Revisiting the Radical Republican Publishers of the Romantic Era in the
Digital Era
Michael Demson
Sam Houston State University
Digital resources are transforming the study of Romanticism, and Romantic
pedagogy must keep pace with these changes. Archived materials that have long
been inaccessible to students, such as newspapers, diaries, correspondences, are
now readily available online; databases of high resolution images scanned are
now free; new analytical tools including word searches and image comparisons
(see the “Compare” button on the [Blake
Archive](http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/public/about/tour/tour.html) for an example) are proliferating with each passing year,
prompting new approaches. In response to these developments, my graduate-level,
four-week, online, research seminar on Romanticism takes full advantage of
innovations in Digital Humanities that enable and accelerate archival research.
A student today can use
The Times Digital Archive 1785-2008
to quickly identify the first reference to a skylark in the newspaper
during the Romantic period (April 20, 1786, 413, pg. 3), how many times it
appeared that year in the paper (twice), and whether or not references to
skylarks fell off or proliferated in subsequent years (they nearly doubled every
following year). This student can then read the articles in which those
references appear to achieve a sense of the contemporary attitudes toward that
celebrated avian. This sort of brief research assignment was not possible ten
years ago, and it has the potential to revolutionize the way students
contextualize Romantic literature. My course challenges students to break the
habits of reading that traditional anthologies promote and ultimately to expand
their sense of who the culturally significant figures in the Romantic era were.
More specifically, the aim of this course is to draw attention to the careers of
those people who were producers and directors of culture but who have been long
neglected because their creations were beyond reproduction in traditional print
anthologies.
I designed my course,
Revisiting the Radical Republican
Publishers of the Romantic Era in the Digital Era, as an online,
summer-intensive workshop for graduate students who have completed introductory
graduate coursework as well as courses in English literature. Rather than being
an introductory survey of Romantic literature, it can serve as an introduction
to the period in a manner that does not include the traditional canon of
readings or criticism. My aim is to push students to explore new websites such
as:
[William Blake Archive](http://www.blakearchive.org)
[Romantic Circles](http://www.rc.umd.edu)
[William Hone Biotext](http://honearchive.org/)
[William Godwin
Diary](http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk)
Virtual libraries to access include:
[Huntington](http://www.huntington.org)
[Beinecke](http://beinecke.library.yale.edu)
[Harry Ransom Center](http://www.hrc.utexas.edu)
Specialized search engines include
[Google Books](https://books.google.com/) and
[WorldCat](http://www.worldcat.org), as well as subscription databases. The course challenges the
tendency to decontextualize and thereby depoliticize Romanticism by asking
students to use digital resources to explore the tumultuous culture of radical
publishers, principally in the 1810s and early 1820s, and to discover how those
publishers interacted with the poets and fiction writers.
Course Overview
“Why crush a starving bookseller?” Percy Shelley furiously wrote Leigh Hunt
after Peterloo, because in doing so, he explained, “tyrants […] strike in
his person at all of their political enemies” and “divert the attention of
the people from obtaining a Reform in their oppressive Government” (
Letters 73-4). In the wake of the government massacre
of reform-seekers in Manchester,
For
overviews, see Donald Read for Peterloo and Iain McCalman for radical
print culture. the Home Office, in 1819, intensified its campaign
of prosecutions to shut down the domestic reform movement and focused their
efforts on those who sought to publicize their radical agenda. Despite this
crackdown, republican publishers including John Cahuac, Richard Carlile,
William Cobbett, Thomas Dolby, William Hone, and Leigh Hunt, fought back.
Veterans of government prosecutions, they rallied together to educate the
public about the imperative of reform and published their political agenda
in diverse forms: nursery rhymes, satirical essays, news reports, lyrical
poetry, open letters, lists of corrupt jurors, and caricatures of nearly
everyone in the government, including King George IV. They were convinced
that if enough people were educated about the need for reform, actual reform
would be inevitable. This radical campaign, however, did not survive for
long because publishers were divided, imprisoned, transported, or coerced
into silence. Because much of the print culture produced was prolific and
too costly to republish in an accessible format, it has remained neglected
in archives—until these materials were recently digitized.
