Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Annotated Frankenstein, eds. Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao (Harvard: Belknap Press, 2012). 400 pp. (Hdbk., $29.95; ISBN 978-0-674-05552-0).

Reviewed by
Nora Crook
Anglia Ruskin University at Cambridge

The Annotated Frankenstein? Most new editions of Frankenstein are annotated now. One thinks of those that have been published or updated in recent years—landmarks such as Charles Robinson’s The Original Frankenstein (2008), Stuart Curran’s wonderfully compendious Romantic Circles hypertext (2009), fine teaching editions (all using the 1818 text) such as Macdonald and Scherf’s Broadview (3rd ed., 2012), Paul Hunter’s Norton (2nd ed., 2012), Judith Wilt’s New Riverside (2003), and not least the Longman (2nd ed. 2007), edited by Wolfson, reviewed in Romantic Circles in 2004.

So what’s new here? It’s fair to describe The Annotated Frankenstein as the offspring of Wolfson’s Longman edition—no hideous progeny, but a very lively and accessible book for the serious (but not necessarily scholarly) reader and a splendid looking monster for the coffee-table. The Longman introduction, rewritten, abridged, and expanded, supplies the groundwork for the introduction to The Annotated Frankenstein. Like its parent, too, this edition has timelines, a history of adaptation on stage and screen, a list for further reading and viewing, and a selection of the 1831 revisions. Some of the 2003/2007 apparatus has been dropped, including contextual material, contemporary reviews, Peake’s 1823 Frankenstein play, Polidori’s The Vampyre, and “Frankentalk” in the popular press. But new features have been brought in, of which the most immediately striking are the illustrations and the expanded critical and informational notes, which form, in effect, a running commentary.

Wolfson and Levao wistfully remark on how “inviting to the eye” (115) the early nineteenth-century three-volume novels were at about 100 words per page, but if The Annotated Frankenstein can’t match that lavishness, the print is beautifully clear, with generous space for the notes, presented as sidenotes; these are distinguished from the text by both a smaller point-size and a sepia tone. The illustrations—nearly 100—have been thoughtfully chosen, and almost all are sufficiently large. There are, of course, the usual portraits of Mary Shelley, her family, Byron, and so on. (A mild demurral: does the spurious Stump portrait, even accompanied by the warning that it is only “long thought to be Mary Shelley,” merit inclusion?) The prints of St. Pancras Churchyard and the Villa Diodati show detail well; a still from the James Whale 1931 Frankenstein is juxtaposed with Fuseli’s Nightmare to illustrate how the first derives from the second. More out-of-the-way illustrations include pages of Godwin’s diary, some of Lynd Ward’s superb wood engravings of 1934, Henry Fuseli’s 1794 Milton Dictating to his Daughter (a voluptuous figure, whose thin red neck-ribbon disturbingly suggests the guillotine as her father’s ghastly sightless eyes roll upward), Rubens’s baroque Prometheus Bound, and Cruikshank’s print of Napoleon’s 1814 dethronement, The Modern Prometheus or Downfall of Tyranny. There is an 1800 map of the walled city of Geneva, showing the three infamous gates that shut inexorably at 10 p.m., sealing poor Justine’s fate. Something that will be completely new to most readers is the reproduction of the title page of the fine Hawkey 1747 edition of Paradise Lost, now at Princeton, inscribed “Mary. W. G. | from Percy B Shelley | June 6. 1815.” Not only does this shed a slender beam on what the Shelleys were up to during this blank period in early June, from which no other documents seem to have survived, but the record of a previous owner, “Lady Savile” (52), supplies a possible additional source for the name of Walton’s sister, Margaret Saville. Furthermore, it is linked to one of the major narratives running through the notes: Frankenstein’s engagement with Milton.

Wolfson and Levao don’t aim at being exhaustive in their annotation, but this is compensated for by expansiveness and cohesion. As well as Milton, topics such as class conflict, the alchemical and scientific background, the unnamed ghosts of Rousseau and Wollstonecraft in the text, parenting, and the significance of names are foregrounded; many notes point out the recurrence of motifs and episodes (the monster collecting wood for “firing,” repeated courtroom and reanimation scenes). A very strong feature is the degree of attention to verbal detail, such as the change from “R. Walton” to “Robert Walton” as a valediction to his sister when Walton believes that he may never return. The editors tease out the numerous occurrences of words that ironically relate to Frankenstein (frankly, frank-hearted, etc.), and the variants on monster and devoted. There is a judicious selection of the alterations made by Percy to Mary’s manuscripts. Even those who believe they know Frankenstein pretty well will catch themselves thinking as they read the notes, “Well, I never noticed that before,” whether it be a submerged allusion to Orlando Furioso or the fact that we never learn what happened to Frankenstein’s one surviving sledge dog. Notes are up-to-date; the identification of Claire Clairmont’s father by Vicki Parslow Stafford in February 2011 has been missed, but the editors have got in a reference to the University of Texas’s research, published September 2011, which found that bright moonlight would have streamed through MWS’s bedroom at 2 a.m. on 16 June 1816 (342), thus supporting her 1831 account.

As its title signals, Wolfson and Levao’s Annotated Frankenstein invites particular comparison with Leonard Wolf’s illustrated 1977 publication of the same name and its 1993 revision, The Essential Frankenstein, both out of print. These two publications delighted with their irreverent and sometimes wacky notes, which include a recipe for Orkney oat-cakes and observations that have more in them than meets the eye, such as: “Where, in the vicinity of the North Pole, [the Creature] expects to find wood enough to make a funeral pyre is a detail that did not trouble Mary Shelley. Perhaps it should not trouble us” (The Essential Frankenstein, 290). Wolfson and Levao, engaging with Wolf’s challenge, show that it should trouble us and that the text supplies an answer: “The pile, we may realize, is to be assembled from the Creature’s sledge, perhaps also from Frankenstein’s, and the shipwrecks of unlucky expeditions” (324)—an interpretation sharpened by their including a reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of a ship crushed in the Polar ice: The Death of Hope (1823–1824).

The chronology of Frankenstein is an anvil that has broken the hammer of many an editor, including that of Wolf, in an attempt to establish internal consistency and seamless correspondence with parallel events, public and private, in the 1790s. Wolfson and Levao have given the matter much thought before putting forward theirs (which blends a fictional timeline with the historical one). Their adding Justine’s history to the tally of internal calendar problems seems based on a miscalculation (358, 374–75), but they are dead right to say that “calendric accuracy . . . seems maddeningly elusive,” and sensibly propose that we accept the seemingly historical time furnished by dates as illusionistic. Anachronistic quotations from Coleridge, Lamb, Byron, and Leigh Hunt “may have a purpose that trumps the calendar: the array of references constitutes, in effect, an anthology that marks Mary Shelley’s tacit solidarity with her Romantic-era contemporaries” (354).

