Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Julia M. Wright
Dalhousie University

This important collection of twelve essays, arising from a 2000 Blake conference at Tate Britain, offers an array of historical frames through which to recontextualize Blake—from sensibility to eighteenth-century ideas of sexuality, and from the Sierra Leone project to the diverse religious cultures of Blake’s England and debates about art, economy, historiography, and proselytization. “Nation” and “Empire” are capacious categories here, allowed to float freely, as they did in Romantic-era discourse (though there are moments when distinctions between patriotism and modern nationalism, cultural nationalism and ideas of the nation-state, or settler colonies and invaded colonies would have contributed to a clearer picture of “Blake, Nation and Empire”). The aim of this volume is to continue the cultural materialist project of Clark and Worrall’s earlier collections and, hence, to focus on the “minute particulars” of Blake’s time and place—a project richly pursued here. This collection is not divided into parts, but I have organized my discussion below to highlight some continuities, and complementarities, among these diverse chapters beyond their shared historicist orientation.

The first essay, by Saree Makdisi, offers a suggestive exploration of a negative, namely that “Blake was basically the only major poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who categorically refused to dabble in recognizably Oriental themes or motifs” (24). (An expanded version of this essay is included in Makdisi’s important William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, as he notes [36].) Such assertions might seem to invite quibbles: what about Robert Burns? Does the occasional Orientalist flourish by Anna Letitia Barbauld put her much closer to Blake than to Robert Southey and Thomas De Quincey? But that would miss the larger importance of this essay as an innovative examination of both the determined (and contrary) inclusiveness through which Blake, in his early work, “emphasize[s] the common nature of all human cultures” (29) and, more broadly, the centrality of Orientalism to many of the Romantic poets we have collectively designated “major”—begging the question of whether the fault is not in our poets but in ourselves or, at least, our canon. While Makdisi focuses on Blake’s early texts and “infinite heterogeneity” (36), Andrew Lincoln argues for a shift in Blake’s thought in the years around 1800 from a “kind of universal myth . . . towards a narrative that identifies itself explicitly with British and Biblical tradition” (153), while yet “reach[ing] across doctrinal differences” (163). This change, Lincoln suggests, not only arises from Blake’s personal renewal of faith, but also from a more broadly perceived imperative “to restore Britain to Christianity” (153) in the wake of the counter-revolutionary rhetoric of the period. Here, that complex counter-revolutionary milieu is concisely sketched with a specific focus on religious debate and Watson’s Apology in order to locate Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem “in the religious fears and aspirations of early nineteenth-century Britain” (159). Steve Clark further extends this discussion of Blake and difference and does so on deftly nuanced terms attentive to philosophical and theological disputes, as well as historical contexts. While Lincoln argues for Milton‘s efforts “to re-integrate the divided legacy of British Christendom” (163), Clark locates Blake’s Jerusalem in the heated debate over Catholic Emancipation and the transformation of “a virulent anti-Catholic iconography . . . into imperial gothic” (168). Clark argues compellingly for Blake’s poem “as anti-papal propaganda” that, despite moments “more sympathetic” to Catholic traditions, “is of an abrasive brand of Protestant nationalism formed in opposition to France and Catholicism projecting an imagined community of empire” (171).

The cluster of essays I group above—those by Makdisi, Lincoln, and Clark—covers the full sweep of Blake’s career and invites further consideration of Blake’s changing stance on cultural and religious differences. Jason Whittaker’s essay is usefully considered in this context as well. Focusing on Blake’s “critical dialogue with Milton” (197), especially Milton’s History of Britain, Whittaker traces the ways in which Blake works through his nationalist politics via Milton as “the obvious candidate for the role of Albion’s prophet” (186). Suggestively, Whittaker contends that Blake recuperates for their “explanatory” value the national origin myths dismissed by Milton while still being “hostile to Milton’s militant Protestantism” (193-194). This essay is arguably at the nexus of the volume’s myriad tracings of Blake’s engagement with questions of national identity in relation to religion and sexuality, and, like Lincoln, Whittaker locates Milton within a transformative period in the development of Blake’s views on those questions.
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Reviewed by
Lissette Lopez Szwydky
Penn State University

