
Notes Introduction 1. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); David Simpson, “Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for ‘Antiquarian’ History”, http:// www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/contemporary/simpson/simpson.html; Lawrence Lipking, “A Trout in the Milk,” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 1. Additional studies that address the current status of literary history include Rethinking Literary History: a Dialogue on Theory, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Politics and Value in English Studies: a Discipline in Crisis? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Guy and Small argue that while literary histories framed within the contexts of academic specialization consistently point to the eclipse of the genre, literary histories continue to be written and, ironically, continue to draw for their evidence on canonical works. 2. William Wordsworth, “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface (1815),” in Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), III.80. 3. For parallels between modern and period developments, see James Chandler, England in 1819: the Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jon Klancher, “Godwin and the Genre Reformers: On Necessity and Contingency in Romantic Narrative Theory,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re- forming Literature 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–38; Ina Ferris, “Melancholy, Memory, and the ‘Narrative Situation’ of History in Post- Enlightenment Scotland,” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77–93. 4. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109; Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 21. For an account critical of the prominence given in St. Clair’s work to the 1774 copy- right decision, see Thomas F. Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–1810 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). H. J. Jackson sees the Donaldson v. Beckett ruling as a “crucial date for the history of publishing in Britain” partly for its breaking up of the cartels, but most importantly for its assigning of new powers, and with them new anxi- eties, over copyright decisions to individual authors. See, Romantic Readers: the Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 15. See also, Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: a Social 161 162 Notes History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) and Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 5. The consequences of this categorical instability in relation to history writing and the genre repositioning stimulated by its increasing focus on man- ners are explored in Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of History Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), in particular, pp. 257–321, “Literary History, Memoir, and the Idea of Commemoration in Early- Nineteenth- Century Britain.” A characteris- tic example appears in William Russell’s 1779 History of Modern Europe, in which the author concludes that after “the histories of Robertson and Hume appeared, romances were no longer read. [Including the once popular “well- known names of Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Amelia”] A new taste was introduced. The lovers of mere amusement found, that real incidents, properly selected and disposed, setting aside the idea of utility, and real characters delineated with truth and force, can more strongly engage both the mind and the heart, than any fabulous narrative. This taste, which has since given birth to many other elegant historical productions, fortunately for English literature, continues to gain ground.” See, History of Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 1800), V.434–5. 6. As Robert J. Griffin astutely observes, this “heterogeneity of writings” makes evident problems with the description of the period 1790–1832 as “Romantic” by exposing the gap between Romanticism as a chronological measure and the highly selective “subsequent discourse about a period that has a history of its own.” Since that discourse largely excludes the genres of literary history with which I am concerned here, I have tried to avoid the use of “Romantic” as a neutral period designation. See, “The Age of ‘The Age of’ is Over: Johnson and New Versions of the Late Eighteenth Century,” MLQ 62.4 (2001), 383. 7. S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer, in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Vol. 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 43. 8. See, for instance, Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print- Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon from the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). Even the more sympa- thetic Jonah Siegel, while acknowledging “the heterogeneous yet consistent project that is [D’ Israeli’s] literary history,” finally dismisses it as “far from what is generally called theorizing; he rather assembles examples from an ever more extensive canon of biography in literature and art.” See, Desire and Excess: the Nineteenth- Century Culture of Art (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 98–9. 9. D’ Israeli identifies both radical and conjectural histories as unaccept- ably theoretical in orientation. His objections to the former are usually voiced through attacks on “metaphysics,” the preferred code among 1790s conservatives for radical doctrine. Conjectural history, as practiced by Scottish Enlightenment writers like Millar and Ferguson, is diminished on the grounds that in order to confirm the “inseparable connection of Notes 163 circumstances ... [which] govern society ... the historian sometimes distorted facts, or joined together events which were no otherwise connected than by his own fallacious imagination.” See, Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England (London: Henry Colburn, 1828–31), I. iv– v. 10. Ralph Cohen, “Generating Literary Histories,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Representing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 48. 11. Johnson’s 1779–81 The Works of the English Poets was released under the pro- visions of the distinct English legal system. Preceding it were Blair’s selection, The British Poets (1773), Boyle’s English Poets (Aberdeen, 1776–6), and Bell’s Poets of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1777–82). Following Johnson’s Works were Anderson’s The Works of the British Poets (London and Edinburgh, 1792–5), Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select British Poets (London, 1794–1805), and Alexander Chalmers’ Works of the English Poets (London, 1810). Sequences of Lives modeled on Johnson’s continue well into the nineteenth century. Henry Francis Cary in his Lives, first published in 1821–4 in the London Magazine, comments on his predecessor: “It was the chance of Johnson to fall upon an age that rated his great abilities at their full value. His laborious- ness had the appearance of something stupendous, when there were many literary but very few learned men. His vigour of intellect imposed upon the multitude an opinion of his wisdom, from the solemn air and oracular tone in which he uniformly addressed them. He would have been of less consequence in the days of Elizabeth or of Cromwell.” See Lives of English Poets, From Johnson to Kirke White. Designed as a Continuation of Johnson’s Lives (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846), 92–3. Numbers of Lives were adapted to specific audiences, as with John Aikin’s Select Works of the British Poets. With Biographical and Critical Prefaces (London, 1820), advertised as “a ‘library of Classical English Poetry,’ and [one that] may safely be recommended to the heads of schools in general, and to the libraries of Young Persons” (sig. A). For an account of these various collections, see Thomas F. Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade, and his series of articles: “Bookselling and Canon- Making: the Trade Rivalry over the English Poets, 1776–1783,” in Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture Volume 19, ed. Leslie Ellen Brown and Patricia Craddock (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1989), 53–69; “John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain: the ‘Little Trifling Edition’ Revisited,” Modern Philology 85 (1987): 128–52; “Patchwork and Piracy: John Bell’s ‘Connected System of Biography’ and the Use of Johnson’s Prefaces,” Studies in Bibliography 48 (1995): 193–228. See also, St. Clair, Reading Nation, Appendix 6, “The Old Canon.” 12. Jackson, Romantic Readers, 120. The interest in “organized diversity” to which Jackson points might also be seen to define the contexts governing
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