The volatility and passion of the republican publishers in the Romantic
period exemplify the vibrancy of radical culture of the era, and this
political culture exerted a profound influence on contemporary literary
productions. I use Percy Shelley’s
The Mask of
Anarchy to demonstrate how various aspects of radical culture in
1819—politics, philosophy, and rhetoric—permeate the Romantic poetry of that
and subsequent years. By exploring the print culture of the era, as Michael
Scrivener has done in
Radical Shelley (1982), the
craft of its major poets becomes more apparent. To reach a broader audience
for his 1819 lyrical satire, for example, Shelley deployed ideas, phrases,
and particular figures drawn from contemporary sources including Hone’s
pamphlets and Hunt’s
Examiner. Through such
examples, I raise theoretical questions about Romantic poetics,
concentrating on originality, genius, invention, combination, and craft by
asking students to compare caricatures in
The
Examiner,
Black Dwarf, and the
Political Register of such figures as Lords
Castlereagh and Sidmouth in relation to Shelley’s caricatures in
The Mask of Anarchy. This activity tracks how
rhetorical strategies move between popular print culture and high
literature. With the new digital resources available to students, it now is
possible to explore these questions of poetics in very material ways, by
textual comparisons made feasible by digital resources rather than
theoretical speculation.
It is presently more feasible to explore the practical concerns involved in
publication in the late Romantic period. Using
The Mask of
Anarchy as an example, we discuss Shelley’s request that Leigh
Hunt publish in London, although Shelley was in Italy at the time, and
Hunt’s decision to suppress the ballad because of threats of government
prosecution. Students read the news, follow which publishers were fined,
arrested, imprisoned or transported, and thereby gather a sense of the
dangers of publication. By studying Romantic publishers, students begin to
see past the Romantic disdain for commerce and pragmatism to some of their
underlying concerns about their audiences, self-image, government
censorship, and financial autonomy, among other considerations.
While the major poets of the period drew from contemporary print culture and
negotiated with their publishers, a study of the era’s publishers open up
deeper issues still. Blake expresses the significance of the link between
authorship and publishing in a letter from 1808, having acquired by this
time his own press: “I call myself now Independent. I can be Poet Painter
& Musician as the Inspiration comes” (“Letter To George Cumberland, 1
September 1880,” [The William Blake Archives](http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/copyinfo.xq?mode=eei_vgroup&group=letters)). Blake’s
press gave him freedom, a Romantic concept that regularly conflated the
political with the artistic. This course introduces students to the careers
and life projects of four English republican publishers of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who, like the major poets of the
period, meditated on political and artistic freedom and were forerunners in
the struggle for the freedom of the press: William Blake, Leigh Hunt,
William Hone, and William Cobbett. Other significant figures are considered,
such as Hannah Moore, Charlotte Smith, the Wordsworths, the Shelleys and
Byron, and John Clare, but the aim here is to spotlight a representative
group of publishers of the era who fought for a free press. Their
convictions prompted them to write, and when their productions were deemed
too dangerous for established publishers, all four began personally to
publish their writings, often at great personal hazard. It is a tragedy,
then, that while historians, literary critics, and teachers have
acknowledged the influence of radical publishers in the Romantic era, the
careers and publications of these figures have been largely neglected or
only mentioned in passing.
My summer intensive online course introduces students to Romanticism, print
culture studies, and the emergent field of Digital Humanities; a variety of
daily tasks are therefore required. Each day, students are check an online
for course announcements and instructions, complete required readings (many
of which are online), review assignments and conduct database research,
write a blog entry, participate in our online seminar discussion threads,
and contribute to our shared webliography (identifying and reviewing new
digital resources). All of these activities along with my lectures return to
three core questions.
1. What is the relationship between journalism and literature?
2. How did self-publishing affect the literary and non-literary
productions of those Romantics who worked closely with a publisher
or, better still, published their own works?
3. How is the postmodern digital era reconfiguring our understanding
of the Romantic era (its canon, its poetics, its enduring
relevance)?
These questions serve as prompts for the students’ blog posts
(suggested three hundred words per day), in which they respond to readings
and make connections (20% of the course grade, 5% per week). They guide our
online discussions (30% of the course grade, 5% per week for participation,
10% for impromptu research-question responses), serve as the weekly exam
question prompt (30% of course grade, dropping the lowest of four), and are
starting points for their final papers (a three thousand-word research paper
that makes use of digital archives, databases, and other online resources is
20% of the course grade). In addition to the daily required readings, I
suggest that students work online from two to four hours daily; however,
once they are engaged with online research and discussion, they tend to
spend much more time online than this guideline proposes. It is not unusual
for threads of student discussions to carry on for days, even when we have
moved on to subsequent units.
