UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title After Time: Romanticism and Anachronism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4f2618ws Author Nicholson, Michael Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles After Time: Romanticism and Anachronism A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Michael Anthony Nicholson 2016 © Copyright by Michael Anthony Nicholson 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION After Time: Romanticism and Anachronism by Michael Anthony Nicholson Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Helen E. Deutsch, Co-Chair Professor Anne K. Mellor, Co-Chair Before, during, and after the long Romantic era, Europe experimented with new technological modes of measuring and telling time with clock and calendar: Thomas Tompion, the “Father of English Watchmaking,” manufactured thousands of timepieces in the 1700s, Britain erased eleven days from the calendar in the 1750s, France turned back the hands of time to Year One in the 1790s, and the British Railway Clearing House adopted Greenwich Mean Time in the 1840s. At the same moment, English poets from a broad range of backgrounds were developing new poetic strategies of anachronism (in its literal, etymological sense of “against time”) to contest the increasing dominance of what I call “imperial time”: the new clock-based, machine-regulated, and strictly standardized temporality used to enforce a forward-moving narrative of empire. My research highlights the central role of poetry in asserting a new ii chronopolitics that enacts powerfully untimely rhythms in order to reform entrenched cultural and economic institutions. Historical and historicist works from the eighteenth century to the present portray anachronism as the sign of error and backwardness. “After Time” alternatively argues that intentional anachronism is neither the emblem of indefensible inaccuracy nor the mark of cultural primitivism. Rather than opposing anachronism to history, my dissertation historicizes anachronism. Revising instead of abandoning history, the poems of Mary Leapor, Elizabeth Benger, Joanna Southcott, and Lucy Aikin build alternative feminist traditions out of the new imperialist teleologies that tied tropes of chronological progress to the Garden of Eden and the feminization of culture. By comparison, both new transatlantic anthologies of fugitive pieces and the more urbane occasional verses of Horace Walpole and Lord Byron defy this new time program by variously relating ephemeral scraps and fading inks to a series of fleeting figures: juvenile poetasters, fugitive slaves, and queer cosmopolitans. The works of William Wordsworth and John Clare, by contrast, connect an increasingly obsolete sense of local, agrarian time with circular and belated lyric temporalities. Finally, the epics and odes of William Blake, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley move after time—beyond anachronism and toward timelessness—in order to explore the ethical and aesthetic possibilities of eternity. Taken together, these writers offer us new ways of understanding the power of poetic form to reshape time’s binds. iii The dissertation of Michael Anthony Nicholson is approved. Joseph E. Bristow Kathryn Norberg Helen E. Deutsch, Committee Co-Chair Anne K. Mellor, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Imperial Time Historicizing Anachronism Chapter I: Sacred Progress: Women and Superior Secondariness in Romantic Poetry 23 “What Oft Was Not Thought”: Feminism, Revision, and the Verse Satire “A Softer Man”: Feminism, Revision, and the Progress Poem Chapter II: Occasional Time: Fugitive Poetics from Walpole to Byron 76 Occasional Time and Queer Fugitivity Juvenile Fugitivity and the Poetics of Privilege Fugitive Slaves, Fugitive Inks The Afterlives and Ancestors of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Anachronism and Fugitive Fellowship Chapter III: Local Time, Rural Architecture: Cumbrian Culture in Lyrical Ballads (1800) 134 Cumbrian Customs and Local Resistance Cumbrian Dialect and Regional Defiance Revising Eighteenth-Century Theories of “Rural Architecture” Cumbrian Temporality and Lyric Time Wordsworth’s “Michael” and the Survival of “Rural Architecture” v Chapter IV: Anachronism, Itinerancy, and the “I”: John Clare’s Lyric Defiance 186 The Landscape of the Romantic Lyric “I” Clare’s Lyric and Biographical Afterlives The Untimely Clare: Poet Past and Future Coda: From Time to Timelessness 226 Bibliography 234 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: The Women Writers Project homepage 71 Figure 2. “Texts Included in Women Writers Online, Sorted by Date,” in the Women Writers 72 Project digital database Figure 3. “Collaborations with the WWP,” in the Women Writers