British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ''Literary Lower Empire'' (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Br i t ish P e r iodic a l s a n d Rom a n t ic I de n t i t y

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory. PUBLISHED BY PALGR AVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identit y, by Mark Schoenfield FORTHCOMING TITLES: Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis

Br i t ish P e r iodic a l s a n d Rom a n t ic I de n t i t y Th e “L i t e r a ry L ow e r E m pi r e”

Mark Schoenfield

BRITISH PERIODICALS AND ROMANTIC IDENTITY

Copyright © Mark Schoenfield, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60947–1 ISBN-10: 0–230–60947–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schoenfield, Mark, 1959– British periodicals and Romantic identity : the ‘literary lower empire’ / Mark Schoenfield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–60947–3 (alk. paper) 1. English prose literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Periodicals—Publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Criticism—Publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. English periodicals—History—19th century. 6. Great Britain— Civilization—19th century. 7. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. PR778.R56.S36 2008 820.9⬘145—dc22

2008017526

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

In memory of Nancy Levit and Leslie Schoenfield For Sarah, Josh, Michael, and Diana, Voices Together

[A] slight hectic flush passes over his cheek, for he sees the letters that compose the word FAME glitter on the page, and his eyes swim, and he thinks that he will one day write a book, and have his name repeated by thousands of readers, and assume a certain signature, and write Essays and Criticisms in the LONDON M AGAZINE, as a consummation of felicity scarcely to be believed. Come hither, thou poor little fellow, and let us change places with thee . . . —W.H. [William Hazlitt], “The Dulwich Gallery” The London Magazine, January 1823, VII:13 Egotistical they [Elia’s essays] have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; . . . If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another—making himself many, or reducing many unto himself- then is the skilful novelist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all . . . —PhiloElia [C. Lamb] “A Character of the Late Elia, by a Friend” The London Magazine, January 1823, VII:19–20

C on t e n t s

xi

Preface

xiii

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

1

Part I 1

Culture Wars in the Lower Empire

Skirmishes in the Lower Empire

13

2 Incorporating Voices: The Edinburgh Review

49

3 Proliferating Voices: Founding the Quarterly Review and Maga

79

Part II Soldiers of Fortune in the Periodical Wars 4 Repeating Selves: Hume, Hazlitt, and Periodic Repetition

111

5 Lord Byron among the Reviews

129

6 Abraham Goldsmid: Financial Magician and the Public Image

181

7 Spying James Hogg’s Bristle in Blackwood’s Magazine

201

Notes

239

Works Cited

267

Index

281

Sir Walter Scott and His Literary Friends at Abbotsford (ca. 1848); engraving by James Faed after a painting by Thomas Faed (image courtesy of Dumfries and Galloway Museums Service—Stranraer Museum). My verbal reconstruction of the figures draws from Mary McKerrow (94–5), George Napier (173–5), and William Maxwell (95–6).

P r e fac e

T

homas Faed painted, and then his brother James etched, a gathering of extraordinary gentlemen. Sir Walter Scott and His Literary Friends at Abbotsford (ca. 1848) depicts seventeen luminaries congregated in Scott’s study, summoned by the lure of a reading from his latest novel. So monumental was the occasion that William Wordsworth and Francis Jeffrey deign to sit, a bit stiffly, next to one another, despite the latter’s crushing and condescending reviews of the former’s poetry. John Wilson leans over, seeming to read ahead in the manuscript, as if already formulating the review he would compose in Blackwood’s Magazine under his pseudonym Christopher North or speculating to whom he would assign the review so that “North” could write a rebuttal; or perhaps, as George Napier suggests, he glances past Scott to James Hogg, stalwart of his writing coterie (Homes and Haunts 174). A young John Lockhart, biographer and son-in-law to Scott, and eventual editor of the Quarterly, sits in the middle of the figures, apparently bewildered as to where to look. To the far left, Humphry Davy, Scott’s cousin by marriage and president of the scientific Royal Society, is distracted by the hilt of a sword, whether because of its artistry or metallic composition is unclear. James Ballantyne, the Edinburgh publisher of the Quarterly Review and the printer of Blackwood’s Magazine, leans confidentially toward Archibald Constable, publisher of the Edinburgh. Both published Scott’s work (and reviews of it) and perhaps hear the jangle of profits in his words. Just behind the two publishers, heads also tilted together as if to emphasize parallels between publishers and painters as keepers of the public record, the artists David Wilkie and William Allan confer; both men painted portraits of Scott and illustrations of his novels and no doubt recognize the artistic possibilities of this grouping. James Hogg alone wears Scottish garb, even though almost everyone present is Scottish; the “Ettrick Shepherd,” as Hogg was known in the literary realm, sits on a stool, one of two figures whose entire body is visible (his hulking figure starkly contrasting Adam Ferguson’s thin, demurely crossed legs, officer’s boots, and

x

P r eface

posed thoughtfulness), and yet Hogg’s face is the most obscured by its angle, turned intensely on his friend and rival, Walter Scott. Only Byron was missing, and yet in a later reassembly, Byron did make his appearance, accompanied by Washington Irving, while Constable and Ballantyne, who had led, or were led by, Scott into grievous financial difficulties, were disinvited from the painting. From the painting, I say, rather than from Scott’s reading, for the event never took place. It could not have. Not only did Scott carefully guard the secret of his authorship, but at any given time, these men were scattered across Great Britain. The chronology was also impossible; Lockhart complained to Wilson, “All ages are jumbled . . . I am twenty-five and you are sixty or thereby. This will never do” (Lang II:278; Lockhart was a decade younger than Wilson). The scene is an act of painterly imagination, like Raphael’s School of Athens, in which the great scholars of Greek antiquity gathered unhampered by time or death or politics. (Faed contributed Shakespeare and His Contemporaries [1851], a collection of Renaissance literati at the Mermaid Tavern, to this genre of imaginary gatherings.) Born in 1826, Faed never met most of Scott’s “Literary Friends,” and knew them through the narratives and artistic iconography that solidified their personalities. He brought together figures in a virtual space, intimated their characters and shaped their identities by citing earlier paintings and by posing their bodies and juxtaposing their positions. The periodical press, the subject of British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, created similar virtual meetings, of words and voices: Charles Lamb, or Elia, obliquely arguing with William Hazlitt on the pages of The London; Francis Jeffrey befriending Lord Byron through the Edinburgh Review, although the two probably never met; the “Satirist” stumbling accidentally upon Hewson Clarke (who actually was the Satirist). The Noctes Ambrosianae, the wildly successful, imaginary dialogues of Blackwood’s Magazine, usually took place at Ambrose’s Tavern, although if necessity required transportation to the continent to speak with Byron, then off the cohorts went. In the December 1825 “Noctes,” Christopher North (an imaginary figure, the corporate identity for John Wilson, but composed by multiple hands) describes a dream encounter with a doppelganger; like Faed’s painting, the dream is an emblem for the play of identities: North: The moment I saw him, I knew that he was the editor of the Imaginary Magazine—the non-existing Christopher North of a non-existing Maga; and what amused me much was, that I saw from

P r eface

xi

the expression of his countenance that he was under prosecution for a libel. Shepherd: Had he advised any man to commit murder?

The Ettrick Shepherd’s reply is comic, signaling an extreme of periodical power (as when Reviews were alleged to have killed Keats), but also poignant, recalling the bungled disputes between the London and Blackwood’s that ended in a duel fatal to John Scott, editor of the London Magazine. His first question about murder unanswered, the Shepherd next asks about literary pay, “What did he offer you per sheet?” North responds, “Kinga men kulish abatton. These were his very words.” Can these be his “very words” when they are not words at all? As the “imaginary editor” spoke them, how can their spelling and transcription be validated? Is it a sentence as the printed punctuation suggests? How in the dream do such sounds signify exact meanings? Is it an offer of payment, and what does it mean to be paid imaginary wages? For the modern reader, encountering the periodicals of the Romantic period is a bit like hearing such a strange uncanny voice; allusions, subtlety, and meanings are blunted or lost. Yet familiarity lingers as the quarterlies, magazines, and newspapers rehearse economics and politics, as they parade celebrities for admiration and then bring them down, and as they train their readers in the ways of their empire and watch warily for insurgency. British Periodicals and Romantic Identities explores the intersection of an industrial product, the magazine, and a social or philosophical construct, the self. It argues that the economic and social values that the periodical press disseminated shaped romantic identity and consequently recrafted the space of literary selfhood. Faed portrays a rarified atmosphere of intellectual stimulation—seventeen prominent literary men gathered to hear, and perhaps comment upon, the latest production of the most prominent among them. Such a concentrated dose of genius, which the viewer is invited to fantasize sharing to his eternal betterment, is a Victorian retrospective fantasy. This book delves not an achieved harmony but rather, akin to the haphazard Noctes Ambrosianae, the messy tactical engagements and strategic battles through which Romantic authors and public figures imagined themselves and constructed others. This text adheres to the convention that, in cases of potential ambiguity, “Review” with a capital R refers to the journal, and review, with a lower-case r, refers to the article. Primary sources cited in the text may be accessed at http://hdl.handle.net/1803/1172 in DiscoverArchive (http://DiscoverArchive.Vanderbilt.edu), a digital repository provided by Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University.

This page intentionally left blank

Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

T

his book, about voices joined together, has been built from conversations, emails, telephone calls, classroom dialogues, instant messages, interlinear comments on drafts, notes scrawled back and forth in the audience of MLA talks, round-table colloquia at INCS, and even occasionally the kind of formal letters that my grandparents expected to receive, and therefore my mother and father taught me to write, or at least to impersonate. With a sense of awe for all the voices that contributed to mine, I can only thank by name a small portion. I hope they will not mind serving as metonymies for others, and that those others will be pleased by their representatives. At Vanderbilt, colleagues of remarkable insight and unending goodwill have helped to sharpen my thinking and my sentences. These include Jay Clayton, Mark Jarman, Leah Marcus, Tina Chen, Mark Wollaeger, Jonathan Lamb, Sean Goudie, Carolyn Dever, Kathryn Schwarz, Vereen Bell, Cecelia Tichi, Dana Nelson, Dahlia Porter, and finally Paul Elledge, for whom Emeritus status may have given him a respite from formal classes but who will ever be a teacher most valued. Special, inevitably inadequate, thanks to Teresa Goddu who, although a great reader and critic, is an even better friend. Just as important have been students whose fresh eyes and new voices reinvigorate; Andrea Bradley Hearn, Lauren Wood, Brian Rejack, Jeongoh Kim and so many students like them, both graduate and undergraduate, have taught me what my words mean, or might mean with a little more revision. Extra thanks to Lauren and Brian for help with the digital archive of primary sources, and to Ronee Francis, Digital Collections Archivist, for guiding that part of the project. Clare Simmons and Peter Manning began this book, and I was pleased to be able to overhear that conversation; in the intervening years it has become my own, but only because of their unending support, sanity, generosity, and clarity. Jerome Christensen has provided counsel and encouragement, so often finding the sparkling potential in the unfinished ore of talk. Vivian Siegel offered sound advice and saving support time and again. Kristin Samuelian’s friendship and guidance are everywhere evident. Andrea Henderson, Kari Winter,

xiv

Acknow ledgments

Laura Miller, Sara Corbitt, Polly Case, Jaya Mehta, Margaret Russett, Janis May, Misty Anderson, Kornblums and Rogaways, Ruth Smith, Jerome McGann, Ian Duncan, Mark Parker, Kathryn Pratt, Bill Galperin, Christine Krueger, and the INCS regulars provided valued interventions, sometimes of ideas and sometimes of opportunities. I am grateful to the publishers and editors who provided initial forums for some of this material and their consent to rework it here. My thanks to The Trustees of Boston University for permission to incorporate into chapter 1 several sections from “Voices Together: Lamb, Hazlitt, and the London” (Studies in Romanticism). Several paragraphs of chapter 2 appeared originally in “Regulating Standards: The Edinburgh Review and the Circulation of Judgment” (The Wordsworth Circle). Chapter 4 is a revision of “Abraham Goldsmid: Money Magician in the Popular Press” (British Romanticism and the Jews, ed. Sheila Specter; Palgrave Press) and chapter 5 is an expansion of “Butchering James Hogg: Romantic Identity in the Magazine Market” (At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, ed. Mary Favret and Nicola Watson; Indiana University Press). Katie Fretwell generously shared her research, published and unpublished, and supplied transcripts of various newspaper accounts referred to in chapter 6. I thank the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University, and Dean Richard McCarty, for research leaves, and the librarians at Heard Library for doing so much to make that time productive. I am deeply grateful to Marilyn Gaull, reader, editor, inspiration, and to the many people at Palgrave Macmillan who made the transformation from manuscript to book a joyful process. Finally and always, I thank Sarah, and our children Josh, Diana, and Michael, for all the music, both heard and unheard.

A bbr e v i at ions

Books BLJ CHP CWB

DJ GLB Hours HP LBS LLJ LW MFH MJH RR Selection Smiles

Byron Letters and Journals, Ed. Leslie Marchand. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; cited by canto, stanza, line from Volume Two of CWB. Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron, Ed. Jerome J. McGann; all of Byron’s poems are quoted from this edition except where otherwise noted. Byron, Don Juan; cited by Canto, stanza, and line from Volume Five of CWB. John Galt, Life of Lord Byron. Byron, Hours of Idleness; cited from CWB. Francis Horner, The Horner Papers. Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength. Henry Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey: With a Selection from His Correspondence. The Letters of Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Horner, Ed. Leonard Horner. James Hogg, Memoir of the Author’s Life, Ed. Douglas Mack. Donald H. Reiman, Romantics Reviewed, Part B: Byron. Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–25: Selections from Maga’s Infancy, Ed. Nicholas Mason. Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends: Memoirs and Correspondence of John Murray.

Periodicals AJ AJW BM

The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine; or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner Blackwood’s Magazine

xvi

EM ER GM QR Sat WR

A bbr ev i ations

Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal The Gentleman’s Magazine, or Historical Chronicle The Quarterly Review The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor The Westminster Review

I n t roduc t ion

Lord Byron first used the concept of a literary “lower Empire” in

an 1817 letter to John Murray, to contrast the “wrong revolutionary poetic system—or systems” of contemporary authors with the greater empire of Alexander Pope: I took Moore’s poems & my own & some others - & went over them side by side with Pope’s—and I was really astonished (I ought not to have been so) and mortified - at the ineffable distance in point of sense—harmony—effect—and even Imagination Passion—& Invention—between the little Queen Anne’s Man—& us of the lower Empire-(BLJ 5:265)

In 1823, Byron deployed the phrase again in Don Juan. Describing a society in which every “paltry magazine” produces its “greatest living poet” (XI.54.7–8) who struts and frets, as Byron had, on the public stage, he declares: This is the literary lower empire, Where the prætorian bands take up the matter;— . . . Now, were I once at home, and in good satire, I’d try conclusions with those Janizaries, And show them what an intellectual war is. (XI.62.1–8)

Limiting the referent of the “literary lower empire” to the dominion of the periodical press, Byron acknowledges the cultural presence that journals had accumulated as the predominant purveyors of scientific, economic, and social information and as the arbiters of literary and artistic taste. Through repetition and self-allusion, periodicals became the repository of “public opinion” (a term popularized during the Romantic period) by marshaling clashing and allied voices across different discourses. These discourses were harmonized in the “great Reviews,”—the Edinburgh and Quarterly—and later Magazines, Blackwood’s and the London, and replicated in smaller journals and newspapers that consolidated local identities.

2

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Byron’s allusion to the Byzantine Empire, as both a derivative of the Roman and an opposition to it, highlights a contested space of readership in which voices competed in the formation of literary identity. The “intellectual war” he envisioned was underway, and, despite his language of deferral, with Byron’s interventions from afar, although he did withhold from publication some of his sharpest salvos. This war was fought over economics and information, over political and aesthetic norms, over the control of public opinion and the boundary between public and private.1 Conscripted into it were the obvious soldiers of the reviews and magazines—Brougham, Hazlitt, De Quincey, paid per sheet—and also poets, such as Keats, Wordsworth, and Byron, who professed indifference or disdain for the periodical press. Its generals included powerful statesmen, such as George Canning, John Wilson Croker, and Lord Holland, and its lieutenants were the conglomerate publishers—Constable, Murray, Blackwood—and the major editors—Francis Jeffrey, William Gifford, “Christopher North.” All of them, the “phalanx” of writers (as Jeffery referred to his reviewers; LLJ II:74), the poets, editors, publishers, and politicians recognized (and most yearned for) the fame that victory in this cultural war could bestow or the power it could consolidate. Yet they suspected the hollowness of such rewards, mired in the commercial concerns of an expanding consumer society. The periodical press also implicated readers, molding them into a public, yet dividing them into types that mirrored the genres of literature. The corporate beings of the Edinburgh, Quarterly, or Blackwood’s had imperial and commercial ambitions that extended to the construction and maintenance of what Jon Klancher has astutely named the “social text,” that discursive formation in which print production encouraged habits of “reading” as a paradigm of social interaction (Making 46–7). In Byron’s metaphor of intellectual war, the audience could be regarded as alternately the spoils or the terrain of the battles. Following the trend of serial contemporary biography, such as the annual Public Characters, William Hazlitt presented Spirit of the Age with an epigraph that justifies his catalogue of preeminent thinkers because they reflect the reader: “to know another well were to know one’s self.” To see one’s self or one’s type mirrored in the periodicals provided a template of identity, and reflections between various structures of individuality—writer, reader, journal, publishing house, public—accumulate in an array of diverse literary encounters as the roles for readers, writers, and entrepreneurs multiplied. These encounters provided both possibilities and limits for writers, periodicals, and other public figures. Despite the intervening five years, a

Introduction

3

logic connects Byron’s two uses of the phrase “lower empire.” The contemporary “systems” of poetry that Byron finds lacking in comparison to Pope’s eloquence arose in dialogue with a periodical press that developed elaborate frameworks for systemization because of its commitment to an organization of knowledge that both modeled and extended economic discourse and markets. British Periodicals and Romantic Identity explores how both periodicals and individuals developed, confronted, and inhabited competing models of identity. Gerald Izenberg has noted that Romanticism balanced two distinct views of individuality, a “direct claim for the self” and a “claim for the collective entity through which the self achieved its realization” (311), and the corporation provided a model to modulate them. Two divergent tendencies characterize the management of identity by periodicals. First, publications consolidated distinct authorial voices into single corporate, authoritative voices, such as the Edinburgh Reviewer or Mr. Satirist. Second, pseudonymity, fictitious correspondents, and other tactics permitted the proliferation of voices, so that even a single individual, such as Walter Scott or Lord Eldon, could speak in distinct registers, some chosen by the individuals and some inflicted upon them. From the perspective of individual writers, periodical representation exacerbated a philosophical skepticism about identity that persisted from eighteenth-century empiricism. As Raymond Martin and John Barresi have argued, “[T]he empirical self, or mind, as discovered in conscious had all the appearances of a conceptual artifact,” which “provoked not only intellectual controversy but existential terror” (Naturalization 1). Individuals experienced not only terror, but also existential delight, self-invention, self-marketing, opportunities for profit and fame. Writers (and editors, by their placement of articles or wholesale rewriting) experimented with various identificatory processes. Anonymous or pseudonymous writing, plagiarism, piracies, impersonations, and false attributions, and the range of hoaxes that Margaret Russett (Fiction) and Peter Murphy have analyzed point to a fluidity of the self as a textualized being. Whatever the attitude and approach by a given person at a particular moment, the presentation and experience of identity were entwined with the institutional structures of its representation. Although committed to a cultural cohesiveness rooted in the habitual circulation of print, periodicals were rife with internal fissures among journals, authors, publishing houses, and political parties. The industry required both cooperation and competition. The former included monopolistic cartels and puffing practices, while the latter ranged from the gentle condescension of, for example, the

4

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Edinburgh Review toward Amelia Opie, to duels of words and occasionally bullets. As Lucy Newlyn notes, “The mutual pressures exerted on writers and their critics, which mounted under increasingly competitive conditions of periodical culture,” were “intensified by the dual consciousness” of a “mass-reading audience” alternately cowed, governed by, and resistant to “a new race of specialist readers” (4). Complicating this dichotomy, many periodicals aligned themselves rhetorically with a public rooted in commonsense and against the expertise—represented as manipulation—of previously established magazines. The periodical industry colonized British readership, or at least represented itself as doing so. For this reason, Byron, writing from his self-determined exile back to a country he engaged primarily through reading periodicals and corresponding with literati, names this realm the “literary lower empire.” Rather than presenting a coherent geography of the periodicals, British Periodicals and Romantic Identities displays the ways their incoherence, particularities, and maneuvers allowed and foreclosed possible self-representations for writers and celebrities.2 The corporate entity of a persona was not an occasional mask but part of the defining fabric of authorship. While individuals could acquire fame, fortune, political and social power that they experienced as their own, the quality of these prizes (and the experiencing of them) was conditioned by the institutions in which the individuals operated. Although individuals did exist outside their representations, the literary world constantly impinged upon that existence and identities were mortgaged to their own representations. The periodical press did not dominate all forms of representation in the Romantic period; rather, periodical representation extended throughout the “social text” and conditioned contemporary discourse that included speeches produced with the expectation of being printed, reported, and repeated, novels written in anticipation of review, and exchanges of private letters guided by public critical principles. Individual writers, whether those who reinvented the radical press such as Cobbett, or who, like Hazlitt and Lamb, found their voice within the polite journals, or, like Byron, wrote poetry opposing the criticism that helped forge Byronism, the myth by which he was culturally intelligible, all were constituted within the periodical press and its readership. These were voices laboring together, at times in alliance and at times at war. Sometimes their proximity was deliberate, sometimes institutional, sometimes accidental; they were yoked together by editors or readers or critics, impersonating one another or were accused of doing so, admiring, hating, copying, and parodying.

Introduction

5

The Terrain of the Empire British Periodicals and Romantic Identity has two parts, “Culture Wars in the Lower Empire” and “Soldiers of Fortune in the Periodical Wars.” Part I concentrates on the rise of the major quarterlies. Within a year of the founding of the Edinburgh, the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine declared cultural war on the upstart “Jacobin” periodical. A letter-writer defending the merits of the British army against the Edinburgh’s accusations wrote: I am convinced the Edinburgh Review would soon follow the fate of the Analytical, and earlier productions which were adverse to their country; and, I trust, that as one of the first glories of the Anti-Jacobin Review was to silence the Analytical, it will be equally successful in silencing the Edinburgh, which croaks the same tune, though in a different key. (AJ XVIII:417)

The writer attacks the Edinburgh’s economic and military policy, but culminates with a salvo on linguistic grounds: “An Edinburgh Reviewer, I think, ought to know that ‘claim’ forms a perfect rhyme with ‘Graham,’ unless he chuses to assert that a Scotch name should not be pronounced as it is in Scotland” (AJ XVIII:418). Wars of words were linked systematically to wars of blood and money, and the technique here, of undermining a national authenticity, is a typical approach. Many of the techniques of the Romantic periodicals have precursors as early as the seventeenth century, when English periodicals evolved from book notices and broadsheets (McCutcheon 706); Derek Roper’s exploration of reviewing journals from 1788 to the founding of the Edinburgh charts the expansion of a “wider public through the subscription libraries, literary societies, and book clubs” (25). The transformation of scale, brought about by changes in printing methods and distribution, shifts in political representation and institutions, the expanded vocabulary of aesthetics and economics, and the development of various modes of professionalism combined to locate the periodicals in the midst of a new print paradigm. For the prior decades, Roper concludes, with some overstatement, “In the end everything depended on the skill and conscientiousness of individual reviewers” (243); for the Romantic period, the reviewing institutions made the category of “individual reviewer” a contentious one. Anton Kirchhofer has noted that the “precise quality of the change” instituted by the Edinburgh has proven “difficult to determine,” and suggests that a cluster of “generic reorientation[s]” (178–9) characterizes

6

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the transformation. Some of these alterations include quarterly publication, longer articles, selectivity, increased pay for writers, greater internal coherence, and dialogic interchange between articles. While none of these developments could have happened if they had not, to some extent, already been happening, the accumulative force produced three major shifts that Part I of this book explores: the construction of the corporate identity of the journal that functioned as a template for individual identity; the restructuring of knowledge that clarified Scottish Enlightenment epistemology as an economic organization for a marketplace of ideas; and the development of the press as a panoptical structure that claimed to see, and oversee, the whole of knowledge and to reduce that about which it was silent to nonexistence. Chapter 1 sketches several paradigmatic skirmishes. The first concerns William Wordsworth, whose disdain for reviews has become part of his reputation, and yet such disdain did not secure independence from the Reviews. The second example is of a lighter nature, the “Preface” to E.S. Barrett’s The Heroine, which, as it takes place on the moon, proposes a new kind of lunacy, the madness of an expanding industry of print—books, newspapers, periodicals—which do not replace prior texts, but extend, parody, and compete against them. Barrett, whose writing included The Comet, a pastiche of a “typical” periodical, presents the periodicals as constitutive of the identities of writers, politicians, and other public creatures. These examples depend on the variety of voices that the periodical industry catalyzed, and the third section of this chapter explores parameters for the “institutional heteroglossia” that periodicals deployed with varying degrees of intentionality. The final section provides an extended example of the haunting effect of periodicals in order to demonstrate their panoptical effect and the resistance to it, at a competing heteroglossic institution, the House of Lords. Lord Chancellor Eldon, in the midst of the Regency crisis of 1811, had to defend his king and his own integrity in the House of Lords and in the press, and the ensuing debate drew on incompatible conceptions of selfhood. Chapter 2, “Incorporating Voices: The Edinburgh Review,” explores the Edinburgh’s participation in a process of social reorganization. The rapidity of the Edinburgh’s success demonstrates its position within a zeitgeist of transformation. While many critics have observed that the Edinburgh disseminated ideals of Scottish Empiricism absorbed by its editor Francis Jeffrey during his education, this chapter extends the discussion of this influence by exploring the economic orientation of Jeffrey’s confidant Francis Horner. Living in London during

Introduction

7

the transformative financial crisis of 1797, when war, debt, and economic instability combined to produce a series of bank failings, Horner observed how public discourse could reshape materiality and this realization provided a structuring principle for knowledge and the adjudication of fact. The Edinburgh, guided by Horner, seized on the potential to make corporate identity—that of the Reviewer— the standard of identity, challenging and modifying other normative structures such as the king, the poet, the father, or John Bull. This new identity for the Edinburgh Review framed its political agenda, because its oppositional relation to the Tory government motivated the construction of an alternative public arena outside the formal political spaces of government. The success of the Edinburgh, therefore, spawned imitative and opposed journals. Chapter 3, “Proliferating Voices: The Quarterly Review and Maga,” explores the development of two key challengers to the Edinburgh, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine. Each discloses how corporate and personal identity are implicated in their foundational moments. Founding the Quarterly solidified John Murray’s position as a publisher and consolidated the notion of publisher as a public figure. A decade later, Blackwood’s exploits the fluid structure of identity to formulate literary identity within the scheme of Tory historical consciousness. Distinguishing between the institutional identities of the periodicals explored in the first part of this book and the individual identities—Hazlitt, Byron, Goldsmid, Hogg—which are the focus of the second part is heuristically helpful, but inexact, in that all of those identities are structured through degrees of incorporation. Because Hazlitt is explicitly analytic about this phenomenon, the first chapter of Part II, “Repeating Selves: Hume, Hazlitt, and Periodic Repetition” explores his articulation of his identity as a function of his periodical writing. Although Byron only occasionally wrote for periodicals, usually defending his friends or his integrity against other periodicals, he was constantly subject to their speculation and representation. Chapter 5, “Lord Byron among the Reviews” argues that, even prior to his celebrity, Byron articulated both selfhood and friendships in terms of periodical relations. Byron followed his own early reviews closely and responded to them vigorously, and throughout his career, meditated on their transformative power and strategies of resistance. While chapter 5 concentrates on his early career and the later cantos of Don Juan, a letter written to fellow poet Thomas Moore in the flush of the fame of Childe Harold adumbrates a number of

8

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

his attitudes: “[Samuel Rogers] has returned to town, but not yet recovered of the Quarterly. What fellows these reviewers are! ‘these bugs do fear us all.’ They made you fight, and me (the milkiest of men) a satirist, and will end by making [Rogers] madder than Ajax” (BLJ 3:107). Ajax was driven to madness and eternal resentment by Odysseus’s wiles and what Ajax regarded as an unfair judgment, and Byron, with his usual range of voice, shifts between heroic images and colloquial, Shakespearean expressions of triviality. While Byron fears the fatal effects of reviews on Rogers, he constructs his reaction as a generic transformation of both style and character. Mythically, Ajax, and metaphorically, Rogers, are deprived of armor by the reviews, but Byron is armed with satire, and a postscript to the letter offers an apocalyptic glimpse of literary culture in which he wields his talents: R[ogers] thinks the Quarterly will be at me this time; if so, it shall be a war of extermination—no quarter. From the youngest devil down to the oldest woman of that review, all shall perish by one fatal lampoon. The ties of nature shall be torn asunder, for I will not even spare my bookseller; nay, if one were to include readers also, all the better. (BLJ 3:108)

Chapters 6 and 7 explore two other figures, as they navigated public representation. No longer famous today, the financier Abraham Goldsmid is the subject of chapter 6, “Financial Magician and the Public Image.” Goldsmid grasped the centrality of his public image for his success. He further recognized that the manipulation of that image was circumscribed by assumptions about his Judaism that ranged from a form of bemused and sympathetic exoticism to William Cobbett’s avowed anti-Semitism. After his suicide in 1810, the struggle for his public image continued, in efforts to mitigate the effect of his death on the financial markets. James Hogg, the focus of chapter 7, anticipated the potentials of the periodical industry by developing his own periodical, The Spy, as the locus of Scottish identity. Like Goldsmid, he recognized that the economic system that the periodicals had helped to formulate integrated the self into a market economy. When he helped found Blackwood’s Magazine, he discovered his identity fractured across various representations and, at its most extreme, co-opted in a form of identity theft. Confessions of a Justified Sinner responded to this condition and reiterated it. The malleability of the self allowed for its incorporation into other structures of identity—the Ettrick

Introduction

9

Shepherd, Noctes Ambrosianae, Romanticism—and its function as both threat and opportunity for literary inventiveness. This dynamic, if more extreme for James Hogg than most other authors, operated as the ongoing dialectic between British periodicals and Romantic identity.

This page intentionally left blank

Pa rt I

C u lt u r e Wa r s i n t h e L ow e r E m pi r e

All are not d——d you happen to dislike; All turn not marble whom your glances strike. . . Why ev’ry trifle to our notice bring, Merely that you may say a clever thing? —Alexander Boswell, Epistle to the Edinburgh Reviewers, 1803.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Sk i r m ish es i n t h e L ow e r E m pi r e

Genius and understanding are a man’s self, an integrant part of his personal identity; and the title to these last, as it is the most difficult to be ascertained, is also the most grudgingly acknowledged. —William Hazlitt, “On the Aristocracy of Letters,” Table Talk, 208

Wordsworth Explaining why the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads could not contain a “systematic defense” of his poetic theory, Wordsworth underscores the pervasiveness of print consumption in shaping contemporary experience. Such a defense would require “retracing the revolutions not of literature alone but likewise of society itself” (242–3). Without listing these revolutions, he details factors that, “with combined force,” reduce “the discriminating powers of the mind” to “a state of almost savage torpor”: The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. (249, my emphasis)

14

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

The cycle of escalating sensation and deprivation begins in material causes but expands through a dialectic between those causes and the “rapid communication of intelligence” initiated by the periodical press. The “great national events” become visible through their dissemination, but, further, that reiterative process transforms disparate incidents into a “national event” that can be named and recirculated: the French Revolution, the gold crisis, the famine of 1798, industrialization, political economy all required public depiction. Because the “accumulation in the cities” enforces the “uniformity of their occupations,” readers compensate with a “craving” for the extraordinary that newspapers and magazines “hourly” gratify. Wordsworth’s complaint emphasizes that this pattern of gratification spreads from periodicals to contemporary literature and theater, threatening to displace works of “permanence”—“I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton”—with works of disposability: “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” (249, my emphasis). S.T. Coleridge, writing in 1808, identified a similar dynamic in language that echoes Wordsworth’s “Preface”: Now three fourths of English Readers are led to purchase periodical works, even those professedly literary, by the expectation of having these Passions gratified, of which we have a melancholy proof in the great sale of the Edinburgh Review (which, thank God! has received a deadly stab by X Y’s Essays in the Courier, as I have just heard from a Friend of the Editor’s & himself a writer in the E. R). (Letters III:141–2)

The periodicals (Coleridge cites Cobbett as well as the Edinburgh) govern the literary empire by manipulating passions, and even the proof of this phenomenon shapes itself as the passion of “melancholy,” while the means of opposition are construed through violence—a “deadly stab.” Wordsworth and Coleridge are criticizing an industry not new but altered by the speed and volume of distribution and the available materials, both physical and textual (Erickson 15–16, 181–2). Robert Southey, an active reviewer,1 offered this assessment of the current terrain in 1804: I look upon the invention of reviews to be the worst injury which literature has received since its revival. People formerly took up a book to learn from it, and with a feeling of respectful thankfulness to the man who had spent years in acquiring that knowledge, which he communicates to them in a few hours; now they only look for faults. Everybody

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

15

is a critic, that is, every reader imagines himself superior to the author, and reads his book that he may censure it, not that he may improve by it. (177)

For Southey, the reviewing industry, internalized by readers, has altered the exchange between author and reader. His nostalgia for readers with “respectful thankfulness” reiterates Wordsworth’s analysis of reception in the Preface; as Jon Klancher notes, Wordsworth links sociological and literary concerns: “The brutal sphere of textual consumption overwhelms the gentler world of textual ‘reception.’ The cultural commodity shoulders aside the cultural gift, overpowering the symbolic acts of giving and receiving” (Making 137). Despite his objection to this new critical economy, Southey adopts the periodical’s censuring attitude, offering a “review” of Coleridge and Wordsworth in a subsequent paragraph: You are in great measure right about Coleridge; . . . His mind is in a per[petual] St. Vitus’s dance [Sydenham’s chorea]—eternal activity without action. At times he feels mortified that he should have done so little; but this feeling never produces any exertion. . . . Wordsworth will do better, and leave behind him a name . . . and probably possesses a mass of merits superior to all, except only Shakespeare. (177)

Southey’s consideration of posterity, like Wordsworth’s, is linked to a past metonymized by “Shakespeare,” so that past and future operate through permanent values and an ethos of purposeful individualism. By contrast, the contemporary moment relies on the transitory standards of periodical consumption and dissemination paradoxically characterized by “eternal activity without action,” an image of temporality reduced to a continual present, in which history and futurity are lost. Coleridge, who wrote for and produced journals, acts as the symbol for this present and as the sign of periodical disease— Sydenham’s chorea is a recurring ailment—while Wordsworth and Shakespeare possess enduring standards.2 So, despite beginning this letter by claiming he could not be “vexed at a review”—“I should as soon be fevered by a flea-bite!”3 —Southey shapes this letter, in form and content, around periodical paradigms. Wordsworth described himself as “only a Chance-Reader of Reviews” (II:174), and, like Southey, Byron, Keats, and Shelley, proclaimed his indifference to them. Nonetheless, he, and these other poets, complained about reviews, manipulated them, imagined their annihilation, and believed they deformed public taste.4 Further, Wordsworth appeared to other writers to be affected by the reviews. Calling Wordsworth’s genius

16

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

“a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age,” William Hazlitt asserts, “If he had been earlier a popular poet, he would have borne his honours meekly, and would have been a person of great bonhomie and frankness of disposition. But the sense of injustice and of undeserved ridicule sours the temper and narrows the views” (Spirit 249).5 For Hazlitt, a creation of the periodical industry, Wordsworth’s poetry displays the bitterness of the man shaped by the Reviews and the traces of the personality preempted by them. Hazlitt maintains that Wordsworth’s defensive reaction conforms to general human nature: We exaggerate our own merits when they are denied by others, and are apt to grudge and cavil at every particle of praise bestowed on those to whom we feel a conscious superiority. In mere self-defence we turn against the world when it turns against us, brood over the undeserved slights we receive; and thus the genial current of the soul is stopped, or vents itself in effusions of petulance and self-conceit. (249–50)

Hazlitt recommends that Wordsworth disregard the periodicals: “Mr. Wordsworth has thought too much of contemporary critics and criticism, and less than he ought of the award of posterity”; his attention to his image in “contemporary critics and criticism” threatens to reduce his psyche to the narcissism of “becoming the God of his own idolatry!” (250). Hazlitt’s proposed remedy, concentrating on posterity, is the same one Wordsworth claimed to adopt, and, in later years, instantiated economically by his efforts to extend copyright. Writing in 1807 to Francis Wringham, who had reviewed Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth describes the intended reviewer for the Critical Review of his Poems in Two Volumes: a “wretch” who has “taken [Coleridge] into his most deadly hatred,” and extends that hatred to Coleridge’s friends. Wordsworth requests that Wringham use his influence to secure a different reviewer: I have requested this of you not that I think the criticisms of this man would have the slightest influence on the final destiny of these poems, or that they would give me a moment’s concern on any other account than this; that some of my relations and friends who have not strength of mind to judge for themselves might be wound[ed] but chiefly because the immediate sale of books is more under the influence of reviews than is generally supposed, and the sale of this work is of some consequence to me. (LW II:155)

Wordsworth dismisses two anticipated objections to the reviewer—his affecting either the “destiny” of Wordsworth’s poetry or his self-regard.

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

17

Instead, he proposes two transient worries. First, his local community of readers would be wounded. The grammar of the sentence implies that the wound would ruin their critical judgment, but the context suggests that they would be stung on Wordsworth’s behalf, out of fear that the review would disrupt either Wordsworth’s equanimity or the reception of his poems. Although he disavows the power of reviews, he projects his anxiety about that power onto his “relations and friends.” His second stated concern regards sales, and logically entailed in this apprehension (vaguely qualified by its being “of some consequence to me”) is the construction of a judgmental book-buying public forming through the periodicals. Wordsworth was enmeshed in the periodicals at a convergence of conflicts among specific magazines. Blackwood’s championed Wordsworth’s genius against the Edinburgh, and “this support was a central part of the journal’s identity,” as David Higgins has shown (94).6 Blackwood’s overlaid Wordsworth’s poems with a biographical telos—as when “Wilson situates Wordsworth in a pastoral context like that of The Excursion” (97)—and so articulates Wordsworth’s identity simultaneously with the periodical’s social values. Blackwood’s challenges the Edinburgh’s “Wordsworth” for whom “Long habits of seclusion, and an excessive ambition of originality” have resulted in the failure to engage “the collision of equal minds” that the “full current of society,” urban and periodical culture, would have permitted him (ER XXVI:1–2). Although Higgins focuses on the discordance between Blackwood’s development of Wordsworth’s genius and the poet’s self-perception, he also demonstrates Maga’s manipulation of Wordsworth’s persona to engage its rivalry with the Edinburgh; Blackwood’s exploits Wordsworth’s identity and his antagonism with Francis Jeffrey to develop its corporate character. Blackwood’s constructed multiple identities to incorporate, and to partially supplant, the debate between Wordsworth and Jeffrey. For example, as Tom Mole notes, John Wilson “capitalized on the controversy” generated by Wordsworth’s Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns. Wilson “entered the fray with no less than three articles, in which he adopted different personae and pseudonyms in order to argue against himself in a way that was guaranteed to generate further controversy and boost the new magazine’s profile” (Selections V:1). In the third letter of this sequence, Wilson, under the guise of “D,” refutes his earlier persona, “N,” and reaffirms the initial assertion by the “Friend” that Wordsworth’s “concern” was “not Robert Burns and Dr Currie, but himself and Mr Jeffrey, and those

18

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

reviews of the Lyrical Ballads, the Excursion, and the White Doe, which he so credibly informs us he has never read” (BM II:203). “N,” by contrast, “will frankly confess that my knowledge of [Wordsworth’s] writings has been derived chiefly from the extracts in the Edinburgh Review” (BM II:204). Wilson creates a dialectic relationship between Wordsworth and Jeffrey that Blackwood’s can simultaneously perpetuate and adjudicate. Wordsworth’s career thus occupies a variety of positions—and takes on a variety of voices— within the literary lower empire, despite his effort to remain aloof and because that effort gave the periodicals a wedge to exploit his reliance on their productions.

A New Sort of Lunacy Given that “Michael: A Pastoral” begins with a direct, presenttense address to a reader venturing, perhaps, from the city (“If from the public way you turn your steps . . .” 1), Wordsworth’s declared audience for the poem, those “youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second self when I am gone” (36–7), is odd. Margaret Russett notes that the “eminently iterable phrase ‘second self’ resurrects the impostor even while it clarifies the structure of authenticity” (Fictions 44) and Mark Jones suggests that “the phrase is parody rather than idealization” in Bakhtin’s sense of “internalized dialogism” (“Double Economics” 1100, 1108).7 This audience is plural and textual (“Poets”) yet material and singular (“among these hills”; “second self”); a contradiction, it inhabits a scene of repetition, replaying the poet’s youth, as a “second self” of the shepherds, whose “Tale” of Michael “led me on to feel / For passions that were not my own” (28–9). Wordsworth imagines repelling the critic’s authority to mediate poetic experience by casting judgment into the domain of future readers, but he nonetheless reflects the ability of the periodical press to produce multiple textual selves. Various Romantic works explored this duplication of self with varying degrees of alarm and amusement. In William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Caleb irresistibly overhears the competing narratives of his second self, “Kit Williams”: “My soul seemed to expand; I felt a pride in the self-possession and lightness of heart with which I could listen to the scene” (245). These competing versions may stem from, or resolve into, the printed version he hears hawked on the streets of London, “THE MOST WONDER FUL AND SUR PR ISING H ISTORY AND M IR ACULOUS A DVENTUR ES OF C ALEB

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

19

WILLIAMS” (278). Thomas De Quincey wrote, as the English Opium-Eater, in the London Magazine (1821): If the public (into whose private ear I am confidentially whispering my confessions . . . ) should chance to have framed some agreeable picture for itself, of the Opium-Eater’s exterior, . . . an elegant person, or a handsome face, why should I barbarously tear from it so pleasing a delusion—pleasing both to the public and to me? No: paint me, if at all, according to your own fancy. . . . (LM IV:368–9)

The discordance of the “public” possessing a “private ear” into which periodical writing is “whispering” and the shift from a collective “public” into the individual who paints “according to your own fancy” combine to project a multiplicity of images, a different opiumeater for every reader, all hovering around an idealization that signifies the unified reading public. This idealization—“elegant person,” “handsome face”—is a shared possession and a shared creation of the network of periodical circulation. Like these generically diverse works of “Michael,” Caleb Williams and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, E.S. Barrett’s comic novel The Heroine, or the Adventures of Cherubina (1813), a popular work that “romance-readers devoured” with “the same zest that they had for the tales it parodied” (Hale 310), engages the dynamic between self-conception and print technologies. A novel displays a fanciful view of Romantic print culture that highlights the ideological centrality and the decentralized organization of the periodicals industry. The sanity of the epistolary narrator and heroine, Cherry, and of her father—their abilities to identify themselves psychologically and legally—depends on their negotiation of textuality, their assumptions about its fixity, circulation, and reliability. Barrett’s plot would have been familiar to readers of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) and the slew of novels that borrowed from it: a young woman, besotted with a fictional, usually chivalric, world, misapplies the aesthetics of romance to shape her material circumstances to that fiction. Cherry, the daughter of a middle-class farmer, misconstrues the fragment of a letter as confirmation of her aristocratic status; everything—physical gestures, fashions, clothing, and letters—becomes a text that she decodes in accord with that assumption. After the requisite adventures, she is cured and rewarded with marriage. While a conventional conflict between reality and the illusions fostered by unregulated feminine reading, the narrative also

20

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

emphasizes the pervasiveness of contemporary print in shaping lives of even characters who avoid reading. The opening confrontation between the readerly Cherry and her hapless father features his exasperated retort to one of her frequent Addisonian maxims: “ ‘Confound your written sentences,’ cried he, ‘can’t you come to the point?’ ” (I:39). For him, the “point” signifies orality and an unmediated presence; for Cherry, the “point” depends on the mediation of printed texts. So does her self-conception. She later exhorts her father, “Remain then, what nature made you; return to your plough; mow, reap, [“whistle Spinning Jenny” in third edition] fatten your pigs and the parson; but never again attempt to get yourself thrust into the pages of a romance” (I:180); those pages are her life, the truth of which she mistakenly derives from the lacuna of “an antique scrap of tattered parchment” (I:51). At a crisis moment Cherry’s father, attempting to prove his sanity and to recover a written promise of marriage to his daughter, declaims: “I will ask you for it ten thousand times over and over. Give me the paper, give me the paper, give me the paper, the paper, the paper, the paper, paper, paper, paper!” (I:191). The repetition of “paper,” first with a definite article, then descending into the unspecified reiteration of “paper, paper, paper” signals the extent to which textuality configures not only Cherry’s delusions, but the world in which she circulates, from man to man, like a newspaper: “Such an insipid routine, always, always, always the same.” This repetitive humdrum is linked to cultural and material consumption by the details of her routine: “Then ‘tis, ‘Good morrow, Cherry,’ or ‘is the paper come, Cherry?’ or ‘more cream, Cherry,’ or ‘what shall we have for dinner, Cherry?’ ” (I:29). Barrett prepares this paradigm with a Preface, in which a second “Heroine” addresses a letter to the reader. She is not “the fictitious personage whose memoirs” the reader will soon encounter, but “a corporeal being, and inhabitant of another world.” She explains that as soon as “a mortal manuscript” is completed, “whatever characters happen to be sketched in it (whether imaginary, biographical, or historical), acquire the quality of creating and effusing a sentient soul or spirit, which instantly takes flight” to the moon, where “it is then embodied” (I:vii–viii) and survives until the printed work from which it derives becomes “obsolete on earth” (I:ix). This conceit parodies, but does not repudiate, the sense that print transforms and sometimes constructs the reality it purports to describe. In Barrett’s lunar vision, this productive capability applies to public identities and to the material and economic forces that

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

21

are the preconditions to the ordinary experiences of readers and consumers: [A]ll the towns, villages, rivers, hills, and vallies of the moon, owe their origin, in a similar manner, to the descriptions which writers give of those on earth; and that all the lunar trades and manufactures, fleets and coins, stays for men, and boots for ladies, receive form and substance here, from terrestrial books on war and commerce, pamphlets on bullion, and fashionable magazines. (I:viii)

Abstract ideas also find their distribution system on the moon, one that imitates the reiterative structure of earthly British periodical culture: Works consisting of abstract argument, ethics, metaphysics, polemics, &c. which, from their very nature, cannot become tangible essences, send their ideas, in whispers, up to the moon; where the tribe of talking birds receive, and repeat them for the Lunarians. So that it is not unusual to hear a mitred parrot screaming a political sermon, or a fashionable jay twittering a compiled bravura. (I:viii–ix)

These images of the materiality and the abstract ideas portrayed in print are chaotic, multivoiced, and intertextual. Geography and political organization intermesh, as the sound-echo of “villages” and “valleys” underscores, and the fashionable products of trade—“stays” and “boots”—are assembled in the same list as the “fleets” and “coins” which enable that trade by providing material and economic circulation. Fashion is represented through a “compiled bravura,” a collection of texts, since fashion depends upon its rapid repetition throughout print culture and its ability to analogize literary and personal style; the jay’s “twittering” is a stylistic onomatopoeia of fashion, just as the screaming “mitred parrot” is a visual emblem of political debate. Exploring the lunar embodiment of print, the “Heroine” discovers antagonism, canonicity, and other intertextual and competitive relationships. She encounters an emblem of novelistic origins, Don Quixote, a “lank and grimly figure in armour” (I:x) who layers several textual references: Don Quixote, the acknowledged first great novel for the Romantic press; Lennox’s The Female Quixote; and Barrett’s own authorship under the pseudonym Cervantes Hogg. These allusions signal confidence in readers trained in habits opposite to Cherry’s naive realism that mistakes literary convention for material reality, past manners for eternal truths, and romance for history. The implied

22

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

audience of Barrett’s satire is politically alert, literarily informed, and suspicious—in short, the habitual readers of critical journals.8 Just as Don Quixote guides the development of the novel, the knight and heroine “walked, hand in hand, through a beautiful tract of country, called Terra Fertilitatis” (I:x). Unlike Cervantes’s character, contemporary productions display competitiveness, rather than kindness. The “Radcliffians” “tossed their heads, and told me pertly that I was a slur on the sisterhood; while some went so far as to say that I had a design upon their lives. They likewise shunned the Edgeworthian heroines, whom they thought too comic, moral, and natural” (I:xi). The Radcliffians view Edgeworth’s comic naturalism (an interpretation of Edgeworth championed in the periodical press) as threatening their generic existence, which is predicated on popularity. Other canonical heroes persist by gestures that coordinate their past epic deeds with contemporary analogues, and embody a heroism deformed by domestic and commercial concern: “Homeric Achilles [was] broiling his own beefsteaks” and “the Livian Hannibal [was] melting mountains with the patent vinegar of an advertisement” (I:xi–xii). Print production is not limited to imaginary characters and not all print structures are committed to survival within a canon or consistency of persona: “[A] mob of statesmen, just created by your newspapers, popped up their heads, nodded, and died. About twenty come to us in this manner, almost every day; and though some of them are of the same name, and drawn from the same original, they are often as unlike each other as so many clouds” (I:xii–xiii). Describing the “statesmen” as a “mob” created by newspapers indicates political disorder aggravated, if not fomented, by the press. For “Cherry,” whose model of identity was Eve’s resemblance to her own reflection, contrary identities that cohere under single names represent a startling terrain. The “self” is materialized through the discourses that acknowledge it; life span is coextensive with recognition. This lunar tour culminates with the Heroine’s discoveries about the reviewers whose industry has provided the template for the lunar landscape. Tristram Shandy, having rescued the Heroine from another contemporary mob (a metonymy of unregulated readership), warns that “you will get miserably mauled by their reverences, the Reviewers” (I:xvii). Tristram complains about the reviewers’ indifference to the beautiful or the comic; they “will say that your character is a mere daub drawn in distemper—the hair too golden—an eyelash too much—then, that the book itself has too little of the rational and argumentative;—that the fellow merely wrote it

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

23

to make the world laugh” (I:xvii; my emphasis). This list, gliding between excesses of the character and of the book, satirizes the mechanical application of standards and the normative assumptions of periodical evaluation. The reviewers’ predecessor is the satirist Junius, whose lunar counterpart remarks that “the writer who sent you amongst us, had far too much to say, and too little to do” (I:xiv) Unlike Tristram, Junius argues for the vitality of civic disagreement by drawing aphoristically on metaphors for the marketplace of ideas: “Mind unopposed by mind, fashions false opinions, and degenerates from its original rectitude. The stagnant pool resolves into putridity. It is the conflict of the waters which keeps them pure” (I:xv). The image of pure water recalls the Heroine’s first self-recognition, when she “peep[ed]” like “the Miltonic Eve” into water (I:x), and for Junius, the conflict of ideas becomes a necessary condition for modern identity. Tristram cautions the Heroine to disregard Junius’s political economy and the reviewers’ evaluations, because whatever their pretensions to cultural representation their influence is limited: In fine, Madam, it will appear that the work has every fault which must convict it Aristotellically and Edinburgo—reviewically, in the eyes of ninetynine barbati; but which will leave it not the ninety-ninth part of a gry the worse in the eyes of fifteen millions of honest Britons; besides several very respectable ladies and gentleman yet unborn, and nations yet undiscovered, who will read translations of it in languages yet unspoken. (I:xvii–xviii)

Tristram argues that the reviewers, not the Heroine, are ephemeral. The neologism “barbati” combines the insider’s term of “literati” with the invading “barbarians,” and etymologically puns on the “beard” of anonymity by which periodicals disguise themselves. Barrett protests against the Whigs’ control of print culture exerted via the Edinburgh. The denouement of the Preface alters the established paradigm in which the lunar culture reflects—without participating in—the material world. The Heroine anticipates that the reader will wonder “how I shall have this letter conveyed to your world” (I:xvi). The answer is a mix of pseudoscience and political apocalypse. Since scientists have calculated the escape velocity from lunar gravitation and postulated that volcanoes could hurl rocks into earth’s orbit, she announces that, by writing in asbestos and liquid gold, she will attach her letter to a rock to be blasted toward the earth. This emphasis on the materials

24

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

and means of textual distribution allows Cherry’s avatar to make an apocalyptic prediction: Alas, alas, short-sighted Earthites! how little ye foresee the havock that will happen hereafter, from the pelting of these pitiless stones. For, about the time of the millennium, the doctrine of projectiles will be so prodigiously improved, that while there is universal peace upon earth, the planets will go to war with each other. Then shall we Lunarians, like true satellites, turn upon our benefactors and instead of merely trying our small shot (as at present), we will fire off whole mountains; while you, from your superior attraction, will find it difficult to hit us at all. (I:xxii–xxiii)

This allegory for the relation of print culture to material reality anticipates a Baudrillardean simulacrum. The accumulated weight of textual representation overtakes that of materiality, exerting catastrophic deforming effects. The “weight” of so-called reality (mistaken by earthlings as an aesthetic advantage of “superior attraction”) makes it vulnerable to the light-weight imitative strategies of print, with its “prodigiously improved” technology for dissemination. The “doctrine of projectiles” becomes the projection of doctrines.

Corporations and Institutional Heteroglossia In the Preface and plot of The Heroine, Barrett displays the multiplicity of competing voices in professional literary culture, but he also emphasizes that such competition infiltrates the domestic space of Cherry’s family, the economic space of her father’s work, and the psychic space of her imagination. After she elaborates a fantasy of her aristocratic heritage, Cherry circulates through London, transcribing various texts into her epistles; these include a speech she recites, believing that a former heroine first delivered it, while a note informs the reader that the speech was given by the radical Francis Burdett, as well as a posthumous memoir by a still-living, unpublished poet. At the denouement, she continues the analogy between her life and literature, although now (presumably) ironically, as she teasingly hands over her narrative to her new husband by asking, “see how you have made me terminate my adventures, like every romance—in a marriage. Pray with what moral will you now conclude the book?” (III:265–6).9 Inventing herself through the available texts, Cherry recognizes that she cannot be her own author, because those texts constitute a world as mad as the lunar world of the Preface.

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

25

Barrett is consciously exploiting the heteroglossic condition of the novel in Cherry’s narrative, but in the Preface, he extends that condition throughout the various texts of British culture. Mikhail Bakhtin, in the Dialogic Imagination, defines heteroglossia as a situation, simultaneously textual and historical, in which different voices mix, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in collision, as a correlative to various social distributions, including occupational, geographic, and sexual: The language and world of prayer, the language and world of song, the language and world of labor and everyday life, the specific language and world of local authorities, the new language and world of workers freshly immigrated to the city—all these languages and worlds sooner or later emerged from a state of peaceful and moribund equilibrium and revealed the speech diversity in each. (296)

Bakhtin’s analysis presents fiction as the juncture for the meeting of different “languages.”10 Taking his illustration primarily from Charles Dickens and the comic novel tradition, Bakhtin examines the alteration in voice from one phrase to the next: “What we are calling a hybrid construction is an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological belief systems” (304). Heteroglossia exists not only in the juxtaposition of discrete phrases, but also in the production of simultaneous voices within one unit of text, whether a single word, an article, or the confederation of articles appearing in a magazine. The periodical industry, by virtue of its internal competition and goal to inscribe the whole of society, institutionalized the principle of colliding social languages within its writing and production methods. While Bakhtin had located heteroglossia within the production of the novel, that production had as its precursor authorial creation. The multiple languages that constitute heteroglossia “encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people—first and foremost, in the creative consciousness of people who write novels”; these languages “may all be drawn in by the novelist for the orchestration of his themes and for the refracted (indirect) expression of his intentions and values” (292; my emphasis). According to David Kropf, “such heteroglossia in the brain” is “constitutive of the novelist’s identity at the moment of writing” (249 n54). By contrast, the institutional heteroglossia of the periodical cannot be located within an individual but exists as the reverberation of multiple

26

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

influences—author, editor, other writers whose work appears beside (or is mistaken for) the author’s, periodical citations that shift contexts—and multiple points of reception: an individual reader, the seriality of readers joined or separated by class interests, inner circles (real or imagined), and the “public” as a conceptual reader. This institutional heteroglossia does not dismantle authorial heteroglossia but incorporates it as one of several sources of meaning. Institutional heteroglossia unmoors intentionality from the particular author and renders it an effect of material production. Bakhtin contends that “when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent ‘novelized’ ” (5–6). The serial narratives of the monthlies demonstrate this tendency toward novelization but novels were also subject to periodical influences. Walter Scott’s historicism in the Waverley novels reflects his prior and simultaneous historical work for multiple periodicals. His reviews of novels, including some of his own, circulated a vision of a reading public upon which his novels could capitalize. His public emanations—as the Author of Waverley, the Great Unknown, or the Magician of the North—depended upon periodical representations, which in turn conditioned the prefaces, footnotes, and other ancillary materials of his historical novels. The “ability of the novel to criticize itself,” which Bakhtin identifies as a “remarkable feature of this ever-developing genre” (6) evolved in concert with the periodical critical enterprise. The novel and the periodical, like the social worlds they refract, exist in a dialogical relation represented in literary articulations such as Barrett’s Preface to The Heroine and De Quincey’s Confessions. The institutional heteroglossia that characterizes the Romantic periodicals evolves from earlier structures of magazine production, but also occurs alongside the modern corporation as an increasing prominent participant in British culture.11 Simultaneous to the development of the individual, the “natural person,” as a focus of legal rights, commercial attention, and social standing, the array of corporate entities, known legally as “artificial persons,” expanded. According to Blackstone, while Roman law recognized aggregate corporations consisting of multiple individuals, “according to the usual genius of the English nation,” “our law” created the “sole corporation, consisting of one person only” (I:457). A king or bishop (or, in the Romantic period, the regent) exist in the double capacity of “natural” and “artificial” persons; their utterances, similarly, cannot be single, but are institutionally heteroglossic. In speech and proclamations marked by the royal first person that periodicals impersonated,

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

27

they speak multiply and depend upon others to speak for them. A corporation, therefore, was not an aggregate of different persons, but an accumulation of distinct or overlapping identities, and the forms of embodiment varied. The corporation might be regarded as a legal extension of Locke’s realization that “two [or more] thinking substances may make but one person” (quoted in Russett, Fictions 44). The history of British corporations entwines economic, political, and social change, influencing, for example, the structures of towns, the rights of individuals, the processes of economic loans, and the rise of copyright law. An “aggregate corporation” can encompass cities or monopolies formed by Royal Charters, joint-stock companies enabled by the developing stock exchange in the eighteenth century, universities, businesses, religious congregations, and, metaphorically, any group of persons acting as if an individual. Writing in his 1793 Treatise on the Law of Corporations, Stewart Kyd enumerated various definitions of the term, indicating that “epithets have been given to a corporation, which, unless particularly explained, are apt to bewilder and mislead,” such as denominating a corporation “a mere metaphysical being, a mere Ens rationis” (15). Strictly, a corporation was a legal fiction, an artificial person granted certain rights for the purposes of fulfilling particular social or economic functions. As a necessary condition of those functions, however, corporations gained social presence far beyond the law. They gained voice within the press and a presence within the “social text,” and they provoked anxiety because of concerns about the efficacy of external regulation. Legal scholar Joel Bakan has argued that the contemporary corporation acts as a “psychopathic personality” (69), exhibiting a psychopathology of antisocial behavior and constituting the “ideal citizen” as “driven by ‘a kind of pyschopathic version of self-interest’ ” (135; quoting Mark Kingwell). Even in the eighteenth century, Lord Thurlow worried: “Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like” (Poynder I:268). Stripped of two key eighteenth-century components of personhood—body and soul— what remains are still crucial human traits, constitutive of the selfinterested Homo economicus: desire and agency to fulfill that desire. A potent metaphorical structure, the corporation provided an analogue to the nation, as Coleridge acknowledged when he declared the need to “not confound the discriminating character & genius of a nation with the conflux of its individuals, in Cities & Reviews”: Let England be <Sir P. Sidney,> Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, <Swift,> Wordsworth, and never let the names of Darwin,

28

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y Johnson, Hume, furr it over!—If these too must be England, let them be another England /—or rather let the first be old England, the spiritual platonic old England / & the second[,] with Locke at the head of the Philosophers & Pope of the Poets, with the long list of Priestleys, Paleys, Hayleys, Darwins, Mr Pitts, Dundasses, &c &c be representative of commercial G. Britain. (Notebooks II:2598)

Coleridge’s lists of the names that constitute the nation(s) of Great Britain suggest that the corporation, though constructed as if possessing a monolithic voice from a legal perspective, retained the trace—sometimes hidden among letters, memorandum, and other internal documents; sometimes exposed through encounters with other entities or by failure of self-regulation—of multiplicity. William Hazlitt argues both the transformative effects of corporate bodies on individual voice and their dependence on networks of textuality. His analysis focuses on the monoglossic impulses of corporations, sole or aggregate, for control, but highlights, through both his antithetical style and his anecdotes, the heteroglossia that persists within the corporate unity. Psychologizing “corporate bodies,” he declares that they “feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill. The principle of private or natural conscience is extinguished in each individual” (Table Talk 264). Hazlitt’s essay catalogues the intellectual and moral stagnancy of universities, political parties, businesses, and fine-arts societies. In all of these, “the official takes place of the moral sense” (265). Surrendering personal autonomy and conscience are prerequisites that “enable” a person “to pass as a cypher, or be admitted as a mere numerical unit, in any corporate body” (266); to lead a corporation requires a commitment to yet greater despotism: He must not merely conform to established prejudices; he must flatter them. He must not merely be insensible to the demands of moderation and equity; he must be loud against them. He must not simply fall in with all sorts of contemptible cabals and intrigues; he must be indefatigable in fomenting them, and setting everybody together by the ears. He must not only repeat, but invent lies. . . . He must (in Mr. Burke’s phrase) “disembowel himself of his natural entrails, and be stuffed with paltry, blurred sheets of parchment about the rights” of the privileged few. (266–7)

Hazlitt’s imperatives direct public expression: protests must be “loud”; intrigues must set “everybody together by the ears”; lies must be invented for others to repeat. Yet, as Hazlitt’s strategies of quotation

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

29

and paraphrase demonstrate, once in circulation, corporate speech devolves into multivocal language. Hazlitt is paraphrasing, with calculated irony, Burke’s insistence that England has remained consistent with its fourteenth-century self and has not been “stuffed” with the “shreds of paper about the rights of man” (Reflections 73). The image of an individual exchanging his “natural entrails” for “blurred sheets of parchment” (which displaces Burke’s more modern phrase, “shreds of paper,” and unveils the class-bias of Burke’s phrase) is not only a critique of the corporation, but also discloses the corporation as more malleable and less stable than its self-representation. Periodicals are corporate entities that emerge from legal corporations—publishing houses—and that operate within the figural corporation of the periodical industry. The convention of naming journals after cities (or other social units) underscores the corporate system of allegiances for periodicals. The increased mobility toward, and centrality of, the metropolis solidified the concept of the metropolitan as simultaneously a personality, geographic and political space, and ideology. Novelistic heteroglossia was predicated on concentration of resources and rapid flow of human beings to and through cities such as London. The rise of the metropolis as a central structure of industrialization, however, was not the precondition for heteroglossia. It was, rather, a social phenomenon shaped by, and also shaping, the structure of literacy. E.J. Hobsbawm has pointed out that the intensification of “industrial production” in the 1780s did not depend on the construction of factories, but on the expansion of “the so-called domestic or putting-out system” by which household cottage industries were linked together by a network of middle men (36). Naturalized as part of modern social conditions, this system helped establish the ideology of production that propelled the later widespread industrial factories. Similarly, the heteroglossia of magazine culture was not a by-product of industrialization and mobility, but a contributing factor to its social normalization. As names such as the Edinburgh Review and the London Magazine indicate, the periodical industry promoted and depended on the consolidation of metropolitan spaces and distribution systems that stemmed from major cities.12 Romantic writers understood the new metropolis through a mapping of competing voices and overlapping conceptions of temporality. London, Wordsworth’s “blank confusion” of overpopulated signifiers (Prelude VII:696), constitutes a realm in which time is multiply represented as a function of diverse structures of identity. Charles Lamb contrasts the old sundial that made the Inner Temple the “most

30

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

elegant spot in the metropolis” with the new clock, “with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass” to illustrate that time—and consequently work, reading, and writing—has changed in the city. Elia’s narrative highlights the multiple versions of his past, the echoing voices that persist, as the “new clock” is a palimpsest of the sun dial (“Old Benchers” LM IV:279). Lamb links this change of the city with the modernization of the periodical. He describes, in a Postscript, R.N. who “would but have been puzzled by the indecorous liberties of Elia,” because he knows nothing “of the license which Magazines have arrived at in this plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the Gentleman’s,” which he only pursues for “honest Urban’s obituary” (IV:284). The frantic confusions of voices in Isaac D’Israeli’s Flim-Flams! (1805) and Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) hover between the genres of novel and article, repeatedly referencing both in envisioning the modern city as the locus of contemporary culture, a domain that reflects the mixed genres which, in Jacques Derrida’s phrase, answer to “the law of overflowing, of excess, the law of participation without membership” (228).13 The centralization of Scottish enlightenment values in Edinburgh required and enabled a literary visibility that its periodicals performed. As Ian Duncan recounts, Walter Scott staged King George IV’s 1822 visit to express “the civic confidence of Edinburgh that showed itself off as a national metropolis, more than a century after Scotland had lost the last of its institutions of sovereignty.” The city had shifted from an eighteenth-century “residential New Town” to a “spectacular, monumental, and imperial urban landscape” exploiting the “sheer verticality of the city’s topography” (Duncan 8–9). Duncan notes that this transformation engaged the dominant positions of the Edinburgh periodicals that could imbue it with the symbolic meaning of cultural sovereignty. The city’s new terrain, both material and semiotic, enabled Archibald Constable, publisher of the Edinburgh, to “enact[] the functional conversion of eighteenth-century bookseller into the modern entrepreneurial publisher” (21). Duncan suggests that Constable’s “transformation” may be, by “commentators then and since” “exaggerated”; rather, the transformation is palimpsestic, the new entrepreneur written over, but not obliterating, the older bookseller. The palimpsest is one form of institutional heteroglossia, of cosmopolitan meaning tied to its historical layering as well as its geographical sprawl but prior to the intentionality of individuals. The mixing of genres, as a mode of institutional heteroglossia that brings multiple voices into proximity, underpins connections between genres and between their practitioners. For Keats, whose

