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
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
Samuel Lyndon Gladden
Texas A&M University

Daniel P. Watkins’s study of works by three major Romantic writers—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats—examines the place of sexual roles and gendered struggles for power within a social and political landscape marked by profound economic change. Specifically, Watkins investigates the shift from an aristocratic, feudal economy to an emerging capitalism, and he points to gendered subjectivity as the primary experiential space through which anxieties over that shift were mediated. Posing the model of “sadeian logic” as the template for making sense of both social and interpersonal relations, Watkins reads a number of well-known Romantic works through the lenses of gender, class, and power finally to conclude that while the idealistic tendency of Romanticism remains compromised by the masculinist biases of its day, a feminist materialist investigation of the history and historicity of that dilemma—the very sort of project in which Watkins’ study participates—offers Romanticism its only way out of the convoluted patriarchalism that structured social, economic, and interpersonal relationships in the early nineteenth century.

Throughout his book, Watkins argues that “during the romantic period there are close relations between visionary idealism, patriarchy, and sadism” (60), and he demonstrates how “[the] three admittedly nonparallel categories of society, philosophy, and sexuality seem . . . to be crucial in the attempt to locate and explain, in historical terms, the romantic imagination and romantic textuality” (xvi). Anticipating skepticism about his subject and approach in the brief “Introduction” that opens the book, Watkins remarks that a central “problem” of Romanticism—in particular, how that movement’s ” . . . entanglement in the turbulent conditions of both feudalism and capitalism [and] its involvement with the declining energy of the Enlightenment project . . . [shapes] the romantic understanding and portrayal of gender” (xv)—”can be considered most usefully when gender is cast in its strongest possible form and then set in relation to other prominent, or constitutive, features of romanticism” (xvi). Indeed, for Watkins, the hallmarks of Romanticism—”[f]ragmentation, alienation, and reification”—are never overcome but, instead, are “pushed further down into the inner recesses of social life until they are almost hidden away in one of the most basic relations of human existence-sexuality” (120). Watkins offers the strongest support for his subject and methodology near the end of his chapter on Keats where he justifies the turn to sadeian logic by underscoring a phenomenological link between the almost simultaneous and, Watkins suggests, the contingent emergence of the works of Sade and the development of the Romantic attitude. Of the particular gender bias for which Romanticism has long been attacked, Watkins writes that “[i]t is important to call the logic of this masculinist poetic strategy sadeian because the word both suggests the severity of the poem’s portrayal of gender and helps to link various social and cultural energies of the age within a single historical and cultural framework” (123). Watkins concludes his study by pointing to the three ways in which such a project—which, he maintains, might seem to invalidate any reading of Romantic poetry as anything other than oppressive, particularly at the level of gender—remains useful to larger questions about Romanticism and its cultural moment. Specifically, Watkins argues that “feminism must explain the enabling logic and shaping conditions of violence if it is to be defused and its energies positively redirected”; that his project “calls attention to the historical field where oppression takes place and, therefore, where goal-oriented materialist feminism must always begin”; and that “feminist intervention . . . enables romanticism to be brought forward as history rather than as ideology or nostalgia, serving not only as a poetic expression of hope but also as a historical register of the real conditions of that hope” (129).

This reviewer’s lengthy focus on Watkins’ subject and methodology underscores the anxiety the author himself voices throughout Sexual Power and British Romantic Poetry; indeed, Watkins admits that his decision to focus on exclusively a few well-known works by canonical writers results from the fact that while he believes his model to hold true for the larger Romantic movement, these familiar and easily accessible texts function as test cases in which his theory may be satisfactorily investigated. Watkins begins with Wordsworth, whose own attitude about political revolution and whose plan for poetic revolution mark him as an important figure to consider in terms of the shifting climates that shaped the early portion of the Romantic age. Focusing on “Tintern Abbey,” “Nutting,” and the “stolen boat episode” from The Prelude, Watkins argues that Wordsworth’s meditations on the self and its place both in the narrow register of individual imagination and in the larger scheme of social relations demonstrate an obsession with emerging subjectivity, which Watkins ties to a cultural and economic shift from feudalism to capitalism. As a member of a developing capitalist society, Watkins argues, Wordsworth struggles to find a place for himself in an increasingly self-made world.
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