Project digital database 73 Figure 4. Google Ngram Search, “Poems on Several Occasions,” 1700-2000 76 Figure 5. Google Ngram Searches, “Occasion” and “Occasions,” 1700-2000 77 Figure 6. Richard Bentley’s satire of The Calendar Act, designed for Horace Walpole’s 84 Fugitive Pieces (1758) Figure 7. Frontispiece to Walpole’s Fugitive Pieces 85 Figure 8. Sundial with inscription (1747), St. Buryan’s Parish Church, Cornwall 86 Figure 9. Philibert Louis Debucourt, Calendrier Républicain (1794) 87 vii Figure 10. Salvatore Tresca, “Brumaire: 23 Octobre” (1797-98) 88 Figure 11. Decimal-Dialed Watch from the French Revolutionary Era 89 Figure 12. Portraits of Walpole and Lord Byron at age 18 91 Figure 13. Images of the Trinity College Clock (1815 and 2016) 107 Figure 14. Masthead from The Mystery, ed. Martin R. Delany (Pittsburgh, 1846) 119 Figure 15. Title page from Henry C. Bibb’s Voice of the Fugitive (3 December 1851) 120 Figure 16. Extract from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Revolt of Islam (1818), reprinted in Bibb’s 121 Voice of the Fugitive (1851) Figure 17. Engraving (1814, after Thomas Stothard) of Byron’s Child Harold’s Pilgrimage 123 Figure 18. Title page from Byron’s Hours of Idleness (1807) 124 Figure 19. Table of contents from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) 127 Figure 20. Title page from The Fugitive: A Journal of Poetry (1922-25) 132 viii Figure 21. Title page from William Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk (1793) 176 Figure 22. Edward Edwards, “On Agriculture and Rent,” in The Quarterly Review (1827) 221 ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without Anne K. Mellor and Helen E. Deutsch. Anne inspired me to attend UCLA, and has been a true advocate ever since. Her encyclopedic mind has enriched my work and broadened the horizons of my Romanticism. From the first, Helen challenged me to think more subtly about the roots of Romantic poetry. Her teaching continues to transform my thinking about lyric form and literary theory. I am forever grateful to both of my advisors for their incandescent brilliance, unwavering cheer, and fast friendship. Joseph Bristow is a stellar and selfless mentor who has guided my scholarship to fortuitous ends. Joe has offered professional advice and care at every turn, and his steady influence will be felt throughout these pages. Kathryn Norberg’s interdisciplinary insights on the poetics of time have tremendously improved this project. Celeste Langan moved me to study Romanticism as an undergraduate, and Saree Makdisi further motivated the origins of this project. I have long benefited from the intellectual influence and judicious editorship of Michael C. Cohen, Sarah Tindal Kareem, and Anahid Nersessian. Ali Behdad, Jonathan H. Grossman, Ursula Heise, Christopher Looby, Christopher Mott, and Felicity A. Nussbaum have offered wisdom and fellowship. Several more generous friends and colleagues have accompanied me on this journey. Katherine L. Bergren, Daniel Couch, Lindsay Wilhelm, and Amy R. Wong have been my most steadfast comrades and skillful critics. I have also appreciated the delightful company of Alex Zobel, Beatrice Sanford Russell, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alex Eric Hernandez, Alex L. Milsom, Sarah Nance, Jordan Wingate, Grant Rosson, Gillian Adler, Ian Newman, Fuson Wang, Taylor Walle, Conor O’Sullivan, Dustin Friedman, and Amanda Hollander. x A dissertation-year fellowship at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library provided welcome research support for my archival work on the fugitive poetics of Lord Byron. A visiting fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library was instrumental to my work on Horace Walpole and anachronism. I would also like to acknowledge the astute feedback of those who attended my research presentations at NASSR, ASECS, MLA, the Dickens Project Conference, and Indisciplines of Enlightenment. The faculty and graduate students of McGill University and The University of Toronto offered brilliant comments on lectures drawn from this study. Thomas and Melody Nicholson have encouraged and supported my aspirations every step of the way. My deepest debts are to Lauren Clifford, without whose unfailing wit and companionship this project would not have been possible. Parts of Chapter Three are reproduced with permission from “‘Rural Architecture’: Local Lyric and Cumbrian Culture in William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1800),” Genre 48.3 (2015): 405-33, while parts of Chapter Four are reprinted with permission from “The Itinerant ‘I’: John Clare’s Lyric Defiance,” ELH 82.2 (2015): 637-69. xi VITA Education M.A., English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011 B.A., summa cum laude,