Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Diego Saglia
University of Parma, Italy

Although published six years apart, these two volumes belong in the same multifaceted critical mosaic. Both studies address the distinctive concerns which have been central to Susan Wolfson’s critical practice since the 1980s—her preoccupation with gender, her focus on literary form, and her indefatigable search for an increasingly detailed, as well as historically attuned, approach to the stylistic materiality of literary works. As with her previous works, these books require us to read intensively into texts, and we cannot escape this demand as we gradually explore their largely shared literary terrain: Hemans and Byron, mostly, but also Wollstonecraft, the Wordsworths and Keats. Wollstonecraft, in particular, plays a major role in Wolfson’s presentation of her argument in the earlier Borderlines, and its discussion of the continuities and discontinuities within Romantic-period gender debates between the 1790s and the 1830s.

Both books perform a series of distinctive critical gestures to which the author has accustomed us over the years. They stand on solid, clearly laid out theoretical and methodological foundations, which Wolfson constantly tests, revises and updates. One of the mainstays in these volumes is, of course, the neo-formalist agenda that Wolfson has been promoting through such contributions as Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997) and “Reading for Form” (MLQ, 2007). Both books present repeated instances of what may be defined as an invigorating form of wrestling with different intersecting textual layers. In addition, these books convey a general impatience with established, conventional “Eng Lit” stylistic registers and lexicon. This translates into a penchant for neologisms which never allows us to sit back into the lull of ready-made phrases. In fact, some of these neologisms may not be to everyone’s liking, but they undoubtedly contribute to Wolfson’s corrective critical approach.

These volumes also share common structural features. Borderlines is divided into an introductory chapter; a section on women (Felicia Hemans; the “Masculine Woman”; Maria Jane Jewsbury); one on men (Byron and Keats); and a final coda on sex in souls. Romantic Interactions presents an introductory chapter; a section on women and poetry (Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith); one on the “two Wordsworths,” that is, on William’s and Dorothy’s “interactions”; and a third on Byron and those interactions in which he took part directly (in his own life and works), and those through which he influenced the lives and works of other (especially female) authors.

Wolfson locates both volumes within the narrative of her own development and growth as a critic. And more explicitly so in the preface to Borderlines, where she places herself and her book within the critical trajectory that gradually led to the renovation of Romantic-period scholarship in the US and Britain from the early 1980s on. This volume, in particular, makes plain Wolfson’s intention to take stock of this itinerary and reflect on its origins, current status, and further evolutions. Taking up the cumbersome inheritance of Romantic-period gender criticism in order to set it on a new course, Borderlines paints a panorama of interrelations between “he-texts” and “she-texts”. It delineates a map of shifting gender categories in order to cast new light on their textual manifestations and cultural significance. Wolfson’s aim is to capture the formally specific coordinates of these categories—their being-in-the-text—that enable us to perceive their presence and agency in their times, yet also to verify their continuing activity in our own. In this respect, Wollstonecraft stands at the beginning of a tradition of debate that her works continued to enrich well after the waning of 1790s radicalism. And Wolfson’s reconstruction and discussion of later reprises of Wollstonecraft is undoubtedly one of the most striking and valuable offerings in this book. Readers will be particularly delighted to find a chapter on the brilliant and combative Maria Jane Jewsbury, one of the most fascinating of Wollstonecraft’s disciples, as well as one of the most unjustly sidelined writers and intellectuals in the later Romantic period.
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Reviewed by
Colin Carman
Colorado Mountain College

Desire, by definition, is mediated, imitative, and mimetic. At the core of identity and indeed of being itself lie the dual demands to be recognized and to be imitated. These are just some of the premises of Eric Gans and René Girard, and the insightful literary study these two thinkers have inspired, Lord Byron and the History of Desire. Byron is a provocative choice: while the “Byronic hero” is usually typified by defiant autonomy, even solipsistic self-adulation, Ian Dennis reveals just how important the roles of mediation, interplay, and the desires of—and for—others are in Byron’s oeuvre.

Since Gans and Girard form the book’s conceptual apparatus, a heavily theoretical introduction to the book’s eight chapters helps to adumbrate the pair’s contributions to the history of desire. That history emerges from certain “imitative processes,” in which “models” act and “subjects” perceive (14). Other key terms include “external mediation,” used to denote the influence of models that exist apart from interpersonal rivalry and, by contrast, “internal mediation,” whereby a more accessible influence can be imitated, even rivaled to the point of violence (17).