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

31

vexed relationship with reviewers persisted in the mythology of his death, reviews, as Andrew Franta argues, provided “a medium through which he might fashion an audience” as well as “the means by which he might understand his relation to his readers” (78). The mixed genre of the “review poem” allows Keats to take “reviewing as a model for how poets might work” (94). Using the exchanges between Blackwood’s, Hunt, and Keats, Franta demonstrates that “Keats does not oppose poetry and reviewing but rather asserts, and capitalizes on, their similarity”; in this heteroglossic category, in which review and lyric chime, he includes “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” (93). The “review poem” depends not only on a cultural ascendancy of the review that poetry could accommodate but also on a continuum between reviews and poems indebted to eighteenthcentury verse and critical theory.14 Tensions between Percy Bysshe Shelley and the periodicals, as Kim Wheatley discusses, also depend upon a mirroring between two genres. To explain the intense nastiness of the reviews, Wheatley revises Terry Eagleton’s grounding of their “sectarian virulence” in “the pressures of mounting class struggle in society as a whole” by demonstrating the rhetoric of that virulence (Shelley 3–4): “By accepting the centrality of individual agency and the interdependence of politics, religion, and morality, the reformers cast themselves in the role of Satanic rebels and disabled themselves from challenging those in power. But although the Satanic scenario is potentially selfperpetuating, the use of paranoid rhetoric is also self-destructive” (39). While focused on Shelley’s engagement with the periodical press and its “paranoid style,” Wheatley reveals a pervasive dynamic. Style is echoed between reviewer and reviewed, between rival periodicals, and so, like paranoia, escalates through repetitions. This perpetual machinery constructs multiple, and even mutually exclusive, personalities both for classes of writers—poets, novelists—and for specific writers—Wordsworth, the Ettrick Shepherd, the Great Unknown. Such multiplicity corresponds to the transformation of eighteenthcentury memoirs into the Romantic mode of autobiography, by which writers attempted to stamp their own characters through textual display.15 In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey introduces the vision of the painter Piranesi “busy on his aspiring labours” within one of his own paintings. A visual emblem of Southey’s characterization of Coleridgean production, “eternal activity without action,” the image concerns the same belatedness that Southey lamented and the impossible perspective of omniscience

32

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

that the periodicals conveyed. With each recurrence, Piranesi appears higher until he is “lost in the gloom of the hall.” This spatial reiteration mirrors the narrative repetitions in which Piranesi’s dreams become a set of plates that Coleridge describes to De Quincey who then deploys the vision as an emblem of “the same power of endless growth and reproduction” that characterizes his own dreams. Although the recurring body of Piranesi and the metaphor of “endless growth” are organic images, at the bottom of the painting— and presented as what the eye first detects—is a contrasting emblem of production: “on the floor of which [the vast Gothic halls] stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c. expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome” (LM VI:374; my emphasis). Within dream, painting, and narrative, these mechanical tools are “expressive” of power; they function textually. In this image of expressive industrialization, just as the painting-dream incorporates Piranesi, the reiterative structures of the periodical industry incorporate De Quincey. This section of Confessions performs a series of condensations: multiple prints become a single image; “imaginary prisons” (“Carceri d’invenzione” was Paranesi’s title) become “Dreams”; prisons become “Gothic halls”; interior prison space becomes cities. By the logic of metonymic substitution, Paranesi’s predicament is De Quincey’s dream of “cities and palaces,” which is visually equivalent to Wordsworth’s “mighty city—boldly say / A wilderness of building” (LM VI:374; Excursion II:835–6). In these sequences of repetition, both spatial and temporal, De Quincey, as Russett details, “consolidates his professional authority by making sameness do the office of differance, or by generating surplus value from the secret differences of a poet and his impresario” (Minor Romanticism 165). De Quincey has not seen the plates, but only recounts, and displaces, what Coleridge has told him; the “vision” has no original voice, but only the persistent “office of difference” imperfectly materialized as writing in the periodical. As De Quincey’s refracted image suggests, the professional classes, investing in periodical reproduction as a mechanical form, imitate the proletariat, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation; each worker, facing other workers and their shared or competing materials, “makes himself into the manual worker” that “this particular machine requires” (Critique 114). One requirement of the “particular machine” of the periodical industry is the recognition of the self within a semiotic system, where its meaning derives from differences beyond individual intentionality. Like De Quincey, Hazlitt resorts to the industrial imagery of the machine, juxtaposed to the dream, to understand the

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

33

formative power of periodical reproduction on the individual identity of the celebrity. The celebrity abandons “[t]his sort of dreaming existence” in “search of realities”: “He is a tool, a part of a machine that never stands still, and is sick and giddy with the ceaseless motion. He has no satisfaction but in the reflection of his own image in the public gaze, but in the repetition of his own name in the public ear” (Table Talk 92–3). Jon Klancher’s Making of English Reading Audiences explores the multiplicity of Romantic-era journals as a means of producing and identifying disparate audiences that vied for resources, coalesced along class lines, overlapped, impersonated one another, and positioned themselves as quintessentially British. “[A]udiences are not simply aggregates of readers,” but “complicated social and textual formations.” Klancher’s work delineates the role of periodicals in those formations: “[A]s the journals multiplied, they registered the increasingly heterogeneous play of sociolects—the discourses of emerging professions, conflicting social spheres, men and women, the cultivated middle-class audience, and less sophisticated readerships” (20).16 Different journals had different approaches to registering this play of sociolects, sometimes, like the Westminster, refracting it through the history of class, or like the London Magazine, muting it within a polite discourse. In its inaugural issue, the Westminster Review argues that the contemporary moment imposes on all reading: “whatever the promise of the title page; poem, play, or tale; . . . history, criticism, science, or even theology. . . . Even Shakespeare and all his wonderful creations cannot induce us to forget Castlereagh and Canning . . . the subject . . . mixes familiarly with whatever company may at any time be assembled” (WR I:9). Reviewing James Boone’s Men and Things in 1823, the Westminster detects an implicit heteroglossia in reading at a historicized moment; the voices of the present impose on the past. Tradition depends on its contemporary formulations, while the present arises as the deformation of the past: “The new consists of little more than selections, expansions, simplifications, and re-arrangements, of the old. The massy plate of antiquity is melted, coined, and pushed into circulation” (WR I:11). The Westminster’s image of the present as new coins made from a melted-down past draws from contemporary economic discourse, in which the value of both coin and commodities— including print—derived from the rate at which they could be pushed into circulation. The self also participates in this commodified and heteroglossic status, and the Westminster selects the “poet” as an exemplar of

34

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

corporate being. “He” is a blend of Scott and Byron, from whom he takes “the Kean-like expression of the most violent passions.” His “ever recurring hits at the popular topics of the day” will “furnish a pretty complete picture of a poet moulded by the spirit of the age, and bearing the image of his creator.” Other poets reflect variants of this generic poet inflected by their relationships to desired audiences: “[t]he anxiety of Wordsworth to be the head of a school, or rather to be himself the whole school; of Campbell to secure the suffrages of men of refined taste; of Moore to charm young ladies; and of Southey to promote the interests of his employers” (I:12–13). For each of these poets, critical voices crowd his perspective with “a louder peal than the anticipated echo of posterity to their voice, in the immediate and immense plaudits of the multitudes who constitute his auditory” (I:9). The Westminster laments the ironic tone and emotional emptiness with which contemporary poetic production has become infected, an effect of a confederacy between poetry—specifically Byronism—and periodical culture. The author highlights the theatricality that Byron modeled in his poetic technique—and inspired as the object of other poets’ imitation—to claim that Byronism and the periodical industry have divided the literary world between them: An affected levity and heartlessness have crept over much of our literature, and more of our criticism, whose cant deserves to be held in equal abomination. Our elder brothers of the reviewing family have a considerable portion of the mischief to answer for; and the rest may be laid at Lord Byron’s door. Because some master minds can gracefully sport with a subject [such as “philosophical controversy”] . . . or because a powerful effect was produced by the inspired delineation of a libertine, . . . does it therefore follow, that every stripling who can indite a pretty verse, or fabricate a readable paper for a magazine, is to find nothing in heaven or earth, in life, mind, or morals, important enough to make him serious, or interesting enough to demand emotion? (WR I:15)

The objection is not to Byron’s writing, but to the mechanism of his fame, which produces imitations. Similarly, the Westminster’s “elder brothers,” the Edinburgh and Quarterly, ooze with “affected levity and heartlessness” that signal their affinity with the cult of Byronism and their capacity to shape opinion and discourse through inspiring imitators and replicating misreadings. Both author and reviewer have corporate identities, and their mutual dependence are constitutive of an institutional heteroglossia: “criticism

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

35

feeds on authorship, and should not deteriorate the quality of its own food: unless, indeed, criticism means to be self-supportive, and to supersede the authors altogether” (WR I:16). This displacement of author by reviewer enacts a fantasy of critical autonomy, but reviews, like the heteroglossic novels Bakhtin explores, are “overpopulated” with voices: “The professed reviewer writes a dissertation on his author’s subject, and in retaliation the author reviews himself in his own book, criticizing as he proceeds” (I:16). Of the scant quotations from James Boone’s Men and Things, most are of Boone’s self-criticism, such as his explanation that he writes in verse because “without that aid, a mere didactic exposition of general principles would be altogether unpalatable” (I:17). As a “didactic exposition of general principles,” this first offering of the new Westminster announces the function and identity of the periodicals, an identity coextensive with popularity: “Such a publication as we project, seems to us to be called for by the voice of the people; of whom we are, from whom we have no separate interests or objects, and to whom, though we cannot sacrifice a single just principle or personal conviction, we heartily devote our efforts in the pages of The Westminster Review” (I:16). This unification of the “voice of the people” whose interests are identical with those of the editorial “we” is a monoglossic stratagem, an effort to harmonize “public opinion” along the ideological axis of reform. An unachievable ideal, at variance with the institution of the periodical within which the Westminster must function, monoglossia operates as a practical strategy. The “modalities within periodicals” that Mark Parker had identified vary “from relative authorial autonomy to collaborations between editors and contributors” (5). This range extends, at the extreme of authorial control, to writers who single-handedly produced a magazine and, at the other extreme of editorial intervention, to editors who appropriate the names of authors to produce work under their signature. While a given journal would have a propensity toward a particular modality, most of them deployed various techniques along this spectrum. Because of the contradictory tendencies to cohere under editorial imperatives and to disassociate in the contrast among contributing authors, periodicals evolve under the pressures of a literary natural selection. Parker demonstrates “a kind of dialectic between an analysis of the cultural work of magazines and a description of the place of culture in the magazine” (11). A similar dialectic of identity occurs between the writings of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, which sometimes appeared side by side in the London Magazine and sometimes referenced one another from across genres. In his “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” Elia admitted

36

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

he “loved to lose [him]self in other men’s minds,” and declared that books, both as texts read and material objects, enabled this fluidity of self. As Peter Manning notes, the word “detached” is exchanged between Lamb’s essay and Hazlitt’s “Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon,” which proposes that but for Lamb’s attachment to the periodical industry, he “would probably never have made his way by detached and independent efforts” (Spirit 268). Manning demonstrates that Lamb “draws out of periodical publishing an identity that disguises the commercial nature of that enterprise” and “seeks to elude the concretion, the historical embedding, of that identity” (“Detaching” 138). Hazlitt, in redeploying the sense of detachment in Spirit of the Age, discloses the commercial and historical underpinnings of this elision. Although Hazlitt declares that Lamb has “chosen to designate” himself as “Elia,” the London had already, though only partially, dismantled that straightforward correspondence by accusing Lamb of Elia’s murder (Manning, “Detaching” 144).17 In the interstices of such dialectics, authors found careers and identities, which sometimes stabilized into fame (and perhaps fortune), and other times dissolved as if written in water. Words, like corporations, participate in the “practico-inert,” Sartre’s term for the institutionalization of political or social praxis that persists beyond its original intentions and utilities (65). “Because they bear the marks of their use in past struggles, words necessarily exceed any meaning the subject attempts to ascribe to them” (Leps 272). Hazlitt, comparing corporations to “antiquated coquettes,” argues that the natural trajectory of corporate bodies is toward the inertia of obsolescence: “What might once have been of serious practical utility they turn to farce, by retaining the letter when the spirit is gone” (Table Talk 267). As a consequence, “[a]ge does not improve the morality of public bodies. They grow more and more tenacious of their idle privileges and senseless self-consequence. . . . The great resorts and seats of learning often outlive in this way the intention of the founders as the world outgrows them” (267–8 ) Certain institutional structures, the encyclopedia, the dictionary, the legal case compilations that were becoming common in the nineteenth century, serve as deliberate storehouses of language; other structures, the theater, Minerva press, radical journalism, disrupt the effects of institutional sedimentation, often by claiming prior or immediate meaning. Hazlitt distinguishes the theater and its audience as an “assembly” from corporate structures such as universities that “become cisterns to hold, not conduits to disperse knowledge” (Table Talk 268). The periodical press, a nexus between these modes, presented articles as occasional, spontaneous,

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

37

contemporary, and ephemeral, yet compiled its products into bound and indexed editions of magazines, collected articles under the names of authors or authorial persona such as Elia, and claimed permanence for its encapsulation of the cultural world. From this perspective, the periodical article—the language of which was often borrowed from prior texts, quoted from contemporary ones under review, and echoed from one article to the next—was institutionally heteroglossic. Coleridge recognized that strategies of borrowed textuality enabled William Cobbett to produce his work cheaply and circulate it widely. First, Cobbett “rarely writes more than a third of the weekly Journal; the remainder of the Sheet is either mere reprinting, or stupid Makeweights from Correspondents (with few excep[tions)] of the very lowest order.” Even his own articles, however, “are mere Comme[nts] on large Extracts from the morning papers, such as a passi[onate] man would talk at breakfast over a Newspaper.” Finally, Cobbett is not invested in the “Nicety and Effort of Composition” but rather in the power of repetition (Letters III:144). Coleridge contrasts his own proposed periodical to Cobbett’s through an elaborate metaphor: “The Labourers’ pocket knives are excellently adapted to the cutting of Bread & Cheese; but it would be unfair to demand, that the medical Cutler A should sell his Case of Lancets, at the same price that the Common Cutler B. sells an equal weight of the Bread & Cheese Knives: supposing them both equally good in their Kind” (Letters 144). Despite his claim to intend no deprecation, Coleridge’s analogy offers a hierarchy that favors those journals that are grounded in “a comprehensive Philosophy” and resist institutional heteroglossia, which is the mark of a corporate existence that panders to a wider, undisciplined audience. The London Magazine, under its first editor, John Scott, exhibits monoglossic tendencies in its efforts to shape London, the London’s middle-class readership, and British citizenry into a unified whole. The “dialogism of the London, especially in the case of Hazlitt and Scott,” Mark Parker observes, “is more akin to that implicit in many eighteenth-century periodicals in which the ubiquitous coffee-house analogy that defined the souls of contributors and readers was predicated on the acceptance of a particular discursive formation and the fulfillment of certain standards of propriety” (65). The appearance of dialogism is recapitulated as single-voicedness. This kinship was complicated in the Prospectus to the London, in which John Scott invokes that former time with a blend of superiority and nostalgia: The days are passed when Vindex could be suffered to dispute with Eudosius, through various successive Numbers, which is most

38

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y eligible—a married or a single state . . . or expect Amicus to recruit his subscription list amongst respectable families, by recommending the Ladies read Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse. Opinion now busies itself with more venturesome themes than of yore; discussion must start fleeter and subtler game; excitement must be stronger, the stakes of all sorts higher—the game more complicated and hazardous. (“Prospectus”; quoted in Bauer 34)

This analogy references a modernity that those earlier periodicals had represented as chaotic and potentially subversive. A June 1820 article in the London titled “Much Ado about Nothing” opens with an epigraph from Blackwood’s, taken from one of its articles surveying periodical culture: “This is likely to be a sort of rambling article,—quite chittychatty and off-hand;—the best sort of leading article, perhaps, after all, now there are so many Magazines at work all over the island” (London I:657; Blackwood’s III:610). Blackwood’s claim is that the loose structure of the article echoes of aesthetic necessity (“best sort”), the structure of the industry in which it appears; heteroglossic rhetoric applies to both. In contrast, John Scott’s monoglossic tendencies, producing a “conversation that never rises to the level of a dispute over fundamental issues” (Parker 65–6), partially align the various voices of the London. For Scott, editorial monoglossia is an organizing principle for the arrangement of authorial differences, a way of establishing an acceptable range of periodical discourses, of marking what will count as a “fundamental issue.” The London’s editorial policy aimed at a collective identity, but, as Scott recognized, such an identity was not a unity, but a series of harmonized voices. His principal objection to Blackwood’s was that its editors availed themselves of the confusion, rather than restrained it. If his magazine complained about the jangle of voices in Blackwood’s, Scott recognized that his own monoglossic presentation was a strategic type of heteroglossia.

The Case of Lord Eldon Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity. It keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial. —Jeremy Bentham, “Draught of a New Plan for the Organization of the Judicial Establishment in France.” 1790 (316)

Thomas Carlyle, in “The Hero as Man of Letters” announced: “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

39

Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact. . . . ” (147). “Facts” about the relative importance of competing producers of discourse are not “literal,” but “figures of speech” and often, like Carlyle’s remark (not actually made by Burke), a “witty saying.” Such “facts” of power are solidified by repetition, circulation, and the regulatory function of “publicity.” The publishers and editors of the Edinburgh, Quarterly, and Blackwood’s recognized that their tactics would establish their roles in the “regime of publicity” (Bentham, “Essay” 314) as did their political allies and rivals. The lord chancellor, John Scott, Lord Eldon, who rendered decisions on the literary works of Southey and Byron and on the custody of Shelley’s children, shaped public discourse from Parliament and the bench, yet he understood that his public voice functioned within a “regime of publicity.” Walter Bagehot contextualizes the import of Eldon’s public visibility: “On domestic subjects the history of the first thirty years of the nineteenth century is a species of duel between the Edinburgh Review and Lord Eldon” (12). While, in Bagehot’s analysis, Edinburgh Review and Lord Eldon act as metonyms for collective political forces, both recognized that their metonymic function gave them extensive representational power within public discourse. As a corporate being, the Lord Chancellor Eldon held the Great Seal, which conferred on him the role of “Keeper of the Royal Conscience.” In that institutional character, he spoke not in his own voice alone, but for the king and as, in the Edinburgh phrase, the “representative of the royal will” (ER XLIII:287). The public negotiation of his identity, during the 1810–11 Regency crisis in which the king’s identity (and will) was perceived as fragmented and shattered, provides a vivid example of the interchange of corporate and individual identity, and of how the press, as one agent of representation, haunted other spaces of symbolic performance. The corporate and individual were not distinct forms of identity, but different modes of representation. Judith Stoddart argues that “the mass circulation of print gave currency in the nineteenth century to an alternative mode of imagining personal formation” (174–5) and while her focus is on the 1830s, her remark provides a context for how the Romantic-era periodicals’ transformation of personal identity was deployed within the political sphere. Eldon recalled a series of weekly levees held by Lord Mansfield in 1779, at the time when Eldon, the ambitious son of a coal-fitter from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was just gaining success—and patronage—for his legal career. At one of these gatherings, the Duke of Northumberland commented that the only “comfort” he had missed while visiting Bath was the chance “to read the newspaper

40

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

at breakfast.” In associating the regular reading of a periodical with a morning meal, Northumberland echoes Addison’s recommendation that “all well regulated Families, that set apart an Hour in every morning for Tea and Bread and Butter” should “order [the Spectator] to be punctually served up, and to be looked upon as a Part of the Tea Equipage” (Addison and Steele 159). Northumberland affirms an idealized reading practice in which, much like the seasonal medicinal waters of Bath, recurrence to the periodical press offers restorative powers that efface the political and social problems of a nation mired in a colonial war. Such metaphors remained potent through the 1820s; in the 1827 Scotsman, a writer comments that serial publications will “br[eak] down the mass of our mental ailment (as chandlers do our corporeal food) into portions for daily and weekly consumption,” and consequently, “literature will take its rank among the necessities of life, and a library will be considered” as “an indispensable part of household furniture” (Constable III:484). The alarmed Lord Mansfield sees nothing regulatory in Northumberland’s habitual “pleasure.” For him, the periodical press threatens to dislodge the relations of property and status that stabilize British culture and commerce: “So,” said Lord Mansfield, “your grace likes the comfort of reading the newspapers—the comfort of reading the newspapers!—Mark my words. You and I shall not live to see it, but this young gentleman, Mr. Scott, may,—or it may be a little later,—but, a little sooner or later, those newspapers, if they go on as they now do, will most assuredly write the Dukes of Northumberland out of their titles and possessions, and the country out of its king. Mark my words, for this will happen.” (Twiss I:112)18

Mansfield prophesizes this catastrophe because he realizes that the “Dukes of Northumberland,” like “their titles and possessions” require a persuasive rhetoric of entitlement. The law and other governmental structures that emanated from a convincing monarchy could “write” titles and possessions into existence through edicts, contracts, bills, and other juridical declarations; the countertext of the press threatened the credibility of these speech-acts. Mansfield anticipates not only the power of the press to alter legal, social, and political relationships, but presents a method: inculcating themselves as an aesthetic, habitual pleasure—underscored in Mansfield’s emphatic repetitions of Northumberland’s “comfort”—the papers gain an ideological foothold. As other systems—property, kingship,

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

41

economy—become dependent on representational structures, the press becomes an indispensable conduit between the government and the people and between the public, as a conceptual body, and the individuals who comprise it.19 The inaugural issue of the Westminster Review confirms the transformation of the “people” (in the course of seventy-five years) from a body “of no consequence in the investigation” of “the manners and principles of the times” into a “public” of “prodigiously increased importance,” which is “recognized in the speeches of the statesman, the sermons of the divine, the lucubrations of the author, and the criticisms of the reviewer.” Like the “House of Commons orator” who speaks less to the “benches” than to the “gallery,” these representational figures are “impressed with the rise of a new power, and, blessing or cursing, they pay to it a certain degree of homage” (I:1–3). The reviewer quotes Boone’s Men and Things in 1823 to confirm this contention: “[T]hey who would oppose the arm of power to the influence of the press, must soon have occasion to rue the hopelessness of the contest” (I:17).20 Eldon heeded Mansfield’s injunction to “mark his words”; the command summoned him to a lifelong, if often quixotic, defense against incursions by the press. In 1798, for instance, as attorney general, he introduced successful legislation, the Act for Restraining Mischiefs in the Press, to prevent the anonymous publication of newspapers (38 Geo. III. c.78). Identifying author and publisher rendered them not only legally liable but publicly responsible; their words could be read through the frame of their reputations, and their identification could forestall the mythos that had surrounded the pseudonymous Junius. During his legal and political career, Eldon opposed the expanding press by prosecutions, legislation, and exploiting the press’s own powers of representation. He recognized that an aesthetic dynamic similar to what Mansfield had pointed out for “the newspapers” operated in William Cobbett’s successful periodical, The Political Register. Writing to his brother in 1809, Eldon complained: “I know what I should have done as to those publications [the ‘morning Chronicle’ and ‘your friend Cobbett’] long ago, if I had been Attorney-General; but it seems to me that ever since my time it has been thought right to leave the Government’s character, and individual character, without the protection of the law enforced” (Twiss II:107)21 His use of “your friend,” ironically evokes that earlier and “largely swept away” periodical epitomized by The Spectator, which could represent itself as enabling an exchange between equals, colleagues, or friends (Klancher, Making 18–20). Cobbett modified such rhetoric as his papers recounted moments in which readers acknowledged (or

42

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

hailed) him. Like the Spectator, he engaged in correspondence with his readership, although unlike Addison’s fictional creation, he did not confine himself to polite discourse; William Hazlitt contrasted Cobbett with Thomas Paine’s “early writing,” in which every “page” contained “some maxim, some antithetical and memorable saying.” In “The Character of Cobbett,” he declares, “[t]here is not a single bon mot, a single sentence in Cobbett that has ever been quoted again. If anything is ever quoted from him, it is an epithet of abuse or a nickname” (Table Talk 51).22 Hazlitt recognized that Cobbett’s strength is in circulating “nicknames” that substitute a new characterization for a given name and that, applied to institutions or objects, animate them as perverse personifications, a key to Cobbett’s method of distending the identities of public figures. From Eldon’s Tory perspective, Cobbett’s persuasive imitation of an Addisonian exchange allows the journalist to exploit the alienable nature of “character.” As a property of the individual, character can be appropriated in the press because, in order to function, it must circulate in the public domain. A variant on Cobbett’s nicknaming tactic involves his reversal of personification in rhetorically denying corporate entities their legal status as an “artificial person” by assigning them dehumanizing epitaphs such as “ ‘thing,’ ‘instrument,’ and ‘machine’ ” (Gilmartin, Print Politics 168). Cobbett insists that granting artificial personhood to corporate identities drains the possibility of authentic individuality from anyone drawn into the corporate system. As Kevin Gilmartin explains, “If Cobbett sometimes drew on the sense of impersonal determination that was emerging in economic and sociological analysis, he was ruthlessly critical of any effort to use the disappearance of agency as an excuse for existing conditions” (168). Eldon’s position was the opposite: within the confines of corporate structures, an individual could discover his duties and his pleasures. Eldon, who resisted economic deregulation, objects to a laissez faire industry of character flourishing in the periodicals. His analysis of Cobbett’s power asserts its reliance on a complacent, selfdeceived audience: “I am very sore on this subject. . . . As to Cobbett, I am quite out of patience about those who will take in his paper; but I observe that all my friends, in short everybody one knows, abuse him, but enjoy his abuse, till he taps at their own door, and then they don’t like the noise he makes—not a bit of it” (Twiss II:107–8). Hazlitt concurs that “even those he abuses read him” and attributes that popularity to Cobbett’s being a “pleasanter writer” than Paine because he “goes more into the common grounds of fact and argument to which all appeal” (Table Talk 52). Eldon sees this aesthetic

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

43

appeal as a deceit, a false universality. He acknowledges a collective psychology by which reading Cobbett is fashionable: the journalist provides public character for those who operate in the interstices between government and fame and that constructs his audience as au courant. Reading Cobbett—boosting his sales figures, subscribing to his information, circulating his gossip—corrupts social values by reinforcing other readers of Cobbett and his illusory “common ground.” Eldon’s objection is not to Cobbett’s working-class readers (though like Mansfield, he constrains them legally) but to those of his own social station, for whom, voyeuristically, the dialectic of abuse is a pleasure as long as one reads within the collective audience and until the individual reader is implicated. At that point, an anti-aesthetic of pain replaces the aesthetic of delight; Eldon’s image of Cobbett, Death-like, tapping at “their own door” invokes a different version of face-to-face exchange in which the individual, too late, recognizes that he has been robbed of a portion of identity. As he achieved prominence, Eldon experienced his own public character not as his own property. During the crisis when Parliament established the Regency, issues of representation (both within Parliament and beyond its walls) were tense. Addressing the House of Lords on the matter of the king’s insanity in January 1811, Eldon remarks, “In the newspapers, I may read to-morrow, as I have often read before, sentiments and expressions attributed to me of which I am totally unconscious. . . . I never refer to those diurnal publications, without discovering errors and misrepresentations as to myself; but the consciousness of rectitude and integrity is sufficient to sustain my equanimity” (Twiss II:147). Eldon does not claim that he does not hold the attributed views, but rather that he is “wholly unconscious” of holding them; just as a jury, not the defendant, definitively declares the intentions of someone on trial, this language acknowledges a dialectic between his public self and his self-consciousness. The context of the speech emphasizes Eldon’s awareness of their interdependent nature. Rehearsing prior constitutional crises instigated by George III’s bouts of insanity, Eldon insists that “nothing could have saved the monarchy but the value of the Sovereign’s personal character, and the almost universal love and reverence of the people for” the king. Eldon aligns the personal character of George III with his public representation, a representation performed across myriad publications, ceremonials, and public venues—including the king’s opening speeches to Parliament, presented several times, in the king’s name, by Lord Eldon and circulated in print.

44

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Eldon acknowledges the porous divide between the monarch and the man, the slippage between the symbolizing figure and the bodily locus of that performance, while concurrently declaring his own consistency of character. Just as he represents his role in the management of the king’s illness in his Anecdote Book, his own constancy—in visiting the king daily, in representing him faithfully by both seal and speech (10–11, 117, 120)—simultaneously makes visible and elides the distinction in the king between Master and man: “I cannot take my heart out of my breast, and forget that my most gracious Master is a man” (Twiss II:135). Underscored by earlier references to Lear, including a quotation and the wish “for myself, let me but see my sovereign well, and then let me depart in peace,” Eldon’s speech positions him as Kent—who may be “unmannerly” if the king is mad—to George III’s Lear. For Lear, as for George III and for Eldon with his seal and robes, the public accoutrements of identity are necessary to selfhood, the “man” that Eldon proposes as prior to the public being, the “Master.” That the substance of the debate turned on how much of the king’s household should be retained as “requisite and suitable for the due attendance on his Majesty’s sacred person” (II:147) further emphasized Eldon’s position as a plain-speaking Kent.23 His venture, to “borrow from one skilled in the science of human nature,” appeals to Shakespeare as a transhistorical constant that trumps the topical press his enemies have mobilized. This rhetorical move reverts to a pre-periodical moment, but only as a nostalgic trace because the transmission of Shakespeare was enmeshed in, and historicized through, print reproductions. Eldon insists that the duties of Parliament are to await not the Shakespearean ending of Lear— king dead, new age—but Colman’s version, with the king restored. Eldon declares that Parliament must “preserve” the “splendor that surrounds his Majesty” in “all its plentitude” in order to “provide for the safe and effectual resumption of the Royal functions” whenever the king’s “recovery shall be fully ascertained” (Twiss II:148). Eldon knew this eventuality to be improbable, but from his perspective, probability was irrelevant and irreverent. Probability, in the context of recent institutional developments, amounted to a scientific assessment. The systemization, for example, of controlled clinical trials in the mid-1790s (Hunter and Macalpine 573–5) meant that subjects could be randomized and classified or characterized in aggregate; consequently, experiments produced an exchangeability of persons upon which political economy and the periodicals that popularized its discourse depended. For Eldon, however, this exchangeability in the king, understood as his manhood, was alloyed by the unique status

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

45

of “Master”; he could no more be subject to the rigors of statistical probability than he could be a subject whatsoever. In this parliamentary scene, the material stakes were enormous, with the shape of the Regency in the balance. Eldon was risking at least his political career. Lord Grey, a powerful Whig and supporter of the Edinburgh Review, had accused Eldon of using his “Great seal,” one of the Royal Seals, at a moment when the king was “incompetent,” suffering from “his notorious and avowed incapacity” (Twiss II:151). “What,” Grey demanded, “would be the character” of one who, under such circumstances “put the Royal seal to acts which could not be legal without his majesty’s full and complete acquiescence?” He answers, “I do not hesitate to pronounce his offence to be treason against the constitution and the country.” Character is defined here, as in Colman’s Lear, by the offence: Eldon, in Grey’s construction, is not Kent but Edmund (“impeach’d” by Edgar “of treason” [64]). Grey invents a new crime: treason directed not against the singularity of the monarchy and monarch, but against the reiterative theoretical structures of “constitution” and “country.” Earlier in his speech, he declared himself “bound to arraign” Eldon for “an offence little short of high treason”; a few sentences later, he declares his intention to pursue Eldon, should he be “guilty of what I cannot but consider all but treason” (151). Grey’s language produces, between Eldon and treason, a difference of nothing. After detailing Eldon’s use of the Seal, Grey summarizes the charge: that Eldon and other lords “have culpably made use of the King’s name without the King’s sanction, and criminally exercised the Royal functions” (153). Eldon has usurped the King’s authority by representing the King through the use of the Seal; to usurp such authority by commandeering its representational emblems is to overtake the King’s identity, to—in the terms of treason—“encompass the death of the king.” The Morning Chronicle reinforced this charge by a verbal play in which the identities of king and chancellor are conflated; Eldon, the Chronicle intimates on January 25, 1811, has taken advantage of the king’s derangement: “The state machine should not be perplexed by a wheel within a wheel an imperium in imperio, a Baron’s Court in the middle of the empire. For we live in Britain, and should wish to see the King a King not the King a Chancellor, or the Chancellor a King” (Melikan 237).The Chronicle is disingenuously offering an unsustainable distinction, in that the chancellor, and all judges, acted through the symbolic presence of the king.24 Eldon, his antagonist Lord Grey, and the Morning Chronicle all recognized a slippage between the asserted personhood of individuals and the institutional structures by which such individuals came

46

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

to have identity, intentionality, and political being. Because he knew that he could not successfully lodge the charge of treason within the House of Lords, Grey resorts to accusations that require reiteration within the press. “All but treason” is not criminal, but is representable and so reprehensible. This complex interaction indicates the extent to which individual identity is implicated in the institutional formations that render social roles intelligible. Within the confines of Parliament, which had recently conceded to public representation of its proceedings in order to forestall fictionalized renditions,25 the specter of the periodical press shaped the behavior of individuals including their ability to account for themselves. While Mansfield in 1779 exaggerated the hegemony of a daily press that he could only imagine as radical in its effects, he did nonetheless predict the institutional force that periodicals would gain. The expansion of the role of the press in reporting on Parliament was such that many MPs, on later deciding to publish their speeches, had recourse to the newspaper reports that they had denigrated on their initial appearance; Herzog offers a concise account of this transformation and Cobbett’s contribution to it (71–8). The conditions of the late eighteenth century, including the new commercialism, extensions of copyright, and a paying reading public, allowed for, in Alvin Kernan’s terms, quoting Thomas Carlyle, “the hero as Man-of-Letters” (124) and, in Jerome Christensen’s terms, quoting David Hume, the “Commerce of Letters” (Practicing 120) that represents society as dependent upon literary commerce for its own persuasive representation. Christensen presents an analogy: “If the merchant goes between producer and consumer regulating supply and demand, the man of letters negotiates between individuals and the larger formation which comprises them” (Practicing 153). The modern individual arose from conditions of manufactured scarcity and desire, and Eldon represents and resists this individual by inserting himself into the heterogeneous, textual space of Parliament. If his “crime” exists to the extent that Lord Grey believably names it and his innocence relies on his own credible representation, then Eldon’s identity depends upon its public circulation. Presiding in Chancery, Eldon recognized the need to emote, sometimes by crying, in order to display a recordable sincerity (which became the subject of public discussion and political ridicule; Archer 242–3). Shelley enrolls him in the “Mask of Anarchy,” a poem intended for Hunt’s Examiner, but withheld for fear of prosecution: Next came Fraud, and he had on, Like Eldon, an ermined gown;

Skirmishes in the Low er Empire

47

His big tears, for he wept well, Turned to mill-stones as they fell. (13–16)26

Misinterpreting “every tear a gem,” little children get “their brains knocked out by them.” Although invoking his own failed (and virtual) appearance in Chancery, in which he lost custody of his children, Shelley emphasizes the characteristic that Hazlitt would also emphasize, the cruelty implicit in the “good nature” of conservative ideologues. Weeping is a performance, a habit that, like the hardening of the tears themselves, solidifies into identity. Shelley’s analysis, although different in valence, accords with Eldon’s own understanding of how, by reiteration of loyalty to Tory values, Eldon strips himself of his earlier class—he nearly became a grocer—and hones himself into a lord chancellor. Eldon is not bifurcated into a public identity beyond his control and a private one that he can nurse in safety, but rather, like the mad king, his sense of self emerges in the osmotic condition of the institutional formations that comprise the array of his unconscious and conscious selves. Eldon recognized the press as a heterogeneous institution, in places resistant to his own desires, elsewhere amenable by them. In 1799, when elevated to the peerage, Eldon came across an anonymous poem celebrating the event through its public representation: “On Seeing in Last Night’s Newspapers the Intended Promotion and Title of Sir John Scott.” He kept the poem to his death (Twiss I:336). Eldon lived in the division between the highly ritualized world of monarchical and aristocratic symbols and the complex marketplace of print.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

I nc or p or at i ng Voic e s: Th e EDI N BU RGH R E V I E W

Calling upon a fellow writer in the Edinburgh Review, Sydney Smith found him, to his surprise, actually reading a book for the purpose of reviewing it. Having expressed his astonishment in the strongest terms, his friend inquired how he managed when performing the critical office. “Oh,” said Smith, “I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.” —John Timbs, A Century of Anecdote from 1760–1860, II:65 Some editor of some magazine has announced to Murray his intention of abusing the thing “without reading it.” So much the better; if he redde it first, he would abuse it more. —Lord Byron, 1813, BLJ 3:238

The Edinburgh Collective The rapid sales of the Edinburgh Review (2,500 copies by the third number; LLJ II:65) and the ensuing public discussion, proffered as objective indicators of success, created from its outset in September 1802 a mythology of inevitable triumph.1 Demonstrating the pervasiveness of that myth, an 1804 pamphlet engaging a legal dispute between Edinburgh master-printers and compositors uses “an example” from a work “in everybody’s hands, the Edinburgh Review” (Additional Memorial 2). Their prominence provoked responses across the political spectrum. The radical John Thelwall, complaining

50

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

of his treatment by the “NEW CRITICAL JUNTO” in Letter to Francis Jeffray (1804), wonders “is there no inconsistency sufficiently gross to call a blush into the cheek of an Edinburgh Reviewer?” (95). He denounces the Edinburgh by querying the humanity of a corporate identity; bloodless, how could it blush? Coleridge, who erroneously believed that Walter Scott had reviewed Southey’s Thalaba for the Edinburgh , wrote to Southey that “Thelwall has had a grand Rumpus with the Ed. Reviewers, written a pamphlet, of which a 1000 copies have already sold & is said to have laid them prostrate & flat” (Letters II:1039). John Ring, referencing D’Israeli’s Flim-Flams! also notes their brazenness: “they find patronage, where any honest man would blush to find it,—in the malice of the age” (74). The conservative Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, in 1805, condemns “the art with which the Edinburgh Reviewers can make an author speak just what they please” (AJ XX:90). Such capabilities—to never blush and to compel others to speak—assured the Edinburgh Reviewers’ preeminence for the next decades. Within months of the first issue, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had “heard of the Edingburgh review, & heard the name of your Reviewer—but forgot it,” he wrote to Southey, assuring his friend, “Reviews may sell 50 or 100 copies in the first three months—& there their Influence ends. Depend on it, no living Poet possesses the general reputation, which you possess” (Letters II:912).2 After the fourth issue, Coleridge bemoans the prominence of the Edinburgh as a collectivity united by a philosophical empiricism that he deeply distrusted, and the spread of which he feared. He writes, “The pain I suffer & have suffered, in differing so from such men, such true men of England, as [illegible], & their affectionate love of Locke/Left no room in my heart for any pain from Scotch Reviewers—” (Notebooks I:1418; my emphasis).3 Distinguishing “true men of England” from “Scotch Reviewers,” Coleridge raises fundamental questions that concerned Francis Jeffrey and the Romantic empiricists: how to account for the differences between individuals while maintaining a concept of a shared identity; how to value difference from the social order when that difference registers as pain; and how to conceptualize categories of identity such as “true men of England.” The generalized “affectionate love of Locke” that he laments received public clarification through the Edinburgh, and so he has “no room in his heart” for the pain caused by the Reviewers because his general suffering already incorporates his pained response to the Edinburgh. In 1808, his disgust responds to the poetic criticism of the Edinburgh: “the High & Mighty Edingburghers &c.” have been “elevated into

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

51

Guardians & Overseers of Taste & Poetry,” primarily, he added, because of their “inability to compose” poetry themselves (Notebooks III:3337). As the “&c” indicates, Coleridge imagines the reviewers as a unified body striving to regulate poetics by replicating prior pronouncements.4 In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge acknowledges the Edinburgh’s epistemological and professionalizing effect on the periodical industry. By promoting “the diffusion of knowledge,” the “commandments of the ‘Edinburgh Review’ ” constitute “an important epoch in periodical criticism” and therefore “has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary republic” ( II:108).5 Coleridge marshals this qualified praise to criticize the Edinburgh Reviewer’s propensity to “betray, that he knows more of the author, than the author’s publications could have told him.” Such a flaw, in which private concerns infiltrate public evaluations, transforms “censure” into “personal injury,” and the “CRITIC” into the “contemptible character” of “gossip, back-biter, and pasquillant” (II:109). Coleridge impugns the Edinburgh’s objectivity and dissolves the corporate identity of the Edinburgh Reviewer into the constitutive parts of fallible individuals. He challenges the distinction of public and private that Jeffrey had invoked in defense of its unifying corporate character. At the end of the review of Cantos I and II of Childe Harold, Jeffrey observes that Byron speaks of “ ‘private resentments’ against us,” and acknowledges a “temptation” to reply in kind. The Edinburgh, however, declines to do so and instead expresses “pity for the strange irritability of temperament which can still cherish a private resentment.” That pointed “still” signals a temporal transformation in which the realm of the public, governed by impartiality, has become the proper domain of adjudication. In contrast to Byron, “when we speak in our collective and public capacity, we have neither resentments nor predilections” (ER XIX:476–7); the Edinburgh Reviewer does not blush. Jeffrey’s objective persona is a veneer, part of his courtship of Byron on behalf of the Whig party. As other periodicals recognized, Jeffrey’s review encoded a private apology to Byron for the Edinburgh’s review of his Hours of Idleness. But the distinction between private and public individual was porous for Jeffrey because he recognized that identity as an abstraction depended, for its content, upon social contexts. Thus, Jeffrey could, merging his voice with Henry Brougham’s, be the Edinburgh Reviewer, or from another perspective, be the military genius leading the Edinburgh while simultaneously making a second-rate soldier in the local militia (LLJ II:67).

52

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Jeffrey adopted the notion of identity as an abstraction from Hume, but located its significance in practical politics. He writes in 1815 that the situation of the King dissolves boundaries between public and private: “Can there be any doubt that the personal influence and personal character of the sovereign is an element, and a pretty important element, in the practical constitution of the government, and always forms part of the strength or weakness of the administration he employs?” (LLJ II:125). Jeffrey does not consider the monarch as an exception, but as a lucid example of the intersection between power and identity. He suggests that “the system of attacking abuses of power, by attacking the person who instigates or carries them through by general popularity or personal influence, is lawful enough, I think, and may form a large scheme of Whig opposition” (LLJ II:125). For both Coleridge and Jeffrey, private and public personalities, like individual and corporate identities, are not strict boundaries, but fluid, rhetorical interventions in the social text. Popular versions of the Edinburgh’s inception connect private and group identities by charting an evolution from the private educations of Jeffrey, Smith, and the other individuals into the mobilized collective, the Edinburgh, that organized public knowledge and contributed to the production of the “modern fact” that Poovey has articulated. This “fact” was not an observable phenomenon, but a theoretical construction based on the accumulation of numerical data and the reiteration of observed phenomenon in persuasively objective narratives,6 analogous to Hume’s explication of identity as the accumulation of perceptions rationalized into an indiscernible, conjectural self. Such facts relied on a discursive connection to other “facts” that coalesced into such fields as demographics, geography, nutrition, and phrenology.7 The story of the Review’s founding was retold as a myth that emphasized the conjoining of voices into a unified print production. On a dark and stormy night, the most repeated version goes, a group of underemployed Scottish professionals met together and invented the idea of a new corporate body, a Review that would transform the intellectual and political culture of Great Britain. “It happened,” Cockburn recounts, “to be a tempestuous evening, and I have heard him [Jeffrey] say that they had some merriment at the greater storm they were about to raise. There were circumstances that tended so directly toward the production of some such work, that it seems now as if its appearance in Edinburgh, and about this time, might almost have been foreseen” (LLJ I:101–02).8 This retrospective inevitability contributes to the Edinburgh’s authority while naturalizing the notion of predictability as an empirical norm, a point highlighted by

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

53

the use of climate and architecture as portents in the various versions of the Edinburgh’s inception. Walter Bagehot, for instance, cites the commonly held belief (“People say”) that “the review was planned in a garret,” adding, “but this is incredible” (quoted in Clive 186). Sydney Smith recalls that Jeffrey, Smith, Brougham, and a few others “happened to meet in the eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleuch-place, the elevated residence of the then Mr Jeffrey” (Bell 34), although in 1802, in “the new town of Edinburgh,” no building “exceeded three stories” (LLJ I:246; Clive 187). Clive’s evidence suggests that the collective planned the journal over several meetings and that these meetings were misremembered, or mythically condensed, as a single incident contradictorily remembered by various participants. Emphasizing Jeffrey’s education, Flynn and Greig have illuminated the public character of the Edinburgh Reviewer, in terms of his aesthetic debts, his repugnance to war, and his Scottish Enlightenment character.9 Greig notes Jeffrey’s awareness of the risks involved in his penchant for abstraction; Jeffrey confesses that an article of his was “in considerable danger of being attacked and ridiculed, as a caricature of our Scotch manner of running everything up to elements, and explaining all sorts of occurrences by a theoretical history of society” (Greig 68; LLJ II:139). The structure of the Review, in which anonymous publication protected individual authors and in which the relentless maw of quarterly publication forced Jeffrey into solicitations that edged on begging, secured a heteroglossic effect exceeding Jeffrey’s control. In 1810, Jeffrey “admit[s]” to Francis Horner that “[w]e are growing too factious,” and produces a model of a republic simmering with revolt: “[Y]ou judge rightly of my limited power, and the overgrown privileges of some of my subjects. I am but a feudal monarch at best, and my throne is overshadowed by the presumptuous crests of my nobles” (LLJ II:107). Comparing the dynamics of periodicals to feudal allegiances, Jeffrey rejects the “expedient of strengthening myself by a closer union with the lower orders.” This metaphor echoes the public perception of the Edinburgh’s role in shaping the literary marketplace. Alert to this dynamic early, D’Israeli pseudonymously identified the Edinburgh as the Imperial Review when he prefaced his 1805 Flim-Flams! with mock reviews in an effort to outflank Jeffrey and shape public response to his work. Although Jeffrey, as editor after the first issues, had responsibility for producing the journal’s consistent tone, another progenitor of the Edinburgh, Francis Horner, proposed the motto that encapsulated that tone: judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur, “the judge stands condemned when the guilty are acquitted.” While this motto emphasizes

54

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the centrality of the Edinburgh Reviewer’s judicial responsibility, its zero-sum balance of guilt and innocence operates within a logic of economic exchange. Declaring an affinity to emerging economic discourse, the motto is emblematic of Horner’s contribution to the Edinburgh Reviewer’s personality. Horner articulated the epistemology by which commerce and knowledge could be regulated through the Edinburgh’s institutional heteroglossia as an economically efficacious model. Economics was important to the Review at a number of levels. First, the project was an economic venture. Although its first year was, in Cockburn’s phrase, “all gentlemen and no pay,” Sydney Smith advised Archibald Constable that “[i]f you will give L200 per annum to your editor, and ten guineas per sheet, you will soon have the best review in Europe” (LLJ I:107–08). Constable’s decision to follow this advice meant that Jeffrey could attract talented writers and that payment, its extravagance well publicized, signified talent. Second, readers perceived that the reviewers could influence the economic fortunes of others. Writing to the amateur reviewer Francis Wringham, in 1807, Wordsworth muses that his motto for Lyrical Ballads—“quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum!”—has become proleptic because of the lawyers of the Edinburgh. Directed at a Roman jurist, the Latin phrase translates, “something not at all to your taste, Papinianus.” In the same letter, Wordsworth, citing Southey, adds that critics “cannot blast our laurels, but they may mildew our corn.” Then, wishing to escape to “a more agreeable subject,” he expresses his pleasure at the Wranghams’ enjoyment of Poems in Two Volumes, especially the “daffodils.” This thought, however, returns him to his economic anxieties, and he relates the tale of a lawyer who glanced “at that very poem, and said, ‘aye, a fine morsel this for the reviewers’ ” (LW II:173–5). The Reviews regulate a virtual commodities market, “corn” being the locus classicus of a commodity, and the daffodils, if not the laurels, falling into that market, despite the poem locating them beyond the commercial: I gazed, and gazed, but little thought What wealth the show [of “golden daffodils”] to me had brought. (17–18)

This wealth, unsought, seems outside the economics of the reviewers, but consequently appears as an inviting “morsel” for them. As Deidre Lynch has demonstrated, the imperative of consumption had profound effects on the public understanding of character, both as a literary and

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

55

as a social phenomenon (Economy of Character). Supplementing this phenomenon, as Andrea Henderson has shown, the depth psychology that displaced competing psychological models (Romantic Identities) resituated economic and other social interactions in terms of normative desires and patterns of consumption. An emerging science, economics blended analysis and self-fulfilling prophecy. Without a rhetoric that convinced economic agents to rely on economic laws, those laws would be ineffectual. In this aspect, the Edinburgh depended on Francis Horner, whose contributions set its economic agenda and thereby influenced the entire organization of the journal. Horner’s preoccupation with economics, inextricable from his general education, was riveted by the reconfiguration of economic discourse following the monetary crisis of 1797. That crisis generated a public discourse on representation and compelled the newly created Anti-Jacobin Weekly (predecessor to the Anti-Jacobin Review) to try to manage that representation. Observing the simultaneous reformulation of monetary practices and representation allowed Horner to connect economic theory (and its modern facts) and the systemic organization of knowledge. In 1799, the “idea broke in upon” him that “with respect to diffusion among the community at large, knowledge may be considered in the light of a commodity, prepared by a separate profession, and consumed or enjoyed by the community as a luxury” (MFH I:96). As Jerome Christensen asserts, the Edinburgh “commodifies Horner’s epiphany” and “aims to be the medium of exchange” in the market Horner contemplates (Romanticism 116). John Ring makes a similar point in 1807: the Edinburgh Reviewers “are not so stupid but they know, that authors in general have more wit than money; and that the readers of their Review have in general more money than wit” (4). The conversion of knowledge into a commodity was not an obvious proposition, but depended upon historically specific rearticulations of economic imperatives. The critical context for the monetary crisis is the “great transformation” that Karl Polanyi has explicated. Polanyi depicts the rise of self-regulating markets not only for tangible commodities—objects traditionally produced for sale, such as corn or furniture—but for other objects that markets constructed anew as commodities such as labor, land, and money: “Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself . . . ; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all.” Yet, the construction of these fictional commodities “supplies a vital organizing principle in regard to the whole of society” (72–3); texts,

56

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

information, reputation, and credit were also configured as commodities, and periodicals devoted endless pages to reiterating economic norms and principles of intellectual organization as commonsensical, self-evident propositions that hardly required mention. While many factors interacted to propel Polanyi’s “great transformation” and the smaller transformations of specific abstract entities into commodities, for the commodification of knowledge within the Reviews the monetary crisis of 1797 was instrumental. That year, the gold standard collapsed under the pressures of debt and war, and the resulting monetary change of taking England off the gold standard, performed first by the merchant class and then regularized by the “Bank Restriction Act,” unveiled money as a representation dependent on creditability that corporate action alone could stabilize. This change, an economic revolution of comparable magnitude to industrialization, provided, for the Edinburgh Review three crucial elements: a central topic for its early years, a crucial predecessor in the Anti-Jacobin Weekly, and the pedagogical experience and theorization of Francis Horner that the Edinburgh Reviewer could transform into its own organization of knowledge.

The Monetary Crisis of 1797: Gold and Representation The conditions for the monetary crisis of 1797 had been building for some time. Since the beginning of the war with France, the government had been making huge draws on the Bank. Consequently, gold was leaving the country and the Bank of England was repurchasing what had been its own bullion at considerable loss. On February 20, 1797, local banks in Newcastle failed, and the subsequent run on banks across the country resulted in a collapse of the monetary market. The directors of the Bank of England coerced the prime minister, William Pitt, into issuing an executive order forcing the directors to do what they had been threatening to do for some time: within a week, the Bank suspended cash payments. Now, although notes technically continued to signify their value with respect to gold, they could not be converted into it. Under eighteenth-century mercantilism, to the extent that the value of a coin equaled the exchangeable rate of the metal in it (plus the cost of the minting), money could be regarded as a transparent signifier with its stamp serving as only a guarantee of authenticity of the metal weight, but not the authentication of value. To the extent that paper money was immediately exchangeable for the equivalent

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

57

bullion of its declared value, paper was a convenient way of carrying and exchanging the value. The markings on the bills, whether governmental or from private banks, were guarantees of the authenticity that would permit the exchange to gold; like the superscription on coin, they did not authenticate value, which adhered in the material of the metal. Such a system, despite its rhetorical stability that enabled tremendous mercantile growth, was known to be an illusion for over a century. The founding of the Bank of England in 1695 responded to a predicament in which the price of bullion on the foreign market sufficiently exceeded mint values of coin to drive precious metals out of England, resulting in a downward spiral of the pound. The notion of coin as reflecting an intrinsic value of bullion—or for Smithians an abstraction of the labor required to procure the precious metal— mystified the role of economic circulation in determining both the availability of bullion and the cost of its production. During the eighteenth century, “[n]early all commercial transactions of any size were conducted with banknotes, bills of exchange, or accommodation paper rather than in cash” (Hilton 152). Further, the gold backing of banknotes—the promise that notes could at will be exchanged for gold—depended on that right not being exercised because of the confidence that it could be exercised, since banks could rarely maintain above 10 percent of capital in gold except at the expense of interest income. The introduction of un-backed paper in 1797 exposed such mystification by questioning what constituted money. William Cobbett, in his pamphlet Paper against Gold, points out such mystifying tactics: “Some people suppose that paper always made a part of the currency, or common money, of England. They seem to regard the Bank of England as being as old as the Church of England, at least, and some of them appear to have full as much veneration for it” (7). “Veneration,” or credit, was what money simultaneously depended upon and represented. Metaphor, in other words, became both the constitution of paper money and the form in which its crisis was addressed. Lord Lansdowne, before the House of Lords, compared public credit to the soul of England. Continuing in this metaphorical vein, he insisted that a “fever is as much a fever in London as in Paris or Amsterdam” (quoted in Andreades and Foxwell 199); paper money in this assessment was the sign of a sick, and contagious, body politic. Gillray printed two relevant cartoons in 1797, MIDAS, Transmuting all into GOLD PAPER and POLITICAL-R AVISHMENT,—or—The Old Lady of Threadneedle-Street in Danger! In the first, Midas (William Pitt) sits over the Bank of England, spewing paper notes from both his mouth

58

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

and rear, while his belly is fat with gold. In the second, Pitt accosts an old woman, who represents the Bank of England and, attired only in paper notes, cries out “Murder . . . Rape . . . Ruin.” In “To a One Pound Bank-Note, Esq” (in the Morning Chronicle and reprinted in the Spirit of the Public Journals for 1800), a Guinea impugns the lineage of the Bank note by claiming it is “the fruit of an intrigue between a cunning young fellow [Pitt] and a silly old woman [the Bank of England].” The Guinea also associates the note with excrement, by constructing a difference in their representation: “I present the head of a king; but many people, when they see you, think of the reverse.” These bodily analogies reinforce the claim the Guinea makes of superior “representation,” especially since the note has “admitted so many imposters into its society” (Spirit IV:110–11). In the cartoons and the newspaper satire, personifications establish continuums and transformations between symbolic and material orders, as well as between individual, corporate, and state bodies, even as their satire highlights the manipulability of the body politic when embodied in institutions such as the “Old Lady of Threadneedle-Street.” Despite such objections, the practice of accepting unbacked Bank of England notes was institutionalized on February 27 by agreement of the principal London merchants. To compel adherence as a patriotic duty, newspaper reports emphasized the similarity of this measure to those taken in 1745 to counter the Jacobite rebellion. More than 3,000 firms and individuals were named over several days in the Times as resolving to “take the Bank of England notes and to promote the circulation of them.” Following the list of names on February 27 was the order from the King for Banks “to forbear issuing any cash in payments, until the sense of Parliament could be taken on that subject” (Hayek 325). The measure was “in consequence of the unusual demand that had been made upon the metropolis, arising from ill-founded or exaggerated alarms in different parts of the country.” This rationale placed the blame on the information system, rather than on the material drain on gold. The public display of support by merchants for the suspension of specie, despite—and partly because of—their private reservations about the effect, required the mobilization of the press, and periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine applauded the honorable conduct of the merchants. The Times, in addition to naming the signatories, listed half a dozen locations where additional merchants could add their names as a public gesture; the sign-up became a mutual advertisement pact. The basis of the Bank’s stability shifted quickly from the gold in its coffers to the declared confidence of the merchant class, bolstered and disseminated by the periodical press.10

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

59

This economic transformation instituted a reconceptualization of materiality. Coleridge, in a letter to Godwin, Byron, in Don Juan, and Wordsworth, in his “Note” to “The Thorn” all assert that “Words are things.” William Keach analyzes these examples to show how this claim “in shifting and conflicting ways” wavers between “affirmations and interrogations of the material efficacy of the Romantic symbol” and “confrontations with the marketing and consumption of literary texts” (23). The economic crisis of 1797 reinforces not only the material status of words—they are objects both signifying value and of exchangeable value—but also the verbal status of the material: gold, paper, other objects speak and can be crafted into speech. The symbolic and the material appear not as opposites, but as complementary modes of viewing the same object. By March 3, the Times reported that “not a guinea was to be had in exchange for Bank-notes on any of the public roads,” and the cohesion of the banking industry had minimized damage. On May 3, the “Bank Restriction Act” codified into law the value of paper money. The legacy of this transformation received pithy and excoriating summary in a widely circulated epigram: Of Augustus and Rome The Poets still Warble, How he found it of brick And left it of marble So of Pitt and England Men say without vapour That he found it of gold And left it of paper (quoted in Andreades 200)

This doggerel depends on assumptions about the materiality of brick, marble, and gold, and the ephemeral and merely representative nature of paper. The sense of representational sleight-of-hand is enforced by the difference between the two imperial spokesmen: for Augustus, poets speak; for Pitt, merely “men,” a public. Further, where the realm of existence for Augustus—Rome—is fully material and spatial, England is offered as an economic system, one associated with, to draw on the constitutive metaphor of the poem, a “vapour.” This poem is part of the nationalist discourse bolstering or impugning British credit. Catalyzing an intense public debate, the crisis was a core event to which the Edinburgh Review responded five years later. The Edinburgh’s economic policy offered the ideological framework for its aesthetic policy on representation.

60

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

An immediate respondent, however, was the Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner, which, despite their political differences, articulated a similar vision to the Edinburgh of the function of periodicals.

Two Responses to Crisis: The A NTI-JACOBIN WEEK LY and Francis Horner The Bank Crisis fit in a sequence of “disasters” that, as Wendy Hinde observes, “began to crowd in thick and fast upon Pitt and his colleagues” (51); George Canning, under secretary of state for foreign affairs, recognized the agency of the press in exacerbating the disasters by an inflationary circulation of alarms. Rumors multiplied about a French invasion; mutinies by soldiers and sailors increased. The government squelched these revolts, but the backlash in the press revived threats of mutiny and impelled compromises where, in calmer times, force would have sufficed. The peace negotiations with Napoleon suffered from “newspaper leaks” that both disrupted political progress and “promoted so much financial speculation” (Hinde 54–5). The day before the suspension of cash payments, Canning wrote that “every little noise makes the monied people quake, and infects all those who are not on their guard with a thousand foolish apprehensions” (quoted in Hinde 51). Recognizing that the public mood was expressed and crafted in the periodical press and the economic markets, Canning decided in October 1797 to join George Ellis in forming the Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner. The goal of the Anti-Jacobin Weekly was to produce an analysis of the social and political state of Britain that supported the government. In its Prospectus, the editorial voice of the journal emphasized its corporate structure by using a capitalized first-person plural: “Novelty indeed We have to announce. For what so new in the present state of the daily and weekly PRESS . . . as THE TRUTH? To this object alone it is that Our labours are dedicated’ (AJW 2). The bulk of the presentation of “truth,” however, turns out to be the identification of falsity in other publications. The editors propose, in the “most copious” of the journal’s three sections, to collect key articles from other papers that “will naturally divide themselves into different classes, according to their different degrees of stupidity and malignity” (7–8); these three divisions are “LIES OF THE WEEK ,” “M ISREPRESENTATIONS,” and “M ISTAKES” (8). The Anti-Jacobin proposes a communal effort, “invit[ing] the assistance of ALL , who think with US that the circumstances and character of the age in which We live require every

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

61

exertion of every man, who loves his COUNTRY in the old way, of ALL who think that the PRESS has been long enough employed principally as an engine of destruction” (9). Joining voices of the nation together, the Anti-Jacobin proposes a union of “truth” and “partiality and prejudice”; these Burkean abstractions are harmonized in the reconstituted press—as a unified expression of public will—that the Anti-Jacobin epitomizes. The new periodical will oppose those “luminous systems” that “are arising on all sides of us” and are predicated on “wild and unshackled freedom of thought.” Such freedom “rejects all habit, all wisdom of former time, all restraints of ancient usage, and of local attachment, and which judges upon each subject, whether of politics or morals, as it arises, by lights entirely its own, without reference to recognized principles, or established practice” (3–4). This position is indebted to the eighteenth-century skepticism that argued that the self—whether individual or corporate—operated through attachments to others, attachments enacted through the serial relation of personal habits to “established practice” and codified through a textual tradition of “reference to recognized principles,” where recognition (“to know again”) is reiterative. The first number begins with an epigram, from Shakespeare’s prologue to King Henry V, that repeats the concept of a body politic: “Oh, England! Model to thy inward greatness, / Like little body with a mighty heart” (AJW I:11) From Canning’s perspective, this “mighty heart” was the monarchy and government. The key subjects of this number (and of the entire run of the journal) are the war and the economy, and for both issues, the shaping force of public discourse troubles the Anti-Jacobin. “Wandering about the world” are “mis-statements so gross, and fallacies so glaring, that one wonders how it is possible they should ever have found reception.” The journal historicizes their bewilderment by noting that false assertions have “become so familiar to the Public” that “well-meaning persons often admit [them], not only as true in themselves, but as the test and standard whereby the probability of other assertions is to be estimated” (I:12). Drawing upon the gold-standard crisis, the editor, William Gifford, deploys the rhetoric of common trust and credit that the merchants had demonstrated in stabilizing currency. He proposes the Anti-Jacobin as an alternative standard to Jacobin publications. He maintains that the decision to believe in the “facts” will corroborate those facts, will convert them from assertions into facts, just as confidence in paper converted it into money. In terms of the war, only the public belief in victory can achieve victory; for the economy, only

62

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the public belief in the soundness of the economy, instituted through the investments in funds, can restore soundness. The “inward greatness” of the body politic is its belief system, linking “little body” with “mighty heart.” The second article of the initial number, “Finance,” contends that “trebling the Assessed Taxes” would reduce the debt and “ultimately save the Public more than two, or perhaps three times the sum to be borrowed” and would distribute fairly the burden of the war’s cost, thereby illustrating and enacting public loyalty. This argument transforms an involuntary tax into an investment (“the sum to be borrowed”), and insists that the tax be structured to encourage the presentation of domestic prosperity, by not rewarding those who would “reduce” “the number of their servants, horses, or carriages, though their circumstances did not really require it” (AJW 18). Of “still more importance” than the economic effects is that such a tax “will at once convince the Enemy, that they can no longer hope to exhaust our Credit.” The Anti-Jacobin persistently associates public credit and national resolve; the nation’s will is more legible in its economic policies, the journal insists, than in those representations epitomized by the Jacobin Morning Chronicle (“styled” by the “Daily Press” as the “Leading Paper of THE PARTY”). This dialogic position on economic and cultural credit defines both the rationale and structure of the Anti-Jacobin.11 At the same time Canning and others were instituting the AntiJacobin, Francis Horner, who would become the primary economic reviewer for the early Edinburgh (Fontana 48–58), was pursuing an education designed simultaneously to acquaint him with the major branches of science and to exterminate his Scottish accent— both preparations for a professional career.12 In letters to his father from London, Horner recognized homologies between eliminating his Scottish inflections (and the correspondent physical exercise of rhetoric, with straight back, proper breathing, and controlled gesticulation13) and mastering scientific reasoning. These enterprises respectively discipline the body and mind, and abstract the individual into a representative of universal reason.14 The teenager’s plan to hone himself into a marketable abstraction reflects his ambitions, consonant with his affluent parents’ assurances about his destiny and the aspirations of an emerging professional class that included a number of Horner’s early friends and fellow contributors to the Edinburgh. In these same letters home, Horner subjects his personal economy— described by his father as “a necessary virtue to all” but without actual consequence because of the family wealth—to the same scrutiny as the

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

63

national economy; this intellectual trope prefigures the methodology of the Edinburgh Review. Of his purchases, mostly books, he writes, “I can recollect no circumstance of voluntary extravagance, though it is evident I have been extravagant on the whole” (MFH I:18). Such an analysis requires two perspectives, that of the individual purchaser who intends no extravagance and that of the distant accountant who can summarize the books to show an accumulative effect. From this dual vantage, Horner viewed the disciplining of the body and of the soul as activities responsive to economic imperatives. Further, Horner understood the concept of “body” expansively, extending it to social conjunctions of individuals; the individual’s body was not a metaphor for the body politic but both were—like a business or a journal— incorporations. The body is not the sensory locus of objective experience, but an abstraction materialized through disciplinary strategies and describable through economic systemization. After spending a day “distilling sulphuric acid,” Horner noted the continuity between “chemical experiments” and “the principles of philosophical inquiry.” Planning to “study law as a science,” Horner thought it “an essential preliminary to become familiar with the methods and principles of philosophical investigation, as they have been successfully employed in physics, before I can pretend to apply them to jurisprudence” (MFH I:115). Viewing the body as a product of scientific abstraction was part of Horner’s practical engagement with Humean skepticism about identity. Like David Hume, who was dissatisfied with his account of intentionality, Horner found “no subject in the Philosophy of the Human Mind more perplexing” than “that of the will.” Will—and its varieties of desire, control, freedom, and volition—vexed philosophers and political economists because of its centrality for individual identity and the structure of the social. Writing to J.A. Murray, Horner notes that the problem is exacerbated by the disjunction between “popular” and “scientific” language, the former of which has been disruptive “in consequence of the jargon which has been heaped up from age to age by the disputants about Liberty and Necessity” (MFH I:31).15 Horner insists that “will,” like “memory, conception, and any one operation of the mind” cannot be defined but only “describe[d] by their effects”; these are, logically, after-effects. Horner distinguishes between will and volition (the expression of an act of will). He believes that one volition may counteract another, and that a person may “will to acquire certain habits of volition,” but to speak of “controlling the will” was a grammatical ambiguity complicated by the uncertain status of the body as producer or recipient of sensations or desires. To clarify the latter point,

64

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Horner tells the story of a “certain systematic glutton.” After years of stopping daily at the same pastry shop, he resolves one day to “get the better of his bad habit”; the next day, the glutton passes by the shop but “immediately, like a dear mother to her darling, ‘Now, says he (addressing his stomach), ‘Now I have disappointed you, and now I’ll indulge you’ ” (MFH I:31–2). He returns to the shop and, in the same gesture, to himself. This parable highlights the dissociation of mind and the habits that project such dissociation across the body—the stomach as disappointed “you” to the indulgent “I.” The glutton’s three “nows,” indicate, respectively, present, past, and future tense, yet are joined through the grammatical structuring of the sentence and the identity of the word; the glutton’s self-authorship, “mother” to his “darling” stomach, depends on this temporal construction in which the self can narrate a particular present, and presence, that evades discontinuities. The anecdote highlights the reiterative structure of identity. The glutton, as allegory for the instability of selfhood, locates consumption as a bodily act, a social practice, and an economic imperative, all of which require regulation. Horner’s bodily education, undertaken in the years leading up to and including the suspension of the gold standard, was a process through which he understood the necessary discipline of the body politic in its economic regulation. When in response to the financial crisis, the principal merchants publicly agreed to promote the troubled Bank of England’s notes, Horner recognized that they had averted a crisis by substituting a discourse of credit for gold. Their agreement required serial representation in the periodicals to assure a seeming simultaneity of sequential decisions; individual merchants could only agree if they collectively did, or else each risked being caught with discounted paper. The resulting stabilizing discourses positioned the material— gold, commodities—on a continuum with the symbolic—paper, promises. Days after the suspension of gold, as yet unaware that the event would determine his career as an economist, Horner wrote to his father: I am happy that you think the late apprehensions, with respect to public affairs, exceed what the occasion could justify; indeed, the panic is now in a great measure worn off, I hope from no other cause than its being discovered to have been unfounded. Paper money still circulates without depreciation, and must be found, in the mean time, a great relief to the market. . . . All political reasonings point out the increase in paper currency as a most pernicious evil; but it is to be hoped, that matters may yet go on well, provided it be used only as a temporary expedient. (MFH: I:34–5)

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

65

Horner’s recognition that all political reasoning points to the evil of paper currency implies that the measure must be temporary, and that declared temporariness meliorates the damage by implying that the government will in the future restore the gold backing and, paradoxically, obviates the need for restoration, since paper money will not depreciate. The discourse of political economy regulates the experience, or sensation, of the body politic. The position of the Edinburgh Reviewer, as a corporate extension of Horner’s thinking, required the suspension of gold to be temporary; it could, however, last an indeterminate time. In this crisis, the mathematical description of an economic event fundamentally altered its material conditions. Back in Edinburgh to prepare for the Scottish bar in 1799, Horner enumerated four key subjects for his study: “Law, Physical Science, Political Philosophy, and English Composition.” In the physical sciences, he planned to attend Allen’s lectures “on the Animal Economy,” supplemented by several texts on mathematics. By “Animal Economy,” Horner means “physiology” and he begins by reading Bell’s “On the mechanism of the Heart” (MFH I:80). This use of “economy” in a journal entry that deploys the term repeatedly in its financial denotation reinforces Horner’s sense of the continuity between the biological and the economic. Conditioned by his experience with London’s financial markets and by his autodidactic approach to formal learning, Horner developed a disciplinary education that emphasized economics as a material science. This education functioned as a prototype for the Edinburgh Review, in terms both of methodology and its structuring of knowledge. His compilations anticipated the methods of the Edinburgh. Letters, memoranda, plans of study, and other documents combine and organize knowledge into a variety of systems, often drawing on texts as the structuring device of his writing. He uses Bacon’s Philosophical Writings, for example, to consider the commercial effects of machinery, the evolution of abstract words, astronomy and calendars, analogies as a structure of the mind, Adam Smith’s theory on the declension of nouns, the need in European literature for a history of the Jesuits, the relation of mind to body, the phenomenon of animal magnetism, and the role of sympathy in political economy (HP 129–32, 138–42). His notes for January 18 on Bacon end by raising the question: “May not the rare introduction of subjects of physical science into common conversation, have favoured the progress of that kind of science, by preserving the language of it definite.” By contrast to physical sciences, Horner believes, “the terms of moral and political science have always been liable to corruption, by the familiar and vague use of them in the common reasonings of

66

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

men of every degree of talent” (HP 142). A disparate array of subjects unify under the management of language, and the Edinburgh Review would direct its energies toward controlling the circulation of language as a commodity of the order of money. Horner’s various tropes of materiality illuminate his construction of economics as a science constrained by material laws. His understanding of the flow of money, its circulation through the body politic, is his contribution to the science of the will. The 1797 crisis altered the discourse of money, so that its representational functions, which under eighteenth-century mercantilism were grounded in the material referent of precious metals, now were justified based on scientific claims resonant with those of physics and biology. The result was a reconstitution of the meaning of gold, and of the material, as a function of metaphoric circulation. Horner’s economic analysis was, consequently, an epistemological and pedagogical system expressed through the encyclopedic project of the periodical industry. Its organizational principles are visible in two related articles, Jeffrey’s essay on Jean Mounier’s study of the influence of philosophers on the French Revolution and Horner’s discussion of Henry Thornton’s investigation into Paper Credit.