Sometimes the vivacious broadbrush approach strays into the tendentious, and there are some mistakes and oversights. Many are trivial; the less trivial ones mostly concern publishing history and Mary Shelley’s relationship with Lackington, publisher of the 1818 Frankenstein (50). I also regret that the 1823 edition of Frankenstein is still called a reprint (53). (Godwin, who reported putting it in hand on 29 July 1823, was almost certainly the introducer of some significant verbal changes, one of which makes the Creature more aggressive, and most of which were carried into the third edition of 1831.) As I understand, Wolfson and Levao are aware of these and other slips, and intend that they shall be corrected on a second printing. And they are among the few commentators who speak accurately of the ghost-story writing project as a “compact” rather than loosely as a “competition.” Shining through the commentary is their sense of the extraordinariness of Frankenstein, the way in which it repays repeated rereadings, its anchorage in a specific historical situation, its untethered freedom from that situation, enabling it to speak to us today. All in all, this handsome edition should give much pleasure and instruction to its intended readership, and I join with the editors and publishers in bidding it prosper.

Susan J. Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 430 pp. (Hdbk., $ 97.95; Pbk., $ 29.95; ISBN-10: 0-8047-6105-1; ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-6105-5). Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 381 pp. (Hdbk., $ 70; Pbk., $ 29.95; ISBN-10: 0-8018-9474-3; ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-9474-9).

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.

In Borderlines Wolfson starts from an intriguing question that she formulates by way of Toril Moi and Julia Kristeva: “What if the notion of border is reconfigured from an outward limit of a concentric structure into a borderline, a differential across which both women and men face each other and continually negotiate, and across which occur more than a few strange shifts and transactions?” (xviii). The entire book reads like a series of interrelated attempts to provide answers to this question, which result in a series of tightly interwoven explorations of significant textual sites, some of them familiar, others less so. In this fashion, Wolfson takes us on a complex journey across the vagaries of Romantic investments in gender and their influence on twentieth-century debates through such ramifications as Virginia Woolf’s reworking of Coleridge’s notion of androgyny.

Among the perspectives she opens up is an examination of Hemans in which the poet emerges as busily employed in promoting “the woman’s case through her aesthetic and figurative textures” (65). Wolfson is one of the main critical sponsors of an analysis of Hemans that does not stop short at the thematic level, goes deeper into her stylistic operations, and revaluates her as a gifted creator of carefully crafted textual objects. Formal phenomena are precisely the sites that Wolfson investigates to recover the mutations of what she terms “Hemans’s inner ‘feminine calculus’”: “the more rebellious a woman, the more vivid the aesthetic fireworks, the more necessary her death” (67). By attending to Hemans’s repeated mise en scène of woman’s “glorious but impotent defiance” (67), she finds formal evidence for a dissident literary project which points to another Hemans, a much less feminine one than that depicted by Victorian commentators. This is why this chapter is required reading for all those who may still entertain dismissive and partial notions of the poet. Wolfson gives these skeptics no quarter by unrelentingly throwing light on the poet’s strategies for walking the tightrope of acceptability, such as her coded references to rebelliousness. What we get, eventually, is a much less elegiac, much less submissive kind of poetical output made up of “poem[s] at war with [themselves]” and texts thriving on a fascinating tug-of-war “between cultural logic and aesthetic energy” (75).

While this attention to Hemans is perhaps expected of Wolfson, the chapter on Jewsbury ventures into partly new territory that aptly complements her examination of Hemans. The two women were close friends and correspondents, and Jewsbury used Hemans as the model for the figure of Egeria in her “History of a Nonchalant” (1830), a crucial piece in her series of portraits of the characters of woman. A talented, unconventional figure, Jewsbury was the author of what are possibly the earliest female-authored critical remarks on Jane Austen. She also read and made sense of Wollstonecraft in the changed panorama of cultural and gender relations of the 1820s. Once again, Wolfson engages in an interpretative tour de force by reading “The History of an Enthusiast” as a mesh of female- and male-authored hypotexts. Here Jewsbury reprises Wollstonecraft, subjects conventional and masculine forms to several ironic sleights of hand, and produces a valuable testimony of intellectual and ideological self-awareness in female writings from the 1820s and 30s. And this self-awareness is both self-assured and embattled, as well as tragically doomed to defeat. In point of fact, Wolfson never loses sight of the poignant narrative of Jewsbury’s retreat from the intellectual and literary frontline into a marriage that brought her to India and an early death. And, as with Hemans, the critic finds fault with “Victorian corrections” (128) for the disappearance of such a valuable figure from our literary and cultural accounts.

Over the years Wolfson has produced a substantial body of memorable work on Byron—especially Sardanapalus, Don Juan, and the question of cross-dressing. Here, she concentrates on what she calls his life-long willingness to “risk some undecidable estimates” (139). This phrase echoes Hemans’s “feminine calculus” and is the starting point of an interpretive tour that takes us back to Ravenna and Byron’s days as a cicisbeo via the Venetian Carnival and the oft-quoted expression “the poetry of politics” that Wolfson submits to careful scrutiny in light of the fact that, at this time, it was becoming “an ironic embarrassment” for Byron (143). Moreover, she shows how Byron’s play with effeminacy presupposes rules that the critic painstakingly teases out of his contradictory textuality. These rules appear to be aptly ambivalent—this is Byron, after all—as well as held in check by his firm focus (in Sardanapalus, yet also, one suspects, in many other portions of his production) on the possibility of “a determined opting out of historical imperatives altogether” (144). Similarly, the issue of Byron’s “style of refusal” (146) ricochets around and permeates the chapter on gender and cross-dressing in Don Juan. Overall, this is a particularly rewarding section, and not just because of its tightly-knit structure and discursive-argumentative cohesion. The pleasure and critical gains it delivers also stem from the cogency of Wolfson’s micro-readings, her eye for detail, and her ability to home in on a word or an incident and unwrap its significance to reveal unsuspected implications and consequences.

The two chapters on Keats almost inevitably resonate with more intensely elegiac tones. Wolfson starts by reading the cultural transformations undergone by the figure of the “man of feeling.” She then goes on to investigate Keats’s fear of “smokeability”, his alternating allegiance to and refusal of romance, his desire for male clubbability, and his investment in negative capability as a gendered antidote to smokeability. She follows the multiple paths of his pen, which she describes as “pointed for vocational manhood” yet also “drawn to the pleasures of female styles and forms of leisure” (219). These forays into Keats’s persona and writings yield a melancholy picture overcast by the poet’s distinctive concern with “Indolence” in both its positive and negative acceptations. It also bears the stamp of his concurrent need to court fame and measure up to contemporary male literary circles. Then, when the book turns from Keats and gender acts to the gendering of Keats and his imagination in the later nineteenth century, the melancholy picture becomes an intricate agon made up of appropriations, rewritings and adaptations of the poet and his image. Taking up this material with distinctive gusto, Wolfson illuminates the ways in which the knot of effeminacy, indolence, sensuality and romance affected Keats’s reception in Victorian times. She looks at how he fared with male and female writers and critics, as gender invariably played a crucial role in shaping his afterlife. In this respect, Wolfson offers a wonderfully rich and suggestive analysis of the numerous nineteenth-century depictions of Keats’s face. Carved on his repeatedly, indeed obsessively, reproduced likeness, the mixed coordinates of a masculine-feminine Keats continued to exercise Victorians artists, critics and readers, confirming and testing their notions of gendered identities until the end of the century and beyond.