Matthew S. Buckley’s Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama is “an effort to render explicit, and thus pull into the active present, modern drama’s connection—it’s ‘secret link’—not only to the drama of the French Revolution but also, and through it, to the dramas of the pre-Revolutionary past” (152). The author uncovers the modern drama’s “secret link” to the past through an interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of the French Revolution as played out both in the streets and on the stages of Paris, as well as London. Although the title of the book suggests an historical approach to developments in the drama from the late-eighteenth century to the early-twentieth century, Buckley instead offers a history of the dramatic character of the French Revolution, its relationship to the dramas staged in the decades immediately before and after, its influence on English political and literary authors, and finally “the Revolution’s relationship to the formal development of modern drama between 1780 and 1840″ (1). The aims of the book are many, but in its multi-national (France, England, and Germany) coverage of the theatricality of politics during this period, its focus is fixed on the permanent effects of the French Revolution on European cultural production.

Buckley begins on the streets of Paris, giving us a tour of the city in the two decades leading up to the storming of the Bastille. He explains that unlike London, whose urban development was determined primarily by commerce, Paris “was a royal city, governed directly by the monarchy’s centralized administration” (11). What follows is Foucauldian analysis of the city’s landscape, one that was organized in order to maximize the surveillance of citizens through lighting, police, and informants. The reading is central to Buckley’s understanding of the Revolution (and other acts of mass rebellion) as performance. In several incidents of pre-Revolutionary public disobedience and crimes committed in plain view, Buckley sees the beginnings of what he calls “Revolutionary theatricality.” He elaborates:

Rather than simply imagining the monarchy’s loss of power, these acts staged that loss, asserting in the most visceral manner both the hollowness of absolutism’s monumental vision of society and the local, contestatory failure of its authority over public action, demonstrating—in a highly theatrical performance—the manner in which its symbolic and political regime could be blinded, stripped of its sight and thus of its rule. (23)

Mob violence and public demonstrations in Paris before the Revolution proved that the crowd was an effective way to overturn sovereign surveillance. The theatricality of these events was, according to the author, fundamental in determining the tone of revolutionary performances both on and off the stage in the years that followed.

The second chapter moves us from the streets of Paris into the city’s theaters and back to the streets again. The main argument here is that the genres staged during the Revolutionary period coincided with the general tone of the Revolution, while at the same time politics became more theatrical. Buckley provides interesting insight into the theatricality of politics in Paris during the Revolution, specifically the way speeches made by representatives of the National Assembly “began consciously to adopt the ways of the theater” by playing to the galleries. Speakers made transcripts of their speeches available, and even took lessons with professional actors in order to hone the effectiveness of their oral delivery and physical gestures (50). This portion of the argument is fascinating, and could be developed on its own. However, the chapter focuses more on the dramatic tone of the Revolution, linking it to traditional dramatic genres. For example, Buckley argues that during the “reconciliation” period between October 1789 and the summer of 1791, the dominant genre (both on stage and in public discourse) was comedy, as “reconciliation was the overwhelming impulse of the day” (52). The rise and fall of Robespierre, on the other hand, is characterized by tragedy. After the dust settles, melodrama is born in order to suppress a Revolutionary history that had run its course after the Terror. Buckley goes back and forth between the unfolding of history as drama and the plays staged in the Paris theaters, arguing for a dialectical understanding of the theatricality of the Revolution itself and the theater of the Revolutionary period. The argument is conceptually interesting, but the materialist analysis articulated in the previous chapter is missing here. It returns to some degree in the next two chapters, as non-fiction prose and periodicals are read for their theatrical representations of the French Revolution.
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Reviewed by
Dana Van Kooy
University of Colorado at Boulder