From there, Dennis plunges into works as diverse as the closet tragedy Cain and Don Juan, perhaps Byron’s most personal work, begun in 1818. If the first canto of Don Juan concludes with an appeal to the public in the form of an advertisement, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, argues Dennis, are even earlier efforts to promote the reader’s dependence on an authorial model. As Jerome McGann has noted, the geographical place being described in Byron’s travelogue pales in comparison to how the poem’s speaker experiences that locale for himself. What the two cantos gave to the marketplace at the time of their publication in 1812 was more than the suffering and melancholia characteristic of the Byronic hero. Instead, Dennis asserts that the cantos are a “remarkable innovation in internal mediation,” as they market Byron’s unique impression of those far-off places, places where no English traveler had gone before (48). From this internality, Chapter 2 turns to the externality of Byron’s reverence for nature. Because Nature cannot be rivaled, the best a Byronic ego can do is model himself upon nature through partnership. In the parlance of Girard, Nature remains an external mediator because it is indifferent to human desire.

“Partnership” shades into darker dependency in Chapter 3, where Dennis argues that Byron’s popular Eastern tales are powered by the author’s fantasies of victimization. In The Giaour, Dennis finds that desire “takes a beating,” as the poem’s hero suffers the loss of his Leila and dies pathetically in a monastery (65). The Corsair, meanwhile, dramatizes an equally destructive love triangle in which heroes pursue women already taken, and wind up massacred as a result. In brief, lovers need rivals—though Dennis stops short of deploying Sedgwickian triangulation as another theoretical tool. He does, however, pay close attention to characters like Alp in The Siege of Corinth, and Hugo in Parisina, forced as they are into symmetrical relations leading to self-immolation. Moreover, these men implicate their audience in the spectacle of their sufferings. Such appeals to readerly desire also hold Dennis’ critical eye in the brief Chapter 4, which couples Byron’s “Prometheus” with “The Prisoner of Chillon” (both composed in 1816). Again, Dennis pursues the rhetoric of victimhood in these works, specifically the way in which Byron subjects his readers to his own projections. Prometheus, that familiar Romantic symbol, is portrayed by Byron as God’s enviable rival who, alongside the Prisoner, models sublime forms of altruism.
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Reviewed by
G.A. Rosso
Southern Connecticut State University

On the final day of Christopher Rowland’s lectures on Blake and the Bible at Yale Divinity School in 2008, the renowned apocalypse scholar John J. Collins began the question-and-answer period by intoning, “Yes, well, but did Blake get Jesus right?” Rowland, the Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at Oxford, replied “Yes and no.” Blake got the “non-conformist” Jesus right but he was not particularly interested in the “historical Jesus”. Although the book developed from these lectures shows that Blake sometimes does get the “Jesus of history” right, Rowland’s primary focus throughout is on “Jesus the archetypal antinomian.” In one of the book’s most profound and original insights, Rowland suggests that the figure of the antinomian Jesus provides a key underlying pattern of thought connecting early and late Blake. In the course of tracing this pattern, Rowland accomplishes his goal of raising Blake’s exegetical profile, arguing persuasively for his place at the center of modern hermeneutical history as “one of the foremost biblical interpreters” (xii).

A compelling aspect of Blake and the Bible is the professional expertise that Professor Rowland brings to the study of Blake. Previous scholars have engaged with Blake’s use of the Bible—Northrop Frye, Thomas Altizer, Leslie Tannenbaum to name the most significant—but Rowland brings both an acute literary sensitivity and a matchless scholarly erudition that derives from extensive experience in the field of biblical studies. He has written widely on apocalyptic literature, including the pioneering work The Open Heaven (1982), as well as The New Interpreter’s Bible (1998) and Blackwell Bible (2004) commentaries on Revelation which allude to Blake throughout. He has written extensively on the merkabah (throne-chariot) tradition that derives from Ezekiel’s inaugural vision of God, particularly as a source of mystical ideas in rabbinic and kabbalistic as well as Christian texts. He has been on the leading edge of contemporary biblical hermeneutics, writing on liberation theology and Blake’s relation to it. And he has written on Paul, specifically on the intersection of apocalyptic and mystical traditions in the letters. One of the book’s major contributions is Rowland’s argument concerning Paul’s central importance to Blake, a position that goes against the grain of Blake criticism but that is demonstrated with skill and deep learning.

