THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Four Literary Protegees of the Lake Poets: Caroline Bowles, Maria Gowen Brooks, Sara Coleridge and Maria Jane Jewsbury being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Dennis Jun-Yu Low, SA (Oxon) March 2003 Therefore, although it be a history Homely and rude, I will relate the same For the delight of a few natural hearts: And, with yet fonder feeling, for the sake Of youthful Poets, who among these hills Will be my second self when I am gone. Wordsworth Contents Contents ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ 2 List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................................... 4 Preface ........................................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1: The Lake Poets and 'The Era of Accomplished Women' ............................................ 13 Chapter 2: Caroline Bowles .......................................................................................................... 51 Chapter 3: Maria Gowen Brooks ................................................................................................ 100 Chapter 4: Sara Coleridge .......................................................................................................... 144 Chapter 5: Maria Jane Jewsbury .... ............................................................................................ 201 Chapter 6: Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 247 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 267 1 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Angela Leighton, for all her sage advice and support during my time at Hull, and Brian Rigby, for all his help in the final stages of writing-up. I would also like to thank the University of Hull's Company of Merchants of the Staple of England Travel Bursary for their assistance in getting me to the Lake District and Nottingham; the university's Carl Baron Fund for getting me to New York and Texas; and Ely Cathedral's Bishop Laney's Charity which generously paid for a substantial number of the books mentioned in my bibliography. I am grateful to the staff of the following institutions for allowing me to consult their rare books and manuscript collections: Bodleian Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; Columbia University, New York; Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Girton College, Cambridge; Harry Ransom Humanities Resource Center, University of Austin, Texas; John Rylands Library, Manchester; Keswick Museum, Cumbria; Miriam Coffin Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; National Art Library, London; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; New British Library, London; New York Public Library, New York; Nottinghamshire Archives, Nottingham; Trinity College, Cambridge; Victoria University, Toronto; West Sussex County Records Office, Chichester; and The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere. I am also grateful to Mrs Joan Coleridge for her kindness respecting my access to the Coleridge Estate; David and Martin Kempe for their willingness to share their information and private manuscript collections relating to Anna Eliza Bray; Lynda Pratt for her valuable inSights into Robert Southey; Michelle Todd for putting me up in Chichester; Isabella (you never told me your last name) for showing me around Greta Hall, Keswick; and the zoological curator of the 2 Manchester Museum, Henry McGee, who went above and beyond the call of duty with respect to my queries about nineteenth-century albatross. I would also like to record my gratitude for all my friends. In particular, I would like to thank Rachel Sarsfield and Eleonora Federici for their shrewd proof-reading; Giles Montagnon for his help with Maria Gowen Brooks's letters in French; and my housemate, Julia Scott, for being so improbably patient with me these last few years. These acknowledgements would not be complete without my thanking my mother and father: without their love and unfailing support, this thesis would never have been written. *** 3 List of Abbreviations BD Caroline Bowles, 'The Birth-Day'. The Poetical Works (London, 1867) CT Caroline Bowles, The Cat's Tail: being the history of Childe Merlin (Edinburgh, 1831) EF Caroline Bowles, Ellen Fitzarthur: a metrical tale. in five cantos (London. 1820) HRHRC Harry Ransom Humanities Resource Center, University of Austin, Texas JE Maria Gowen Brooks, Judith, Esther and Other Poems (Boston, 1820) RSCB The Correspondence of Robert Southey and Caroline Bowles, ed. Edward Dowden (Dublin and London, 1881) SCML Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge. 2 vols., ed. Edith Coleridge (London, 1873) SH Caroline Bowles, Solitary Hours (New York, 1846) WL The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 8 vols., ed. Alan G. Hill and Mary Moorman (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967-93) 4 Preface Sailing to Bombay aboard the HMS Victory in 1833, the Revd. William Fletcher wrote to his sister­ in-law, Geraldine Jewsbury. He enclosed, with his letter, a stuffed albatross. 'The admirable joumal of your sister will give you some account of albatross shooting, and a specimen of its plumage', he explained, 'Since then a gentleman has most politely presented a real albatross though rather a small one, to her & she now gives it to you. There, my dear Girl, I know you will now repeat 'The Ancient Mariner' with more knowledge though not better taste than you used to do. '1 At some stage in the 1820s and 30s, Coleridge's' Ancient Mariner', a cautionary tale about an old sailor who is severely punished for shooting an albatross, had, it seems, gone on to inspire a generation of sea-faring readers to take up albatross shooting for themselves. Word of this never reached Coleridge himself but, given his low opinion of the contemporary reading public, he would not have been at all surprised at how divorced readings of his poetry had become from his 2 original intentions . If the 1820s and 30s proved to be difficult years for Coleridge and his contemporaries, they have, subsequently, proved difficult for modem literary scholarship. Falling chronologically between received notions of Romanticism and Victorianism, the 1820s and 30s remain something 1 'Letter from William Fletcher to Geraldine Jewsbury', Jewsbury archives, English MS 1320/62, John Rylands Library, Manchester. 2 Alexander Dyce recalled that. '[W]henever they were guilty of any unfortunate piece of awkwardness, - such as breaking a wine-glass, or spilling a cup of coffee, - [Byron, Hodgson, and Harness] would exclaim, in allusion to their favourite poem, "Dear me, I have shot an albatross!''' (Schrader 1972: 177) 5 of 'an embarrassment to the historian of English literature' (Nemoianu 1984: 41), a nondescript 'twilight' (Leighton 1992: 20) that constitutes 'a quiet buffer between more turbulent Romantic and Victorian zones' (Tucker 1995, quoted in Cronin 2002: 260), 'a shadowy stretch of time sandwiched between two far more colourful periods' (Cronin 2002: 1). Virgil Nemoianu, Angela Leighton, Herbert Tucker and Richard Cronin have all made valuable incursions into understanding the literature of the 1820s and 30s: Virgil Nemoianu's The Taming of Romanticism (1984) identifies and deploys the aesthetic impulses of Germany's Biedermeier as a frame for a larger, pan-European phenomenon; Angela Leighton's Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992) has become seminal reading for those studying Felicia Hemans or Letitia Elizabeth Landon, two of the most celebrated and prolific poets of the period; Herbert Tucker has written a substantial article about the domestication of poetry in the 1820s (1995); and, most recently, Richard Cronin's Romantic Victorians (2002) has traced the way in which the ideas of femininity, fashion, citizenship, nature and religion, present in the literature of the period, metamorphosed into ideologies that came to underpin the literature of post-1840s England. Yet, in spite of their collective sphere of influence, the work on the 1820s and 30s that these critics have produced continues to run counter-intuitively to traditional conceptions of Romanticism and Victorianism. Traditional notions of British Romanticism are 'based ... almost exclusively upon the writings and thought of six male poets' (Mellor 1993: 1) and it is perhaps due to this received convention that the literary activities of the 1820s and 30s have so often been overlooked. The 'six poets neatly divided into two generations' (Cronin 2002: 5) are, of course, a first generation consisting of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and then a second, consisting of Keats, Shelley and Byron. Had the lives of these latter, second-generation RomantiCS been a few years longer, there might be no chronological gap for literary history to account for, but the strikingly early deaths of Keats, Shelley and Byron, in 1821, -22 and -24 respectively, have meant that scholars of Romanticism have usually been reluctant to engage in research topics that stretch beyond the mid-1820s. Whatever lies beyond is left for Victorian studies to