Just as Mont Blanc has been central to the Shelleyan canon, so too the sublime as an aesthetic discourse has been pivotal to our understanding of Percy Shelley as a poet, a philosopher, and a radical. Cian Duffy’s Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime challenges the “critical orthodoxy which assumes not only that there is such a thing as a generic ‘romantic sublime’, but also that this ‘sublime’ rehearses the transcendentalist paradigms of [Kant's] Critique of Judgment” (5). Eschewing Burke and Kant, Duffy reorients the Shelleyan sublime through two other texts: C.F. Volney’s Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les Révolutions des Empires (translated into English in the early 1790s) and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766-88). Both texts, according to Duffy, embody the eighteenth-century idea of “ruin-sentiment” (38-9), a term which links imperial collapse to moral decadence and, as a discourse of political and social reform, offers to resolve the terrifying prospect of ruin through an appeal to moral restraint. Shelley, Duffy argues, takes this causal formulation a step further; the sublime provides the means of representing the inevitable imperial failure as a natural cultural process that mirrors society’s moral and political corruption. Shelley’s sublime landscapes—significantly, inhabited by volcanoes, avalanches, and other events marking geological catastrophe—signify the natural necessity of revolution. This essentially inverts the traditional theistic discourse of the natural sublime; instead of pointing to God as the organizing principle of life, Shelley’s sublime exposes “the artificiality, the un-naturalness of contemporary social structures” (9). Duffy’s study places a new emphasis on the catastrophic imagery of the natural sublime while it also redefines the Shelleyan sublime as an “aesthetic ideology” in order to be attentive to the figurative power of the natural sublime to change the observer’s conception of what is “natural” or what is “right.”

Organized chronologically, the first two chapters focus on the philosophical and literary influences that shaped Shelley’s early figurations of the natural sublime in the Esdaile poems, Queen Mab, The Assassins, and Alastor. Tracing Shelley’s early “radical, rationalist distrust of the imagination,” and his reactions to the theistic structure of the sublime in works like Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), Duffy maps Shelley’s shifting skepticism regarding the sublime and how it might be used in poetry as a discourse of political reform. In the first chapter, Duffy’s main concern is to identify the conflict between Shelley’s “gradualist politics and the revolutionism of his engagement with the discourse on the sublime” (48). He also shows how Shelley uses the sublime in Queen Mab to argue for Necessity and its ability as a natural process to bring about “a political and environmental utopia” (34). With chapter two, Duffy follows Shelley’s growing concern with the politics of the imagination and its relationship to the increasingly politicized notions of the natural sublime. Duffy’s reading of The Assassins is suggestive. Here, Duffy uses Gibbon and Delisle De Sales’ 1799 novel, Le Vieux de la Montagne to explore Shelley’s interest in incorporating the sublime to describe social bodies and their political activities. This transforms the sublime from a merely descriptive language into a means of visualizing political change. As with his work on Laon and Cythna in chapter four, here is a point where Duffy breaks new ground with regard to the texts and the contexts of the Shelleyan sublime. As with his reading of Alastor, he stresses Shelley’s disillusionment with Rousseau and with the post-Excursion Wordsworth, especially their politics of what Keats referred to as “egotistical sublime.”

Chapter three follows the traditional pairing of Mont Blanc with the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. This familiar ground—inhabited mostly by Byron, Coleridge, Rousseau, and Wordsworth—reveals Shelley’s growing awareness of the ideological power wielded by the sublime in travelogues, poetry, and in the works on natural history. Duffy also provides us with a view of how this super-saturated landscape was disfigured by the consumerism of tourists and by the imperial demands for natural resources such as rock (taken from ancient ruins and from the local landscape) to build roads. Responding to these unwieldy forces, Shelley, Duffy argues, pursues the need to develop a praxis for the “cultivated imagination.” A term introduced in chapter two, the cultivated imagination amounts to a means of using the sublime to reform an individual’s ideas about social and political questions. This is a central premise in Duffy’s narrative regarding Shelley’s evolving deployment of the sublime. Duffy invokes Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in order to define intellectual beauty not as a platonic idea but rather as “a product, and a defining characteristic” of the cultivated imagination (99). This pragmatic view of intellectual beauty takes it out of the idealistic realm too often associated with Shelley and makes clear the transformative power of the Shelleyan sublime as an experience and as a discourse.
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Reviewed by
Anthony Jarrells
University of South Carolina

