a political journalist.7 By 22 August, however, Coleridge was planning to start a day-school in Derby under the patronage of Dr Peter Crompton – a member of the Derby Philosophical Society and also well known to Roscoe – who offered to send his own children to Coleridge for tuition.8 Roscoe must have been informed in some way of Coleridge’s new plans as another letter of his to Edwards dated 28 August graciously indicates his pleasure at hearing of Coleridge’s decision. Here, even more than before, the public-spirited Roscoe seems to view Coleridge in the light of a promising but impecunious talent whose promotion was for him something of a duty. In this respect, Coleridge reminds Roscoe of Burns’s unfortunate career at a time when Currie’s edition of Burns was being contemplated but had not yet begun.9 Roscoe cordially agreed that Coleridge’s genius required a more rural setting and that Derby would be ideal on account of its pleasant situation, the greater opportunities it presented, and “its greater number of distinguish’d characters in matters of taste and Letters”.10 Roscoe’s reference to Derby’s distinguished personages would have surely included Erasmus Darwin, founder of the Derby Philosophical Society of which Crompton was a member, and well-known to the Liverpool circle and beyond. Coleridge had met Darwin in 1796 and was much 5 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eds Kathleen Coburn et al., 16 vols, Princeton and London, 1971- , II: The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton, London and Princeton, 1970, 351-52. 6 See Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, Oxford, 6 vols, 1956-71, I, 229. 7 William Roscoe, “To Rev. J. Edwards”, 20 July 1796, Ms. 920 ROS 1364, Roscoe Papers, Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool. See Appendix. 8 Coleridge, Collected Letters, I, 229-33. In 1798, Peter Crompton would again be involved in discussing Coleridge’s prospects, this time, with the well-known radical, John Thelwall (see Nicholas Roe, “‘Atmospheric Air Itself’: Medical Science, Politics and Poetry in Thelwall, Coleridge and Wordsworth”, in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin, London, 1998, 198-99). 9 Although Currie showed a lively interest in the publication of Burns’s papers in the aftermath of his death, it was only in September 1796 that he finally agreed to act as editor (see W.W. Currie, Memoir of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of James Currie, 2 vols, London, 1831, I, 259-66). 10 William Roscoe, “To Rev. J. Edwards”, 28 August 1796, Ms. 920 ROS 1365, Roscoe Papers, Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool. See Appendix..
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