Romantic Circles Reviews

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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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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