The implicit claim of Kevin Gilmartin’s Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790-1832, is that containment is as apt a metaphor for romantic-period writing as the more widely used explosion. Of course, the effort by conservative writers to counter what was thought by many in the period to be a very real threat of revolution did itself lead to an explosion of print. Indeed, it is precisely this tension that Gilmartin finds at the heart of the “counterrevolutionary” enterprise: how do those who see print as a suspect vehicle of revolution engage in a print-based campaign to counter such a threat? Gilmartin’s first book, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), explored the radical side of the struggle. His new study brings a similar, rigorous approach to the “pervasive rhetorical and literary dilemma” (13) that occupied those writers working to forestall the movement chronicled in Print Politics. The five chapters of Writing Against Revolution trace the myriad forms in which this rhetorical and literary dilemma found expression: from pamphlets and tracts (chapters one and two), periodical reviews (chapter three), and novels (chapter four), to attempts (chronicled in chapter five) by two canonical writers of the period—Robert Southey and Samuel Coleridge—to extend counterrevolutionary practices beyond specific moments of crisis and to articulate “a model for a more stable society” (207). Against a scholarly field that tends to associate romantic writing with progressive strains and causes, Gilmartin aims “to demonstrate the enterprising and productive (rather than merely negative and reactive) presence of counterrevolutionary voices in the culture of the romantic period” (9).

Gilmartin’s account of the counterrevolutionary movement begins in the tumultuous early years of the 1790s—although not, as might be expected, with Edmund Burke. Burke occupies a kind of Coleridgean “life-in-death” presence in Gilmartin’s study: while the “nervously imperfect rhetorical organization” (7) of the Reflections (1790) inspires Gilmartin’s interest in the “range and complexity of counterrevolutionary expression” (9), Burke’s ambivalent relationship to British conservatism and utter distrust of “political men of letters” make his a less than vital presence in a campaign set, for better or worse, on waging war on the compromised terrain of print. As the first two chapters of the book demonstrate, Gilmartin’s concern with writers like William Paley and Hannah More is not with “abstract ideological positions” such as those that have come to characterize the Burke / Paine debate, but rather with “the social and cultural circumstances under which political expression and persuasion actually took place” (64). The pamphlets and tracts issued by John Reeves’ Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers and More’s Cheap Repository betray a willingness—however begrudged—to engage Burke’s “swinish multitude” as actual subjects of public discourse. Paley’s Reasons for Contentment; Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (1792), for instance, begins in the social space of the theater, acknowledging the laboring class as a public. Although he fairly quickly retreats to the private realm of the home, where social place and duty can be imagined in more purely individual terms, the rhetorical gestures of Paley’s pamphlet perform loyalist anxieties over addressing the populace. As Gilmartin shows, Paley cannot completely seclude his laboring subject indoors. Instead, he places him between the collective space of the theatrum mundi and the individual space of the home—somewhere accessible to public discourse, that is (“at his door,” Gilmartin notes), where he can be reasoned into contentment.

The danger with making laboring class readers participants in public debate, however, is that they become accessible to other arguments as well—arguments geared to provoke “envy and resentment” (37) among the less well-off. But as Gilmartin’s deft analysis of Paley’s pamphlet suggests, the goal of counterrevolutionary writing was not merely to address the reader, but also to manage that reader’s place in the fallen realm of the public. Loyalist associations like Reeves’, which was founded in 1792 and which distributed Paley’s pamphlet, helped to forge the “necessary institutional framework” (37) required to police the participation of laboring-class readers in public discourse.
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Reviewed by
Debbie Lee
Washington State University

It seems appropriate that Gunter von Hagens held his London exhibition Bodyworlds in the same neighborhood where Jack the Ripper took his victims. When I attended the 2002 exhibition at the Atlantis Gallery on Brick Lane, I was both fascinated and freaked out. It progressed from body parts to full corpses, in postures that mocked their lifelessness. One was a horseman, one held what looked to be a cape but turned out to be his entire skin, while others mimicked athletes: a runner, a basketball player, a swimmer, and a pole-vaulter lodged half-way between floors. Then there was a room dedicated to the development of the baby in embryo.