There are four units to the course: (a) “William Blake: The Recluse with a
Printing Press;” (b) “Leigh Hunt:
The Examiner, the
Cockney School Romantics, and Peterloo;” (c) “William Hone: The Treason
Trials, Peterloo, and Pamphleteering;” and (d) “William Cobbett: The
Political Register and
Rural
Rides after Peterloo.” In each unit, students read a biography,
explore the publisher’s career, analyze both literary and non-literary
texts, discuss a variety of theoretical questions, and take an essay exam.
Unit One: William Blake: The Recluse with a Printing Press
The first unit of the course introduces students to William Blake, to print
culture studies, and to Digital Humanities. Students read G. E. Bentley,
Jr.’s
The Stanger from Paradise: A Biography of William
Blake (2003), selections from Northrop Frye,
The William Blake Archives, and
The Georgian
Index of early British newspapers. I introduce students to
Blake’s mythology, to radical culture of the Romantic era, to Digital
Humanities, and to key aspects of Blake’s thought, including his creed of
radicalism and roots in Dissenting Enthusiasm.
Students explore Blake’s self-published works, analyze the relationship of
image to text, and compare different manuscripts of the same text. They
discuss Blake’s “Enthusiasm” and the influence it has in his productions
(specifically, his parents’ rejection of public worship in preference for
private prayer and introspection), and the more generic connections between
literature and religion (specifically, in questions relating to inspiration,
epiphany, and the aura of scripture). My lectures (which I post as text
documents, usually between six- to twelve-hundred words in length) focus on
The First Book of Urizen and take students
beyond the Blake that typically appears in anthologies, and I encourage my
students to explore later works as well.
At the end of each unit, students are given a two-hour open-book, take-home
exam in which they answer the following question: “Considering that Blake
had near complete control over his artistic productions—from their
conception, through their composition and publication, to their
distribution—how did Blake’s self-publication affect his artistic
productions?” Students are required to focus on a specific passage from a
text and to work with
The William Blake Archive.
Unit Two: Leigh Hunt:
The Examiner, the Cockney
School Romantics, and Peterloo
The second unit introduces students to Leigh Hunt and the Cockney School.
Students read Anthony Holden’s
The Wit in the Dungeon: The
Remarkable Life of Leigh Hunt: Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the
Romantics (2005) and browse issues of Hunt’s
The Examiner. Rather than reading whole issues, they find an
event or story and follow Hunt’s coverage of it over several issues. My
example is Hunt’s coverage of Peterloo in the fall issues of 1819. During
this week, students also read selections from Jeffrey Cox’s
Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and
Their Circle (1998), several poems by Keats, including
“Dedication to Leigh Hunt, Esq.,” “Written On the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt
Left Prison,” and poems by Percy Shelley, including
Adonaïs.
Student discussion topics range widely as they draw comparisons between
Blake’s and Hunt’s biographies and their activities as publishers. We
discuss literary circles and the central role that publishers often play and
survey contemporary literary reviews and the politics that inform them,
particularly in relation to Shelley’s response to reviewers of Keats in
Adonaïs. I ask students to think in broader
terms about the relationship between newspapers and poetry. Hunt was often
accused of spur-of-the-moment overproduction at the cost of quality (a
typical criticism of newsprint prose), yet spontaneity was lauded by most
Romantics as an essential trait of poetic genius. Though not traditionally
conserved as a genre of literature, to what extent can we say that
The Examiner is literary? As several of the critics we
have read point out, Keats owed much to the paper—if Hunt had not published
his poetry, it is hard to imagine how Keats would have reached reviewers
around the nation. My question, however, is a large one: Is the sum of each
issue greater than the whole? Or, in other words, what are some of the
effects of reading poetry next to drama reviews next to bankruptcy notices,
etc.? I urge students to work with specific examples. These questions tend
to produce much speculation, so it is helpful to intervene in the discussion
with guiding quotes from Wordsworth’s prefaces to
Lyrical
Ballads and/or from Shelley’s
A Defence of
Poetry.