Blake and the Bible makes several specific contributions to Blake studies that stem from the author’s familiarity with the New Testament and the history of biblical exegesis. Not least is his grasp of Blake’s unique Christian interpretation of Job, the subject of the first two chapters that serve as a methodological model for the book. Focusing on the engraved text of 1826, Rowland gives a plate-by-plate reading that provides “a heuristic lens to view Blake’s theology and interpretation of the Bible as a whole” (15). His main points—Blake’s critique of transcendence, his removal of the division between the divine and human, and his rejection of scriptural literalism—are not new, but they are grounded more securely in biblical texts and exegetical history than previous studies, particularly the sweeping excursions of Frye and Altizer and the standard texts by Wicksteed, Damon, and Lindberg. Of special value is Rowland’s exploration of “defective divinity” in the relation of God and Satan and his emphasis on Job and his wife’s visionary experiences. Blake’s keen focus on passages featuring dreams and visions anticipates modern critical insights into apocalyptic elements in Job. Rowland’s reading of plates 16-17 is superb in this regard. As Satan falls to judgment, he is not excluded from but integrated into the divine economy, enabling God to appear as Christ and bless Job, who rises to participate in the divine life again.

The Job material sets up the ensuing chapter on divine contraries, bringing clarification to the debate about Blake’s Gnosticism. With great economy and agility, Rowland lays out the biblical and Gnostic texts that present various exalted angels and divine figures who open up “exegetical possibilities” that Blake exploits in his critique of transcendence (84-5). In his view of contraries, Blake “uncannily anticipates” late twentieth-century discussions about “the theology of Second Temple Judaism” (278). Rowland helped open up the area of biblical scholarship that sees the exalted angel figure in biblical and rabbinic traditions as providing early Christians with a scheme for placing the resurrected Jesus alongside God without departing from monotheism. He explains how Blake utilizes biblical texts that present this figure, both to challenge monotheistic views of God and to emphasize the human form of divinity, placing the transcendent and immanent in dialectical tension.
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Reviewed by
Patricia Peek
Fordham University

This volume, a recent addition to the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series, should be of great interest to both Romantic and Victorian scholars. Spanning nearly one hundred years of literature about gardens and horticulture, Page and Smith discuss how women engaged in discussions of topics not limited by their domestic sphere. The motivating agenda for this work is an exploration of how in “a period marked by major political, technological, and cultural changes, the domesticated landscape was central to women’s complex negotiation of private and public life” (1). The act of gardening, botanical study and writing, and sketching the landscape both within and beyond the garden gate created opportunities for women in the nineteenth century to stretch beyond the boundaries set for them by society, in an attempt to participate in the larger socio-political arena. The essays found in the volume demonstrate how these acts “served as a ground for both social and intellectual experimentation” (11). Both Romantic and Victorian scholars will feel at home in the tangencies found in this genre and with the socio-political currents of each period, as Page and Smith see in their “domesticated landscape” the familiar (but always fresh) prospects of gender, female education, the tensions of class and labor, as well as the more abstract concept of sympathy.

Page and Smith divide their work into four major sections and an epilogue. Two essays linked by the topic heading comprise each section. In addition, complementing the text are over seventy illustrations carefully placed to guide the reader through the authors’ analyses. Rather like a finely crafted English garden, the structure of the book leads readers on different paths that clearly are part of a more complex, yet still defined textual and thematic structure. The authors are quite deliberate in adhering to this pattern, often reminding the reader how the essays relate to each other. One such example appears in Chapter 8, in a discussion of Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford, where we are “reminded here of the walls that so often enclose and constrain the children in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century didactic stories, as discussed in Chapter I, and of the girls who yearned for the freedom outside the garden enclosure” (245). The authors clearly sense the tension created by employing such a wide range of examples in the genre, from perhaps lesser known children’s literature and studies on botany, to popular works by Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth. The guidance can feel intrusive, but the effort at cohesiveness ultimately props up the reader’s negotiation of the sometimes scattered dazzle of so many texts and their “interrelation” (7). Perhaps the most structurally and thematically useful construct is the “Conclusion” at the end of six of the eight essays which frames and encapsulates each topic.