Articles in Dialogue: The Economics of Intelligence Despite their distinct subject matter, two articles in the first issue of the Edinburgh form a dialogue on the relationship of economy and intelligence, and on how the structure of knowledge mimics and sustains social and financial economies. Horner regarded the two articles, Jeffrey’s on J.J. Mounier and his own on Henry Thornton as crucial to the constitution and influence of the Edinburgh. Years later, he urged Jeffrey to “wake again the little inspirer that dictated your Mounier, to which we always go back as the first and best of the Review” (HP 363). Of his own contributions, Horner considered only the review of Thornton significant, noting that it “served to break up the ground in one of the most necessary fields of political economy” (HP 258). The two longest in the volume, each article focuses on a central policy and raises, as a correlate, the issue of how public representation effects that policy. Jeffrey builds his article, around Mounier’s On the Influence attributed to Philosophes, &c., on the French Revolution, tacitly responding to the Anti-Jacobin’s earlier review that declares that the first part of Mounier’s book is “specious,” the second

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

67

“superficial,” and the third, “something that is worse, as well as weaker, than either” (AJ XI:337); he thus takes on in subject the preeminent political issue and engages in dialogue the most powerful contemporary journal.16 Horner’s article explored the effectiveness of an economy in which paper money circulated as the primary currency. As Burke’s excursus, in Reflections, on the correspondence between the French Revolutionaries’ bankrupt economy and their wasted intellectual capital indicates, these two matters were entwined in the public discourse. For Jeffrey and Horner, for the Edinburgh Reviewer as a corporate identity, the interpenetration between economic and intellectual value was a primary justification for the Review and its commitment to Horner’s ideals of an analytic organization of knowledge. Jeffrey’s review of Mounier’s Influence of the Philosophers . . . on the French Revolution questions the contribution of ideas to the French Revolution and its consequent terror. It asks whether ideas can be regulated to maximize their good effects—such as the overthrow of a tyrannical aristocracy—without spinning into the chaos of anarchy that Mounier attributed to “[t]he dissension that naturally arose among the different orders that had thus been called to deliberate” (ER I:3–4). The Edinburgh Reviewer determines that the failure of an orderly intellectual economy led to the deterioration of Jacques Necker’s financial system. The situation then forced Necker into “irresolute and inconsistent language” in the face of the Third Estate. Hence, the “dissension” did not arise “naturally” but through the structural interplay of information, economics, and language. Mounier exonerates philosophers by attributing the collapse of the French government to economic policy. The Edinburgh Reviewer accepts this explanation as having a “foundation in truth,” but the form of that acceptance allows him to maintain a regulative power in systematic practical philosophy. According to him, Mounier mistakes the beginnings of the Revolution for its causes. What changes took place, the Reviewer asks, that events which could happen in 1690 “without endangering the monarchy were sufficient to subvert it in 1790”? The answer is a threefold link of “commercial opulence, diffusion of information, and the prevalence of political discussion” (I:8). Any reader of the Edinburgh in 1802 would recognize these conditions operating in England; hence the article calls for an implicit regulation of these factors, not by the government, but by the literary marketplace. According to Jeffrey, Mounier does not allow “the horrors of the revolution” to “terrify” him into “an abjuration of the principles of liberty. He classes the bigots of despotism with

68

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the apostles of insurrection, and adheres steadily to the notions of regulated freedom” (I:8). Mounier models a middle ground, one reasonable and systematic, for the Edinburgh to occupy. If the chaos of the Revolution was economic, that economy was understood through the ideological lens of the philosophers. This argument allows the Edinburgh to act as a stabilizing influence on the intellectual economy, especially since the reviews in the same volume of “Irvine’s Effects of Highland Emigration” and “Christinson’s General Diffusion of Knowledge, One Great Cause of the Prosperity of North Britain” outline the Scottish intellectual character that finds its ideal in the corporate identity of the Edinburgh Reviewer. “Though we conceive,” concedes the Reviewer, “that philosophy is thus, in some degree, responsible for the French Revolution, we are far from charging her with the guilt that this name implies” (I:9). At this point, midway through the review, the Reviewer gives up on Mounier’s book and instead focuses on the distinction between the intention and the effect of the philosophers. Speaking of Montesquieu, Turgot, and Raynal, the Reviewer states, “Every step towards the destruction of prejudice is attended with the danger of the opposite excess: But it is no less clearly our duty to advance against prejudices.” The interjection of “our duty” aligns the Edinburgh with the sagacious philosophers, whose works were initially received not as “harbingers of regicide and confusion,” but “as hostages and guides to security” (I:10). So also— the Reviewer implies—the speculations of the Edinburgh Review. The topic of banking occupies the plurality of pages in this first issue. The Edinburgh invested in the ability of credit to solidify its own corporate body, and as Coleridge’s dismayed remarks show, he was perplexed by how thoroughly the journal established its credibility. The Edinburgh argued that paper money was an economic stimulant partly in order to analogize itself as a comparable intellectual stimulant. The first volume contains five articles that discuss money; the most elaborated is Horner’s response to Thornton’s Inquiry into the Nature of the Paper Credit of Great Britain. The introductory pages of this review link the circulation of knowledge with the circulation of money. It cites economic fiascos such as the South Sea Scheme, which partially compensated for their damage by “the more distinct knowledge, which they ultimately furnished, with respect to commercial adventure.” The value of knowledge circulates back into the commodity market, not directly as a commodity, but as a collection of theoretical or systematic advances that insure the market’s smooth operation. (In accord with Polanyi’s analysis of market regulation, professionals converted such advances into commodities.)

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

69

While opponents of paper money viewed it as compelling unearned trust in the government, the Edinburgh insists that the foundation of money relies on “mutual trust” among “mercantile men” (I:175). Bank notes facilitate those transactions that are the foundations of the market by making them more efficient, since all commodities can be referred to a single standard. Banking reshapes the market from dependence on governmental monopoly tainted by unregulated opportunists to reliance on the class of merchants, restrained by concerns of their public characters, whose transactions regulate finance under the limited inspection of the Exchequer. The role of the Edinburgh Reviewer was to establish a similar standard across the range of literature; consequently, the Edinburgh marked its audience by an indelible class affiliation, whether actual or imaginary for an individual reader. The Edinburgh suggests that the debate regarding paper money is not about discovering an inevitable meaning but about manipulating how potential meanings will affect market behavior. Since paper money is not a fixed signifier, the cultural need for its continual definition entails a permeable boundary between the financial and intellectual marketplaces. In a way analogous to the fluid division between commodity and negotiable paper, the intellectual marketplace bifurcates fact and theory: “It is necessary that the labor of accumulating particular facts should be separated from the more liberal talk of generalizing into principles” (I:172–3). This dichotomy serves as the engine for the circulation of knowledge, and, as with money, the rate of that circulation determines the health of the economy: “[W]orks contributed by professional men form a large deposit of authenticated facts. For these we are primarily indebted to that diffused literature which multiplies the demand for varied information, and has already liberalized the practitioners in almost every walk of industry” (I:173; my emphasis). Facts beget theory, and theory facts, and that intellectual enterprise stimulates the market it describes by increasing consumer confidence, which, in turn, provides more data. The Edinburgh Reviewer proposes to complete the diffusion of knowledge by liberalizing the periodical industry, making it the master industry of knowledge that would encourage and regulate other producers. As a theoretical standard, the Edinburgh would maintain the rate of this engine by evaluating the reliability of productions and the reasonableness of consumer desires (in aesthetic terms, of consumer taste). Such a standard would not depend upon any specific data, but would arrange all relevant facts within a systematic understanding.17

70

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

On behalf of the Edinburgh, Horner proposes to answer another question raised by the 1797 crisis: what determined the value of money, given that it varied against the value of gold? His answer is a modification of Adam Smith: the value of money fluctuates against commodities as a function of its rate of circulation, since that determines the amount of money required to circulate a fixed quantity of commodities. This claim echoes Jeffrey’s contention that the Edinburgh’s circulation was wider than the large numbers of copies distributed, because various copies might be read by dozens—at their clubs, work, reading rooms, even passed hand to hand in the street— and this reading would extend as their ideas were integrated into the conversations of their readers. In the Mounier essay, the Edinburgh Reviewer had established the need for a regulative system for the circulation of intellectual ideas. As with the analysis of French philosophers, the analysis of Paper Money secures a role for periodical analysis not merely as a commodity, but as the standard against which other intellectual commodities fluctuate. The Edinburgh was the banker, fixing in its judgments the values of other commodities within a free market. The journal’s value was determined not by reference to particular other works, but as the representative of the ideas that constituted the market. Its circulation, far wider than Thornton’s book could achieve over the same time, secured this role. Sydney Smith, writing to Jeffrey in 1812, indicated the success of this project in his backhanded way: “[E]very man takes up the Review with a lazy spirit, and wishes to get wise at a cheap rate” (quote in Clive 183). For both the Edinburgh, and the rising professional class that proposed as market products immaterial objects such as words, writs, or poems, the notion that paper was as much a form of gold as were daffodils or bullion was clasped tight in its imaginary hand. A second review by Horner rehearsed his economic epistemology. “The Utility of Country Banks” (1802) was a defense of local economic procedures that retain value because of their locality, rather than their transferability. The anonymous author, after citing various commodities that functioned as money in earlier cultures, adds a contemporary example: the “manure that children and poor persons gather on the post-roads in Yorkshire. It is a very common practice for poor persons to exchange it for coals, or other necessities; thus making horse dung a species of money.”18 Money, in this example, is a material form that circulates by virtue of its inherent utility, despite the precarious creditableness of its backers; “children” and “poor persons” lack both credit and credibility. At the same time, the insistence

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

71

on the distance from England’s economic center, in terms both of geography and of class, positions dung as a metonymy for the country banks the text seeks to bolster despite increasing public perception of their outmodedness. In a second metaphor that Horner quotes from Country Banks, the dualism of materiality and representation is reworked at the level of production: “Building, though considerably checked during the war, has in many parts of the country proceeded with vigour; and houses, streets, and towns have been raised, as substantially, on paper currency, as brick or stone, cemented by gold or silver, could have built them” (I:108). Both gold and paper operate as mortar in order to be materialized as actual, rather than metaphoric, value. While representations depend upon a metaphoric structure to denote the literal, they also expose the catachrestic rhetoric through which value is materialized. Horner’s review ends by quoting a long passage that traces the “adventures” of a “twenty shilling note” from a “Glasgow bank through the West or East Indies, till it returns in the suite of a Nabob, who fixes it in a palace which he builds in the neighborhood of his native city, on his return from Asia, whither he himself was probably first sent by the operation of paper currency” (I:64). In this narrative, money at once is circulated and becomes the agent of circulation; the nabob imitates the note, and constitutes it as an aesthetic object “fixed in his palace.” The slippage in this image is that, to be fixed in the palace as part of the “mortar” that built it, the note must have fled beyond the palace back into circulation. The arrival of the note, designated etymologically by “adventure” [advenire, to arrive], reduces—stripped of its arching plot toward homecoming—to the aphetic truncation “venture,” the commercial enterprise of, for example, Richard Bateman, in Wordsworth’s “Michael,” who cannot return home, but who, “wondrous rich,” can “at his birth-place buil[d] a Chapel, floor’d / With Marble” (269–70). The first example from Country Banks, the manure, constitutes money as a metaphoric structure that ultimately inhabits the commodity it signifies; the second example, the building, uses a metonymic substitution to mystify and to materialize the power of money; the third example of the circulating note deploys a metaphor to constitute money as continuous with other genres of circulation (such as the travel narrative). Taken together, these moments present money as janus-faced: either the representative or the material embodiment of value. The wealth of paper that proliferated (both notes and literature) in an effort to stabilize the economic empire was at once a component and an object of the discussion of money.

72

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

The Edinburgh offered the public what Horner in his educational practices had sought for himself: “A knowledge of the arts, especially the subserviency of such knowledge to the study of political economy” (MFH I:112). Horner contends that “while nothing can more immediately contribute, than the publicity of that system [political economy], in all its operations, to extend and strengthen the confidence on which it is solidly built: such dissected exhibitions of our commercial economy prepare, with necessary knowledge, those more active citizens who undertake the discussion of the national counsels” (ER I:186).He is making two simultaneous claims. First, that the accurate delineation of political economy will “extend” the confidence that will produce another revolution in trade, such as the development of commercial paper to increase the rate of circulation. Such an extension, however, obliterates the system it describes. In describing trade, political economy will alter it; a persuasive description is a security, not only backing the scene of description but effectively backing the paper money that the system activates. Horner’s statement operates by a continual set of displacing metaphors that move between images of materiality—the “solidly built” of Country Banks that he had ridiculed earlier in the volume—and images of credit (security); mediating between them is the image of dissecting the commercial body politic, exposing the material as a form of metaphor. In the article following Horner’s analysis of paper money, Jeffrey reviewed John Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth. Like the economy explored in Horner’s article, an inquiry into the “constitution and history of our globe” seems to require assimilation of facts “so boundless” and “so diversified” in their “nature” that “attempts to form a theory of the earth may still be considered rather as exercises for fanciful and speculative minds, than as sources of improvement to useful science” (ER I:201). But as speculations, like species, circulate, that circulation has a catalytic effect: “The observer never proceeds with so much ardour as when he theorizes; and every effort to verify, or disprove particular speculations, necessarily leads to the evolution of new facts, and to the extension of the limits of real knowledge” (I:201). Consequently, the “business of philosophy,” as it seeks out errors, “must at least facilitate generalization, and render the approach to truth less tedious.” Jeffrey is adopting Horner’s construction of knowledge, and applying it to the debate between the Vulcanists, who think continents arose through volcanic action and the Neptunists, who attributed them to erosion. He situates the Edinburgh not as adjudicating between the two hypotheses, but as maintaining a general theory of knowledge—that

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

73

“observations accumulate but slowly unassisted by the influences of system”—that depends upon periodical circulation as the enabling “system” (I:201). Examining its First Number, Jerome Christensen suggests that the Edinburgh aspires to “something like sovereignty” (Romanticism 126). This distinction—an ambition to an approximation, a “something like,” rather than “sovereignty” itself—acknowledges a shift in constitutional power that the 1797 crisis illuminated, in which sovereignty is only as effective as the paper on which it is printed, the accreditation accorded it by other corporate entities. The Edinburgh’s own structure, like the Bank’s, is that of “a clerky cult at the heart of the machine” (124) and Jeffrey is less monarch than signatory of the Bank, an authorizing presence even when he is not present, because his name is corporately reproduced as “something like” a synonym for the Edinburgh Review. Periodicals function, for Jeffrey, like a banking system; the Edinburgh takes a limited supply of knowledge, and by circulation increases its effectiveness and generates intellectual wealth. Further, its rate of circulation, the interest it produces, the capital it arranges—all influence the flow of other commodities within the marketplace of ideas. Like the Bank of England, as Horner described it, the Edinburgh is a centralized locus of knowledge, but it depends on, and influences, other subordinate institutions, which will increase the rate of circulation of knowledge. Consequently, the Edinburgh sought dominance within the periodical market, but not a monopoly. It depended on other voices, in order to constitute a culture of knowledge and to inculcate the habits of reading that would make the analogy between money and knowledge persuasive. In the third number, Henry Brougham reiterates Horner’s analysis in a satiric tenor. He opines that the ignorant author of Guineas an Incumberance to Commerce has “utter[ed] his crude, half-formed, and incoherent opinions, upon questions likely to remain for ever the subject of dispute, with more certainty than Sir Isaac Newton has displayed in stating his most celebrated discoveries in physical science” (ER II:102). The tract, written in support of making the suspension of gold permanent, insists that “paper, and not metallic money, represents public credit,” to which Brougham responds that “honesty and industry are the supports of public credit; and now, all accommodation-bills are iniquitous, because they express a direct lie, the actual transfer of value.” (He echoes Horner’s claim, in the Thornton review that “no definite boundary can be marked between the circulating medium, whether paper or metallic, and the commodities” it circulates; ER I:176.) The materiality of gold is not in its

74

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

hardness or luster, but in its enduring referentiality within the economic signifying system. Brougham rails against the author’s use of bodily imagery, undermining the rhetorical trope by treating it literally: “Now we hear of a capital of fifty-six millions being raised from the dead. Suddenly it is attacked with a consumption; but it retains the power of generation” (ER II:104); elsewhere, the author’s case is made in terms of the physical sciences, in which “unvarnished facts” are “weighed” and the “preponderating balance prevail[s].” Brougham and the corporate Edinburgh Reviewer object to the notion of unvarnished facts; facts emerge from the polishing mechanism of scientific enquiry, just as new metals—such as Columbiam, which Brougham discusses in the article immediately prior to “Guinea”—emerge from techniques that rely on their reiterable status: “experiments confirmed by a repetition.” In the previous article, Brougham outlines a scientific method for “An Analysis of a New Metal”—a subject intrinsically linked to the gold standard. In the attack on the Guineas pamphlet, Brougham’s point is neither the ridiculousness of the economic argument nor the inappropriateness of the scientific metaphor, but rather that the author’s erroneous principles will contaminate the social fabric: “London blockaded by sea; sedition sowing on the shore, a barometer falling in a congregation of perils. . . . The poor damsel (Paper credit) is saved by the Bank Restriction bill, and order returned to the universe.” Given the author’s link of Jacobinism to gold-based fiscal policy, the Edinburgh Reviewer “fear[s] that even on the dry subject of paper credit, we shall soon see Bowles’s, and Giffords, and Playfairs, thundering out their artillery; and then [will] the science of number and quantity itself [be] safe?” (II:104). In this analysis, the abuse of the scientific method by economic policy taints its entire procedure, and results in the infiltration of nonsense, metonymized as literary figures operating through unregulated metaphors, at the core of scientific discovery. In this economic, scientific context, the early Edinburgh Review places its relatively few literary reviews. The first volume examined two books of poetry, one, a scathing attack on the feeble economics of Samuel Jackson Pratt’s, Bread; or the Poor, a weakness expressed in his limited economic analysis and meager versification. The longer review is Francis Jeffrey’s discussion of Southey’s Thalaba. Jeffrey’s attack on the “language of the vulgar” deployed by the Lake Poets responds to its increased visibility, its reiteration in poetry, and its documentation in works such as Frederic Morton Eden’s 1797 The State of the Poor. Eden’s opus sought to categorize mathematically the experience and prevalence of the poor. His project was inspired,

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

75

according to its Preface, by the “difficulties, which the labouring classes experienced, from the high price of grain, and of provisions in general, as well as of cloathing and fuel, during the years 1794 and 1795.” Like Wordsworth, in “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” Eden singles out fuel and clothing as physical necessities, although Wordsworth, in emphasizing the ineffectiveness of Harry Gill’s many coats, indicates the psychological component of physicality (which makes the statistical analysis of poverty difficult). Jeffrey’s recognition, like reviewers before him, of the economic polemic of “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” prompts him to cite Harry Gill’s chattering teeth as a synecdoche of everything ridiculous among the Lake Poets (ER I:68). The Edinburgh extended its analysis of “systems” to aesthetic concerns, because aesthetics permeated the rhetorical norms of political persuasion and helped establish the habits of reading by which a community signified itself. Thus, the Edinburgh’s leading aesthetic principle is taste, rather than originality. Taste signals a communal organization in which the individual confirms selfhood through similarities. Jeffrey delineates a “sect of poets” for which Southey is “one of its chief champions and apostles” (I:63). The claim for originality that characterizes the Lake poets, Jeffrey insists, amounts to a display of difference and reaction: “they are dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism” and “their doctrines” have been “derived from some of the great modern reformers” of Germany, although their “leading principles” “seem to have been borrowed from the great apostle of Geneva” (I:63). Although they have “abandoned the old models,” they have not “yet created any models of their own,” and so they “cannot be better characterized, than by an enumeration of the sources from which their materials have been derived” (I:64). Like Mounier, the Lakers misconstrue history for causation, and so fail to recognize that their self-invention is only the collection of prior sources. Because Jeffrey establishes a genealogy for the Lake poets, the striving for originality that they insist upon becomes a perversion of taste. The review opens with an extended metaphor that links poetry to religion. For each, “its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call into question.” Both institutions have histories in which the effort to replicate those original “inspired writers” becomes a perverted imitation. Consequently, the “catholic poetical church” has been “more prolific” of “doctors than of saints”; it “has had its corruptions, and reformations also, and has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies

76

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

and errors” (I:63). The Edinburgh represents religious doctrine as transcending its bloody history, persisting, like common law, from time immemorial despite intermittent obscurities. Such a view, offered as a middle ground of political, aesthetic, and legal debate, unified various discourses just as the first issue of the Edinburgh organized subjects as diverse as the French Revolution, optics, colonial voyages, and infectious fevers, through the analytics of reason and refinement and the recurrent images of law and economics. Thalaba, Jeffrey contends, is “the fruit of much reading, undertaken for the express purpose of fabricating some such performance” (I:77). Jeffrey extends this contention into an insistence that the poem is a kind of overflow of copying. When Southey “had filled his common-place book, he began to write; and his poem is little else than his common-place book versified.” Because the wild originality that the Lakers seek is a chimera—a merely oppositional stance against taste—it cannot escape the earlier voices that shape it. Thalaba, as a redaction of reading, resembles a misguided periodical, not a genuine poem. The decision to focus a literary review in the opening salvo of the Edinburgh Review on Thalaba is consistent with the thematics of the entire volume as a study in the limits of power, and on the relationship between the material constitution of an object and the powers—natural, political, intellectual—that inhere in that object. After summarizing the plot of Thalaba, Jeffrey remarks that Southey has taken on a nearly impossible problem in the introduction of magical powers: Supernatural beings, though easily enough raised, are known to be very troublesome in the management. . . . It is no very easy matter to preserve consistency in the disposal of powers. . . . The antient poets had several unlucky encounters of this sort with Destiny and the other deities; and Milton himself is not a little hampered with the material and immaterial qualities of his angels. (I:76)

The humor of this passage depends on the permeability between the narrating space—the paper on which the supernatural beings are “easily enough raised” like so much printed paper money—and the space of production, in which authors are troubled or “hampered” by their own creations. The expressed faith of the London merchants in the intangible value of paper money is replicated by the faith of the Edinburgh in its own circulation as a performance of power, in so far as each depends on the discoursive practices that can constitute paper as a persuasive, materialized form of value. Southey’s supernatural

I nc or p or a t i ng Voic e s

77

creatures, by contrast, are unmanageable, and their powers—like paper money inappropriately managed—produce an inflationary economy of representation, in which their powers multiply into absurdity.19 Representation, in Jeffrey’s analysis, manages the apportionment of power. The Edinburgh’s investigations into theories of observation and visibility, its commitment to the practices of science and economics, its reproduction of literary platitudes all positioned it for the managerial task of intellectual laborer that Jeffrey denies to Southey. The project of incorporation, conceived on a stormy Edinburgh night as the myth of origins contends, expands Horner’s education from one designed for an individual into one suited for the newly professional class as the brains—and perhaps generative organs—of the body politic. Such grand schemes functioned through tactics of style. Jeffrey realized that the reliability of contributions, from even his most faithful adherents, would remain troublesome. His editorial solution, imposing consistency of style that obscured variations in quality, allowed him to seek contributors more widely. As Walter Scott analyzed the Edinburgh, with a view of besting it with the Quarterly, he explained to William Gifford the following process: One great resource to which the Edinburgh editor turns himself, and by which he gives popularity even to the duller articles of his Review, is accepting contributions from persons of inferior powers of writing, provided they understand the books to which their criticisms relate; and as such are often of stupefying mediocrity, he renders them palatable by throwing in a handful of spice, namely, any lively paragraph or entertaining illustration that occurs to him in reading them over. By this sort of veneering he converts, without loss of time or hindrance to business, articles, which in their original state might hang in the market, into such goods as are not likely to disgrace those among which they are placed. (Smiles I:105)

This process duplicated, at the level of production and textuality, Horner’s conversion of Thornton’s findings into the Edinburgh’s monetary policy, and maintained a minimal stylistic quality, but also stamped the journal with a heteroglossic tension as the voices of authors were partially digested into a whole. Considered in the economy of information that the Edinburgh championed, certain articles in the Edinburgh were only forgeries of the Edinburgh Reviewer. Such paper, as the Guinea complained to the Banknote in the Morning Chronicle, admitted “[i]mposters into its society” and so was “barely passable” (Spirit 111). Jeffrey, writing to Horner in 1810, recognizes

78

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

that the battle for cultural dominance that the Edinburgh was waging against its competitors reverberated within its own pages and editorial dynamics: “I would give a great deal for a few chieftains of a milder and more disciplined character. Thank you, a thousand times, for your ready compliance with my request, and your kind promise of continuing to illumine the public through our pages, in spite of all the violence with which they are defaced” (LLJ I:296). If Horner aided Jeffrey by producing the persuasive economic analysis and analogy that allowed the Edinburgh to act as lord of the literary lower empire, that structure provided the instability that made the competitors inevitable. Jeffrey recognizes a rebelliousness in his “chieftains” and connects that internal instability of power to the external “violence” (Jeffrey ‘s metonymy for the periodicals challenging the Edinburgh). that “deface[s]” (an imposed form of pseudonymity) “our pages.” Chief among the challengers were John Murray’s Quarterly Review and William Blackwood’s Blackwood’s Magazine.

Chapter 3

P rol i f e r at i ng Voic es: Fou n di ng t h e Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W a n d M AG A

[T]he tongue of an Edinburgh Reviewer is not the tongue of the wise. It is not the tongue of health, but a running sore. —John Ring, The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, Alias the Stinkpot of Literature Because Mr Blackwood is becoming a great and good Publisher, are we not to review his books? a pretty joke truly. Does the Quarterly Review, never on any occasion whatever, take notice of a single work emanating from Albemarle Street? Does the Edinburgh Review blink every heavy volume from the Mount of Proclamation? . . . in a certain sense, we ought all to be friends. —“Postscript to the Public” following a double-columned article, with a letter from “Philomag” on the left, and “Answer from C. North” on the right, Blackwood’s Magazine, XII:54

Opportunity and Motive The original advertisement of the Edinburgh Review announced the intention to be notable “rather for the selection, than for the number of its articles.” The editorial voice acknowledges that this approach is not new, but an intensification of an existing one: The very lowest order of publication are rejected, accordingly, by most of the literary journals of which the Public is already in possession. But

80

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y the Conductors of the Edinburgh Review propose to carry this principle of selection a good deal farther . . . and to confine their notice, in a great degree, to works that either have attained, or deserve, a certain portion of celebrity. (ER I:iii)

To be excluded from the Edinburgh marked figural exclusion from the literary marketplace, and so the system of the Edinburgh Reviewer was logically, or at least rhetorically, comprehensive. The habitual reader could distinguish his accidental tastes, based on his peculiar associations, from those in his capacity as a social being, by comparing his responses to those of the Edinburgh Reviewer. This priority in the management of taste obfuscated that readers formed judgments through other reading communities, associated with other periodicals or literary structures, such as bookshops or coffeehouses. Further, a reader’s judgment of many books was determined solely through reviews since many readers encountered most books instead of (or after) reading the redaction of the periodicals. The economy of publications positioned the Edinburgh as the arbiters of theory, that is, aesthetic knowledge in its representative aspect; but from the outset this primacy faced challenges. The Anti-Jacobin Review, in addition to its initial excoriating evaluation of the upstart journal, developed an irregular column, “The Reviewers Reviewed,” which was frequently directed at undermining the Edinburgh. In February, 1804, it devoted a “Reviewers Reviewed” to an attack by R.C. Dallas, who later befriended Byron and guided his assault on the Edinburgh, the parodic English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, into print. Dallas had published a two-volume History of the Maroons. Brougham had reviewed it in the second number of the Edinburgh and Dallas’s response disputes a heinous charge against him: “I am made to appear before the readers of the Edinburgh Review, as a keen advocate for the use of blood-hounds trained exclusively in the scent [of men], the taste of human flesh, and the tearing of the victim limb from limb” (AJ XVII:205; repeated at 206 and 211).1 Dallas argues that the Edinburgh controls authors by reflecting their personalities to their readership. He emphasizes the journal’s production of its readers’ self-perception by metonymy: “[T]aking the part for the whole, a figure in great use among the Reviewers, its readers have the accustomed claim to be considered as the public, and as such I address them with all the respect due to the public” (205). Dallas’s claim is rhetorical since the audience he addresses is not the Edinburgh’s, but the Anti-Jacobin’s, and this tack extends the competition between the journals to a competition between the two

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

81

readerships to represent the public. He notes that he would let his book speak for him, except that many “worthy men . . . form their judgment from the decisions of periodical publications.” Dallas’s approach is to produce, first, a dialogue between his book and the review, in which the text that the review had paraphrased refutes the import of that paraphrase. He then transmogrifies the discussion between author and review to a dispute between the reviewer and the colonists: [B]ut what is that to the purpose, says this humane writer; it is against the policy recognized by civilized nations at war. Rather than terrify your enemy from his haunts by dogs, wait quietly and be sacrificed. No, said the colonists, we will do no such thing:—extraordinary cases require extraordinary expedients. Very well, says my critic, you are a pack of blood-hounds yourselves. (210)

This imagined exchange stresses the dehumanizing tendency of the Edinburgh Reviewer, even as it insists on a flux between literary and material conditions analogous to the Edinburgh’s construction of paper money. Dallas positions the colonist’s unified voice as erupting through his—as the evidentiary ground for his own judgments. The Edinburgh’s basis, in contrast, is the necessity of “filling up the usual quantity of sheets” that requires the “employment of illiberal hirelings” (216), whose language is then melded into an identity by the editor who “collects the productions of the various workmen, and takes considerable liberties with their works” (216). This collective voice is a fraud, a stylistic trick made necessary by economic contingencies. Dallas’s conclusion abandons his dispute with the article on the Maroons and turns to the opening advertisement of the first issue, quoted extensively, to demonstrate the grammatical and logical errors of the Edinburgh “Conductors”: “They, that is, he, need not have assured us that they did not mean to take notice of every production, for common sense tells us it was impossible” (217). The shift from “they” to “he” undercuts the corporate identity of the Conductors, reducing it to the capricious voice of its editor. Against this masquerading collective, Dallas poses the communal discourse between “common sense” and “us.” In his concluding sentence, Dallas offers a variant on this contrast between genuine incorporations of voice and those driven by periodical necessity; Edinburgh “has always been in possession of great talents, learning, and virtue,” and might take up reviewing “with brilliancy, but its press must be purged of the papillons of criticism”(218). 2

82

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

By the 1820s, the centrality of periodicals to the expansion of the publishing industry was retrospectively clear. From an economic perspective, the individual publishing houses were sometimes distinct and other times merged into the overarching denomination of the “book trade.” The Morning Herald noted in 1825 that “the book trade was never known to be in so depressed a state as at the present time. The Bank of England has refused for the last week to discount any bookseller’s bill” (quoted in Constable III:477). The Morning Chronicle denies the factual basis of this charge and asserts, as evidence of the impossibility of the Bank acting as “a corporation possessed of a degree of stupidity and malignity altogether unexampled in the annals of commerce,” that bookselling is “least liable to fluctuation, depending almost entirely on home consumption” (III:478). The News of Literature concurs, maintaining that “the publishers of books” are “the connecting link between the people of England and that which has made, is making, and shall continue to make, the people of England superior to the people of every land where intellect has not the same unbounded scope” (III:480). The article notes that the significance of the increased wealth of the booksellers lies not in their own opulence, but in their system of distributing wealth. The writer credits “Constable of Edinburgh” with first seeing the “advantages of this liberality” and fixes the rise of the book industry with the new professionalizing pay scale of Constable’s Edinburgh. He adds that “[a]nother proof” of the “discernment of the booksellers” is their ability to “adapt the form and mode of publishing” to the “spirit of the times.” Since “the reading public became the world generally,” a “new literature” in “a new form” has “been demanded.” The author elaborates: “Men, whose occupations are connected with the passing time, have become the majority of readers” and they “desire that the reading shall not only be connected with the passing time, but shall come in portions as that time passes.” The result is “the great demand for periodical literature” and breaking larger works down so they “may be published periodically” (III:482). The structure of literature reflects the professionalized ordering of temporality both in content and form. The book trade, partly because of the centrality of the periodicals and other market imperatives, organized many publications in serial form. The advertisement for Constable’s Miscellany, which appeared in the Scotsman of 1827, emphasizes that the “plan of progressive publication in weekly numbers puts it within reach of all but the very poorest classes, while the style of its typology, and general appearance, render it not unworthy of a place in the libraries of the opulent.”

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

83

The Miscellany joins together the classes by giving them common domestic objects (but with different, and class-preserving, emphases on affordability or the aesthetics of presentation). In this argument, the Miscellany exceeds the capabilities of periodicals in the “diffusion of knowledge,” because quarterly articles are limited by space and “modern Magazines,” primarily Blackwood’s and its imitators, are “filled up with flash and flummery” (III:483). Such publications “sparkle like champagne at the moment of decanting, but are so stale and vapid one month after they issue from the press, that no man out of his dotage ever opens them a second time” (III:483). The claim for the Miscellany as a superior form of periodical extends Addison’s vision of the Spectator being “served up” regularly, because the miscellany will occupy so vital a cultural position that “a young couple taking up house will reckon thirty or forty volumes of Constable’s miscellany as indispensable as a chest of drawers, or an eight-day clock—and that the question ‘Who is your bookseller?’ will be as pertinent in every decent family as ‘Who is your grocer’ or ‘clothier?’ ” (III:484–5). Periodical publications provided templates for revived literary genres such as the confession and the miscellany. Their periodicity developed the habits of regularized reading that would be applied more broadly and, as John Murray recognized, would be a key feature marking a journal’s reliability for content as well as distribution. Forming the Quarterly, he warned its editor that punctuality was vital: “I begin to suspect that you are not aware of the complete misery which is occasioned to me, and the certain ruin which must attend the Review, by our unfortunate procrastination” (Smiles I:156). Because their regularity corresponded to a structuring of writing, printing, subscriptions, and editing, periodicals ordered a publishing house’s operations. Each major publishing house produced periodicals to signal its professionalization. The News of Literature observed that as the booksellers moved from lives “huddled together in their small shops” to the current vast circulation of ideas, publications, and wealth, their characters were transformed from “men of narrow and illiberal views” to “the most generally influential profession in the whole kingdom” (Constable III:480–81). This assessment is based simultaneously on the diffusion of information and on the expansive employment produced by the book industry, including “paper-makers, typefounders, engine makers, printers, bookbinders, shopkeepers, and agents” (III:481). Although, as Walter Scott and Jeffrey agreed, the success of the Reviews depended on remaining independent of booksellers, such

84

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

independence was qualified. For both economic and personal reasons, the interactions of the periodicals were shaped by the tensions among the major publishers, John Murray, Archibald Constable, Thomas Norton Longman, and later, William Blackwood. Because publishers sold books beyond their own stock, often went in on joint ventures, and were personal acquaintances, their periodicals, although avoiding straightforward puffery, were conditioned by the personalities of these major investors and owners. When Hogg allegorized the formation of Blackwood’s Magazine in the Chaldee Manuscript—an article published in its October 1817 issue that purported to present an ancient manuscript recovered by editorial antiquaries—the prominence he gives to Blackwood and Constable recognizes not only the influence of particular publishers, but also of publishers as a social presence. The Edinburgh theorized a national economy and an intellectualism that depended upon a united class of professionals embodied by the corporate Edinburgh Reviewer. The dynamics of the Quarterly incorporated these goals with creating the means for Murray to shape his public character and to establish the “publisher” as a public character.

Founding the Q UA RTERLY Just months prior to the first issue of the Quarterly, the plan remained a secret. Walter Scott maintained a cordial relation with Francis Jeffrey, whose Edinburgh Reviewer he intended to obliterate with the new journal. Scott’s attitude was not hypocrisy, but evidence of the distinction he drew between the public figure of the Edinburgh Reviewer and the private person of Jeffrey.3 In October 1808, the Edinburgh published “Don Pedro Cevallos on the French Usurpation of Spain,” which combined “the highly controversial claim that any British supporter of the Peninsula” was logically “ ‘a party to revolutionary measures’ ” with a “defeatism as to the eventual outcome of the peoples’ struggle against France” (Coleman 144–5, quoting ER XIII:223), Although the article opined that “we can once more utter the words liberty and people, without starting at the echo of our own voices, or looking round the chamber for some spy or officer of the government’ ” and anticipated a “salutary change in public opinion” in which the “voice of the country will no longer be stifled” (ER XIII:222), Jeffrey recognized that the article’s own language had overreached the Edinburgh’s representational boundaries, with significant consequences to the journal.

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

85

Scott relates that Jeffrey has offered terms of pacification, engaging that no party politics should again appear in his Review. I told him I thought it was now too late, and reminded him that I had often pointed out to him the consequences of letting his work become a party tool. He said “he did not fear for the consequences—there were but four men he feared as opponents.” “Who are these?” “Yourself for one.” “Certainly you pay me a great compliment; depend upon it I will endeavour to deserve it.” “Why, you would not join against me?” “Yes, I would, if I saw a proper opportunity: not against you personally, but against your politics.” “You are privileged to be violent.” “I don’t ask any privilege for undue violence. But who are your other foemen?” “George Ellis and Southey.” The other he did not name. All this was in great good humour; and next day I had a very affecting note from him, in answer to an invitation to dinner. He has no suspicion of the Review whatever, but I thought I could not handsomely suffer him to infer that I would be influenced by those private feelings respecting him, which, on more than one occasion, he has laid aside when I was personally concerned. (Lockhart III:150–51).

While Scott’s account of Jeffrey’s vow is suspect, given the Edinburgh’s continued “party politics” and Jeffrey’s later claim to have been misunderstood, having only forsworn “all violent and unfair party politics” (Jeffrey, Contributions viii), Jeffrey’s respect for Scott as an adversary is both clear and warranted. Scott’s witticism depends on recognizing that advocating a policy of pacification—against Napoleon—argued in the Edinburgh provided the “proper opportunity” for Scott to ally with the two named “foemen,” and that Scott’s “privilege of violence” is, within the literary world, analogous to British resistance to Napoleon. A convergence of conditions made the Quarterly viable: the political state of Britain following Pitt’s death and the wrangling by the administration of “All the Talents”; the economic collapse in Edinburgh in which interest rates reached 9 percent and its effect on the book trade, particularly the strained relationship between Constable and Murray; Scott’s disgust at recent issues of the Edinburgh; and George Canning’s conviction that the government needed to win the war of representation in the popular press. Like the formation of the Edinburgh, the Quarterly was an opportunity to meld like-minded voices into a chorus and to coordinate the criticism of culture with the analysis of politics. Its goal was to claim (or reclaim) for the Tories the political center and the intellectual and economic middle ground.4 John Murray’s early career prepared him for his commitment to the Quarterly by shaping his notion of character.

86

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

In 1803, Murray, emerging from his minority and from a business arrangement he described as “shackled to a drone of a partner,” wrote to George Colman that he hoped his “first appearance before the public” would “at once stamp my character and respectability.” He wanted this first “appearance” to be as publisher of Colman’s play, John Bull, but the enterprise failed, because of “the custom to offer the refusal of the copyright to the proprietor of the theater in which it has been produced” (Smiles I:32–3). Murray understood that the publishing industry was a cartel in which reputation entwined with opportunity, in which independence balanced precariously with allegiance. When an author wished to have Murray’s former partner’s name appear as part of the imprint, Murray objected on personal grounds—that Samuel Highley “advertises himself as ‘successor to the late John Murray,’ ” usurping Murray’s legacy—and on economic grounds that Highley “undersells all other publishers at the regular and advertised prices” (Smiles I:37). Publishing was a matter of customs and loyalties internal to the industry, integrally connected to the economy and the political circumstances. The national availability of money, for instance, influenced the credit that Murray and other publishers could extend or secure. Declining a volume of poems, Murray wrote to the author that “the threat of invasion and the magnitude of our taxes, fill the mind with apprehension, and swallow up the sums that have been usually appropriated to literature” (I:35). The public “apprehension” was both a cause and effect of the publishing industry, as it sought to represent the nation to itself. Despite his conservative inclinations, Murray recognized the value of the Edinburgh. In its first year of publication, he hinted to Constable that he would welcome the chance to be the Edinburgh’s London distributor. He wrote to Constable that he hoped the Edinburgh “will continue its celebrity and prove highly advantageous to all its proprietors. Let me know if I can serve you in London” (Smiles I:59). While Constable initially allied with Thomas Longman, by 1805, he regarded Longman’s accumulation of other periodicals, including the Annual Review and the Eclectic, as interfering with “exertions on behalf of the Edinburgh.” Murray monitored the situation and, through a series of delicate maneuvers, acquired the London distribution. In the early days of the Edinburgh, Isaac D’Israeli wrote the anonymous Flim-Flams!, which Murray published. It explores the dynamic of corporate and public character. In a cameo, as D’Israeli describes it to Murray, an author “dies with laughter—whom nothing can revive but the galvanic science of Professor Murray.” He adds that he uses

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

87

Murray rather than Davy as the reviving professor because “you, to my knowledge, have more than once restored a dead author to life” (Smiles I:44). D’Israeli’s joke registers the notion of a public life that functions less like an individual than a corporation, that is, a textual and legal fiction for whom death, like life, is a mobile category.5 Just as Murray implicitly accuses Highley of attempting to kill him off publicly by usurping his paternal legacy, D’Israeli acknowledges the dependence of authorship on the publisher’s capital—cultural and economic. The periodicals, however, interfered with this symbiotic relationship, and Flim-Flams! was a veiled attack on the nascent Edinburgh Review. In the opening chapter of Volume Three, a “constable,” “bids” a gaggle of “vagrants” to “follow him to the Tollbooth”: “This constable did not take them to the Tolbooth; instead of exhibiting articles against these mumpers; he assisted them in drawing up their articles; and became what Blackstone defines an accessory before and after the fact to be—printer and publisher!” (III:6). D’Israeli fretted to Murray that “if the Edinburgh Review really considers it a libel,” they should “retain Erskine” (Smiles I:44). Instead, D’Israeli undertook an “Apology” to front the Second Edition. Flim-Flams! is a confusing compilation of genres and discourses, structured loosely around a “family biography”; like The Heroine, it returns to the periodicals as a shaping influence on thought (and on the body—as readers are sickened, weakened, or awakened by them, and metaphors of consuming texts are literalized in scenes of cooking, cannibalism, and eating). D’Israeli asserted in Flim-Flams! that the publishing firm was an extension of the personality of its principal owners. Murray, writing to “Messrs. Constable & Co” about the opportunity to acquire their London business, observes that, “being young, my business may be formed with a disposition, as it were, towards yours; and thus growing up with it, we are more likely to form a durable connexion than can be expected with persons whose views are imperceptibly but incessantly diverging from each other” (I:64). Murray shifts from the firms (“my business”) to an amalgam of the persons and corporation (“we”), but in a manner that acknowledges that the firms, shaping one another, also shape their proprietors. He argues that persons, whether corporations or individuals, are vulnerable to public representation in direct proportion to their prior intimacy; recalling his resolution to remain silent on his break with Highley, he explains, “I knew that I had the personal superiority, but what his own ingenuity could not suggest, others could write for him” (I:65). The anthropomorphism of corporate structures acknowledges the legal permeability between “natural” and “artificial” persons, and a recognition

88

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

that in any instantiation—author, publisher, “Byron,” reviewer; minister, lord chancellor, “Canning,” “Walter Scott,” “the Author of Waverley”—the individual is a heteroglossic structure, not merely the “natural” being signified by the name but the multiply determined structure that enables and qualifies that being. After the break between Constable and Longman, Murray had acquired all of Constable’s London trade except the Edinburgh, for which Longman had a contractual monopoly. Initially, Longman protested Murray’s attempted acquisition of the Edinburgh and sought a legal injunction; Jeffrey, however, viewing the figure of the Edinburgh Reviewer as the amalgam of its writers, announced that if Longman did not retreat: “it is our fixed resolution to withdraw entirely from the Edinburgh Review; to publish to all the world that the conductors and writers of the former numbers have no sort of connection to those that may afterwards appear, and probably to give notice of our intention to establish a new work of a similar nature.” Murray was alarmed by this escalation, fearing, in Smiles’s words, that it could “perhaps le[a]d to the ruin of both publications” (I:78). Although he recognized the talents of the Edinburgh’s authors, Murray viewed the work’s accumulated cultural capital as adhering in the corporate identity of the journal, and did not regard that as a commodity transferable to a new publication, even one comprised of identical individuals. Despite Murray’s apprehensions, Jeffrey’s threat worked. Southey warned Longman that “I hope you will accommodate matters with Jeffrey; for if there should be two Edinburgh Reviews, or if he should set up another under a new title, you would probably be the sufferer, even though yours should manifestly be the best—such is the force of prejudice” (Southey, 223). Longman surrendered its interest in the Edinburgh for £1000, a maneuver that indicated that, for Longman, a corporate entity depended upon the individuals who comprised it or could represent themselves as its guiding lights. These different understandings of corporate identification—Murray’s and Longman’s—reverberate through periodical culture as the identities “behind” different journals are alternatively concealed, advertised, exposed, disguised, and even invented. About August 1807, Murray acquired the London rights to the Edinburgh but incompatible personalities and financial issues troubled the arrangement between him and Constable. By October, Murray was writing exasperated letters about Constable’s commercial notes; in March of the following year, Murray’s complaints against “friendship and business” included being “obliged to provide L250

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

89

in consequence of your failure to remit this sum” (Smiles I:83), and by the end of 1808, Constable had set up a London satellite to sell the Edinburgh. Murray was without a periodical once again. This crumpling financial relationship corresponded to Murray’s developing plans for a new journal. As early as September 1807, Murray wrote to Canning about a new Review. Canning had worked on the Anti-Jacobin as an antidote to what he viewed as a press sick with liberalism. With the death of Pitt in 1806, Canning regarded the Tory government as again in crisis. While he held a tenuous cabinet post as under secretary of state for foreign affairs, he recognized that the management of the public mood needed to be undertaken by all available means. Murray’s letter to Canning announces his sympathy with this imperative: [T]here is a work entitled the Edinburgh Review, written with such unquestionable talent that it has already attained an extent of circulation not equalled by any similar publication. The principles of this work are, however, so radically bad that I have been led to consider the effect that such sentiments, so generally diffused, are likely to produce, and to think that some means equally popular ought to be adopted to counteract their dangerous tendencies. (Smiles I:93)

While the “radically bad principles” of the Edinburgh Reviewer occurred to Murray only after the financial liability of working with Constable became intolerable, his understanding of character and finances made that liability symptomatic of Constable’s—and the Edinburgh’s—public identity. Although Murray stresses to Canning the political need of a countervoice, from his own perspective, the argument for founding the Quarterly is that the Edinburgh has created the economic and professional opportunity by its talent as much as by its politics. Scott had estimated that in Edinburgh, “where there is not one Whig out of twenty men who read the work” (Lockhart III:140), large numbers would “defect to a journal of the opposite party” (Sutherland 139), but Scott worries that readers will begin to like the “politics” that are “so artfully mingled with information and amusement” (Lockhart III:140). Opposition within the periodical industry merges competition and dependence by securing for a specific journal the general habits of a readership available to the entire industry. If Murray’s firm provided the publishing character of sustained respectability, Scott produced the ideological character of the Quarterly Reviewer. In July 1807, Scott had tempted Southey to join the coterie of Edinburgh writers, but Southey declined, noting that

90

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

“whatever of any merit I might insert there would aid and abet opinions hostile to my own, and thus identify me with a system which I thoroughly disapprove” (Southey 230). Southey recognizes that being incorporated into the Edinburgh Reviewer would give his words meaning and force beyond, and hostile to, his intentions. After regretting the financial loss incurred by declining the invitation, Southey signals a similar division in the review’s editor: “To Jeffrey as an individual I shall ever be ready to show every kind of individual courtesy; but of Judge Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review I must ever think and speak as of a bad politician, a worse moralist, and a critic in matters of taste, equally incompetent and unjust” (Southey 230). In his analysis of his own position and Jeffrey’s, Southey distinguishes between a private individual and an institutional entity. Scott’s own view, in recruiting Southey, was that such writers could transform the Edinburgh Reviewer, guiding his voice to moderate perspectives. Ultimately, Scott acceded to Southey’s view. Scott’s political disgust with the Edinburgh was exacerbated by its review of Marmion. It was negative and condescending, but worse, it alluded to the financial arrangements of publication and read the poem through that knowledge. Scott objected that the Edinburgh was using personal information, not the public character of the author. Scott wrote to his brother that “I owe Jeffrey a flap with a foxtail on account of his review of Marmion, and thus doth the whirligig of time bring about my revenges” (Lockhart III:149). Murray recognized the opportunity afforded by the Edinburgh’s treatment of Scott and chose this occasion, as Smiles puts it, ‘to draw closer the bonds between himself and Ballantyne, for well he knew who was the leading spirit in the firm” (Smiles I:96). Scott insisted that the new review be “constitutional” in orientation. He realized that success depended on managing the middle ground of the debate, and the establishment of a stylistic continuity across the Quarterly’s various subjects. Noting that currently “no genteel family can pretend to be without” the Edinburgh because “independent of its politics, it gives the only valuable literary criticism to be met with,” Scott outlined the cultural, and consequent political, effect of the situation to George Ellis: “Consider, of the numbers who read the work, how many are there likely to separate the literature from the politics?— how many youths are there upon whose minds the flashy and bold character of the work is likely to make an indelible impression?—and think what the consequence is likely to be” (Lockhart III:129). In another letter to Ellis, Scott addresses “a string of much delicacy—the political character of the Review. It appears to me

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

91

that this should be of a liberal and enlarged nature, resting upon principles—indulgent and conciliatory as far as possible upon mere party questions, but stern in detecting and exposing all attempts to sap our constitutional fabric” (III:142).6 Although moderate in tone, the implications of this view are ambitious. Scott’s letters vacillate between moderation and military imagery that stakes out an imperial project reminiscent of the Anti-Jacobin Weekly; he implores Ellis to “take down your old Anti-Jacobin armour, and ‘remember your swashing blow’ ” (Lockhart II:204). To counteract the Edinburgh’s force, the new Review needed to represent the Tory position as that of constitutionality, rather than partisan politics. While Murray conceived of “establishing a journal upon principles opposite to those of the Edinburgh Review,” he also articulated the difference not as one party against the other, but as securing a general interest based on contemporary constitutional principles: “No man, even the friend of the principles we adopt, will leave the sprightly pages of the Edinburgh Review to read a dull detail of staid morality, or dissertations on subjects whose interest has long fled” (Smiles I:110). Murray emphasized to Scott the importance of the first issue in making an impression: “The fact must be obvious to you,—that if Mr. Canning, Mr. Frere, Mr. Scott, Mr. Ellis, and Mr. Gifford, with their immediate and true friends, will exert themselves heartily in every respect, so as to produce with secrecy only one remarkably attractive number, their further labour would be comparatively light” (Smiles I:111–12). As they planned, they maintained secrecy to prevent the Edinburgh from anticipating them and so they could produce their initial articles without the time pressure that would ensue once the quarterly schedule was announced. In a retrospective memoir, Brougham had opined that “Cevallos on Spain” made the Edinburgh “conspicuous as Liberals and called the Quarterly into existence” (quoted in Clive 112). Although founding the Quarterly was already resolved before the Cevallos article, after it appeared, Murray, Gifford, and Scott recognized that, to establish their combative position with respect to the Edinburgh, the Quarterly would need to address the issue of Napoleon in Spain; Scott wrote, “The last number of the Edinburgh Review has given disgust beyond measure, owing to the tone of the article on Cevallos’ expose. Subscribers are falling off like withered leaves. I retired my name among others, after explaining the reasons both to Mr. Jeffrey and Mr. Constable, so that there never was such an opening for a new Review” (Smiles I:114). Scott’s opportunism depended on a lead article on Spain that argued the necessity—and patriotism—of Spanish resistance to

92

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Napoleon, and demonstrated an understanding of the situation superior to that of the Edinburgh. Murray and Scott considered several possible writers, including Frere, Gifford, and Southey, and finally Ellis was selected and Canning provided aid (Smiles I:118). As Jeffrey thought Canning primarily wrote the article, the Quarterly progenitors might have prompted that rumor as evidence of their greater access to political information. On January 10, 1809, Monthly Literary Advertiser announced that the Quarterly Review would appear near the end of the month; on March 3, 1809, the first number, dated “February, 1809” did appear (Cutmore).7 The journal chose, as the text around which to build its opening article, the Affaires d’Espagne, a “collection of all the papers which have yet been published by the several Provincial Juntas of Spain, or by the Central junta of the Government, together with extracts from our Gazettes, translated into French for the purpose of dissemination on the Continent” (QR I:1). The review immediately acknowledges that the collection contains nothing unfamiliar to an English reader, because periodicals have already rendered the facts “notorious.” Nonetheless, the tasks of providing a “general sketch,” enhanced by “our own opinions” and “examining some statements and reasoning published by other writers” that “we believe to be incorrect” justifies the review (I:1). “Surveying the transactions” the Quarterly is “almost tempted to doubt whether we are reading the events of real history.” The Spanish king’s “surreptitious removal” and subsequent forced abdication as “a spectacle, certainly, not less probable than the wildest fictions of romance,” and Napoleon, the principal “actor” in this “strange drama” performs “a theatrical and fanciful display of his unbounded power” (QR I:1–2). Shaping the events as a drama locates Napoleon’s power as a theatrical trick that patriotism can counteract, but which the Edinburgh too easily accepted. In its final paragraph, the Quarterly draws an elaborate comparison between Napoleon in Spain and Edward I in thirteenth-century Scotland. Repeating the phrase “like him” five times in four sentences, the analogy concludes: “He more than once conquered or at least over-ran the whole country, yet—we trust that the parallel will continue to the end; and that national vengeance has in store some future Bannockburn” (Edward’s 1314 defeat of 20,000 troops by an army about a quarter of that size; QR I:18–19). Emphasizing historical repetition, the Quarterly implicitly accuses the Edinburgh of forgetting Scottish history because of its Whig ambitions and of underestimating the strength of nationalist pride. In the face of historical precedence, the success of Napoleon’s

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

93

individual arrogance becomes “we think, extremely improbable and contrary to all experience” (19). The “we think” resists those who invite defeatism, namely the Edinburgh. The tease in this allusion to Bannockburn is that Jeffrey, reviewing Reliques of Robert Burns the prior month, had declared, “The finest piece of the strong and nervous sort, however, is undoubtedly the address of Robert Bruce to his army at Bannockburn” (ER XIII:269). Burns had written the Ode in September 1793, between the assassination of Marat and the execution of Marie Antoinette, which gave it, in Jeffrey’s review, a political context. The Quarterly underscores its jab at the Edinburgh by placing Scott’s review of Reliques of Robert Burns immediately after the review of Affaires d’Espagne; in it, Scott applauds the “masculine and lofty tone of martial spirit which glows in the poem of Bannockburn” and deflects the Edinburgh’s politicization by emphasizing Burns’s “gallant Bruce,” as a chivalric figure (QR I:28).8 Within the body of the review of Affaires d’Espagne, the Edinburgh’s simultaneous failure of literary and political analysis becomes an analogue to Napoleonic pride. The Quarterly declares: As we feel ourselves by no means competent to the discussion of objects purely military, we would willingly have avoided the proverbial rebuke ne sutor, &c. but, cobblers as we are, we cannot refrain from answering, with due humility, a question or two which some brother cobblers have propounded in a style, which we think rather too arrogant and authoritative, for professors of our gentle craft.

