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Introduction Chapter 1: Gothic and Romantic Crowds Notes Introduction 1. Frank Jordan cites Arthur Murphy’s 1772 tragedy The Grecian Daughter as an analogue or source for Scott (FN 576). A more likely source would be Joseph Addison’s Spectator, No. 439, July 24, 1712, but Scott also owned a copy of Brydone’s Tour Through Sicily and Malta (Alexander, ed., Count Robert of Paris 531). 2. In order partly to ensure silence “a small tin tube might reach from each cell to the inspector’s lodge. By means of this implement, the slight- est whisper of the one might be heard by the other” (Bentham 41). 3. The postmodern transvaluation of the swarm shares little with anti- novel discourse. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri establish a his- torical sequence of the common people in resistance: from a modern army in which the people are imagined as a single body, to a guerrilla army structured “like a pack of wolves,” to the postmodern network that “might be imagined like a swarm of ants or bees—a seem- ingly amorphous multiplicity that can strike at a single point from all sides” (57). Characterized by a seeming formlessness and spon- taneity, the postmodern multitude possesses “swarm intelligence,” a collective and social intelligence, quite opposed to the lowest com- mon denominator (91). 4. Drawing upon Walter Reed’s Exemplary History of the Novel (1981), Cathy N. Davidson uses the phrase “mass privacy” (260). 5. Nicholas Visser argues that Le Bon synthesizes an “amalgam of ortho- dox views of the crowd into an overarching ‘scientific’ explanation” (294). These orthodox views find their origins at the time of the French Revolution in the work of such authors as Burke, Scott, and John Galt: “English novelists and social thinkers in the aftermath of the French Revolution developed a sustained and surprisingly cohesive ‘theory’ or discourse of the crowd” (293). Chapter 1: Gothic and Romantic Crowds 1. Deidre Lynch claims that Radcliffe engaged in a project of populist and feminist historical recovery: “In works such as A Sicilian Romance and The Mysteries of Udolpho, servants’ gossip, not written docu- ments, keeps alive the memory of the wrongs done to the narratives’ 202 Notes dispossessed, spectral mothers. Radcliffe thereby makes the truth of the past the charge of the group conventionally associated with illit- eracy, superstition, and delusion” (145–46). 2. For a delineation of “the shaky line between the effects of crowds and those of the novel itself,” see Plotz 72. Carol Houlihan Flynn discusses, in addition to Harrington, other fictional representations of the Gordon Riots prior to Dickens—those in George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799) and Thomas Gaspey’s The Mystery; or Forty Years Ago (1820). 3. Raymond Williams argues that Wordsworth posits alternative responses to the powerful impact of urban anonymity: “we can retreat, for secu- rity, into a deep subjectivity, or we can look around us for social pic- tures, social signs, social messages, to which . we can try to relate as individuals but so as to discover, in some form, community” (295). Frances Ferguson suggests that in Book 7 of The Prelude it is less crowds of bodies than the presence of competing consciousnesses—owing, for example, to the rise of new roles for women—that led to the forma- tion of a Romantic consciousness that found its fullest expression in solitude (114). 4. In claiming that the imagination for Wordsworth and Coleridge is consistent with an individualist ideology, I am emphasizing a differ- ent kind of politics from Nigel Leask, who has examined Coleridge’s shift from an egalitarian, republican, civic model of imagination in his early works to an elitist, other-worldly one by the time of the Biographia Literaria. Following Gayatri Spivak, Forest Pyle finds a challenge to the unified subject in Shelley’s “strong” version of imag- ination “as the proposition of an insistent alterity that works against the ‘principle of Self’ in which it is ‘housed’ ” (ix). For Shelley, “the agency exercised by the imagination is not regarded as a subjective agency: the imagination Shelley refers to in the Defence and else- where exceeds the ‘circumference’ of the self or the mind” (Pyle 96). Despite the ideological opposition between Shelley and Coleridge, Pyle finds a similar relation between imagination and subjectivity in both writers: “Coleridge’s theory of the imagination . does not presume the unity of either subject or nation; it takes the divisions of both as the starting point of its ideological work. Coherence is not, in other words, a condition of the process but an imaginary outcome” (57). 5. In contrasting Godwin to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who “had become pillars of the established order,” John Middleton Murry comments on Godwin’s attitude toward alehouses: “Such a degree of imaginative sympathy and tolerance towards the labourer was almost unparalleled among his most enlightened contemporaries” (254, 266). 