Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790-1830 transitions General Etlitor: Julian Wolfreys Published titles NEW IITSTORICISM AND CULTURAL MATERIALISM John Brannigan POSTMODERN NARRATIVE THEORY Mark Currie MARXIST LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORIES Moyra Hask:tt LITERARY FEMINISMS Ruth Robbins DECONSTRUCTION•DERRIDA Julian Wolfreys CHAUCER TO SHAKESPEARE, 1337-1580 SunHee Kim Gertz MILTON TO POPE, 1650-1720 Kay Gilliland Stevenson BURKE TO BYRON, BARBAULD TO BAILLIE, 1790--1830 Jane Stabler JACQUES LACAN Jean-Michel Rabate BATAILLE Fred Botting and Scott Wilson Forthcoming titles NATIONAL IDENTITY John Brannigan GENDER Alison Chapman IDEOLOGY James Decker QUEER THEORY Donald E. Hall POSTMODERNISM • POSTMODERNITY Martin McQuillan RACE Brian G. Niro MODERNITY David Punter PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE Nicholas Rand SUBJECTIVITY Ruth Robbins TRANSGRESSION Julian Wolfreys FORMAllST CRTI1CISM AND READER-RESPONSE THEORY Kenneth Womak and Todd Davis IMAGE TO APOCALYPSE, 1910--1945 Jane Goldman POPE TO WOLLSTONECRAFT, 1713-1786 Moyra Haslett PATER TO FORSTER, 1873-1924 Ruth Robbins ORWELL TO THE PRESENT, 1945-1999 John Brannigan DICKENS TO TROLLOPE, 1837-1884 Julian Wolfreys TERRY EAGLETON David Alderson JUUA KRISTEVA AND LITERARY TIIEORY Megan Becker-Leckrone HELENE CIXOUS: WRITING AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Abigail Bray ROLAND BARTIIES Martin McQuillan ALTHUSSER Warren Montag HOMI BHABHA Eleanor Byrne 'I'nmlitiollll ISBN 978-0-333-73634-0 --""'"'(outside North Amerioo only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in the case of difficulty, write to WI at the address below with your nBlilC and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England transitions Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790-1830 Jane Stabler pal grave © Jane Stabler 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, * or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIT 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-0-333-69625-5 ISBN 978-1-137-14939-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-14939-8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 10987654321 I 0 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 II Contents General Editor's Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction X 1. 1790: Reflections of Revolution I • Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (1790) I • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) 16 • William Blake, The French Revolution and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) 30 2. Romantic Drama 46 • Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays (1798) 49 • Joanna Baillie, De Monfort (1798) 56 • Byron, Manfred (1817) 64 • August von Kotzebue, Lovers' Vows adapted by Elizabeth Inchbald (1798) 78 • Charles Lamb, Lord Byron and transitions in audience taste 81 • Transitions in audience expectations: Lamb's and Byron's attitudes to women and children 87 3. Romantic Poetry 99 • Eigbteenth-rentury theories of transition 99 • Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798; 1800; 1802; 1805) 104 • William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799; 1804; 1805; 1850) 114 • John Keats 116 • Moving away from the 'Big Six' 121 v y; Contents • Anna Barbauld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge: poetic experimentation 123 • Links between technological and imaginative experimentation 133 • Charlotte Smith 135 • Anna Seward 138 • Mary Robinson 141 • John Clare 143 • Percy Bysshe Shelley 146 • Lord Byron: the Romantic poet's challenge to the reading public 149 4. The Romantic Novel and Non-Fictional Prose 158 • Prose battles in the 'pamphlet wars': Burke, Paine, Mackintosh, Williams, More and Wollstonecraft 159 • William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794) 174 • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818): links with the Jacobin novel 180 • Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) 182 • Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796) 187 • Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Persuasion (1818) 192 • Prose journals, fragments and confessions: Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey 200 5. 1830: Time for Change 211 • Felicia Hemans, Songs of the Affections (1830) 220 • William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830) 233 • Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather and Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) 245 • Byron, Werner (1822 and 1830) 251 Chronology 179(}-1830 265 Glossary of Key Concepts and Contexts 278 Annotated Bibliography of General Books on Romanticism 283 Bibliography 288 Index 310 General Editor's Preface Transitions: transition-, n. of action. 1. A passing or passage from one condition, action or (rarely) place, to another. 2. Passage in thought, speech, or writing, from one subject to another. 3. a. The passing from one note to another. b. The passing from one key to another, modulation. 4. The passage from an earlier to a later stage of development or formation ... change from an earlier style to a later; a style of intermediate or mixed character . .. the historical passage of language from one well-defmed stage to another. The aim of Transitions is to explore passages and movements in language, literature and culture from Chauoer to the present day. The series also seeks to examine the ways in which the very idea of transition affects the reader's sense of period so as to address anew questions of literary history and periodisation. The writers in this series unfold the cultural and historical mediations of literature during what are commonly recognized as crucial moments in the development of English literature, addressing, as the OED puts it, the 'historical passage of language from one well-defmed stage to another'. Recognising the need to contextualise literary study, the authors offer close readings of canonical and now marginalised or over­ looked literary texts from all genres, bringing to this study the rigour of historical knowledge and the sophistication of theoreti­ cally informed evaluations of writers and movements from the last 700 years. At the same time as each writer, whether Chaucer or Shakespeare, Milton or Pope, Byron, Dickens, George Eliot, Virgi­ nia Woolf or Salman Rushdie, is shown to produce his or her texts within a discernible historical, cultural, ideological and philosophi­ cal milieu, the text is read from the vantage point of recent theore­ tical interests and conoerns. The purpose in bringing theoretical vii viii General Editor's Preface knowledge to the reading of a wide range of works is to demonstrate how the literature is always open to transition, whether in the instant of its production or in succeeding moments of its critical reception. The series desires to enable the reader to transform her/his own reading and writing transactions by comprehending past develop­ ments. Each book in the second tranche of the series offers a pedagogical guide to the poetics and politics of particular eras, as well as to the subsequent critical comprehension of periods and periodisation. As well as transforming the cultural and literary past by interpreting its transition from the perspective of the critical and theoretical present, each study enacts transitional readings of a number of literary texts, all of which are themselves conceivable as having effected transition at the moments of their first appearance. The readings offered in these books seek, through close critical reading, historical contextualisation and theoretical engagement, to demonstrate certain possibilities in reading to the student reader. It is hoped that the student will fmd this series liberating because the series seeks to move beyond rigid definitions of period. What is important is the sense of passage, of motion. Rather than providing a definitive model of literature's past, Transitions aims to place you in an active dialogue with the writing and culture of other eras, so as to comprehend not only how the present reads the past, but how the past can read the present. Julian Wolfreys Acknowledgements I would like to thank Julian Wolfreys for his patience and encour­ agement during the writing of this book. Keith Povey gave invaluable assistance at the copy-<:diting stage for which I am most grateful. My friends and colleagues in the English Departments of Dundee and Glasgow Universities have offered support and good cheer: in particular I would like to thank Kasia Boddy, Alison Chapman, Richard Cronin, Jo-Anne George, Gwen Hunter, Peter Kitson, Simon KOvesi, Seamus Perry, David Robb, Andrew