The last chapter in Borderlines, “Sex in Souls?”, centers on the ways in which the Romantics wrote about the soul and the idea that “a poetics of soul … is also a poetics of gendered agons” (300). Once again, Wolfson sets up a spirited and determined examination of such significant formal features as syntactical structures, sound chains, and metrical layouts. Her aim, here, is to tease out how texts contribute formally to the emergence and circulation of one of the main concerns for Romantic-era authors; a concern, we should perhaps add, that does not often feature in current scholarship, given a generalized tendency to underplay the impact of religious faith. The chapter also necessarily concentrates on texts where the dialogue between male and female (or masculine and feminine) interlocutors is precisely that: an exchange and a conversation. Although, on many occasions, it may be marred by what Wolfson terms “alter-egoism” (296), this dialogue constitutes a lively encounter and a constant comparison of different positions, one that bears testimony to the uninterrupted and endlessly productive crossing of gender borderlines that characterizes the Romantic-period literary field.

Such dialogues and exchanges form the backbone and substance of Romantic Interactions, a book in which Wolfson significantly reorients her critical focus. In fact, this book might trick us into thinking that she wants to take us where we have already been several times before. Once again, however, she surprises us by avoiding a whole range of rather predictable approaches. Wolfson focuses neither on intertextuality nor on the lyric’s investment in dialogue with real/imagined or visible/invisible interlocutors. She is also uninterested in poetical schools or collaborative groups and circles. Instead, her aim is to debunk the myth of Romantic isolationism and creation in solitude. To this end, she sets her sights on how authors identify themselves as such (how they “author” themselves) by way of exchanges and connections with other authors, whether on the bookshelf or in propria persona.

This is what “interaction” means in a book where Wolfson deals once more in major figures and crucial turning points. On the one hand, her arguments and discussions reflect certain recurrent preoccupations in the field of Romantic-period studies and her own critical practice. On the other, however, she treats us to a generous helping of unexpected insights and readings. The case of the Wordsworths is, in this sense, exemplary. Wolfson explores it in all its complex and unpleasant nuances. Thus, she duly charts William Wordsworth’s process of writing the female and feminine out of his verse. Yet, when it comes to addressing Dorothy’s figure and function, she zooms in on the vexed question of the “alter ego” which, in her perspective, also functions as an other “to the point of inaccessibility” and “vexed by gender difference” (152). Accordingly, “interaction” mutates into a scene of resistance, in which the “we converted to me” is a transition fraught with tension and divisiveness (171). Wolfson conjures up and investigates the ambivalence of the “alter ego” by constantly going back to a textual field made of revisions, cross-fertilizations, and clashes.

The chapter on Smith and that on Wollstonecraft and poetry display an interesting series of balancing acts. In the former, Wolfson reads Smith’s The Emigrants as a textual operation dealing with revolutionary and counter-revolutionary issues. Bent on a revision of the epic, the poem questions sympathy and dares express a hope for peace by resorting to (and reconfiguring) men’s poetical voices. In the case of Wollstonecraft, Wolfson instead transports us into the arena of poetical criticism, indeed one of the foundational moments of the contemporary feminist critical tradition: “On the text of Milton’s Eve, Wollstonecraft invents what we now call feminist literary criticism” (69). In this chapter Wolfson reevaluates the role and position of poetry within Wollstonecraft’s cultural-political project. At the same time, she reconstructs the author’s delineation of a canon of verse through a process of selection that hinges crucially on The Female Reader (1789)—a process that Wolfson denominates “Wollstonecrafting poetry” (80).

Both chapters, as well as the middle section on the Wordsworths, address the practices of manipulation and revision of other authors through which writers identify their spaces of authorial intervention. “Authorial self-recognition”, Wolfson notes, takes place within webs of “reciprocal formation in a society of formations, that is continuously challenged by this field” (8). In a way, we are at a safe distance from Bloom’s “agonic” arena. And yet we may also get the impression that it would be comparatively easy to fall into it again. Wolfson, however, takes heed never to stray too far into psychological approaches. Although she pays all due attention to biographical imperatives, her notion of the authorial function is first and foremost that of an aspect of textuality, stylistics, and institutions. Her interpretative angle privileges self-constructions that result in public authorial personae that cannot evade the pressure of the “public’s authority over (its writing about) the socially legible self” (11). And this is precisely why the final chapters on Byron provide such an apposite culmination to the book.

The first chapter in this section is an in-depth study of the action of “gazing on ‘Byron’”. It considers contemporary reactions to the portraits, later dicta such as S.T. Coleridge’s or Mario Praz’s rhapsodic prosopographies of the poet, and Byronism and its status as a “dynamic of reading” promoted by Byron himself (215). His separation from his wife and the attendant paper war give Wolfson an opportunity to test the poet’s own theatrics, his ability to generate desire to gaze on him, and his (not always successful) control over that game. She investigates the act of “viewing Byron” as a challenge and a necessity for a long list of contemporary colleagues, friends, and commentators—from Joanna Baillie to Annabella Milbanke, from Thomas Moore to John Wilson and Francis Jeffrey. All of them took up the challenge as Byron had set it up, and to some extent their reactions testify to the dangers posed by the “public’s authority” over a self that offers itself as publicly legible.

In the last chapter, “Byron and the Muse of Female Poetry”, Wolfson continues her exploration of this material and produces what seems destined to become an inescapable point of reference for future work on Byron and women poets. This chapter starts from his lordship’s ability to take hold of the inmost recesses of his (male and female) readers’ spirits, thus inspiring them with the awareness of possessing an “inner Byron”. It is in this light that Wolfson reads female poets’ reactions and responses to his myth and poetry from the 1820s and 30s. Suggestively defining Byron as a “dreamboat [that] ripples across gender codes” (259), she carefully turns to trace the textual/formal manifestations of these ripples in L.E.L.’s poetry and, to a lesser extent, Hemans, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Caroline Norton. Hemans represents an illuminating case study of the female Byronist’s dilemmas, as she did not give up her Byronic style even after shifting her allegiance to the Wordsworthian mode. Yet Wolfson reconstructs an even more varied picture by charting the myriad ways in which L.E.L. channeled Byron through her verse and self-projections. This protracted investment constitutes the ultimate instance of a process of authorial self-construction based on an interaction with an author on the bookshelf and yet endowed with a powerfully present, embodied persona. As Wolfson says, “For posthumous readers, Byron was as undead as dead” (280). Contrary to appearances (once again, in this case, cursory interpretations are much to blame), Landon does not “sign on” to Byron, but rather becomes highly skilled in “reading the system” (266) and using it to her own advantage. And she did so throughout her career—from her first major Byronic foray The Improvisatrice (1824) to her overflowing output for the Annuals. The image of an ultra-feminine Landon dissolves as Wolfson focuses on the complex gender faultlines attached to “Byron”, and her own diversified response to his myth and verse. By exploring the game of mirrors between Landon as a female Byron and also as a feminized Byron, Wolfson closes her volume with neatly laid out, resonant conclusions in which Romantic-period phenomena continue to re-echo into the Victorian period and beyond.

