Romantic Circles Blog

Romantic Circles is pleased to announce the following new resources, along with a substantive update to an existing resource.

Robert Bloomfield, The Banks of Wye. An edition of Bloomfield’s multimedia picturesque tour of the Wye valley. Poem, tour journal, sketchbook. Ed. Tim Fulford.

This edition presents a rare surviving example of the kind of multimedia production that arose from one of the new cultural activities of the late eighteenth century—the picturesque and antiquarian tour. It comprises a facsimile of the manuscript sketch- and scrap-book that Robert Bloomfield made after his 1807 tour of the Wye, an annotated transcription of the prose tour-journal that he incorporated into his scrap book, and a collated and annotated text of the poetic versions of the tour that were published (as The Banks of Wye) in 1811, 1813, and 1823. Also included are reproductions of the engravings that illustrated the 1811 and 1813 publications, deleted or unadopted passages from the manuscript of the poem, and a selection of reviews from journals of the time. The whole represents a visually and verbally rich response to the fashionable tour of the Wye. Bloomfield’s manuscript sketch- and scrap-book is an example of the newly popular fashion for on-the-spot sketching. Full of self-penned images of views and ruins, it is a fine example of the visual culture that the English gentry began to produce and to value, a homemade book to pass around in drawing rooms before turning either to the latest set of picturesque engravings or to the poetic tour —The Banks of Wye — that Bloomfield himself issued in print. Bloomfield, indeed, hoped to issue not just the poetic tour but also the ‘whole triple-page’d Journal, Drawings, prose, and rhime’. Cost prohibited such a publication at the time: only now, with this composite edition of poem, prose, scrap- and sketch-book, can we see the multimedia response to the Wye that was then accessible only to the intimate friends among whom the manuscript circulated.

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Robert Southey and Millenarianism: Documents Concerning the Prophetic Movements of the Romantic Era. Ed. Tim Fulford

This website presents the first scholarly edition of Robert Southey’s various writings about the prophetic movements of Romantic-era Britain. Its aim is to throw new light on two related areas: the nature and history of millenarian prophecy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—especially William Bryan, Richard Brothers, and Joanna Southcott—, and the significance of prophecy in Southey’s social, political analysis of his times. A fascinated commentator upon what he termed ‘enthusiasm’, Southey published two of the earliest accounts of Southcott and her predecessors ever written, accounts derived both from personal acquaintance with some of the major figures involved and from a detailed study of their writings. These accounts are reproduced here, collated with the manuscripts on which they were based, and with explanatory notes. In addition, a selection of Southey’s remarks on millenarians in his private manuscript correspondence is presented, and an introduction comprising a brief history of the prophetic movements in the Romantic era and a critical discussion of Southey’s writings on the subject.

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The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and his Circle. Ed. Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt

The editors are delighted to announce an update to their edition of Bloomfield collected letters, comprising four previously unknown letters that throw new light on Bloomfield’s relationship with his patron, Capel Lofft, and on the patronage of labouring-class poets in the early nineteenth century more generally. The letters also throw new light on periodical culture in the period and present an early draft of one of Bloomfield’s popular songs.series.

Norse Romanticism: Themes in British Literature, 1760–1830 is a collection of texts that illustrate how the ancient North was re-created for contemporary national, political and literary purposes. The anthology features canonical authors (such as Thomas Gray, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, and Ann Radcliffe). Standard editions of these authors’ works generally lack the contextual framework and necessary commentary that explain the way in which they repurpose Norse material. There are also more unusual selections of lesser known writers, whose texts have not previously been available to modern readers. The range of material presented in the edition has the scope and breadth to allow for new research into the Norse-inflected writing during the period.

The anthology shows how a number of writers utilized the Norse tradition to address issues of political and cultural concern, as well as find new aesthetic models for their poetry. Importantly, the interest in Norse literature and mythology came at a time when the need to recover ancient literary heritage came under tremendous pressure. Before the discovery of Beowulf (and the realization of its importance), the Norse past was taken up in an attempt to substitute for a missing Anglo-Saxon tradition. In England, the need for Anglo-Saxon heroic verse was given an increased sense of urgency as Celtic antiquaries began to publish heroic traditions associated with Wales, Ireland and not least Ossian’s Scotland. The Norse material also appealed to romantic-era writers for its ideals of Liberty, while the dark Norse imagination was exploited as a vehicle for the creation of Gothic terror. Therefore, the anthology contains texts that will be of relevance to researchers and students pursuing a number of different projects.