The Quarterly then quotes, without identifying, a rhetorical question from the Edinburgh’s review of Cevallos, and, truncating the Edinburgh’s argument, announces that “we apprehend that, to these questions, our readers will have anticipated some very obvious answers” (13) and then enumerates four and lists several more. The metaphor of “cobblers” puns on the periodical method of cobbling together ideas around the presumed object of the review, or, as described in the opening sentence of the Cevallos essay, “avail[ing] ourselves of the appearance of this interesting document, in order to enter somewhat at large into several points, either omitted, or too slightly touched upon, in our former observations on Spanish affairs” (ER XIII:215). The Edinburgh had prioritized its own discourse, its sequence of articles on Spain, over the books it reviewed. The Quarterly’s strategy of decontextualizing, epitomized by the local example of treating a rhetorical question as one demanding an actual answer, contested the Edinburgh’s ability to control periodical

94

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

discourse. Jeffrey recognized the challenge; he wrote to Horner on March 4, 1809: Tell me what you hear, and what you think of this new Quarterly; and do not let yourself imagine that I feel any unworthy jealousy, and still less any unworthy fear, on the occasion. My natural indolence would have been better pleased not to be always in sight of an alert and keen antagonist. But I do rejoice at the prospect of this kind of literature, which seems to be more and more attended to than any other, being generally improved in quality, and shall be proud to have set an example. (LLJ 193)9

Jeffrey realized that the Quarterly and the Edinburgh were committed to a continual dialogue, an “alert and keen” antagonism. But he also recognized what Murray knew, that the new order was not seeking obliteration of one another, but staging an ongoing debate that would capture the public imagination and display the boundaries and contours of that imagination. The lead article for the Quarterly’s second issue was Walter Scott’s review of Thomas Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming A Pennsylvanian Tale. And Other Poems. Ellis’s assessment was that “Scott’s ‘Wyoming’ is better than Jeffrey’s, and that upon the whole we decidedly surpass the E.R. this time” (Smiles I:159). Ballantyne noted that his “private subscribers have increased considerably; and the demand for the trade also is more considerable” (Smiles I:159). Although Scott reviewed for the Edinburgh, appearing in the guise of the Quarterly Reviewer meant forging a new identity, and he wryly alludes to the process in the first paragraph of his review of Gertrude of Wyoming: We open this volume with no ordinary impression of the delicacy and importance of the task which it imposes on us, and the difficulty of discharging it, at once with justice to the author, and to that public at whose bar we, as well as Mr Campbell, must be considered to stand. It is not our least embarrassment, that, in some respects, Mr Campbell may be considered as his own rival; and, in aspiring to extensive popularity, has certainly no impediment to encounter more formidable than the extent of his own reputation. (QR I:241)

As a new journal, the Quarterly stands as much as Campbell before the “bar” of the public. By contrast, the Edinburgh opened its review with mild chastisement of its audience: “Beautiful as the greater part of this volume is, the public taste, we are afraid, has of late been too much accustomed to beauties of a more obtrusive and glaring kind,

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

95

to be fully sensible of its merit.” Jeffrey explains this blunting as the effect of “the babyism or the antiquarianism which have lately been versified” so that the public has “been somewhat dazzled by the splendour, and bustle and variety of the most popular of our recent poems” (ER XIV:1). The term “babyism,” which Jeffrey might have coined (1836 is the earliest citation in the OED), refers to Byron’s Hours of Idleness and his response to the Edinburgh’s review of it in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which Jeffrey could not directly address but could categorize as petulant with this neologism.10 The reference to “antiquarianism” alludes to Scott’s own authorship of Marmion. The Edinburgh had criticized Marmion for imitating Scott’s earlier work and noted, with words that Scott’s Gertrude review echoes, that “it is difficult for an author, who has obtained great fame by a first publication, not to appear to fall off in a second—especially if his original success could be imputed, in any degree, to the novelty of his plan of composition” (ER XII:1). Jeffrey’s review, like Scott’s, situates the author in the position of competing against himself. The inside joke is that Scott, now in the guise of the Quarterly Reviewer, competes against his former self as an Edinburgh Reviewer. In the Quarterly’s review of Gertrude, different voices intersect, exhibiting an institutional heteroglossia that merged Campbell’s image of American voices, the competition between the Quarterly and Edinburgh, Scott’s professional understanding of poetry, and conflicting notions of nationalism. Scott hoped to transform the genre of the literary review, and, after “conduct[ing]” his readers “to the end of Mr Campbell’s affecting tale,” Scott comments: “We are perfectly aware, that, according to the modern canons of criticism, the reviewer is expected to show his immense superiority to the author reviewed, and, at the same time, to relieve the tediousness of narration, by turning the epic, dramatic, moral story before him into quaint and lively burlesque” (I:222). Scott lists “materials” prepared “for caricaturing Gertrude of Wyoming,” such as “irresistible Spanish pantaloons of her lover” and “reliev[ing]” the “sombre character of the Oneyda chief” by “various sly allusions to ‘blankets, strouds, stinkubus, and wampum,’ ” that he disdains to deploy in the review. This litotes allows the Quarterly to parody the Edinburgh, and to expose their motivation for this generic trick of transforming “story” into “burlesque” by characterization, quotation, and reference to discordant objects, a favorite trick of Brougham and Jeffrey, because it could be wielded to reflect an inadequate economic understanding of commodities or circulation: “[H]aving thus clearly demonstrated to Mr Campbell and to

96

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the reader, that the whole effect of his poem was as completely at our mercy as the house which a child has painfully built with a pack of cards, we proposed to pat him on the head with a few slight compliments on the ingenuity of his puny architecture.” Scott dismantles this display of power by representing it as a form of bullying with selective quotations, cheap jokes, and other devices that play on a propensity for humor over substance, and a need to establish one’s own public character at the expense both of the author and of public debate. The Quarterly, disingenuously, disavows this approach: We shall ever be found ready to apply the lash of ridicule to conceit, presumption, or dulness; but no temptation to display our own wit, or to conciliate popularity, shall prompt us to expose genius to the malignant grin of envious folly, or, by low and vulgar parody, to derogate from a work which we might strive in vain to emulate. (QR II:254)

Scott knew that Jeffrey would realize that this review was by Scott, who was perfectly capable of emulating Campbell’s work while Jeffrey, no poet, was not. He is, however, also making a claim about the genres of reviewing, and their limitations in terms of originality and the propriety of their acknowledging their secondary or derivative status. The opening articles for the first two issues of the Quarterly were exemplars of the journal’s approach to constructing its reading public, one carved out from those wearied by the Edinburgh. Some of the arguments depended on reading against the Edinburgh and so implicitly acknowledged the journals’ complicity. Gifford, writing to Murray, thought that the appearance of the Quarterly had the immediate effect that “in their last number, they [the Edinburgh] have also attempted to be serious, and abstain from their flippant impiety. It is not done with the best grace, but it has done them credit, I hear” (Smiles I:158). Murray’s initial assessment was less sanguine than his cofounders; he wrote to his wife on July 28, 1809 that “I have been in a sad plight all day about my Review. We are going on very indifferently” (Smiles I:161). He perceived that the Edinburgh had risen to the challenge and told Constable that its most recent issue was “the best they had yet published.” D’Israeli concurred that the Quarterly “has yet its fortune to make” and wished that Murray had a “genius” available like “Buonaparte” (Smiles I:164). Over the next decade, the dialogue between the journals deepened, and Murray worked tirelessly to bring talented writers into the

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

97

fold of the Quarterly. By 1812, Gifford was writing a satisfied analysis to John Barrow (who contributed roughly two hundred articles to the Quarterly); he contrasts “the alarm which took possession of Pitt when he discovered that he had nearly lost the world, by his contempt of the press” with the current time where “we have advantages which Mr. Pitt had not”: “He had the vehicles of information to create; they are now at hand. He would have thought twenty thousand pounds a slight sacrifice to secure such a medium of conveying the most interesting political views, as the ‘Quarterly’ offers to Government without any expense whatever” (Barrow 506–07). Gifford estimated a readership of “at least 50,000 people, of that class whose opinions it is most important to render favourable, and whose judgments it is most expedient to set right” and a sale of 6,000 copies.11 This ratio suggests a view of shared reading, in which the reviews function as a focal point for debate and conversation. For Murray, the Quarterly solidified both his public character and his interconnections with other publishers. In 1810, he wrote to Gifford an explanation of what Gifford began to perceive as meddling “intimidation”: “I have let my hopes of fame as a bookseller rest upon the establishment and celebrity of this journal. My character, as well with my professional brethren as with the public, is at stake upon it . . . my mind is so entirely engrossed, my honour is so completely involved in this one thing, that I neither eat, drink, nor sleep upon anything else” (Smiles I:185). In the decade after its founding, the journal grew in circulation and reputation, and Murray continued insistently stamping his character on it, and used its editors to help mold his book list. Correspondence among the principals addressed how explicitly and frequently to reference the Edinburgh. George Ellis wrote to Murray that he would prefer to “avoid entering the lists with our adversaries,” but once the Edinburgh had “formally thrown down the gauntlet,” to “pretend a total ignorance of their opinions” would appear as “a degree of affectation even more ridiculous than that of Sydney Smith” (Smiles I:184). By 1819, the two journals had achieved a kind of jointventure monopoly. William Hazlitt nicknamed them “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” and asserted their political dependence: The distinction between a great Whig and Tory Lord is laughable. For Whigs to Tories “nearly are allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.” So I cannot find out the different drift (as far as politics are concerned) of the ********* and ********* Reviews, which remind one of Opposition coaches, that raise a great dust or spatter

98

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y one another with mud, but both travel the same road and arrive at the same destination. (Political Essays xxxii)

The use of asterisks is a joke that would be instantly decoded, and emphasized that “Edinburgh” and “Quarterly” had the same number of letters, an arbitrary similarity that reinforced their substantial ones. Alluding to himself, Hazlitt declares that “[a]ny writer who is not agreeable to the Tories, becomes obnoxious to the Whigs; he is disclaimed by them as a dangerous colleague” because the Whigs fear a “knock-down blow” and prefer “their endless see-saw way of going about a question” (xxxii–iii). The Westminster also decries a confederacy between the Edinburgh and the Quarterly in its 1824 inaugural issue. “Periodical Literature; the Edinburgh Review, Vols 1, 2, etc.” begins by noting that, although it occupies the attention of “the greatest class of readers,” periodical literature has evaded becoming “subject to a regular and systematic course of criticism” (WR I:206). Lacking analytic perspective, neither other periodicals nor other readers can resist the system concocted between the Edinburgh and Quarterly, and consequently, all works are evaluated through the habits of reading that these periodicals have inculcated: “the number of those who love reading and the number of those who derive pleasure from periodical literature, are the same” (I:207). This identity produces a closed system in which value can be constituted by the rate of circulation: “the more [the periodical reviewer] can furnish [aristocratic readers] with reasons for being more in love with their opinions than before, the more sure he is . . . of increasing their zeal to promote the reputation of his work” (208). The consequence for nonaristocratic readers is that they read outside the dialogical relation of periodical and aristocrat, but they read as a simulacrum of that dialogue, occupying an imaginary space of aristocracy and hence identifying with interests anathematic to their own. The myth of the inevitability of the Edinburgh’s success allows (forces?) the Westminster to accept that literary negotiable “instrument” (WR I:207)—the periodical review—as an inevitable development of intellectual culture. Preceding the article on the Edinburgh is an analysis of paper money, “On the Instrument of Exchange,” that contends that a government’s use of paper denominated as “legal tender” but not redeemable for a hard currency allows the aristocracy to drain wealth from the economic system and replace it with a frenzy of unsignifying paper (I:171–205). By analogy, the periodicals perform no work, but replace the labor of others with their representations

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

99

of it; simultaneously, their judgment erases the labor of the reader, or at least limits it to conformity to the Edinburgh’s program.12 Consequently, value is transferred from the intellectual laborers to the corporate periodicals who, like bankers, convert it into cultural and commercial capital: the high profits of the Edinburgh; Jeffrey’s flourishing legal and subsequent judicial careers; and the ability of robbing poets of their profits or at least forcing them to accept a discounted payment by posterity. The Westminster, new champion of intellectual debate, exaggerates the hegemony of the Edinburgh and Quarterly, and ignores the rising monthlies such as Blackwood’s Magazine.

Blackwood’s M AGA The Quarterly developed through John Murray’s commitment to his public identity, a commitment that intersected with the diverse goals of Walter Scott, George Ellis, and others, as they challenged the Edinburgh. Blackwood’s Magazine was similarly a vehicle for its publisher to develop his public persona. For the several years leading up to Blackwood’s, Blackwood was the Edinburgh distributor of the Quarterly and shared many of Murray’s professional ideals. On the founding of Blackwood’s, Murray undertook the London distribution until the “personalities” in it became overwhelming. In one ludicrous event, John Wilson and John Lockhart issued written challenges to the anonymous author of Hypocrisy Unveiled (attributed to Macvey Napier and James Grahame). This attack on Blackwood’s began with an analogy between Maga and “mischievous boys” throwing “dirt” at passers-by (3); the author(s) remained concealed and, rather than accepting the challenges, simply published them and, in Murray’s opinion, made them and their publishers look like fools. He wrote to Blackwood: “I declare to God that had I known what I had so incautiously engaged in, I would not have undertaken what I have done, or have suffered what I have in my feelings and character—which no man had hitherto the slightest cause for assailing—I would not have done so for any sum” (Smiles I:488).From the outset, he complained of Blackwood’s personal attacks; his letter of December 7, 1818, is typical: “I hope the next number will be free of politics and of personalities. If, for instance, you are going to attack Mr. Brougham, you must strike out my name. Mackintosh is offended, and thus a very material source is closed to me—at least, until your literary character is established” (Smiles I:492). As important as Blackwood’s figure is to his Maga, as the journal was familiarly called, and as frequent as attacks on contemporary

100

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

personalities were in its pages, this section explores the journal from a somewhat different angle, namely its notion that a Tory periodical could exploit cultural notions of Scottish authenticity, and reformulate public perceptions of the historical and the personal. If economics was the bedrock of the Edinburgh’s organization of knowledge, history was Maga’s foundational discourse. The establishment of Blackwood’s exhibits a complex party rivalry within the publishing industry. Despite Blackwood’s Tory loyalties, his initial editors, Thomas Pringle and James Cleghorn, were Whigs, who, after several marginal issues, defected (or were shunted off, depending on who tells the tale) to Constable, publisher of the Edinburgh. That this professional rivalry was part of the negotiations of the Scottish political parties for control of the periodical press is evident from the success—and legal ramifications—of the Chaldee Manuscript and its narrative of decimating the Whig Edinburgh. In the dream vision, published in double columns with numbered verses and exaggerated biblical language, Constable, identified as the “man who was crafty in counsel and cunning in all manner of working,” observes the rise of the “Book,” as Blackwood’s is coded, and laments, “Why stand I idle here, and why do I not bestir myself? Lo! This Book shall become a devouring sword in the hand of mine adversary [Blackwood] . . . and the hope of my gains [from the Edinburgh Review] shall perish from the face of the earth.” The success of Blackwood’s imitated its own imagining, and was staked on a multilayered struggle for the public imaginary, for the terms that would constitute common sense and the norms of history, for the representation of the Scottish and the British nationalist ideals, and for sales, calculated in hard subscription rates and bookseller’s accounts. Like Hazlitt and the Westminster, Blackwood’s acknowledged the periodical duet of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly. The monthly magazine charged that neither quarterly publication could disentangle politics from aesthetics, because they misunderstood the relation of personality to history. A reputable German correspondent opines, through translation, in March 1818, that if the author’s uncle or nephew “votes with Lord Castlereagh, the poetry, or biography, or history, or philosophy, or erudition, of his kinsman is excellent in the eyes of the Quarterly, and contemptible in those of the Edinburgh Reviewer.” The short-term political goals of the Quarterlies compelled them to misconceive the relation between history and the present. In particular, their insufficient attention to the Middle Ages as precursor and uncanny model for the contemporary moment doomed these

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

101

periodicals to misconstrue their own antecedents and to misinterpret the centrality of Scottish culture in the construction of Britain. The German correspondent, Baron von Lauerwinkel, explains the pitfalls of the combination of politics and aesthetics in the quarterlies: “[T]he heads of these two factions—these Neri and Bianchi of criticism,—are Jeffrey and Gifford. The former resembles the gay despot of Rome, the latter the bloody and cruel one of Capreae. Both are men of great talents, and both are, I think, very bad Reviewers” (BM II:672). This argument positions the struggle between quarterlies as characteristically medieval and as a palimpsest of yet more ancient despotisms. Blackwood’s critique of this dynamic makes it a crucible for literary imaginative achievement beyond the quarterlies, just as the struggle between the Neri and Bianchi provided the contemporary panorama for Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the issue prior to Lauerwinkel’s letter, Peter George Patmore had described the Italian poet as one who “stands bewildered, but not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and modern world”: “Dante exhibits a perpetual struggle of mind to escape from the thralldom in which it had been held by Gothic darkness and barbarism” (II:558). Lauerwinkel—John Lockhart in philosophical disguise—concedes that William Gifford’s editing “of almost all the old dramatists of England” displays acumen, yet is unfortunately undercut by his “perpetual abuse.” Wilson’s own series on the early dramatists presents Maga as a superior reader because it is attuned to the role of drama in England’s emergence from medieval sensibilities. By analogy, Blackwood’s is poised to help Britain move beyond the feudal oligarchy and pseudo-modernity of the Edinburgh and Quarterly. Gifford only sees the earlier dramatists as precursors of Shakespeare, while Wilson can delineate their “deep insight into the darkest depths of human nature” and understand what Gifford does not: that “Shakespeare was quite of a different order of being from them all” (II:657). Lauerwinkel entwines this historical failure of Gifford’s with another instance of critical blindness, his bigotry toward “his fellow-countrymen—the Scots”: “to revive [as the Quarterly does] the feelings of those old warlike days which have been immortalized by a series of poets, not in the world of politics, but in that of letters, is an idea worthy only of an old woman on the Border” (II:657). In imagery and attitude, such comments invoke a medievalism that Gifford is doomed to repeat and barred from comprehending. Similarly, Jeffrey and the Edinburgh are victims of his character and circumstances: “His writing manifests, indeed, the most complete possession of all those faculties which form the armor of a pleader” and consequently, he “never shows any keen feeling in his case, till he

102

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

has become, as it were, a party in it” (II:675). Despite representing Jeffrey as purposefully modern—and consequently intellectually superficial—this quotation establishes him, with his armor, as a medieval claimant in the court, prior to the reconfiguration of the courts that allowed indifferent professional lawyers to represent clients. Like Gifford, he is an unaware victim of historical repetition that Blackwood’s can recognize, celebrate, and wield as satiric mace. Lockhart repeats this critique of Jeffrey in different generic figurations throughout Maga. In January of 1822, on the Edinburgh’s twentieth anniversary, he published as part of a series of “Ancient National melodies” a satire “When This Old Book Was New,” with the lyrics of “When this old Cap was new,” the sixteenth-century ballad that provides the melody, reprinted in a footnote. The contrast between chivalric original and Lockhart’s satire depends upon the soft nostalgic vagueness of the former—“Our ladies in those days / In civil habit went; / Broad-cloath was then worth praise, / And gave the best content”—with the sharp contemporary historical reference of the latter: Tom Paine, and Pindar’s Louse, Lay close by the Buff and the Blue [the colors of the Edinburgh] In many a Jacobin’s house— When this Old Book was new. When their darling was squabash’d At glorious Waterloo, Old teeth full sore they gnash’d, Old SHEETS made room for new. (QR XI:87–8)

With a footnote that cites the Quarterly to assert that “old sheets” (i.e., typeset pages) were replaced to conceal Jeffrey’s failed historical perspective and Napoleonic sympathies, the doggerel reinforces the Edinburgh’s identity as a journal committed to the political shaping of history. Blackwood’s represents its own politics as emerging from the historical condition of Scotland as the trace of the medieval within Britain and an historical pageantry of customs, traditions, and monuments. In this formulation, the Edinburgh appears as a transitional moment in which modernity cannot read its own history and awaits the fulfilled historical perspective reiterated in Blackwood’s.13 In the first number, a long article on Scottish Gypsies appeared— the first of a three-part series. Coauthored by Walter Scott and Thomas Pringle, the first installment articulates a series of historiographic claims through the gypsy as a figure ubiquitous but unnoticed,

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

103

signifying but meaningless. The article notes as “singular” the “fact” that “an Asiatic people should have resided four hundred years in the heart of Europe . . . almost unaltered” and the metafact that this phenomenon has been met with “unaccountable indifference” from scholars and the populous. “Men of letters, . . . losing their tempers in endless disputes about Gothic and Celtic antiquities, have witnessed with apathy and contempt the striking spectacle of a Gypsey Camp,— pitched, perhaps, amid the mouldering entrenchments of their favourite Picts and Romans. The rest of the community . . . have probably never regarded them with any deeper interest than what springs from the recollected terrors of a nursery tale.” Scott and Pringle join a historiographic problem—that evidence may be rendered invisible by both scholarly and popular myths—and a problem in history, the presence of a people that disrupts European space and European theories of social development. Fiction writers, however, have “executed the task so well” of delineating the gypsy presence that “we have little more to ask of the historian, than merely to extend the canvass, and to affix the stamp of authenticity to the striking representations which poets and novelists” have furnished. The authors decline this task, asserting that “Our duty is rather to collect and store up (if we may so express it,) the raw materials of literature—to gather into our repository scattered facts, hints, and observations,—which more elaborate and learned authors may afterwards work up into the dignified tissue of history or science” (I:43). Scott and Pringle chose gypsies as their subject for several reasons. They could draw upon Scott’s expertise, developed in Guy Mannering, from which they quote at length as “the accurate and striking account” by “a celebrated anonymous author of the day” (BM I:45). It also provides an opportunity to allegorize historical consciousness. The gypsies’ “pretensions to fortune-telling and ‘warlockry’ ” and their self-representation as knowledgeable “in physiognomye, palmestrie, or other abused sciences—‘tellers of destinies, deaths, or fortunes, and like fantastical imaginations’ ” makes them the cultural equivalent of storytellers; Scott and Pringle note three times that legislation curtailing gypsy movement also limits that of players and bards. Further, the gypsies’ entrance into Europe depends on their creating a false, but persuasive, past of persecution for themselves, which is ultimately prophetic, as it compels future persecution. Their inroads into England proved harder than elsewhere because Henry VIII and Elizabeth “were too much accustomed to use religion, as well as law, for a cloak to cover their own violent and criminal conduct, to be easily imposed upon by the like artifices in others.” The monarchs could

104

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

read their own historical manipulations in the gypsies and become physiognomists and palmesters themselves. Both prophesy and history are matters or extensions of character. The gypsies are figures of prophesy that summon the need for history. They recall the Druids of Burke’s Towards an Abridgement of English History, which Clare Simmons has astutely adumbrated: “Druids, then, fulfill a need to know what will happen in the future, and in an advanced culture they can be replaced by an awareness of history” (36). For Blackwood’s, with its commitment to a medieval past, the simultaneity of prophesy and historical awareness produces the present as a narrative machine, in which past prophesy emerges as the future’s history. The first part declared that to “render them more complete,” the “modern anecdotes” about the gypsies require a preface of a “rapid view of [the gypsies’] earlier history” (BM I:43). Yet, the length of the history in contrast to the scanty anecdotes suggests that this early history is Blackwood’s real interest. The final installment of the anecdotes, only published several months after Scott and Pringle originally intended because of “more pressing subjects,” is a pastiche of quotation—“the remainder of the miscellaneous anecdotes, with which we have been furnished” (I:615). No doubt editorial pressures resulted in reconceiving the final installment, less than a third of the length of the first one. Yet, the odd balance between the announced organizations—in which history forms a brief introduction to the present—and the actual production, in which history provides the bulk of the discussion and the contemporary moment is an appendix of borrowed anecdotes, reinforces the historiographic theory that the first installment develops: history is character and self-consciousness requires being in history and therefore within a textual tissue as the precondition of public selfhood. This precondition has its contemporary analogue in Blackwood’s, in which identities are produced, manufactured, and marketed through periodical repetition. In March 1818, in the same issue as Lauerwenkel’s letter, Blackwood’s introduced “Time’s Magic Lantern,” a series of imaginary conversations. The April 1818 issue opened with this series. It detailed first a conversation between Galileo and a monk who tries to convince him that gazing into a book of devotion, especially the one he authored, would be more fruitful than staring at the heavens. A sketch from Rembrandt’s workshop follows, in which the painter resists modernity in several ways. The scene opens with him in monologue: “Too much light here still. I must deepen the shadows even more, until the figures begin to shine out as they ought. And now for Pharaoh’s Baker, whose dream is not yet interpreted” (III:4). A knock

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

105

at the door interrupts, and a Dutch Trader—a precursor of the banking industry that would impel Europe toward its modern economic state—enters to purchase a painting for his wife but cannot agree on the price. After the merchant leaves, Rembrandt considers faking his own death and funeral in order to increase the value of the paintings (and a footnote, citing a biography, vouches for this “fact”). As with Galileo, Rembrandt is represented as an historical figure cognizant of his historical position and of his need to enter into history as an economic venture. In a later “Magic Lantern,” a bemused Adam Smith questions a laird about his quaint traditions, including using bagpipers to measure land, so that he can only estimate his lands as between ‘twelve and nineteen hundred acres” (III:419). Complimenting the laird on his “feudal” methods, Smith admits his own bewilderment. The laird, shifting to a linguistic register—whether as metaphor or misapprehension is unclear—assures Smith that “not everyone” can “follow our sennachie” (the family’s official reciter of Gaelic legend). For himself, as long as he can make out his own patriarchic name now and again in the song, “we are sure everything is going on well.” The weaknesses of this limited view of history are exposed when the laird reveals that he is so mired in the debts of his operating expenses and his son’s gambling—a necessary ritual of manhood, according to his wife—that he is in danger of losing his estate. He nonetheless rejects Smith’s suggestions for modernization, as they would undermine familial identity, just as he insists on placing his sons in the army, despite the expense, rather than in the law, which would produce income. Materiality—objects, land, property—is read through the family stories and naming rituals: the vignette had begun with the laird responding to Smith’s query that his estate is named Coilanachgoilach, which means the roaring of the wind upon a hill, and ends with Smith’s sympathetic observation, “Tis very hard, Mr. Macrurah of Coilanach-goilach” (III:420). In the “Magic Lantern” vignettes, usually pairing a famous participant with a stereotypic representative of a particular class and worldview, the transmission of character—whether individual, familial, or national—explains the relationship of present to past, and serves as the filtering device that purifies myth, legend, or bad science into history. The Magic Lantern figures stand on a threshold of modernity by virtue of their historical awareness of their own antiquity. This dynamic recurs in Blackwood’s at a variety of levels, from brief historical notes to extended historical essays to the arrangement and juxtaposition of various letters, anecdotes, and dialogues into issues and series.

106

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

From its outset, Blackwood’s was championing and reproducing a notion of the historical. The early numbers included a section called “Antiquarian Repertory.” Collected by editor Thomas Pringle and Walter Scott, these reproductions, mostly in Latin and prefaced by an English summary, offered accounts in the April 1817 issue of “the history of the Culdees and the far-famed Macbeth” and the “savage story of the ‘Saxum Hiberienism’ ” (I:65). The subsequent issue contained a letter titled “Anecdotes of Antiquaries” praising the concept of the “Antiquarian Repertory” but warning of the necessity of “procur[ing] well-authenticated articles, connected with antiquity” (I:136). Despite the general periodical discourse on Macpherson’s Ossian and other historical hoaxes as deliberate frauds, the correspondent offers two anecdotes involving antiquarians who unearth artifacts that seem definitively to link Roman and medieval Scottish culture. These items, however, are discovered to be contemporary folk items—a highlander’s kettle and a farmer’s merestone. In each case, professional enthusiasm bolstered by a learned discourse produces the error, and an illiterate peasant unravels the correct reading of the objects. Printing this letter allows Blackwood’s to assert a sufficiently nuanced understanding of history as it was, rather than as other periodicals wished it to be, to evade such mistakes in its literary excavations. Blackwood’s acknowledges, in Simmons’s term, the partiality of all history (10), yet represents itself as the adjudicator of those partial positions—clung to by the Edinburgh and Quarterly. In the August 1817 number, the “Antiquarian Repertory” includes an extract of a “Sale of Land in the Thirteenth Century” that “throws some light on the state of property in this kingdom during these dark ages” (I:496). Here, “dark” functions simultaneously as a description of the medieval period, and, in contrast to the “light” cast by republication of the document, as a description of historical circumstances; the condition of history—a relation of present to past—renders the medieval period dark. In the early, relatively unsuccessful issues of Maga, the items of the “Antiquarian Repertory” were keyed to relevant articles elsewhere in the volume, serving as a repository of authenticity for these other articles. This format correlated the structure of the magazine with a system of authentication that relied on established medieval expertise; put baldly, the organization of history was the organization of the periodical. Both in struggling for early success and in exploiting the ideological possibilities of having achieved that success, Blackwood’s offered itself as a repository of medievalism, by exploiting the associations of ancientness and Scottishness.

P r ol i f e r a t i ng Voic e s

107

Perceived as musty in the initial numbers, the organization of the “Repertory” quickly transmogrified. First, cross-referencing disappeared. By the seventh number, in which the notorious Chaldee Manuscript appeared, it vanished as a distinct category in the table of contents. Nonetheless, the continual dialectic between the contemporary moment and the medieval period marks the journal throughout Blackwood’s tenure as publisher. His punning moniker of “Ebony” achieves prominence in the pseudo-medieval Chaldee MS. As hoaxes on identities and documents became under Christopher North a mainstay of the magazine, the insistence of a privileged analysis of the Middle Ages marked its paradoxical commitment to authenticity. For example, direct commentaries on the medieval period, such as “Remarks on the Humour of Our Ancient Songs,” connect an aesthetic of sublimity and ridiculousness with a periodic structure of history: “Everything in the universe moves in a circle till the two extremes meet; thus the highest refinement returns again to where it set out” (I:239). This cyclical attitude is reinforced throughout the article by the pun on “humour” as comic, as a medical structure of health, and as a cultural disposition. This same attitude is extended into peripheral discussions of law, economics, manners, and language. Defending the notion of a Gaelic dictionary, an editorial note quotes Samuel Johnson’s reluctance to see even the language of the Scots “be totally extinguished”: “The similitude and derivation of languages afford the most indubitable proof of the induction of nations and the genealogy of mankind. They add often physical certainty to historical evidence, and often supply the only evidence of historical migrations, and of the revolutions of ages which left no written monuments behind them” (I:256). In a brief review of Stories for Children, a collection of tales from the conquest to the revolution, Blackwood’s points to the modern advantage that “history is now rendered ‘as attractive as a fairy tale’ ” and selects for its extended quotation the story of King Richard II quelling the crowd after the death of Wat Tyler. The crowd, “astonished by the king’s bravery,” follows him “out into the fields” where they disarm. After quoting the author’s moral that Wat Tyler’s death was well deserved for the “mischief and murders that his rebellion had occasioned,” the reviewer adds that “[w]e rather think this story may be read with advantage at present by children of a larger growth—as we certainly did not expect that Wat Tyler would have been held up as a patriot even to a Spafields mob.” The contemptuous allusion refers to the recent unauthorized publication of Southey’s 1794 Wat Tyler in an effort to embarrass the poet laureate who “was known

108

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

to be the author of an unsigned article in the Quarterly denouncing ‘incendiaries’ who stirred the lower orders to rebel” (as Jonathan Wordsworth points out in his Introduction to the facsimile edition). Ostensibly chosen as “a specimen of the happy manner in which our author unites the utmost elegance of language with that simplicity” appropriate for children, the example is a claim about historical interpretation, in which the character of the king, and the king’s recognition of his own historical nature, renders his power astonishing and quelling to the mob. By contrast, the leaders of the mob “could neither read nor write” and so “took a great hatred to all gentlemen, and every body who could read and write” (I:80). Blackwood’s uses a children’s story to join and to disrupt a debate that engaged Hazlitt and Coleridge (Lapp 115–37), Quarterly and Edinburgh, House of Commons and Monarchy, newspapers and law courts. An allegory both of history and of historiography, as well as of the limits of political- and self-knowledge and the need for deference, the article provides a didactic example of the occluded historical argument that permeates Maga. This calculated antiquarianism seized periodical possibility more aggressively than the Edinburgh, which modulated its sensationalist impulses through economic rationalism and Jeffrey’s own uneasiness about “the trade,” and with more self-irony than the Quarterly, Maga’s political ally though commercial rival. Each of these journals projects different conceptions of the heteroglossic periodical, of the Scottish incorporation into Great Britain, and of the identities, artificial and natural, of the author. Yet each draws upon the others—in opposition, even in anger, but also, as the publishers’ letters behind the scenes demonstrate, with cautious respect and professional admiration—to stake out its own identity and to structure that of the literary lower empire.

Pa rt II

S ol di e r s of For t u n e i n t h e P e r iodic a l Wa r s

A. And you propose then seriously to take “this one entire and perfect chrysolite,” this self, this “precious jewel of the soul,” this rock on which mankind have built their faith for ages, and at one blow shatter it to pieces with the sledge-hammer, or displace it from its hold in the imagination with the wrenching-irons of metaphysics? B. I am willing to use my best endeavours for that purpose. —William Hazlitt, “Self-Love and Benevolence,” New Monthly Magazine, 1828; the speaker “B” altered to “H” on reprinting.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4

R e pe at i ng Se lv es: Hu m e , H a z l i t t, a n d P e r iodic R e pe t i t ion

A period something like a printed page, Black letter upon foolscap, while our hair Grows grizzled, and we are not what we were, —Byron, on middle age, Don Juan, XII.1.6–8

G

ayatri Spivak relates that, in a “students’ English dictionary,” the etymology for the word “identity” stems from two languages: [T]he source of the word was given as Latin idem or Sanskrit idam and both were cited as meaning “same.” Now the meaning of the Latin word idem is not exactly “same” in the sense of one, but rather “same” in the sense of multitudes or repetitions. . . . Idam is not only not the undiminishing selfsame, as a pronoun . . . it is always enclitic or inclined towards the noun, always dependent on the proximity of a particular self for idam must remain monstrative, indexed. (774)

The composite etymological establishes “identity” as a reiterative structure. To have an identity entails the ability to repeat oneself; to be assigned an identity requires an institutional capacity to extend that identity, as the repeated appearances of the Opium-Eater—some engineered by him, and others not—crafted Thomas De Quincey’s public self. This link between repetition and identity had concerned major enlightenment thinkers in its relation to the epistemological

112

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

problem of the self. David Hume’s analysis became foundational for the Scottish Enlightenment and provided the framework for popular theorists of identity such as William Hazlitt to confront their own vexed relation to their public selves. David Hume posits the repetition of habit as the fundamental structure of knowledge; from it, derives scientific causation, social organization, and individual experience. Moreover, as Jerome Christensen has demonstrated, the structures of repetition characterize the Humean literary career as it “exploited, facilitated, and epitomized the operations of the commercial society” (Practicing Enlightenment 4). His final public act of iteration is the pseudo-literary, pseudo-legal documentation of his life, a short biography that, by the provisions of his will, was to appear at the beginning of all editions of his work. Titled “My Own Life,” the document both “owns” the life, claiming its possession, and disperses it across Hume’s other literary productions: “It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (xiii). Hume rescues himself from the charge of vanity by making that construction only the repetition of what has already been, a “History of my Writings.’ After sketching a life structured around literary production, Hume notes that in “Spring 1775, I was struck with a disorder in my bowels.” He comments, almost posthumously, “It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present” (xxi). Against this abstract “life,” floating now without the announced ownership of the title, Hume proposes to “conclude historically with my own character,” which “[m]y friends never had occasion to vindicate” (xxi–ii); character stands on the grounds of its own ceaseless repetition. “My Own Life” appeared as the first portion of “The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself”; the second part is a “Letter from Adam Smith, LL.D. to William Strahan, Esq.”: “A few days before he set out [on “a long journey”], he wrote that account of his own life, which, together with his other papers, he has left to your care. My account, therefore, shall begin where his ends” (xxiii). Hume’s dying allows for Adam Smith’s vindication not of Hume’s character, but of his body, showing that it acted consistently with the character of the writing consciousness of “My Own Life,” as the final, vindicating repetition. For the men of letters who gathered in print around Hume’s death, Montaigne’s various aphorisms on death disclose the fantasy that with death, a person’s life becomes solidified, fully and finally said and no longer subject to revision. “If I can,”

R e p e at i ng Se lv e s

113

Montaigne asserted, “I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said” (I:7).1 The qualifying “If I can” anticipates the need for supplementation, for additional text and revision, to prevent one’s death from unwriting, transforming, one’s life. Hume knew that the commerce of letters was anxiously observing his death, determined to make meaning from it. Boswell had anticipated that on dying, Hume would reveal a self at odds with his public persona (838–9). Adam Smith, however, as the supplemental narrator to “My Own Life,” was Hume’s hedge against this threat. In Smith’s account, Hume tells an anecdote of reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, and acknowledges that, of the various excuses offered “to Charon for not readily entering into his boat,” none was appropriate to him. The “jocular excuse” Hume proposes for himself reveals the endlessness of his project: I thought I might say to him, “Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time, that I may see how the Public receives the alterations.” But Charon would answer, “When you have seen the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so, honest friend, please step into the boat.” (xxv–vi)

The project becomes endless because of the loop between readers and writer, the dialectical project that hones the literary name David Hume. His career anticipates writers such as Hazlitt, because the periodical industry invested in a British commerce reliant on individualism, and drew on the eighteenth-century models of identity that filtered from Hume through the Scottish Enlightenment theorists into the popular discourse of the periodical coteries. Despite deep differences between Hume and Samuel Johnson, both “accept the notion of consensus as the basis for an intelligible reality” (Damrosch 5). David Hume contended, “[W]hat we call a mind, is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and suppos’d, tho’ falsely, to be endow’d with a perfect simplicity and identity” (Treatise 207).2 In Hume’s formulation, the validity and stability of the self depend on the social sanctions and correspondences of personal experiences, as well as on a collective conspiracy against acknowledging the incoherence concealed within the ceaseless reiteration (“we call”) of its own lie. Moreover, the achievement of such confirmation required inserting oneself into the “social text,” in which “the middle-class audience would come to see the social relation between people in the

114

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

fantastic form of a relation between texts” (Klancher, Making 50). When Johnson writes in a private letter that “[y]ou know Des Cartes’s argument, ‘I think therefore I am.’ It is as good a consequence ‘I write therefore I am alive,’ ” he means that his writing will contradict a “report that I died today” (Johnson 118), but his recognition of a textual identity allows Johnson’s witticism. In another letter of the same day, he writes to Lucy Porter: “I am afraid the story [of my death] should get into the papers, and distress my dear Mother. I therefore write to tell you, that though not quite well, that I am coming down soon” (119). Johnson’s letters are a counter-text, attempting to manage the public circulation of the story of his death. They illustrate Paul Privateer’s contention that the “textual representation of the self as a presence is still another method by which Locke materializes personal identity in the form of a ‘thinking thing . . . always consciously present’ ” (32). The recourse to textual supplementation, however, displaces the self-presence (“always consciously present”) it is meant to stabilize because of the temporal effect of writing; Johnson’s assertion that his writing is conclusive proof of his present identity depends upon the additional proof of his “coming down soon”; like Hume’s quip to Charon, as a bid for immortality, Johnson’s writing only establishes his identity through supplementation. Hume “puts in question the validity of Locke’s use of self-reference to prove the materiality of self” (Privateer 33). Hume argues that “[i]t is therefore on some of these three relations of resemblance, contiguity, and causation, that identity depends” (Treatise 169). As with Spivak’s explication of the etymology of identity, each of these terms relies upon repetitions, habits that materialize the boundaries of the self. The divide between the body and the external world limits the self in the present; and the distinction between memory and imagination separates the past from phantasms of uncertainty and madness; and the sense of responsibility with which the self discovers itself injects it into a causal world. Yet these distinctions are conventional and tentative, and their perceived incoherence propels a socializing discourse that the Romantic periodicals extended. The next paragraphs briefly consider each concept in its empiricist context. Contiguity. In his “Of Memory,” Thomas Reid was repeating established Lockean dogma in expressing identity as “[a] relation between a thing which is known to exist at one time, and a thing which is known to have existed at another,” but goes on to say that defining the character of the relationship is impossible. “How do you know,”

R e p e at i ng Se lv e s

115

Reid asks, “that there is such a permanent self?” His answer is “remembrance”: “my memory testifies, not only that this was done, but that it was done by me who now remember it.” Against the dilemma of distinguishing real memories from false ones, dreams, delusions, and so forth, Reid can only refer to a social practice: “Every man in his senses believes what he distinctly remembers, and every thing he remembers convinces him that he existed at the time remembered” (334–5). Accepting one’s own memories requires first attaining a socialized notion of “distinctness.” Locke asserts the continuity of consciousness as a moral necessity for judgment, and the fact of God-as-judge guarantees that the moral prerequisites are met at Judgment Day. Until then, for both Reid and Locke, the certainty of memory comes from the confirmation it receives from other human beings, a corresponding judgment, whether criminal or psychological. Persons can, by virtue of available public representations, monitor their private ones; we can, to quote Hume drawing from the public discourse in which he made both his living and his life, test “the fidelity of Printers and Copists” (Treatise 146) against one another. Resemblance. Reid notes that the “identity of other persons” proceeds “upon other grounds,” namely, “similarity,” and “has often furnished matter of serious litigation before tribunals of justice” (345). Locke had pointed out that “if the same consciousness can be transferred from one intelligent being to another, which he thinks we cannot show to be impossible, then two or twenty intelligent beings may be the same person” and equally, “one intelligent being may be two or twenty different persons” (352). Reid, echoing Locke, recognizes the implications that “as the right and justice of reward and punishment are founded on personal identity, no man could be responsible for his actions.” Legal practice, however, demonstrates empirically that human beings, by reference to their body, are responsible for their actions, and therefore the body operates as a consistent practical delineation of the self. Causation. As a third boundary, closely related to the previous ones, personal identity refers to a consciousness of self as the being to whom sensation is referred. The experience of pleasure, in this model, is not merely “Here is pleasure,” but the simultaneous recognition that “The pleasure is happening to myself.” Speaking of his own experience, however, Hume claims to have no distinct impression of his self: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light

116

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

or shade . . . I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but a perception” (162). In a rhetorical move typical of Hume, he transforms this objection into a nonproblem by throwing the question into the field of public debate: “If any one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can no longer reason with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular.” The process of debate becomes an agreement with Hume’s position, which derives from his sense of being the self who possesses the “essential” character of being bound to perception. Hume proposes an analogy similar to Socrates’s city-state, updated to the current dominant form of political organization: “I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts” (170). The implication of this analogy is the adaptability of the self to its circumstances. The state exists through its self-representation of histories, legal spectacle, social arts; the self exists because it recognizes itself within a similar textual social fabric. The intermediary term—that which by legal definition remains the “same” within “the incessant changes of its arts”—is the corporation. Both Adam Smith and Edmund Burke recognized the body as a boundary made permeable by the mirroring process between the self and the other, which is the necessary condition for the intelligibility of either.3 Having told the story of the physiognomist who can “penetrate the inclinations” of others by contorting his expression to match theirs, Burke notes that “I have often observed, that on mimicking the looks and gestures, of angry, or placid, or frightened, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that passion whose appearance I endeavoured to imitate; nay, I am convinced it is hard to avoid it; though one strove to separate the passion from its correspondent gestures” (Sublime 133). His rhetorical structure mimics his point; first, his experience mirrors the more exotic one of the physiognomist, and then is refracted through his audience as the pronoun shifts from “I” to “one.” One reads one’s own body by its posture in relation to other bodies. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith insists that the body provides a limit such that “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” but that limit provides the method of mediation

R e p e at i ng Se lv e s

117

by which human beings enact sympathy, since sympathy “does not arise so much from the view of the passions, as from the situation which excites it” (12). A person projects himself into the situation of the other, and this social habit brings into consciousness a figure of judgment, the “supposed impartial spectator of our conduct” who exists both as an external tribunal “in the first instance,” and as “the man within the breast” as a higher order of judgment. Thus, for Smith, the condition of the body as boundary propels the construction of an inner self whose function is to incorporate the other; the potential instability of such a model is mitigated by an appeal to a third tribunal, ‘to that of the all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never be deceived” (130–31), which can only function as an abstraction of human judgmental procedures. Both Smith and Burke, generalizing from necessarily limited evidence, rely on methods of textuality—citing authority, narrating stories as representative, shifts between first-person singular, first-person plural, and third-person pronouns—through which to naturalize their theories of self. William Hazlitt, among the most prolific of the Romantic era’s periodical writers, wove his understanding of his textualized being into his own theories of self. Hazlitt’s first published work, An Essay on the Principles of Action, was, as Martin and Barresi describe, “the culmination of a kind of perspective on personal identity that had begun with Locke” and developed through the eighteenth century (Rise 163). “The self for Hazlitt,” James Mulvihill argues in his analysis of Action, “is a constant dialectic of experience and abstraction” (33). His essays refract topics through this dialectical engine. In “What Is the People?” (1817), he argues that the “will of the people,” a conglomerate of millions of individuals, must be guided “[f]irst, by popular feeling, as arising out of the immediate wants and wishes of the great mass of the people” and “secondly, by public opinion, as arising out of the impartial reason and enlightened intellect of the community” (Political Essays 318). In “On Fashion” (1818), he notes that fashion “constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity” (EM III:203). In “On Consistency of Opinion” (1821), he opines that, despite the “political machinery,” the “whirling motion of the revolutionary wheel,” a man “need not become one vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire on himself” (LM IV:487). His popular essays generically reflect this dialectic in that “authorial style” as an instantiated experience “is shaped by reader expectation” (Mulvihill 30), while those expectations are an accumulated synthesis of individual experience.4 As Mulvihill demonstrates,

118

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Hazlitt’s works return to a dialectical notion of identity that he formulates in Principles of Action. Hazlitt’s key observation in Action is that the self has no closer connection with its own future than the future of another person; both are acts of imagination. Thus, “I” can imagine a future in which I do not exist with the same intensity that I imagine the future in which I am, but such a future is invariably connected by human presence (my child’s old age) or by palpable human absence (as in apocalyptic imagining). Since the identity of the self as a temporal being is an act of imagination, the unity of self is imaginary and “[a]ll individuals (or all that we name such) are aggregates, and aggregates of dissimilar things.” Identity is an act of forging, and so potential forgery, and Hazlitt’s solution, following along Humean lines, is as much a recipe for forgery as a guard against it: “[E]ach thing in that whole having a much nearer and more lasting connection with the rest than with any thing else not included in it, so that the degree of connection between the parts after all requires to be determined by annexing the name of the thing, that is collective idea, signified” (98). Sameness, in this analysis, turns out to be a collection of differences under a conjoining name. Thus, an individual has components necessarily different from one another: “[f]or the eye is certainly more like the same organ in another individual, than the different organs of sight and hearing are like one another in the same individual” (103). Hazlitt insists that similar differences in the self, as an aggregate of emotions and thoughts, must exist for “personality” (which Hazlitt defines as “conscious individuality”) to be possible. The self, for Hazlitt, is an incorporated being, but, because the elements of incorporation are at some level necessarily incommensurate, the consistency of self rests not on epistemological grounds, but on acts of will. In “On the Knowledge of Character,” Hazlitt rehearses the Humean dilemma that no amount of repetition could indubitably establish character. Hazlitt quotes a Monsieur P—— regarding a new wife, “the very next day she might turn out the very reverse of the character that she had appeared in during all the preceding time” (Table Talk 303). This instability has consequences for the periodical writer, as Hazlitt turns this observation on himself: What is it to me that I can write these Table-Talks? … Others have more property in them than I have; they may reap the benefits, I have only had the pain. Otherwise, they are to me as if they had never

R e p e at i ng Se lv e s

119

existed: nor should I know that I had ever thought at all, but that I am reminded of it by the strangeness of my appearance, and my unfitness for every thing else. (Table Talk 305)

The repetitions of periodical production constitute Hazlitt’s identity, rendering him unfit for everything else, yet also estranging him from himself. He reads his own alienated thoughts in the periodicals and those engraved in his own appearance, both in his body and in print. The empirical question, “What is it to me that I can write these TableTalks?” raises the issue of the meaning of labor to the laborer who surrenders the artifact of his production and converts it into what it was doomed to become as the precondition for it being produced, namely a commodity in the futures market of periodical publication. For all their differences, Wordsworth felt the same tensions of possession and circulation; Henry Crabbe Robinson recorded a remark by Southey that Wordsworth “has by him poems that would be universally admired, but he has a miserly feeling concerning them, as if by being published they would cease to be his own” (I:34). Hazlitt and Wordsworth, whose writings were stylistically marked as autobiographical, both had recourse to seemingly contradictory strategies for maintaining textual possession, withholding publication and incessant republication. The former approach retains the writing as a private possession that was, legally, held in perpetual copyright and acted as a totem of identity. The latter, incessant republication with reordered essays or poems, revisions, compilations, and so on, acknowledged the reiterative structure of a public identity. Perpetual reappearance before readers and critics was, if not a genuine identity, then a convincing simulation of it, and thereby a claim to self-possession. In Table Talk, Hazlitt poses, as an essay title, the question of “Whether Actors Ought to Sit in the Boxes,” and answers, in the first sentence, “I think not.” His reasoning begins with the observation that “[a]ctors belong to the public; their persons are not their own property,” just as Hazlitt lacks “property” in his works. Typical of his essays on identity, after such a firm assertion, Hazlitt complicates his argument with examples that destabilize the notion of a public performer’s identity and his own role as an intermediary—as a critic—between the public and those actors whose work he frames. An actor’s “person” belongs to a public, to whom the actor has an obligation “not to disturb this borrowed impression by unmasking before company,” but the language here of a “borrowed impression” that can be “unmasked” reveals that just as the actor’s possession of his personhood is an illusion so too is the public’s. Like the periodical

120

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

writer who performs under an implied contract with his reader, an actor “should repel idle curiosity, and by a certain deference to the public, in whom he has inspired certain prejudices which he is covenanted not to break.” This contract to uphold an illusion is necessary to the integrity of the text; once the actor has taken “the responsibility of heroes and lovers on himself,” he should not appear in the boxes “with a plain-cut coat, to say—‘What fools you all were!—I am not Hamlet the Dane!’ ” (Table Talk 272–3). Hazlitt’s first extended example, however, contradicts his rule. Charles Matthews may, “with strict propriety,” “after he has been imitating his inimitable Scotchwoman,” “slip out as quick as lightning, and appear in the side box shaking hands with our old friend Jack Bannister.” Because Matthews is “imitating” the “inimitable,” he is performing an impossible task, and that makes his performance the focus of the audience’s attention; there is “no imaginary spell broken—no discontinuity of thought or sentiment” because “he had been before us in his own person during a great part of the evening.” In comedy, the illusion of all drama can be exposed and the claim of individual identity registered before the public. Tragedy, by contrast, requires sustained illusion, because the meaningful personality is not that of the actor, but that of the playwright’s character. Once again, Hazlitt’s illustration is ambiguous. Observing the rule that “a cut” to actor and audience occurs when “any part of an actor’s dress comes off unexpectedly,” he notes an exception: “It has been considered as one of the triumphs of Garrick’s tragic power, that once, when he was playing Lear, his crown of straw came off, and nobody laughed or took the least notice, so much had he identified himself with the character.” For lesser actors, costuming is a necessary component for the illusion of identification, but for a great actor, the costume is superfluous because the actor’s deeper identification with the character compels the audience’s identification as well. But this depth is an illusion; Hazlitt continues, “Was he, after this, to pay so little respect to the feelings he had inspired, as to tear off his tattered robes, and take the old, crazed king with him to play the fool in the boxes?” (273). Hazlitt poses for an actor a dilemma between the acquisition of fame on stage and its exploitation within other public spheres. “An actor,” he maintains, “like a king, should only appear on state occasions.” This remark, written in 1821, is a commentary at once on the actor and the king. If, as the Examiner, for which Hazlitt was writing frequently, acknowledged, the orchestration of the king’s coronation was a triumph of pageantry, the king’s appearances in public seemed

R e p e at i ng Se lv e s

121

certain to undermine his public self by exposing a private being. In antithetical fashion, Hazlitt notes, that a public person “loses popularity by too much publicity” (274), and alludes to George IV’s extravagant and expensive coronation by associating it with a staged romance: “Ordinary transactions do not give scope to grace and dignity like romantic situations, or prepared pageants.” This political subtext, rehearsing the continuities between state and stage, is consonant with Hazlitt’s Humean bent, in which reality is a performed reiterative practice, the success of which depends upon the illusions of scale: “I do not see how with his crown, or plume of feathers, he can get through those little box-doors without stooping and squeezing his artificial importance to tatters.” Hazlitt’s emphasis on proportion corresponds not just to his sense of the performative nature of identity, but of its connection to repetition and representation within the commercial society that craves extravagance. As critics across disciplines have noted, “economic man,” serves as a “figural representation of ‘possessive individualism,’ ” which “becomes a central model for virtually all British social and economic theory from Hobbes” into the “late romantic period” (Heinzelman 160). What are the consequences of a self-consciousness that recognizes no possessive possibilities in his individualism, as in Hazlitt’s representation in “On Character”? Although less extravagantly, the Table Talk essays explore the same dynamic as Liber Amoris in which H. recognizes selfhood as a struggle to simultaneously speak his way into being and to, thereby, gain S. as audience, lover, possession.5 H. “becomes my own man” at the instant the Scottish courts have written him free of his wife, and he immediately supplements the claim by adding “and your’s ever” to P—, who represents the stabilizing homosocial friendships of the periodical world that H. requires. This supplemental gesture of anchoring his independent being with a fellow writer characterizes self-identification as a social enterprise. Within the narrative, in which H. fails to gain S., he can maintain his own selfhood only within the complete circulation of letters, images, and declarations of masculinity. For Hazlitt himself, as Benjamin Haydon viewed him, only publication would have allowed the management of an excess that would have destroyed his mind: He talks of nothing else day and night. He has written down all the conversations without color, literal as they happened; he has preserved all the love-letters, many of which are equal to anything of the sort, and really affecting ; and I believe, in order to ease his soul of this burden, means, with certain arrangements, to publish it as a tale of

122

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

character. He will sink into idiotcy if he does not get rid of it. Poor Hazlitt! (II:75).

Both Liber Amoris and Table Talk explore the psychological limits of the claim made in Principles of Human Action, that, in Heinzelman’s sharp paraphrase implies, “Interest is only real when the desired object appears to this ‘extended consciousness’ as projective and futural, a ‘thing’ of thought and imagination, not objective and memorial; and the self is only authentic when interest in selfhood no longer constitutes the principal subject” (164). For Hazlitt as a professional writer, the vision of a self free from possession is constrained by the periodical industry; the self—the residual “pain” that is left when the “benefits” have been distributed—is belated. This belatedness perpetuates a crisis of presence, one aspect of which is the dynamic between a fiction of the immediacy of speech and writing as its secondary solidification. Because the solidification is necessary for language to operate as a commodity, speech becomes structured through writing. As a written genre, table-talk precedes the speech on which it seems to depend, and so undermines the immediacy that Hazlitt’s antithetical style is intended to signal; he records no prior conversation but stylistically impersonates his own speech. Hazlitt recognizes his reliance on a system of literary production that drains him of his properties, in the multiple senses of profits, rights, and traits. Elsewhere, he reemphasizes the peculiarity of reading one’s own work in print, and how it fractures identity across the stages of the material production—reading proof, answering an editor, and listening anonymously to public discussions of his works. In this experience, “Hazlitt” or “W.H.” is as much a pseudonym for him as Elia is for Charles Lamb. The relation of identity to repetition for periodical writers was institutionally based. Professionals working at a per-sheet wage required continual reappearance; the colloquy of writing, review, and response entailed the production and reproduction of one’s names— and those of allies and nemeses—until, as Hazlitt points out, the writer’s identity becomes an extension of his textual productions. Once, Hazlitt argues in the Examiner, this situation directed the writer toward posterity and future fame, one could imagine becoming coextensive with one’s works and living through them. But, he argues, the periodical industry—in which his own writing thrived, and in opposition to which he produced much successful work—has co-opted the function of the future: “The spirit of universal criticism has superseded the anticipation of posthumous fame, and instead of waiting for the reward of distant ages, the poet and prose-writer

R e p e at i ng Se lv e s

123

receives his final doom from the next number of the ‘Edinburgh’ or ‘Quarterly Review’ ” (“On Different Sorts of Fame” 136). This transformation propels spiraling demand for immediacy, the equivalent of “prompt payment,” so that the writer “in a weekly journal engages with reluctance in a monthly publication.” This addictive paradigm ends with an example of writing yielding to speech, thus positioning “actual” table-talk as a genre of writing: We, indeed, have known a man of genius and eloquence, to whom, from a habit of excessive talking, the certainty of seeing what he wrote in print the next day was too remote a stimulus for his imagination, and who constantly laid aside his pen in the middle of an article, if a friend dropped in, to finish the subject more effectually aloud. (136)

By supplanting future fame, the periodical industry imposes on the writer, as his own self-image, the expectation of consumption, of possessing and devouring a reader/auditor. In the context of Hazlitt’s own debts (and Coleridge’s, the unnamed “man of genius”), the writer is an exemplar of those economic “men of the world” who, as De Quincey wrote to Blackwood, “never write long letters: so much have post offices and other civil arrangements multiplied the claims upon every man standing like you in a public situation” (Ainsworth 262). Hazlitt and De Quincey reverse the role of producer and consumer from Wordsworth’s formulation in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in which readers suffer the “craving for extraordinary incident, which rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.” For Hazlitt, writing provokes an increasing need for immediacy of audience, because that audience is always mediated by indirect signs such as reviews and sales figures. Hazlitt’s own experience, as he described it in the 1821 Table Talk, underscored his own economic vulnerability to literary representation: After a diatribe in the —— [Quarterly Review], (which is taken in by a gentleman who occupies my old apartment on the first floor) my landlord brings me his bill (of some standing), and on my offering to give him so much in money, and a note of hand for the rest, shakes his head, and says, he is afraid he could make no use of it. … It is in vain for me to endeavour to explain that the publication in which I am abused is a mere government engine. (284)

This narrative records a complicated dynamic, since the “money,” like the Quarterly, operates as a government engine. Paper money

124

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

depended on the reliability of the government. As the periodicals that defended paper money since the 1797 crisis recognized, however, the reverse was also true; as paper money became increasingly entrenched in the economy, it developed a commodified status, and the credit of the government was, through continual reiteration, reified into an indisputable presence. The government could weave rags into gold. Hazlitt aligns his own credit and writing against that of the government and, though he proposes this struggle as unwinnable, in redeploying the narrative in “On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority” he continues the struggle within periodical culture. Hazlitt’s representation of the periodical industry as a monolith against which he stood in valiant opposition was a scheme to exploit the periodical industry’s susceptibility to its conflicting representations. If the Edinburgh stood for judgmental objectivity, Cobbett’s Political Register highlighted the rhetorical dimension of that objectivity. If a Review could claim to classify a poet, then a clever poet could transform that Review (and the notion of reviewing) through his next poem. Although Blackwood’s and the Quarterly could reduce Hazlitt’s market value through “libels,” Hazlitt could repackage the conflict in the London to recoup his losses. Cobbett’s own self-representations in the Register fed on his appearances in other periodicals, allowing him to occupy diverse social identities; as Peter Manning explains, the “mobility of Cobbett’s rhetoric, ventriloquizing speakers from the bottom of the social scale to the top, discloses both the disintegration of the eighteenth-century public sphere into competing class interests and Cobbett’s determination to speak across the rifts between them” (“Touring” 82). If the periodicals sought to define social spheres, such as linguistics and political economy, their project depended on other institutions, the “ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples,” in Wordsworth’s expansive metonymy of London’s architectural and economic terrain.6 If the self is an unstable structure, then the institutions that produce selfhood are correspondingly destabilized. The self, as both a concept and an experience, performs rhetorical labor. James Hogg worked hard to become the Ettrick Shepherd, just as Charles Lamb struggled both to be and not be Elia and Thomas de Quincey devoted his life and body to becoming the English OpiumEater.7 For these writers, as Elsbeth Probyn says in Sexing the Self, “The self is an ensemble of techniques and practices enacted on an everyday basis [that] entails the necessary problemization of these practices” (2). The process of particularization is the process of living, and even moments of achieved identity can be fraught with loss. After Scott first publicly acknowledged his authorship of the Waverley novels,

R e p e at i ng Se lv e s

125

to the tremendous applause of the Edinburgh literary community, he complimented the actor, Charles McKay, who reveled in having “a compliment paid to him by the Great Unknown.” “The Small Known, now,” Scott replied (Lockhart II:565). To be known is to be reduced. Once known, Scott turned to collecting his novels, as he had once sought out Scottish ballads, into a finished and contained set. He echoes Steele, who announced in his final Tatler that, having written enough Papers to republish as a four-volume set, he would cease publication: “The work has indeed for some Time been disagreeable to me, and the Purpose of it wholly lost by my being so long understood as the author” (Addison and Steele 130). Being pseudonymous allowed Steele (along with his coterie of authors) to form the composite of Isaac Bickerstaff, “an Old Man, a Philosopher, an Humorist, an Astrologer, and a Censor,” while Steele’s own “character” was “at best but pardonable” and so could make “but an indifferent Progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable Vices” (130). For Scott, as for Steele, pseudonymity did not drain the text of authorship, but allowed him to script the persona of the author at a remove from biographical limitations. Francis Jeffrey’s anonymity as the Edinburgh Reviewer, in contrast to Scott’s in the Waverley novels, did not obscure his presence but broadened it both across contributors (who complained about their work being edited beyond recognition) and across other journals that adopted the Edinburgh’s standards of professionalism. The seeming erasure of identity for Jeffrey transformed it into an objective voice that secured editorial power. Hazlitt experienced literary anonymity in yet another way. Among the libels against Hazlitt was the imputation that he had been “expelled” from the Edinburgh. Writing to Hazlitt, Jeffrey acknowledges that the imputation is “quite false”; he added, however, that because “it is against our principles to proclaim or acknowledge any name among our contributors, I cannot give you a formal warrant for saying so” (Constable II:220–21). In the next paragraph, Jeffrey comments on an article by Hazlitt to appear in the next issue, and at the time of this letter Jeffrey had already advanced Hazlitt £100 against future articles. This anecdote reveals the extent to which the coherence of the Edinburgh Reviewer as an anonymous compilation of talent provided flexibility, but also multiplied voices; no “formal” language is available to denounce what, in another register, is patently false. The ensemble of techniques and practices that constitute selfcreation is historically specific. Thomas Spragens, writing about the liberal ideology of individualism formulated in the later eighteenth century, noted that within liberalism the “problems of political theory,

126

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

then, tend to take the form of answers to the question What, given the nature of man, is the appropriate way to order political society? The nature of man, in turn, is very importantly defined by his knowing capabilities” (12). Yet, as philosophers of the period acknowledged, assessing those “knowing capabilities” depended upon a system of investigation and evidence that presumed a certainty of the social “nature of man”; as Hume recognized, the postulation of a state of nature was only a convenient fiction to ground the corollary fiction of social contract. The solution to this epistemological impasse was to produce the body politic as the site at which personal identity was stabilized. Locke’s foundational gesture of grounding human identity within a textual metaphor—as a tabula rasa—was reiterated by those thinkers who provided the intellectual background for the Romantic periodical industry. To consider the mind as “white paper, void of all characters” implies the necessity of it being scripted within the defined reiterative characters that constitute a linguistic system. What Jon Klancher has said about readers in the decades following the 1790s applies equally to writers: “In an inescapably historical world subject to the creation and destruction nineteenth-century readers were learning to appreciate in the most quotidian way, popular writing must be constructed on the wreckage of the past for a modern, harshly demanding, commodity buying public” (Making 45). Further, the production of the world as “inescapably historical” was an achievement of political, legal, and literary institutions determined to resituate Great Britain in the aftermath of the French Revolution. That the past was something gone—wrecked, superseded, used up, or played out—was not an ontological position, but a restructuring of temporality under the sign of consumption. William Hazlitt recognized that accepting (or resisting) this attitude toward the past had consequences for how a writer constituted his relation to his work, his audience, and his self. Comparing Scott and Byron in The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt writes: If Sir Walter Scott may be thought by some to have been “Born universal heir to all humanity,” it is plain Lord Byron can set up no such pretension. He is, in a striking degree, the creature of his own will. . . . Lord Byron’s verse glows like a flame, consuming everything in its way; Sir Walter Scott’s glides like a river, clear, gentle, harmless. . . . The productions of the Northern Bard have the rust and freshness of antiquity about them; those of the Noble Poet cease to startle from their extreme ambition of novelty, both in style and manner. Sir Walter’s rhymes are “silly sooth”—“And dally with the innocence of thought, / Like the old age”—his Lordship’s Muse spurns the olden time and affects all the

R e p e at i ng Se lv e s

127

supercilious airs of a modern fine lady and an upstart. The object of the one writer is to restore us to truth and nature: the other chiefly thinks how he shall display his own power.(161–2)

Hazlitt reproduces Byron’s own representations. Regarding Don Juan, he writes, “You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself” (173). Yet Byron has already explained his method of emotional disguise in similar echoing terms: “And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / ‘Tis that I may not weep” (IV.4.1–2). Byron’s “Muse despises reference,” because his status within the world of letters condemned him to referentiality; Christensen glosses the reference of “referent” as the Humean position of a self being inexorably adrift on the thoughts, sentiments, and ideas of others (LBS 4). Hazlitt understood that Scott and Byron were responding to the heteroglossic condition of their times, in which their own voices were laden with the words of others. The dependency in eighteenth-century political economy between self-identity and language systems implicit in metaphors such as tabula rasa and social contract was reshaped in the Romantic period. “Jeffrey and Co,” Wordsworth’s delineation of the reviewing corporation, seized possibilities implicit within an epistemological crisis that revealed a “self” instituted within a matrix of consumption and production.8 An illustration of this contingent understanding of identity, echoing the negotiations between the real and the ideal in E.S. Barrett’s The Heroine, is the case of James Scott, a “strange-looking, bald-headed, bluff little man, that practised as a dentist,” who, according to James Hogg, “for utter ignorance of everything literary . . . was not to be matched among a dozen street porters with ropes around their necks” (Author’s Life 77). When Lockhart and company started publishing songs and ballads under his name, Scott “could not resist going into the delusion”; when the “literary gentry [of Liverpool] got up a public dinner in honour of his great and versatile genius,” Scott “very coolly accepted the compliment” (78). This hoax, for Hogg, is possible only because of the correspondences between British class structure (with its gentry and porters) and the literary culture; both rely upon systems of representation that are subject to manipulation, and within which individuals experience their own identity.9 Although the periodical procedures seem to be composed of unstable and stable features, even those seeming stable are subject to manipulation. For example, in general, a book is written first and subsequently reviewed. Blackwood’s Magazine, however, reviewed “Peter’s Letters to His Kinfolk” with such success that, having

128

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

invented the author as a “certain Dr. Peter Morris,” John Lockhart was “induced to complete ‘Peter’s Letters,’ which Blackwood published (as a second edition!) and it soon reached a third” (Noctes x). Though a lark, this narrative recognizes that reading any book, or—as the sum of books—any author, involves a serial structure in which the book presumes its periodical reiteration; in this sense, the review of “Peter’s Letter’s” might be regarded, to paraphrase Victor Shlovsky on Tristram Shandy, as the most typical review in English literature, and James Scott as its most typical author. The periodical industry set out to define the perceptual frames for experiencing other writing, speech, and language. As an evaluative structure, the review compares a work to its generic ideal, which logically precedes the work as the standard against which it is measured. This ideal, however, results from the organization of prior texts into prescriptive universals by critics, collected editions, and the authorial sign as a particularizing mark (the Shakespearean, the Johnsonian, the Byronic).10 Coleridge, “adopt[ing] the words which Mr. Wordsworth once used to Longman,” wrote to Blackwood, regarding becoming a contributor to Maga, “You pay others, Sir! For what they write; but you must pay me likewise for what I do not write: for it is this (i.e., the omissions, erasures, &c) that costs me most both Time & Toil” (CLC 917). Scott the dentist wrote only omissions, and the First Edition of Peter’s Letters was all erasures. The identity of the writer enacted a general concept of a human being caught between expression and erasure, and the space of that enactment was the shadows of the periodicals.