Borderlines is a sustained interpretation of the “ethical and potentially political relevance of dislocation” (126). It is a book that warrants reading and re-reading, as its intuitions and reformulations gradually come into view and start to play off one another. It is also a crucial introduction to Romantic Interactions and its explorations of the formal and ideological mechanisms regulating authorial self-definition. Dislocation and interaction are the keywords to these fundamental contributions to current Romantic-period studies, both of which look set to go on “rippling” across the discipline for years to come.

Ian Dennis, Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009). 266pp. (Hdbk., $55.00; ISBN-13: 978 0 87413 066 9.)

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.

Chapter 5 isn’t the first place where Dennis relies on a rather unusual device to argue his point, but it is where his use of dramatic monologue becomes the most salient. Perhaps Dennis is modeling his own desires on Byron when he writes: “Nemesis neatly summarizes the process in all its circularity and futility, as he recalls the lost Astarte. As long as it is inaccessible I continue to desire it, it continues to torture me, but it continues to live in my desire. Torture and fascination, I gradually see, are the very conditions of love, of life even” (122). And there’s more: “Only you remain desirable, in death, the unobtainable phantasm of my former desire, the doubled image of myself, the vestige of our mad spiral into ontological rivalry, still tempting me on. Forgive me!” (122). First-person effusions, wherein the scholar appropriates the subject, obfuscate the point where Byron ends and Dennis begins, but this could be a stylishly metacritical objective. Dennis’s own study is further evidence of what he terms the “struggle over influence” (138).

Chapter 6, on Cain (1821), scrutinizes the sources of violence behind the first murder, in order to posit that the poet (playing priest) widens his cultish following, while dramatizing new models of desire: Lucifer’s influence over Cain and the ensuing rivalry with brother Abel. Since the modern market best embodies the mediation of our collective desires, it’s not for nothing that Byron’s greatest poem, Don Juan, abounds with slave and marriage marts, harems, even shopping lists and menus as food for thought. There’s a refreshing aside—entitled “Digression on Sex, Joking about Sex, and Sexism in Don Juan”—in which Dennis unmasks humor and joking as differentiation: “To laugh at others is to differentiate them, to scapegoat them even, in order to ward off the contagion of their betrayed desires” (159). Thus, on the sexist jocularity of Don Juan, Dennis concludes that its author is primarily a sexist and only secondarily a comedian. An additional chapter on Don Juan broadens the degree to which Byron’s magnum opus affects readers, specifically through irony and alliance-building. The poem’s narrator is another model with whom we form an alliance through confession and identification: the work’s “Ironic Lesson,” according to Dennis, teaches readers to “be like Byron, ironically” (219).

But Lord Byron and the History of Desire doesn’t quite take all of Byron’s lessons to heart. It’s not just that Dennis’ exegesis of Don Juan overlooks, in its consideration of Byron’s love of double entendre, Jonathan Gross’s claim (in Byron: The Erotic Liberal) that Byron uses a gay narrator in Don Juan. Queer theory as a whole is a significant blind spot in Dennis’s work. Indeed the main deficiency of this book is that, for a history of desire, this is a sterile and normative one, either unfamiliar with or resistant to the queer Byron revealed by Louis Crompton’s Byron and Greek Love. Since then, Andrew Elfenbein has hardly been alone in reminding us that Byron was not only the “most famous poet of his day” but also “the one with the most scandalous sexual history” (207). Byron’s erotic biography looked backward and forward, from the homophobic persecution of William Beckford thirty years earlier to the lynching of Oscar Wilde eighty years later. His erotic nonconformity outraged even the heterodox Percy Shelley into drafting one of the rare references to same-sex desire in early nineteenth-century letters: Byron, living in Venice in 1819, “associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait & physiognomy of man, who do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named but I believe ever conceived in England” (Letters II: 488). It’s surprising that the queerness of Byron’s “practices” are still “not named” in a study published in 2009.

The life notwithstanding, there are always Byron’s writings, chiefly his gender-bending drama Sardanapalus (1821), with its eponymous “man-queen,” tellingly absent from Dennis’s study. What’s missing also in an otherwise fine reading of Byron’s satiric comment on Plato in Don Juan—“Oh Plato! Plato!” who “paved the way” to “immoral conduct”—is an alertness to the cultural association Byron’s readers would have made between Plato’s supposed immorality and sodomy, which is vital to what George Rousseau has called the “historicizing of homoplatonism […] within the domain of same-sex relationships” (21). In a memorable phrase, Dennis calls Byron the “author of the greatest and most novelistic verse satire of his century” situated “in the eye of a hurricane of celebrity, of mass desire” (15). In this respect, Lord Byron and the History of Desire joins another engrossing examination of Byronic notoriety—namely Ghislaine McDayter’s Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (SUNY, 2009)—but the more infamous and radical dimensions of Byron’s desires, on and off the page, are here effaced. The risk of writing any comprehensive history is that it invariably leaves the feeling that more than a little has been left out.

Works Cited

Elfenbein, Andrew. Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Rousseau, George. “Homoplatonic, Homodepressed, Homomorbid: Some Further Genealogies of Same-Sex Attraction in Western Civilization,” in Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 1550-1800, ed. Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 12-52.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). ISBN: 9780300112603. $50.00.

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.

The middle chapters (5-7) slow the pace a bit. Though they contain intelligent commentary on Blake’s “Bible of Hell” (primarily Marriage and Urizen) and on Blake’s place in English radical traditions, the material will be familiar to Blake scholars. Even so, readers should not miss the outstanding section in chapter six on biblical prophecy (137-50), in which Rowland situates Blake in relation to biblical, rabbinic and early patristic interpretations of merkabah, showing how Ezekiel’s dramatic throne vision enabled later writers to “see again” what the prophet saw, but within their own experience and context.

The following two chapters are among the strongest in the book. They provide sustained discussion of the biblical roots of Blake’s antinomianism (complementing Jon Mee’s work) and demonstrate his indebtedness to Paul’s ideas of atonement and the divine body of Christ. In an astute reading of the Woman Taken in Adultery segment of “The Everlasting Gospel,” Rowland shows that Blake conflates passages from John’s Gospel and Paul’s letters to foreground the dissident Jesus. Blake appropriates Pauline language of “putting off” the garments of flesh in terms that refuse to negate desire, that instead accommodate desire and forgiveness, self and the other, in a dynamic movement. Blake thus maintains the contraries and takes a significant step forward (and away) from the Bible. The chapter devoted to Paul should set the course for future study of their relationship: “Paul is not primarily an interpreter of the Bible; he was, rather, a mystic whose sense of his communion with the heavenly world made him a broker of divine mysteries” (200-1). Rowland deftly summarizes Paul’s ambiguous views of Mosaic Law and provides a valuable overview of various types of antinomianism. In an excellent section on “The Cross” he argues that differences between Blake and Paul are largely superficial: Blake rejects Pauline language about the ransom theory of atonement in which Jesus’ death propitiates demands for divine justice and wrath; but Paul’s letters also provide what he calls “an entirely plausible gloss” on Blake’s concept of self-annihilation. Moreover, Paul espouses an understanding of Christianity in which the historical Jesus plays second fiddle to the cosmic Christ, a theme Blake develops into his core concept of divine humanity. In an original and challenging analysis of Ephesians and Colossians, often viewed as conservative and church oriented and thus less valuable for Blake, Rowland argues that their presentation of Christ’s body as a “wider, cosmic space” of divine activity and community had tremendous appeal for Blake.