The introduction, headnotes and extensive annotations place the texts in relation to their original Norse sources. The extensive editorial matter also discusses the perception of the Norse Middle Ages, as these were shaped by sometimes fanciful antiquarian and romanticizing discourses in the period. The electronic edition is a unique resource that makes it easy to compare and search for the characters, themes and ideas that were central to the Norse revival in English letters.

We are pleased to announce the second part of an eight-part electronic edition of the Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Two is edited by Lynda Pratt and Ian Packer.

Robert Southey, as many of our readers know,  was one of the best-known, controversial and innovative writers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Based upon extensive new archival research, this Collected edition makes available for the first time all his surviving letters, freshly edited, annotated and introduced.

Part One covers 1791-1797, turbulent years which saw the forging of Southey’s career and reputation, his involvement in radical politics, and the beginning of his friendships with Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Part Two, which covers 1798-1803, includes his public and private responses to Lyrical Ballads (1798); his reaction to the rise of Napoleon and the continuing conflict between Britain and revolutionary France; his second and final visit to Portugal and the resultant hardening of his anti-Catholicism; his unhappy stint as a secretary to the Irish Chancellor Isaac Corry, and his emotional bludgeoning by the deaths in relentless succession between 1801-1803 of three Margarets, his cousin, mother and first child. Part Two comprises 596 letters, of which 199 are published for the first time, and 107 are published in full for the first time. In addition, 5 letters that appeared pseudonymously in the Monthly Magazine are here newly attributed to Southey.

Thoughts in Prison, in Five Parts, was written by the Reverend William Dodd in 1777, while he was awaiting execution for forgery in his Newgate prison cell. Blandly Miltonic in style, the poem is unique not only among prison writings, but also in the history of English literature: none of the many reflections, stories, essays, ballads, and broadside “Confessions” originating—or purporting to have originated—in a jail cell over the last few hundred years can begin to match it in length (over three thousand lines of blank verse), in the irony of its author’s notoriety (Dodd had been a chaplain to the king), or in the completeness of its erasure from history after a meteoric career in print that began to wane only at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is a document deserving attention from anyone interested in the early movement for prison reform in England, the rise of ‘natural theology,’ the impact of Enlightenment thought on mainstream religion, and, of course, death-row confessions and crime literature in general.

An appendix presents manuscript versions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower, my Prison,” by way of suggesting a reliance, at least metaphorically, on this major work of prison literature by Romantic writers.

A sample letter from Bloomfield's letters. The edition includes annotations; contextual materials, including a chronology, images, reviews, and selected poems by Bloomfield; indexes of the people and places mentioned in the letters; and an Introduction by Tim Fulford.

Romantic Circles is very pleased to announce the publication of a new electronic edition, The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and his Circle, edited by Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, with Associate Editor John Goodridge and Technical Editor Laura Mandell.

The Suffolk farmhand turned London shoemaker Robert Bloomfield was the most popular poet of the early nineteenth-century before Byron, admired not just for the authenticity that stemmed from his childhood experience as a rural labourer, but accepted as a master of narrative and versification—the living continuation of the Georgic and ballad traditions epitomised by James Thomson and Robert Burns. This edition of Bloomfield’s correspondence makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in what it was like to be a professional poet in the early nineteenth century.  Intimate, humorous, self-analytical, Bloomfield’s letters show from the inside what it was like to work in the rapidly expanding book market.  They reveal the power of the publisher, and show Bloomfield struggling, as Wordsworth and Clare also did, with gentlemen patrons who resented the independence that sales gave their protègés.   Throughout, they demonstrate Bloomfield’s difficulties in straddling the labouring-class culture from which he came and the polite culture of his readers and supporters.  This is partly a matter of what they discuss—work in garrets, poor relief, popular songs and political protest, for example. Bloomfield meets the radical shoemaker Thomas Hardy and converses with Hardy’s fellow-accused in the 1794 treason trials, John Horne Tooke; he also corresponds with Paine’s admirer Thomas Clio Rickman.

Invaluable resources for the social historian, like the memoirs of Francis Place and the more passing comments of William Blake, Bloomfield’s letters open up a world not recorded in print at the time, and absent from most twentieth-century histories.   With Clare and Rogers among his correspondents, and with Moore and Wordsworth among his admirers, Bloomfield emerges here as a writer who was for a while central to the poetic culture of the Romantic era. Intended as a resource for scholars of Bloomfield and of labouring-class writing, this edition includes an introduction and extensive editorial apparatus and features transcriptions of Bloomfield’s unpublished poems, critical remarks and children’s writings.  It incorporates over forty reproductions of illustrations to his poems (Bloomfield was one of the most heavily illustrated poets of the day).  Also collected are contemporary reviews of his poems and the texts of poems by his brothers George and Nathaniel.

