ROMANTICT eXTUALITIES literature and print culture, 1780–1840 (previously ‘Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text’) • Issue 18 (Summer 2008) centre for editorial and intertextual research cardiff university Romantic Textualities is available on the web @ www.cf.ac.uk/encap/romtext ISSN 1748-0116 Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 18 (Spring 2008). Online: Internet (date accessed): <www.cf.ac.uk/encap/romtext/issues/rt18.pdf>. © 2008 Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research Published by the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University. Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 11 / 12.5, using Adobe InDesign cs3; images and illustrations prepared using Adobe Illustrator cs3 and Adobe PhotoShop cs3; final output rendered with Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. Editor: Anthony Mandal, Cardiff University, UK Associate Editor: Issue 19–: Tim Killick, Cardiff University, UK Reviews Editor: Issue 18: Tim Killick, Cardiff University, UK Issue 19–: Nicola Lloyd, Cardiff University, UK Advisory Editors Peter Garside (Chair), University of Edinburgh, UK Jane Aaron, University of Glamorgan, UK Stephen Behrendt, University of Nebraska, USA Emma Clery, University of Southampton, UK Benjamin Colbert, University of Wolverhampton, UK Edward Copeland, Pomona College, USA Gillian Dow, University of Southampton / Chawton House Library, UK Caroline Franklin, University of Swansea, UK Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta, Canada David Hewitt, University of Aberdeen, UK Gillian Hughes Claire Lamont, University of Newcastle, UK Robert Miles, University of Victoria, Canada Rainer Schöwerling, University of Paderborn, Germany Christopher Skelton-Foord, University of Durham, UK Kathryn Sutherland, University of Oxford, UK Aims and Scope: Formerly Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text (1997–2005), Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is an online journal that is committed to fore- grounding innovative Romantic-studies research into bibliography, book history, intertextuality, and textual studies. To this end, we publish material in a number of formats: among them, peer- reviewed articles, reports on individual/group research projects, bibliographical checklists, and biographical profiles of overlooked Romantic writers. As of Issue 15 (Winter 2005), Romantic Textualities also carries reviews of books that reflect the growing academic interest in the fields of book history, print culture, intertextuality, and cultural materialism, as they relate to Romantic studies. cONTENTS iSSUE 18 SuMMER 2008 • Editorial 5 Articles The ‘Disposition to Combine’: Thomas Campbell’s The Pleasures of Hope, Edmund Burke, and the Power of the Poetic Imagination to Reconcile and Reform 8 Bernard McKenna ‘The Approbation of my Own Heart’: Virtue and Duty in Harriet Ventum’s Selina and Justina 24 Barbara Vesey Remediating Byron: Textual Information Overload during Byron’s 1816 Travels 42 Maximiliaan van Woudenberg Report (non peer-reviewed) Mary Julia Young: A Biographical and Bibliographical Study 63 Nicola Lloyd Book Reviews James Hogg, A Queer Book, edited by P. D. Garside 99 Wendy Hunter Gillian Hughes, James Hogg: A Life 101 Richard J. Hill Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington (eds), Romanticism’s Debatable Lands 105 Rachel Hewitt Franz Potter, A History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–36: Exhuming the Trade 108 Peter Garside Notes on Contributors 113 Instructions for Authors 115 editorial Anthony Mandal • Romantic Textualities—in both its present incarnation and its previous existence as Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text (1997–2005)—has attempted to participate in the dynamic relationship between textual scholar- ship and new electronic media. At first, we did this principally through the medium of various reports, which provided regular ‘snapshots’ of data mined from projects running within or associated with Cardiff University’s Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research (The English Novel, 1800–1829; British Fiction, 1800–1829; The English Novel, 1830–1836). Over the years, we have extended the journal’s activities beyond the confines of its host institution, to include surveys of Romantic-era print culture made by the international scholarly community. For a journal so engaged with exploring aspects of print culture and histories of the book, Romantic Textualities has always been symbiotically linked to its web- based medium: it would simply not have been possible to publish most of our material—author studies, survey bibliographies, database transcriptions—were it not for the plenitude (both spatial and financial) offered by the World-Wide Web. In keeping with these aims, the current issue (18) marks a significant