In the second unit I also introduce students to Peterloo as a defining event
in the Romantic period. Students read selections from James Chandler’s
England in 1819 (1999) and reports in various
newspapers, including Hunt’s reporting. I ask students whether Hunt’s
reports of Peterloo are reliable or inflammatory, seditious propaganda, or
Romantic. The exam question at the end of this unit is: “If Hunt fostered a
coterie of radical authors and a culture of political defiance, how did this
culture permeate the literary and/or non-literary productions from the
Cockney School?”
Unit Three: William Hone and the Popular Reform Movement
The third unit continues reading on Peterloo and also introduces students to
William Hone’s political pamphlets and the caricatures of George Cruikshank.
Students read the following:
Ben Wilson’s lively biography, The Laughter of
Triumph: William Hone and the Fight
for the Free Press (2005)
Kyle Grimes’s The William Hone Biotext
Hone’s The Political House that Jack Built
(on The William Hone BioText)
Shelley’s “England in 1819” and The Mask of
Anarchy
Who Killed Cock Robin? and Letter to Sidmouth, two publications by John Cahuac, a
long-forgotten radical publisher transported to Australia soon after
Peterloo
Grimes’s 2003 essay, “Verbal Jujitsu: William Hone and the Tactics of
Satirical Conflict.”
We cover the Romantic era battle for the freedom of the press,
beginning in the 1790s and carried through to the 1830s. In
The Political House that Jack Built (1819), a pamphlet that
articulates a core conviction of radicals of the era, Hone lays out his
faith in the power of an independent press. Unlike Cruikshank, Hone rages
with indignation: “This is THE THING, that in spite of new Acts, / And
attempts to restrain it, by Soldiers or Tax, / Will
poison the
Vermin, / That plunder the Wealth, / That lay in the House, / That Jack
built” (published on
Romantic Circles in
conjunction with
[The William Hone BioText](http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/hone/index.html)).
To prepare students for the third exam, we explore
The
William Hone Biotext in order to analyze how word and text
interact in the era’s political pamphlets and to assess the political
rhetoric of Shelley’s 1819 poetry. This week ends with a broad discussion of
radical and Romantic attitudes toward money and economic ambition. The third
unit exam asks students to explore a comparative analysis of different
rhetorical strategies or modes that radicals and Romantics adopted in the
battle for the freedom of the press after Peterloo. They focus on specific
passages and/or images from Hone’s publications, the writings of the Cockney
School, and/or John Cahuac, and their responses should include digital texts
from
The William Hone Biotext.
Unit Four: William Cobbett: The
Political
Register and
Rural Rides after
Peterloo
In the fourth unit of the course, students explore William Cobbett’s
writings. Whereas Bentley was dense and slow-going, Richard Ingrams’s
The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett (2006) is
lively and a quick read. Students browse issues of
Political Register, read selections from his
Rural Rides online, and evaluate Kevin Gilmartin’s assessment
of Cobbett in “Reading Cobbett’s Contradictions” (1996). At this point, I
begin to help students define their final paper project and our discussion
questions tend to be comparative and reflective in kind. I ask students, for
example, to compare Cobbett’s early years to those of other radical
publishers whose biographies we have read. This allows us to appreciate how
Cobbett, whose career runs across the entirety of the Romantic period, had
little interaction with literary figures and is usually not thought of as a
Romantic at all. Nevertheless, we can draw interesting connections with his
contemporaries: Cobbett’s critiques of the English prison system, of the
need for public education, of rapid urbanization and the expansion of global
commerce, as well as his celebrations of the independent cottage as the
English ideal (John Bull appears throughout his writings), of the freedom of
the press, and of greater governmental transparency are not dissimilar to
the convictions expressed by his contemporaries.