Not surprisingly, the media has taken to calling von Hagens a Doctor Frankenstein, saying his techniques recall a “pre-Victorian past,”[1] but that “in the end it is a freak show.”[2] However, marriages of science, art, and monstrosity are not all that rare. Much has been made, for instance, of Diana Arbus’s photographs of the deformed body. Arbus has photographed Russian midgets, Siamese twins, transvestites, and a Jewish giant, among many others who stood out because their bodies were not seen as conforming to a proper norm. Talking about monstrosity, Arbus famously said, “there’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.”[3]

It struck me when I was reading Paul Youngquist’s exciting book, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, that von Hagens’s science is the absurd end-point of the late eighteenth-century surgeon John Hunter, while Arbus’s photographs find an echo in early nineteenth-century tabloid descriptions of figures like the Irish Giant. In Monstrosities, Youngquist takes readers on a tour of various forms of nineteenth-century fleshly disfigurement—from obesity to amputation—and introduces them to the ghoulish doctors, writers, and artists who pickled, dissected, and fetishized the monstrous, Hunter foremost among them.

Clearly, Youngquist has spent much time in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inns Fields, which he describes in the book’s opening chapter, highlighting some of the displays—from whale skeletons to human body parts—among the 13,000 specimens. Youngquist also uses some of the period’s quirky print sources, such as Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum; or Magazine of Remarkable and Eccentric Characters, which ran from 1802 to 1920. Kirby was a London printer who specialized in profiles of the strange and deformed. He ran stories about an enormous hog, a trout of remarkable size, a gigantic rat, and human giants such as James Toller and Patrick O’Brien. There were accounts of monsters, mermaids, some people born without limbs, and others born with horns.

In fact, within the book’s overall argument, Youngquist digs up a lot of historical detail, some of it quite fascinating, such as the stories of Daniel Lambert, who was extraordinarily obese, and Sarah Biffin, who had no hands or arms, as well as the strange narratives behind Mary Wollstonecraft’s placenta and Lord Byron’s club foot. Youngquist bolsters this historical detail with reference to a range of theoretical works, from contemporary Romantic sources such as Emmanuel Kant, to later thinkers such as Frederick Nietzsche, and contemporary theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault, all of whom help him push the idea of monstrosity in fascinating directions.

For Youngquist, monstrosity is metaphorical as well as literal, and it has applications to Romantic writers: Wordsworth’s poetry and Coleridge’s addictions, to take two examples. Through his many illustrations, Youngquist implicitly shows how monstrosity was an integral part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual culture as well.
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Reviewed by
Judith Barbour
University of Sydney

There is no denying the dramatic interest and thematic pertinence to the fictional writings of William Godwin and Mary Shelley of the metaphor of the “mental anatomy” (Introduction 15–17 and passim), which gives the title to William D. Brewer’s critical monograph, and contours its extended comparison of this father-and-daughter pair of authors. An anatomy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (in the old form of the word “an atomie”) is a violent delapidation of an organic unity. In the primitive conditions of hospitals and morgues contemporary with the Godwin-Shelley writers, only cadavers could be anatomized and made intelligible, dissected and made visible, the veins, nerves, and musculature traced, flayed, and probed. The metonym of the eye—its “terrible aspect”—is hegemonic in Enlightenment cultural politics. In one pathetic instance, the dead foetus, or as it was officially called the abortion, could by now be anatomized in situ in the dead gravid uterus, as the “naturalistic” optics and perspective machines of graphic artists gave the burgeoning male profession of scientific obstetrics its first breakthrough. Incidentally, “abortion” was one of the key words inserted by Percy Bysshe Shelley into the manuscript-in-the making of his pregnant lover’s and soon-to-be-wife’s Frankenstein (1818).

