Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Susan J. Wolfson
Princeton University

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” That may be, as Keats’s ironizing odist insists, all we know on earth, and all we need to know, but the tautology is as enigmatic as it is alluring. And so the dust jacket of Stanley Plumly’s extraordinary biography reads, in small print at the top, a personal biography, then, more largely declared, Posthumous Keats. But the title page within inverts the order: Posthumous Keats, a personal biography. Which came first, the personalizing of a biography that, by generic agreement, is supposed to be about the other person, the biographized? Or Posthumous Keats, an epithet that feels like a personal biography, even though the poet-biographer outlives poet-Keats, who dies not even a third of the way into his twenty-sixth year, by decades–more than twice and half Keats’s mortal span?

What is “personal” about this? Is it the persona of “Keats”—the mask for thinking as Keats in camelion sympathy? Is it “personal” in the sense of relating to or being affected as a Plumly-private individual, in the persona of a public biographer? Is it a reciprocal relationship, a personal interviewing? Is it an intense engagement in one’s person, belonging to oneself, and self-directed? A personal biography plays in all these registers, with a Keatsian flexibility of imagination. To reverse Michael Corleone, writing Posthumous Keats was not business, it was personal, so Plumly-personal that the impulse seems simultaneous with wanting to think hard about what it was to be Keats, who in his mortal body of less than 10,000 days on earth had a lifetime of mortal experience: the death of both parents, a beloved brother, the loss of another brother to America; the heartbreak of a romance that was everything and nothing, all absorbing and fated to go nowhere; the heartbreak of an adored friend whose limitations couldn’t help but betray Keats in his last half year of life, abandoning him to a foreign clime and a bewildered acquaintance.

Just a month into his twenty-sixth year, on 30 November 1820, with less than three months left of life, Keats writes to this fugitive friend, Charles Brown:

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been–but it appears to me– however, I will not speak of that subject.¹

This letter, the muse of Plumly’s project, is a formation in striking syntax, its “having past” tensing the expected “passed” into a pained epitaphic sigh (what Plumly terms a “posthumous tense” [294]), in relay with the persistent, even insistent, present tense “I am leading” and that “I have an habitual feeling”–as if always on the pulse, and all sensations summed in that present absence, absent presence of the stunning oxymoron, “posthumous existence.” It’s a diminishing existence instead of a life, at once agonized by a prospect, now only hypothetical, of “how it would have been,” and pained into a tenacious sensation of presence–“it appears to me”–a relay into this life turned a ghost of itself, then an insistent speaking of what the will says it won’t do: “I will not speak of that subject.” Like patience, to prevent that murmur, “posthumous Keats” is oxymoron turned into expressive syntax–Keats’s own poetic forte of unheard melodies and cold pastoral. Keats writes in both a refusal to pain himself and Brown, and a refusal to decline to speak the refusal. Pain is never done. And so he ends his letter, wrenchingly:

Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister–who walks about my imagination like a ghost–she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.
God bless you!
JOHN KEATS

George, Tom, sister (Fanny), Brown: all were, in effect, ghosts by this point of existence, and so the posthumous past tense in the antonym of eulogy: “I always made an awkward bow”–what Christopher Ricks has termed the least awkward bow ever made. Even the tense is curious. Rollins gives it as this past-reflective (Keats Circle 2: 86), and so does Milnes (2: 84), but one reader of the manuscript thinks the verb is still present, and not posthumous: “I always make an awkward bow” (KC 2: 86n). The ambiguity is the perfect oxymoron, hovering, as Coleridge would say, between possibilities, between, even, plausibilities. Keats performs to an audience that is only imagination, in a formality that feels like a gracious haunting, a leave-taking of something already left, and slightly, poignantly self-parodic, another Keatsian performative forté.
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Reviewed by
Michelle Levy
Simon Fraser University

In the last decade, historians of the book have held forth the possibility that material culture might provide us with a compelling account of the historical uniqueness and special tenor of Romantic-era literary culture. By examining the dramatic rise in print publication that began in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the Romantic period may be more easily distinguished both from what came before (the more stable rate of print production that prevailed through most of the eighteenth century) and what came after (the even larger rise in print production and emergence of a truly mass reading public in the Victorian era, enabled by new forms of mechanical reproduction—iron presses powered by steam, industrial paper-making, stereotyping, and lithography). The four books under review demonstrate the potentially transformative effect of a rigorous empiricism on literary studies, as it seeks to supplement and even supersede the more anecdotal and impressionistic material histories that preceded them.

In studies of the Romantic period, the bibliographical projects of Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schowerling (The English Novel 1770-1829, 2000) and J.R. de J. Jackson (Annals of English Verse, 1770-1835: A preliminary survey of the volumes published, 1985 and Romantic Poetry by Women, A Bibliography, 1770-1835, 2003) first ushered in a new era of quantitative analysis. William St. Clair’s monumental The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, released in 2004 and reissued in paperback in 2007, for the first time provided scholars of the period with an unparalleled and nearly exhaustive “quantified factual foundation of costs, prices, print runs, textual controls and intellectual property” (16). The data St. Clair collects are reprinted in over 300 pages of appendices, which summarize and organize years of archival research in the records of literally hundreds of publishers, booksellers, printers, circulating libraries, book clubs, and private collections. The matters they cover range from government policy and copyright regimes to lengthy schedules of print runs, editions, prices, costs, from lending institutions to piracies—from Shakespeare through the Victorian period. These data have already been mined by countless scholars working in the field, and are the subject of rigorous analysis by St. Clair himself over the course of twenty-two chapters, which survey a panoply of topics in print history: from the manufacturing process to the international book market, from the piratical and monopolistic practices of booksellers to the reception of influential individual literary works. In The Reading Nation, St. Clair at once provides a provocative revision of the Romantic period as a history of the book and an indispensable reference guide to the entire print era.

The comprehensive nature of the project is one of the reasons it has garnered accolades from scholars working in a wide range of period and national literatures; but its appeal also lies in its narrative force, as St. Clair tells an altogether poignant story of the enduring and evolving struggle to obtain access to books. Reflecting a ruling class distrustful of a reading nation, the state colluded for years in the British publishing industry’s operation as a “perfect private monopoly,” which in turn “rested upon the perfect monopoly of intellectual property” (101). The turning point for St. Clair comes in 1774, with the shattering of the de facto system of perpetual copyright by the House of Lords in Donaldson v. Becket, constituting “the most decisive event in the history of reading in England since the arrival of printing 300 years before” (109). By limiting the period of copyright protection to the term established by the Statute of Anne in 1701—fourteen years, with an additional fourteen if the author was still living at the expiration of the first period—Donaldson initiated what was in fact the shortest copyright period in English history.
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