Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Brett Mobley
Fordham University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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