This volume will be useful to a wide range of readers. Scholars of the genre will delight in the richness of the textual references and use of illustrations to ground the discussions. Page and Smith deftly weave critical threads from other scholars and pull those arguments further in interesting directions. An extensive list of works cited is worthy reading in itself for those interested in further exploration of the topics covered. They also make some interesting points that demonstrate that some of the literary theories put forth by prominent male authors in the canon could also be found in the specialized works of female authors in the period. In Maria Elizabeth Jacson’s 1797 Botanical Dialogues, Page and Smith point out that the character of Hortensia “teaches her children a skill akin to the concept of defamiliarization (in which poetry and art reveal common objects in new and startling ways): she models what can be learned through careful observation” (62). They link this “observation” to its more widely anthologized versions: “Jacson’s method also bears some comparison to Wordsworth’s idea just one year later in Lyrical Ballads that those who are attuned to the world find stories everywhere, as well as to Shelley’s argument in A Defence of Poetry (1821) that poetry removes ‘the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’” (62). This comparison demonstrates the need for critical analyses such as that of Page and Smith to expose the depth of thought and insight in the works of these female authors. Examples such as this further the thesis that these women were pressing on the limits of the domestic sphere in an attempt to comment on the world beyond the “garden gate” (38). For readers less familiar with the genres of botanical writing and garden literature in the two periods, this text will open up surprising areas of exploration and perhaps create new points of connection with their own critical interests.
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Reviewed by
Brett Mobley
Fordham University

The guiding claim of Matthew Rowlinson’s Real Money and Romanticism is that literary historians have overlooked the ways in which “British literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was shaped by changes in the economic structure of the publishing industry and the commodity status of intellectual property” (32). Rowlinson’s objective is to develop a new understanding of the connections between Romantic authors, print culture, and capital as each was changing during this tumultuous period. While much good work has been done on the economics of Romantic literature, Rowlinson’s approach departs from predecessors such as William St. Clair and Lee Erikson. His critical lexicon and methodology are primarily derived from Marx’s Capital (and reactions against Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations), with informing ideas from Marcel Mauss and Jacques Lacan. The works that receive this theoretically-charged critique include Scott’s Waverly novels (particularly Guy Mannering and The Antiquary), Keats’s “Fall of Hyperion,” and Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. One of these things is not like the other: Rowlinson includes Dickens in his broadened Romanticism as a writer who “acutely experienced” this “period of rapid change in the monetary system, in the British economy at large, and in the publishing trade” (32).

What Rowlinson calls “real money” focuses the opening two chapters. In the first, he develops a complex definition of money: drawing on the “chartalist” neo-Keynsian theories of Randall Wray, Rowlinson understands money as a circulation of “tokens representing debt” (8). From here, he builds on Mauss’s theories of gift-giving and Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic order to separate the physical body and commodity-exchange value of money from its sublime body, which he casts as a “kernel of rationality at the signifier’s heart” (30). This conceptualization of real money, Rowlinson argues, led Romantic-era authors to involve themselves in new and increasingly complex “relations of trust and symbolic identification” when making transactions, provoking anxieties about money which pervade many of the period’s works (32). A brief but detailed history of money in Britain follows in the second chapter, in which Rowlinson charts the shifts from gold and silver to bills and finally—in the context of a national crisis—to banknotes. Turning to Marx, Rowlinson questions the dominant narrative of The Suspension of Payments order of 1797. By charting this crisis’s history, and challenging Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s view of productive labor, Rowlinson argues that while utterance—variously, of debt, creativity, or work—could be transformed into many forms of the pound, “none of them, however, could be viewed as embodying the pound itself” (54). Together with his earlier chapter on real money, Rowlinson here offers a convincing, theoretically complex conception of an abstract and sublime body operative within money itself.

While Rowlinson’s literary purview may seem limited—three novels and one poem—he makes good use of the material he studies. The final chapters study Scott, Keats, and Dickens through an inquiry into the economics of literature. Rowlinson’s careful readings include a wide range literary and theoretical reference, but as in his earlier Tennyson’s Fixations (1994), he is at his best in close readings of literary works. The most robust of these comes in Chapter Five, “Reading capital with Little Nell.” Rowlinson begins the chapter by focusing on the commercial development of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. He argues that Dickens’s negotiations with his publishers commodified the piece as capital as it was being written. This historical discussion helps lead readers to Rowlinson’s central argument: within The Old Curiosity Shop, the virginally embodied Nell, “together with the insistent materiality of the curiosity shop and the miser’s hoard, [is] the central allegorization of the impossible materiality of money” (188). Rowlinson earns this claim through a well-plotted chapter peppered throughout with ingenious readings of Dickens.
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Reviewed by
Seamus Perry
Balliol College, Oxford

Readers have often noticed that something odd keeps happening in Thomson’s The Seasons. A poem supposedly devoted to the Newtonian excellences of order and proportion keeps surprising itself with the counter-experience of disorderliness and unruly profusion. These glimpses of covert chaos prove no less absorbing for their being so obviously troublesome to the poem’s tidy-minded Deist agenda:

