"[S]hak[ing] the dwellings of the great": Liberation in Joanna Baillie’s Poems (1790)

Notes

¹ Elsewhere, Cox writes about "a gold ring containing hairs taken from the head of Charles I" that Baillie gave him and inscribed with the word Remember. Cox believes that "this recollection of a king beheaded by revolutionary forces is less "a sign of some shared Romanticized Jacobinitism than of a common anti-Jacobinism" ("Baillie, Siddons, Larpent" 31).
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² Sympathetic curiosity, one of the central tenets of Baillie's dramatic theory, has been a rich avenue of exploration for critics of the plays. See, for example, Brewer's "The Prefaces of Joanna Baillie and William Wordsworth," Yudin's "Joanna Baillie's Introductory Discourse as a Precursor to Wordsworth's 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads,'" Henderson's "Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baille's 'Introductory Discourse," Burroughs's, Closet Stages, Forbes's "'Sympathetic Curiosity' in Joanna Baillie's Theater of the Passions," and Judson's "'Sympathetic Curiosity': The Theater of Joanna Baillie." Few, if any critics, have applied this important theoretical concept to her poetry.
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³ One might account for Baillie's sympathy for George III because her physician brother Matthew attended him.
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⁴ In her comparison of Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor to Baillie's Witchcraft, Hewitt interprets Baillie as somewhat progressive in her attitude about the Poor Laws: "Less fearful of unrest than Scott, or perhaps more fearful of oppression, Baillie directs her criticism at the abusers of power and their self-sacrificing victims" ("Bewitching" 348). 
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⁵ Baillie published the poems in the following order in 1790: "A Winter Day," "A Summer Day," "A Night Scene" in three parts, "A Reverie," "A Disappointment," "A Lamentation," "An Address to the Muses," "A Melancholy Lover's Farewell to his Mistress," "A Cheerful Tempered Lover's Farewell to his Mistress," "A Proud Lover's Farewell to his Mistress," "A Poet, Or, Sound-Hearted Lover's Farewell to his Mistress," "The Storm-Beat Maid," "Thunder," "Wind," "An Address to the Night--A Fearful Mind," "An Address to the Night--A Discontented Mind," "An Address to the Night--A Sorrowful Mind," "An Address to the Night--A Joyful Mind," "To Fear," "A Story of Other Times--Somewhat in Imitation of the Poems of OSSIAN," "A Mother to Her Waking Infant," "A Child to His Sick Grandfather," and “The Horse and His Rider." In the 1840 Fugitive Verses and the 1851 The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie she deletes "The Storm-Beat Maid," "Wind," "An Address to the Night--A Fearful Mind," "An Address to the Night--A Discontented Mind," "An Address to the Night--A Sorrowful Mind," "An Address to the Night--A Joyful Mind," "To Fear," "A Story of Other Times--Somewhat in Imitation of the Poems of OSSIAN," and adds "Fragment of a Poem."  She changes the order of the poems as well, most notably moving "To the Muses" to the four spot which gives her aesthetic theory more prominence.
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⁶ I cite the Dramatic and Poetical Works version of the preface because the original 1840 version is not widely available, no scholarly edition of Fugitive Verses exists.
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⁷ See Duff's "From Revolution to Romanticism: The Historical Context to 1800" and Dawson's "Poetry in an Age of Revolution" for brief and lucid discussions of the impact of the French Revolution on Britain during the 1790s.
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⁸ In the 1840 preface to Fugitive Verses, Baillie takes special pride in a reviwer's comment that her early poems "contained true unsophisticated representations of nature" (771). 
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⁹ A number of critics have examined the psychological complexity of Baillie's plays.  See, for example, Purinton's Romantic Ideology Unmasked and Forbes's "'Sympathetic Curiosity' in Joanna Baillie's Theater of the Passions."
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¹⁰ This criticism is consistent with Hewitt's observation in "Scott, Baillie, and the Bewitching of Social Relations" that Baillie "celebrates" her wealthy ancestor, Lady Griseld Baillie's "personal commitment to relieving the sufferings of those left destitute by war" in "The Legend of Lady Griseld Baillie" (345).
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¹¹ Leith Davis comments on the complexity of Burns's politics: "In works such as 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' and 'Scotch Drink,' Burns speaks of his allegiance to Scotland. Yet in other poems such as 'The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer, to ... the Scotch Representatives in the House of Commons,' he harnesses this patriotism to the larger enterprise of representing Britain" (623).  It is worth noting that Baillie only uses the word Scotland in footnotes in Fugitive Verses and never in the poems, and so her interest in Scotland as a nation appears to be much more muted than Burns's.  A comparison of Burns and Baillie's collections could yield important insights into the work of both poets and become a valuable contribution to literary studies of eighteenth century Scottish literature.
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¹² In the conclusion to her essay, Goslee comments that "Metrical Legends as a volume becomes destabilized.  Its conservative, pan-British nationalism, even imperialism, like its affirmation of a separate domestic sphere of heroism for women, is unsettled, even subverted, by the liberating potential of the Wallace legend" (63) which points to the complexity of her attitudes about liberation in the context of British nationalism.  In "Staging Baillie" Cox addresses this complex split between revolution and British nationalism in the context of her staging of The Family Legend in Edinburgh in 1810 (see especially 160-64). 
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¹³ See, for example, Burroughs's Closet Stages, Mellor's Mothers of a Nation (especially chapter two "Theatre as the School of Virtue"), and Purinton's Romantic Ideology Unmasked (particularly chapter five on Count Basil and De Monfort).
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