Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Paul Youngquist
Penn State University, University Park

Before there was Wordsworth, before the bright and dying Keats, before even Blake came pugnaciously along, for me there was De Quincey. I learned of him early from a guy who was some years my senior. He was a diabetic and had an easy way with needles, poking himself with enviable nonchalance. He looked gnarled and limber—like a stick that just won’t snap, no matter how hard you bend it. He gave me two tips that made college a little more interesting than it would have been otherwise. First, drink the best wine you can afford. That usually kept me from the party crowd, the Thunderbird, and a fair amount of foolishness. Second, read De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He even lent me his own old copy (the first one’s always free). To say it made an impression would be putting it mildly. I read it night after night, a little at a time, not knowing exactly what I was reading, but transfixed. Here was a very strange way of writing: clear and oblique, concrete and complicated, logical and florid. It was a trip. And it got me to thinking that there might be more to literature than Truth and Beauty, then the apparent prerequisites of Great Writing. De Quincey bothered me, put a little glitch into the literature system that my major was wiring up. I’d like to believe that thanks to him, and to that old hipster who first tipped me off, I acquired a feel for other literary oddballs: Blake, Carroll, Burroughs, Dick, to name a few. At any rate, De Quincey remains for me something other than literature, perhaps other to it, at least as it’s institutionally construed.

My experience of De Quincey differs from the one Margaret Russett describes in De Quincey’s Romanticism: Cultural Minority and the Forms of Transmission. For her De Quincey is the creature—and the creator—of a literary canon that reproduces a constitutive difference between majors and minors. He’s a triple-A essayist to Wordsworth’s big-league lyricism, a self-styled second-stringer whose claim to literary fame results directly from his “minority.” As Russett understands it, that status reveals much about the production and cultural function of canonical Romantic writing. Unlike the wholly marginal writer, whose recovery proves that she didn’t see much play in the production of that canon, the minor writer remains part of the show, “never ‘forgotten’ and in no danger of becoming so” (6). He occupies the “negative pole” of a dialectic of production that scripts Romantic writing as either “major” or “minor” and evaluates accordingly. So to be minor, as in De Quincey’s case, is at least to be not major; minority arises in the image of a greatness it negatively defines.

Such is the force of this dialectic of production that it comes to characterize the whole cultural project of canon formation. Russett’s real interest is less in De Quincey per se than in “the production of signature Romantic themes, motifs, and rhetorical effects at the contested and undecidably distorting site of transmission” (8). Minority is thus not so much a literary fact as a cultural function—Russett’s “transmission”—that authorizes certain themes, motifs, and effects over others. As such it arises out of neither reading nor interpretation but rather the material conditions of its “institutional locus” (9). Drawing extensively upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and John Guillory, Russett shows how such conditions make the Romantic canon possible. Its members owe their authority to “the transformed materiality of the institutional habitus: that is, the rarefied literacy, or ‘sociolect,’ that registers the traces of social stratification” (9). Literary reputation mimics material interest, which is why Russett directs attention away from the ostensible achievement of canonical Romantic writing and toward its circulation as cultural capital. The minor writer best exemplifies this effect precisely because his reputation remains qualified. He’s in the canon, but only just, betraying the ideological force of the dialectic that produces it. Hence the urgency of what Russett calls her “largest abstract claim: that the Romantic cult of solitary genius misrecognizes what is in fact a corporate mode of production that the minor’s ‘genius for instrumentality’ both underwrites and unveils” (10). Thanks to his closer proximity to the material conditions of Romantic writing, the minor writer proves its cultural capital to consist mostly of bad bills. A major leaguer like Wordsworth may get the bigger signing bonus, but it falls to De Quincey to cash it in.

And by Russett’s account he frequently finds himself short-changed. The bulk of De Quincey’s Romanticism examines the various ways that De Quincey’s minority supplements and troubles the idealism that colors much Romantic writing, even his own. Russett’s “method” is appropriately varied. She approaches De Quincey’s writing by multiple paths, some of them little traveled, living up to her claim that the “book is about reading Wordsworth, repeating Coleridge, writing for magazines, and competing for popularity at least as much as it is about interpreting De Quincey” (8). And it’s a good thing too; interpreting De Quincey has become something of a growth industry lately. Russett’s is the fifth book-length monograph on the Opium Eater to appear since John Barrell’s psychopathology of empire, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey (Yale University Press, 1991). What sets Russett’s study apart from those others is its concentrated attention to what I’d call the economic unconscious of Romantic writing. While in some cases that unconscious is material and in others affective, Russett shows consistently how it configures De Quincey’s minority to troubling ends.