Nor undelighted by the boundless Spring
Are the broad monsters of the foaming deep:
From the deep ooze and gelid cavern roused,
They flounce and tumble in unwieldy joy.
Dire were the strain and dissonant to sing
The cruel raputures of the savage kind …

In his excellent English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, David Fairer describes very well the odd power that attends such moments of lost ‘poise’: with an inspired sort of waywardness, the poetry fleetingly includes within its ambit just the sort of bewildering scenario that it was originally devised to redeem. Kevis Goodman is evidently fascinated by such moments too, and her clever and tenacious book builds upon her sense that they represent a crisis of genre: the genre in question is georgic. That the Augustans had a long puzzling love affair with Virgil’s Georgics is a staple of literary history, the grounds for their attraction usually said to be the astonishing directness with which georgic poetry could represent the banal paraphernalia of workaday reality (dung-heaps and so on) which lay excitingly beyond the pale of good judgment. Goodman maintains here something like the opposite: what really matters about georgic, she says, is not its unassuming ordinariness but its intense and bookish self-consciousness, the self-advertising verbalism by which it conjures – she would say ‘mediates’ – humdrum things into the stuff of art, so as to ‘beautifie the vilest dirt’ (as she nicely quotes one commentator) and ‘enliven the deadest Lump’. What charms us is not so much the dung-heap that is being portrayed, Addison says, as the beauty of its portrayal. When Thomson loses his georgic poise, the improving virtue of his art fails: an alternative kind of perception gets into the poetry, as though to reveal a complicating life beneath the surface calm. Goodman calls this effect a ‘clash between rival mediations of the social field’, and the example which strikes her with special force occurs when Thomson makes a tentative descent to the world of the microscopic:

                                      Where the pool
Stands mantled o’er with green, invisible,
Amid the floating verdure millions stray.
Each liquid too, whether it pierces, soothes,
Inflames, refreshes, or exalts the taste,
With various forms abounds. Nor is the stream
Of purest crystal, nor the lucid air,
Though one transparent vacancy it seems,
Void of their unseen people. These, conceal’d
By the kind art of forming Heaven, escape
The grosser eye of man: for, if the worlds
In worlds inclosed should on his senses burst,
From cates ambrosial, and the nectar’d bowl,
He would abhorrent turn; and in dead night,
When silence sleeps o’er all, be stunn’d with noise.

Goodman plausibly connects the animation of that passage with a lively debate within empiricist writings of the period about magnification: concealed beneath the normal range of human perception, but suddenly discovered by the new science, lurked a giddy plurality of worlds, diversely scaled. Thomson is responding to that kind of troubling new awareness as surely as does Swift in the first two books of Gulliver’s Travels.

Now, you could follow the magnificent sweep of Lovejoy (The Great Chain of Being) and identify in Thomson’s lapses signs of a momentous and encompassing confrontation between two concepts of nature – the one, unified, lawful, divinely regulated, the other, diverse, individualistic, anarchically self-governing. But Goodman, as befits the historicist credentials of the Cambridge series in which her book appears, doesn’t go along with that – or, anyway, wants to join that good old argument about plurality to a newer one about history: ‘this act of poetic seeing’, she says, ‘working as microscopic eye, reverses direction and opens out to an influx of the historical world’. The world in question here is the world of food production in an imperial age: mentioning ‘unseen people’, for example, is said to imply a whole obscured background of human relations. I suppose you could hardly say that The Seasons was a poem about the empire; but you might well agree that it is a poem with the empire behind it: stylishly, Goodman calls that background awareness ‘the noise of history’.
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Reviewed by
Patricia A. Matthew
Montclair State University

The allure of editing a text that has been out of print for two hundred years is irresistible to any scholar interested in lesser-known texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially a novel compelling enough to gain the notice of influential periodicals like The British Critic and The Monthly Review. For anyone interested in histories of prose fiction, Lyndon J. Dominique’s edition of The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808) has much to offer. The novel fits neatly into that period between Frances Burney’s novels of the late eighteenth century and the historical novels of the Romantic era, and anticipates Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). As Dominique convincingly argues, it extends the traditions introduced by Samuel Richardson in Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). The meticulously annotated primary text and the supplemental material Dominique has selected to situate it within its cultural moment has the potential to fill in gaps in our understanding of literary history, expand our understanding of a specific cultural moment and struggle (namely England’s competing projects of abolition and empire), and provide an entry to heretofore marginalized (if not completely unknown) literary traditions, all the while highlighting previously ignored threads in existing ones.

