PROSE DECLAIMERS: BRITISH ROMANTIC ESSAYISTS AND CLASSICAL RHETORIC by Katie S. Homar Bachelor of Arts, John Carroll University, 2007 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2014 F UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH THE KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Katie S. Homar It was defended on February 3, 2014 and approved by Thora Brylowe, Assistant Professor, Department of English Stephen L. Carr, Associate Professor, Department of English John Klancher, Associate Professor, Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University Dissertation Advisor: Don H. Bialostosky, Professor, Department of English ii Copyright © by Katie S. Homar 2014 iii PROSE DECLAIMERS: BRITISH ROMANTIC ESSAYISTS AND CLASSICAL RHETORIC Katie S. Homar, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2014 Prose Declaimers argues that major romantic essayists repurposed classical rhetoric in their experimental prose. Although they did not identify as rhetoricians, they repurpose practices, such as declamation, to reinvent themselves as “prose declaimers” whose texts resist easy identification with the period’s political agendas. These essayists invest literary writing with the community-building functions of rhetoric even as they differentiate themselves from political orators. By revealing romantic essayists' adaptations of classical rhetoric, Prose Declaimers complicates rhetoricians’ conversations about epideictic rhetoric, or the rhetoric of community- building and celebration. I argue that the romantic essayists were modern epideictic rhetors who transformed the mode from the celebration of shared ideals into a means of orchestrating competing political perspectives in a modern society. My research demonstrates the versatility of epideictic rhetoric in the nineteenth century and reintroduces its resources for rhetoricians and literary scholars. The opening chapters situate Romantic essayists in the transformations of rhetoric and literature at the turn of the nineteenth century. The third chapter argues that Coleridge’s Friend refigures literary prose as modern epideictic rhetoric. Chapters 4 and 5 trace the development of Hazlitt’s rhetorical theory and practice from his early Eloquence of the British Senate to The Spirit of the Age. Hazlitt criticizes the corrupt deployments of rhetoric in parliament, schools, and periodicals, and he repurposes the practices of these institutions to develop his politically iv oppositional prose. In Chapter 6, I argue that Charles Lamb adapts rhetorical exercises to magazine readers in his Elia essays. Chapter 7 examines De Quincey’s rhetorical theory and practice as responses to the innovative Blackwood’s Magazine. De Quincey’s redefinition of “rhetoric” as bravura mind-play anticipates Victorian configurations of literature and rhetoric. v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 INTRODUCTION: PROSE DECLAIMERS ............................................................ 1 2.0 CLASSICAL RHETORIC AND ROMANTIC LITERARY MAGAZINES ....... 14 2.1 EPIDEICTIC RHETORIC ............................................................................... 14 2.2 CLASSICAL EDUCATION ............................................................................. 25 2.3 ROMANTIC LITERARY MAGAZINES ....................................................... 33 2.3.1 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ........................................................... 40 2.3.2 The London Magazine ................................................................................ 44 2.4 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 50 3.0 THE "PROSE DECLAIMER'S" FRIEND: COLERIDGE'S RHETORICAL PRINCIPLES .............................................................................................................................. 54 3.1 COLERIDGE’S “CLERKLY” PROSE WRITER......................................... 57 3.2 THE FRIEND: A ROMANTIC MODEL OF EPIDEICTIC RHETORIC .. 62 3.3 COLERIDGEAN RHETORICAL PRINCIPLES .......................................... 67 3.3.1 “Old and Venerable Truths” ..................................................................... 67 3.3.2 “The Flux and Reflux of the Mind”: Rhetoric as Inquiry ...................... 69 3.3.3 “My Reader, My Fellow-Labourer”: The Figure of the Active Reader 73 3.3.4 Reviving “Our Elder Writers”: Seventeenth-Century Styles ................. 74 3.4 VARIATIONS ON “COLERIDGEAN RHETORICAL PRINCIPLES” .... 79 vi 3.4.1 Coleridge, De Quincey, and the “Literature of Power ............................ 79 3.4.2 Coleridge and Lamb’s “Suggestive” Style ................................................ 