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Reviewed by
Anne Janowitz
University of Warwick

Nicholas Roe’s John Keats and the Culture of Dissent is a substantial contribution to the on-going debate about Keats’s politics. As Roe notes in his discussion, Jerome McGann’s 1979 article, “Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism” (Modern Language Notes 94 [988–1032]), and Marjorie Levinson’s subsequent Keats’s Life of Allegory: the Origins of a Style (Oxford Univeristy Press, 1988) developed a historico-political reading of Keats’s poetics in the context of class culture and politics. But it was the discussion of Keatsian stylistics presented by William Keach in a 1986 Studies in Romanticism forum on “Keats and Politics” that may well be a more crucial inspiration for Roe’s thorough and wide-ranging study of the elements that together add up to the political-poetics of the “Cockney School.” For the main investigation of Roe’s study is how “Z”‘s Blackwood’s articles shaped a set of erroneous critical commonplaces about Keats (which, Roe wryly argues, underpin the greater part of twentieth-century Keats criticism, including the ostensibly demystificatory approach), but also, paradoxically, accurately responded to the force of a coherent political grouping. But if Roe shows us how we came to have a version of Keats that has until recently dominated the critical tradition, he also opens up the questions of Keats’s own literary and political inheritance by looking closely at his formation in the culture of Dissent. So Roe is able to place Keats within a consistent narrative of the trajectory of the liberal intellectual tradition from the 1780s through the 1820s.

The conceptual center of the study is the assertion that “Cockney School” poetics is deeply indebted to the cultural milieu of Dissent. I think the title of the study is slightly misleading in that Roe doesn’t appear to be interested in tracing the history or literary ramifications of Dissenting religious doctrine or principle within the reformist and radical politics of the period; rather, he is concerned with the impact of Dissent on the formation of secular liberalism. But by linking the circles of 1790s Dissent with those of the post-1815 liberal London intellectual scene, Roe offers access to a more accurate recognition of how 1790s radical generation (and their teachers and mentors, such as Mrs. Barbauld, who were radicalized in the 1790s) influenced the political poetics of the younger romantics. By articulating the links between the Dissenting and the “Cockney” sets, Roe also makes it clearer how Keats belongs to the historical and geographical groupings within London poetic and political radicalism that have been investigated in recent years by scholars such as David Worrall (Radical Culture: Discourse Resistance and Surveillance [Wayne State University Press, 1992]), Marcus Wood (Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 [Oxford University Press, 1994]), and Kevin Gilmartin (Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England [Cambridge University Press, 1996]). Roe’s volume convinces one of Keats’s secure place in a version of the romantic canon that narrates the complex formation of liberalism.

The major scholarly contribution of the book involves the presentation of the world of the Enfield School and the influence of Charles Cowden Clarke on Keats’s formation. Recent attention to the issue of education (e.g., Alan Richardson’s Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as a Social Practice, 1780–1832 [Cambridge University Press, 1994]) has made the meaning of romantic conceptions of childhood more understandable through study of those institutions which generated the social model of childhood, and Roe’s presentation of the life and concerns of Enfield is a significant addition to that discussion. Roe places Enfield in an intellectual network of impressive proportions and makes it clear why Tory critics would later have found an easy target in a product of the Enfield educational method. And the importance of Charles Cowden Clarke both as an influence on Keats and as a complicated conduit towards Hunt is impressively articulated. But here I felt that Roe owed us more information and speculation about how the religious politics of Dissent influenced Keats; and if they did not, why.

Roe is an impressive literary historian. By focusing on how the Enfield circle was socially linked to the Dissenting radicalism of those in Cambridge and before them to the Warrington Academy, we get both a fuller feel for not only the manner in which Dissenting intellectual life was disseminated into a growing articulation of liberalism, but as well for the links between Keats and the generation before him. Roe’s attention to George Dyer (about whom he has also written in the very useful article, “Radical George: Dyer in the 1790′s,” Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 49 [1985],17–46.) may help bring that poet and poetical theorist into more recognition, and though Roe doesn’t develop this point in his study, it seems likely that Keats was himself influenced by Dyer’s democratic theories of lyricism. Roe’s work of making a central intellectual place for Charles Cowden Clarke proves to complicate Keats’s relationship to Hunt in particularly interesting ways, allowing us to see Keats as more independently minded and with a fuller complement of already formed opinions and positions than our myths of his youth have allowed.