Chapter 5

L or d B y ron a mong t h e R e v i e w s

There was a devil of a review of him [Leigh Hunt] in the Quarterly a year ago, which he answered. All answers are imprudent: but, to be sure, poetical flesh and blood must have the last word—that’s certain. I thought, and think, highly of his Poem; but I warned him of the row his favourite antique phraseology would bring him into. —Lord Byron, BLJ 5:211 Believe me there is no Character talked of in this Country as yours is—it is the constant theme of all classes & your portrait is engraved & painted & sold in ever town troughout the Kingdom . . . —Murray to Byron, March 19, 1819, Letters of John Murray, 267

Becoming Lord Byron According to both Shelley and Byron—Shelley writing with accusatory sentimentality in Adonais and Byron with self-congratulatory jesting in Don Juan—the periodicals killed John Keats. An early biographer of Byron, John Galt, makes a related claim about Byron: With title, wealth, and genius blest, The noble Byron knows no rest; From clime to clime, he flies in vain, Nor finds a refuge from his pain. Is love, rejected love the cause,

130

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y Perfidious friendship, or the laws? Or does the moon control his blood? Ah no. What then? His books reviewed. John Galt, “Epigram” (Autobiography 123)

Although reviews were not fatal to Byron, Galt proposes that they were instrumental to his public persona, to his restlessness, to a deformation that Galt associates with Byron’s “singular scowl” (GLB Chs. 8 and 24 and Autobiography 118).1 They are the unexpected, yet mundanely anticlimactic, solution to Byron’s dejection. Galt’s short phrases—“rejected loves,” “perfidious friendships,” “laws”—refer to sweeping biographical events, indicating his confidence in his reader’s ability to decode details of the putatively private (though relentlessly public) life: failed relationships such as his affair with Caroline Lamb, embarrassingly overt rejections including the one by his eventual wife, encounters with laws of copyright and custody, possible madness. The abrupt juxtaposition in the last line shifts what seems possible causes, such as “Perfidious friendship,” to an effect of “His books reviewed.” The word “books,” not “poems,” highlights the material products of Murray, Hunt, and other publishers.2 Galt’s epigram constructs a Byron aligned with Childe Harold, and then shifts to a Byron exposed as an industrial product of the publishing empire. In contrast to Childe Harold’s experience of singing when “deem’d he no strange ear was listening” (CHP I.13.4), Byron’s poetic enterprise is structured through his engagements with the periodicals, the “strange ear” that heard and overheard, the eye that viewed and reviewed. Galt’s humor reduces a complex set of impulses into the single cause of the reviews, as if the Edinburgh’s attack on Hours of Idleness summoned a fully formed Byronic persona. Galt’s biography, like Thomas Moore’s, demonstrates, however, that Byron’s career of periodical opposition was composed of repetitions and variations of earlier fantasies of opposition and conquest in literary, social, and sexual domains. He balanced a penchant for secrets— his affair with his half-sister Augusta, the undisclosed offense of Lord Grey, acts of private charity—with the compulsion for public recognition, and even the existence of these secrets, if not their details, was incorporated into the public myth of “Lord Byron.”3 Byron was crafting his identity prior to any critical notice of his poetry, by imagining confrontations with the periodical press and by conceiving of other confrontations as mediated through public print exchanges.

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

131

Galt associated Byron’s physical disability, his clubfoot, with his early reception by the periodicals, because both disrupt Byron’s ability to inhabit his own self- idealization: The unjust ridicule in the review of his first poems, excited in his spirit a discontent as inveterate as the feeling which sprung from his deformity: it affected, more or less, all his conceptions to such a degree that he may be said to have hated the age which had joined in the derision, as he cherished an antipathy against those persons who looked curiously at his foot. (GLB 3)4

Galt had experienced the convention of periodicals highlighting, and inventing, physical deformities to discredit writers. Reviews could analogize deformities to Scottish or Cockney accents, to grammatical or syntactic infelicities, or to coarse social skills, as in attacks on Galt’s work. Building on traditions of Homeric and Miltonic blindness as well as Oedipal lameness, Galt uses Byron to mediate his own anxieties about reviews; he offers Byron’s foot not as aberrant, but as typifying literary production. By emphasizing Byron’s animosity toward not individuals, but the “age” that, coalescing in print, “joined in the derision” of his bodily and metrical feet, Galt retrospectively synthesizes the Byronic and incorporates himself into it. Byron, by contrast, constructed his public persona through tactical engagements and uncertainties, developing a simulacrum of inevitability from a situation of unease. He lived Byronism forward, while Galt understands it backward. Byron’s body-shaping regimens of starvation, exercise, dehydration, and dress, his ostentatious sexuality, his flamboyant brooding, combined with his letters that circulated narratives of those performances, underscore his need for recognition and a rejection of that recognition in favor of a private version of self. As Christine Jones has shown, the “visual” presentations of Byron, through portraits and his own presence in drawing rooms, complemented the literary enterprise of Byronism; Byron pursued his “look” by “means of weight control, clothes, fashion and costume,” in addition to “his interaction with the many portraits made of him during his lifetime” (110). Although no single trauma explains his receptiveness to the periodicals’ gaze, early anecdotes project the semiotic shape of his susceptibility. Thomas Moore recounts the story of the day after “little Byron’s accession to the title.” Aged ten, he ran up to his mother and asked her, “whether she perceived any difference in him since he had been made a lord, as he perceived none

132

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

in himself:” a quick and natural thought; but the child little knew what a total and talismanic change had been wrought in all his future relations with society, by the simple addition of that word before his name. (I:30; my emphasis).

The father dead as a precondition of lordship, the child “appeals,” as Jerome Christensen notes, “to his mother for a verdict that she—a Gordon, a woman, a mother—cannot legitimately give” (LBS 18). Moore does not leave this moment as an impasse, but shifts scenes to the homosocial, complementary realm of the school where Byron responds to the “addition” of lordship. During roll, his name was “called out with the title of ‘Dominus,’ ” and he, “unable to give utterance to the usual answer, ‘adsum,’ ” instead “stood silent amid the general stare of his school-fellows, and, at last, burst into tears” (I:30). He inadvertently models for his fellows the transformative power of “dominus” as a defining supplement. Lordship strips Byron of the “usual answer,” as it places him in a different relationship to interrogation. The excess of emotional response, Byron’s public tears, demonstrates an inadequacy of adsum—“I am here”—to express Byron’s new, textualized being, a creation he needs to learn. In Moore’s sequence, Byron first attempts to perceive the difference in a reflection or visual inspection; failing that, he seeks it in his mother’s response, and finally finds it in public space. The title linguistically corrected his clubfoot, despite his mother’s early mythology that the foot itself destined him to greatness (Moore I:28), and allowed him to imaginatively substitute the entire ancestry of the Lords Byron for his absent and spendthrift father.5 Throughout his career, Byron would compel a repetition of the moment in the school, in which others—reviewers, critics, friends—would identify him amid the “general stare” of the public. Pseudo-anonymity of publications produced this effect as a convention of Byronism. The redirection of the public “stare” from his foot to his title was never complete, as Hazlitt’s conceptualization of aggregate identity predicates. Before Byron was certifiably famous and despite the importance of such public certification to him, the fame he imagined relied on the disseminating power of periodicals.6 In 1805, having completed his final Speech Day at Harrow, in which he recited from King Lear, he wrote to his sister Augusta about the event, narrating through the mediating specter of the press: I presume you were rather surprised not to see my consequential name in the papers amongst the orators of our 2nd speech day, but

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

133

unfortunately some wit who had formerly been at Harrow, suppressed the merits of Long, Farrer and myself, who were always supposed to take the Lead in Harrow eloquence, and by way of a hoax thought proper to insert a panegyric on those speakers who were really and truly allowed to have rather disgraced than distinguished themselves, of course for the wit of the thing, the best were left out and the worst inserted, which accounts for the Gothic omission of my superior talents . . . . These are disappointments we great men are liable to, and we must learn to bear them with philosophy, especially when they arise from attempts at wit. (BLJ 1:72–3)7

Byron’s mocking tone and many of his underlines—“consequential,” “superior talents,” “great men”—announce and retract his fame. The phrase “Consequential name” locates his importance in the sequential naming in the papers. As Paul Elledge observes, “[T]he absentee [Augusta] needed to hear it [the speech] acclaimed” (155). Unable to declaim the Lear speech to her, he resorts to acclaiming it, by mobilizing the failure of the newspaper to do so. This dynamic, in which Byron impersonates, in an attempt to interpret and transform, periodicals runs throughout his poetry, from early references in Hours of Idleness to his comparisons of Don Juan with “gazettes” (referenced in Cantos I, VII, VIII, IX, XIII, and XV). Impersonation, in a private letter to Augusta, of the missing recognition complemented his project of shaping himself, literarily, politically, bodily, into his own idealized image. Byron’s earliest volume, the privately printed Fugitive Pieces (1806) commenced with a disclaimer that the poems were “never intended to meet the public eye” (the metonymy that came into vogue in the later eighteenth century). Despite the “indulgence” he anticipates from the “few friends” who will read the volume, Byron adds that “as most of them were composed between the age of 15 and 17, their defects will be pardoned or forgotten, in the youth and inexperience of the Writer” (CWB I:363). Since his friends knew his age, this apologetic supplement evinces Byron’s inability to conceive of the publication as entirely local; the structure of poetry looks, to use terms he would invoke in the Preface to Hours of Idleness, beyond “verbal” critics to “periodical.” The first sentence is echoed in the opening phrase of the Hours of Idleness Preface, “in submitting to the public eye the following collection,” a continuity that underscores Byron’s trajectory toward public recognition. This trajectory proceeded by fits and starts as Byron negotiated the contradictory figure of the poetic lord at a moment when poetry, like reviewing, was professionalizing. While awaiting the public response

134

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

to the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, and characteristically denying any interest in the response, Byron wrote to Moore: Did you read [Leigh Hunt’s] skimble-skamble about [Wordsworth] being at the head of his own profession, in the eyes of those who followed it? I thought that poetry was an art, or an attribute, and not a profession;—but be it one, is that ****** at the head of your profession in your eyes? . . . He is the only one of us (but of us he is not) whose coronation I would oppose. (BLJ 6:47)

Byron resists the professionalizing spirit that he associates with Wordsworth and the mechanism of such professionalization through reviewers—the “eyes of those who followed it”—in favor of an appeal to Moore as fellow poet. His claim that poetry is “an art, or an attribute” positions poetry to manifest personality. Even hypothesizing poetry as a profession, Byron’s language reverts to the aristocratic scene of a coronation as the guiding metaphor.

Hobbling toward Lordship Byron’s fame occurred within a literary marketplace, in which periodicals provided indirect patronage (the efficiency of which, in terms of sales, remained conjectural but was unequivocally declared by authors and reviews). Throughout his early career from Hours of Idleness through Childe Harold I&II, Byron correlates his embattled position against the periodicals with his effort to envision his own form of lordship. This aristocratic fantasy depended on an illusion of the executory “strength” of speech acts (Christensen, LBS 4), despite Byron’s recognition that the House of Lords was increasingly juridical. Its procedures and attitudes were significantly shaped by the judicial and judicious Lord Chancellor Eldon, whose own public character was closely aligned with the medical treatment of the king and the economic management of the Prince of Wales, the two principal vestiges of the monarchic executive power from which lordship derived its sanction. During his minority, Byron rehearsed and anticipated the problem of converting himself into a romanticized figure of a lord. He discovered that the mere announcement of his status, as May Gray had done on his first venture to Newstead (“[A]nd this is he, bless him!”; Moore I:37) could not confer that status; it required continual persuasive repetition, but perplexingly, such repetition was formally identical to parody. Poetry provided an outlier space where he could perform the lordship no longer available to the aristocracy,

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

135

yet once he determined to publish, he encountered the juridical machinery of booksellers and periodical review; as Hazlitt observed, he learned to “travestie” himself as an evasive maneuver. Like Moore and Galt, Jerome McGann, Jerome Christensen, and other critics have noted the galvanizing effect on Byron of the Edinburgh’s criticism of Hours of Idleness. His reaction consolidated biographical tendencies established with Hours of Idleness (1807) and the two privately printed predecessors, and in responses to earlier reviews, negative and positive, of Hours.8 This biographical accretion emphasizes Byron’s awareness of criticism as a publicizing activity, one through which he imagined his own status, even when dealing with private critiques and local rumors in the tight-knit community of Southwell. Willis W. Pratt estimates that no “more than half a dozen copies of Fugitive Pieces were ever circulated in Southwell,” and that the criticism that coerced Byron to withdraw the volume stemmed from two sources: first, Byron’s friend Thomas Becher and, second, the conglomerate of “callers at the Becher and Pigot houses” whose “censures” spread “through the town” and those “self-appointed critics, many of whom he was sure condemned his book upon hearsay” (41). Byron answered these criticisms of Fugitive Pieces in two contrasting poems. The response to Thomas Becher differs in tone and rhetoric from those aimed at the crowd which, in Willis Pratt’s description, included “several Southwell fathers . . . considerably outraged by what they felt were uncomplimentary allusions to the ardent natures of their daughters” (42). This division between critical friends and paternalistic critics anticipates a distinction between two types of readers for his later work, those who are his friends (or imagine themselves as such) and a reading public mediated by publishers and reviews.9 The poems traded between Byron and Becher modulate Byron’s anger into a respectful, if condescending, artistry. Becher had expressed his reservations about the poems’ “guilty luster” and “amorous lay” in drab couplets that formally reinforce the claims of moderation: Enhance thy native worth [Becher urges Byron], and proudly twine, With Britain’s Honors, those that are divine. (Pratt 38)

Flattering in predicting a wider audience for Byron’s future poems, this closing couplet uses that flattery to reclaim the word and concept of “divine” from the amorous register into which Byron had used it repeatedly, if conventionally for the lyric genre, in Fugitive Pieces.

136

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Quizzing John Pigot in “To the Sighing Strephon,” Byron had conceded in mock apology: Since your beautiful maid, Your flame has repaid, No more I your folly regret; She’s now most divine, And I bow at the shrine, Of this quickly reforméd coquette. (7–12)10

“Divine” acts as nearly synonymous with sexual willingness, in opposition to prudish coquetry. Her “shrine” becomes a site of male homosociality that authorizes the poem’s continual shifting between the speaker’s and addressee’s sexual, seductive, and verbal practices. Byron’s response to Becher’s objections appeared as an “Answer to Some Elegant Verses Sent by A Friend of the Author, complaining that one of his descriptions was rather too warmly drawn.” Written in answering couplets, the poem is a defense of poetic agency: Precepts of prudence curb, but can’t controul The fierce emotions of the flowing soul. When Love’s delirium haunts the glowing mind, Limping Decorum lingers far behind; Vainly the dotard mends her prudish pace, Outstript and vanquish’d in the mental chace. (9–14)

On a small scale proportional to Byron’s neophyte lyric development, the poem attempts a poetics of the body and a somatics of poetry. Just as the prude(nt) “precepts” seek to regulate the poet, the rhythm of line nine is governed by its hard plosives (p, c, t, b) breaking it into distinctive feet, in contrast to the subsequent line that flows with soft alliterations and sibilance. Byron opens both lines twelve and thirteen with disrupting trochees, “Limping,” and “Vainly.” The image of Decorum first limping and then vainly (in both senses) mending her pace associates the personified figure with Byron’s own body, but not his “flowing soul.” Byron concedes some justice to Becher’s accusations, but insists that the alternative to his “too warmly drawn” verses is a “nerveless, frigid song, / The ceaseless echo of the rhyming throng” (20–21). Warm verse is personal rather than a “ceaseless echo,” a phrase that obliquely registers the commercial enterprise of professional poetry and the déclassé status of its “throng.” Byron

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

137

recognizes that Becher’s complaints are less about a reluctance to expose readers to lust than about the decorum of shielding some of those readers (and Byron himself?) from accusations of lasciviousness, whether real, imagined, or plausible. When Becher implores Byron, “Forbear to taint the Virgin’s spotless mind,” of less significance is the conventional accusation of the poetry as deflowering the mind than the covert charge that the “taint” is in the exposure of the not spotless, if still possibly, Virginal, body.11 A week after “Answer,” Byron wrote “To a Knot of Ungenerous Critics,” which directly connects the local response and an imagined public grounded in periodical culture. This poem, written with the dashed-off effect of tetrameter couplets, opens with two trochaic substitutions that establish the growlingly alliterative “r” sounds that run through the poem: Rail on, Rail on, ye heartless crew! My strains were never meant for you; Remorseless Rancour still reveal, And damn the verse you cannot feel. (1–4)

This effusion generalizes the critics as a collective “crew.” Either indifferent to the somatic effects of poetry or wishing to repress them, they respond with rage because this abundant false emotion compensates for lacking the genuine sympathy of feeling verse. Unlike Becher, who felt the “warmth” of Byron’s “descriptions,” these “ungenerous critics” appear as the repressive, punning negation of a “knot.”12 The poem combines from The Dunciad and Essay on Criticism Alexander Pope’s disdain for criticism that adheres to mere rules and critics guided by their desire for cultural power and self-regard. This poem, which Byron showed to Elizabeth Pigot but chose not to publish, shifts between an urge to operate on the scale of the commercial and imperial Pope, and the safer task of adapting Pope to the compass of Southwell. Simultaneously with the revisions that Byron undertook for wider publication, he embarked on a regimen of “violent exercise, much physic, and hot bathing” (April 1807; BLJ 1:117; see also 1:119 and 122–3). This coordinated honing of body and poetry prepared him for his debut in London, an event, or rather a process, that “On Leaving Newstead Abbey” and “Elegy on Newstead Abbey” had mythologized through their elegiac anachronism. In “Leaving Newstead Abbey,” the poem that began all four editions of the Hours

138

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

sequence, he theorizes fame as a fulfillment and extension of history and as a duty coextensive with lordship. McGann hypothesizes that the poem was written in November 1803, when Byron left Newstead for Southwell, but its appearance in Hours of Idleness generalizes the moment of departure into Byron’s emergence on the public stage. The poem opens by addressing the physical Newstead, “Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay” (2), and the first five stanzas contrast past Byronic military grandeur with current disintegration. Robert de Byron, whose “harp-stringing numbers / Raise[d] a flame in the breast, for the war-laurelled wreath” (9–10), now lies “Unnerv’d” by death. The final stanzas shift in address from Newstead to his ancestors: Abroad, or at home, your remembrance imparting New courage, he’ll think upon glory, and you. ... Far distant he goes, with the same emulation, The fame of his Fathers he ne’er can forget. That fame, and that memory, still will he cherish; He vows that he ne’er will disgrace your renown: Like you will he live, or like you will he perish; When decay’d, may he mingle his dust with your own! (23–32)

Identification with his ancestors occurs only in death; the term “decay” connecting the dust of the Byronic bodies to the “decay[ed]” (2) walls of Newstead. Distanced from himself by the third-person pronoun, Byron’s existence can be only the simulacrum of former glory, living or perishing, while his ancestors necessarily did both, their aristocratic allegiances unifying the acts of living and dying. As McGann has observed, phrases such as “Abroad, or at home” denote the “thoroughly conventional Grand Tour” (15–16) rather than military exploits, and signal the poem’s central elision, the loss of a domain of heroism. The adventure implied by “Far distant he goes” becomes incalculable; is “far distant” Harrow, Burbage, Southwell, Cambridge, London, the House of Lords, the anticipated European grand tour, or the journey to India for which Byron sought a passport? All these locations shrink to insignificance beside the grandeur of the Crusades. What is the space of modern lordship? This poem anticipates Byron’s need to translate his European travels into Childe Harold’s pilgrimage as an act of deliberate anachronism.

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

139

Byron published Hours of Idleness in hopes of reviews that would promote his public figure, a figure whose public function—however much alluded to in the poems—was deferred by the references in the Preface to both idleness and the poet’s minority. The Preface follows the biographical imperative that McGann has noted characterizes the volume: Byron’s effort to “realize an image of himself in the artifice of his own making.” This effort, once shifted to London publishing, becomes doubly ambivalent because his “own making” is refracted through a “concern for public recognition as a validating condition of achievement” and through “the most conventional forms of eighteenth-century psychological thought” (21). Byron uses the Preface to present the volume “as a gift” (Christensen, LBS 20). The gesture was affectation, a courtesy that revealed and undermined Byron’s yearning for an unmediated public. He represents this new audience as an extension of the mythologized readership at Southwell, considerably transformed: A considerable portion of these poems has been privately printed, at the request and for the perusal of my friends. I am sensible that the partial and frequently injudicious admiration of a social circle is not the criterion by which poetical genius is to be estimated, yet “to do greatly” we must “dare greatly”; and I have hazarded my reputation and feelings in publishing this volume. (CWB 32)13

This risk is reexpressed—“I have cross’d the Rubicon”—and disavowed—“Poetry, however, is not my primary vocation”—in the course of the Preface. Byron’s strategy toward the reviewers— his ingratiating tone and constant demurral—is manipulative; he declares his indifference but also dares them to violate Dr. Johnson’s precept: The opinion of Dr. Johnson on the poems of a noble relation of mine *[Lord Carlisle], “That when a man of rank appeared in the character of an author, he deserved to have his merit handsomely allowed,” can have little weight with verbal, and still less with periodical, censors; but were it otherwise, I should be loth to avail myself of the privilege, and would rather incur this bitterest censure of anonymous criticism, than triumph in honours granted solely to a title. (CWB 34)

Byron has established a lineage in which the “periodical censors” are the cultural descendants of the greater Dr. Johnson, bound to him just as Byron is bound to his ancestry. While he waives “privilege” as a gesture of noblesse oblige, he requires that the reviewers accept that

140

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

gift with a corresponding graciousness that, logically, precludes the “bitterest censure.” Despite Byron’s rhetoric, the reviewers were not bound by this gift economy. Rather, they acted on their professional and commercial commitments. Byron followed the reviews with attention, alluding to at least eight of the seventeen (reproduced in RR) in his extant letters. The first review appeared in the Monthly Literary Recreations, and like most of those that followed, it responds to Byron’s request to “be fairly examined, without suffering the splendour of rank” to “dazzle the critic’s eyes, and disarm his hand. We will, therefore, strive to gratify his wishes” (RR 1658). The reviewer notes that “the truth comes from friends alone, who wish to foster, and not to crush the buds of nascent genius.” Such flattery accepts Byron’s aristocratic terms and aligns the reviewer with the “friends” in the Preface who urged the publication of Hours, and whom Byron associated with Becher. Writing to Elizabeth Pigot, Byron acknowledges and extends this dance of reciprocity: I have now a review before me, entitled Literary Recreations where my hardship is applauded far beyond my deserts. I know nothing of the critic, but think him a very discerning gentleman, and myself a devilish clever fellow. His critique pleases me particularly, because it is of great length, and a proper quantum of censure is administered, just to give an agreeable relish to the praise. (BLJ I:130)

Despite his claim of being “ignorant of every other person concerned with” the journal, Byron, as Leslie Marchand points out, “was perfectly aware that the review” was part of the bookseller Benjamin Crosby’s effort to “puff his stock of books through the magazine he controlled” (BLJ 1:130 n1). Byron may be maintaining the illusion of anonymity to preserve the review’s effect on Pigot or he may not know the author. In either case, he sees his own identity crystallized—a “devilish clever fellow”—because of how the reviewer represents him, with excerpts occupying most of the review, and because the reciprocal admiration between the “very discerning gentleman” and the “devilish clever fellow” conforms to Byron’s idealization in the Preface. Most of the subsequent reviews similarly subscribed to Byronic gallantry by repeating the formula of making allowances for youth and rank, or refused to do so with such polite apology that it amounted to the same courtesy. The Universal Magazine declared, “This work offers itself to our notice with many claims to indulgence and lenity”

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

141

and ends, as “experience ventur[ing] to whisper in the ear of youth” by coaxing Byron to retract his resolution to cease publishing (RR 2309). The Critical Review, the first major periodical to notice Hours, begins by quoting Byron’s comment on the privileges Johnson accords rank, and in a witticism convoluted enough to suggest the courtesy it disavows, declares: “From a spirit of just pride, he asks for his book no allowances; from our opinion of its real merit, we offer it none” (RR 604).14 The Review in the Eclectic announced, “The notice we take of this publication, regards the author rather than the book” (RR 700), an approach justified through the mock-position of being “commoners” dazzled by Byron’s rank. The Eclectic cleverly misconstrues the Preface not as a performance of nobility, but mundanely—pretending that the words mean what to common, literalist readers they straightforwardly declared: Byron’s unabashed affirmation of amateurism. Writing to Robert Charles Dallas in a reply to Dallas’s introductory letter (and prior to their meeting), Byron commented, “Our Critical, Monthly, and Antijacobin Reviewers have been very indulgent, but the Eclectic have pronounced a furious Philippic, not against the Book, but the Author” (BLJ 1:147). He inserts this comment after a series of biographical revelations that position his character within the public realm of letters. The letter begins by disowning the “uncommonly lenient” praise of “our Periodical censors” in favor of a “tribute from a man of acknowledged Genius,” Dallas himself (BLJ 1:146). But he deflects Dallas’s efforts to read the person through the poetry (Dallas had declared: “Your Poems are not only beautiful as compositions; —they bespeak a heart glowing with honour, and attuned to virtue” [Recollections 4]). Byron insists on his “[c]ompositions speak[ing] for themselves,” a fantasy of a text not reliant on other texts, or even on the body of the author, and confesses that “my pretensions to virtue are unluckily so few . . . I cannot accept your applause in that respect.” (BLJ 1:146) But this rejection accepts the covert applause of his poetry’s ability to construct a persuasive representation of its author. He next contrasts Dallas’s extrapolations of personality with those other circulating voices: “I have already been held up as the votary of Licentiousness, and the Disciple of infidelity . . . I am made worse than I really am— — —” (1:147). Three dashes mark the end” of this reasoning, setting the “really am” as beyond exploration. Byron next changes topics from “myself (the worst theme I could pitch upon)” to “my poems.” These, in their “Second Edition” he wishes to “present” as a gift to Dallas. This moment conforms to

142

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Christensen’s observation that Byron “gives because he is obliged by the thing given him—his status, title, or blood” (LBS 19). And these “thing[s]” are given again to Byron through Dallas’s acclaim that associates the poetry with nobility. This reciprocity imagined between them occurs against the background of periodical consumption that first brought Byron’s work to Dallas’s notice.15 Byron later extended this gift to Dallas, giving him not only a copy of the second edition but the copyright to Byron’s second self, Childe Harold. At this point, however, he is still exploring lordship’s potential deflections within the commercial realm. In the “furious Philippic” of the Eclectic Reviewer Dallas “will find all I have mentioned, asserted by a Reverend Divine, who wrote the Critique” (BLJ 1:147). He positions the critic as drawing not from the book by Byron, but from the public book of Byron that is being composed. Byron ends with a joke of textual confusion: “I am afraid you will hardly be able to read this, for my hand is almost as bad, as my Character, but you will find me as legibly as possible / your obliged and obedt. Servt./ Byron.” The ambiguity of “Character”—the textual one reported, the one evident to Dallas in the poems, the composer of this letter?— becomes scripted into Byron’s poor hand, a metonym for writing that requires print to be rendered legible. Byron omitted to mention to Dallas the review in the Satirist, or Monthly Meteor that, like the Eclectic, was negative and personal. Once referenced, it would have disrupted Byron’s containment of the Eclectic. If the Eclectic was vulnerable to the suggestion that it imported an inappropriate textualized Byron to its analysis, the Satirist attacked the Byron present in the poems and in the artifact of the bookmaking, despite the reviewer Hewson Clarke’s personal knowledge of him. Byron’s main complaint about the review, expressed not to Dallas but to the safer Elizabeth Pigot, is that “my censor only quotes two lines from different poems” to support his position (BLJ 1:136). This charge is imprecise, and the Satirist’s weird quotation makes the review potent. As Christensen has detailed, Byron is caught in the paradox that the “name” he would make is also “a name he has been given.” “It is,” Christensen contends, “singularly difficult to know how Byron might write his name” (LBS 14); Christensen offers fragmentary renditions drawn from the title page, “Lord Byron,” “George Gordon, Lord Byron,” and so on. The Satirist, emphasizing the name’s absence from the annals of accomplishment, repeats six times (once in the possessive case), “George Gordon Lord Byron, a minor,” quoting the name announced on the title page. The review begins, “There certainly must be a wonderful charm in the name

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

143

of author, and a prodigious desire in men to see their own works in print, or what could have induced George Gordon Lord Byron, a minor, to have favoured the world with this collection of poems” (Sat I:77). Balancing the “name of author” with the awkward amalgam that identifies Byron as particular author, the reviewer insists on his right to regulate excess and authenticity. Like the Eclectic, the Satirist reads Hours of Idleness as self-exposure, but as an exposure of the inability to produce and not as a record of the poetic process of transforming idle moments into verse: if Byron had not published, “no human being would have guessed the quantity of time he had spent in doing nothing.” For the Satirist, Byron’s minority is not, as he positions it, an anteroom to lordship, but an expression of his personality.16 The larger claim of the Satirist is that Byron, misunderstanding the construction of the book, misconstrues how his conventional markers would be read; he consequently overloads the volume with mottoes in an excess of poetic artifice. Quoting all three of them, the reviewer quotes more lines that Byron borrowed than made, and declares, “Isn’t he a classical lord?” This early misapprehension of materiality evolved into Byron’s cagey carelessness about publication and became part of the process of writing himself into existence through a biographical medley of his recollections. In Childe Harold, the Preface, the title, and other extratextual elements are woven into the poem’s success, and the reviews, including the Edinburgh, succumb to their influence. If, as McGann and Christensen attest, Byron’s poems are characteristically transitional, the engine of transition is materialization, turning text into work, manuscript into print, and registering that transition within the poetry by self-reference, allusion, and other citations. The Satirist’s review shows that, in Hours, Byron mismanaged elements of this transitional ethos, but, as his poetry developed, he clarified his devices through sightings of, and engagements with, his public being in Reviews such as the Satirist. The Satirist’s review races through thirteen poems, only, as Byron points out, paraphrasing or quoting short phrases. This practice foments confusion. The paragraph on “On a Distant View of the Village and School, of Harrow, on the Hill” reduces its title to “Harrow on the Hill,” and so collapses the poetic distance to the nearness the review had already identified in “On Leaving Newstead.” That poem “begins so familiarly and so affectionately, that we suspect it is only an answer to some kind epistle that the abbey had sent before to the lord, or that they have been in the habit of corresponding for some length of time.” Such a reduction allows the review to strip

144

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

“On a Distant View” of its ironic perspective and represent, as its central point, Byron’s “fanc[y]” that “he spoke better than Mossop, and acted better than Garrick,” opinions that are “very singular” (Sat I:78). In context, the poem’s point is that such sensations of fame occur by confusions of scale—mistaking the school auditorium for Drury Lane and thereby mishearing the conventions of applause: While, to swell my young pride, such applauses resounded, I fancied that Mossop himself was outshone Or, as Lear, I pour’d forth the deep imprecation, By my daughters, of kingdom and reason depriv’d Till, fir’d by loud plaudits, and self adulation, I regarded myself as a Garrick reviv’d. (18–23)

The comparison with Mossop and the resounding applause create a fantasy of fame that the poem discounts but which the review attributes to Byron. The allusion to Lear is complex, because the external applause and the “deep imprecation,” as he succumbs to his own (Byron’s, Lear’s, Shakespeare’s?) words enact a kind of madness. The temporality indicated by “Till” points out something of the actor’s (and poet’s) delusional craft, of needing to believe in order to render lines believable.17 The Satirist, in misrepresenting these lines, grasps Byron’s desire to challenge not Garrick but Shakespeare, not renditions of Lear but leaders of state. It protests his couching such ambition in sentimentality and hiding it behind his minority.18 Byron saw the fragility of his public self, because the redeployment of his words within the review altered his character and exposed his anxieties about, and commitments to, that character. Calling “The Tear” a “pretty bit of versification,” the Satirist claims “[t]he noble lord determined . . . to shew to the world what a vast number of rhymes there existed to the word ‘Tear’ and, consequently, he has exhibited them all, and breaks off his subject, not because he has come to a climax, but because his stock of poetry would hold out no longer” (Sat I:78). The Satirist emphasizes the “world” as Byron’s imagined audience, and constructs such ambition as an egotism that the Preface and other markers attempt, futility in the face of periodical scrutiny, to disown. The rhyme of “tear” does repeat once in each of the twelve stanzas, and Byron is showing off a certain facility: each stanzas has the rhyme scheme of aabccb (with “b” as the “tear” rhyme), with anapestic dimeter for the “a” and “c” lines, and trimeter for the “b” lines, so that rhythmically, the “tear” is an excessive outpouring. The

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

145

poem’s argument is about signs of authenticity; a “tear” is the only reliable “test of affection,” as smiles are easily faked. The speaker, moving through various stages of life—school days, failed courtship, adult dispersal of community—finally imagines his own death when: No fiction of fame Shall blazon my name, All I ask, all I wish, is a Tear. (70–72)

Because “Tear” has ended the previous eleven stanzas, the reader knows, that instead of “fame,” an authentic tear will be wanted, so the phrase “All I ask, all I wish” delays the climax a reader will already have subvocalized. The conclusion is thematically motivated, and not driven by the rhymes. Although “The Tear” is perhaps mediocre, in terms of sentiment and technique, the Satirist fixes on only its most obvious element to reduce it to an arbitrary exercise.19 The virulence of this review arises partly from a periodical, in its first issue, staking out generic territory, but it seems also connected to personal animosity. Byron knew (and disliked) Hewson Clarke at Cambridge.20 The Satirist lodged a salvo in a dispute that involved a challenge, probably not sent, a lawsuit, not pursued, and accusations of absurd, immoral, and illegal acts. Byron saw the Satirist review within a few weeks of its appearance and wrote to Elizabeth Pigot about it on October 26, 1807. The letter compares Cambridge to Southwell, before discussing the Satirist: “This place is wretched enough—a villainous chaos of din and drunkenness, nothing but hazard and burgundy, hunting, mathematics, and Newmarket, riot and racing. Yet it is a paradise compared with the eternal dullness of Southwell. Oh! the misery of doing nothing but make Love, Enemies, and Verses” (BLJ 1:135). “This place” is where Byron encountered Clarke, and the phrase “doing nothing” echoes the Satirist’s accusation of Byron’s idleness. But Byron’s “doing nothing” is supplemented—stylized—by his making “love, enemies, and verses.” The asymmetrical meanings of “making” as applied to each of the nouns gives it triple meaning, and signals the serial nature of Byron’s own construction. He makes himself by making love, enemies, and verses, and sometimes, in a single act of creation—“To M.S.G.,” for example—Byron achieved all three. Turning to his literary plans, Byron mentions “one poem of 380 lines [British Bards], to be published (without my name) in a

146

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

few weeks, with notes.” Calling the poem “a Satire,” he goes on, “Apropos, I have been praised to the skies in the Critical Review, and abused equally in another publication” (BJL 1:136). Are these reviews “apropos” because of his certainty that the satire will be reviewed? Or because the new satire performs or parodies criticism? Because he contemplates revenge that the tenor of the remainder of the letter dissipates? In any case, defining his literary activity as “apropos” to reviews channels his worry about them into productivity. By leaving the Satirist nameless, Byron makes its text unavailable to Pigot, who must depend on his interpretation, as a reader usually depends on a reviewer. He deflects the controversy, portraying it as between the two contrary journals: “ . . . so much the Better, they tell me, for the sale of the Book: it keeps up controversy, and prevents it being forgotten, besides, the first men of all ages have had their share, nor do the humblest escape, so I bear it like a philosopher.” Pitting the Critical against the unnamed Satirist removes Byron from a struggle between juridical bodies unworthy of aristocratic notice, but useful enough for “sales.” The phrase, “they tell me” connotes casualness about the literary marketplace, but as a letter to John Ridge written a couple weeks later shows, Byron was seeking advice, learning about the industry, and determined not to be caught out by reviewers: When I was in London, I observed the Book-sellers objected to the size, & two or three said, the poems should have been printed in the same size, as Ld Strangford’s & Little’s poem . . . I don’t admire the yellow backs—We will also alter the Title simply to “poems” by Ld. Byron &c. &c. & omit the Latin Motto . . . (BLJ I:137)

This attention belies his explanation to Pigot. Although Byron reminds Ridge several times that he has no direct economic interest in the sales of Hours, they provide an index of his fame. The verbal skirmishes between Clarke and Byron escalated until, about a year later, the latter felt compelled to write a challenge to a duel. Byron’s cartel turns on the anonymity of Clarke’s satire, just like the later fatal duels between Jonathan Christie and John Scott and between James Stuart and Alexander Boswell (and the earlier farcical encounter between Moore and Jeffrey): “I shall expect (if you are not the author) an immediate & unequivocal disavowal.—In case this proposal should not meet your approbation, my friend Mr. Hobhouse is instructed how to act” (BLJ 1:167). Byron appears not to have sent the note (Marchand 1:155); instead, in English Bards and Scots Reviewers (973–80), he describes Clarke as a “living libel on

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

147

mankind” (980), another Byronic formulation that treats a person as a textual entity, one both legally and extralegally construed. Then, in the postscript of the second edition, he chides Clarke for his cowardliness in not challenging Byron, although had he, Byron’s status would make noticing the challenge problematic. Such interplay between the bodily presence in the well-regulated duel and its textual substitution is a staple of the Byronic career. English Bards, in Christensen’s phrase, “belongs as much to the history of English dueling as to the history of English Literature” (LBS 33), but Byron’s career in dueling discloses the inability for the “field of honor” to function, except as a supplement to the law it was meant to stand beyond; he never fought one. While Byron’s bluster was simmering, the Edinburgh’s review of Hours of Idleness appeared. Many scholars have recognized the centrality of this review to Byron’s maturing, yet the review recapitulates prior claims that, if Byron found irksome, he had, in letters, sloughed off as “good for sales.” The Edinburgh was different, because its dominant position confirmed the other reviews and because its Whig perspective asserted the incompatibility of Byron’s anachronistic lordship with contemporary aristocracy. Byron’s response, however, produced the enduring significance of the review; for the Edinburgh in 1808, with its tribulations regarding the Cevallos review on the usurpation of Spain and the Quarterly, the snipe would have disappeared. It was the shortest review of the January issue, about half the length of the next shortest (and a third the length of Jeffrey’s notice of Wordsworth’s Poems in the previous issue); and one of four essays probably authored by Brougham, who must have dashed it off. The Edinburgh unpacks Byron’s strategy by insisting (like the Satirist) that the Preface’s self-serving terms permeate the poems: His other plea [beside minority] of privilege our author rather brings forward in order to waive it. He certainly, however, does allude frequently to his family and ancestry—sometimes in poetry, sometimes in notes; and, while giving up his claim on the score of rank, he takes care to remember us of Dr. Johnson’s saying, that when a nobleman appears as an author, his merit should be handsomely acknowledged. (ER XI: 285–6)

Contaminating Byron’s sincerity, the Edinburgh reviewed the work because of his rank, a decision at variance with its policy of attending to substantial works: “In truth, it is this consideration only, that induces us to give Lord Byron’s poems a place in our review, beside

148

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

our desire to counsel him, that he do forthwith abandon poetry, and turn his talents, which are considerable, and his opportunities, which are great, to better account” (XI:286). By condescendingly granting the privilege Byron had disclaimed, the Edinburgh exposes Byron’s disclaimer as the cant of courtier courtesy. Thus, Brougham unpacks Byron’s executive plea for disowning privilege as a juridical submission to such privilege. Shifting from Byron’s judge to his counselor, Brougham recommends that Byron abandon his lawsuit, that is, his poetry. In advising Byron to do what the poet has declared as his intention, Brougham reveals that declaration as conventional. Brougham’s jab, in implying that Byron’s talents are less than his opportunities, indicates that those talents do not produce the opportunities, but rather that Byron’s situation—not of his own making—confers both, and challenges Byron’s self-construction. The Edinburgh recognizes Byron’s investment in place as central to his self-construction. It quotes the final three stanzas of “Leaving Newstead Abbey,” commenting that, while a “youth of nineteen” should know not to publish them, the volume contains “nothing better.” The reviewer warns Byron that such attachments to place invite “comparisons”; Gray’s “Ode on Eton College” should have forestalled the “ten hobbling stanzas” on the “Distant view of Harrow” (XI:286). Steven Cheeke has observed that Byron’s metonymic method of identification meant that the citation of a spot— Newstead, Harrow, Athens—“stands for the essence of the place, simultaneously speaks for itself and for Byron, so that geo-history and self-identity are interchangeable” (Byron and Place 22). Granting that Byron is disabled from poetry because he “does not live in a garret, but ‘has the sway’ of Newstead Abbey” (XI:289), the Edinburgh Reviewer makes a similar point sarcastically, with two dismantling caveats. First, the Reviewer pulls Scottish rank, commenting that, “on Lachin-y-gair, a mountain where he spent part of his youth,” he “might have learned that pibroch is not a bagpipe, any more than a duet means a fiddle” (XI:288). Byron has confused the music—a pibroch is an air played on a bagpipe—with the instrument that produces it. Brougham uses this error in diction to expose the arbitrariness of Byron’s metonymic methods; his attachments to place are conventional, the imitation of prior poetic acts. Second, to “ha[ve] the sway” of Newstead grants dominion, in the sense of “sway” as power, but the word also invokes the vacillation of irresolution and, nastily, an easy gait that opposes Byron’s hobbling verses. Byron’s poems on place expose his commercial investment in those places and his poetry, but also in the marketing of his name. Warning Byron

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

149

that a youth “should not know, or should seem not to know, so much about his own ancestry,” Brougham declares: “Beside [“On Leaving Newstead Abbey”], on the family seat of the Byrons, we have another of eleven pages, on the self-same subject, introduced with an apology, ‘he certainly had no intention of inserting it;’ but really, ‘the particular request of some of his friends,’ &c, &c.” (XI:288). The double “&c”s signals the conventionality of evading judgment by publishing at the request of friends. Brougham strikes the heart of Byronic identity. The poems on Newstead insist on a steadfastness which, in their repetition (highlighted by the redundancy of “self-same” for “same”) becomes inadvertently the self-parody that Byron, in later work, will manage so effectively; here, it manages him. Brougham insists that Byron’s knowledge of his past disables, by conflating, his poetic abilities and his potential lordship. Byron’s immediate reaction to the Edinburgh Reviewer registers in his letters. He associates the review with his physical status: To John Becher, on February 26, 1808, Byron wrote a letter that weaves his physical dissipation with his apprehension about Hours: Just rising from my Bed, having been up till six at a Masquerade, I find your Letter, and in the midst of this dissipated Chaos it is no small pleasure to discover I have some distant friends in their Senses. though mine are rather out of repair.—Indeed. I am worse than ever, to give you some idea of my late life, I have this moment received a prescription from Pearson, not for any complaint but from debility, and literally too much Love. (BLJ 1:157)

The terms of his sensual life—the Masquerade as social quintessence, senses “out of repair,” the surfeit of love that requires the bodily discipline of purges, medicines, and treatments—intimate a crisis of identity as Byron awaits simultaneously his majority (now less than a year away) and the public recognition of Hours. He uses mythic terms to segue from his sexual life to his writing—“So much for Venus, now for Apollo”—and declares with a self-protective humility: “I am of so much importance, that a most violent attack is preparing for me in the next number of the Edinburgh Review, . . . you know the System of the Edinburgh Gentlemen is universal attack, they praise none, and neither the public or the author expects praise from them” (1:157). Yet, Byron worries about Becher being “hurt by [the review’s] severity” and asks him to prepare Byron’s mother for it. Although professing less concern for himself than for his friend and mother, Byron recognized that his sense of self and of self-control was tied to public reception.

150

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

In a letter to Becher, his mother, proving herself able to withstand the shock of the review, represents Byron as discouraged to the point of inaction. Byron, she writes abuses himself worse than the Edinr Reviewers, he says if I have any regard for him I never will mention his Poetry to him more . . . he is really discouraged and depressed, and that odious Review has convinced him that he really has no talents. . . . God help him if he is so easily discouraged he will neither be a statesman or an Orator, in short he will do no good. (Marchand 1:149)

Byron’s mother is dismayed primarily at Byron’s susceptibility to the reviews, in being rhetorically vulnerable to them (“convinced” by them about his own identity), and in exceeding them by imitation (he “abuses himself worse”). She concludes that if he allows the reviews to construct reality, he will be stripped of those occupations that most construct the social reality of others. As Byron developed his response to the reviews over the next fifteen months, he likewise developed the central connection between his personal opposition to Clarke and Jeffrey and an awareness of his potential as a public agent.21 Byron probably read the Edinburgh’s review sometime on February 26, after writing Becher about it, and stormed off to the Cambridge Whig Club, where “perhaps in a moment of Intoxication,” he threatened to withdraw from the Club as he was “devoured with Chagrin.” Writing Hobhouse, he does not yet explain the cause of the “Chagrin,” but warns that, should the Whig Club “erase my name,” he “shall become a Tory of their own making” (BLJ 1:158). In the context of Hours in which Byron associates his name with accumulated honors and fame of his devising (“My epitaph shall be my name alone”; “A Fragment” 8), this self-pitying complaint surrenders authorship—the writing of his name—to a party’s ability to erase it and transform him, despite Whig “sentiments which I never will disavow,” into a Tory. Byron marshals the permeability that his mother lamented as a threat. Then, still not having mentioned the Edinburgh, he describes his daily life, probably as a self-imitation of the letter to Becher written the day before. He begins with Venus—“I am buried in an abyss of sensuality . . . I am given to Harlots . . . under a course of restoration . . . for a debility occasioned by too frequent Connection”—before turning to Apollo: “As an author, I am cut to atoms by the E Review, it is just out, and has completely demolished my little fabric of fame, this is rather scurvy treatment from a Whig Review, but politics and poetry are different things, & I am no adept in either, I therefore submit in Silence” (1:158–9).

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

151

He next details debauchery, gustatory and sensual. He dines with “seven whores” “behind the scenes” (an allusion, actual event, or both?), considers “purchasing” a “harem” of dancers, both encounters situated around the theater to emphasize the imaginary play of identities on which his letter depends. By locating his concern about the Edinburgh between two descriptions of sensual excess, Byron connects his physical being and his poetic identity. The characterization on the Edinburgh’s “treatment’ as “scurvy” links the disease of the review with those of bodily excess, an attitude consistent with Byron’s characterization of his writing as a form of indulgence.22 Further, the parallel of Byron being “cut to atoms” and his “little fabric of fame” getting “completely demolished” aligns his identity as an intersection of bodily presence (“atoms” as the bedrock of materiality) and public awareness, a fabric (text) subject to the fashion discipline of the reviews. As with his threat to become a Tory, and the prior false modesty of the Preface to Hours, the claim to be “no adept” rings as hollow as the promise to submit in silence, as Byron had, by October 1807, neared the completion of a first version of British Bards. Within a month of the Edinburgh’s review, Byron’s next edition (now Poems Original and Translated) was set to appear and Byron declared to Becher that “these ‘paper bullets of the brain’ have only taught me to stand fire; and . . . my repose and appetite are not discomposed” (BLJ 1:162). Byron signals his regained equanimity through his regulation of his body (adding, “I am thin and in exercise”), but also by asserting his mastery of the key device of the reviewing industry, reiteration. He tells Becher: I think I could write a more sarcastic critique on myself than any yet published. For instance, instead of the remark,—ill-natured enough, but not keen,—about Macpherson, I (quod reviewers) could have said, “Alas, this imitation only proves the assertion of Dr. Johnson, that many men, women, and children, could write such poetry as Ossian’s.” (1:163)

Byron performs the self-devouring as an intentional pastiche, which echoes the Edinburgh’s comment that: We fear his translations and imitations are great favourites with Lord Byron. We have them of all kinds, from Anacreon to Ossian; and, viewing them as school exercises they may pass. Only, why print them after they have had their day and served their turn? . . . As to his Ossianic poesy, we are not very good judges, being, in truth, so moderately skilled in that species of composition, that we should, in all probability,

152

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

be criticizing some bit of the genuine Macpherson itself, were we to express our opinion of Lord Byron’s rhapsodies. (ER XI:187)

Brougham’s point is that Ossian is the touchstone of the confusion between original and imitation, and the range from Anacreon to Ossian is the narrow difference of two other self-imitators whom Byron imitates. Like Brougham’s comment, Byron’s witticism is a sequence of allusions in which imitations of imitations serve, through continual textual reproduction, as originals. Byron, imitating a reviewer, quotes Johnson, a reviewer, about imitators of Macpherson, himself an imitation of Ossian, all the time building to a transformation of “children” from a comment by Johnson to a reference to Byron’s self-denomination, “A minor.” This series of textual references that he places between his “I” and his “myself ” reflects Byron’s understanding of his identity’s accessibility to public appropriations. He conceived of his poetry and his ascendance to the House of Lords as correlated ways to defy such appropriations, both of them understood through his structuring of his relation to Newstead Abbey. In November 1807, when Byron was planning Poems Original and Translated, he suggested as a frontispiece his own portrait; then, recognizing that the time was inadequate to produce it, he proposed Harrow or Newstead. These architectural images are metonymic representatives of Byronic lordship, quicker to produce and so easier to circulate than Byron’s own image. Even while raising tenant rents and avoiding his coming-of-age celebration at Newstead, he insisted on his attachment to it through an architectural metonymy: “[C]ome what may, Newstead and I stand or fall together. I have now lived on the spot, I have fixed my heart upon it, and no pressure, present or future, shall induce me to barter the last vestige of our inheritance” (BLJ 1:195). Byron developed this attitude concurrently with his early poetic voice; a year before, Byron wrote ambivalently, “Of Newstead I have little hope or care . . . Newstead I may sell;—perhaps I will not” (I:163). His vision of a lordship beyond “barter,” one entailed by its past and inflected in Byron’s poetry, was a myth that Brougham, Clarke, and even favorable reviewers recognized as untenable. Reiterating that he “will not sell Newstead” leads Byron to rehearse his quandary with the House of Lords, Lords Carlisle and Eldon, and his plotted revenge of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: I shall get my seat on the return of the affidavits from Carhais, in Cornwall, and will do something in the House soon: I must dash, or

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

153

it is all over. My Satire must be kept secret for a month; after that you may say what you please on the subject. Lord Carlisle has used me infamously, and refused to state any particulars of my family to the Chancellor. I have lashed him in my rhymes, and perhaps his lordship may regret not being more conciliatory. (I:196)

Byron’s worry is not about illegitimacy, but about the necessity of certifying his legal status, which reveals what he wanted hidden, that the legitimacy of his lordship remains unreadable on his person or through his poetry. Carlisle’s silence is an “infamous” use, because it reveals Byron’s reliance on documentation and subjugation to rules. His decision to revenge himself against Carlisle, his guardian (who was a sometime poet), through his verse, signals the permeability between the realms of poetry and lordship; both relied on a persuasiveness of representation. Byron’s treatment of Carlisle gauges his tactics for dealing with his public persona in these early years. Because Byron’s relationship with his guardian extended from his minority through his taking his seat in the Lords, and because his letters record projections onto those relationships of public anxieties, his incorporation of Carlisle into the various drafts of English Bards reveals the close association of his poetic and political standing. First cousin to Byron’s father, Carlisle was appointed guardian by Lord Chancellor Eldon in 1799. Byron sent Carlisle a copy of Hours, and Carlisle’s reply was noncommittal: Your letter of yesterday found me an invalid, and unable to do justice to your poems by a dilligent [sic] perusal of them. In the meantime I take the first occasion to thank you for sending them to me, and to express a sincere satisfaction in finding you employ your leisure in such occupations. Be not disconcerted if the reception of your works should not be that you may have a right to look for from the public. Persevere, whatever that reception may be, and tho’ the Public maybe found very fastidious, . . . you will stand better with the world than others who only pursue their studies in Bond St. or at Tatershall’s. (E.H. Coleridge and Porthero 1:138)

Pleading his status as invalid, Carlisle avoids commenting on the poems by sending his thanks before reading them. He deflects Byron’s eagerness for a response by cautioning him against the public reception and applauding him for using his leisure for poetry. This nonresponse, which contrasts poetry with the dissipating consumption and gambling of Bond Street, a high-end shopping district, and Tattersall’s, where horses were both bought and raced, all

154

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

too obviously highlights Byron’s aristocratic advantages, over which Carlisle was guardian. Byron’s reaction to Carlisle’s snub appears as a postscript to a letter to Elizabeth Pigot that rehearses his prominence in town and teasing scorn of rustic Southwell opinions: P.S.—Lord Carlisle, on receiving my poems, sent, before he opened the book, a tolerably handsome letter:—I have not heard from him since. His opinions I neither know nor care about: if he is the least insolent, I shall enrol him with Butler and the other worthies. . . . Perhaps the Earl “bears no brother near the throne”—if so, I will make his sceptre totter in his hands.—Adieu! (BLJ 1:133)

Imagining himself in poetic competition with Carlisle, he shifts from the relation of ward and guardian to that of rival brothers. The quotation, from Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot, coordinates the literary marketplace that Pope explored with the aristocracy to which Byron aspires.23 The passage from Pope lists means of literary assassination available to poetic genius, including “Damn[ing] with faint praise, assent[ing] with civil leer / And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer” (219–20), techniques Byron modeled in his letters. While Pope figures the scene of rivalry in the domain of rumor and the oral transmission that characterize pre-periodical literary reputation, Byron transplants it to a fully established periodical industry that enables the literary skirmishes of English Bards. In the transition to the second edition, however, Byron changed his approach to Carlisle. After the first edition, delivered as a private gift, failed to establish the reciprocity Byron desired, in the second edition, he translated the gift into a symbolic public act. This time, the reciprocity occurred simultaneously with the announcement of the gift; in other words, he dedicated Poems Original and Translated to: THE RIGHT HONOURABLE FREDERICK, EARL OF CARLISLE, KNIGHT OF THE GARTER, ETC., ETC., THE SECOND EDITION OF THESE POEMS IS INSCRIBED, BY HIS OBLIGED WARD AND AFFECTIONATE KINSMAN, THE AUTHOR. (E.H. Coleridge and Porthero 7:251)

This public gesture, an impersonation of a patronage that Byron had not experienced, translated the new edition into a vehicle for increased respect and sales. The sequence of “ward,” which contains

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

155

the trace of Byron’s minority, and “kinsman,” which signals both adult masculinity and equality, culminates in Byron’s announcement of his identity as “the author,” the declaration that the now suppressed Preface had disclaimed and into which the reviews had goaded him. Carlisle’s public titles, signaled by the familiar Byronic trope of careless accumulation—the doubled “Etc”—are balanced by the adjectives of Byron’s personal feelings: “obliged” and “affectionate.” These feelings guide readers’ sentimentality toward the author, just as Byron had previously staged affection for Carlisle to court Augusta’s affection. Despite the array of titles and relationships in this dedication, Byron contracts any reference to Carlisle as a writer (which had appeared in the first addition in the elaborate allusion to Johnson’s comment) into the abstraction of the “ETC.”s. Despite the coded irony of the dedication, Byron had an additional reason to court Carlisle. About to turn twenty-one, he intended to shrug off simultaneously his literary and legal minority, by taking his place in the House of Lords and immediately afterward making public English Bards. Byron had calculated on his presentation before the House of Lords to announce his unequivocal status. He had anticipated that Carlisle would present him, and so fulfill what Byron (erroneously) imagined was a tradition that obviated requirements for certifying documentation. When he wrote to remind Carlisle that “he should be of age at the commencement of the session,” he received “a mere formal, and, as it now appeared to him, cold reply, acquainting him with the technical mode of proceeding” (Moore I:229; Dallas 17). Byron had to dispatch his lawyer to secure corroboration of the legitimacy of his grandfather’s marriage, a reminder that the invisibility of lordship on the body was not confined to his initial experience of its childhood bestowal, but was institutionally embedded. At the same time, Carlisle’s response confirmed for Byron the suspicion about his guardian’s apathy toward Byron’s poetry. Byron responded with the transformation of complimentary lines in British Bards, which compared Carlisle to earlier greatness: On one alone Apollo deigns to smile, And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle. (CWB I:252)

The image of a coronation associates Carlisle with Byron’s own anticipated achievement in the Lords, and this special commendation awaits Carlisle as public, though concealed, gratitude for his anticipated help. Dallas speculates that these lines were written just when

156

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Byron was soliciting Carlisle’s aid near the end of 1808 (26–27), but three days after his birthday, on January 25, 1809, Byron wrote to Dallas that the lines should be replaced by these: Roscommon! Sheffield! with your spirits fled, No future laurels deck a noble head; Nor e’en a hackney’d Muse will deign to smile On minor Byron, nor mature Carlisle. (BLJ 1:190)

This equation of himself with Carlisle would, he wrote to Dallas, “answer the purpose of concealment,” because it repeats the cruelest of the periodical attacks on himself. But he could not let this association, even with its opposition of youth and age, remain unglossed. Over the next weeks, he added (apparently in three segments) the following lines: The puny schoolboy and his early lay Men pardon, if his follies pass away; But who forgives the Senior’s ceaseless verse, Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse? What heterogeneous honours deck the Peer! Lord, rhymester, petit-maître, pamphleteer! So dull in youth, so drivelling in his age, . . . (727–33)

Writing anonymously grants him a Byronic fluidity, in which follies, like youth, pass away, while Carlisle’s poetry ages with his body, growing “worse” and “hoary,” respectively. These accumulations ossify into an identity, a dullness that persists through Carlisle’s vocations—“Lord, rhymester, petit-maître, pamphleteer”—as he moves into a second infancy, characterized by his “driveling,” a description of his body and poetry. In the second edition, published under his name, Byron dropped the reference to “minor Byron”: No Muse will cheer, with renovating smile, The paralytic puling of Carlisle. (725–6)

Carlisle’s poetic production remains linked to his ruined body, but now, without the contrasting “Byron” to serve as the referent for the “puny schoolboy,” the entire passage turns on Carlisle’s inability to

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

157

reform himself from being such a schoolboy. From the first revision to this final one, Byron seems to have had no contact with Carlisle, and so Byron’s anxieties about ascending to the House of Lords fueled this animosity for the first changes, and his anger at the anticlimax of that event prompted the second edition. Carlisle becomes not an individual antagonist, but the image of what Byron, poet and lord, opposes. Carlisle’s rule-bound poetics corresponds to the rule-bound Lord Eldon, who, as lord chancellor, oversaw Carlisle’s appointment as guardian and now the process of Byron’s ascendance. Byron composed English Bards over a two-year period. About four hundred lines of it were written before October 1807, in the flush of the initial critical successes of Hours. He then continued to revise it through May 1809, when James Cawthorn issued the second expanded edition just as Byron left the country. Byron’s revision method is, as is typical for him, accretive. His most extensive changes occur not in immediate response to the reviews, but as he brooded over them in conjunction with the difficulties surrounding his taking his Seat in the Lords. The second period of expansive revision was the transformation from the first to second edition, as Byron was processing the anticlimactic experience of taking his seat before Lord Eldon. At this time, he adds, for example, a paragraph to the Preface that uses the first-person pronouns 17 times in 183 words (as opposed to not at all in the initial shorter Preface). In the new, ninety-six-line beginning, Byron, now named on the title page, uses “I” eleven times; in the first version, the pronoun did not appear until 200 lines into the poem. Byron revises as self-assertion, while in his later career, he would decline to revise for the same reason. Although the manuscript from October 1807 no longer exists, Hartley Coleridge’s hypothesis that its 400 lines represent over half of the 520 lines in the original printing of British Bards (MS M, printed sometime after February 1808) fits Byron’s general method of revising. It makes sense that Byron’s reactions to Carlisle would have tracked in the variants of English Bards around Byron’s encounter with Lord Eldon, since Byron conflated them as obstructing his entrance and disrupting its symbolic import. More intriguing is why the revisions regarding Jeffrey escalate also. Moore notes that during this time, while awaiting a resolution of his paternal identity, Byron constantly sent “fresh matter” to Dallas, who was overseeing the publication. In one note, Byron declares, “Print soon, or I shall overflow with rhyme” (Moore I:232). In Moore’s analysis, “there was in the very act of printing an excitement to his fancy, and that the rush of his thoughts towards that outlet gave increased life and freshness to their flow” (I:232). Byron proposes that “Print” will contain him and prevent “rhyming” from instigating

158

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

simultaneous overflow and depletion similar to the sexual “dissipation” he had described to Hobhouse. In his revisions, Byron redirects this anxiety from the personal/political to the reviews because both act in a single system—the fame machine—that mediated Byron’s self-creation by exposing the conventions and laws that regulated the representation of that creation. Byron’s revision to his lines on Jeffrey clarifies his management of his public identity in the maw of this machine. Byron’s original lines on Jeffrey were probably written in reaction to the Edinburgh’s attack, although E.H. Coleridge believes some were drafted prior to the review in response to the general prominence of the periodical. The structure of the satire is an extended comparison between Francis Jeffrey and George “Jefferies,” whose reputation as a “hanging judge” came from the “Bloody Assize” of 1685, when he presided over the death sentences of 300 supporters of the Monmouth Rebellion. Beyond the shared name, the Jeffreys shared an association with the law and reputations for severity. Byron never mentions Francis Jeffrey, but introduces him, in the final line of the passage, as the reverberation—“The same in name and character and soul”—of the judge, a conclusion prepared by earlier references to periodical culture. Byron’s lines begin with a statement about the status of historical knowledge: Who has not heard in this enlightened age, When all can criticise the historic page, Who has not heard in James’s Bigot Reign Of Jefferies! monarch of the scourge, and chain . . . [?]

The question constructs the audience as a collective entity (an “enlightened age”) bound by shared knowledge and an ability to “criticise the historic page.” With this abundance of print, standards for critical assessment have given way to a culture of universal access to rewriting history. While such openness is available for historical criticism, the destruction of contemporary identities is a monopolistic proposition reserved to the Edinburgh. Byron reflects the paradoxical nature of a growing market of information: because the dissemination of knowledge is so expansive, it lacks reliable evaluation; consequently, periodicals such as the Edinburgh can simulate authority to garner representational power. Citing Jefferies’s “pestilential breath,” whose sentence meant death, Byron defines the judicial logic that echoes the Edinburgh’s motto that the “judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted”: Such was the Judge of James’s iron time, When Law was Murder, Mercy was a crime[.]

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

159

Condemnation, rather than mercy, was the operative attitude until James was overthrown by “weary millions,” a forecasting of Francis Jeffrey’s fate: Years have rolled on;—in all the lists of Shame, Who now can parallel a Jefferies’ name? With hand less mighty, but with heart as black With voice as willing to decree the Rack, With tongue envenomed, with intentions foul The same in name and character and soul.

Byron preserved these lines until at least November 27, 1808. As his birthday approached and he realized that his ascension would be neither triumphant nor smooth, he reworked the passage, expanding it to almost hundred lines. The section still begins with the same comparison between critic and judge: Health to immortal JEFFREY! once, in name, England could boast a judge almost the same; In soul so like, so merciful, yet just, Some think that Satan has resigned his trust, And given the Spirit to the world again, To sentence Letters, as he sentenced men. (438–44)

In this version, Byron mentions Jeffrey’s legal training—“Bred in the Courts betimes”—and declares him a “party tool” of the Whigs (447–8). That “Letters” can be sentenced as men signals the exchangeability between them that Byron is experiencing as his fame develops its own life, of which his “real” life is an image. Despite the metaphor of legal judgment, Byron focuses on an extralegal event, the duel between Jeffrey and Thomas Moore. While in the early version, he had asserted that “all” shared in a cultural memory, now he asks: Can none remember that eventful day, That ever-glorious, almost fatal fray, When LITTLE’S leadless pistol met his eye, And Bow-street Myrmidons stood laughing by? (465–8)

The duel took place in 1806, when Moore challenged Jeffrey in retaliation for a review of his poems. The meeting was interrupted before its culmination, and when the pistols were examined, one was found

160

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

to be unloaded, and, as Byron chortles, “[t]his incident gave occasion to much waggery in the daily prints” (note to l. 466). The event takes on mythically comic proportions, as Byron, paralleling the goddess Dulness’s relation to Cibber from The Dunciad, invokes Goddess “Tolbooth” (the central prison of Edinburgh) who “saved him from the wrath of Moore”; she From either pistol snatched the vengeful lead, And straight restored it to her favourite’s head; That head, with greater than magnetic power, Caught it, as Danae caught the golden shower . . . (492–5)

The reference associates Jeffrey with Cibber’s “brazen, brainless brothers” and Pope’s prophetic “new Saturnian age of lead” dominated by “Bards” whose escape from Bedlam results in “journals, Medleys, Merc’ries, Magazines” and other elements of the print explosion (Dunciad I:28–44). Like Dulness addressing Cibber, Tolbooth urges Jeffrey to: Resign the pistol and resume the pen . . . For long as Albion’s heedless sons submit, Or Scottish taste decides on English wit, So long shall last thine unmolested reign, Nor any dare to take thy name in vain. (499–505)

Byron satirized this botched duel as an emblem of the commercialization of both poetry and aristocracy, from which the middle class pilfered the duel. He combines “classical allusion” and “obscene insult” in the reference to “golden shower,” as Jane Stabler notes; she shows that the “intimation of effeminacy in the image of the vanishing balls” undercuts Jeffrey’s “manliness and personal honour” (147–8). Such hostility prompted Byron to declare that he waited “in daily expectation of sundry cartels” (Postscript to the second edition, CWB I:383), and their failure to arrive confirmed his sense of literary degeneracy. The impulse to augment the passages on Jeffrey responds less to the initial review, now months distant, than to the recent circumstances of Byron’s coming of age. By inserting this duel that revolved around misfired words and paper bullets, Byron provides a parodic example of what he wished could be represented seriously—a modern chivalry. Just as the dueling tradition had deteriorated with the introduction

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

161

of pistols, the technology of periodical production and other bureaucratic forms of information management had transformed aristocratic sensibilities. Carlisle’s refusal to validate him comingled with the Edinburgh’s similar refusal. The challenge to Byron, as poet and lord, was to confront a system of representation centered in the periodicals but extended throughout public life. Alvin Kernan reads the scene of George III meeting Samuel Johnson in the King’s Library as signaling the advent of a “print culture” (49) that, with its emphasis on the author and the technologies of market production, transformed the patronage system. The king asked Johnson to continue writing publicly; when Johnson demurred, claiming he had written enough, the king replied, “I should have thought so too . . . if you had not written so well” (Kernan 26; Eldon 17). Insisting that Johnson write, the king asserts “the essential royal power over discourse,” a power both “courteous” and commanding; Johnson’s refusal initiated a shift recognized consciously by neither Johnson nor Boswell: “a transfer of literary power from king to author was being symbolically enacted in the library” (Kernan 29, 38–9). Johnson’s new literary marketplace was not devoid of patronage; rather, gambits, disguises, and displacements of patronage inundated it. Byron’s entrance into the House of Lords before Eldon presents a complementary tableau to George III’s encounter with Johnson of another threshold moment in the commercialization of authorship. In this case, the role of the periodical press in shaping the literary psyche is invisibly, yet decisively, present: Byron made his entrance when his poetic career hovered between obscurity and the expansive Byronism that would constitute a cultural topos. Stricken by the moment’s anticlimactic banality, his entrance amplified anxiety present in his struggle with the Edinburgh over how the young lord would assume the mantle of his majority. Though he had imagined lordship to provide an escape from such entanglement, he found it rehearsed and deepened that entanglement. John Galt compared the effects of the encounters with Eldon and the Edinburgh: Byron “recognized in advancing to this proud distinction, so soothing to the self-importance of youth, he was destined to suffer a mortification which probably wounded him as deeply as the sarcasms of the Edinburgh Review” (GLB 63). Though Byron imagined that Carlisle’s introduction would have shed his guardianship, the experience of assuming lordship instead confronted him with another figure of parental authority. When Byron as a child inherited Newstead as an “unsettled estate,” he “automatically became a ward of court,” and as such, his “interests and welfare” were the province of the Chancery Court and Eldon (Beckett 89).