6. In her reading of this Coleridge footnote on mass culture, Karen Swann uses Benjamin’s term “mechanical reproduction”; for Coleridge, Notes 203 popular literature “is aligned with the mechanical reproduction of conventions and the proliferation of commodities, and with the falsely or unnaturally inspirational ‘dose’ which circulates a taint of diseased sexuality through a body of increasingly dependent and emasculated consumers, most of whom were of course female to begin with” (413). For Swann, Coleridge and high Romantic culture remain haunted by the addiction, commodification, and feminiza- tion against which they define themselves. 7. Nicholas Rennie compares Emile Zola to Wordsworth in their resis- tance to the mass phenomena that threaten both individuality and narrative unity. Zola seeks to manage the crowd and preserve the integrity of the individual by foregrounding from within a multitude a group of named representative individuals. Zola avoids slipping into fragment and anecdote, the narrative genres that express the disper- sal of experience in urban modernity, while he “necessarily compro- mises the effect of the crowd as an anonymous force” (Rennie 407). 8. The now famous instance of Wordsworth’s individualizing, dehis- toricizing, and “romanticizing” of scenes described by Gilpin involves the elimination of the numerous beggars from the scene of Tintern Abbey. Gilpin is struck by how “the whole hamlet” of wretched inhabitants appeared “at the gate” of the ruined abbey to seek alms (50). 9. Indeed, the “growth of marine insurance” contributed support to eighteenth-century legislation against the practice of wrecking, which traditionally met some of the needs of impoverished “coastal dwellers” (Rule 168, 170). 10. For Andrew Franta, Wordsworth’s claim in the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” that an original author “has the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” involves a simultaneous assertion of control over and acknowledgment of dependence on the reader, as the “Essay, Supplementary” marks a “move away from the expressiv- ism of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads . toward a new recognition of the centrality of the effects that poems have on their readers” (59). 11. Franta connects Wordsworth’s concern for the making of taste to ensure “poetry’s endurance” with “Wordsworth’s increasingly strong tendency to think about his poetry in architectural terms” (70). 12. Austen creates in Lady Maria Bertram a female figure of luxury simi- lar to the Regency dandy. Like Beau Brummell, Lady Bertram rejects interiority and choice, because she lacks access to her own needs and preferences. Thus, when Mrs. Grant invites Fanny Price to dinner at Mansfield parsonage, Lady Bertram wonders if she will be able to do without her niece’s company. Edmund advises his mother to seek Sir Thomas Bertram’s opinion: “So I will, Edmund. I will ask Sir Thomas . whether I can do without her” (Mansfield Park 253). A few pages later, when confronted by the choice between two card tables, Lady Bertram again consults her husband: “What shall 204 Notes I do Sir Thomas?—Whist and Speculation; which will amuse me most?” (278). 13. Describing Hazlitt as a skeptic who “seeks no unity, offers no ‘res- olution of tensions’ ” and as one who “had the faculty of holding two opposed ideas in his mind at the same time,” David Bromwich discusses at length the chapter on Coriolanus from the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (5, 22, 314–26). Noting that “the visual spectacle and personal vanity of monarchy seemed to [Hazlitt] to play into an inherent weakness in the human imagination,” Kevin Gilmartin insists that, beyond an individualizing imagination, there is “the potential for collective trajectories in Hazlitt’s prose” (45, 52). 14. While concerned with the tension between British Unionism and Irish nationalism, rather than with efforts to represent the crowd, Jim Hansen offers similar reflections on formal problems in Maturin’s novels: “When his texts attempt to work out insoluble social prob- lems at the level of content, they end up falling apart at the level of formal unity” (358). Chapter 2: Popular versus Legitimate Authority in Scott’s THE HEART OF MID-LOTHIAN 1. These opposing symbolic values have been explored in the debate between Catherine Gallagher and Neil Hertz over why it is that the figure of a hideous woman should have embodied revolutionary vio- lence in nineteenth-century literary and historical accounts. 2. Mike Hill has criticized E. P. Thompson’s “unsustainable opposi- tion” between the “moral economy” of the crowd and Adam Smith’s political economy. In Hill’s view, Thompson should have taken into account Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to recog- nize that, “Far from standing outside and thereby in opposition to capitalism, sympathetic experience and (unequal) moral reciprocity is . congenial to the early modern market” (760, 756). 3. Burke’s friends Thomas English (c.
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