Roe brings together many of strands of recent critical attention, and works them into a fabric that we can now really see as a “Cockney School” poetics: the liberal politics of classicism is very nicely discussed in a chapter on “Cosmopolitics”; the important links between liberalism and contemporary medicine are brilliantly presented in a chapter on “The Pharmapolitical Poet,” which acknowledges the work of Hermione de Alemeida (Romantic Medicine and John Keats [Oxford University Press, 1991]) and others, but brings close attention to bear on the importance to Keats’s intellectual formation of the Guy’s teacher and surgeon, Astley Cooper. Cooper, a friend of John Thewall, had gone to France with him in 1792. Roe wants to make Thelwall a prefiguration of Keats, which doesn’t quite work, but the evocation of an ambiance which includes medicine, Dissent, and radical politics is brilliantly conveyed. Keats as student of medicine is now more clearly fused into his life as a student of ideas and politics.

Roe’s contributions to literary history are unmistakable: I found his literary interpretations somewhat less rewarding. There are some forced readings of poems, aiming to show rather too direct a connection between the intellectual milieu and its preoccupations and the particular trope or affective representation at hand. But in his discussion of the “green” Keats, and of the way Keats worked up the myth of Robin Hood and the politics of greenery, Roe is wonderful to read. Here he shows how intellectual history and poetic interpretation can work together to defamiliarise and so renew our understanding of the human structure of the romantic landscape. The chapters “‘Soft Humanity Put on’: The Poetry and Politics of Sociality 1789–1818″ and “Songs from the Woods; or Outlaw Lyrics” together give a powerful reading of the tradition of radical vernal sociability, linking oppositional politics, the vernal, and the antiquarian. Roe gives all this a precise psycho-geographical location in relation to metropolitan poetics, conveying the atmosphere of London and its suburbs, with a valuable discussion of the very political meaning of the idea of the suburbia itself. Roe shows how “Z”‘s “Cockney School” articles make an argument about suburbia and liberalism which offers a distorted mirror to Keats’s working up of vernal imagery. Together with Christopher Hill’s essays on “Robin Hood” this material should be part of any course on “green poetics.”

I greatly admire Roe’s accomplishment in this volume. He shows how “Z”‘s derogatory naming of Keats’s poetic milieu as the “Cockney School” can as well be understood as the “Culture of Dissent,” as Roe calls it. He has given us new information about Keats’s world and about the overlapping circles of metropolitan sociability in the romantic period. He has shown, by following through the daily to-ings and fro-ings of the chief actors, how permeable were the boundaries between medicine, poetics, and politics.

Reviewed by
Charles Snodgrass & Jeffrey N. Cox
Texas A&M University

New technologies are coming to the aid of the study of Romanticism. E-mail keeps scholars around the world in contact as do on-line discussion groups such as the NASSR-Listserv. Websites — such as Romantic Circles itself — provide a gathering point for scholarly information and a meeting point for scholarly exchange. Now, with the issuance of Romanticism: The CD-ROM, created by David Miall and Duncan Wu and issued by Basil Blackwell, scholars and students have another useful tool at hand for the exploration of the literature and culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

When one starts the Romanticism: The CD-ROM program, one is first presented with the “Home” page that also serves as an initial table of contents and a navigation tool for the components of the hypertext. We are first going to be concerned with the texts, which can be accessed by clicking the “Texts” button above that summons up an alphabetical list of primary literary authors, the “Index” button which offers a complete list of documents and most images, or the “People” button which moves to a set of short biographical notices that are linked to texts. The other features of the hypertext—contextual material, maps, an examination of the “Gothic”—are also available from this page as are the help, search, and other navigation functions to be discussed later.

The hypertext anthology reproduces Romanticism: An Anthology, edited by Duncan Wu and published by Basil Blackwell in 1994; that is, it provides the first Wu edition, not the second edition offered in 1998 which has a different selection of texts and expanded critical apparatus. The hypertext anthology has the virtues and the drawbacks, then, of the first Wu edition. There are many things to praise in Wu’s anthology. One can only admire the return to manuscript and early printed sources; one is glad to have many texts offered in their entirety rather than in snippets. There are generous offerings from the six canonical poets. For example, the entire 1798 Lyrical Ballads is reproduced; Anne K. Mellor’s and Richard E. Matlak’s British Literature 1780–1830 (Harcourt Brace, 1996) offers about half of the poems. Wu provides complete texts of Songs of Innocence and Experience and of the Thirteen-Book Prelude, edited from the manuscripts, while Mellor and Matlak offer most but not all of Blake’s Songs and the Two-Part Prelude of 1799 together with long excerpts from the 1850 version. (It is interesting to note that Wu’s second edition now includes the Two-Part Prelude together with selections from the Five-Book Prelude, the Thirteen-Book Prelude, and the Fourteen-Book Prelude.) While one may have a favorite, say, Byron or Coleridge poem not included in the Wu selection, he enables any instructor to cover the canonical poets well.

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