162

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

He welcomed the young lord into the House, and so represented, for Byron, Carlisle intransigence and embodied criticism, by his insistence on adhering to the mundane regulations that shrank lordship down to the dimension of Tom Thumb—to whom Byron compared Eldon to his face (“you have done your duty, neither more nor less” [GLB 57]). If Johnson’s exchange with the king faintly sounded a death knell for patronage, Byron hobbling into the Lords signaled its vampiric afterlife within the periodical marketplace. R.C. Dallas described the event, in which talk of English Bards prepares for the journey to the House of Lords: After some talk about the Satire, the last sheets of which were in the press, I accompanied Lord Byron to the House. He was received in one of the ante-chambers by some of the officers in attendance, with whom he settled respecting the fees he had to pay. One of them went to apprise the Lord Chancellor of his being there, and soon returned for him. There were very few persons in the House. Lord Eldon was going through some ordinary business. When Lord Byron entered, I thought he looked still paler than before, and he certainly wore a countenance in which mortification was mingled with, but subdued by, indignation. He passed the Woolsack without looking round, and advanced to the table, where the proper officer was attending to administer the oaths. When he had gone through them, the Chancellor quitted his seat and went towards him, with a smile, putting out his hand warmly to welcome him; and, though I did not catch his words, I saw that he paid him some compliment. This was all thrown away upon Lord Byron, who made a stiff bow, and put the tips of his fingers into a hand, the amiable offer of which demanded the whole of his. (53)

Whether narrating with historical hindsight or accurately assessing Byron’s attitude, Dallas depicts the Byronic problem of lordship. Byron is caught between a required gesture—the custom of the lord chancellor to greet new members—and the potential indications of such a gesture of affiliation. Required by courtesy to subordinate his position, he was suspended between mortification and indignation. The necessity of submitting his body to the requirements of oath taking before the “proper official” required Byron to surrender his dignity in order to regain it through Eldon’s happy informal conferral of a handshake that “welcomed” him into his identity as lord. Byron can neither shake hands nor refuse, so he touches Eldon’s hand with the tips of his fingers. Next, Byron confronts the problem of where to sit: “The Chancellor did not press a welcome so received, but resumed his seat,

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

163

while Lord Byron carelessly seated himself for a few minutes on one of the empty benches to the left of the throne, usually occupied by the Lords in opposition” (54). The chancellor easily retakes his seat, returns to “business,” comfortable with a lordship professedly subordinated to sovereignty and shaped by judicial regulation. Byron, by contrast, because he cannot satisfactorily choose where to seat himself, instead chooses how to; despite the paucity of audience (there are “very few persons” in the house), Byron sits “carelessly,” as if to dismantle the meaning of the act. Seated for only a “few minutes,” Byron underscores the willed emptiness in the gesture, the confusion of identity in becoming now the lord he has been since childhood. Although he will later declare he was “born for opposition” (DJ XI.22.8), he cannot stand to be seated for it by a symbolic order so obviously not of his own making. Dallas goes on: “When, on his joining me, I expressed what I had felt, he said, ‘If I had shaken hands heartily, he would have set me down for one of his party; but I will have nothing to do with any of them on either side. I have taken my seat, and now I will go abroad” (54). Byron’s explanation emphasizes the overdetermined symbolism of the moment; having taken “my seat,” he must go abroad to prevent that seat, as it positions him in relation to party and monarchy, from determining him. More than a year earlier, Byron had announced his intention for a “pilgrimage” (BLJ 1:151), partly in anticipation of the appearance of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. At this moment, he conflates that earlier decision into a commentary on ascending to the House of Lords. Byron’s moroseness, propelling his flight, emerges from inadequacy of the symbolism, bureaucratic rather than transformational. Byron realized that the structure of aristocracy, subject to a new economy and to demystification by the press, had extinguished lordship as he had theatricalized it in his education, friendships, and correspondences. Both Jeffrey, whom Byron assumed wrote the review of Hours and Brougham, who did, became lords by virtue of their legal performances; their ascension signals the extent to which lordship had been brought under the sign of juridical bureaucracy. Byron’s resistance in the House—the withheld hand, the cold fingers, the careless pose—is futile. In acknowledgment of—and compensation for—its futility, he reimagined the field of literature, and his battle against periodicals, as the space in which lordship could be romantically perpetuated. Byron’s swift alterations for the second edition of English Bards stemmed from the decision to announce his unequivocal name, despite the equivocal experience of gaining it. The revised poem

164

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

challenges not only English Bards and Scotch Reviewers but the political machinery that deploys them both: Then, hapless Britain! be thy rulers blest, The senate’s oracles, the people’s jest! Still hear thy motley orators dispense The flowers of rhetoric, though not of sense [.] (1011–14)

The tension of poet and critic becomes a mock-duel—metonymized by the exchange between Little and Jeffrey—in which reviews prop up an established system and construct a public incapable of distinguishing rhetoric from sense. This final lengthy passage returns to the notion of Byron’s declared identity from the Preface, but revisionary anxiety tinges the declaration: Thus far I’ve held my undisturb’d career, Prepared for rancour, steel’d ‘gainst selfish fear; This thing of rhyme I ne’er disdain’d to own— Though not obtrusive, yet not quite unknown: My voice was heard again, though not so loud, My page, though nameless, never disavow’d; And now at once I tear the veil away:— Cheer on the pack! the quarry stands at bay, Unscared by all the din of Melbourne House, By Lambe’s resentment, or by Holland’s spouse, By Jeffrey’s harmless pistol, Hallam’s rage, Edina’s brawny sons and brimstone page. (1037–47; emphasis mine)

This passage begins in negations that allow for ambivalence, for interim positions between being named and being anonymous, not only to retract the anonymity of the first edition but to reconstitute his Byronic personality after the trauma of taking his seat. The “undisturbed career” is ambiguous, reflecting either poetic efforts and political engagement. On January 15, 1809, he wrote to Hanson, “I shall stand aloof, speak what I think, but not often, nor too soon. I will preserve my independence, if possible, but if involved with a party, I will take care not to be the last or least in the ranks” (BLJ I:187). Although the claim to independence reflects Byron’s truncated handshake with Eldon, the image of taking his place within the ranks of the Whigs overwhelms this plan, and “independence” becomes a strategy within the system, rather than an opposition to

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

165

it. Between the first edition and Byron’s departure from England, Byron was shaping a political career: David Erdman points out that he attended the Lords seven times between March 13 and May 15. The “rancour” he is prepared for (an echo of both “rank” and “ranks”) is equally political and literary, as the mix of personages who make up the quarry—Melbourne House, Holland’s spouse, Lambe, Jeffrey, Hallam—indicates. His reference to English Bards as “this thing of rhyme” locates it as an accidental position and conceals his deliberate disguise in the first edition; although he declares his identity was “not obtrusive, yet not quite unknown,” Moore, after reading the satire about his duel, determined to challenge the author but could not identify him. The choice to represent the first edition as “nameless” but not quite anonymous (and the corresponding impulse “now” to “tear the veil away”) reflects Byron’s discomfort about his persona as a chivalric lord in a day when “the age of chivalry is over” (Postscript to English Bards, CWB I:263).

Byron’s Foolscap: Death, Keats, and the Literary Lower Empire When Byron left England in May 1809, leaving behind the second edition of English Bards to work upon the public imagining of nascent Byronism, he warned readers and reviewers that “should I back return, no lettered rage / Shall drag my common-place book on the stage” (1023–4; CWB 261). Byron asserts that the goading of periodicals will not manipulate him into self-exposure, but the metaphorical phrasing underscores a porous condition of identity. His “commonplace book”—a collection of intertextual references—becomes an autobiographical character whose appearance on “stage,” a political as well as theatrical location, he will resist. Once Byron did return to England in 1811, he prepared (though ultimately suppressed) a fifth edition of English Bards; by this point, reviews had considerably tamed the poem by praising it and debunking its most excessive claims by declaring them a function of genre, not animosity. The Edinburgh could not directly notice English Bards without dismantling its literary aristocratic claims before the commoner Byron, but folded it into a footnote: “The various attacks on the Edinburgh Review, which have appeared during the last six months, partly in prose, partly in some other sort of writing not exactly resembling prose, would, if collected, make a volume of no ordinary weight” (ER XIV:246; Sat IV:92). Except that the Satirist quotes this note under its collected snippets on English Bards, the allusion would be easily missed. Although

166

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the fifth edition included few changes (the most extensive being the addition of ten lines modulating the attack on Jeffrey), Byron also altered these lines as follows: But should I back return, no tempting press Shall drag my Journal from the desk’s recess.

These lines indicate a shift in his perspective. Whether “press” refers primarily to the periodical industry (as the words it replaces, “lettered rage,” did) or to the publishers is ambiguous, but both options point to Byron’s refusal to let the print industry force self-disclosure. Yet when this revision was made, Byron was already preparing Childe Harold, which reviews would enthusiastically recognize as a biographical travel journal in verse. Byron’s compulsion to publish himself, to write himself into being, overcomes his reticence, and the poem’s success was rooted in exposé, a mode in which Harold was Byron’s avatar and the Red Crosse Knight’s literary descendant transplanted to modernity. Despite Byron’s recollection that, with the publication of Childe Harold, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous” (Moore I:436), his transformation was not from obscurity to fame, but from a fame modestly inscribed by the multiple editions of English Bards, in his notorious family and its scenic Newstead Abbey, and in a reputation subject to public scrutiny in the periodicals into a celebrity that Annebella Milbanke wryly named “Byromania.”24 Just as the publication of English Bards was coordinated as a supplemental gesture to his taking his seats in the Lords, the appearance of Childe Harold rehearsed a new emergence into adulthood, whose correlative was Byron’s maiden speech in the Lords. As Dallas recalls: “When he left the great chamber, I went and met him in the passage; he was glowing with success, and much agitated. . . . He concluded with saying, that he had, by his speech, given me the best advertisement for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (204). As early as Childe Harold, Byron was producing retrospectives that disrupted the periodical industry’s ability to produce its own narratives of his career. Although Byron complained of being “everlastingly taken, or mistaken for my own protagonist” (E.H. Coleridge and Porthero XI:475), this strategy helped him manipulate the Reviews until they expressed exasperation about his resistant stance or built their criticism on the basis of that resistance. Reviewing The Giaour in 1813, the British Critic declared that he “is at once so popular and so fertile, that his productions pass through five editions, and are succeeded by new poems, before we can find time to write down our opinions of them” (RR 238). The

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

167

Monthly Magazine admits that the “genius of Lord Byron does not stand in need of our eulogy” (RR 1662). The Monthly Review notes that the “high popularity, which this singular production [Childe Harold I-II] has so rapidly attained, will materially abridge our critical labors” (RR 1730), and reviewing The Waltz, declares that “Fashion” (not realizing that the term is a metonymy for the anonymous Byron) “seems to be such an autocrat in the world, that it is almost in vain to remonstrate against any edict which she issues as law” (RR 1737). The Edinburgh, having made peace with Byron through a series of mediations, including reviews, mutual friends, and common political interests, classed Byron with Rousseau, as the “two writers, in modern literature, whose extraordinary power over the minds of men” resides “less in their works than in themselves” (Review of CHP IV; ER XXX:87–8). The review delineates Byronic character as “prior to conduct” and consequently able to equate “the secrets of his own being” with the “mysteries of the framing of man” and to “have commanded and enforced a profound and universal sympathy” (88). This abstraction produces a Byron indifferent to reviews, but also aloof from the material figure of Byron. John Wilson, as the Edinburgh Reviewer (a role he took only this once), is constructing a defense of the poetry despite Byron’s separation, a legal struggle in which Henry Brougham sided with Lady Byron. The Edinburgh Reviewer declares that “[w]e can thus easily imagine the poet whom, in real life, the countenances and voices of his fellow-men might silence into shame, or fastidiousness or timidity, or aversion or disdain,” but “in the midst of all this, proudly guarding his own prevailing character, so that it shall not merge in the waves of a common nature” (91). The review—written by the Edinburgh Reviewer who melds Jeffrey and Brougham—is, like the poem, an anti-autobiographical confession. Readers, the Reviewer asserts, “must” be “aware” of a “singular illusion” in which the poetry is “not felt, while we read, as declarations published to the world,—but almost as secrets whispered to chosen ears” (90). The illusion disavows the commercial situation of Byron’s work, in which the readers purchase the poetry within the matrix of Byronic publicity, and, aware of the oddity of this claim, the review offers two elaborate metaphors to explain it. The first hypothesizes “a hundred persons” observing from a “hilltop” “some transcendent landscape” (90–91). This view transcends the situation of its viewing, the gathering of tourists that constructs the site of viewing, making each tourist feel like a unique adventurer. The second analogy, anticipating Hazlitt’s essay on “Whether Actors Ought to Sit in the Boxes,” is “the theater” in which the “audience . . . forms a sublime

168

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

unity to the actor.” Such a unity is an incorporation dependent upon “the publicity which is before our eyes”; “but each person sees and feels with the same incommunicated intensity, as if all passed only before his own gifted sight” (91). The Reviewer explains this effect by modeling the poet on the corporate reviewer who has no private being, by locating the private scene of writing as one in which the poet “is not daunted, or perplexed, or disturbed, or repelled by real living breathing features” (91). Indicating the superfluidity of “a formal critique on the genius of Byron,” the Reviewer declares, “There is felt to be between him and the public mind, a stronger bond than ever linked its movements to any other living poet” (93). This review is an extraordinary example of the institutional heteroglossia that functions in the Edinburgh. Read as a work by John Wilson (as some readers could do), it becomes a counter-text for the Blackwood’s review that he also wrote. Claiming that the “moment” of Byron’s “first literary success wedded him to the public, this was his history” (ER XXX:89); the verb “wedded” recalls Byron’s highly public disastrous marriage, and his historical embeddedness. But, where “Shakespeare himself submits to the shackles of history and society,” Byron “traverses the whole earth” (98) as ahistorical as Harold is anachronistic. Wilson makes Byron’s historicity figure in the career of his fame, but dissolves it in the force of his “character.” Yet, that character depends on “all the Italian, Grecian, Peninsular, Ionian and Ottoman feeling which pervades Childe Harold” and “is singularly suited . . . to the genius of Byron”; blending the multivoiced exoticism with the monoglossia of Byronic singularity, Wilson delicately weaves contradictions into his analysis. Wilson supports Blackwood’s theorization of “character” as an emanation of “history,” and undermines Jeffrey’s prior reviews of Byron through imitation and excess. From this perspective, his Edinburgh article is not an Edinburgh Review, but a parody, in the Bakhtinian sense of “an image of” the form parodied—which possesses the “distinctive features” of the form, but makes the form an “object of representation” and not a mode of presentation (51; Bahktin’s examples are the sonnet parodies that begin Don Quixote and mock-epics). Within the confines of the Edinburgh, however, situated between a review of David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and Morris Birbeck’s Notes on a Journey in America, and in the sequence of reviews of Byron with which it declares its consistency, the review of Childe Harold IV functions as an Edinburgh review. Its commitment to the circulation of knowledge as inscribing the public consciousness is present in the review’s metaphors of travel and crowds; its insistence on Byron’s

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

169

personality as disjointed from his life locates identity in the realm of Humean perception. So, conceding for the moment that Byron is beyond criticism and instead only in need of explanation, Wilson and the Edinburgh Reviewer, in the same space, argue with one another. This trope of Byron being beyond criticism occurs extensively in Blackwood’s Magazine. Blackwood’s, reviewing Childe Harold, Canto IV, declared, “We feel as if there were a kind of absurdity in criticizing a power that hurries us along with it like a whirlwind” (this phrase is echoed by Wilson’s review in the Edinburgh, in which Byron is “borne along by the whirl-wind of his own spirit”; ER XXX:98). What renders “criticism” as “altogether foreign” to Byron’s genius is that “more than any other man’s, there is felt a continual presence of himself— there is everlasting self-representation or self-reference” (III:216). Commenting on Byron’s “extreme” fame, Blackwood’s remarks: “Of our other great authors even the greatest are not exempted from the workings of the common-place critical mania so entirely as Lord Byron is” (V:429). Blackwood’s concedes Byron as an exception in order to bring the rest of contemporary poetry into the “critical mania,” a term that balances the public mania for Byron. Such early praise developed a virtual Byron against which future productions could be contrasted, so that the Byron of Don Juan could be weighed against the impervious Byron of Childe Harold. Two additional reviews, written while Byron was transferring Don Juan from Murray to Hunt, expound Maga’s strategy. The fictional Odoherty, probably William Maginn, opens his December 1822 commentary on Byron’s Werner by declaring that “[w]e are exceedingly sorry for John Murray,” because Byron’s new work is “degraded ere it comes forth, for it receives as many preliminary puffs, in the shape of advertisement, as even a new ‘Voyage’ of Mother Morgan’s” (XII:710). By exposing the mechanics of publication, Blackwood’s folds Byron into the field of ordinary writing, and allows Odoherty to condescendingly warn Murray (who had by now abandoned Blackwood’s) to avoid the “clumsy kind of manufacture that breaks the back of a bookseller with its leaden weight” (XII:711). Four months later, in response to Byron’s Age of Bronze, published by John Hunt, Blackwood’s produces an elaborate narrative to explain why this “doggerel” is misattributed to Byron by the “paid puffers in the Radical Newspapers,” who, “because they have been damned by us,” now “call themselves ‘Byron!!’ ”: “[T]he ‘Age of Bronze,’ begotten by a Cockney, on the body of a muse, name unknown, is laid upon the doorsteps before his Lordship’s door. The noble Childe, careless about such matters tells his valet to give the bantling to any woman in the household who happens to be nursing” (XIII:457).

170

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Drawing on eighteenth-century commonplaces about books as bastards and on rumors of Byron’s private life (why is someone in his household nursing?), Blackwood’s produces a vision of print recklessly reproducing and dissolving boundaries of class and regimes of knowability.25 By this point, given Wilson’s knowledge of Murray, Blackwood’s knew that Don Juan had been shifted to Hunt. As Donald Reiman notes, the “devil-may-care tone of Blackwood’s makes it impossible to be sure whether Wilson really believes The Age of Bronze to have been written by a ‘Cockney’ ” (RR 202), but he certainly had to suspect Byron’s authorship because of the poem’s rapid sales, “2,000 copies sold out in a week” (MacCarthy 445). From his perspective, however, a Byron published by Hunt was not “Lord Byron” but a manipulation of him by the radical press. As these examples suggest, Byron’s victory in compelling the reviewers’ conformity was tactical, not absolute, and Reviews retrenched, twisting the meaning of Byron’s fame. If, as Hazlitt says, Don Juan is “a poem written about itself” (Spirit 259), then Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt is an anticipatory version of the same thing. About the impossibility of romance, it travesties romance. Don Juan represents a climactic moment of retrospection, because its recursive structure makes retrospection a stylistic marker. The opening of Don Juan replays the Spenserian anachronistic dissonance of Childe Harold, pitting the contemporary moment against the older displaced structure of lordship—here, “Don” takes the role of “childe,” as the signifier of, yet different from, lordship, and the adventures of Don Juan begin at the same age as Byron’s introduction into public life as both poet and lord. Like Harold and like Byron’s own perception of himself, Don Juan is displaced, shifted from the preprint-obsessed realm of “pantomime” to an “age” in which its temporality, “every year and month,” is organized around periodicals: I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan, We all have seen him in the Pantomime Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time. (DJ I. 1.1–8)

The hero is unique, like Una, a “true one” but in the regular intervals of magazines and annuals, different candidates, each declared a

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

171

“new one,” are Duessas, simulacrums. These have the effect of satiation—cloying—familiar from Harold’s youth, but the sequence of enchantment and disillusionment characterizes the rhythms of the modern “age” that disgorges Gazettes as Spenser’s dragon Errour spews “vomit full of bookes and papers” (Fairie Queene I.xx.6). The reception of the early cantos of Don Juan was mixed (Philip Martin Ch. 8), and Murray became increasingly worried about both legal and professional implications of publishing the poem. After the second installment of Cantos 3–5, Byron resolved to abandon the poem, and when he returned to it, he decided to publish with John Hunt. The public reassessed both his poetry and personality in terms of this decision. This shift to Hunt’s radical press associated Byron with the Cockney school of poetry as Jeffrey Cox has demonstrated (20), and, from the perspective of reviewers, this move betrayed not merely aristocracy, but the Byronic itself. The British Critic declares that just as Don Juan has sunk from “Moliere” to “Tom, Jerry, and Logic,” Don Juan has fallen from “the polite sanctum of Albemarlestreet,” where Murray’s publishing house was located, to be “gibbeted in effigy in every twopenny book-stall, side by side with grim wood-cuts of Hunt and Thurtell” (RR 340). Jokes that, from the house of Murray, would have proven, or at least recalled, Byron’s wit, now indicated his vulgarity. Instancing Byron’s jabs at the dead Castlereagh, the Gentleman’s Magazine claims that he “fastens upon the bleeding and mangled corpse of this ill-fated minister, with a vampire’s thirst for vengeance.” The review concludes that “genius has been extinguished for its perversion, in the nebulous dullness; [and Byron] lives the wretched Thersites of his day” (GM XCIII:250–51). Such characterizations obliquely reference a biographical, bodily Byron, with his clubfoot and extravagant drinking and eating habits. These habits, for an aristocrat, could be regarded as style; but coming from the Cockney school—of which the ugly and despised Thersites is a mythic member—could only signify degeneration. Timothy Tickler declared: ALAS! POOR BYRON! Not ten times a-day, dear Christopher, but ten times a-page, as I wandered over the intense and incredible stupidities of this duodecimo, was the departed spirit of the genius of Childe Harold saluted with this exclamation. Alas! that one so gifted— . . . should descend to the composition of heartless, heavy, dull, anti-British garbage, to be printed by the Cockneys, and puffed in the Examiner.—Alas! alas! that he should stoop to the miserable degradation of being extolled by [Leigh] Hunt!—(BM XIV:88)

172

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Tickler makes dullness symptomatic of Byron’s subordination to Hunt, which translates him from a sovereign in the realm of rhyme to a subject under the “King of the Cockneys.” Several reviewers speculated that the cantos had been written or heavily doctored by Hunt. The cantos published by Hunt were described as dull. The adjective, the same Byron had used to describe the “young” Carlisle in English Bards in order to contrast him with himself, guaranteed that the new cantos were not Byronic.26 The British Critic derides the “same dull declamations against the great Captain of the age [Castlereagh]” that are “repeated ‘usque ad nauseam’ ” and laments “our nauseous task” of determining how far Byron has succeeded in “serving the interests of the firm in which he has seen fit to become an active partner.” While in the opening paragraph, the reviewer blames Byron for electing his association with Hunt, in the third paragraph, the reviewer declares that “Lord Byron has perceived too late that public opinion has connected him” with “the Riminists, or Cocknico-Carbonari,” whose “body collective has been roughly brushed away, like a nauseous flesh-fly, from the front of Whiggism on which it crawled for a while” (RR 337). Both the Edinburgh and the Quarterly stood silently by, drawn into the fray only indirectly by the demands made by other periodicals to enter it and by analyses of their silence as signs of complicity or cowardice. While composing Don Juan, Byron learned of Keats’s death: Who kill’d John Keats? I, says the Quarterly, So savage & Tartarly <Martyrly> ‘Twas one of my feats— Who shot the arrow? The poet-priest Milman (So ready to kill man) Or Southey or Barrow.— (BLJ 8:163)

This ditty, written to Murray, acknowledges the cultural power of reiteration that the periodical industry had accumulated, not least by its pseudo-objective and protective anonymity; the killer, enmeshed in the corporate identity of the Quarterly, is a matter of speculation. Byron was struck by the possibility of fatal writing, of the equivalency between drawing the pen and shooting the arrow, because he repeats the accusation in several letters, each time with an interrogative formulation. To Murray, on April 26, 1821 he writes, “Is it true—what

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

173

Shelley writes me that poor John Keats died at Rome of the Quarterly Review?” (BLJ 8:102). To Shelley, that same day, he wrote, “I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats—is it actually true?” (103) And to Thomas Moore, about two weeks later, he wrote: “Did you know John Keats? They say he was killed by a review of him in the Quarterly” (117). Shelley becomes “they” as Byron’s source shifts the news into bonafide rumor, but in the earlier formulations—“is it [actually] true”—he seems less interested in the possibility of a review killing Keats than in confirmation that a review could be killing. He is also omitting the causal chain that Shelley had provided: Keats “died . . . from the consequences of breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at the contemptuous attack . . . in the Quarterly Review” (Shelley Letters II:284). Byron is asking an epistemological question about the force of representation, and the permeability between layers of representation. In “thinking over our late correspondence” in September 1821, Byron proposes to Murray six “articles” to govern their correspondence, including the request that Murray write about “yourself” and “all friends,” “but of me (quoad me) little or nothing” (LBJ 8:219). Except for the request for “tooth-powders” and “any such antiodontalgic or chemical articles,” the other requests are all prohibitions about information: 4thly That you send me no periodical works whatsoever—no Edinburgh—Quarterly—Monthly—nor any Review—Magazine— Newspaper English or foreign, of any description— — 5thly- That you send me no opinions whatsoever, either good—bad—or indifferent—of yourself or your friends or others—concerning any work or works of mine—past—present—or to come. — (219–20)

Byron offers several justifications for these “strange” requests. Though he recognizes “Reviews and Magazines” are “ephemeral and superficial reading,” they nonetheless “increase Egotism,” and “unfavorable” notices might “conduct me to inflict a species of Satire,” which could result in Murray and his friends getting “cut . . . up like gourds”—a chain reaction that recalls the chain reaction of English Bards. Literary provocation amounts to a control over Byron that he can only evade by avoiding the reviews. “Opinions good, bad, or indifferent” will “soil the current of my Mind” if he is “touched” by them. He recognizes that these “precautions in England would be useless,” but in Italy, all that reaches him is “through some garbled and brief extract in some miserable Gazette,” which he compares to “the

174

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

few feelers of the Polypus that crawl over the Channel” (8:220–21). Though these meditations respond to a variety of Murray’s communications, and to an increasing tension between the two men, they reflect Byron’s continual worry about the power of the reviews over his self-conception, the extreme of which is a fatal power. Byron wrote his doggerel to Murray the same month he promised Teresa Guiccioli to stop writing Don Juan, and his meditations about Keats do not emerge in drafts of that poem until the next year, after P.B. Shelley drowned: You will have heard by this time [Byron wrote to Moore] that Shelley and another gentleman (Captain Williams) were drowned about a month ago (a month yesterday). . . . There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it. (BLJ 9:190)

The world expresses itself through its presses, and Byron is thinking of the Edinburgh’s defense of Keats, coming, as Shelley saw it, too late to help the Cockney poet. That the death of Shelley should recall to Byron the death of Keats is not surprising; at the moment of “identification” (Byron’s word), the function of Shelley’s body was performed by a Keatsean text. “Shelley’s body has been found and identified (though with difficulty) two days ago—chiefly by a book in his Jacket pocket—the body itself being totally disfigured” (Matthews 132; the book was Hunt’s copy, given to him by Keats). The book, as Byron knew, was Keats’s Lamia, Isabella and Other Poems, bent back as if the fatal storm had interrupted Shelley’s reading (132–3). Just as Shelley brought Byron news of Keats’s death, Keats’s poetry told Byron of Shelley’s death, which aroused for Byron the epistemological problems he had voiced in thinking through Keats’s death. According to Trelawny, on seeing the body of Shelley’s drowned companion, Edward Williams, Byron exclaimed, “Is that a human body? . . . this is a satire on our pride and folly.” Trelawny presented as proof “the letters E.E.W. on [a] black silk handkerchief” (86). The sight of Williams’s drowned body—as a satire on human pride and folly—aphorizes the Byronic project of Don Juan, in which materialization is both the constant desire and the ironic failure of the epic poem. Rather than the body materializing the text, textuality reveals the body as a genre of print, namely, “satire,” a genre dependent on its intertextuality within print.

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

175

In Canto XI, Juan’s “body,” authorized by the Empress Catherine’s secret commission and marked (and exhausted) by her phallic force, returns, as proxy for Byron, to England. Written in eleven days, the canto moves relentlessly from one meditation on the body to another, from the mock-Iliad death of a highwayman killed over the confusions of language to the sight of “people ridden o’er like sand / By slaves on horseback” (XI.85.5–6), an allusion, couched in a Shelleyan vocabulary, to the Peterloo massacre. The canto begins with a punning disquisition on “matter” (XI.1–4) as textual, physical, and headache producing. Just as Johnson refutes Berkeley’s idealism with the pain produced by kicking a stone, Byron’s body (against his disciplinary will) refuses such idealism by aches, indigestion, and growing “phthisical,”—a word linked to Byron’s suffering from “a violent rheumatic and bilious attack, constipation, and the devil knows what” (BLJ 10:12). “Phthisical” can also refer to consumption, the disease that, Byron now knew from Hunt, had killed Keats. Just as placing Don Juan in the hands of Hunt placed Byron in Keats’s position as the preeminent Cockney poet, here Byron suffers, mockingly, even innoculatively, from the illness that he represents as the killing strategy of the periodicals—consumption. The Monthly Review summarizes the narrative of Canto XI; the canto “initiates him somewhat in the manners of this country; first, by bringing him into contact with highway robbers on Shooter’s Hill, next by presenting him at court, and then by leading him into the commencement of fashionable life in London” (RR 1830). Digressions intersperse the plot, including a ten-stanza meditation on the periodicals. In stanza fifty-four, Juan, “admitted to all the coteries,” encounters the literati, which prompts Byron’s consideration of the mechanisms of fame. His list, running from stanza 55 to 60, of the “live and dead pretenders” to the title of “greatest living poet” culminates with “John Keats killed off by one critique.” Keats is the only other poet besides Byron himself (with whom the digression begins and who himself is anatomized by correlating his poems, as greeted by reviewers, to Napoleon’s defeats) who is granted an entire stanza to himself. That stanza ends: Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate. ‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuffed out by an article. (XI.60.6–8)

Although Byron names Keats, the strangeness he mentions resides not in Keats’s character, but in the sudden fragility of the mind in

176

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the face of periodical production, characterized two stanzas later as “those Janizaries” whom, were he back in England, an avenging Byron would show “what an intellectual war is” (XI.62.7–8). The Janizaries were a standing national army in Turkey, which “dictated the deposition of Sultans and the nomination of their successors” (Eversley 42)—a body which, though produced by the ruling class, reduced that class to a pale imitation of itself. Byron understands identity in simultaneously transcendental and empirical terms. The passivity of “the mind” that lets “itself be snuffed out” is not Keats’s mind per se, but “the mind” as an entity, a “very fiery particle.” A mind must be open to the fuel necessary to sustain it, but that receptivity—at least for Keats—makes the “mind” vulnerable to its own extinction, because the fuel that must be incorporated is text itself. The play between the meanings and chiming of “Article” and “particle” emphasizes this textuality. An article is the unit of the periodical that incorporates the individual author, that brings him—in the typical metaphor of both Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews—before the bar of the periodical. Byron emphasizes the textuality of identity through the internal slant rhyme of “Keats” to “cri-tique,” and the accentual stress on the singularity of the review: it only took “one critique”—the smallest distinct unit of criticism, that is, a particle of criticism—to kill off Keats, in constrast to the heroic sequence of Byron’s battles detailed in stanza 56. Byron offers Keats’s fate as evidence of a tension between particularity of individual identity and the reiterative being of authorship; it is “strange” and estranging, as selfhood is revealed not as a “particle,” in the sense of an indivisible unit, but as recognizable only within the grammatical sequences by which “particles” have meaning through reiteration and difference. Byron positions Keats’s death as a casualty of battle amid the chaos of the contemporary cultural scene, which Juan discovers in a procession resembling “Banquo’s glass”: He saw ten thousand living authors pass, That being about their average numeral; Also the eighty “greatest living poets,” As every paltry magazine can show it’s. (XI.54.5–8)

Byron’s narrator uses statistics to describe the situation, but rather than providing an ordering system to literature (as the science of statistics was meant to do for all social domains it enumerated 27),

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

177

it empowers “every paltry magazine” to award its own titles, and thereby own “it’s” own poetic mascot. This antiaristocratic form of patronage transforms the image of “Banquo’s glass” from a temporal one—in Macbeth, Banquo’s ghost shows Macbeth the seemingly infinite sequence of kings in his line—to a spatial one, in which the writers, like Banquo’s own horrifying ghost for Macbeth, are the entertainment “[a]t great assemblies or in parties small.” Byron puns not only on his sense of the smallness of mind of such corporate persons as magazines and political parties (their coextensive smallness underscored by the chime between the phrases “parties small” and “paltry magazines”) but demonstrates their infectious effect, as “great assemblies” and “greatest living poets” are themselves reduced. In the stanzas that follow, Byron names the various crown-holders, including himself, and their supporters, although he parades his own indifference to his place in the series. He is “sure” he “did not know it, / Nor sought of foolscap subjects to be king” (XI.55.6). Yet, as he constructs the rest of the list, his presence is necessary for the intelligibility of the sequence. He emphasizes the seriality, for instance, by situating “Moore and Campbell / [as coming] Before and after” him, making their positions reciprocally dependent on his (XI.57.1). Structurally, Keats’s death stops this procession of “living” authors, and reminds all authors that ultimately they cannot know their rank: The list grows long of live and dead pretenders To that which none will gain—or none will know The Conqueror at least; who, ere time renders His last award, will have the long grass grow Above his burnt-out brain, and sapless cinders. (XI.61.1–5)

Whether for Keats, killed by a single article, or a long-lived (or at least world-weary) writer for whom the epic in the reader’s hand is his “Moscow” (XI.56.1), the truth of one’s place in the list comes after the transformation of the “fiery particle” into the “burnt-out brain, and sapless cinders.” This “list” (punning on a jousting arena) of “live and dead pretenders” signals the futility of their competition; Byron’s critical skepticism does not deny the existence of truth, but human access to it and therefore to self-knowledge. Like the grass that will feed on them and grow “long,” the poets make a “long” list. As an echo of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” the image of the grass signals a nostalgia, in that the contest is no longer for glory but for recognition.

178

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Seeing that the periodical industry has become the nexus of “the literary lower empire,” Byron’s narrator announces that he would, were he back in England, “show them what an intellectual war is.” Yet, in this same canto, when Juan comes to England, he finds himself embroiled in a series of linguistic confusions that suggest just how complex such an intellectual war would be.28 These debates deployed by the periodical industry configured many of the possibilities for literary identity, by forcing authors to negotiate the tentativeness of their possession of their own language. Byron’s decision to offer himself as a potential ally of Keats stems less from a private response to the younger poet than from the power of the periodicals to align him with the Cockney School because of his decision to publish with the Hunts. Leigh Hunt claimed of Canto XI, in a puff published in the Literary Examiner, that “in no preceding division is the noble author more himself and less anybody else” (August 16, 1823; VII:105). To be Byron is to have escaped Murray and found Hunt. Blackwood’s counters this assertion, claiming that Don Juan “contains nothing that the moment it is read makes everybody exclaim, ‘Well, say what you please of the book—but here is a stanza which no living man but Lord Byron could have written’ ” (BM XIV:92). Timothy Tickler’s tone catches Byronic indifference—“say what you please”—and recognizes Byron’s construction of a self that seems universal, in that certain lines can make “everyone” respond in reaction to his uniqueness. Lamenting the “completeness” of the “recent fall of Lord Byron’s name” as comparable only to Hazlitt’s self-exposure in Liber Amoris, Tickler locates him among the “Brotherhood” of “the Hunts”; in that contaminated space of the Examiner and the Liberal, like Don Juan, “Lord Byron himself” appears “to be getting into his dotage before his time” (BM XIV:92–3). Byron’s formulation of the intellectual terrain depended for its satirical effect on the recognition that battles, duels, wars, and other violent encounters characterized the metaphors of literary debate. Byron reworks the classical formulation of Achaean battlefield glory to situate the periodicals as the conveyers—and therefore producers—of fame. After a list of nondescript names—the last of whom, Jack Smith, child of a blacksmith from Cumberland, gained a notice of three lines—Byron “wonder[s] . . . if a man’s name in a bulletin / May make up for a bullet in his body?” (DJ VII.21.1–3). Byron’s pun is underscored by an etymological consistency, as “bulletin,” the diminutive of “bullet,” had a military inflection when Byron wrote: “A short account or report of public news or events, issued by authority; applied esp., c1800, to a report sent from the seat of war by a

Lor d By ron a mong the R ev iews

179

commander for publication at home” (OED). Especially for Byron, who could bring himself home only through the bulletins of Don Juan, to remain alive within this embattled space depended on asserting one’s identity against competing versions of one’s self—including one’s own publishers and, always, those reviewers that Byron first imagined even before publication and, over the course of his career, whom he trained into obedience. Finally, critics, now as then, are left with the Byronic as a system that refers to, without revealing, anything properly named Byron. Critical practice, Byron’s intellectual war, is fraught with violent exclusions and forceful materializations, and an identity happens, within that war, in reference to the armies that one serves.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 6

A br a h a m G ol dsm i d: Fi na nc i a l M agic i a n a n d t h e P u bl ic I m age

To this Jew, and to other advertising money-lenders (some of whom were, I believe, also Jews), I had introduced myself with an account of my expectations; which account, on examining my father’s will at Doctors’ Commons, they had ascertained to be correct . . . but one question still remained, which the faces of the Jews pretty significantly suggested—was I that person? . . . . It was strange to me to find my own self materialiter considered (so I expressed it, for I doated on logical accuracy of distinctions), accused, or at least suspected, of counterfeiting my own self formaliter considered. —Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, LM IV:307 They [Abraham and Benjamin Goldsmid] like the pomp and stance of a printed subscription, where their names blazoned in the front of a newspaper tells the world so much good has been done. —Levy Alexander, 1802, quoted in Rozin, 49

Creating Credit In March of 1807, the publisher Alexander Hunter attended a dinner given by Isaac D’Israeli. In a letter to his partner, Archibald Constable, a few days later, he reported: “The whole company, except ourselves I believe, were Jews and Jewesses! The astonishing fact of the separate and uniform appearance of this wandering people over all the nations of the earth is one of the most extraordinary events

182

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

recorded, or rather foretold, in scriptures, and is surely one of the most puzzling facts an unbeliever can meet with” (Constable I:126). In a gesture that replicates Christian exegesis, Hunter understands the communality of the Jews as signifying the truth of Christianity.1 Such assumptions exerted pressure on Jews to perform their ethnicity in prescribed ways. A paradigmatic figure for this performance in Romantic-era London was Abraham Goldsmid. His own performance of his public identity operated within the matrix of the periodical press, and confronted William Cobbett’s marshaling of cultural anti-Semitism. When Goldsmid died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on September 25, 1810, two years after his brother and business partner Benjamin had killed himself, polite magazines and newspapers reported the event throughout Great Britain, and political economists speculated on the alarming effect of his death on the public stocks. The European Magazine and London Review ran four different items in the October 1810 number. Its second article (longer than its first on the king’s Jubilee and accompanied by a frontispiece portrait of Goldsmid) began as follows: “There has, in the commercial and moral world, scarcely ever occurred an event that has excited a more general sensation of sorrow, or in a greater degree stimulated the emotions of sensibility” (58:244). A poem by “J.M.” immediately followed on the next page: Blessed with those qualities which men hold dear Wealth, honour, fame, attended his career, His death a grateful nation seem’d to feel. So Florence mourn’d—so drooped commercial pride, When Cosmo perish’d, and Lorenzo died.

The assonant chiasmus—“Florence mourned—so drooped commercial pride”—coordinates the social and commercial responses to public deaths through sentimentalizing personifications. A later poem, Samuel Pratt’s “Lines, Occasioned by the Death of Benjamin Goldsmid, Esq,” continues in this mode by declaring that, despite his dying a suicide, “The rich who lov’d, the poor who bless’d thy worth, / Whate’er the cause, shall consecrate thy earth.” In both poems, the collapse of the public firm is tantamount to the destruction of the private individual, so the suicide becomes a confirming gesture of public reality, rather than an individual sin. Pratt’s poem is followed by a report of the inquest and burial of Abraham Goldsmid; the inquest marshaled evidence for a verdict of “insanity” that included his “occasional depressions of spirits, in

A br a h a m Goldsmid

183

the highest degree alarming to his family” and an “accident” in which an ox and cart struck him and “contributed to the derangement of his nervous system, and rendered him more susceptible to the mortifications and embarrassments to which the late depreciation of omnium exposed him.” Despite this legal mitigation, the article reports that “in conformity to the Mosaic laws, they [“high priest and elders”] withheld from him the customary funeral rites” (58:313–14). Although more extensive than notices in other periodicals, the European’s presentation of Goldsmid is typical in several respects, including its signaling a tension between British and Jewish identity, evident in the difference between the British and Jewish legal determinations regarding Goldsmid’s suicide. Goldsmid’s philanthropy, however, becomes a sign of the universal in which Jewish and British identities can converge, as the association of “wealth, honour, and fame” negotiates contradictory representations. Although the suicide is delineated as an aberration in Goldsmid’s career, the ability to disassociate his death from his life demonstrates that the continuity of his selfhood cohered not as individual identity but in the public context of the self. The connection of Jews with the English financial markets is an eighteenth-century truism replicated throughout popular print and theatrical cultures. Describing his chameleon nature, Addison’s Spectator notes that “I have been taken for a Merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten Years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of Stock-jobbers at Jonathan’s” (I:4). Susan Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife locates a key financial scene among the stockjobbers at Jonathan’s; there, the hero Colonel Fainwell, disguised as a Dutch merchant, dupes Changelove as part of the marriage plot. Stockjobbers provide ambient confusion that culminates in the Second Stockjobber’s exclamation: “Zounds, where are all the Jews this afternoon? Are you a bull or a bear today, Abraham?” The Third Stockjobber replies that he is a bull today and will be a bear next week (IV.i.19–22). In both Addison and Centlivre’s representations, Jewish presence at the nascent stock exchange registers the uncertainty of its trading procedures and its dependence upon stabilizing discourse. Such representations ranged from pro-Semitic commentary that credited Jewish stockjobbers with professionalizing the markets to anti-Semitism that blamed the financial uncertainties on the Jewish brokers. These caricatures overstated a genuine but limited phenomenon, the influx of Jewish immigrants with mercantile and financial skills, who, in concert with others, transformed the English monetary markets. The law limited the number of licensed Jewish

184

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

financial merchants to a dozen, and while some others worked as unlicensed merchants, Jews only constituted a substantial minority of the financial market (Pollins Ch. 2). Burke’s Reflections provides an example of the anti-Semitism that linked financial instability to Jewish duplicity. Defending his version of English constitutionalism, Burke recognizes that political and military success in Europe depends upon the viability of financial markets, which, in turn, rely on the stability of money as a representation of public credit. He proposes a series of analogies that link the economy of ideas to that of monetary exchange. Distinguishing the English revolutionaries under Cromwell from the contemporary French revolutionaries, Burke insists on the “long view” of the former: “They were not like Jew brokers, contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils” (41). In associating the French National government with Jews in 1791, Burke strives to erode French financial credit as anti-Christian: church wardens should not “so much as to trust the chalice in their sacrilegious hands, so long as Jews have assignats on ecclesiastical plunder, to exchange for the silver stolen from churches” (Letter 15).2 His rhetorical attack on the French Assignats corresponded to British attacks on French currency waged through counterfeiting and monetary manipulation. Such attacks corrupted French economic stability—and contributed to Robespierre’s defeat of the moderate Girondins and to Napoleon’s rise—but distressed England’s financial markets as the national debt soared. The resulting situation spawned an industry of financial pamphlets meant to assure an uneasy public. Financiers recognized that the faith of the nation in economic stability was partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. The delicate balance of gold reserves was aggravated when country banks failed in 1797 and thousand of firms and individuals publicly declared their willingness to circulate unbacked Bank of England Notes. Among the chief agents of this stabilizing effort was the firm of Abraham and Benjamin Goldsmid, two sons of an Amsterdam merchant. From the early 1790s, their career had relied increasingly on the public representation of their reliability as intermediaries within diverse financial markets. For them, the events of 1797 were less a crisis (although they did lose considerable money) than a developmental stage in the financial markets that required merchants to represent persuasively financial stability. In 1792, a “landmark [year] in the firm’s history,” the Goldsmids had moved “from a house on the close and cramped Jewish quarter to more spacious premises in

A br a h a m Goldsmid

185

Capel Court, within a stone’s throw of the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange, and the move was the outward sign of the growing prestige and importance of the firm” (Cope 184–5). There, they befriended Abraham Newland, the “famous, popular” and “very speculative” chief cashier of the Bank of England; Paul Emden suggests that “this very close acquaintanceship” might be better described as “a very silent partnership” from which “both sides benefited (233). On his death, Newland left each brother L500, with the proviso “to buy mourning rings” (Emden 234). Like Newland, as the brothers extended their professional relationships, they developed their public personae as philanthropists and patriots. Benjamin Goldsmid’s biographer maintains that the brothers took “up the business of a Bill Broker,” that is, “the middle man between the Merchant and the Monied Interest; a concern wholly unknown on the Royal Exchange till that time,” about 1771 (Levy Alexander 100, 16). Their ancestor, Rabbi Uri Halevi, was reputedly an alchemist capable of transforming base metals into gold (Arkin 159), and although the myth was, presumably, not widely believed, it contributed to the popularization of Abraham Goldsmid as financial magician. Summarizing their career as it had been captured in the periodical press, John Francis compares their “entertainments” to “the glories of the Arabian nights” and characterizes their success in lotteries as “little inferior to romance”; he grants them a relevant clairvoyance: “they knew as if by instinct a bill of exchange with a bad name to it” (162–3). Even their father’s death was surrounded with an aura of the mystical. Levy Alexander relates “a mysterious circumstance” that “occasioned much talk among our people,” that is, English Jews. Aaron Goldsmid had been left a “packet of papers carefully sealed” by a “Cabalistical Doctor,” accompanied by the “severest injunction” not to break the seal. Obedience to this command would make his family “highly prosperous in all their undertakings,” but succumbing to curiosity, he eventually opened the scroll and was found dead “the same day” beside a scroll “covered with Cabalistic figures and Hieroglyphics” (45–7). This narrative accounts symbolically for the fortunes of the Goldsmids—financially successful but culminating in Benjamin’s suicide (Abraham’s suicide took place after Alexander’s Memoir appeared). Its emphasis on representational figures (Hieroglyphics) corresponds to transformations in which the Goldsmids participated, where, as Karl Polanyi has argued, money and other representers of value emerged as commodities capable of being produced for sale and deployed for gain (75–6); the cabbalistic manipulation of figures in Alexander’s narrative presaged the economic legerdemain of Abraham Goldsmid.

186

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

The government in 1797 had quickly acted to correlate financial loyalty with patriotism regarding the war. Having already been instrumental in Pitt’s 1795 Loyalty Loan, the Goldsmids undertook brokering numerous loans for the navy and loaned the Prince of Wales considerable funds. In this environment, they transformed both their own fortunes and the financial markets. By 1803, the annual Public Characters noted that they had an international reputation “as merchants particularly in the line of exchange, in which lucrative line of merchandise the Goldsmids are unrivalled” (Stephens 4:50); that same year, Robert Dighton painted a portrait of Abraham Goldsmid that was reproduced in print form. Alfred Rubens demonstrates the visibility, in both representation and caricature, of English Jews, including the Goldsmid family and estates (Anglo-Jewish Portraits 40–43). As England became mired in the expenses of hostilities with France, the Goldsmids’ position as bill brokers allowed them to act as intermediaries between the Exchequer and the Bank; Cope estimates that on a single day in 1802, B and A Goldsmid sold 85,000 pounds to the Bank, and that between 1797 and 1810 they sold some 300 million pounds of Exchequer notes to private firms (188). For the English financial market, the legacy of public anti-Semitism, exploited by Burke in his attack on the French National Assembly, was becoming a liability. If before shadowy Jewish figures were acknowledged as a necessary evil, now the public presentation of the Jewish community was part of economic recovery. For the Goldsmids, the new alchemy consisted of transforming loans into wealth—Jewish monetary magic into English patriotism. Their public enactment of what was, in all likelihood, a genuine patriotism, aligned national imperatives with self-interest and negotiated the double-bind hybrid nationality—at once Jewish and British. A combination of financial innovations, public presentation, and social maneuvering situated their firm visibly within the financial community and permitted important friendships. Just as both brothers’ much-advertised personal friendship with the Prince of Wales aided their business, Abraham’s “commercial transactions,” as a newspaper reported in 1806, “in a manner, identified him with the Government of the country” (“Mr. Goldsmid’s Fete”3). This account also notes that while “Buonaparte is assembling the Jews at Paris,” Britain should exult that “a British merchant should hold so distinguished and eminent a rank in society, that the first characters in the kingdom are anxious to pay respects to his invitation, to become the guests at his hospitable and munificent table.” Such rhetoric is replicated in the Anti-Jacobin, which notes that while the French have

A br a h a m Goldsmid

187

their Goldsmidt (a spy), the British have theirs as well—the financier. This difference between the two Goldsmi(ths) serves as a metonymy for the difference between French and British society and finance.4 The brothers deployed their money in visible charity projects, balanced between Jewish and British causes, and represented the markers of their success as indicators of British success as well.5 The 1808 Spirit of the Public Journals included in its comic list of Christmas Festivities reported from the British Press the announcement of “Abraham Goldsmid: The Benevolent Jew and Who Wants a Guinea” (XI:365). The Goldsmids recognized that the physical appearance of their land was part of their public persona. Benjamin had his estate at Roehampton designed by James Spiller, who had designed the Great Synagogue of London, while J.T. Groves, the “official Clerk of Works for Whitehall and Westminster,” designed Morden Lodge for Abraham (Jamilly 140). In addition to the Times, several periodicals reported on the feast Abraham Goldsmid held to celebrate the completion of his estate at Morden, to which accounts Cobbett alludes five years later (Fretwell 56–8). The Courier (August 26, 1806) reported “Mr Goldsmid’s Superb Fete,” at which “Yesterday evening Mr GOLDSMID was honoured at his newly erected villa at Morden, with the presence of His Royal Highness the Prince of WALES, his Royal Brothers, the LORD CHANCELLOR of England, and a select assembly of the first persons of distinction.” Elaborate descriptions of the grounds, interwoven with that of the event, begin the next paragraph: “A more picturesque and romantic place in point of rural scenery cannot be imagined. Before the house is a beautiful lawn, diversified with orange and lemon trees, aloes, and the various exotics of the most luxuriant climes.” As with their business move to Cadel Court, Abraham’s home at Morden reflects financial accomplishment that is now joined to a sense of culture and acculturation. Included in the festivities were songs by John Braham, including one with the following refrain: Fill then the bowl with myrtle bound Let Morden’s roof with mirth resound And every tongue this strain declare “Long live Britannia’s Joy and Heir.” (The Englishman No. 167; reprinted in Dennie, 391)

This imagery of permanence is similarly reflected both in Abraham Goldsmid’s identification as a “Pillar of the community” and in the

188

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

conspicuous presence of pillars at both Morden and Roehampton, where “Every thing” is presented “on a scale of magnificence and beauty equal to any Nobleman’s country seat” (Alexander, L. 95). The breakfast room at Roehampton was adorned with “genealogical pictures,” some of which were “executed by the most eminent Masters viz. WEST, SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS AND BEECHY,” and this room was “introduced [to] its visitors” by “[a] vestibule of the most beautiful and expensive marble pavement supported by Corinthian pillars” (Alexander 90). David Hughson includes in his guide to the neighborhoods of London an illustration of Morden, with the pillars emphasized; the text identifies it as “the elegant mansion of Abraham Goldsmid, Esq. The structure is formed upon a lively and beautiful model . . . part of the roof is supported by twelve porphyry pillars” (Hughson 5:293–4).6 Goldsmid’s public reputation was available to be co-opted in a variety of ways. Philo-Judaeis, responding to a proposal for taxation to ameliorate the condition of the Jewish poor, addresses his pamphlet as a Letter to Abraham Goldsmid.7 After a brief Preface detailing the argument he opposes and pointing out that taxation is likely to have no positive effect because Jewish philanthropists “cheerfully” donate and “in every instance, their bounty has been more than apportioned to their means,” the author invokes Goldsmid: “Sir, Persuaded that you merit every eulogium, and confirmed in that opinion, by the testimony of those, who have had opportunity of experiencing how justly they are bestowed, I am induced, although a stranger, to address you.” Philo-Judaeis cautions Goldsmid about lending his name, which is accompanied by such immense public recognition, in a scheme that “appears” to be “pregnant with the most mischievous consequences to your nation [i.e., Judaism].” Despite never having met him, the author assures Goldsmid he is actuated by concern for Goldsmid’s character. Philo-Judaeis uses the name “Goldsmid” and its public associations metonymically for Jewish philanthropy, a connection expanded by the subsequent claim that should Van Oven’s scheme be enacted, “responsibility” for its practical flaws would devolve on “you, as the ostensible head of the Jews in this country.” Such praise advances a disciplinary agenda regarding British Jews, as Philo-Judaeis uses Goldsmid’s success within British culture—“your noble example” of “lavish” “benefactions to the Christian poor” (30)—to produce an assimilation argument, in which any specifically Jewish cultural identity stems from anti-Semitic persecution that is best mitigated by avoiding all legislative or rabbinic measures to consolidate Jewish society beyond gestures of personal acts of charity.

A br a h a m Goldsmid

189

The appeal to Goldsmid positions his “genuine charity” as part of a “pure, and unostentatious humanity” (13) and not of Jewish identity, even as this humanity manifests those “long habituated” rights, the “franchises and privileges of Englishmen” that Goldsmid’s fellow Jews “conceive themselves entitled [to] by inherent right” (31–2).8 An 1805 letter of recommendation for a Mr. Phineas Johnson vouches for him “as a very honest man for transacting business for seamen” on the word of “Mr Abm Goldsmid,” and continues that “Lord Nelson will feel much obliged to any Captain who may be pleased to show attention to the recommendation of Lord Nelson’s friend and neighbor Mr. Goldsmid” (quoted in Susser 101). The Goldsmids’ friendship with Lord Nelson, as with the Prince of Wales, was integrated into their public credit. After the battle of Trafalgar, “The Discourse of the Three Sisters,” N.I. Valletine’s poem issued in Hebrew and English, memorialized Nelson through the speaking voices of England, Scotland, and Ireland; it was dedicated to Benjamin Goldsmid as Nelson’s closest friend and public champion. In the European Magazine, J.M.’s elegiac poem to Abraham Goldsmid is followed by a brief article, “An Anagram on the Name of Horatio Nelson”; both items emphasize the personal honor and public virtues of their respective subjects in language justifying their placement in the same column (245). Goldsmid’s qualified success in producing a public character meant, however, that such a character fluctuated with his financial success, and this vulnerability provided the basis for Cobbett’s demolition of his public character.

Competing Parties In his 1812 Preface to the serialized letters, Paper against Gold, William Cobbett explains that the “greater part of this work” was “written in, and dated from the ‘State Prison, Newgate’ ” (iv) where Cobbett was incarcerated for sedition. As an indication of the esteem in which the public held him, he describes the celebration occasioned by his release: “A great dinner was given in London for the purpose of receiving me, at which dinner upwards of 600 persons were present” (viii).9 Within this narrative, additional public ceremonies, bell-ringings, and fetes secure Cobbett’s reputation and position him to relaunch his perennial attack on government fiscal policy. Paper against Gold begins with a consideration of the 1810 Bullion Report, a document produced by Parliament that favored extending the suspension of gold payments for a limited time. Demonstrating his contempt for the government’s motives, Cobbett notes that the

190

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

committee that authored the Bullion Report opened their investigation when they “sent for several persons, whom they examined as witnesses, touching the matter in question. There was SIR FR ANCIS BARING, for instance, the great loan-maker, and GOLDSMIDT, the rich Jew, whose name you so often see in the news-papers, where he is stated to give grand dinners to princes and great men.” Italicizing “witnesses” reminds Cobbett’s audience of the interested positions of these witnesses, who were not economists but financiers. Where parties in Cobbett’s honor—depicted as spontaneous overflows of admiration—validate his character and integrity, Goldsmid’s celebrations, like his testimony and ostentatious charity, act as calculated public relations, integral to his financial operations, which Cobbett represents as a sophisticated form of theft masked by his periodical persona. Cobbett’s misspellings of Goldsmid’s name, even within quotations otherwise accurate, codes the banker’s inassimilable foreignness and insinuates that the Anglicization constitutes a breach of public trust, in a system increasingly reliant on accurate signatures and recognizable origins of bills and notes. In his first letter, Cobbett substitutes Goldsmid’s public representation, as the producer of grand parties and ubiquitous newspaper articles, for an analysis of Goldsmid’s evidence before the Committee. He intends for Goldsmid’s tainted presence to compromise the Bullion Committee. In his two brief appearances before the Committee, Goldsmid reported on fluctuations in the price of gold in Amsterdam and Hamburg (Horner et al., Report 114–15). Asked directly about the key issue, the effect of “the circulating medium, as entirely confined to paper in this country,” Goldsmid demurred, replying that he was not “competent to give [his] opinion” (121). By contrast, his nephew, the lesser known Aaron Asher Goldsmid, who testified on four separate occasions, had indicated that, as a bullion merchant, he “did not any make any distinction between Bank paper and coin” (41); although Aaron Goldsmid articulates the precise position attacked in Paper against Gold, Cobbett ignores his testimony and similar accounts by many witnesses, including other Jews. Cobbett’s decision to target the less relevant Abraham Goldsmid indicates that his animosity does not stem from the information Goldsmid provided the Bullion Committee. Cobbett excoriates Goldsmid’s means of establishing his personal public credit, which he interprets as a deceit analogous to that inscribed on the bills from the Bank of England—namely, that although on their face, they read “payable on demand,” they were not. Cobbett’s response accurately describes Goldsmid’s use of the

A br a h a m Goldsmid

191

press, partly because Goldsmid’s methods resembled Cobbett’s own public development. The 1824 Westminster Review noted that “no sooner were the poor taught to read, than, somehow or other, they took to reading Cobbett,” who, “had he added consistency to his other qualities, would have been by this time the most powerful man in the country” (I:7). The viciousness of Cobbett’s antiSemitism focuses on Goldsmid because of the success of his public performance—whether deliberately orchestrated through bribes, as Cobbett maintains, or as a predictable consequence of his actions in a society attuned to fame—and because Cobbett recognized that, in a paper-money economy, such public performances augmented the discourse bolstering public credit.10 By misrepresenting Goldsmid’s centrality to the Bullion Committee, Cobbett insinuates that its hearings were designed for public consumption and not for genuine investigation of the issue. Ricardo similarly acknowledges the social utility of Goldsmid’s presence as a witness, when he notes that John Sinclair implies Goldsmid’s sanction in attributing an opinion to “the authority of persons of practical detail” (359). Despite the dubious merit of Cobbett’s claim about the purposes of the Committee, his appropriation of Goldsmid’s public persona to make that claim indicates the availability of a periodical industry that corresponded to, and complemented, the economic expansions in which both Goldsmid and Cobbett participated. The risk of deploying the press in public self-representation, exacerbated for Goldsmid by his dependence on credit as both commodity and metaphor, is baldly illustrated by a brief excerpt from an obituary in the Morning Post: “His benevolence was so enlarged—his public and private character was so princely, embracing men of all persuasions—he was so unostentatious in his habits.” Cobbett quotes this passage as evidence of its untruth; he argues that its appearance—as a remnant of Goldsmid’s own public relations machine designed to “keep the public from grudging”—demonstrates that “[n]ever was anything more ostentatious than the acts of benevolence,” which have been “carefully printed and published” (Paper 104–05). Cobbett was not alone in making such assertions. As Todd Endelman points out, the anonymous author of The Commercial Habits of the Jews (1808) announces that Goldsmid “has been exhibited in the windows of the printshops, with scrolls of paper dangling out of his pocket, enumerating the whole of his splendid gifts . . . our contempt and disgust are excited when we learn, that it was not the result of gratuitous adulation, but a wretched design and plot upon the admiration of the public” (252). By contrast, contemporary apologists for the Goldsmids, such as

192

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Benjamin’s biographer Levy Alexander, characterized their charity as “too conspicuous to be hidden” (100). The theory of credit—in which bills depend on the solvency of their signatory and the fluidity of their circulation—made it both possible and requisite for a banker such as Goldsmid to produce his public image as credit. Goldsmid publically balanced his allegiances to Judaism and Britain, representing them as coextensive rather than contradictory. His public ability to pass in a circle of friendships that included the Prince of Wales and prime ministers, while he provided special wheat for the matzo of the chief rabbi of London, expressed these allegiances by signaling the depth of his personal credit. Cobbett vilifies Abraham Goldsmid for having a public character, although such a character was required and produced by the historical context in which Goldsmid—and Cobbett—operated. Roughly a month after Cobbett began publishing Paper against Gold, the newspapers reported Goldsmid’s suicide. In the two years since Benjamin’s death, he suffered recurrent despondency, and in 1810, as his firm suffered significant financial losses from overextended credit, he appeared increasingly agitated. Chaim Bermant reports that on the last day of his life Goldsmid “felt that everything and everybody was ranged against him. ‘I will have my revenge,’ he kept roaring, shaking a fist at an unseen adversary” (21).11 Letter IX of Paper against Gold, nearly the longest of the collection, is dated October 2, 1810, a week after Goldsmid’s suicide. Cobbett, therefore, wrote immediately and quickly; he recognized the need to participate in shaping its public meaning by challenging other representations that he considered beholden to Goldsmid’s reputation and the government’s investment in it. As Cobbett puts it, “the circumstances connected” with the suicide “afford, perhaps, a more striking and satisfactory illustration” of the “loan-making transaction” (99). Cobbett begins by relaying the consternation reported in the Courier and Times when the news of Goldsmid’s death reached “the city of London” from “his house, or rather palace.” The Times reports that “the FUNDS felt the effect . . . stock fell from 66 1/2 to 63 1/2”; the Courier announces that a special messenger was dispatched to alert the king and Prince of Wales. Cobbett quotes, as an illustration of the hyperbole that accompanies these reports, the Courier’s assertion that “Words would be inadequate to express the surprise, the alarm and the dismay that were visible.” He then marshals a series of rhetorical questions that restate the Courier’s claims sarcastically: “Is there truth in the shameful fact, that a Jew Merchant’s shooting himself produced alarm and dismay in the capital of England,

A br a h a m Goldsmid

193

which is also called . . . the emporium of the world” (100). Similarly, he ridicules the Times for labeling Goldsmid and Baring, who had also died recently, “PILLARS OF THE CITY” compared with the whole body of public servants, such as the mayor and aldermen to whom the “kingdom have been indebted for the preservation of their liberty,” and private individuals such as “ingenious Tradesmen,” who constitute the city’s genuine wealth. In comparison, Cobbett insists, Goldsmid and Baring are “the names of a couple of dealers in funds and paper money” (101–02). In contrast to the Times’ construction of the Stock Exchange losses as a synecdoche for the British mourning of Goldsmid’s death, Cobbett isolates Baring and Goldsmid—reducing them to their names as objects of commercial and periodical circulation. He distinguishes them from the producers of material wealth—laborers, apprentices, artisans—and those protectors of liberty (like himself and his publication, in opposition to the government’s organs, such as the Times). He ridicules the association of Goldsmid with architectural stability by shifting the metaphor, accusing the government of establishing “CAPITAL, CREDIT, and CONFIDENCE” as “pillars of national strength,” when they are in reality “three words instead of one, merely for the sake of the sound” (115–16). The repetition of sound, like that of public appearance, leads to an illusion of materiality, but also to linguistic absurdity, so that these synonyms are “the pillars of the nation” and Baring and Goldsmid are “the pillars of our CREDIT.” This illogical imagery is sustained, Cobbett maintains, through circulation; he traces a series of articles about stock values and notes that “these paragraphs were circular” in two related senses—first, they circulate “through all the daily news-papers” (and likely “the weekly newspapers too”), and second, they perform in self-fulfilling ways, as public representations of credit bolster public credit (114). Cobbett insists that the newspapers’ claim that the monetary markets depend on individuals—meant to bolster confidence by constructing those merchants as modern economic heroes—will “destroy all confidence in the FUNDS and STOCKS: for what man in his senses can possibly confide in that which leans for support upon the life of individuals . . . who, from the perils of their very calling, are liable to be driven to commit acts of suicide” (102–03). Where Goldsmid had associated his monetary magic with an ethical and vital public self, Cobbett resituates it, calling the financier’s work “tricks of the moneyJobbers” aided by the “erroneous opinions” of “political writers” (115). Cobbett makes the suicide not aberrant, but the logical culmination of Goldsmid’s empty representations; his “outward show” cannot conceal

194

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

“his essential practices, still a money-loving, a money-amassing Jew”— which his death discloses (121–2). Cobbett locates Goldsmid’s greed in the commodification of money as a collectable object, rather than a device to represent and to purchase. For Cobbett, money becomes a fetishized object for the wealthy because it is no object at all but is systematically treated as one by collusive organizations such as the Bank of England, the Exchequer, and Goldsmid’s firm. The inexorable mark of Cobbett’s anti-Semitism is his construction of Goldsmid’s lavish spending as evidence of miserliness; Cobbett’s hyperbole deflects his own resemblances to Goldsmid as a character inventing himself before a public and relying on its accreditation. To undermine Goldsmid’s charity, Cobbett chooses an example that invokes the governmental institutions; he asserts that the sum of Goldsmid’s charitable contributions were less than half of his profits from the single day in which, by using his connections, he was admitted into the Bank to discount 350,000 pounds of Exchequer Bills while other merchants waited outside.12 This event, Cobbett insists, rather than those produced in the periodical press, demonstrates Goldsmid’s “real character,” which can be adduced “from these facts alone, facts which cannot be denied” (107–08). Like Goldsmid, Cobbett is committed to the production of “facts” that necessarily embody interpretations. Associating Goldsmid’s facts with paper money and its system of manipulation, Cobbett presents his own analysis as genuine: produced through his unalienated labor as writer/ editor/publisher within the objective space of the “prison,” in opposition to the “palace” that Goldsmid occupied. Neither Goldsmid nor Cobbett operates outside the system of public representations, but both rely on systems of differentiation by which to construct their identities. Both recognized that even genuine emotion needed to be performed and would serve rhetorical purposes, and both sought to graft their public character onto public institutions. Cobbett’s stridency was not the only public response to the assertion that Goldsmid’s death was a catastrophe for the market. “Erinaceus” published Remarks on . . . Public Credit and the Consequences Likely to Result from the Decease of Mr. A. Goldsmid & Sir F. Baring within weeks of Goldsmid’s suicide. He notes that the “public funds have not been inaptly termed the political barometer of the state,” and that the recent “very material depression of the stocks” was “particularly calculated to depress Mr. Goldsmid.” Like his brother’s death, which he never got over, the public mood, reflected in the stock depressions, is incorporated into the private person of the banker. Erinaceus describes Goldsmid’s situation through a series of metaphors, such as “standing alone in the

A br a h a m Goldsmid

195

midst of a labyrinth,” and seeing “a storm gathering over him”; similarly, the “general confusions” caused by news of his death meant that “the richest commercial man scarcely felt the ground secure beneath his feet.” These matching metaphors are meant to convey a temporary state of affairs: when “consternation and amazement had relaxed their grip on the public mind, the funds revived.” He asserts that, ultimately, Goldsmid’s death “may be placed amongst those private evils which contribute to the public good.” His vision is of a hypnotic trance broken: “the monopoly [on the Loan industry established by Goldsmid and Baring] which paralyzed the inferior merchants, like a spell, has been suddenly dissolved; the giants of the Stock-exchange, who stalked majestically to and fro, holding every stock-holder and merchant in awe, have fallen . . . the streams of opulence, no longer arrested in their regular course, will revert to their accustomed channels” (38, 39, 41). Erinaceus replaces the correspondence of credit between Goldsmid and the public funds with a natural image of English wealth, which the monopoly of Baring and Goldsmid had diverted, as a kind of magic. Although Erinaceus is sympathetic to Goldsmid as a suffering human being, his purpose is to disrupt the continuity between the personalities of the leading financial figures and the behaviors of the financial markets. He argues that the characters of Goldsmid and Baring were an anomaly, and their absence will restore a personality-less normality, prompting the circulation of money through “accustomed channels.” This rhetorical position is consistent with his representation of public credit not as the aggregate of the creditability of individual and corporate financiers, but as a reflection of the British “spirit of enterprise” and a steady domesticity of the English worker “possessed of a humble cottage, sufficiently capacious for his wants and wishes; . . . he has a spot of ground where he raises his vegetables” (20). He continues this description of rural felicity, which includes “a pig in his stye” for a full page, noting that the peasant would dispute representations of “his unhappiness.” Linking commerce to agriculture—“the same cause which fetters commerce will also fetter agriculture”—Erinaceus locates the economic barometer in an aggregate, the idealized farmer (21). This figure, both occupationally and constitutionally immune from melancholia, is meant to replace the corporate Goldsmid in the public imagination as the emblem of British credit.