New resources this month at Romantic Circles include Shelley Sites/Sights, a pictorial essay of locations associated with Shelley, Fictions of Byron: An Annotated Bibliography, edited by G. Todd Davis, and two new volumes in the Praxis Series, Gothic Technologies, edited by Robert Miles, and Historicizing Romantic Sexuality, edited by Richard Sha. At the Poets on Poets MP3 archive and podcast this week, Robert Thomas reads Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.”

Romantic Circles is very pleased to announce the publication of British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism: 1793-1815 by Betty T. Bennett, digital text edited by Orianne Smith.

http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/warpoetry/

This is a new electronic edition of Bennett’s valuable 1976 book, in which she collected 350 poems from among over 3000 she discovered in newspapers, journals, and books of the time, together representing the complex and shifting attitudes of Britons during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Over the years since it was first published in 1976, this collection has been prized by several generations of Romantic-era scholars who owned or, after it went out of print, were fortunate to find an extant copy.  This electronic edition of Bennett’s British War Poetry was created in order to give current and future scholars access to this significant work of scholarship.  Besides hypertext annotations and menus allowing the user to access the poems by date, title, and author, and a keyword search engine covering the collection as a whole, the edition includes Bennett’s original introductory essay and bibliography, as well as a new bibliography listing 1030 additional war poems not included in the original book.

SJ

Romantic Circles is very pleased to announce a new electronic edition of Robert Southey’s historical dramatic poem about the 1382 Peasants’ Rebellion, Wat Tyler. This important play was written in 1794, at an important moment politically, but remained unpublished until 1817, when a series of pirated editions appeared, printed by publishers intent on embarrassing the now-Poet Laureate Southey. The subsequent public legal battles over the work’s publication and its extremely partisan reception make it worth studying, both as an example of early Romantic drama and as an episode in the political upheavals that followed Waterloo. The electronic edition was produced by a team of graduate students** at the University of Maryland, College Park under the guidance of Neil Fraistat. Matthew Hill oversaw the project through most of its stages. Michael Gamer (U Penn) stepped in to provide final assistance, reworking and finishing the project, expanding and rewriting its content.

**General Editors: Anne Benvenuto, Eric Berlatsky, Matthew Hill, Lisa Delucia Lewnes, Erin Sadlack, Ingrid Satelmajer. Contributing Editors: Claudia Bowe and Jonna Perillo.

Next month, Romantic Circles will launch a special section called Romantic Pedagogies, which will continue to expand well into the summer. Within this section, we plan to set up a “Romantic Commons” in which teaching issues can be discussed and teachers’ materials shared with one another.

We plan to establish the section on a firm scholarly footing, including peer-review and MOO conference participation as part of each thematic-based “issue” or site produced. All Romantic Circles materials are peer-reviewed, of course, but we add this by way of indicating that we would work to ensure that people’s work “published” and discussed in this site will be adequately valued by their home institutions.

Leaders would serve as editors of thematically named issues within the Pedagogy Commons. For example, we could imagine a special issue called “Wordsworth’s Pedagogy,” or, say, one on Romantic Ecology. We had originally planned to launch the Commons with the theme “Romantic Women Writers,” asking in particular our continental associates how they teach British Romantic women writers. Those interested in helping to establish Romantic Pedagogy Commons as part of the RC Pedagogies section should contact us.

Laura Mandell
Ron Broglio
Tilar Mazzeo

Romantic Circles has just published The Sceptic: A Hemans-Byron Dialogue, edited by Nanora Sweet and Barbara Taylor, with Adriana Craciun as Consulting Editor and Andrew Elfenbein and Anne Hartman as Contributors.

This edition excavates the text and context of Felicia Hemans’s 1820 pamphlet-poem, The Sceptic. Neglected by Hemans’ pervious editors, this 550-line poem places her in direct contention with Byron over questions of doubt and belief in a time of personal and national uncertainty. Essays incorporated in the digital edition by Anne Hartman, Andrew Elfenbein, Barbara Taylor, and Nanora Sweet present Hemans’s inclinations toward philosophical and theological scepticism, her immersion in the topics and stylistic experiments of the day, and her challenges to Byronic genre, style, and theme. Featuring images, letters, and reviews, the edition includes a “guided tour” of the poem that follows its Sceptic’s “progress” through a cosmos spanning heaven and earth.

RC Eds.