Course Conclusion
As the course concludes, I ask students for reflections. One of the great
advocates for the freedom of the press, Cobbett repeatedly returns in his
papers to the struggle not only for a free press but also for a press
independent of Government control: If ever there was in the world a
thing completely perverted from its original design and tendency, it is
the press of England; which, instead of enlightening, does, as far as it
has any power, keep the people in ignorance which, instead of cherishing
notions of liberty, tends to the making of the people slaves; and which,
instead of being their guardian, is the most efficient instrument in the
hands of all those who oppress, or wish to oppress, them. (Qtd. in Jones
1-3)
I take this further with a final thought on the course:
The activity of publishing runs counter to Romanticism’s
celebration of solitude, introspection, and the reclusive poet;
publication, a very practical activity, assumes an interested public and
demands a market, requires broadcast expression rather than private
reflection or meditation, and rarely can be accomplished without a
circle or network of suppliers and distributors. In other words and
perhaps more simply put, its concern for being timely run counter to
aspirations for transcendence. Even Blake, whose most dear publications
were limited to a very select audience, wrestled with contradictions
between his artistic vision and his work as a publisher. For this
reason, the study of Romantic publishers allows us to see through the
ideology of Romantic poetics and to appreciate better those that made
possible, often at great personal hazard, Romantic
literature.
Conclusion
New digital resources offer students the ability to research and analyze
print culture of the Romantic period in ways that were not previously
possible outside of archives. Today students have an unprecedented level of
access to self-publication; they may blog, maintain a website, read and post
reviews, comment on news stories, and participate in forum discussions
online. Throughout my course, I ask students to reflect on possible
analogies between the rise of the popular press in England during the
Romantic era and the rise of the Internet in our present digital era. What
is perennially at stake is our freedom of speech and of the press, that what
we learn from the radical publishers of the Romantic era is that there is a
political if not ethical (as radicals often conflate the two) mandate to use
the Internet to enable and enfranchise others through the open dissemination
of information.
Understanding the publication history of the Romantic literature is integral
to understanding the literature itself; the title of Percy Shelley’s early
sonnet, “On Launching some Bottles filled with Knowledge into the Bristol
Channel,” reveals one of many ways the poet found to disseminate his work,
and Leigh Hunt and Mary Shelley fought to publish Percy Shelley’s poetry
after his death despite pressures to suppress it. This struggle to publish
was an essential aspect not only of Percy Shelley’s career but also is
apparent throughout Romantic literature. His troubled relationship with
publication is already figured in his poetry, much as Blake’s hard-won
artistic independence, won through securing his own printing press, is
figured in his later works.
Works Cited
Bentley Jr., G. E. The Stanger from Paradise: A Biography
of William Blake. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Print.
Cahuac, John. Who Killed Cock Robin? A Satirical Tragedy,
or Hieroglyphic Prophecy on the Manchester Blot! London: John
Cahuac, 1819. Print.
---. Letter to Lord Sidmouth, on His Oppressive Arrest
for the Sale of an Alledged Libel. London: John Cahuac, 1819.
Print.
Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of
Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1998. Print.
Cox, Jeffery. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School:
Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1998. Print.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William
Blake. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Print.
Grimes, Kyle. “Verbal Jujitsu: William Hone and the Tactics of Satirical
Conflict.” The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic
Period. Ed. Steven E. Jones. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
173-184. Print.
Holden, Anthony. The Wit in the Dungeon: The Remarkable
Life of Leigh Hunt: Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the
Romantics. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2004. Print.
Ingrams, Richard. The Life and Adventures of William
Cobbett. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Print.
Jones, Aled. The Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power
and the Public in Nineteenth Century England. Leeds: Scolar P,
1996. Print.
McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets,
Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840. New
York: Clarendon P, 1993. Print.
“Newspapers.” [The Georgian Index](http://www.georgianindex.net/publications/newspapers/news_sources.html). 2003. Web. 31
May 2014.
Read, Donald. Peterloo: The ‘Massacre’ and its
Background. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1973. Print.
Scrivener, Michael. Radical Shelley: The Philosophical
Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. Print.
Shelley, Percy. Letters from Percy Bysshe Shelley to J.
H. Leigh Hunt. Ed. Thomas Wise. London: Privately Printed, 1894.
Print.
---. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical
Edition. Ed. Donald H Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002. Print.
[The William
Blake Archive](http://www.blakearchive.org). Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and
Joseph Viscomi. Library of Congress, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, The University of Rochester, and the Scholarly Editions and
Translations Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 1996.
Web. 31 May 2014.
[The William Hone
BioText: A Biography, Bibliography, and eText Archive](http://honearchive.org/).
Ed. Kyle Grimes. 2008. Web. 31 May 2014.
Wilson, Ben. The Laughter of Triumph: William Hone and
the Fight for the Free Press. New York: Faber & Faber, 2005.
Print.
Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture
1790-1822. New York: Clarendon P, 1994. Print.