Readers of this Broadview edition of the novel will leave it with a clear sense of the tradition of women of color in fiction that has been largely ignored—for example, The Irishman in London; or, The Happy African (1793) by William Macready and Zoflora, or the Generous Negro Girl (1804) by Jean Baptiste Piquard—and a new understanding of how these figures function in canonical literature, such as Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814) and William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847). Most importantly, The Woman of Colour is a more than satisfying piece of storytelling. Despite the novel’s didactic and overt political agenda, it avoids the preachiness of William Godwins’s Caleb Williams (1794) or Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). This is in part because of the plot turns in the novel, in part because of the heroine’s sense of humor, and in part because the novel uses recognizable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gender tropes to both humanize the people of color in the novel and highlight the inequities all women of the times faced.

The Woman of Colour is an epistolary novel about the orphan Olivia Fairfield—the biracial daughter of the slaveholder Mr. Fairfield and Marcia, a Guinean woman on his plantation. The story begins at sea with Olivia en route from Jamaica to London to meet Augustus Merton, the cousin her father’s will stipulates she must marry in order to gain access to her inheritance. Without this marriage, Augustus’s older brother and sister-in-law will inherit the estate. Anxious but stalwart, Olivia manages the turmoil of her journey, both her internal unease about meeting her future husband and the turbulent ocean she travels, all the while offering pronouncements, arguing not just for the humanity of people of color but for their equality to their English counterparts: “I see the distributions of Providence are equally bestowed, and that it is culture not capacity which the negro wants!” (55)

In letters to her governess, Mrs. Milbanke, she describes her often painful adventures facing the prejudices of England’s elite, often offering slyly witty critiques of those in the upper classes, which she describes as a “wondrous pile of novelty” (95). As the daughter of a white man and a black woman, Olivia can speak with great authority about several issues: she understands the limits of gender and is uniquely situated to empathize with black women. She is the outsider and “Other” with an insider’s access because of her parentage, which provides her the opportunity to comment on the foibles of England’s parlor culture. Standing between the blackness of her servant Dido and the whiteness of her father, she is the mediator for those in and out of the text, able to discuss the dehumanizing subject position of women and men of color while gracefully and patiently negotiating the bigotry of the elite, whether directed at her in the form of the genuinely ignorant (the three-year old child of her nemesis in the novel) or through the snide comments of his mother. Language has a different tint when spoken by Olivia: as she says to her admirer George Honeywood, “when I set my foot on your land of liberty, I yield up my independence” (66). Words like “liberty” and “independence” ring differently when in the voice of a slave’s daughter, and the entire novel tilts towards a critique of bigotry, even in its most common moments.
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Reviewed by
Ron Broglio
Arizona State University

Several years ago, Pickering and Chatto published three volumes of collected period poems entitled Eighteenth-Century Laboring-Class Poets, as well as another three volumes under the title Nineteenth-Century Laboring-Class Poets. Through this large project general editor John Goodridge and a list of volume editors have brought to light many lesser known poets, and they have contextualized better known peasant poets such as Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, Robert Burns, Ann Yearsley, Elizabeth Hands, Robert Bloomfield and John Clare. The formidable size of this handsome collection calls for scholarly inquiry into a large number of poets and poems which have seen only marginal attention.

Robert Bloomfield is one such laboring-class poet whose work has seen a revival of interest. Yet, as with many such marginal figures, scholarly work on Bloomfield has been scattered. The brilliance of editors Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keegan has been to bind into a single book collection a sampling of readings of this poet and his life’s works. The collection seeks to validate Robert Bloomfield as a poet worthy of study and does so according to the metrics most commonly accepted by the profession today. There is a large amount of historicism in the volume. Some essays position the poet in relation to other laboring-class poets, and a few place him in the tradition of the picturesque. Bloomfield is best known for The Farmer’s Boy, first published in 1800. There are several good essays on the poem, while the rest of the collection explores the poet’s life and work prior to and after this central and defining work. The collection succeeds in making the case that Bloomfield is a poet whose work was not simply a passing fashion of the period, but is worthy of reflection and continued scholarship. As an aside, I do hope others will take up the call to publish similar collections on other laboring-class poets.

In his introduction, Simon White gives a brief biographical sketch of Bloomfield, and then traces his influence on John Clare and William Barnes, and through them onto Thomas Hardy, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. From here the collection moves to essays beginning with Bloomfield’s larger and better known works, and then moves on to smaller poems, and his relation to other poets.