As often with the best books on Blake, and as Rowland says of Blake’s relationship to Milton, there is a creative intimacy palpable on every page. The book reads as a continued stream of revelatory encounters between a renowned but unassuming New Testament scholar and an artist who has helped liberate him from the constraints of his field, enabling him to chart new territory. What I found most exciting about the book is the dynamic interaction it sets up between Blake’s images/texts and biblical traditions, one that reflects the author’s own deep insights and convictions. Indeed, a special feature is Rowland’s consistently capable analysis of Blake’s visual images, including the Job plates, sketches for the book of Enoch, and assorted biblical watercolors and other designs (handsomely reproduced). The only major gap I found is the lack of a sustained discussion of the epics, where Blake’s engagement with the Bible is crucial and where the antinomian Jesus is continually shadowed by the defeat of the cross and its appropriation by the forces of reaction. The book’s thesis of continuity between early and late Blake also would benefit from an analysis of Blake’s changing views of Milton. Nonetheless, Blake and the Bible performs a valuable service in placing Blake at the center of modern biblical hermeneutics.

Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith, Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011). ISBN: 9780521768658. $90.00.

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.

Another surprise in this book is its exploration of aesthetic techniques and sensibilities outside the nominal bounds of the aesthetic. In Chapter 2, “The ‘botanic eye’: botany, miniature and magnification,” Page and Smith share the technically acute and beautifully rendered botanical illustrations of both Priscilla Wakefield (52) and Agnes Ibbetson (70). The works of these two botanists, as well as those of Mary Roberts, amply demonstrate that even “scientific” texts straddle multiple worlds of representation and artifice. Once again, Page and Smith link these authors to other Romantic writers: these botanical texts have “one foot in the Enlightenment, sharing Hooke’s ambition that science will uncover the secrets of the world that is there, under the microscope, and the other foot in the imaginative dream world that we traditionally associate with the male Romantics—the Wordsworthian seeing ‘into the life of things’ or the Blakean vision of “a World in a Grain of Sand’” (75). Later in Chapter 4, I was delighted to learn that the author of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” Jane Taylor, was also an accomplished artist who could record not only the beauty of her existing world in numerous sketches, but also conceive “a great sweeping bridge . . . surprisingly modern in its elegant abstraction” (134 and Fig. 4.5, 127). Page and Smith highlight how these women could use the limitations placed on them by societal norms to create spaces and opportunities for ideas both imaginative and tangible in ways thought only the purview of their male counterparts.

In Chapter 4, Page and Smith share how “constructing a view” and framing the landscape was an integral part of female authors’ negotiation of domestic and public spaces (4). In the concluding paragraph to this section, Page and Smith, in speaking about Jane Taylor’s images, describe an idea that sums the importance of this work as a site of promotion for the cultural and literary importance of the genre and the works discussed in this volume. Page and Smith’s essays urge us to

move—over a bridge, across a stile, down a lane—but we are most often given a point of security or home base from which to operate. We are positioned in the near side of the fence or right before the sunlit spot at the base of the spreading tree, but still there is the suggestion of a larger world to explore.

They offer that opportunity to all who read their book and desire to understand how these women writers, scientists and artists pushed beyond the confines of their spheres to find new paths and engage the larger world.

Matthew Rowlinson, Real Money and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 266pp. (Hdbk., $85.00; ISBN: 978-0521193795).

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.

Equally impressive are Rowlinson’s readings of Sir Walter Scott. Chapter Three, “Curiosities and the Money form in the Waverly novels,” builds on the previous definitions of real money while developing new readings of Marx, arriving at the claim that “capital views every commodity as merely a form of money—which is to say a medium to recognize itself” (57). The crux of Rowlinson’s argument begins to emerge more clearly in the form of an analogy: language—the text of the Waverly novels in this case—is like capital, and utterance turns into money through an obscured process of self-reference and self-disguise. Although Rowlinson worries that his analogically framed analysis “will seem fanciful” (58), he supports his claim by thoughtfully navigating the novels’ cryptic preoccupation with identity, self-discovery, and debt. These preoccupations crystallize as bank notes, doubled vehicles of economic value and papered waste, and Rowlinson’s sense that developments in the history of bills of exchange run parallel to Scott’s financial and creative development of the Waverly novels is deft:

In the crash of 1826, many of the debts of Constable that Scott was required to pay were … debts which had originally been due to him in return for novels promised or actually written. To be paid by bill was thus for Scott invariably to sign; and since after Waverley itself, he always had an advance on his share of the profits, Scott wrote his novels to make sure that the bills he had signed were retired. Scott wrote, in short, to withdraw his signature from circulation. (64)

Less certain is Rowlinson’s chapter on “Keats and the Hidden Abode of Production.” The majority of this chapter is spent bringing critical theory to bear on Keats’s decision to use Moneta—the etymological root for “money” in English—instead of Mnemosyne as the central allegorical figure of the “Hyperion” poems. Rowlinson argues that these poems “represent the mythic origin of labor,” and that in “The Fall” especially, Keats “allegorizes the embodiment of his own writing”(149). While suggestive, the argument tends to substitute its theoretical armature for either of the “Hyperions,” and an unfortunate drift away from the texts which nominally authorize the chapter may leave readers unconvinced of Keats’s place within the larger framework of the study.

At the same time, there is abundant recompense for Rowlinson’s theoretical focus, both here and throughout the book. While he spends a good deal of time re-conceptualizing Romanticism, by bookending each literary engagement with meditations on Marx, Rowlinson leaves us to think as much about a Romantic Marx as he does a Marxist Romanticism:

Our concern here has not been with intellectual history, but rather specifically with the way for both Marx and Keats the historiographic problem of the fall or profanation of sacred artifacts allegorizes the problem of the commodity’s relation to labor … Their shared topic—across all the obvious differences … is the historical effect on work of its transformation into commodified labor, which is withdrawn, as Foucault puts it, “behind the scenes.” (153)

This is one example of something implicit throughout: the criticism Rowlinson brings to bear on the sublimity of Romantic-era authors, and their anxieties concerning value and exchange, is equally attributable to the mysticism of Marx himself. By creating a new sense of Romanticism—one characterized by worries over the meanings and relationships of capital and labor—Rowlinson is ipso facto dubbing Marx a Romantic.

One need not be entirely persuaded by these cross-identifications between Marx and Romanticism to recognize that Rowlinson has achieved his major objective, and developed a new understanding of the connections between Romantic authors, their works, and money and capital. Best of all, this comes with a surprising timeliness: through his unexpected alignment with Randall Wray, Rowlinson situates himself at the cusp of neo-Keynsian thought, and in doing so evokes our own modern financial crises. Although Rowlinson shies away from making direct connections to the current economic climate, it is difficult to ignore the link, and Real Money and Romanticism raises questions that will be hard for economists and Romantic scholars alike to ignore.

Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 244 pp (Cloth; ISBN: 0521831687; £45.00).

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’.

This intricate reading of Thomson – in which generic complication is interpreted as a symptom of oblique historical awareness – goes on to serve as a model for accounts of both Cowper and Wordsworth. Cowper liked newspapers, and The Task is, partly, the task of turning the news into poetry: ‘a “georgic of the news”’, says Goodman. Adopting newsprint as a sort of paradigm for his work makes Cowper’s poem fruitfully open to all kinds of heterogeneous experience, like a page of The Morning Chronicle. So the chatty, digressive, inclusive Task becomes ‘a medium – a loophole – through which the world’s strangeness enters’. (The particular example of strangeness dwelt upon here is Omai, a Tahitian who visited England in 1774 and returned home a couple of years later: with warm fellow feeling, Cowper imagines him wandering forlornly about his island, feeling a stranger though at home.) Wordsworth’s Excursion – like The Task, if not a georgic exactly, then at least ‘written under the sign of the georgic mode’ – also works as ‘an aperture or lodging for a reality that lies beyond it’; but here the obscured reality is more local and intimate. The discussion of Wordsworth’s memorial poetry here is very striking, I think, and the best thing in the book: there is common ground with David Bromwich’s dark and powerful study, Disowned by Memory. To speak, as Goodman does, of Wordsworth’s ‘refusal to gratify the desire for the immediacy of the past, or intimacy with the dead’ is to get at something central about the place of reticence and tact in Wordsworth’s poetry of loss and absence, and to speak shrewdly to the way his poetry often bases itself on the hope of consolation while yet maintaining a quite undeluded scepticism about the plausibility or sureness of any solace it might find.

Whether, by the time we reach Wordsworth, the argument is very obviously about either history or the georgic is debatable, I suppose, though it would be graceless to complain when what is said about Wordsworth is so stirring. Anyway, Goodman’s invitation to think more about the eighteenth century’s re-imagining of georgic habits is very welcome. My own sense is that heterogeneity is not a failure of georgic mediation, but one of its hallmarks, which was why the genre appealed in the first place: Thomson wanted to write a big poem about how confusing and rich the world was, and the country evidently wanted to read it, even if everyone needed to soothe their consciences by pausing from time to time to protest the Deist excellences. (If we are on the look-out for generic clashes, the face-off which shapes a lot of the best poetry of the period is one between georgic and pastoral, as Fairer argues in his excellent chapter on the subject: that would certainly promise to fit Wordsworth well.) Goodman writes with great flair and purchase about the ways in which poetry registers kinds of experience that do not lie squarely within its purlieu: it is a terrific subject and Goodman repeatedly does it justice, though I am not sure that the catch-word ‘history’ really repays her sensitivity in pursuing it. Occasionally, ‘georgic’ in this study feels a bit like ‘aesthetic’ as it has featured in some recent historicist criticism, as a kind of purposeful and interested mediation of the world, within which the insistent but unacknowledged presence of ‘history’ nevertheless makes itself felt, like dark childhood secrets mishaping the adult ego. But it is a rum sort of metaphysics that attributes ‘history’ to plantation workers while denying it to someone writing about Spring in the home counties: Goodman quotes Jameson early in her study saying that history ‘is what hurts’, which, in its way, is hardly less objectionable than saying that history is a succession of gemlike moments.

The Woman of Colour: A Tale, by Anonymous, ed. Lyndon J. Dominique (Broadview, 2007). 268pp (Paperback, ISBN-10: 1551111764; $24.95).

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.

The novel reflects the moment of its production with themes and tropes familiar to readers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature: the larger theme of nineteenth-century women’s subject position as chattel, the treatment of fallen women, and notions of the ideal woman, a trope the author complicates, and makes all the more poignant, as it is represented through the bodies of women of color. This representation of double oppression is best seen in the story of Marcia’s death during childbirth. The common plight of nineteenth-century fallen women characters carries a different weight when it is enacted upon the body of a black slave. Punished by “nature” for a crime she has no part in committing (Mr. Fairfield’s prejudice keeps him from marrying the slave he’s fallen in love with and impregnated), death is both a punishment for succumbing to the temptations of the flesh but also an escape from the world’s torment. Marcia is not exempt from the period’s gendered Christian values simply because she is a slave: “In giving birth to me she paid the debt of nature and went down to that grave, where the captive is made free” (55). But the end of Olivia’s statement (“when the captive is made free”) resituates this fallen woman as one freed from two sets of chains: the metaphorical bonds of sexism and the physical ones she would have worn as a slave.

The novel falls near the middle of England’s struggle with abolition (1789-1833) and it reflects this in subtle and explicit ways. The name of Olivia’s betrothed, Augustus Merton, is an allusion to Thomas Day’s immensely popular children’s story The History of Sandford & Merton (1783-1789), which tells the story of two young men: Sandford, who has the right values, and Merton, who must be taught good values by a Gambian boy. In The Woman of Colour, Olivia is the educator of color who teaches those in the text (and presumably its nineteenth-century audience) Christian values—primarily through her own physicality. Thus, for example, she offers a theology of acceptance to the three-year old George when she explains that her color comes from God, and she meets his skepticism by explaining that God has made them all:

The same God that made you made me…the poor black woman [Dido]—the whole world—and every creature in it! A great part of this world is peopled by creatures with skins as black as Dido’s, and as yellow mine. God chose it should be so, and we cannot make our skins white, and more than you can make yours black (79).

Throughout the novel, Olivia’s physical body counters the image of the ideal white heroine. The novelist inverts the idea that the model heroine possesses a certain set of physical qualities. And even the immoral Merton sees this and admits in a letter to a friend: “A very few hours served to convince me, that whatever might have been the transient impression made by the colour of Olivia, her mind and form were cast in no common mould. She has a noble and a dignified soul, which speaks in her words and actions; her person is raised about the standard of her sex” (102). He goes on to describe her in detail, and, like the farmer’s daughter Lucy in Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), who has to overcome her discomfort with the black Juba’s face to realize that he is the ideal partner for her, so Merton ultimately comes to see Olivia’s moral superiority and her suitability as a life partner. One of the most interesting aspects of Olivia is how she reflects on her impact on the vulgarly curious society she navigates in Bristol. With a self-possession and maturity that would be disorienting in an Evelina or any of Austen’s heroines, Olivia Fairfield is aware that she moves through the world differently than other young women. She is keenly aware that in addition to being the object of the male gaze because she is young and female, her circumstances (her racial identity and her father’s will) make her, as she writes to her friend, “an object of pretty general curiosity” (84).

Dominique has bookended this edition with literary history at one end and socio-political texts on the other. After the introduction, which offers an account not only of the cultural moment that produced this narrative but of the critical movement that necessitates its publication, the edition opens with a chronology of drama and long prose fiction from the start of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth that feature women of color. While some names and texts are familiar, most of the 72 listed will be unfamiliar. In addition to showing that Olivia Fairfield is one of many women of color in British fiction, this list also provides a snapshot of the reading landscape available to nineteenth-century readers. The seven appendices include excerpts of fiction that features heiresses of color, historical treatises like Edward Long’s influential The History of Jamaica and other historical documents. Taken together they offer a valuable primer about the politics of race and ethnicity in abolitionist England. The introduction explains the cultural and legal distinctions of West Indians, bi-racial people, and black people within the British empire and the appendices show their presence in literary, legal, and anthropological texts.