de- velopment in the history of the journal, in incorporating and then discussing the possibilities of Romantic scholarship through emergent forms of multimedia, in the form of Digital Narratives. The current issue carries a wealth of material, which explores in various promising ways Romantic textualities that benefit from the particularly mul- timodal nature of present-day media transformations. The three articles and extensive author study provide a rich vein of print-cultural analysis, drawing together philosophy and polemicism, gender and authorship, as well as con- necting Romantic with today’s anxieties of epistemological procedure. In his article, Bernard McKenna examines Thomas Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope, a response to the French Revolution, the underlying thesis of which suggested that gradual change rather than a sudden break with the past offered the best model of reform. Echoing the changing perspectives of better-known contemporaries such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Campbell’s poetical composition offers a nuanced meditation on the nature of human identity in the revolutionary period. Rejecting both scientific empiricism and ‘baneful’ scepticism, Campbell instead follows in the wake of Enlightenment thinkers such as Hutcheson and Reid, and echoes Burke’s more contemporaneous phi- 5 6 romantic textualities 18 losophies, in linking truth to beauty, and the aesthetic to the ethical. Through the individual’s ‘disposition to combine’, human hope shares its origins with the natural world, so that living and having faith become one in the same. Faith certainly would have been needed in great measure by the subject of Barbara Vesey’s essay, Harriet Ventum, whose writings construct virtue and duty through the tension between social responsibility and individual fulfil- ment. Vesey’s study of Ventum’s novels Selina and Justina suggests that this underrated writer explores the complexities of female subjectivity, where a moral life and social duty are not always congruent. By considering how such subaltern voices—too often the victims of history’s vagaries and only slowly being recuperated—contributed to the construction of female interiority, Vesey argues that our notions of canonicity can be profitably shaken. The essay is followed by a biographical summary and bibliographical checklist of Ventum’s literary works. The final essay in this issue is itself an example of a more modern ‘disposition to combine’. In his article, Maximiliaan van Woudenberg begins by explor- ing what we accept as a present-day problem—the experience of ‘information overload’—and then places it within a Romantic context. Taking Byron’s ac- counts of his own reading practices, the movements of the Byron–Shelley circle in Europe, and Byron’s composition of Manfred, Van Woudenberg suggests that the Romantics were perhaps the first to experience this particularly ‘modern’ phenomenon of information overload. The essay concludes with a relocation away from the textual into the multimedial, which attempts not only to ex- plore but also to enact the experience of information overload by remediating Van Woudenberg’s thesis into the multimodal (aural, visual, textual) arena of ‘Digital Narrative’. Despite such acts of traversing various forms of media in such postmodern ways, Van Woudenberg is at pains to point out nevertheless that ‘digital media return us with renewed vigour to the very materiality of print media of the Romantic period.’ The essays are followed by a Nicola Lloyd’s report on the prolific and (like Ventum) little-known Romantic belletriste, Mary Julia Young. In an extensive preliminary essay, Lloyd draws attention to the often chameleon-like roles female writers were often forced to adopt, in order to eke out a living by the pen. Traversing various genres of fiction—the Gothic, the fashionable, the didactic—Young’s novels metonymically pastiche the contents of the myriad circulating libraries that populated Britain at the turn of the nineteenth cen- tury. Drawing on Young’s correspondence with the Royal Literary Fund (a charitable society set up for indigent authors), Lloyd further illustrates that the narrative range (if not adroitness) of hack writers such as Young nevertheless did not indemnify them from the more pressing material concerns of everyday life. The report concludes by providing a plethora of supplementary materials, including a bibliographical checklist, plot summaries, and transcriptions of reviews, correspondence, and samples of Young’s writing. editorial 7 The issue concludes with four reviews essays on recent publications that engage with Romantic print culture in various ways. Two of the books under review (a reissued scholarly edition, a new biography) pertain to a long- ne- glected writer, James Hogg, whose significant position in the literary canon has become