In his excellent essay, “Illustrating The Farmer’s Boy“, Bruce Graver traces the publication history of the poem as Bloomfield navigates between the publishers Vernor and Hood, who wished to sell it as a quaint pastoral work, and the patron Capel Lofft, who touted the radical political implications of the poem (underscored by his own introduction). Most interesting about Graver’s essay is that he makes the argument not only from historical records of transactions and correspondences but most strikingly through the commissions for illustrations to the poem. The Farmer’s Boy has an extensive history of illustration, and Graver opens the conversation by following key shifts in early editions from the first rustic “primitive” woodcuts of John Anderson (a student of Thomas Bewick), to the later “softening process” of Nesbit’s illustration of a pastoral poet who has all but abandoned labor in the field. Worth noting is that popular agricultural painters and engravers such as George Moreland and James Ward can be added to Graver’s list of illustrators to the poem.

The Farmer’s Boy is not the only poem in which Bloomfield found himself caught between patron and publication. Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee trace a similar tension between poet and patron—in this case the famed doctor Edward Jenner—in the publication of Good Tidings, a work commissioned by Jenner to advocate his cross-species cure of cowpox to immunize against smallpox. Their essay “The Vaccine Rose: Patronage, Pastoralism, and Public Health” extends their work on smallpox from Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era (2004). As Fulford and Lee claim, Bloomfield was quite excited to be approached by Jenner for this commission. That Bloomfield’s father and siblings died from smallpox certainly influenced his willingness to take the commission and their deaths are recorded in Good Tidings. Since Jenner made his discovery by refining folk wisdom regarding smallpox and cowpox, Bloomfield’s rustic writings were a clear fit with Jenner’s cure. But as Bloomfield found with Lofft and The Farmer’s Boy, “Jenner . . . turned out to be another patron who wanted to present Bloomfield’s words on his own terms to advance his own cause. . . . Jenner was a commercial operator, who had commissioned a poem as part of his own propaganda campaign” (155). Bloomfield found himself caught between the old patronage model for publication and the newer commercial market.
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Reviewed by
Luke Iantorno
University of North Texas

Karen Fang’s examination of post-Napoleonic periodical culture in Britain focuses on the works of Charles Lamb, James Hogg, Letitia Landon, and Lord Byron, their individual experiences with imperialism, and how they translated those experiences for British periodicals. Periodical culture, according to Fang, was the nexus of empire and capital, consumption and commodification–a privileged formation that brought imperial exoticism to the domestic consumer, in the “visual and textual representation[s] within newspapers and magazines” (2). Jon Klancher’s work figures heavily here, especially his sense that “the professionalization of the early-nineteenth-century periodical marketplace” constituted a “fundamentally different cultural economy”: as such, Fang follows Klancher in reading the semiotics of the imperial project, an “‘empire of signs, a phrase he derives from contemporary Romantic metaphors of the mind” to develop her own examination of the more material, “geographical exoticism” in British periodicals (7).

Chapter One, “China for Sale,” is concerned with Charles Lamb’s contributions on the “mercantile trade” in his “Elia” essays for the London Magazine beginning in 1820, composed in response to his long-term employment with the East India Company (37). Lamb’s London essays, which create a “link between literary and imperial writing”, illustrate a propensity for the unknown and “exotic objects” procured for England by its imperial endeavors (37-8). Fang refers to this representation of imperialism and exoticism in Lamb’s “Elia” essays as “opportunities for Romantic wonder” (38). Yet Fang teases Lamb’s “wonder” out of the apparently banal, especially in “Old China,” which figures the “aesthetic and cultural significance of [Oriental] porcelain” in Britain’s imperial and consumerist society (39). Fang claims that “[b]y including porcelain among more familiar Romantic pleasure of drama and painting”, “Old China” is converted from “a household item usually trivialized as a decorative – and therefore minor – art” into an object of a “contemporary consciousness with which imperial commodities are treated by Lamb in the London” (38-9). This arises from her observation that Lamb treats porcelain as “symbolic of the upward mobility possible through imperial expansion” (41). This idea of “imperial expansion” in “Old China” is strengthened by a brief, yet crucial analysis of Marx. Fang draws from the concept of commodity fetishism to advance her examination of the teacup as “symbolic” of the British Empire’s dependence on foreign expansion and commodities, which is subsequently rendered a fetish by Elia, providing an “ekphrastic pleasure … as he gazes upon its ornamental decorations as if it were a telescopic window into China itself” (46-7). This vision of the Orient as Lamb renders it in “Old China” lends itself to a new vision of England’s expansion.
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Reviewed by
Tristanne Connolly
St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo

The prospect of reading Nature as the Book of God in and around the Romantic period immediately calls up both the precise, “rational religion” of the eighteenth century (how much can be known of the true God without Revelation?) and the vague, evocative pantheism that has traditionally defined high Romanticism. Colin Jager navigates a way between the two, and the topic of design, seemingly only one small detail in the larger relations of theology, philosophy and literature, reveals itself as influentially everywhere, much like the hand of God. Design becomes a deft little needle to embroider the broad fabric to which Jager sets himself, a repatterning of the relation between Romanticism and modern secularism. The project points suggestively toward multiple significances of the concept of design, and ways to rethink Nature and Reason in early and late Romanticism, and in modernity. More explicitly, the book considers how to read religion in Romantic literature where it might seem most elusive, critiques Romantic criticism through its own investments in a certain narrative of modernity, and extrapolates that critique into a revisionary theory of secularization that accounts for the persistence of divine design and human faith.

A strength of the book is its combination of expected and unexpected texts for its subject matter. Its revivification of William Paley as a worthy object of scholarship is exciting, and the book’s standout chapter on Mansfield Park builds insightful and thorough arguments about design on a brief conversation about chapel fittings, moving out more broadly to a religious triangulation of Edmund, Fanny and Mary perceptively informed by British religious history.

Jager begins by taking on the secularization thesis as endorsed, for instance, in M.H. Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism, and suggests instead a process of differentiation in which religion becomes one sphere among many rather than infused in all aspects of life. He argues for adoption of Charles Taylor’s concept of multiple modernities to enrich the idea that differentiation may mean a shift but need not imply a decline in the public role of religion. However, Jager seems to assert at once that there has not been a decline in religion, and that there is a current resurgence. He considers Western Europe to be the world exception in actually having “experienced secularization as both differentiation and religious decline and transformation”, and considers the objection, “why would it matter for interpreting British romanticism that secularization as commonly understood is not universally applicable, and that the global South, for instance, is currently experiencing a massive surge in religious activity?” (32-3). In answer, Jager emphasizes the interests of later interpreters who appeal to secularization, which is fair enough, but still the question remains open, as earlier he had argued “the most reliable data show that religious participation in England rose between 1800 and 1850 (the period of most intense modernization and industrialization) and then held steady or rose gradually until 1900; the period between 1890 and 1914 was probably the key turning point” (27). Was there or wasn’t there religious decline in Britain in the Romantic period? The amorphousness of the figures adds further uncertainty: religious participation is a lump undifferentiated by sect. The understanding of “religion” is problematic in the book, as overall it clearly concentrates on Christianity, yet appeals to wider examples to demonstrate resurgence—for instance, Saba Mahmood’s study of the Egyptian mosque movement—though surely a modern and feminine desire to uphold religious norms will be interestingly different between Christian and Muslim, English and Egyptian experience. (The “bodily postures” involved are treated in a broad, abstract, barely physical mode by Jager, one hint of how the transfer is inadequate.) The introduction is most solid and interesting in its initial explanations of points that will be crucial throughout, such as the rhetorical nature of design arguments, compactly demonstrated in Raphael’s advice to Adam that he must “reck’n right”: “we try to figure out something about God based on what we can see around us … But … we need to be reminded … to begin not with what we can observe but with what we know about God” (9). Design arguments, Jager insists, convince those already inclined to believe them. Also insightful is the understanding of analogy (on which design arguments rest) as “itself… a figure for secularization as differentiation” (31) because of its paradoxical ability at once to distinguish and hold together two different realms, such as nature and divinity, or science and religion.

Chapter One, “The Argument Against Design from Deism to Blake”, is somewhat confusingly titled, as deism is concluded not to be really “against” design; it is just like design without the orthodoxy. Jager turns to Godwin, using Caleb Williams’ relationship to Falkland, initially seen as a “benevolent divinity” (53), as a “rereading of the optimism of the deists … The subject can no longer believe, but that loss entails paranoia and a crippling reflexivity rather than a compensatory liberation” (54). Again this is conceived more as an extension than an opposition (almost like the relationship between modernism and postmodernism). Indeed, Jager draws an affinity between Caleb and Paul de Man, for whom, he argues, “secularization is melancholy, obsessive, and secretive” (54); both realize knowledge does not set them free. One might ask whether this is the inevitable result, though: in Caleb’s case, remembering that this reading is metaphorical, figuring his relation to God on his belief in a fellow human as divine (which is idolatry, of a kind very convenient to arbitrary earthly power), it may be that he is too socially brainwashed to get over the revelation that a (mere) class superior is not so superior.
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