Afterimage: “The Azure House” Economic and Jewish history has located Abraham Goldsmid on the periphery of the Rothschilds and Montefiores, partly because of

196

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the Goldsmids’ suicides, which set them outside the Jewish burial practice, and partly because the deployment of metonymic credit, although developed by the Goldsmids, was enduringly employed by the Rothschilds. In 1820, Cobbett references Goldsmid, and links him to Nathan Rothschild as both false prophets: Some author asks: “what must the priest be, where a monkey is the God!” And I ask: what must the minister be, where a stock-jobber is “the Oracle!” Pretty support, indeed, would that be which would be given by a set of Lords and country gentlemen, who could call in Baring; and Gladstaines and Rothschild and Ricardo and Goldsmidt instruct them as to the conditions, upon which they were, in future, to hold their estates. (Political Register 37:1284).

In 1842, the adjudication of the estate and debts of Abraham Goldsmid seems to have been completed in Goldsmid v Goldsmid (2 Hare 187–99). As late as 1850, the myth of Goldsmid reverberated. In his history of the stock exchange, John Francis wrote that the newspapers “bore an almost daily testimony to their [the Goldsmids’] munificence. On one day the grandeur of an entertainment to royalty was recorded, and on the next a few words related a visit of mercy to a condemned cell” (162). The appearance of the Goldsmids in the press is exaggerated into “daily testimony” in keeping with the figure of the Jew as a trope of exaggeration and overextended credit. An American tale, James Kirke Paulding’s “Azure House,” schematizes the historical construction of Goldsmid that emerges from his public persona. Paulding, like Goldsmid of Dutch ancestry (though decidedly not Jewish), had been, with Washington Irving, editor of the American journal Salmagundi. The essays in Salmagundi in 1807–08 provided the occasion for the Quarterly Review to attack the “savage character” of the American, and Paulding retorted in 1812 with the satirical “Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan.”13 In his 1830 Chronicles of the City of Gotham, Paulding presents three tales. Though each is couched as a recognizable romance narrative—the marriage plot and the feminine excessive reader organizes The Azure House—the Preface by the putative author, a retired New York Councilman, emphasizes the cultural and economic underpinnings of the work as a whole. Addressing the political leadership of New York City, he catalogues “certain good things of which the world cannot have too many such as laws, colleges, paper money, and paper books” (vi). In his justification of this list, he explicitly connects the latter two: In respect to paper money, it is quite a sufficient indication of the necessity of having plenty of that invaluable commodity, to instance

A br a h a m Goldsmid

197

the avidity of every body for more. Besides, if it were not for the establishment of new banks, in a little while we should have no paper money at all, seeing the number of old ones that become bankrupt every day. The wear and tear of these useful manufactories of paper, is such as to require perpetual repairs. So in like manner with books, which being for the most part forgot in a few weeks, in consequence of the perpetual supplies of novelty, it necessarily becomes proper to apply new stimulants to the spirit of the age, and development of the human mind. (vi–vii)

Emphasizing the materiality of paper money and books, the “Councilman” discredits their symbolic value and produces them as commodities in Polanyi’s sense, objects produced for the primary purpose of sale and deliberately consumable in order to produce recurrent need for their replenishment. A scene early in The Azure House, placed in 1810, exploits the interchange of cultural and financial economics. The novel’s heroine, “Miss Lucia Lightfoot Lee, one of the prettiest alliterations ever seen” generally spends her mornings “making up her opinions for the day, from the latest number of the London Literary Gazette.” Her attachment to the periodical as the repository of social values and metropolitan ideals transforms her into a print-cultural object; she, not merely her name, is a pretty “alliteration,” a continual repetition of the same sounds: Lucia, Lee, London, Literary. In Chapter Three, after an early morning’s shopping, Lucia finds herself at Miss Appleby’s at-home; the current argument of this literary circle, about the merits of a new novel, devolves into a struggle of authority, in which citation replaces reasoning: “Dr. Johnson affirms”—“The Edinburgh Review says”—“The London Quarterly lays it down”—“The London Literary Gazette”—screamed Lucia—“Blackwood’s Bombazine”—cried Mrs. Coates, yet louder.

This appeal to periodical authority begins with the reasonableness implied by the verbs associated with the magazines, as the sequence moves chronologically through major Reviews. Johnson, as honored precursor, “affirms”; the Edinburgh Review assertively “says,” while its rival Quarterly “lays it down,” as a kind of challenge. The verbs shift, however, from descriptors of how the journals speak to the hyperbolic, competitive tones that summon them—Lucia “screamed,” and Mrs. Coates “cried . . . yet louder” the names of their champions. This comic moment depends upon the cultural credit accrued to the periodical press, but simultaneously notes the ease of its manipulation.

198

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Unresolved, the argument takes another turn with the arrival of a Highfield, a worldly but indifferent student: “What do you think of Goldsmith?” asked Miss Appleby, after the compliments. “Goldsmid?” said he [Highfield], “why really I think he was a great fool to shoot himself.” “Shoot himself!” screamed Mrs. Coates, “what, is he dead?” “Yes, madam—his affairs fell into confusion, and he shot himself; I thought you had seen it in the papers, by your asking my opinion.” . . . “Lord!” said Miss Appleby, “I don’t mean Goldsmid, the broker, but Goldsmith, the poet and novelist; what is your opinion of him?” (29–30)

These juxtaposed conversations signal Goldsmid’s currency within the popular discourse dominated by the periodical press. The confusion between Goldsmid and Goldsmith plays on the permeability of literary and economic figures, but also points to the historical confusions from which the discursive distinctions themselves emerged. Highfield assumes that Miss Appleby draws her interests from the current newspapers, but her own shock at Goldsmith’s mistaken death is comic because he has been dead for nearly forty years. His literary self obscures his death and allows him to compete, as the discussion develops, against Byron, the modern poet who is “all passion,” a phrase five of the characters use in echoing succession; by contrast, Goldsmith appears as “one of the most agreeable, tender, and sprightly writers in the language” to Highfield, and as “insipid” to the Byron-inspired Puddingham and Goshawk, who insist that he lacks “power” and “force.” Within the structure of this conversation, in which Goldsmith’s lack of suicidal impulses marks his insipidness, Goldsmid occupies the position of Byron. His sensitivity to his “affairs falling into confusion” marks his passionate impulses. This discursive slippage is underscored by the historical impossibility of the events, as Goldsmid had died long before the formation of some of the reviews mentioned and before the establishment of Byronism as the gold-standard of poetic passion. Thus, his currency in the newspaper is as implausible as the recent news of Goldsmith’s death in 1810.14 Written in 1830, Chronicles of the City of Gotham registers the currency of Goldsmid’s fame and locates it within the modes of literary productions that Goldsmid exploited by enacting press-worthy performances of charity, celebration, and civic duties.

A br a h a m Goldsmid

199

For Paulding, to invoke Goldsmid’s fate as the inevitable consequence of a Byronic Britishness based on paper money and paper books provided the means to construct a contrasting, materially rooted Americanism, although one under threat by the incursion of the British periodical press.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 7

Sp y i ng Ja m es Hog g’s Br ist l e i n B L AC K W O O D ’ S M AG A Z I N E

Lastly, pour l’envoi, we say to Hogg, in the words of Bacon, “what is more heavy than evil fame deserved? Or, likewise, who can see worse days than he that, yet living, doth follow at the funerals of his own reputation?” —An Old Dissector, The “Life” of the Ettrick Shepherd Anatomized, 1832, 48

From Spectator to Spy Blackwood’s individuates the personalities that appear in it; features of speech, dress, physique, and personal quirks contrast Maga’s coterie with the corporate Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviewers. Although the editorial Sylvanus Urban of the Gentleman’s Magazine anticipates Christopher North, he is largely without features, a cipher for information and anecdotes presented by him, collected by his writers, or sent to him by readers. His character projects a disembodied and transhistorical idealization of Lockean enlightenment norms. Most frequently, letters mention him only as the addressee. By contrast, readers are encouraged to read beside Christopher North as fellow reader. In a letter to “Respected Christopher,” the “Man in the Moon” complains of novelists who make “the moon come and go, out of all reasonable calculation.” He asks, “Hast thou not in thy multifarious reading, Christopher, met with passages of the same kidney as this?” (IX:12).1 Although character implied the potential of character assassination, of exposing behind the universalizing claims

202

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

of Whig and radical journals the vested interests of petty individuals, it also provided a claim of legibility for the individuals that, as an aggregate, amount to historical force. The recognition by Blackwood and his editors of the political and aesthetic potentials of a discourse on character emerged within the first years of Maga, and was connected to their complex relationship with James Hogg. Kenneth Simpson has suggested that eighteenth-century Scottish writers were “particularly prone to adapt personae and project selfimages,” a tendency that “may well reflect a crisis in Scottish identity in the century after the Union” (ix). A refiguration of that crisis emerged in the early nineteenth century, as Edinburgh attempted to establish itself as a center of British, and European, culture and trade. Journals such as Blackwood’s and the Edinburgh presented themselves as distinctly Scottish, but expanded the empiricist tradition into a general theory of British nationalism. This dynamic operates from the Whig perspective in the Edinburgh, as it established norms of progress and systemization as the intellectual benchmarks by which both individuals and corporate entities could evaluate themselves and others. Rather than challenging the Edinburgh in its own medium as a Review, as the Quarterly had done, Hogg designed The Spy in the tradition of The Spectator. Walter Scott saw the similarity as risky, calling it “dangerous ground to take the field after Addison Johnson and Henry McKenzie.” Responding that “Naething ventured naething won,” Hogg coaxed Scott’s concession that a periodical of his making “will certainly be original enough with a vengeance” (Anecdotes 19). As models for reading the Spy, the public had Burns and Bloomfield, as well as the series of working-class poets that Donna Landry has identified. The Edinburgh and other critical Reviews had identified the appropriate topics for such writers, as well as the appropriate condescending, yet sentimental, attitude to take toward them. Although the Edinburgh Review never reviewed Bloomfield, in a review of Reliques of Burns, it quotes a “very splendid” letter from Bloomfield. Because “nothing is more rare, among the minor poets, than a candid acknowledgement of their own inferiority, we think Mr. Bloomfeld well entitled to have his magnanimity recorded” (13:273–4). Bloomfield’s “magnanimity” stems from the inferiority on which his identity is predicated. In the letter, he contends, “I do remember Burns; but I am not Burns.” His reward is publication in the Edinburgh, as if this citation, rather than the letter’s earlier appearance in Reliques, transforms it into a public record. Hogg recognized that, like Bloomfield, his occupation as shepherd would place him in relation to Burns, in addition to Scott. His identity was relative, and

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

203

his ability to negotiate it stemmed from his own supervision of the comparisons. Where Hogg recognized himself as a historiographic agent, constructing, through his works and public persona, interpretations of history, the editors of Blackwood’s relegated him to historical object, subject to their interpretations. Like so many of the found items that permeate Blackwood’s, the recurrences of Hogg, rooted to his Scottish ancestry and shepherding origins, enforced a nascent Tory historiography counterpoised to the Edinburgh’s construction of historical progress (which by the late 1820s, would align with political reform; Simmons 13–14). Blackwood’s viewed the past as a repository of objects and anecdotes that reiterate, in Clare Simmons’s phrase, the “universal moral lesson [of the constancy of human nature] not merely to individuals, but to societies and institutions. . . . Tory history, then, implies a recognition of history’s metaphorical force: its example is one that, given human and cosmic consistency, may be infinitely replayed” (17).2 Such reiteration was applied to their theory of character, including the unwavering consistency of Hogg’s, despite his efforts at disguises and evasions. Hogg constructed his identity within a knot of textual interrelations that revolve around Blackwood’s, although they predate it and expand throughout his career. He published his Memoirs of the Author’s Life in 1806 and revised it in 1821, having, in the intervening years, established his credentials in both poetry and prose. He published a journal, The Spy (1810–11), the pseudonymous Poetic Mirror (1816), as well as Scottish ballads, sometimes traditional, sometimes original, sometimes a blending of the two that emphasized his originality as a form of Scottish traditionalism. In 1817, he coauthored the anonymous Chaldee Manuscript, which established the reputation of Blackwood’s Magazine. Starting in 1819, John Wilson and John Lockhart, editors at Blackwood’s, developed fictitious dialogues and adventures in which “Hogg” figured; these articles were the prototype for the regular feature of Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of dialogues featuring “Hogg,” that ran from 1822 to 1835, the year of Hogg’s death.3 Blackwood’s published a devastating review of Hogg’s 1821 Memoir. Hogg covertly replied to that review with the short letter, “A Scot’s Mummy,” and, more substantially, with the anonymous Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The publication of the Confessions generated reviews by several other magazines that referred to Blackwood’s. These efforts were followed by the reissue of the Memoirs in 1832 and the Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott in 1834.

204

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

In this swirl of intertextuality, subjectivity is not only mirrored by its representation but constituted by it. As Samantha Webb has shown, Hogg’s The Poetic Mirror, by staging Hogg’s exclusion from literary culture, emblematized by the refusal of the other poets to participate in his plan, “simultaneously deconstructs the romantic poetics of rusticity, and exposes the class biases of the contemporary critical establishment” (17). For Hogg, the cogency of identity as a rhetorical structure dissolved in this same critique of class bias, because the parameters of identity—family connections, attachment to land, position within community, relation to dominant cultural texts, and so on—were organized through class parameters. The rustic was not a given identity, a body molded into rusticity. Nor was it, as Wordsworth suggested, access to more objective language. Rather, a rustic was signed as such by middle-class conventions that Wordsworth, Scott, Dallas, and others championed as they promoted or protested idealized rusticity and performances of it by Bloomfield, Burns, Blackett, and Hogg. Scott, writing in 1806, comments that “Our Ettrick Shepherd has laid by his pastoral reed for the more profitable employment of valuing Sheep land,” and adds that Hogg is “a remarkably intelligent clever fellow in the line of his business” (Letters I:299–300).4 The rustic body was given multiple signifiers within Blackwood’s; Ian Duncan notes references to Hogg’s hair and teeth (174–5). In addition to these body parts, his skin, voice, and musculature all constructed Hogg as an emblem of primordial Scottish authenticity which, incapable of the assimilation within polite society that Horner had achieved, performs a symbolic resistance to the incorporation of Scotland into Britain.5 The March 1823 “Noctes Ambrosianae” presents an emblematic exchange, which occurs with “Hogg” in the scene of the conversation, but seen only at the “cattleshow”: ODOHERTY. Did you see Hogg the day of the Celtic cattle-show? I am told he looked nobly. TICKLER. Yes, indeed. Hogg makes a very fine savage. He was all over in a bristle with dirk, claymore, eagle’s feather, tooth, whisker, pistol and powderhorn. His ears were erect, his eye-brow indignant, his hands were hairy, his hurdies [hips] were horrible, his tread was terrific. I met him even where our merchants most do congregate, at the Cross, and truly he had the crown of the causeway all to himself. (BM XIII:369)

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

205

Hogg’s physicality constitutes a nobility that becomes “told” and circulated. Tickler describes it as a mix of bodily and staged attributes that play on the hypermasculinity of authenticity and marketability that Hogg had explored, and satirized, in The Spy. Hogg’s significance to Blackwood’s, thus, is as a precursor, a legitimating figure, and a mode of exploring the uniqueness of Scottish culture. In The Spy, which ran for fifty-two weekly numbers from September 1810, Hogg inscribes himself in the tradition of literary periodical identity, and delineates the heteroglossic terrain of Edinburgh. Other works by Hogg share the design of organizing the miscellaneous through a consistency of character. Peter Murphy describes Hogg’s The Queen’s Wake as “a narrativized anthology . . . a collection of various ballad-oriented verses set in narrative framework” (98). Murphy’s point is that, despite this miscellaneous structure and the “superficial variety” of the poem’s “different stories” and poetic forms, “all but one of the poems” fit the “category of ‘Border poetry’ ” and are united by a concern for the liminal and the problematics of lawlessness (99). Hogg’s insistence on a single identity nameable by “the Spy” positions his periodical as a challenge to the modernizing periodical industry. Each number generally began with an English or Latin epigraph; the first was by Burns, the next Shakespeare, and of the forty-five epigraphs, nineteen different authors were represented. Then, a “paper” ran continuously for most of the eight pages of the issue, or ended with enough space left for a concluding poem or two or a short tale.6 The evidence from Hogg’s autobiography is that the composition of the serial was haphazard and hurried, with Hogg seizing onto observations readily at hand, as well as available texts, whether his own unpublished work or that supplied by others. A bound edition, compiled to recoup the losses of the serial, retained many of the markings of the periodical presentation, but opened with a detailed table of contents that projected an order on the miscellaneous production. The first and last issues, in the bound edition, retrospectively become framing commentaries on identity. The first number announced: “The Spy’s Account of Himself—His Character, Life, and Misfortunes,—Plan of conducting the Work—Causes of a Reviewer’s opposite conceptions.” The final volume exposes the “Spy” as a rhetorical ruse: “The Spy’s Farewell to his Readers—His real Character and the difficulties he has had to encounter—Conclusion.” Unlike the protean Spectator, who can be taken for a Merchant on the exchange or a Jew at Jonathan’s, the Spy’s malleability is limited, a limitation that corresponds to the inflexibility of his body within

206

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the narrative. While the Spectator operates within a well-ordered social world that mirrors and transforms the quasi-feudal stability of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales prologue (the model for the Spectator’s introduction of his coconspirators), the Spy explores a disordered cityscape of consumption. Just as “Spy” is an orthographic truncation of “Spectator,” the Spy is a self-consciously limited version of the Spectator. Unlike Wordsworth, who presented the exchange between reader and writer as the generalized version of men talking to men, independent of their accidental characters, the Spy was devoted to revealing the formulative nature of accidentals. For Hogg, whose geography, education, accent, dress, and vexed social class impugned self-representation, accidental was the deep structure of destiny. In the Seventh Number (October 13, 1810), Hogg published the anonymous “Letter to the Spy on His Former Numbers.” The “dreadful letter,” as Hogg described it to Walter Scott, was apparently written by the publisher John Ballantyne, a major subscriber to The Spy (558–9). Ballantyne links the Spy’s goals with Addison’s through a metaphor of polite consumption; he believes that the periodical, “if conducted with spirit and promptitude, had a chance to succeed as a paper for the breakfast table” (72). Unfortunately, rather than “adher[ing] to politeness and purity of sentiment,” features characteristic of The Spectator, Hogg creates a generic monstrosity by repeating an “error into which nine tenths of our writers of plays and novels constantly fall,” namely, “painting imprudent characters, and vicious traits of a character” (72). Gillian Hughes points out in the editorial apparatus to The Spy that Ballantyne has in mind “a poem on a well-known Edinburgh prostitute” (583). Such a figure could only be “well-known” by implicating Hogg’s audience in her fame, and Ballantyne’s critique distinguishes the poem—“too coarse for publication”—from the appropriate Addisonian goals of the journal, “improving the taste of the middling classes of both sexes” (72). Harkening to a patronage system that Hogg exploited and deplored, Ballantyne suggests that the Spy consult “the honorable names” of his “subscribers,” as a guide to both style and topics. Hogg’s goals, however, as suggested by his use of this criticizing letter in The Spy, are more ambitious than merely updating The Spectator. He is experimenting with a generic heteroglossia that Ballantyne views as monstrosity, as a way to represent the heterogeneous space of Edinburgh. Hogg places Ballantyne’s letter as the third in a sequence of essays on propriety, the first two written by Hogg over feminine signatures, “Alice Brand,” a name borrowed from Lady of the Lake and the obviously pseudonymous “Fanny Lively.” Brand complains about the

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

207

dullness of her husband’s parties, to which only “men of genius” are invited; her theory is that, as each knows in advance of the “great perfections” of his fellow attendees, none will venture beyond platitudes of weather and news. This plight of domestic felicity unsettled by the dullness of literary genius precedes a courtship complaint, Fanny’s tale of being “very ill used” (66). Like Alice, Fanny relates dull parties organized by her parents, in which potential suitors say nothing until the women have left the room: “Now, pray Sir, inform me when this custom was at first established; and why any discourse should ever pass current at a gentleman’s table, in which his wife and daughters may not partake? There is a disgusting indelicacy in the very idea . . . ” (67). She confesses that, imitating the Spy, she secretly observes the masculine gatherings filled with toasts and songs that “have not a bad meaning,” but “no meaning at all” (68). Alice and Fanny argue for the “propriety of mixed company” and undermine Ballantyne’s argument, by exposing the mystification of domesticity that The Spectator perpetrates. Impersonating first a matron and then a coquette, Hogg intimates a complexity of social relations that politeness conceals; placing Ballantyne’s voice within this sequence transforms its masculine force to prudish self-protection. Hogg follows Ballantyne’s letter by the parodically polite “Fall of the Leaf,” an extended meditation on aesthetic and commercial markets: But the grain, late adorning the field, With its soft heaving billows so pale, More gain to its owner will yield, Than if still waving sweet in the vale. So the breast where firm virtue and reason, Could every wild passion subdue, The fall of his leaf is a season, That man may with pleasure review. (74)

The internal rhymes of “grain, late adorning” and “More gain” highlight the conversion of a fragile aesthetic moment into a durable commodity, one that creates the temporal possibility of “review.” The pun of the leaves, as both natural and textual objects, proposes literary culture as a solution to the series of complaints generated by the three prior letters. From the outset, The Spy’s relation to the Spectator functions metonymically for differences between a mercantile and industrial

208

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

world, between a rhetoric offered as comfortably insular and one besieged by competing discourse. The Spectator announces in his first number: “I have observed, that a reader seldom pursues a book with pleasure, till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author” (141). The Spectator inhabits his own announced identity as spectator—“I have observed”—which quickly becomes an embodied writer with complexion, disposition, and a marital status. These bodily characteristics, by supplying a disarming “pleasure” to the reader, alleviate anxiety about textual deceptions. The opening of The Spy, despite making the identical claim, is a marked contrast in tone: It will without doubt be expected of me, and the expectation is perfectly reasonable, that before I make any observations on the characters of others, I should give some account of my own; therefore to this necessary purpose, established by invariable custom, and that of giving some general outlines of the plans I mean to pursue in the course of this publication, I dedicate this day’s Paper. (1)

Expectation and suspicion, not pleasure, distinguishes the relation between reader and writer. Rather than Addison’s empirical observation of readerly comfort, the Spy deals in a contractual relationship of convention. He presents his character to establish the credentials that authorize criticism. This “invariable custom,” of presenting character as a credential, established by the success of The Spectator and its imitators, was ignored by both the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, both of which present their corporate identity as self-affirming without particularizing embodiment, and therefore, in Hogg’s terms, without accountability. Like the Spectator, the Spy moves with impunity through his city: “though there is scarcely a single individual in Edinburgh who has not seen me . . . yet not one in a thousand amongst them know who I am.” This anonymity will allow him “to laugh at a great deal of my fellow subjects, and to make other people laugh at them likewise” (1). Unlike the Spectator, however, the Spy has something to hide: “[I]f I were to give a true and literal detail of my adventures and mis-adventures, and the blunders of various kinds I have committed, they might well laugh at me in their turn.” Ridiculing laughter situates a self as the object of another’s judgment, and so locates the self as a social being under contest. Mutual laughter at the blunders of others seals the contract of reader and writer, but reveals

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

209

the threat of their being the object of laughter. This alliance is only as stable as its utility to its participants: “he who would reclaim others, should reserve a certain degree of consequence to himself.” Despite his declared desire to avoid ridicule, he divides the rest of the first issue between his humiliations that stem from his protean character and a commentary and the industry into which his periodical enters. The Spectator announced that his ruling passion, “an insatiable thirst for knowledge” carried him “into all the countries of Europe” as well as on “a voyage to Grande Cairo, on purpose to take the measure of a pyramid” (270–71). The Spy’s insatiability concerns human behavior not amenable to measurement; his “abominable propensity” is being “wholly intent on the behavior of other people, and regardless of my own.” As if to signal a similar interest by his readers, he immediately presents his tangible attributes. He is a “bachelor, about sixty years of age”; “You will be very apt to suspect that a simple old man, who has only left the mountains a few years back, can have no great stock of ideas wherewith to entertain the enlightened and polite circles” (1–2). The metaphor of “stock” proposes merchandizing of the self; contingent on its own experiences, the self is a form of capital, the sum of its observations that can be deployed as entertainment in the right market. Although the Spy is addressing Edinburgh, the generalized term of “enlightened and polite society” situates the city as continuous with London, Paris, and the other great cities whose upper classes function through salons and intimate circles, the “little circular audiences” of The Spectator (143). Anticipating the reader’s “suspicion,” the Spy suggests his knowledge of that seemingly homogeneous class and transforms his position as newcomer into a strength: “[E]very thing here being quite new to me, any incongruity of taste or character will be much more ready to strike me, than such as have been used to witness the same scenes all their days” (2). Unlike the “witness” whose presence is habitual and whose identity is formed by that habituation, the Spy stands outside the scene. Where the Spectator’s strength was his protean ability, the Spy’s defamiliarization becomes his. Like the Spectator, the Spy presents a sketch of his childhood, but unlike his predecessor, who was “a favourite of my schoolmaster” because his “parts were solid, and would wear well” (Addison and Steele 142), the Spy was so taken by “many wonderful things” on the route to school that he often arrived “much about the time the rest came out of it” (Spy 2). This passion for observation has further consequences for his learning: “Our teacher was a man of peculiar manners, and I could not help regarding him often so earnestly, that

210

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

I fell insensibly into a habit of imitating him,” the result of which was the “pedant having conceived the idea that I mimicked him for sport, . . . I was often belaboured most severely.” Rather than being his master’s pupil, he becomes his simulacrum, characterized by an insensibility to his own self, which exists only as a function of observation and imitation (3). This trait leads to a variety of career failures. As a novice preacher, he is distracted from his sermon by “the manner and looks of a very old man” in the congregation; rather than returning to his organized “discourse”—“it was divided into three heads and an improvement, and each of these was branched out again, into first, second, and third places”—he extemporizes: a “speech from Shakespeare, appropriated to the old man’s character, flow[ed] spontaneously from my lips.” For the Spy, even spontaneity is recursive, embedded in literary associations. He fails next as a farmer and then a poet, “the worst business I ever tried.” The booksellers, “blockheads” that refuse to publish his poetry, are punished by economic loss and the Spy’s retaliation: “It was then I commenced a Spy upon the manners, customs, and particular characters of all ranks of people, and all ranks of authors in particular” (3). In this biographical sequence, Hogg maps his own career onto the Spy’s, creating a double-voiced entity indicative of the heteroglossic structure of the periodical. This notion repeats when the Spy describes his fondness for “comparing one author, or one public character, with another” (5), character does not mean individual, but type, so that individual authors operate as social types. While this understanding of authorship stems from Hogg’s class position relative to the Edinburgh literary elite, it also comments on the function of periodical imitation. Both Burke and Hume theorized that physically mimicry produces sympathy, and the Spy extends this imitative identification into a professional practice, so that “by putting my body into the same posture which seems most familiar to them, I ascertain the compass of their minds and thoughts . . . not precisely what they are thinking, but the way they would think about anything.” Habits of mind are habits of the body, and repeated enough, they become identity; in Confessions of a Justified Sinner, “by setting his features in the mould of other people’s,” Gil-Martin can “enter at once into their conceptions and feelings” (82). A story of the Spy’s humiliation becomes an illustration of the relationship between physicality and interpretation. While walking along the “Water of Leith” (echo of Lethe, in which the self is forgotten), he is watching “three beautiful young ladies”: “If I remember aright, I was endeavouring to ascertain the exact degree of value which each

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

211

of them set upon herself, and how each would receive the same proposal or address” (4, my emphasis). This analogy for reader response, poised between the economics of self-commodification and the rhetoric of desire, recognizes that the interpretation of an “address” depends upon self-regard, which is projected into appearance. The Spy then falls into the river, and the ladies who rescue him tease him for watching them rather than “looking to my own feet, or thinking upon my grave” (4). The ladies’ reading of the Spy’s glance, his doubtful qualifier, “if I remember aright” in his own reconstruction, and his sense of value as inspired by their beauty all reflect a displaced sexual desire that he does not recognize, having projected it into a fantasy of readership, and so contends that “my misfortune has been attributed to causes widely differing from the truth.” A final, repetitive anecdote completes the transition to his current profession as Spy. He notes his daily habit of “saunter[ing] from one bookseller’s shop to another,” where he pores “over the reviews, magazines, and new productions” (4). His own habits depend upon the regular production of periodical material, but unlike the Spectator’s readers, who are imagined as purchasing subscriptions that arrive with breakfast in a well-ordered house or shared with friends in a structured social club, the Spy is a browser, not a purchaser, whose poverty is marked by his “long, lean, hungry-looking” visage that seems threatening the booksellers (as the allusion to Julius Ceasar implies). The Spy sums up booksellers as beings “who feed themselves upon the brains of their own species.” This observation reflects Hogg’s understanding of the literary industry, in which periodicals substitute for books and magazines redact and appropriate highland oral tales to produce written stories that accrue profits. The opening of the next paragraph suggests Hogg’s own vexed position juxtaposed to these intellectual cannibals: “Such then is the man who hath set himself up as a Spy upon the taste and genius of his countrymen.” The grammatically correct referent to “such” is the cannibal, but the contextual meaning is that “such” sums the set of narratives of the entire paper. The task of The Spy, and of Hogg’s career, is to write himself from one position into the other, within the frame of the periodical industry in which identity is sold, imitated, appropriated, and contested at the three loci of the Spy’s attention: “our literary, rural, and national economy” (5). The Spy next offers an outline of future issues, noting that he will deploy “excellent stories” he has “laid up in store,” to provide “matter” for the periodical. The pun of “stories” and “stores” locates such stories as commodities. But it also positions the Spy’s literary

212

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

endeavors as duplicating his physical habit of imitation, since not only are the stories traditional or conventional but—because of the requirement of filling eight pages—they will by supplemented by “elegant, or comparative extracts, illustrative of the preceding subject.” Further, he intends to “compare all the Scottish poets, reviewers, &c. with each other,” a task that is a less interesting version of the “even more curious” study of the “singular changes which take place in the taste and opinions of the same person.” These two forms of variety impinge on a theory of identity by insisting on the self as, first, existing within a series of comparisons and, second, as inconsistently related to itself. Having established this dialectic, he contextualizes it with a critique of Francis Jeffrey that occupies just under half of the first issue. To demonstrate Jeffrey’s self-inconsistency, he compares two of his reviews of James Grahame’s poems, a harsh assessment of Sabbath and a laudatory one of British Georgics. Hogg manipulates Jeffrey’s position by misrepresenting Jeffrey’s distinction between style and subject matter. While Jeffrey’s review of The Sabbath declares that the unnamed author has “more merit than many of those with whose names the printers are familiar” (ER V:438), Hogg claims that Jeffrey is charging Grahame with “diffusion, want of originality, and of borrowing his ideas from an indefinite number of poets” (Spy 6). What the Edinburgh Reviewer asserts, however, is that the “subject” “does not admit of much novelty” and that the author’s “digressions”—in which he “indulges” with “laudable liberality”—add to the poem’s interest. Jeffrey cites Robert Blair and William Cowper as primary “models” but notes that Grahame “has rarely made use of” other poet’s “words, and generally imitated their good passages.” Hogg’s quotation from Jeffrey’s review begins, “[t]he greater part of it is written in a heavy and inelegant manner,” omitting the qualifying first clause: “There are many other passages in the poem which bear marks of genius.” By ignoring Jeffrey’s favorable assessment of appended poems that describe four Sabbath walks, Hogg exaggerates the differences between this review and Jeffrey’s positive review of the Georgics (despite the latter’s reference, omitted from the Spy’s redaction, to “agricultural precepts” that are “as dull and prosaic as any precepts we ever met with”; ER XVI:213). Hogg’s main point is to particularize Jeffrey, and remove the aura of corporate reliability from the Edinburgh; like Alice Brand and Fanny Lively demystifying masculine dinner conversation, Hogg seeks to expose Jeffrey’s insecurities and baser motivations. He determines that two primary causes account for the variation between the two reviews: the effects on the individual reviewer of the weather

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

213

and of the other material he has been reading. Insisting that Jeffrey’s inconsistency is not contrived or duplicitous, he imagines This notable reviewer on a cold day in December, sitting at his desk; the window perhaps facing to the north—his feet smarting with cold, and his hand scarcely able to hold the pen wherewith he marks the delible (take care and do not read damnable) passages; his eagle eyes brushing impatiently over the pages— “Then woe to the author, and woe to his cause When J___y his weapon indignantly draws.” (10)

Despite the pun on “notable” emphasizing Jeffrey as a textual being, the passage emphasizes his physicality; his feet are “smarting with cold” while his brain is numb with it. The play on delible and damnable echoes the motto of the Edinburgh, “the judge is damned, when the guilty are absolved.” The reviewer’s task is an intervention in the social text, through his power of erasing other texts (the primary meaning of “delible”) by writing over them, or (mis)quoting them. In the parody of Campbell’s lines from “Lochiel’s Warning,” Hogg links Jeffrey’s project not only to the literary wars, but those of Scottish (in)dependence. Campbell’s poem is a dialogue between a wizard who warns Lochiel of the impending defeat and the slaughter of his clan if he takes up the standard of Prince Charles in the 1745 rebellion, and Lochiel’s scornful disregard of the prediction.7 Telling the wizard to hide himself he asserts that he has “marshaled my clan— / Their swords are a thousand, their bosoms are one.” This vision of an incorporated power leads to Lochiel’s declaration: Let [Cumberland] dash his proud foam like a wave on the rock! But woe to his kindred, and woe to his cause, When Albin her Claymore indignantly draws!

Although Hogg could have retained “Claymore,” the two-handed sword used by the Scottish highlands clans, to invoke Jeffrey’s Scottish background, the generalized term of “weapons” disassociates Jeffrey from his heritage, and perhaps draws his lines closer to Byron’s parodic description of Jeffrey’s duel with Moore. In the context of the localized references used to imagine Jeffrey’s reading experience, Hogg presents this abstraction as an affectation that renounces Jeffrey’s own embodiment in favor of British nationalism. Hogg postulates that just before reading The Sabbath, Jeffrey had been perusing The Lay of the Last Minstrel, while, before taking up

214

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

the Georgics, he read William Brown’s Philemon; Or, The Progress of Virtue. The differences in Grahame’s poems that Jeffrey asserts arise from their accidental proximities to different poems in Jeffrey’s library and head. Unlike Jeffrey’s image of the review as a well-regulated court of law, the Spy insists Jeffrey’s judgment is dictated by the extraneous effects of accidental readings of other authors and the bodily effects of the seasons. The literary economy becomes a sort of garden that needs tending—weeding and cultivating—in order to give “those tender buds of genius” the “smallest hopes of one day opening in full and beauteous blossom” (Spy 8). This analogy is a critique of Jeffrey and an appeal to readers to allow The Spy time to blossom. The Quarterly had challenged the Edinburgh by imitating its corporate structure, overlapping in the books reviewed and subjects discussed as well as raiding the Edinburgh of its writers and its audience. The Quarterly sought to transform the periodical readership by convincing that audience of its own Tory inclinations. Hogg challenges the Edinburgh on different terms. He opposed the far larger publication with a vision of individual authorship, and contested the Edinburgh’s representation of self-consistency by accounting for its judgments by the quirks of individuals. As Hogg’s periodical developed, allegories of dress and gait inscribed Scottish identity by marking the anarchic allegiances with clans identified by their tartans and underscoring the reiterative structure of identity, as habiliment becomes habit. His imitation of his schoolmaster includes wearing his hat “a little to one side” and “adjusting his neckcloth” in the same way. His disastrous sermon is summed up in his “having lost the thread,” and as he hastens from the church, “the only effort I was capable of making was that of taking down my hat.” His rescue from the Leith by the three allegorical women occurs when one holds out her “silk mantel.” In these sartorial gestures, the Spy recoups his personality. The second number centers on an elaborate conceit in which the Spy encounters a mechanical contraption invented by Mr. Giles Shuffleton designed to make the Scottish muses appear “in their natural colours,” that is, “in their common wearing apparel” (12). Playing with appearance and apparel the Spy gestures to Hogg’s own construction as a rustic. Shuffleton’s machine is an image of the periodical industry, and his name reinforces Jeffrey’s inconstancy, while the “crowd of spectators that instantly appear when the machine is turned on” acknowledges the critical reviews’ production of a successful audience. The machine operates, “upon principles perfectly simple and natural,” although its operations appear as “enchantment,

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

215

or the black-art” (12–13); the demystifying explanation, however, is forestalled by the Spy’s eagerness to see the contraption at work, an acknowledgment of the reader’s complicity in the Edinburgh’s “mysterious” power. The need for Shuffleton’s machine arises from the “number of candidates that are yearly and daily stepping forward, and struggling to excite our notice,” and each episode ends with comments about the “improvement” of the muses through education (the first is sent to school; the last put on a diet to gain weight and substance). Four muses appear in all, and the Spy is told he must guess whom they represent (Macpherson, Campbell, Hogg, and Scott). The first walks to music with “a wild irregular measure” and wears “dress” that “really becomes her,” despite being two hundred years out of date. She poses a danger to Scottish literary values because her mode is imitation, and yet she is inimitable. The third muse, the only one the Spy addresses, responds to his admonishment about her “affected negligence of dress” with the only instance of orthographic Scottishness in the number: “I think I sude ken as weel as you, or ony like ye, what suits my ain form and features” (12). She appears in “what she supposed would pass for the most elegant simplicity,” but in the context of the Scott’s and Campbell’s muses, she is ignored until she throws off the “mantle” that, “somewhat resembling the dress of the first lady,” “incumbered her,” and appears instead “in the dress of a native shepherdess.” Nonetheless, the crowd remains “rather insensible to her personal charms” or else refuses to “acknowledge” the “effect” of a “girl so low bred.” This allegory of self-recognition in the public mirror ends ambiguously, with the Spy’s companion at the event suggesting that, despite taking offence at his remarks, she will “pay more attention to the regularity and elegance of her dress in the future.” Whether this is self-criticism, confession, or irony is indeterminate. The Spy is not Hogg, but neither is he not-Hogg; he is a figure that dismantles the binary of identity by locating it within a series of textual binds, and allegorizing such textuality through the body. In Familiar Anecdotes of Walter Scott, published shortly after Scott’s death as a revision of Anecdotes of Walter Scott, Hogg recounts a remarkable exchange with Scott that occurred as The Spy was folding: [Scott] Mr Hogg I am very angry with you. I tell you plainly; and I think I have a right to be so. I demand an explanation of a sentence in your Spy of yesterday. . . . [Hogg] Then I must first demand an explanation from you Mr Scott . . . Were you the author of the article alluded to in my paper

216

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

which places you at the head and me at the tail nay as the very dregs of all the poets in Britain? [Scott] What right had you Sir to suppose that I was the author of it? [Hogg] Nay what right had you to suppose that you were the author of it that you are taking it so keenly to yourself? . . . The truth is that when I wrote the remarks I neither knew or cared who was the author alluded to . . . But if the feather suits your cap you are perfectly welcome to it. [Scott] Very well Hogg . . . that is spoken like a man and like yourself. I am satisfied. I thought it was meant as personal to me in particular. But never mind.

Invoking a body of contemporary British literature bounded by Scottish talent—Scott at the head; Hogg the tail—and playing on the difficulties of attribution in the realm of anonymous publication, this exchange displays the entanglement of identity and authorship as at once an opportunity—“if the feather suits”—and a limitation—“the very dregs.” Countering Scott’s accusation with his witticism, “what right had you to suppose that you were the author of it?” Hogg insists that authorship arises not merely from the writing of a work, but through its deployment, circulation, reviews, and allusions; by recognizing himself through allusion in Hogg’s writing, Scott is compelled to acknowledge himself in his own. Hogg offers this anecdote against the background of Scott’s anonymity as the author of Waverley and his own struggle for recognition within literary and Edinburgh society, for which he constitutes Scott as the supreme emblem. This parable of Hogg and Scott’s mutual dependence is reinforced by the rationale for the Anecdotes, that it provides “a few simple and personal anecdotes which no man can give but myself” (37).8 This recounting transforms an earlier written exchange between two literary characters—the new critic for the Edinburgh Annual, and the author of The Spy, writing for his last issue in (he claims) “his real character”—into a verbal exchange between two literary figures—Hogg and Scott. The Spy’s commentary underscores the ease by which public reputation can be manipulated: “It has of late become fashionable for some great poets to give an estimate of their own wonderful powers and abilities in periodical works of distinction . . . It is truly amusing to see how artfully a gentleman can place himself at the head of a school, and make himself appear as the greatest genius that ever existed” (Spy 517). Hogg’s Spy insists on the periodicals as the locus for the “fashionable” trend of self-promotion and turns his own journal’s failure into

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

217

a mark of his refusal to condescend to fashion. Unpeeling the layers of literary personae in the pseudo-immediacy of speech—Scott’s “I tell you plainly”—, Hogg presents himself as self-consistent, yet this consistency requires the constant reiteration of Scott’s affirmation. As the dialogue evolves, for Hogg to speak “like a man and like [him]self,” and to have the iconic Scott say so, achieves a triumph of self-identity. Scott’s authorization affirms Hogg’s identity by guaranteeing consistency of style both in the particular (Hogg) and in a class (man, a figure at once gendered and located in public economic space). As with Blackett the cobbler, Bloomfield the farmer, and Keats the apothecary, Hogg’s literary fame depended on his occupying the class of literary professionals and existing as an anomaly within it. The significance of affirmations of masculinity and literariness are entwined throughout the Anecdotes. Scott’s own body is a corporeal emblem for the literariness, a status Hogg perpetuates: “He was the best formed man I ever saw and laying his weak limb out of the question a perfect model of a man for gigantic strength. The muscles of his arms were beyond belief” (27).9 Scott’s weak limb, like Byron’s clubfoot, Pringle’s limp, and Christopher North’s invented frailty and lameness, is never fully “out of the question,” but rather the supplemental imperfection that secures the literary, lameness having replaced blindness as the mark of literariness, as one reviewer puts it. If Hogg faced literary dismemberment by the periodicals, in the Anecdotes, such abuse underscores his resemblance to Scott and to literary culture.10

B L ACK WOOD’S : The Resurrected Spy Blackwood’s Magazine, even in its early, weaker form as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine under Pringle and Cleghorn, was a corporate project in which various objectives, aesthetic, political, ideological, and personal, were interwoven. From a personal perspective, Blackwood sought to distinguish himself against Murray and Constable, whose kindly condescension was wearing on him. For Hogg, the idea of a new magazine was an opportunity to extend his earlier experiment of The Spy. In his own analysis, the failure of that publication was located not in the writing or presentation, but the lack of corporate backing. To produce a variant of The Spy under the auspices of Blackwood would secure its success. In his Memoir of 1821, Hogg makes this connection explicit: “From the time I gave up ‘The Spy’ I had been planning with my friends to commence the publication of a Magazine on a new plan.” After approaching Pringle with the idea, he consulted

218

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Blackwood who, “to my astonishment,” had “likewise long been cherishing a plan of the same kind” (42).11 The opportunity arose almost immediately. Blackwood’s failed, in its initial issues, to establish a distinctive voice. Moreover, from Blackwood’s Tory perspective, the magazine misfired in its initial article, a eulogy of Francis Horner, the economic writer for the Edinburgh Review and contributing author for the Bullion Report. In the opening paragraph of the article, Horner’s having “ministered to the improvement and the happiness of [his] countrymen” by “the exercise of splendid talents in the public councils of the nation” corresponds to his “bright example” in “private life” of “inflexible integrity, and the practice of every amiable virtue” (BM I:1). The article then quotes at length praise for Horner by the Morning Chronicle, George Canning, Samuel Romilly, and five other speakers in Parliament. Although the decision to focus on Horner’s private life and general integrity allows the article to ignore nearly entirely his Whiggish leanings, it did not establish either the tone or outlook Blackwood envisioned. A rift quickly developed between Pringle and Blackwood, and Hogg presents himself as in the middle of it: “I received letters from both parties. I loved Pringle, . . . but, after balancing fairly the two sides, I thought Mr. Blackwood more sinned against than sinning” (Memoirs 43). Then, “expecting excellent sport in the various exertions and manauvers [sic] of the two parties for the superiority,” Hogg conceived of the “Chaldee Manuscript” as “a sly history of the transaction, and the great literary battle that was to be fought” (43–44). The motivating event of the article that spurs Blackwood’s success allegorizes the internal tensions of the magazine’s corporate identity. The allegorical subject of the Chaldee Manuscript is the “lower literary empire” transformed into a mystical representation of the formation of Blackwood’s, but by making the future “battle” an event of the distant and textualized past, Hogg also places this new empire within the recurrent frame of the rise and fall of power. Quickly suppressed, Chaldee nonetheless “made the rounds of literary Edinburgh accruing penciled annotations to identify its victims” (Russett, Fictions 179). As Blackwood’s developed, “Christopher North” gathered, in the Noctes Ambrosianae and elsewhere, a distinctive coterie of literati, enumerated in the “hymn to Christopher North.” After announcing “Great is thy strength, O Kit, and valiant thy men are in battle,” the “Hymn” arrays North’s forces: “Wastle, the laird of that ilk, who wrote of the crazy-pate banker,” “Timothy Tickler so brave, and the couple of grave-looking Germans,” and “Seward and Buller from Isis,

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

219

and Hogg the Shepherd of Ettrick.” Chief among North’s conquests are other periodicals: among those who tremble “When they are told ev’ry month, lo! Terrible Christopher cometh” is the Edinburgh: Thou hast put down for ever the rascally Whig population; Muzzled by thee is the mouth of Jeffrey’s oracular journal; Onion and onionet there have suffered a vast degradation. (IX:61–2)

Such internal praises, extended criticisms of the industry in which it operates, and the use of allegorical figures all recall the methods of The Spy. Further, North’s physical features—he is old, lame, loquacious, and energetic—make him an editorial figure with a recognizable prototype, Hogg’s Spy. Rather than publicly signaling indebtedness, Blackwood’s produced Hogg as its own invention. Ina Ferris argues that, for the critical rhetoric surrounding the historical novel, “truth lies in persons and not in impersonal constructs” (188); yet truth emerges from the ability to represent certain constructs— even persons—as impersonal (Gil-Martin is a case in point; corporate in structure, he is malleable yet always the same), and to allow other corporate groupings (such as the meeting house) to be constituted through the individual and the individual speech act. In search of the fleeting authority of transcendent authorship, Hogg published his Memoirs of an Author’s Life four times, usually in conjunction with other literary ventures, as in the 1832 version prefacing the Altrive Tales, meant to be a complete collection of Hogg’s tales, but halted after the first volume. In the August 1821 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, the second edition of Hogg’s Memoirs was scrutinized by Wilson in the guise of a correspondent (“an Old Friend with a New Face”) writing a “Familiar Epistle” addressed to Christopher North. Wilson conceals his own solipsism (as correspondent and recipient, author and editor, writer and reader) while exploiting Hogg’s fluidity of identity through plays on his name: “I take the liberty of sending back Hogg, which has disgusted me more severely than anything I have attempted to swallow since Macvey’s Bacon.” Overdone by references to “pickled pork,” “roast pig,” “boar,” and so on, the puns position Hogg as uncouth and as consumable, if not digestible.12 While the review of Hogg’s Memoirs in Blackwood’s thwarts his effort to establish his own identity, its context in August 1821 gives additional political significance. The August issue is anomalous, being the second number for that month in a journal committed to monthly

220

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

appearances. Blackwood’s was in a vexing position at this moment, only a few months after James Christie had killed the London’s editor, John Scott. The occasion that ought to have prompted a Tory magazine to an extra issue was the pageantry of the previous month, the coronation of the king. Originally planned for the previous August, but delayed by the spectacular “trial” of Queen Caroline, the coronation represented an opportunity for national reconciliation.13 As regent, George had battled with his public representation, in which his body, often obese, continually figured. This struggle occurred partly between two artistic genres; as Valerie Cumming points out, George IV “had chosen the finest artists to convey an elegant and heroic image. Gainsborough, Stubbs, Beechey, Hoppner, Lawrence and Wilkie all contributed to this visual iconography, but undoubtedly the majority of his subjects were more familiar with him through the caricatures of Rowlandson, Gillray, Cruikshank and others” (42).14 Like Goldsmid, the king sought to control his public persona, and the coronation was staged to integrate the participants into a social whole that staged the king’s consistency and mercy. In artistic terms, George IV wanted “the participants in his coronation to be as visually coherent and as memorable as possible” (Cumming 46). Reports, engravings, and paintings publicly inscribed the event into collective memory. Walter Scott wrote that he had “witnessed the Coronation[,] certainly one of the most brilliant spectacles which the british eye could witness” (7:1). The event, however, was not what Blackwood’s had hoped. George IV performed it as a reconciliation with the Whigs, not a triumph of the Tories. W.D. Rubenstein points to the historical “distinction between the first half of the years of Tory government headed by Lord Liverpool and his successors and the second half, with the dividing line being drawn around the time of George IV’s Coronation.” The regent’s ascension to the throne “showed considerably more liberalism” by enacting at least some of the reforms for which the Whigs and even radicals had agitated throughout the Regency (16).15 As a Tory periodical, Blackwood’s could neither ignore nor embrace the event, and so the editors confronted it with an ingenious display of institutional heteroglossia. “C.N.” opens the volume explaining that resorting to second numbers is necessary when “our correspondents become dangerous and personal.” Apologizing to the writers whose “articles are not inserted,” he explains that those appearing were chosen by having a blindfolded printer’s devil “throw out at random thirty articles,” and they were printed in the order he selected them. This process explains the absence of “any sentimental description of

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

221

the late august ceremony.” Reading through other periodicals, C.N. declares that the coronation was so successfully staged to appease Whigs that “The morning Chronicle” wept with “tears of joy and gratitude,” “The Examiner” confessed “ ‘the thing was well got up,’ ” and “Cobbett himself bit his lips with vexation to such a degree, that there is some doubt if he will ever be able to wash his mouth again” (X:3). Describing this additional volume as a “boon” performed “in imitation of his Majesty’s act of grace to the Radicals,” North makes explicit the Scottish Tory unease with the new king’s seemingly reconciliatory position toward the Whigs. The volume is replete with sly allusions and sometimes blatant satire. The first article, written pseudonymously by John Galt, is titled “the Steamboat” and concerns the travels of “Thomas Duffle,” a cloth-merchant from Glasgow. Although beginning as a narrative on the pleasures of traveling, it quickly becomes a political commentary on the coronation. In “Part II,” Duffle comments that the “rank and dignity of both their majesties suffered” from “all such irreverence anent the characters of the King and Queen” (X:11). His interlocutor, a “stiff and dry man, of a pale metaphysical look,” that is, a Whig, replies that the coronation “does not concern personalities, but was a solemn recognition of the monarchical principle in the Constitution.” This presents a distinction, as Blackwood’s articulated it, between Whig and Tory conceptions of history and the rituals that instantiate it. For Maga, personalities necessarily shape principles, and rituals, as displays of power, must reflect and contain personalities. The third part of the article finds Duffle in a “gallery,” awaiting the coronation. Perturbed by all the commotion, he “now took my old Magazine out of my pocket, and began to make comparisons” (X:14); for Duffle, the Magazine provides a framework of order for the commotion, and he describes his first encounter with ritual: “The performance of the day began by sixteen queer looking men, dressed into the shape of Barons, rehearsing how they were to carry a commodity over the King’s head, called a canopy.” Among this “batch of curiosities” is “a man of slender habit of body,” the “great Mr Brougham,” who paces about “with a high head, and a crouse look, snuffing the wind with a pride and panoply just most extraordinar to behold” (X:14). In this description, the event begins with its own rehearsal, recalling the months of public preparation but also emphasizing it as a performance of power. Duffle does not have a ticket for the formal Coronation, and instead compares the “look of the procession” with the coronation of “our king Crispin” from November 1818, by presenting a program of the earlier mock ceremony with footnotes comparing the

222

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

actual king’s ceremony, so that his “majesty’s ministers . . . may have a proper pattern for the next ceremony of the kind.” Reiterated throughout the volume is the extent to which the accidents and personalities of the past guide the present, not demonstrating a Whig notion of progress, but signaling a melancholic recuperation through repetition. Writing about a children’s game, Columbus Secundus16 notes with sadness that It would, perhaps, be in vain now to expect, that judges should leave the bench to hold the bannets between two pugilistic competitors, . . . that a gambler at cards or dice should stop the ruin of his own or of another’s fortune, by playing at nivy-nick-nack of pitch and toss; that colonels and generals should amuse themselves at Ho, spy! (X:37).

These adults have not left their games but transformed them into unacknowledged modes of replaying their pasts. Mark Parker has noted that Charles Lamb’s political valences were disputed by the London and Blackwood’s, and has demonstrated that, in pairing “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist” with the February 1821 “Sign of the Times,” John Scott claims for Elia’s nostalgia a Whig orientation that serves as “commentary on as well as relief from the contemporary political scene” (49). At the end of that essay, Elia yearns for “sick whist,” a game without consequences but only repetition; Columbus Secundus, whose style and circumstances echo Elia’s, attempts to reclaim for Tory historiography the reiterative narrative of history. In this context, like the simulated games of judge, lawyer, and other professions, the king’s coronation is a form of dress-up make-believe. Hogg, although an avowed Tory, did not fit easily into this camp. As Gillian Hughes notes, “that he is found among the Whigs in 1810–11 indicates a certain political pragmatism, which probably also informed his more celebrated Tory allegiances of the 1820s and 1830s” (“James Hogg” 57). While attacking Hogg as a pragmatist in light of the king’s wavering makes sense, the letter from “Old Friend” is also directed against Christopher North as Hogg’s champion, and is one of several “letters” that challenges North’s judgment. The Old Friend writes, “What you can possible see to admire in Jamie Hogg, is to me quite a puzzle” (44). The final article of the volume is “An Expostulatory Round-Robin from Fourteen Contributors,” all signing by their acronyms, such as “M.O.M,” “Viator,” and “Crux. (I.)” (116),17 and all “disappointed” with North. These articles stage North’s temporary humiliation as a stand-in for what Wilson viewed as the king’s unwarranted compromises with the Whigs. In this context, the attack on Hogg criticizes North and his complacency as the

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

223

monarch of the periodical world, and it uses the coziness of North and Hogg to suggest the analogue with the king and Whigs. Second, it repositions Hogg within the stabilizing terms of a given, inescapable identity, by exposing his own shifting identity as derived from a desire to be more than he is. His egotism is expressed as a belated effort to imitate himself, a self he knows but faintly. “It is no doubt undeniable,” the Old Friend notes, “that the political state of Europe is not so interesting as it was some years ago. But I still maintain that there was no demand for the Life of James Hogg . . . At all events, it ought not to have appeared before the Life of Buonaparte” (43). No market demand, perhaps. But Hogg himself makes such a demand for recognition. Explaining that Hogg’s “self-conceit” is “incredible,” the old Friend opines that “Lord Erskine is a joke to James Hogg.” Erskine, a strong Whig who often supported publishers in libel actions, was renowned for the flexibility of his character in court, while Hogg’s egotism is based on, and compensates for, unsuccessful self-reproduction in literary forms. The Old Friend imagines the future perspective from which Hogg has become historical: “His death will be remembered like a total eclipse of the sun, no doubt; and the people about Selkirk will date any event according to its distance in time from the death of Hogg.—‘I remember it well—it was the year of the national bankruptcy.’—‘Ay, ay—the year Hogg died of the cholic’ ” (45). Even within history, Hogg disrupts the historical, as solar eclipses once seemed to disrupt the time measured by the sun. Parodically reminiscent of the stock market’s near collapse on the news of Baring and Goldsmid’s deaths, Hogg is imputed to imagine that the credit of the nation is so integrally linked with his own integrity that one cannot survive the other. Besides objecting to his Napoleonic egotism, the Old Friend will not tolerate the proliferation of lives Hogg achieves in his writing: Beside, how many lives of himself does the swine-herd intend to put forth? I have a sort of life of the man, written by himself about twenty years ago. There are a good many lives of him in the Scots Magazine—a considerable number even in your own work, my good sir—the Clydesdale Miscellany was a perfect stye with him—his grunt is in Waugh—he has a bristle in Baldwin . . . This self exposure is not altogether decent; and if neither Captain Brown [of the Edinburgh police force, at the time enmeshed in scandal] nor Mr. Jeffrey will interfere, why I will—so please print this letter. (43)

The misidentifying of his early profession as a “swine-herd,” rather than shepherd, attacks his self-authorship with the pun of Hogg

224

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

tending Hog(g)s.18 This dissemination of lives across periodical culture becomes a disintegration (butchering) of self, as body parts haphazardly disperse across magazines, based on the appropriateness not of substance, but of sound—as “miscellany” chimes to “perfect stye” and “bristle” alliterates with “Baldwin.” Although many of Hogg’s “self-exposure[s]” were not written by Hogg, the menace of indecency validates the appeal to Francis Jeffrey and his regulatory Edinburgh. After the attack on The Spy, the Old Friend quotes Hogg’s description of his time in the Forum. This debating society let Hogg “feel . . . the pulse of the public, and precisely what they would swallow and what they would not” (46). The Old Friend acknowledges Hogg’s metaphor that construes the public as a corporeal body, but insists it is sickened by Hogg. “Suppose, my dear Christopher, that you, or any other medical man,” the Old Friend suggests, “prescribe to a dowager, fat, fair, and forty, as if you were James Stuart flinging oil cakes to the Dunearn ox?” Stuart, who in 1822 would kill Alexander Boswell in a duel over Boswell’s Tory attacks, had already “thrash[ed] the Beacon’s printer in the public street” (Sutherland 245). Tying Hogg to Stuart reinforces the vulgarity, violence, and politics of the Forum, while insisting on North’s obligation to prescribe properly for the public. Presented as a diagnostic by Hogg—“taking the pulse”— the Forum is, for the Old Friend, part of the social poison: The public unquestionably has a large and a wide swallow, and a pretty strong bouncing pulse of her own. But the public would have retched, scunnered, vomited, swarfed, fallen into successive convulsions, become comatose, and died under one tenth part of the perilous stuff that was both meat and drink to the Forum. The Forum got fat and pursy, red in the face with a round belly, under circumstances that would have reduced the Public to a walking skeleton. (45)

In this analysis, Hogg misrecognizes the Forum for a microcosm of the Public, and so derives the wrong intellectual recipe for sustaining a public. The reason, the Old Friend argues, is the composition of the club, which he describes in a list of 16 different types, composed of about 350 words, which is longer than Hogg’s entire account of the society. The list includes “Young grocers, redolent of cheese,” “tallow-candles, who dealt out their small, greasy, fetid sentences, as if they were serving a penny customer across the counter with something odious in brown paper,” “precocious apprentices,” and “now and then a blunt bluff butcher-like block-head, routing like a bull on a

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

225

marketday.” The list emphasizes how one’s work shapes ideas and the forms of expressions available to a person, and extends the critique of the Cockney poets, hinted at by the presence of “apothecaries deep in dog-latin” who are “tenderly attached to words of six or eight syllables.” Such a sampling, the Old Friend argues, accounts for Hogg’s want of taste. The logical bind in developing taste is that an individual cannot adjudicate his own taste without importing the potentially tainted standards by which that taste was acquired. Readers must look to the objective professional review. The Poetic Mirror, the Old Friend contends, illustrates Hogg’s misunderstanding of the connection between the habits of mind that constitute identity and public persona; “Does Hogg believe, that if he were to steal Lord Byron’s breeches and coat, and so forth, and walk along the Rialto, that the Venetian ladies would mistake him for his lordship?” (49). Whatever clothes, or rhetoric, Hogg chooses to wear, his own physical and intellectual being would remain legible and repulsive to the ladies. The concerted attack on Hogg’s sexuality imputes a grandiose sex drive and a disgustingness that makes its fulfillment impossible. Instead, Hogg reproduces himself within the textual world of the periodicals, a misguided solution that only exacerbates his own frustrations. After the Old Friend’s letter, a note initialed “C.N.” (Christopher North) justifies the publication of the letter since it will “tickl[e] the public sympathy . . . and put a few cool hundred’s in [Hogg’s] pocket” (32). Whether Wilson formed an attitude toward Hogg’s Memoirs outside his various personae is hard to know, because the journalistic function of Blackwood’s, like the Edinburgh, is not to produce individual opinions, but to constitute the range of opinions that denominated common sense. In the “Familiar Epistle,” the Old Friend marks one margin and Christopher North’s supplement, the other. Like Ian Duncan, I resist seeing in the Noctes and elsewhere in the Magazine—including the Old Friend’s “Familiar Letter”—a “traumatic dissociation of identity for Hogg” and reading the Confessions as a recuperative reproduction focused on compulsive “doubling” (181). Rather, in both periodical and novel, the permeability of genre and person led to ongoing negotiations of agency.

Concluding Confessions Conflating the work and the person, the Old Friend insists that Hogg is always unmistakable: “A stout country lout, with a bushel of hair on his shoulders that had not been raked for months, enveloped in a coarse plaid impregnated with tobacco, with a prodigious mouthful of

226

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

immeasurable tusks, and a dialect that set all conjecture at defiance” (45). He is equally unsuitable as editor and spy since both professions depend on the ability to move incognito. The Old Friend’s letter prefaces a long excerpt from the Memoirs detailing Hogg’s effort to publish The Spy with these remarks: The author makes love like a drunken servant, who has been turned out of place for taking indecent liberties in the kitchen with the cook-wench. The Edinburgh young ladies did not relish this kind of thing—it was thought coarse even by the Blue Stockings of the Old Town, after warm whiskey toddy and oysters; so the Spy was executed, the dead body given up to his friends—where buried, remains a secret until this day.

