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
Celestine Woo
SUNY Empire State College

Robert Miles’s Romantic Misfits is an erudite, far-ranging reconsideration of Romanticism that cleverly fuses both old and new conceptualizations of the period. Miles recuperates a more conservative (in more than one sense) reading of Romanticism, returning to older sites of scholarly interest in order to defamiliarize them with recent work on theatre, science, and hitherto unrecognized writers and genres. Miles writes for an advanced audience familiar with major theorists, scholars, and arguments within Romantic studies. Even graduate students may find portions of Romantic Misfits difficult to parse without aid, especially the discussion of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and its political context (which arrives with minimal explanation), or the ongoing presumption that the reader has internalized the thought of Jürgen Habermas as fully as Miles. This is not to say, however, that Romantic Misfits is an abstruse, arcane book—at its best, the prose is lucid, even lyrical.

A few years ago, I taught a course entitled “The Romantic Outsider,” in which I used the trope of the outsider to interrogate both canonical and non-canonical romanticisms, beginning with the Wordsworthian poet of Nature as figural outsider, then proceeding to the “outsiders” of genre (especially theatre) and gender. What Miles has done in his excellent monograph is analogous to these experiments, though Romantic Misfits develops its arguments far more thoroughly. Its opening sentence cuts to the core of the paradox of the canonically noncanonical: “Although all Romantics are misfits some misfits did not fit” (1). Miles delineates his project as a critique of institutionalized Romanticism, beginning with an examination of the Victorian reception (and creation) of the Romantic, as the “original moment of canon formation—of Romantic misfitting—in order to [… analyze] what was excluded in the process” (5). In answer to Jerome McGann’s “Romantic Ideology”, Miles proposes to re-read Romanticism not as an institution of shared themes or commitments, but rather as a period characterized by the emergence of two formations in dialectical opposition: a radical Enlightenment and its reactionary counter, the latter ultimately privileged by the Victorians (8).

Romantic Misfits is well grounded in historicist scholarship, particularly the work done by Jon Klancher, Kevin Gilmartin and Iain McCalman. Supplementing these historicisms with the theoretical work of Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu, Miles situates the “normative ideal” of Romanticism in the trope of the misfit, selecting indicative case studies as exemplary targets. The first chapter analyzes the famous “Shakespearian” forgeries of William Henry Ireland, contending that Shakespeare constituted a central normative ideal within Romantic discourse, and thus, a fitting lens through which to view misfitted notions. Miles reads Ireland’s Confessions in light of the Habermasian public sphere, in order to reveal a privileged moment for the construction of romantic forms of subjectivity, illusion, and national sentiment, as the debate over Ireland’s forgeries merged the political and literary, casting the figure of the injured Bard as a metonym for the nation. Following Linda Colley, Miles punningly analogizes the outrage over Ireland’s temerity at forging Shakespeare with the nation’s growing concern with forging English nationalism. The analysis is innovative, and usefully synthesizing—regrettably missing, though, is any engagement with the substantial work of Jeffrey Kahan, who has published two monographs on Ireland and forgery, as well as a collection of Ireland’s poetry.¹

In his second chapter, Miles effects a revaluation of the Gothic, drawing it from its beleaguered position on the margins, back into the center of Romanticism. Beginning by contesting Wordsworth’s claim in the “Preface” to be rejecting popular Gothic in favor of the internalized lyric, Miles asserts that Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers are in fact deeply Gothic works. As he keenly puts it, “The second edition of the Lyrical Ballads may be a cornerstone of English Romanticism, but it was set amid Gothic ruins” (62). Miles’s argument excels here at clearly describing how Wordsworth’s ideas—a “position,” in Bourdieu’s terms—fits into the interplay among various familiar and unfamiliar discourses. Relating Wordsworth’s ideas to constructions of ideal presence, the political, and Gothic tropes, Miles smoothly knits together canonical interpretations of Romanticism (Wordsworth as compassionate celebrator of the downtrodden) with newer revisionist notions (the Gothic Wordsworth). An example of Miles’s skill at synthesis appears in his lengthy analysis of “The Thorn”: “If the narrator unknowingly Gothicizes Martha, burying her alive in gossip, the reader certainly ought not to. To read the poem well is thus to enlarge one’s views on the question of otherness … while remaining alert to the complexities of language and power” (82). The chapter includes a sterling presentation of the body and evolution of Romantic criticism, and an astute (though difficult) discussion of critical and reception histories.
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