If the proof of a marginalized text’s value is in its teaching, then The Woman of Colour passes the test. I have taught the text in two classes—an undergraduate course in the history of the novel from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and a graduate seminar on Romantic-era British abolitionist literature. In my history of the novel class, The Woman of Colour came between Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811). It teaches well, but students need more help thinking of the novel within its cultural moment than I anticipated. The phrase “woman of colour” has such modern overtones that they begin the novel expecting a more explicit critique of bigotry and place on Olivia their own experiences of reading women of color (primary in American literature)—either as abject victims or cultural warriors. Olivia is neither of these, and even sophisticated graduate students struggled with how dutiful she is as she faces obstacle after heart-breaking disappointment. Her temperament prompts an interesting discussion about the modern student’s idea of what makes a “heroine” (a similar question comes up when students encounter Austen’s Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, a novel with its own complicated relationship with the slave trade). More than a female protagonist, students want a woman who is heroic. So while they might judge Moll Flanders for her sexual machinations and are suspicious but eventually accepting Evelina’s saintliness, they have very clear expectations of a woman of color. They see the sexism that permeates eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction as “of the time,” but this impulse to historicize (primarily as a way to gloss over the nuances of nineteenth-century sexism) does not extend to the bigotry and ignorance of racism. They are frustrated by the decision she makes at the end of the novel and want to see those who have wronged her punished. That Olivia seems complicit in her own loneliness, and that the novel does not end with a neat matrimonial bow around it, leaves them dissatisfied and confused. In this moment, I found Dominique’s introduction most useful and students who took the time even to skim it, while not entirely happy with Olivia (they long to see role models in black women, and she’s not particularly inspirational in this post-civil rights moment), are able to see her more clearly, especially through Dominique’s reading that argues that the novel “deliberately compounds Olivia’s helplessness and vulnerability as a young woman of color in an alien white society because there are political advantages to making her subjection wholly over-determined” (28). This claim demonstrates the intersection of form and content better than any lecture ever can, and because students have such strong opinions about the strength of women of color, they are forced to re-examine their expectations about representations of women in fiction in the Romantic period. Thus Dominique’s edition of The Woman of Colour not only works as a compelling story, but also teaches students to be more self-conscious about their readerly expectations.

Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon, ed. Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keegan (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006). 315pp (ISBN-10: 0838756298).

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.

Bridget Keegan’s essay “Science, Superstition, and Song” complements Fulford and Lee’s on the role of science and reason in Bloomfield’s poetry. Keegan traces the life of the self-taught poet and his religious faith as one of piety and industry. His “humble Christianity was offered to counteract readers’ suspicions that by writing poetry the author was aspiring beyond his or her God-given station in life” (197). The Farmer’s Boy is replete with the “spiritual lessons of the rural scenery” and praise for “the morally salutary quality of rural life” (201). As evident in The Farmer’s Boy and Good Tidings, Bloomfield disavows folk superstition and advocates the wedding of reason and Christian beliefs.

Several essays position the poet’s work in relation to other pastoral poetry. Hugh Underhill puts Bloomfield next to Cowper and notes that while both have a sensitivity to place, Cowper maintains a picturesque distance from labor while Bloomfield is at home with the grit and detail of the bucolic. Underhill provides an excellent overview as to why Bloomfield’s peasant poetry is invaluable for re-reading the picturesque. In “Labor and an Ethic of Variety in The Farmer’s Boy“, Kevin Binfield positions Bloomfield’s work in relation to Thomson’s georgic, The Seasons. While Bloomfield follows Thomson’s episodic, descriptive and reflective structure, for Bloomfield the “task is to depict or recover in an active and not entirely monumentalizing manner that whole [of rural life]” (71).

Several authors bring to the general reader’s attention lesser known works by Bloomfield. As such, these essays help the collection in becoming an authoritative introduction to the poet’s oeuvre. Each essay provides a narrative introduction to the poem or collection, coupled with analysis of the work as a whole, while also marking crucial passages for investigation.

For Simon Smith, the lyric “My Old Oak Table” shows the peasant poet struggling to write amid the mundane and the domestic. The work is an extended meditation on the rough and rude table and its similarities to the poet, whose work does not have the polish and finesse of writers with greater education and social standing. Furthermore, the weary and worn quality of the table serves as an entryway for the poet to recall the many illnesses which plagued him and his family (a topic which crops up as well in “Shooter’s Hill”). Tim Burke’s essay “Colonial Spaces and National Identities in The Banks of Wye” explores “how Bloomfield, listening now with the ear of the tourist, hears the voices of the various fishermen, cart drivers, cow-herders, boat pilots, and gleaners of Monmouthshire amplified by the territorial ambiguity of the border country which they inhabit” (92). Burke compares and contrasts how Bloomfield populates his poem in relation to the picturesque reading of the terrain by William Gilpin and William Wordsworth. Burke sees Bloomfield’s account as recovering the polyphonic and heterotopic traits of the region. In particular, Monmouthshire proves stubbornly complex, since it was counted as an English county but was redolent with Welsh history, culture, and geography. Scott McEatheron examines Bloomfield’s early work “On Seeing the Launch of the Boyne” as a war poem that displays “a concern with the often contradictory demands of personal and national liberty in the period of the Napoleonic Wars” (213). Moving from the ship to the landscape and then the reason for the ship’s creation, the poem works on “fittedness” and “scale” to show how the ship relates to humans, the ship-building city to the larger world, and humans to God. From McEatheron’s essay the reader can glean a theme common to much of Bloomfield’s work: inspiration from technologies (ships to agriculture, for example) which make the country great, and yet, just below this praise, a reluctant recognition of the violence enabled by these technologies and the nationalism they inspire.

In a well-wrought essay, “Georgic Ecology,” Donna Landry positions the history of the georgic in relation to the pastoral: “The georgic ethos rewrites the pastoral as fantasy, and itself as pragmatic reality, but it cannot exist without feeding on the very pastoral it repudiates” (254). The essay puts Bloomfield in relation to Clare and Yearsley as georgic peasants thinking about landscapes. Other essays are as their titles indicate. William J. Christmas considers that while Bloomfield was a shoemaker in London (after his childhood days on a farm), he would have found himself amid “the largest representation among the ranks of artisans who joined the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s” (28). Christmas’ reading of the politics of horses, and what constitutes cruelty (such as tail docking) is interesting for animal studies, and his reading of the politics of the harvest-home feast in The Farmer’s Boy is astute. John Lucas traces the traditions of the May Day fairs. John Goodridge explores the scant instances of women’s stories in Bloomfield and Clare, and Mina Gorji traces the use of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as a way of framing the biography and works of peasant poets. The collection concludes with a useful checklist of works and editions of works by Bloomfield.