The leading terms of Brewer’s discussion—psychological exploration, analysis of the workings of the mind, delineation of ruling passions—are announced at the start in Godwin’s pithy declaration: “The thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive” (qtd. in Brewer 15). This, Brewer writes, is Godwin’s “account of the composition of Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)”; and he adduces the examples of dramatist Joanna Baillie and novelist Mary Hays, “a disciple of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft,” whose writings in the 1790s devled into human passion and prejudice, the “power of the human mind,” and the “springs which set it in motion” (Brewer 15, quoting Hays in 1796).

Enter a caveat, pointing out that Godwin wrote his account of the imaginative jouissance that had shaped Caleb Williams, and distinguished between his own creative purposes in fiction and the then prevailing canons of novelistic realism, not in 1794, but in 1832. In hindsight, Godwin can perceive the connections between minute psychological operations, and literary authority and moral significance. The 1794 debut of Caleb Williams into the London of the Treason Trials, gripped by wartime paranoia and state repression, carries forward a history of “the private and internal operations of the mind” into the sphere of public morality and national governance. In this re-weighting of the gravitas of private conscience and self-knowledge, Godwin rejoins at the close of his career a movement, sponsored at first by women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, to challenge the rigidity of their exclusion from the public intellectual sphere, and moreover to redefine the formative importance of such so-called private matters as sexuality, labor, childhood education, and parenting.

A manuscript fragment was drafted by Mary Shelley in late 1836 when she was starting to compose a memoir of her late father. While she concedes that “pot-boiler” hack writing was often forced on Godwin by the need for a livelihood, Mary Shelley claims that even his earliest writings show gleams of his later mastery of psychological fiction, what Mark Philp, in his editorial introduction to the Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, terms Godwin’s unfolding of “an alternative history, the history of mentalities” (1.42). Of his apprentice sermons from the dissenter pulpits at Ware and Stowmarket, hastily got up for publication in 1783, she writes:

The Sermons are entitled Sketches of History . . . . They are peculiar from displaying that tendency to dive into & anatomize the human heart, which is so principal a feature in all Mr Godwins writings – & also by that lofty conception of the excellence of human nature which led him to consider its absolute perfection no dream of the imagination . . . he had a firm faith in the powers inherent in Man to raise himself to heroism & surpassing excellence.[1]

Demonstrably, Mary Shelley in 1836 is echoing Godwin’s self-analysis in 1832, his “metaphysical dissecting knife” “displaying that tendency to dive into & anatomize the human heart.” Brewer quite rightly emphasizes the rhetoric of anatomy as a master light of Godwin’s seeing and of Mary Shelley’s reading of him. But he passes over Mary Shelley’s idealizing of Godwin’s novels, her attribution to him of a “firm faith,” irrespective of his probing analytic powers. In her youth, Mary Shelley read Godwin’s work in the afterlight of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, and Godwin in old age read his own work in the reflected light of his daughter’s mollifying vision. A spate of writing from both Godwin and Mary, between 1816 and 1818, coincided with traumatic life events: Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay’s suicide; Mary’s marriage to the poet P. B. Shelley after his first wife’s violent death; and the death of the Irish barrister and defender of civil liberties, John Philpot Curran, who is the dedicatee of Godwin’s novel Mandeville (1817), written in the heat of Godwin’s reading of the pre-publication manuscript of Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, while Frankenstein itself is dedicated to “the Author of Caleb Williams.” From 1831–1832, another flow of writing and rewriting saw Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, St Leon (1799) and Fleetwood, or The New Man of Feeling (1805), revised and republished with a panoply of authorial prefaces in the Standard English Novels series.
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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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Reviewed by
Steven J. Willett
University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus

Despite the modest renaissance in the study of versification the past few years, romantic critics continue to write about poetry as if it were little more than a textual stream of rhetoric, imagery, metaphor, ideology and selfreferentiality whose only purpose is to provide matter for hermeneutic hunters. Nowhere has this tendency been more pronounced than in criticism of Wordsworth, a poet who combined unmatched passion for the sound and rhythmic texture of poetry with a Horatian dedication to craftsmanship. As Brennan O’Donnell notes in the introduction to this superb study of Wordsworth’s metrical art, “Wordsworthians and commentators on the romantic period and on the history of English poetry and prosody have tended, with some notable exceptions, to depreciate, dismiss as irrelevant, or simply ignore the particularities and peculiarities of Wordsworth’s verse considered as verse” (2). The neglect of the metrical, rhythmic and auditory in Wordsworth is symptomatic of a general postmodernist tendency to level all literary texts to one semantic Flatland where their oral, aural and temporal dimensions are lost. Against this background of neglect, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art stands out as the first and for some time probably the only sustained treatment of his metrical theory and practice. It rectifies a crucial omission in our understanding of Wordsworth, but does more than just that. Its close, dexterous analysis of the verse provides a virtual education in techniques of metrical scansion for the reader with little knowledge of prosody. The exposition of metrical theory is so lucid, and the examples so well chosen, that one can learn quite enough here to read many another poet with a fair degree of metrical competence.

Nearly half the Introduction (11–17) is given over to a detailed explanation of the scansion and terminology used throughout The Passion of Meter. This is necessary, since O’Donnell has chosen to employ the system of metrical analysis devised by Derek Attridge in The Rhythms of English Poetry (1982) as his chief tool for exploring the subtleties of Wordsworth’s versification. In recent years Attridge has turned his attention to literary theory, Joyce and South African fiction, but his landmark book still remains one of the most important contributions to English metrical theory in the past 25 years. It is not, however, easy reading due to the sheer density of argument. These seven pages provide as concise, accurate and pragmatic a summary as one could hope to find in such short compass. Those who would like a more thorough summary of the principles underlying the 1982 work should consult his recent college textbook, Poetic Meter: An Introduction (1996).

The Passion of Meter falls into two parts of very unequal length. The first part consists of two chapters, one that traces out Wordsworth’s own complex theory of meter from among other sources (a) his abstract public statements in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and (b) his more practical views in letters to John Thelwall and William Rowan Hamilton (Chapter 1), and one that addresses the significant differences between himself and Coleridge on the function of meter (Chapter 2). The second part, of three chapters and a conclusion, treats the versification of the poems under the following categories: the early practice of “An Evening Walk” and “Descriptive Sketches” (Chapter 3), the varieties of stanzaic form in the Lyrical Ballads (Chapter 4), the characteristics of Wordsworthian blank verse (Chapter 5) and the poet’s late apologia for his dedication to verse, “On the Power of Sound” (Conclusion).

Thelwall and a number of revisionary prosodists writing in the period 1770–1815 insisted that the true genius of English verse music lay in independence from abstract metrical patterns. They, like many modern poets, advocated the subordination of meter to the normal prose rhythms of English. Wordsworth’s own theory of meter places him squarely in the main accentual-syllabic tradition running from Surrey to Pope and in opposition to the reformers who wanted to loosen constraints on the verse line. An understanding of his opposition to current ideas is, O’Donnell rightly insists, necessary if we are to read him metrically: “Appreciating Wordsworth’s resistance to contemporary developments in prosodic theory and practice is of primary importance in reading Wordsworth metrically. Indeed, I think that many twentieth-century commentators have failed to hear the music of Wordsworth’s verse in part because the attitude toward verse pronunciation and performance that Thelwall espouses more closely approximates our own than does Wordsworth’s” (31). While essentially conservative in his metrical practice, Wordsworth held a novel theory of meter whose articulation, scattered oven many disparate sources, is often oblique.

O’Donnell untangles the involved braid of theory better than almost any other critic I know. In essence, Wordsworth conceived of the verse line as the locus for two different systems of organization, “the passion of meter” and “the passion of sense” as he calls them in an important letter to Thelwall. The predictable passion of meter, which suggests something inevitable as a natural force, must be fitted to the widely variable passion of sense. The fitting is not mechanical or fixed, but fluid and organic in the best sense of the words: sometimes the passion of meter fully supports and sometimes significantly resists the organizing dynamics of the passion of sense.
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