82 3.4.3 Coleridge, Hazlitt, and the “Mechanical” William Pitt........................... 85 3.5 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 87 4.0 HAZLITT'S ELOQUENCE OF THE BRITISH SENATE AS ROMANTIC ARS RHETORICA ............................................................................................................................... 89 4.1 INTRODUCTION: HAZLITT AND RHETORIC ........................................ 89 4.2 HAZLITT’S RHETORICAL EDUCATION .................................................. 92 4.3 THE "DIVISION OF LABOUR" .................................................................... 97 4.4 THE ELOQUENCE OF THE BRITISH SENATE ........................................ 101 4.4.1 Parliamentary Anthologies: The Epideictic Remediation of Parliamentary Oratory ............................................................................................ 104 4.4.2 Hazlitt’s Critical Adaptation of Parliamentary Anthologies ................ 107 4.4.3 Hazlitt's Rhetorical Theory in Eloquence of the British Senate ........... 111 4.4.3.1 Pitt and Mechanical Rhetoric .......................................................... 112 4.4.3.2 Burke and “Eloquence” .................................................................... 117 4.5 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 127 5.0 "THIS SPLENDID PIECE OF PATCHWORK": HAZLITT'S HETEROGLOT RHETORIC IN THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE ......................................................................... 130 5.1 HAZLITT, THE NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE, AND THE LITERARY PROSE AUTHOR ............................................................................................................ 132 5.2 "POLITICAL POETS" AND "POETICAL POLITICIANS" ................... 135 vii 5.3 "THIS SPLENDID PIECE OF PATCHWORK": HAZLITT'S HETEROGLOT ADAPTATION OF CLASSICAL RHETORIC .............................. 148 5.3.1 Imitatio ....................................................................................................... 149 5.3.2 Double-Voiced Quotations ....................................................................... 152 5.3.3 Syncrisis ..................................................................................................... 155 5.3.4 The Self-Critical Prose Declaimer ........................................................... 158 5.4 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 161 6.0 “REHEARSING CONTINUALLY THE PART OF THE PAST”: LAMB’S ELIA ESSAYS AND CLASSICAL EDUCATION .......................................................................... 166 6.1 LAMB IN THE HISTORY OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION ..................... 169 6.2 "ACTING A CHARITY" IN ELIA'S ESSAYS ........................................... 176 6.2.1 "A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig" ............................................................ 178 6.2.2 "The Praise of Chimney Sweeps" ........................................................... 183 6.2.3 "A Complaint Against the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis" ......... 190 6.3 EPILOGUE: LAMB, DE QUINCEY, AND LITERARY MAGAZINES . 201 7.0 DE QUINCEY’S RE-VISIONS OF CLASSICAL RHETORIC AND THE EMERGENCE OF “LITERATURE” .................................................................................... 206 7.1 DE QUINCEY’S RHETORIC IN 1828 AND THE MISSION OF BLACKWOOD’S ............................................................................................................... 211 7.2 DE QUINCEY'S VARIATIONS ON QUAESTIO INFINITA AND THE EMERGENCE OF "LITERATURE" ........................................................................... 222 7.2.1 "Letters to a Young Man" (1823)............................................................ 226 7.2.2 "A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature" (1839) ............................. 227 viii 7.2.3 "Suspiria de Profundis" (1845) ............................................................... 229 7.2.4 The Works of Alexander Pope (1848) ..................................................... 232 7.3 DE QUINCEY AND ARNOLD ...................................................................... 237 7.4 CONCLUSION: ROMANTIC PROSE DECLAIMERS ............................. 244 WORKS CITED........................................................................................................................ 254 NOTES ....................................................................................................................................... 276 ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation has been a challenging, strange, and sometimes fun process, and I would like to thank my dedicated dissertation