Current scholarship is almost without exception invested in historical-biographical approaches to literature, with a bit of cultural studies at the margins. Thinking in new, critical ways in Romantic studies increasingly has come to mean thinking about new authors, rather than shifting the ground of thought itself. We’ve yet to find new ways into the works of laboring-class poets, but this is not the goal of this collection. Rather, Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon provides historical and cultural readings of the poems in order to nudge the “the Romantic Canon” a little further toward Bloomfield.

Karen Fang, Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 248 pp. (Cloth; ISBN: 978-0-8139-2874-6; $35.00).

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.

In Chapter Two, “Deciphering the Private Memoirs: James Hogg’s Napoleon Complex,” Fang examines a different side of periodical culture by examining French imperialism under Napoleon, as well as the tribulations of Hogg’s collaboration with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Fang divides this chapter into two parts. First, Fang discusses the “exotic materialism” (67) in Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824); second, she discusses the defamation of Hogg in Blackwood’s “Noctes Ambrosianae” (1822), which caricatured Hogg as “an unlettered figure, incapable of writing anything of literary merit” (82). The main point of this chapter is Fang’s contention that current scholarship on Hogg’s Memoirs does not significantly realize the novel as an allegory for his “Chaldee Manuscript,” which Hogg wrote for “the first issue of Blackwood’s” (66-7). Fang places the Memoirs in the context of her discussion of British imperialism by examining certain imperial and material tropes of the Napoleonic Empire that, similar to Lamb’s “Old China,” bring a form of exoticism to British periodical culture (67). In contrast to Lamb’s exoticism of the Orient, Hogg evokes “Napoleonic Egyptology” (68) in his “Manuscript” that Fang understands as a result of Hogg’s “Scottish nationality and the power that Egypt exercised in the British national imaginary” (76) after Napoleon. Thematically, one aspect of this Egyptian exoticism is invoked with the appearance of “the mummified body of Robert Wringhim”, the main character of the novel (67). In Fang’s very clever analysis, Hogg reinvents Scotland in his “Chaldee Manuscript” as an exotic artifact that induces a Biblical mystique (71-2). Fang supports this view by claiming that Hogg’s evocation of “Napoleonic Egyptology” in the “Manuscript” registers in his use of “verbal ciphers to reference Edinburgh personalities by replacing their proper names with oblique descriptions” (75). Interestingly, Fang contends that the “actual text formally resembles the Rosetta Stone by ingeniously evoking Egyptian hieroglyphs” (75). The examination of Hogg’s “Manuscript” as a Rosetta Stone-like artifact makes for a compelling read, as Fang frames it within representations of Scottish nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars. Fang points out that Scottish participation in the British Empire in North Africa “marked a shift […] toward British occupation, and hence a shift in Scottish interest in Egypt” (76), which lead to Hogg’s appropriation of imperial triumphalism and the figure of the Rosetta Stone to construct his own authorial identity (90-1).

Chapters Three and Four, “’But Another Name for Her Who Wrote’: Corinne and the Making of Landon’s Giftbook Style,” and “Only ‘a Little above the Usual Run of Periodical Poesy’: Byron’s Island and the Liberal,” focus again on the “conflat[ion] [of] geography and textuality” in post-Napoleonic periodicals (142). Fang’s discussion of Letitia Landon focuses primarily on the author’s “work in the giftbooks and literary annuals”, and maintains that Landon is “not known for […] topical or political commentary” (104). This willfully de-politicized stance might seem to make Landon an awkward fit–yet it allows Fang to foreground the other side of the “empire of signs.” Fang accomplishes this with her assertion that Landon “cannot be identified with a distinct imperial position”, yet Landon’s adaptation of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) illustrates the “domesticating and diffusing [of] Napoleonic history” (105-6). Likewise, as with Lamb and Hogg, Fang is quick to show that Landon still “capitalizes upon current imperial and political motifs to advance her profile within the contemporary periodical press” (106). Similar to Hogg’s use of the Rosetta Stone to propel his own authorship, Landon’s adaptation of de Staël’s “Napoleonic novel” illustrates the continuing appropriation of the exotic for British consumption (107). This ongoing discussion of consumer culture and the periodical is examined further in the chapter by explaining how “giftbooks and annuals traffic in a fundamentally value-added aesthetic” (109). Fang examines this “aesthetic” in the annuals by providing readers with a brief, yet informative overview on the costs of giftbooks, as well as their propensity of bringing “conceits of material value” to consumers (110). The types of conceit manifested in such giftbooks include “material emblems” such as flowers or jewels that exemplify the “material tendencies underlying much late Romantic periodical culture” (110). Fang draws the reader’s attention to just such conceits in Landon’s Corinne. Landon’s adaptations of de Staël for English audiences are reminiscent of Lamb and Hogg, whose literary exploits in “Old China” and the “Chaldee Manuscript” pay special attention to an exotic object of desire. Just as the giftbooks are devoted “to a beautiful or precious object” for British readers to consume, Landon’s use of Staël’s novel as a “Napoleon-era artifact” to build up her own career as a writer brings the exoticism of Italy into British parlors (116-7). Fang’s inclusion of Landon’s less explicit “motifs” places her contributions in the framework of the “empire of signs,” as well as offering readers new scholarship on Landon’s work in annuals.

Fang contextualizes Byron’s work for the Liberal by pointing out “the journal’s history as an English periodical largely composed and edited outside of British shores”, which “reversed the usual trajectory of the form to a nation’s readers” (143). Byron’s composition of The Island while abroad in Italy illustrated the importation of the exotic to British consumers in the form of text. At the same time, Fang turns her attention to the anti-imperial aspects of Byron’s life and his Island, which includes his “anti-imperial involvement with the Carbonari” during the Greek War of Independence (145). This anti-imperial facet of Byron’s life resonates in The Island, as the poem itself echoes the detrimental nature of empire, yet at the same time “relies on a timeless romantic notion” of the exotic (155). Similar to the importation of China and Egypt as exotic ideals in English periodical culture by Lamb and Hogg, Byron brings the exoticism of the South Seas to consumers. Byron’s poem, which retells the 1789 mutiny on the HMS Bounty, juxtaposes the exotic and the imperial. Fang emphasizes this idea further by examining the historical implications of the mutiny itself, as the South Seas represent a “modern emblem of undisturbed nature,” while “also portraying the inescapable power of contemporary imperialism” (157). It is this construction of the exotic as an ideal, yet ultimately corruptible state which Byron critiques in The Island. Byron’s anti-imperial sentiment arises from the concept that the South Seas, while subject to British imperialism after Cook’s voyages, were viewed as a “prelapsarian Eden” which provided “abundance without labor and consumption without commerce” (154-160). It is this “prelapsarian” ideal that Byron evokes in The Island for a British audience, and ultimately wishes to defend from imperial expansion.

Fang’s impressive and thought-provoking examination of post-Napoleonic periodical culture in Britain offers Romantic scholars insight into the lives of writers who internalized their experiences of empire, no matter how direct or oblique, and capitalized on those encounters for professional advancement. Fang’s Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs not only provides readers with an overview of periodicals in Britain, but offers fascinating biographical and historical information that will undoubtedly prove useful for scholars of print culture, empire, and commodity culture in the later Romantic period.