The model for this execution is Swift’s literary assassination of the almanac-making Partridge, though a recent parallel was Blackwood’s announcement of Leigh Hunt’s death in October 1819, which might have been in retaliation for Leigh Hunt’s “Death and Funeral of the Late Mr. Southey.”19 Using the formulaic expression that “departed this life the better portion of Robert Southey” (quoted in Magnuson 146), Hunt suggests that the young Southey, who wrote the radical Wat Tyler has been killed off by the later conservative Southey of the Quarterly Review, who had tried unsuccessfully to squelch the pirated publication of his radical play and whose article on “Parliamentary Reform” (QR XVI:277) was used in the Commons to attack the freedom of the press (Magnuson 143–7). Only as a “dead body,” not as a voice within the series of literary production of Edinburgh, can the Spy keep his “secret.” By killing off the Spy and insisting on the disappearance of the body as a secret awaiting disclosure, Blackwood’s sets up Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Hogg’s indirect answer to the “Old Friend.”20 The novel ends with the exposure of a secreted body and its subsequent anticipated dissolution, as an allegory of literary identity and its reliance on a Byronic heroism that, like The Spy’s body, evades complete disclosure, but, unlike The Spy, manipulates literary class structure from a position of strength. Through both the Blue Stockings and Hogg, the Old Friend connects identity to the refinement, revision (through eating), and sublimation of desires. Such sublimation, in Confessions of a Justified Sinner, becomes the operative characteristic of Robert Wringhim’s

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

227

misogyny and of Gil-Martin’s projection of violence and rape onto Wringhim. While maintaining his innocence of crimes of which he is accused based on “the purity of nature and frame to which I was born and consecrated” (122), Wringhim acknowledges: “Here I must confess that, highly as I disapproved of the love of women, and all intimacies and connections with the sex, I felt a sort of indefinite pleasure, an ungracious delight in having a beautiful woman solely at my disposal” (125). Wringhim’s inadvertent puns on “ungracious” (out of grace) and “solely at my disposal” (implying a soul under his control and not God’s) undercut his assertion of being among the elect, and emphasize, as with being in Christopher North’s favor, that election has no visible sign. The pleasure he experiences is based on events that he cannot recall, events he performed under the spell of Gil-Martin (or Gil-Martin performed for him?). The imaginary and indirect pleasure of overpowering a “beautiful woman,” requires being “confirmed” (a sound echo of “confessed”) by Gil-Martin and a series of textual and bodily “evidences.” Only in “reading” about the events through the evidence and the highly textualized rhetoric of Gil-Martin does Wringhim gain access to his own relation to either emotion or power. Where the Old Friend had argued that sexual improprieties resulted from Hogg’s assertion of self, Hogg’s narrative connects sexual violence to the denial of desire in the form of institutional fanaticism, both religious and editorial. Wringhim lives in a material world that is the simulacrum of periodical culture. His relation to Gil-Martin parallels Hogg’s own textualized self when Blackwood’s repeatedly “put words and sentiments into my mouth of which I have been greatly ashamed” despite “a solemn written promise that such freedoms should never be repeated” (Memoirs 107).21 The moment of enjoying the recollection of something for which he has no memory—and so, from a Humean perspective, no identity in—is a turning point for Wringhim. His comment echoes Hogg’s sensation of beginning to lose himself within the textual world of his publisher. In his 1821 Memoirs, Hogg describes coming under the influence of the publisher James Robertson.22 Daily, they “drank whiskey and ate rolls with a number of printers, [so that] I was at times so dizzy, I could scarcely walk; and the worst thing of all was, I felt that I was beginning to relish it . . . Instead of pushing myself forward, as I wished, I was going straight to the devil” (20). Both backslidings begin with too much drinking and evoke a consequent loss of temporal stability and selfhood. As Wringhim puts it, “from this time forth I began to be sick at times of my existence. I had

228

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

heart-burnings, longings and yearnings, that would not be satisfied; and I seemed hardly to be an accountable creature . . . I was a being incomprehensible to myself” (125). As a form of irony that aligns these fictional confessions with Blackwood’s description of Hogg’s memoirs and career as excessively confessional, this paragraph is one of only two in which the phrase “I confess” is used twice. The paragraph is framed by the confession of disconnected pleasure and Wringhim “confess[ing]” to “secret terrors” about his salvation. Both of these confessions emphasize a self divided between Gil-Martin’s version of himself and the residual trace of his father’s construction of him, or alternatively, between an embodied and textualized self. Other moments of confession continue this trope.23 Wringhim “durst not confess to myself, that the presence of my illustrious and devoted friend was becoming irksome to me”; Gil-Martin’s omnipresence figures the overbearing presence of editors, publishers, and other producers of textual identities as both seducers and inverters of authorial identity. The final two confessions belong to the editorial figure who discovers Wringhim’s text. Like Wringhim, he acknowledges a bodily sensation, an aesthetic, of triumph, in this case for the potential of discovery: “We soon reached the spot, and I confess I felt a singular sensation, when I saw the grey stone standing at the head, and another at the feet, and the one half of the grave manifestly new digged, and closed up again as had been described.” And then, reading the text, he announces his bewilderment: “I confess that I do not comprehend the writer’s drift” (174). In his account of his encounters with Robertson, excerpted in the Old Friend’s “Letter,” Hogg describes himself as lured into the character of “The Shepherd” in the Noctes. As J.H. Alexander points out, the series makes frequent references “to his partiality to the tumbler.” He notes the dual function of heavy drinking as “a badge to distinguish Tory robustness from Whig feebleness” within Edinburgh literary culture and as a form of “inspiration” for Hogg personally (39). Moreover, these two functions connect, as the drinking mediates Hogg’s communal relation to the others and emphasizes his performances for them. This integration entails a surrendering of authorial selfhood; speaking of a song from his Three Perils of Man, the Noctes’s Hogg declares he “had to learn the words” just “as if they had been Soothey’s, Tam Muir’s, or some other body’s, and no my ain.” If the Noctes’s Hogg performs himself, learning his words as if those of another, the Memoir’s Hogg resists this disassociation, despite its temptations and the sense of “beginning to relish it.” In the Memoirs, Hogg saves himself by changing publishers, and deploys Robertson’s

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

229

name in Confessions, when the “justified Sinner” is reborn “Robert’s son” through a series of linguistic transformations. In that novel, a complex transformation of Hogg’s own literary situation into an earlier incarnation of religious controversy, identities are formulated through linguistic and nominal associations.24 These transformations begin the “Editor’s” (a stand-in figure for Wilson, the main author of Noctes Ambrosiane) description of Old Wringhim’s Ambrosianic nights with Rabina, Young Wringhim’s mother. Hogg depicts these encounters as a series of theological debates laced with sexual innuendo: [I]t was their custom, on each visit, to sit up a night in the same apartment, for the sake of sweet spiritual converse; but that time, in the course of the night, they differed so materially on a small point . . . that the minister, in the heat of his zeal, sprung from his seat, paced the floor, and maintained his point with such ardor, that Martha [the maid in the other room] was alarmed. (13)

The pun on “spiritual converse,” at once a symmetrical exchange of words and an asymmetrical transfer of semen, establishes a flux, continual throughout the novel, between the production of words and the procreation of mirroring, second selves. Yet identity, within this patriarchy as in the Noctes, is given not by bodily conception or birth but by the acquisition of a name. Old Wringhim “baptize[s] him by the name Robert Wringhim—that being the noted divine’s own name” (14). The phrase following the dash adds no new information but rhetorically emphasizes the production of young Wringhim’s linguistic continuity. Struggling to establish his independence, Young Wringhim derides his mother’s feeble theological understanding (and, therefore, unknowingly—or perhaps with hostile suspicion—queries the “converse” of his own conception). Old Barnet (a name that distantly echoes Scott’s Baronet and recalls his presence in various regulatory guises throughout the novel) overhears Young Wringhim’s diatribe against his mother and worries that the lad will “turn out to be a conceited gowk”: “No,” said my pastor, and father, (as I shall henceforth denominate him,) “No, Barnet, he is a wonderful boy; and no marvel, for I have prayed for these talents to be bestowed on him from his infancy; and do you think that Heaven would refuse a prayer so disinterested?” (68)

The son denominates—names—the father and becomes himself (“a wonderful boy”) and his father’s double in the gesture.

230

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

Old Wringhim’s “prayers” are the linguistic equivalent of genetic determinism, empowered by the empiricist guarantor of objectivity, disinterest. Finally, like Hogg, the adult Wringhim arrives in Edinburgh to discover himself in the power of a publisher, GilMartin. As the novel develops, both Old Wringhim and Gil-Martin in effect publish Young Wringhim, by circulating his name and his likeness, respectively. These two stories, Hogg’s escaping Robertson and Wringhim’s succumbing to Old Wringhim and then Gil-Martin, display the conflict of identity that inheres in the hierarchical structure of the publishing industry organized around the Edinburgh periodicals. Robert Wringhim’s name points not only to illegitimacy within the novel (as he is reputedly a bastard) but also to the problem of legible identity within Hogg’s career. Hogg’s novel figures this problem as a negotiation between an editor (who mirrors not only Wringhim and his denominated father, but also his “printer’s devil,” Gil-Martin) and a self whose existence is implicated in works extending beyond the novel. In keeping with the recurrent trope within the periodicals, in which speech and text battle for primacy and authenticity, the discovery of Gil-Martin transforms Wringhim’s existence from an oral to a textual one: “I come now to the most important period of my existence,—the period that has modelled my character, and influenced every action of my life,—without which, this detail of my actions would have been as a tale that hath been told—a monotonous farrago—an uninteresting harangue—in short, a thing of nothing” (78–9). Instead, the life becomes a text continually written, twice within the narrative, and then recounted within the reviews as a rewriting of Hogg’s own career. The Confessions was published anonymously, and in the coda the Editor explains how he came upon the pages, some typeset and some in manuscript, that comprise the second part of the novel. Quoting the “Scots Mummy” letter planted in Blackwood’s Magazine the year before the novel’s publication, he says that this letter, “signed by JAMES HOGG, and dated from Altrive Lake, . . . bears the stamp of authenticity in every line; yet, so often had I been hoaxed by the ingenious fancies displayed in that Magazine, that when this relation met my eye, I did not believe it” (169). The hoax is Hogg impersonating Wilson’s impersonation of him. The letter ends by declaring that, due to “exposures to the air” and the “impossibility of burying it up as closely as it was before,” the mummy’s “flesh will now fall to dust.” No body, but only the textual remains, can survive the air. As Redekop points out, “Hogg has his editor interpolate this ‘authentic’ [and authenticating] letter at the end of the novel and embark on a search for [the mummy’s]

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

231

grave, taking the August issue of Blackwood’s with him as a treasure hunter might take a map” (“Beyond Closure” 160). In this extratextual encounter, the reader is invited to position the novel within the wider framework of material print production, and to link it with other pseudo-archeological investigations reported in Blackwood’s such as the excursion of antiquarians who go searching for the Roman Empire and find a highlander’s kettle and a farmer’s merestone instead. Hogg dissolves the margins of his fiction by marshaling procedures usually about a novel, including its typesetting, advertisement, and review, as part of the novel. For example, the Editor had wished to title the volume “Confessions of a Self-Justified Sinner,” but was prevented by his bookseller because of a “curse pronounced by the writer on him that should dare to alter or amend” (174). Slipping the bounds of the novel, Longman’s advertising list for June 1824 nevertheless offers the Editor’s title, Self-Justified Sinner, and the title is repeated in several of Longman’s volumes; for example, it appears in the list of “Important Works” scheduled to appear “in the course of “March and April” printed at the back of Elizabeth Pipe Wolferstan’s Eugenia. The altered title is also picked up by a number of journals, including the Edinburgh Annual Register, the Universal Review, and the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, in their publications announcements; the last of these classifies the work under “Theology” rather than “Novels and Romances” (EM XV:235–6). These documents, like Blackwood’s Magazine, become part of the fiction within the novel, despite being actually outside of it. This strategy, literally a disappearing and reappearing “self,” raises doubts not only about Hogg’s fictional editor but also about the editorial role within publishing.25 To publish per force is to “alter or amend,” and so to be cursed, as the transformation from manuscript to print is an act of justification, to invoke the pun that runs through the work. The construction of a literary self was a corporate effort, even if, as Hogg often experienced it, the corporation was an unholy alliance of writer(s), publishers, reviewers—anonymous, named, pseudonymous, and mistakenly or purposefully misidentified or unmasked in other publications. Reviewing the Confessions, Hunt’s Examiner refers tacitly to the Noctes: We gather from [Hogg], that every man is the child of his own creation, and may do or say what he pleases. If he can say as much of himself, well; but let him first pause and consider whether he has not more than once favoured himself with an unintended head-ach after spending the previous evening with Christopher North and co.? (483)

232

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

The pseudonymous Q (possibly Henry Leigh Hunt) challenges Hogg’s self-reliance by employing Noctes as an historical representation with a physical trace—a reaction to too much alcohol or, perhaps, verbal abuse. He asks Hogg to contemplate his own existence, and body, through Christopher North’s incorporation (“and co.”). Q has constructed an analogy in which North stands in the same relation to Hogg as Gil-Martin does to Robert Wringhim. From the Examiner’s perspective, Q intimates that the alliance with the Tory politics of Blackwood’s abrogates not only self-determination, but selfawareness. Wringhim, having fallen under Gil-Martin’s control, suffers fits of amnesia for periods of time during which he may or may not have committed various crimes and indiscretions. Yet, knowing he may have indulged in these experiences fills him with a perverse sense of pleasure and self-satisfaction. Similarly, Hogg had only to open Blackwood’s to learn that he had spent an evening drinking immoderately and bragging about his poetic abilities in self-defeating doggerel. Q’s observations are not original; rather they constitute a belated entry into the array of documents in which Hogg’s identity is contested. In his “Familiar Epistle,” the Old Friend disputes the continuity between Addison’s Spectator and The Spy. In “A dialogue in the Reading Room” (Spy December 29, 1810; 185–94), someone is mistaken for “the Spy on account of his lean, starved appearance, while the true author turns his small legs and meager hand to one side that the truth may not be discovered” (Hughes, “The Spy” 49). As Hughes and others have pointed out, Hogg was well built and so is here playing on the convention of the starving writer, one the Spy describes in terms of the distribution of profits between the publisher (who controls the means of mechanical reproduction) and the writer, who comes as a supplicant before him. The Old Friend targets his attention on the physical body, what Addison rendered invisible, as a reliable metonym for literary character. Here, however, robust, almost gross physicality characterizes Hogg in his visits to “bookseller’s shops”: “What would he himself have thought, if a surly brown bear, or a huge baboon, had burst open his door when he was at breakfast, and helped himself to a chair and a mouthful of parritch? would not his hair have touched the ceiling, and his under jaw fallen down upon the floor?” (45). The disruption of breakfast emphasizes the failure of Hogg’s writing to regulate either his audience or himself. The vulgarity of his ingestion, further, anticipates the quality of both his literary and bodily output, their conjunction emphasized by the baboon’s

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

233

hugeness invoking its spectacular backside. To struggle over authorial identity meant contesting the body as a site of production. Only when dead, consigned to an unmarked grave (and absorbed into Blackwood’s editorial machinery), does the Spy achieve the paradoxical anonymity of editorial power. Hogg, in his Memoirs, argues that becoming literate at a late age allowed him to develop a personal integrity prior to his literary self; a friend “often remonstrated with me, in vain, on the necessity of a revisal of my pieces, but in spite of him, I held fast my integrity.” Revision, a mode of internalized editing, threatens integrity. The Old Friend responds vigorously to Hogg’s claim, focusing on Hogg’s material ability to produce literature materially: “He could not write, he says, till he was upwards of twenty years of age. This I deny. He cannot write now. I engage to teach any forthcoming ploughman to write better in three weeks. Let Hogg publish a fac-simile of his handwriting, and the world will be thunderstruck by the utter helplessness of his hand” (44). The attack on Hogg’s irregular handwriting (offered in the emasculating insult of “helplessness”) foreshadows the extended pun in the Confessions on “justification” as the epitome of both textual and spiritual regularity. Further, the Old Friend’s choice of a “ploughman” as the proposed pupil recalls Hogg’s greater predecessor Robert Burns, and so expands the phrase “write better” to include not only the mechanical portion of writing, but the imaginative aspect of literary production. Hogg pushes the Old Friend’s joke further in his novel, having his Editor produce a facsimile of a manuscript page in Wringhim’s hand. Using the facsimile as incontrovertible proof satirizes the inherently mediating position of an editor as a consumer—rather than producer—of truth. As the handwritten page turns into facsimile, it loses its status as handwriting and becomes another form of justifying print, of mechanical reproduction. Empirical proof is not confirmed, but warped, by becoming the textual proof pages, which is as near to publication as Wringhim can bring his tale. Blanchard, Wringhim’s first murder victim, had warned him, “There is no error into which a man can fall, which he may not press Scripture into his service as proof of the probity of” (91; my emphasis). Although Blanchard is criticizing Gil-Martin’s view of spiritual justification, in the context of textual production, the idea of pressing Scripture into proof becomes a pun on the habits of rewriting through the process of print-justification. The message for Wilson and his readers is that the mechanics of justification delude because of their pseudo-objectivity. Because identity refers beyond the self toward both its representations and its

234

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

difference from them, any presentation of self can be only a facsimile, a similarity masquerading as a fact. To write a “memoir” is to edit a “life”—the terms interchangeably identify the textual object, even though the latter refers simultaneously to the text and its putative object of representation an embodied, historical existence. If Wringhim’s life is preordained, then such editing is liable to the curse that ends his manuscript: “cursed be he who trieth to alter or amend” (165). Hogg, however, acknowledges omissions in his own Memoirs and refers to a larger, obscure master-text (the existence of which remains conjectural), claiming that “this short Memoir . . . is composed of extracts from a larger detail,” and that in it he has confined himself “to such anecdotes only as relate to my progress as a writer” (51). Unlike Hume or Addison’s Spectator, who intend to write themselves out, Hogg reserves himself as individual and as text. This rhetorical strategy suggests that a reserved self exists apart from its published manifestations—a claim targeted by the Old Friend and belied by Blackwood’s deployment of the “Ettrick Shepherd.” Wringhim, in contrast, intends to present the entire story; omissions cease to exist because additions are cursed. A printer advises Wringhim to keep the type “close,” a word that coordinates the secretive production of the work with the condensing procedures that result in his repeated amnesia. Gil-Martin tells Wringhim, “I am wedded to you so closely, that I feel as if I were the same person”; the verb “wedded” recalls marriage as the legal conjunction into a single corporate being in which the woman (Wringhim) loses her (his) status. When the Editor encounters the memoir, “the pamphlet was wrapped so close together, and so damp, rotten, and yellow, that it seemed one solid piece” (158, 173; my emphasis). The correspondence of the contents and the form of production, the claustrophobic closeness that alters text into a seemingly unified object, a “solid piece,” highlights the transforming character of print. The pamphlet resembles the rotting, yellow flesh that Frankenstein had used to form his creature. In producing his own fanciful autobiography in the London, Charles Lamb exposes the illusion of certainty that print, in contrast to manuscript, provokes: “There is something to me repugnant at any time in written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it” (LM 3:367). The horror for Lamb of the manuscript is that it compels a confrontation with the malleability of writing. Seeing the manuscript of Lycidas, which destroys his illusion that it was a “full-grown beauty,” “How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise,

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

235

just as good! as if inspiration were made up of parts, and these fluctuating, successive, indifferent!” Lamb’s insistence, in “Oxford in the Vacation,” that manuscript emphasizes the conditional nature of writing—underscored with the repeated phrase “as if”—reveals justified print as a mystification, displacing not only the writer’s labor, his deliberate and arbitrary choices, his accidental associations, but also the entire mechanics of modern print production, with its intermediaries of editor, publisher, bookseller, and reviewer. The use of justified print—that is typesetting with regularized margins—implies a teleology because it indicates a moment beyond the text at which the work was produced. Romantic novelists, relying on and also coaxing the reader’s suspension of disbelief, produced various ploys to elide this perspective: the found diary, the discovered stack of private letters, and the hiatus in a mutilated journal (all variants on the told tale recorded by an amanuensis, a role both Hogg and Scott performed in collecting Scottish songs). These frames typically introduce an editorial figure who describes the transformation of handwritten forms into print as a transparent procedure that preserves the unjustified (subjective) character of the manuscript, which becomes evidence of truth as an admission against interest, since no one would willfully condemn himself in the public sphere by assassinating his own character. Hogg’s presentation of the typesetting, however, constructs both justified print and unjustified handwriting as tentative positions, always already public. Wringhim errs in trusting his own editing and typesetting, and the linguistic puns that pervade the descriptions of his crimes emphasize the mistake as symptomatic. Wringhim does not begin his memoirs until after he has learned the craft of typesetting, and the confession begins with a summation: “My life has been a life of trouble and turmoil; of change and vicissitude; of anger and exultation; of sorrow and of vengeance. My sorrows have all been for a slighted gospel, and my vengeance has been wreaked on its adversaries” (67). As with the genre of written confessions, the implied perspective is that of completion, of a life summed up, as certain as the Gospel to which it has been dedicated. The balanced construction of the sentences works an illusion of completeness consonant with Lamb’s willful self-deception that print has no manuscript before it, and the final contraries of the first sentence become the reconciled antitheses of the second. This is a life, the rhetorical structure implies, whose meaning may be read. The confession within the novel is typeset almost to completion. Under the sign of justified print, Wringhim “will let the wicked of this

236

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

world know what I have done in the faith of the promises, and the justification by grace, that they may read and tremble” (67). Wringhim anticipates a reader who does not interpret the text but recognizes his own fallenness by the trembling response of his body. Yet near the novel’s end, Hogg creates an intermediate stage of text: “I must furnish my Christian readers with a key to the process, management, and winding up of the whole matter; which I propose, by the assistance of God, to limit to a very few pages” (153). “Winding up” the press sheets puns (inadvertently from Wringhim’s perspective, but a bristle recalling Hogg’s management of the whole) on the winding sheet in which Wringhim is buried and the winding, circular chase described by the “driver” in Hogg’s “Scot’s Mummy” letter. The pun, doubling meanings and voices, undermines Wringhim’s hope of making the matter whole by resolving the divisions through the conventions of a printed conclusion. In the process of composing, Wringhim has transformed his audience; the shift from considering them as “the wicked” to “my Christian readers” reconceptualizes Wringhim’s role as narrating subject of an autobiography. In the paragraph following the shift, set off by an italicized date, he writes, “My hopes and prospects are a wreck.” This collapse begins the “handwritten” section. The mention of “prospects” recalls that, so far, Wringhim has pointed his confessions toward a specific conclusion, those “very few pages” that provide the interpretive key that makes the “matter” a “whole” that they will never reach. Now, each day’s entry only guesses at the continuation, and only the habitual dates provide a legible sequence. September 7, 1712 finds Wringhim handing over to the reader the task of judgment: “And to what I am now reduced, let the reflecting reader judge” (164). Reflecting what or whom? The final curse invokes a future at once inevitable and doubtful: “My hour is at hand.—Almighty God, what is this that I am about to do! The hour of repentance is past, and now my fate is inevitable. —Amen, for ever! I will now seal up my little book, and conceal it; and cursed be he who trieth to alter or amend!” Uncertainty is concealed by the first exclamation point that substitutes for the grammatically appropriate question mark in the appeal to God; the further exclamation points, then, signal typographically the interrogative uncertainly behind the assertive exclamations, and raise the issue of effective speech, the ability to seal and to curse. The insistence on a fate and a book equally sealed and unalterable exposes an anxiety about the teleological possibilities having escaped Wringhim. To unseal (and to un-conceal) by publication is necessarily an alteration that questions the inevitability of Wringhim’s

S p y i n g J a m e s H o g g ’s B r i s t l e

237

suicide, since fate depends on the certainty of text.26 The reader and the mediating Editor discover that no text is transparent, nor any interpreter a free agent. Wringhim’s insistence on a justified identity, like the Editor’s guise of objectivity, fails to acknowledge institutional constraints such as those Hogg faced. The “reflective reader,” like Wringhim and the Editor (who offers himself as a surrogate reader, as the periodical Reviews did), gazes into a maze of refracting texts, in which the “stamp of authenticity” is only a facsimile. The novel, however, does not mark a final retort to periodical machination, but is only part of a sequence that Hogg struggled to control. He had hoped to have his Confessions reviewed in Blackwood’s, but failed; the journal teased both author and readers with references to the novel and hints of a review that never emerged. From this point, however, Hogg’s identity continued to be reconstructed at the margins of the novel. The British Critic, for instance, reviewing the anonymous Confessions, says, “Write what he will, these is a diseased and itching peculiarity of style, . . . which, under every disguise, is always sure to betray Mr. Hogg” (22:68). The “peculiarity of style” is Hogg’s own Gil-Martin, betraying—in both senses of confirming and undermining—Hogg’s authorship. Since Hogg’s publication appeared near the end of June, however, the reviewer likely obtained an early copy from Longman’s and was apprised of the author. Such fraud is the standard wit of the critical trade. Hunt’s Examiner, August 1824, also attributes the “very singular production” to the Ettrick Shepherd, indicating that “its principal defect is, that with much elaboration in the assumption of disguise, no one can be deceived for a moment. In other respects, the strong hand of Mr. Hogg is often recognizable” (482). Like the reviewer’s own work, prose style should not betray particularity. In this regard, the anonymity of the Waverley novels underscored their value, though that value depended upon the suspicion of Scott’s authorship (in which Hogg asserts a “fixed belief” until “Johnny Ballantyne had fairly sworn me out” of it). By contrast, like the British Critic and the Examiner, Blackwood’s blasts Hogg’s anonymity in the June 1824 “Noctes Ambrosianae” and reinforces the unmasking when the Ettrick Shepherd offers a subsequent unconvincing denial. The play between the anonymous and the named as a struggle for self-authorship charts a tension between the journals of judgment and the authors of identity who came before their bar. The Confessions allegorizes this struggle in the bewilderment of the Editor, yet his identification with Wilson is unstable. In the 1837 version of the Confessions, reputed by his daughter Mrs. Garden in the “Advertisement” to have been revised by Hogg, the character of

238

Br itish Per iodic a ls a nd Rom a ntic Identit y

“Hogg” disappears from the Editor’s supplemental narrative and the initials “JH” appear to indicate the editor. The retitled Confessions of a Fanatic traps Hogg in the snare he set for Wilson. Doubt as to the edition’s authorization reiterates the confusions of identity and style that the novel opens. George Saintsbury, a Victorian canon-builder, declares that the Confessions is “one of the most remarkable stories of its kind ever written—a story which . . . is not only extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader shall wonder how the devil it got where it is” (26). The feeble joke of “devil” aids the shift from the novel’s problematizing its own authorship (the Editor exclaims, at the end of Wringhim’s tale, “What can this work be? . . . I cannot tell”) to Saintsbury’s questioning Hogg’s authorship: “I am absolutely unable to believe that it is Hogg’s unadulterated and unassisted work” (28). Saintsbury suggests collaboration with Lockhart, though he might as well have said Wilson; his analysis depends upon Blackwood’s construction of the “Ettrick Shepherd” to which they both contributed. Since, however, that persona was the implied author for the reading public, after the reviews almost immediately unmasked Hogg’s anonymity, Saintsbury is, in a sense, right: James Hogg may have written the novel, but the identity of its author(s) is a complex dynamic of editorial interaction.27 For Hogg, the literary marketplace was not a place for the expression of Romantic identity. It was, rather, the site of contention that revealed the self as a product of, and mediation between, personal agency and institutional power.

No t e s Introduction 1. Paul Keen notes tensions in the public sphere of the 1790s: “Reversing its originally hegemonic role, the public sphere of the printed word ‘was now casting itself loose as a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion’ ” (31, quoting Habermas). Coleridge notes the power of “the Taste of the Public as opposed to the People” to distort poetic reputation (Notebooks III:3281). In 1809, an article in the Anti-Jacobin’s “Reviewers Reviewed” complained: “In the Anti-Jacobin Review, ever the vehicle of attack upon transcendent speculations, it is asserted, ‘that the Edinburgh Review, instead of bestowing praise where due, makes war on the whole host of authors, and mangles them without mercy for the amusement of the public’ ” (XXXIII:436). Wordsworth, writing in Coleridge’s periodical “The Friend,” also uses martial imagery: “Range against each other as advocates, oppose as combatants, two several intellects, each strenuously asserting doctrines which he sincerely believes” (quoted in Owen 167). 2. “Celebrity became a modern cultural phenomenon because it answered an ‘urgent need’ created by the industrialized print culture of the romantic period” (Mole 10).

1

Skirmishes in the Lower Empire

1. Southey’s tepid review of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads annoyed Wordsworth because “Southey knew that I published those poems for money and money alone” (WL I:267). Christopher Smith describes Southey’s review as “the tactics of someone already in the ballad market” and “quite prepared to put the opposition in its place, and even damage it a little.” 2. Like Southey, Coleridge associated the dominance of the periodical press with a disease of the body politic (bracketed comments from Hazlitt in the Examiner): For among other odd burs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity, we have now a Reading Public . . . , [ . . . It

240

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 5 – 1 6

seems that whenever an objection in matter of fact occurs to our author’s mind, he instinctively applies the flattering unction of words to smooth it over to his conscience, as you apply a salve to a sore] . . . whose heads and hearts are dieted at the two public ordinaries of Literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press . . . if the average health of the consumers may be judged by the articles of largest consumption [Is not this a side-blow at the Times and Courier?]; if the secretions may be conjectured from the ingredients of the dishes that are found best suited to their palates; from all that I have seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my Profaccia with a desponding sigh. [“Oh, thou particular fellow!”] From a popular philosophy and a philosophic populace, Good Sense deliver us! (Coleridge Statesman’s 36–8; quoted by Hazlitt, ER XXVII: 450 and, as reprinted from the Examiner, December 29, 1816, Political Essays 132) Hazlitt, defending the Periodical Press in the Edinburgh, extends Coleridge’s metaphor by noting, “There is something, then, worse than ‘luxuriant activity,’—the palsy of death” (ER XXVII:450). “Coleridge’s overcooked metaphor,” as Charles Mahoney notes, “draw[s] our attention to an alimentary trope (the periodical press as an ‘ordinary,’ or table d'hôte, for unsophisticated palates) that in turn informs Hazlitt’s own dégustation of the state of public taste in an 1823 essay, ‘The Periodical Press’ ” (2). 3. Southey repeats the metaphor of the reviews as fleas in a letter to Scott rejecting the idea of writing for the Edinburgh Review: “[T]hough these things injure me materially in a pecuniary point of view, they make no more impression upon me than the bite of a sucking flea would do upon Gargantua” (230). 4. Dorothy asked Thomas De Quincey to rebuke Jeffrey: “It would be treating Mr. Jeffrey with too much respect to notice any of his criticisms; but when he makes my Brother censure himself; by quoting words as from his poems which are not there, I do think it is proper that he should be contradicted and put to shame” (LW II:326). Wordsworth’s Essay, Supplementary to the Preface is “a retort aimed at Francis Jeffrey” for the Edinburgh’s review of The Excursion, which Wordsworth claimed to know only secondhand, despite appropriating its language as when he offers “a vigorous account of critics whose ‘perverseness . . . is supported by system’ ” (Owen 161, 166). 5. In his 1823 “On the Periodical Press,” Hazlitt defended the current “critical age” as a consequence of the abundance of prior and contemporary genius that needed organization. He constructs his Spirit of the Age as an explication of the exchange between genius, a topos of individuality, and a public perception instantiated through the periodical press. His maxim, “if we cannot be profound, let us at least be popular” (ER LXXVI:357), as David Stewart has detailed in “We are

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 7 – 2 4

6.

7.

8.

9.

241

Absolutely Coining Money,” acts as a tenet for the commercial construction of periodical culture. Blackwood’s support of Wordsworth was qualified as useful to the magazine’s own goals, which could include disrupting its own authority: [North]: Wordsworth is, in all things, the reverse of Milton—a good man, and a bad poet. Tickler: What !—That Wordsworth whom Maga cries up as the Prince of Poets ? North: Be it so; I must humour the fancies of some of my friends. (XVIII:380) Francis Jeffrey sensed the “air of parody” in Wordsworth’s work (Jones, “Parody” 64). Although serious in tone, Wordsworth’s “Michael” is characteristic of the dialogic voices of periodical culture: when Jeffrey quotes Wordsworth, do ellipsis and decontextualization veer into parody? (“the most significant mark of a parody is the doubt it induces as to whether it is parody”; Jones “Parody” 71). When Wordsworth republishes his earlier work, is he occupying the position of a second self, or forestalling the encroachment of “youthful Poets”? When Southey imitates a periodical review in his letter about reviews, is it self-parody, as he is a reviewer, self-denial (consistent with his rejection of his youthful self, the author of Wat Tyler), or an unconscious mimicry of habituated patterns? The second self of “Michael” is a variant (repetition? parody? palimpsest?) of Dorothy, from “Tintern Abbey,” as a repository of self-presence against the decomposing “world of evil tongues, / Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men” (128–9; a phrase Kenneth Johnston, in “Romantic Anti-Jacobins” associates with the Anti-Jacobin Weekly): in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. (116–19) Henry Crabbe Robinson was not amused: “I was foolish enough to skim over two volumes of Barrett’s Heroine—a very poor application of the satire of Don Quixote to the sentimental novels and poetical romances of the last and present age. There is some fun in the burlesque of the ridiculous style of the worst of these novels” (I:181). Jane Austen was more appreciative: “I finished the Heroine last night & was very much amused by it. I wonder James did not like it better. It diverted me exceedingly” (255–6). His response intimates Cherry’s fate by borrowing from children’s tales, which herald her future as a mother of properly raised boys: “Tommy Horner was a bad boy, and would not get plumcake; and that King Pepin was a good boy, and rode in a golden coach” (III:246). The notes that end each volume (which are not designated in the main text) are a panoply of borrowed language. Most references derive from the

242

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 5 – 2 9

“romances” Cherry reads, but others dissolve the façade of her narrative integrity with an authorial nod to the reader’s political awareness. Coming upon a stranger, Cherry declares, “As he came nearer, I perceived, that surely never lighted on this orb, which he hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision” (I:125; 3rd ed. I:116). A note cites Burke’s passage on Marie Antoinette—which this passage, with gender reversed, is quoting, unbeknownst to Cherry (3rd ed. I:216). 10. Walter Scott, whose own novels exploit linguistic multiplicity to enact cultural collisions and mediation, argues that English, distinct from other European languages, is a “compounded or mingled language.” Writing under the guise of the Edinburgh Reviewer in 1804, Scott maintains that while other languages, of either Teutonic or Latin origins, exhibit “a uniform pattern and texture” (ER IV:152), English exists as a “middle dialect” that encodes historical circumstances as heteroglossia: “the same chance that has peopled Britain with such a variety of tribes and nations” has “decreed that the language of Locke and of Shakespeare should claim no particular affinity” to either the Latinate or Teutonic. Instead, the language mediates between the “Anglo-Norman conquerors and the vanquished Anglo-Saxons” (152). Although imprecise about the uniqueness of English in this regard, Scott’s recognition that the language itself—and therefore its poetry, metaphors, history, and rhetoric, and not merely specific instances of its use—is dialogic underscores the linguistic range present in institutionalized sociolects such as the periodical press. 11. “Every system of law that has attained a certain degree of maturity seems compelled by the ever-increasing complexity of human affairs to create persons who are not men, or rather (for this may be a truer statement) to recognize that such persons have come or are coming into existence” (Pollock and Maitland, quoted in Raymond 353). Raymond’s analysis in the “Genesis of the Corporation” demonstrates the development of the corporation as a dialectical process between law and other social units; he argues, e.g., the notion of the corporation as an “ideal person” stems from earlier religious idealizations (360–61). Cornish and Clark provide an account of the jointstock companies from the founding of the Bank of England, and detail both public suspicion about their operation and the reluctance of the law to directly regulate them, a decision which meant that, as Lord Eldon put it in 1825, “they act as a mutual understanding and a kind of moral rule” (Cornish and Clark 250). 12. The Quarterly Review, despite its non-geographic name, was acknowledged as London’s response to Edinburgh; Noah Porter writes: “Perhaps one family read the London Quarterly and another the Edinburgh, which were then reproduced, the one in drab, and the other in blue and yellow” (Books and Reading 341). The initial intent to use “London” in the title was thwarted by the appearance of Richard Cumberland’s London Review, which quickly failed (Wellens

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 0 – 4 1

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

243

453). The London Magazine, North American Review, and other journals also referred to the Quarterly as the London Quarterly. Jon Klancher details the coordination between literary and cosmopolitan development: “The crisis and disintegration of the early modern ‘republic of letters’ amounted to the transformation of an intellectual field, its literary practices and relationships, and the debate about ‘cosmopolitanism’ was one mode in which that field was restructured at the turn of the nineteenth century” (“Discrimination” 79). Sonia Hofkosh’s “Commodities among Themselves” and Bonnie Gunzenhauser’s “Reading the Rhetoric of Resistance” have noted heteroglossic structures in periodicals. Tracing commentary from the coinage of “autobiography” in the 1790s to its general usage in the 1820s, James Treadwell argues that the “apparently new genre” grew “with remarkable speed from embryo to monstrosity” (3). In an unusual review for the Quarterly (1827), John Lockhart surveys ten autobiographies that “would normally be unlikely to receive notice in the periodical press” to prove the “inappropriate self-importance and egotism of nobodies” (Treadwell 77) as a national problem. Kevin Gilmartin’s Print Politics continues Klancher’s revision of the Habermasian conception of the “public sphere.” Gilmartin’s Writing against Revolution further extends Klancher’s work by exploring the sociolects of Romantic-era conservatism. Although comic in tone, speculating Lamb’s motive was an “eye to poor Mr. Elia’s situation in the London Magazine” (LM VII:160), the essay invokes the death of the London’s editor John Scott, the absent presence that haunts the journal under its subsequent editors. Scott died in a duel with Jonathan Christie (of Edinburgh’s Blackwood’s Magazine). Ralph Waldo Emerson commented on this anecdote: The tendency in England towards social and political institutions like those of America, is inevitable, and the ability of its journals is the driving force . . . . Hundreds of clever Praeds and Freres and Froudes and Hoods and Hooks and Maginns and Mills and Macaulays, make poems, or short essays for a journal, as they make speeches in Parliament and on the hustings, or as they shoot and ride. (262) Mansfield had experienced the effectiveness of a less systematic press than the one Eldon faced when Junius had ridiculed him in the Public Advertiser (1769–70) and when subsequent prosecutions of Junius’s publishers and printers, argued before Mansfield, resulted in acquittals and ambiguous verdicts by the jury. The judicial failure prompted more attacks, and Junius’s final letter asserts that Mansfield is “the very worst and most dangerous man in the kingdom,” and that by his own writings, Junius has “bound the victim, and dragged him to the altar” (II:243). Heward narrates this complex argument waged across the press and King’s Bench (128–9).

244

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 4 1 – 4 7

20. The article notes that “our newspapers” serve as “the not infrequent vehicle of communication between the very noblest minds, and the common sense and heat of the many,” despite their functions as “party engines” (6–7). Writers “are evidently pleading at the bar of the public, and not at that of the legislature or the aristocracy” (10). The bar of the public, however, is never immediately present, but always filtered through the periodical press. The Westminster is drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s idea of an emerging “regime of publicity” that would counterbalance the government by producing consistent accounts of character, and thereby consistent characters. 21. When Eldon wrote this letter, the government was moving to arrest Cobbett for sedition and was prosecuting the publisher of the Morning Chronicle (Cole 151–3). 22. Byron appropriates a “nickname” from Cobbett for the first line of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers that he glosses, “Mr. Fitzgerald, facetiously termed by Cobbett the ‘Small Beer Poet,’ inflicts his annual tribute of verse on the ‘Literary Fund’ ” (CWB III:399–400). In Spirit, Hazlitt described “Cobbett” as “a kind of Fourth Estate in the politics of the country” (216). 23. Paul Elledge notes that in 1805 “[i]njured monarchy had of course saturated British consciousness for some years, to such an extent that public performances of King Lear had been suspended out of deference to King George III’s observable but not yet officially conceded mental and emotional impairment” (158). 24. Prosecuting the publisher and proprietors of the Morning Chronicle for inserting an advertisement “purporting to have been issued by a political society in Derby,” Eldon, as attorney general, had spoken for the king, or for his most pervasive metonymy: “the crown, upon the temperate consideration of what the jury does, will not be dissatisfied with the verdict” (Melikan 95). Both crime and prosecution are acts of impersonation. 25. Kevin Gilmartin explains, “Although formal prohibitions against parliamentary reporting were dropped in 1771, a full and accurate account was still a long way off.” Gilmartin notes that the Tory press “learned to answer radical attacks on corruption with the argument that parliamentary publication was a sufficient concession to extraparliamentary opinion,” while the “Whig Edinburgh Review also treated the publication of debates as a ‘democratical’ accommodation that dictated against radical demands for universal suffrage” (Gilmartin, Print Politics 27–8, citing ER XXXI:176). 26. In Byron’s unfinished “The Devil’s Drive,” Byron highlights the “tears in Lord Eldon’s eyes” (145). Robert Montgomery, in a note to “The Runaways” comments, “And then his Lordship’s late gush of tears in the House of Lords, and the Court,—I really cannot convey my admiration, on this point, with sufficient energy” (326).

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 4 9 – 5 1

2

245

Incorporating Voices: The E DINBURGH R EV IEW

1. James Greig catalogues contemporary references to the Edinburgh’s literary significance. For example, under the guise of the “author of Waverley,” Scott (who had reviewed for the Edinburgh) noted that Constable established “a Court of letters, which must command respect, even from those most inclined to dissent from many of its canons” (7). Edwin Whipple, in 1850, traces the origins of a shift in literary culture to the economic disadvantages of a few Scottish intellectuals: The Edinburgh Review, which took the lead in the establishment of the new order of things, was projected in a lofty attic by two briefless barristers and a titheless parson; the former are now lords, and the latter is a snug prebendary, rejoicing in the reputation of being the divinest wit and wittiest divine of the age. That celebrated journal made reviewing more respectable than authorship. (I:10) John Ring (1807) identifies six journals that recurrently attacked the Edinburgh and ten books written against specific reviews within the first five years; many prompted a series of texts that circulated the Edinburgh’s notice and notoriety. 2. After the second number, Coleridge remains confident of the Edinburgh’s failure, although his need to assert authority strains his dismissive tone: “Your [Southey’s] prophecy concerning the Edingburgh Review did credit to your penetration. The second number is altogether despicable—the hum-drum of pert attorneys’ Clerks, very pert & yet prolix & dull as a superannuated Judge . . . the first article on Kant you may believe on my authority to be impudent & senseless Babble” (Letters II:936). By June 1803, he recognizes influence that he tries to trivialize: “I have not seen the Edingburgh Review—the truth is, that Edingburgh is a place of literary Gossip—& even I have had my portion of Puff there” (Letters II 953). 3. Rei Terada develops Coleridge’s objections to empiricism that weave through his notebooks (261–5). 4. Coleridge’s response to the Edinburgh was more complex than the hostility of these pronouncements suggest. At his own request to Jeffrey, he reviewed Thomas Clarkson’s antislavery work for the Edinburgh in 1807 and assured Jeffrey that he understood the editor’s obligation to produce “a general consistency of principle in the different Articles” (Letters III:148). The following year he noted that Jeffrey and Constable subscribed to his The Friend (Notebooks III:3471). Kim Wheatley has explored how the dispute between Jeffrey and Coleridge has a doppelganger structure; she concludes: The notion of holding oneself aloof from the age of personality has to remain a fantasy. John Wilson’s review [in Blackwood’s] of

246

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 1 – 5 8

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

the Biographia accuses Coleridge of being “haunted by the Image of a Reviewer wherever he goes” (BM 2:14). Not only is Coleridge “haunted” by his enemies, he is one of them: “almost every friend he ever had is a Reviewer;—and to crown all, he himself is a Reviewer . . . ” (BM 2:14). (“Reading” 8) The idea of the literary world as a “republic” was cliche. Writing to Francis Horner to “dun” him for thirty pages, Francis Jeffrey laments that if Horner does not comply, “I shall be tempted to despair of the republic” (LLJ 60). Poovey notes, “[W]hen Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, and James Mackintosh—all of whom had been [Dugald] Stewart’s pupils—established the Edinburgh Review in 1802, that created a vehicle capable of disseminating the lessons Stewart had taught throughout literate Britain” (269). John van Wyhe describes the tension between Phrenology as a “reform science” or as a “science of personal authority” (313–14). The conditions Cockburn enumerates includes “the fall of old systems on the French revolution; the strong feelings of resentment at our own party intolerance; the obviousness that it was only through the press that this intolerance could be abated,” and the “dotage of all existing journals” (LLJ I:125–6). Philip Flynn and Clive have noted Jeffrey’s intellectual development among the debating societies, and Hesketh Pearson narrates parallels between the founding of the “Friday club,” a debating and dinner club that included Walter Scott, Horner, and Jeffrey, and the Edinburgh Review. Tracing Jeffrey’s debts to and divergences from the “practicality and undogmatic skepticism” of Cicero and David Hume, Flynn has demonstrated the Edinburgh’s dissemination of Scottish Enlightenment ideals as a body of knowledge and a set of criteria for assessing political and aesthetic claims (Jeffrey 45–6). For the first weeks of the crisis, the government treated it as chiefly involving merchants, but on March 2, a bill was brought authorizing the payment of laborers in notes. Fears of riots and rebellion were immediately raised, with Mr. Fox observing that “the general ignorance of the lower class of people” made them liable to “fraud and injury” by employers, as well as likely to find their notes not useable in purchasing necessities. The debate highlighted the obvious contradiction that Notes, in order to be legal, required the phrase “payable on demand” either printed directly on them or implicit through their issue—although they no longer were. These words became a formal condition of the notes rather than a substantial claim about them. Hence, the reliability of the government depended upon the notes containing a lie on their face. As a counter, Richard Brinsley Sheridan proposed making the bills payable only after a certain date, but John Freeman-Mitford, the solicitor general, pointed out that this approach would devalue them relative to other notes, and make

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 6 2 – 6 7

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

247

laborers likely to refuse them. He suggested that bills correct in form and contradictory in practice were better than notes that stated their actual condition, as that statement itself would materially decrease purchasing power. Stephen Koss’s discussion of the Anti-Jacobin’s attack on the Courier for reporting abuses of enemy prisoners of war (44) demonstrates the intersection of the shadow war of words and money with the military war that England was prosecuting. Horner wrote to his father that “[w]ith respect to one great object for which you were at the expense and trouble of placing me here, I think I am beginning to pronounce some words as Englishmen do, and just to feel the difference between the rhythm of their conversation and mine” (MFH I:7). Reviewing the Memoirs in 1843, the Quarterly remarks on the success of this venture of Anglicization, first by declaring that “there was something in Mr. Horner’s character thoroughly English,” and adding, “If any man was the author of his own character, and, through his character, of his fame, . . . it was Francis Horner” (QR LXXII:109) Horner gives a typical account of his studies: To consider “the principles of English pronunciation, and English composition,” he is conducting, with perhaps some irony, “a very rigid examination of the style of Mr. Hume in his History, which I am astonished to find abound so much both in inaccuracies and inelegancies.” He concludes this letter by expressing his disappointment in the “eloquence of the British Senate,” in contrast to classical speeches: The one [Fox], indeed speaks with great animation and, I am convinced, from the warmest sincerity of heart; and the other [Pitt] has a most wonderful fluency and correctness, approaching almost to mechanical movement. But neither of them has proceeded so far as the observance of Shakespeare’s rule; for the one saws the air with his hands, and the other with his whole body. (MFH I:11) In 1806, teasing Horner about his efforts to become “Londonized” and joking about his desire for a “place,” Jeffrey assured him that he recognized his desire to “do some good, to make society and posterity your debtor” and his need to “cultivate and improve your own mind” (LLJ II:94, 96). Hume had made a similar point about identity: [T]here is no question in philosophy more abstruse than that concerning identity, and the nature of the uniting principle, which constitutes a person. So far from being able by our senses merely to determine the question, we must have recourse to the most profound metaphysics to give a satisfactory answer to it; and in common life, ‘tis evident that these ideas of self and persons are never very fixed or determinate. (Treatise 189–90) When the Anti-Jacobin reviewed the Edinburgh’s first issue, its longest response was to the Mounier essay (AJ XVI:213–17).

248

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 6 9 – 8 5

17. Biancamaria Fontana uses the Edinburgh Review to correlate transformations in the commercial world to the political struggles between the emerging modern parties of Whig and Tory (112–15). 18. Jeffrey recalls this association in writing to Horner in April 1803: “I hear of your talking about dung, and of your making a great deal of money. Good. I wish you would let me in on the secret” (LLJ II:61). 19. Thornton had asserted that “[i]t has thus been admitted that paper possesses the faculty of enlarging the quantity of commodities by giving life to some new industry.” He notes, however, that this “[m] agic influence of the new paper” produces an economic quandary, because even assuming that, e.g., “thirty-five millions of additional bank notes will have the extraordinary power of calling at once into being thirty-five millions of new goods,” those goods “would by no means find employment for that equal quantity of paper which is here assumed to have given existence to it” (264–5).

3

Proliferating Voices: Founding the Q UA RTERLY R EV IEW and M AGA

1. Dallas claims that, but for this insult, the positive reactions of other critics and his friends, as well as brisk sales, would have let him ignore “the asperities of a pseudo-critic, purchased by the proprietors of the Review, like other commodities of trade, to fill their periodical bale.” Emphasizing the Edinburgh’s dehumanization of the “pseudocritic” provides the first of a series of links between the Edinburgh and slaveholders, as the metonymic framework of the article. 2. A footnote cites Samuel Foote’s The Liar for “Papillons.” In the play, Papilion explains his power as a critic: The whole region of the belles lettres fell under my inspection; physic, divinity, and the mathematics, my mistress managed herself. There, sir, like another Aristarch, I dealt out fame and damnation at pleasure. In obedience to the caprice and commands of my master, I have condemned books I never read, and applauded the fidelity of a translation, without understanding one syllable of the original. (79) 3. Even after the Quarterly was well established, Scott wrote to Byron about “my friend Jeffrey, for such, in spite of many a feud, literary and political, I always esteem him” (LLJ I:143). 4. John Murray learned from Gifford that Lord Teignmouth “and the Wilberforce party had some idea of starting a journal to oppose the Edinburgh Review, that Henry Thornton and Mr. [Zachary] Macaulay were to be the conductors, that they had met, and that some able men were mentioned. Upon [Gifford’s] sounding Lord T. as to their giving us their assistance, he thought this might be adopted in preference to their own plans” (Smiles I:116–7).

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 8 7 – 9 3

249

5. Blackstone provides the common gloss; corporations consist “of many persons united together in one society, and are kept up by a perpetual succession of members.” But the distinctions between corporations and individuals is complicated by the existence of “sole corporations” that “consist of one person only and his successors, in some particular station, who are incorporated by law, in order to give them some legal capacities and advantages . . . which as natural persons they should not have had” (I:457–8). Individuals, corporations, and nations are all, potentially, persons—and the character of their personhood is determined by reference to law. 6. He is reiterating a theme from the prior letter: “The cure [for the Edinburgh] lies in instituting such a Review in London as should be conducted totally independent of bookselling influence, on a plan as liberal as that of the Edinburgh, its literature as well supported, and its principles English and constitutional” (Lockhart III: 129). He shared the same views with Murray and Gifford; he wrote the latter: The points on which I chiefly insisted with Mr. Gifford were that the Review should be independent both as to bookselling and ministerial influences—meaning that we were not to be advocates of party through thick and thin, but to maintain constitutional principles. Moreover, I stated as essential that the literary part of the work should be as sedulously attended to as the political, because it is by means of that alone that the work can acquire any firm and extended reputation. (Smiles I:103) His insistence on acting from a constitutional perspective, rather than one of party alliance, echoes Jeffrey’s view of the Edinburgh (LLJ 197). 7. Jonathan Cutmore’s website provides an excellent overview of the Quarterly Review, including useful statistics and the following summary of the accounts for the first issue: This Number cost Murray £544. Costs included £70 for printing, £1 for wrappers, £13 for corrections, £1 for a cancelled article (11 pages), £2 for night work, £156 for paper, £43 for stitching, £50 for the editor, £10 for books, postage, carriage, £30 for advertising, £163 for the articles. Murray’s loss after all 3000 copies were sold was £19. Murray reprinted the number, 1000 copies, on 14 July 1810. The reprinting sold out. Murray printed a third edition of this Number on 6 May 1811, a run of 1000 copies. The Third Edition cost Murray £123, including £52 for printing, £54 for paper, £14 for stitching, and £3 for advertising. By November 1811, Murray still had on hand 800 copies. 8. If the ground of the Edinburgh was economics, then the Quarterly was founded on a notion of character, and this critique of the Edinburgh emphasizes Jeffrey’s (like Horner’s) assimilationist view of the relation of Scotland to England. In 1807, Walter Scott had accused Francis Jeffrey: “Little by little, whatever your wishes may be . . . [y]ou will destroy and undermine until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland

250

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 9 4 – 1 0 2

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

shall remain” (Harvie 90). A decade later, Blackwood’s would similarly construct its identity in opposition to the Edinburgh’s assimilationism (Flynn “Early” 46–8). Jeffrey also wrote “I have seen the Quarterly this morning. It is an inspired work, compared with the poor prattle of [Richard] Cumberland [editor of the London Review]. But I do not think it very formidable; and if it were not for our offences, I should have no fear about its consequences” (LLJ 193). Ballantyne wrote that the Quarterly’s “view of Burns’s character is better than Jeffrey’s. It is written in a more congenial tone, with more tender, kindly feeling. Though not perhaps written with such elaborate eloquence as Jeffrey’s, the thoughts are more original, and the style equally powerful” (Smiles I:145–6). When the first issue appeared, Southey complained that it was “too much in the temper of the Edinburgh” (Edgar Johnson I:311). Scott, who similarly felt disabled from publicly engaging English Bards, alludes in his review of Gertrude to the “indiscreet, and undaunted precipitation with which another popular poet is said to throw his effusions before the public with the indifference of an ostrich to their success of failure” (QR II:255). Gifford contrasts journals to earlier modes of distribution: “I know of no pamphlet that would sell 100; besides, pamphlets are thrown aside, Reviews are permanent, and the variety of their contents attracts those, who never dream of opening a pamphlet.” He also notes, however, the continued strength of the opposition’s press: “In what you say of the secrecy which is affected to the friends of Government, while everything that can do mischief steals into the world through the channels of hostile papers, it is a folly that wants a name” (Barrow 507). From early on, Jeffrey worried that the Edinburgh would become a commercial, rather than intellectual, enterprise that would define him. In 1803, he wrote to Horner, “I hope you do not imagine that I have made a trade of this editorship. . . . The main object of every one of us, I understand to be, our own amusement and improvement—joined with the gratification of some personal, and national, vanity” (LLJ I:83). Arguably, the Edinburgh Reviewer was more and differently ambitious than any of its component contributors. Another way to conceptualize the Edinburgh’s transitional status would focus on its uneasy relation to Scottishness as it developed its British presence; as Fiona Stafford points out, while Byron “perceived an ‘oat-fed phalanx,’ ” James Mill “found excessive enthusiasm for all things English” (53). Asserting its own Scottishness allowed Blackwood’s to contrast its own materiality against the Edinburgh’s abstraction.

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 1 3 – 1 2 1

4

251

Repeating Selves: Hume, Hazlitt, and Periodic Repetition

1. Elsewhere, Montaigne asserts that in dying, a person reveals himself: “In judging the life of another, I always observe how it ended; and one of my principal concerns about my own end is that it shall go well, that is to say quietly and insensibly” (I:19). Hazlitt declares that “FEW things show the human character in a more ridiculous light than the circumstance of will-making”; among many examples, he notes that “we meet with continual examples of the desire to keep up the farce (if not the tragedy) of life, after we, the performers in it, have quitted the stage, and to have our parts rehearsed by proxy” (Table Talk 113, 120). 2. Critical assessments confirm Ainslie’s point that “[i]t is notoriously difficult to make sense of Hume’s discussion of persons” (557–8). Geoffrey Scarre traces Hume’s changing views on identity (217–21). Martin and Barrisi argue as follows: “Rather than considering the nature of personal identity per se, Hume turned instead, and almost exclusively, to two other questions: first, . . . how the fiction of identity arises, . . . [and second] the role the fictional self plays in our emotions and motivations” (Naturalization 42).Terence Penelum suggests that Hume considered “personal identity not really a belief, but a convention” and that “the conventional ascription of identity to changing and complex objects is the expression of a belief that they somehow satisfy the conditions for ascribing strict identity to them” (113). 3. Damrosch makes a similar point about Boswell’s “street roles” in the London Journal and, peripherally, about Adam Smith (73–86). 4. Dialectics register stylistically as antithesis. Hazlitt claimed that Burke’s “antithetical style and verbal paradoxes . . . in which the epithet is a seeming contradiction to the substantive, such as ‘proud submission’ and ‘dignified obedience,’ ” derived from the Tatler (Comic Writers 116). “[S]ustained and controlled rhythms” and “antithetical movement,” as E.P. Thompson notes, characterize Hazlitt’s essays (822) and David Bromwich demonstrates that “through the whole range of its concerns, Hazlitt’s criticism has two voices. The first voice, emphatic and persuasive, seeks to restore values that were in danger of slipping into total eclipse, while the second, antithetical and observant, remains aware of all that qualifies the truth of those values” (145). 5. The extravagant result of Liber Amoris was that, within the text, S. is imagined dead, the easily seen-through preface announces that H. is dead (as a precondition of publication), and the cost to Hazlitt in both lawsuits and reputation was substantial. Kurt Koenigsberger has explored how the crisis of identity displayed in Liber Amoris “expose[s] the profoundly incoherent notion of the sovereign individual that underlies libel law” (304).

252

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 2 4 – 1 3 0

6. Joseph Mawman had used a similar description in his 1805 Excursion, a travel book that culminated in the Lake District, and begins with a flight from London’s “anxious inhabitants,” metonimized by “the Mansion-house, the Bank, the Exchange, streets teeming with wealth, noble churches and extensive structures erected by public and private charity” (7). 7. De Quincey also used “X. Y. Z.,” a signature that plays on the practice of signing with initials and on these letters as signaling reiteration and finality. In a burlesque doggerel in the Biographia, Coleridge had traced the transmutation from “I, I, I! I itself I!” to “X, Y, Z, the God infinitivus” (Biographia I:159–60). Margaret Russett, arguing that the “edge of this joke is honed on what Derrida calls the ‘grapheme,’ ” explores the tension between typography and the “assigned” (BL 160) self (Minor Romanticism Ch. 3). 8. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things provide the conceptual basis for this claim. Polanyi demonstrates the transformation of labor into a commodity produced for sale within the enforced wage-market of laissez-faire economics (139). Foucault recognizes a corollary development in the intellectual perceptual frame of the “new empiricities,” scientific discourses that produce labor as “an irreducible unit of measurement” (223) and allows “general grammar to be logic” (296). 9. Peter Murphy has analyzed the appropriation of James Scott, an act that makes the question “Who was the real James Scott?” “interestingly difficult to answer” (Poetry 121). If, as Murphy demonstrates, “fictional characters poach reality from the real ones” in Blackwood’s (120), the poaching destabilizes the identity of the self—real or fictive—with itself. 10. In a similar hijinks of publishing, William Hazlitt reviewed Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual prior to the book’s appearance, on the basis of an advertisement. Robert Lapp, in his detailed study of Hazlitt’s reviews of Coleridge, notes that both “Hazlitt’s Review and Coleridge’s announcement” were “competing responses to the Edinburgh’s influencial reviewessay” on the “Present Distresses of the Country” (53–5).

5

Lord Byron among the Reviews

1. In both Galt’s Autobiography and Life of Byron, Byron’s poetry confirms his personality. Galt records Byron’s “indignation against a writer in a scurrilous publication, called The Scourge; in which he . . . charged with being, as he told me himself, the illegitimate son of a murderer” (GLB 163–4; retold with somewhat different details in Autobiography I:230–31). To convince Byron not to pursue a lawsuit, Galt observed that the libeler was rearranging the narrative of the fifth Lord Byron’s duel in 1765 with William Chaworth, “the facts of which being matter of history and public record, superseded the necessity of

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 3 0 – 1 3 3

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

253

any proceeding” (GLB 164). In Galt’s reconstruction, Byron projected his own personality into the narrative generated in the public press, in order to write Lara. This dynamic among Byron, reviewer, and poem typifies Galt’s understanding of Byron’s creative process. In Don Juan, Byron uses “poem” to refer to Don Juan, and reserves “book” for the works of others. The ironic exception is the end of Canto I, where he offers the apotheosis, “Go, little book, from this my solitude! / I cast thee on the waters, go thy ways!” and then, revealing that the lines are Southey’s, begs, “For God’s sake, reader! take them not for mine” (I.222.1–2, 8). The reviews of Manfred that speculate on Byron’s incest are blunt examples of the public circulation of secrets, but reviews of virtually every work from English Bards onward engage in this dynamic. Jerome Christensen observes that the Edinburgh’s attack on Hours of Idleness, repeating the term “hobbling” to characterize Byron’s verse, “intends to inflict a mortal wound on Byron’s name by remarking on the deformation of Byron’s foot” (LBS 22). Byron deploys the same metaphor in English Bards (“Let Hayley hobble on”), and Hints from Horace: Though you and I, who eruditely know To separate the elegant and low, Can also, when a hobbling line appears, Detect with fingers—in default of ears. (433–436) Moore reports that Byron “was prouder of being a descendant of those Byrons of Normandy, who accompanied William the Conqueror into England, than of having been the author of Childe Harold and Manfred” (I:1). Even before attaining his title, he rebuffed a compliment by a friend of his mother who hoped for the “pleasure, some time or other, of reading your speeches in the House of Commons,” by declaring, “I hope not . . . if you read any speeches of mine, it will be in the House of Lords” (I:29). Stephen Cheeke asks: Was there ever a time when Lord Byron was an unknown writer? In a sense, perhaps not really. Not just because Byron’s pre-fame writings seem especially sensitive to questions of reputation, name and reaction, but because the representational potencies of Byronism are such that it may be impossible not to discover this phenomenon at each and every stage of the poet’s life and work, at least in potentia. (“Geo-History” 134) Paul Elledge, discussing the letter to Augusta about Speech Day, notes a Byronic ambivalence about the locations of fame: “Here is the future author/performer hypersensitive to press review, and already adept at disputing censure. But his coup de grace now follows: to be a local sensation may be preferable to widespread recognition; the heat of the Harrow spotlight may feel better than the warmth of diffused celebrity” (156).

254

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 3 5 – 1 3 9

8. The “framework” of Hours is, Jerome McGann maintains, “essentially realistic” and “organized in such a way as to force upon the reader the presence of the poet—a specific man named George Gordon” who defined himself “by reference to a variety of publicly verifiable facts and situations” (8, 5). McGann emphasizes that reviewers “singled out the strongly expressive quality of Hours of Idleness, for Byron seems to have consciously striven to publicize his character” (14). 9. To the extent that the “fathers” stand between Byron and the daughters as readers, such a dynamic anticipates Byron’s concern with his female readership and the masculine cartel of reviewers. 10. In “To M . . . “ Byron reiterates the connection between female beauty and the divine (“When Nature stamp’d thy beauteous birth, / . . . She fear’d that, too divine for earth [9–11]); the metaphor is conventional but perhaps too explicitly invokes sexual performance to be read comfortably by the ostensible performers and their parents. Byron’s solution to this conundrum of an audience too nearly implicated, in the revised Poems on Various Occasions, was not as “miraculously chaste” as Byron described it. In the seeming renunciation, “To M.S.G.,” the speaker vows that despite “those lips of thine, / their hue invites my fervent kiss,” he will resist so that “At least from guilt, shalt thou be free.” The active verb “invites” and the qualifier “at least” (hovering between two readings: at least she though not he is free of guilt, or at least she is free of guilt, but not desire) indicate urges that undercut the claim that her “yield[ing] those lips” is a gesture of a “last farewell” (29, 32) rather than, like the “kisses” in “To the Sighing Stephon,” signifying “still there was something beyond.” Julia, in Don Juan, seduces both Juan and herself by pretending that signs of invitation are acts of farewell. 11. Though I cannot confidently decode the sexuality of these poems, lines such as the following suggest non-penetrative sexual practices: No more that bosom heaves for me, On it another seeks repose, Another riot’s on its snows, ... And though no more in folds of pleasure, Kiss follows kiss in countless measure (“To Mary” 13–15, 34–5) 12. Byron used a similar formulation disdaining critics of Don Juan more than a decade later: “Your little envious knot of parson-poets may say what they please” (BLJ 8:192). 13. Byron remained concerned with the sales of his poetry in Southwell. Within two weeks of the publication of Hours, Byron asked Elizabeth Pigot, “[H]as Ridge [the publisher] sold well? Or do the ancients demur? what Ladies have bought? All disappointed I dare say nothing indecent in the present publication” (BLJ 1:125).

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 1 – 1 4 4

255

14. Aligning Byron’s satirical powers with his determination to “run a career worthy of his character and talents, and of his genuine pride of an illustrious ancestry,” the critic falls into the courtesy that the Preface set out for him. Similarly, the Anti-Jacobin’s short notice and Le Beau Monde both quote the Preface on youth and “On Leaving Newstead Abbey,” and the latter, allowing that “youth” has “some claims to indulgence,” ends by urging Byron’s cultivation of his talent. (RR 76). The British Critic’s squib announces “there is much taste, and more vigour than might reasonably be expected from a minor” (RR 232). 15. Dallas learned of the poems from family members who had seen extracts in a periodical. He ordered the book, and “discerned in it marks of the genius which has been since so universally admired” (5–6). 16. Reviewing Charles Hoyle’s Exodus, a Poem, the Satirist, deriding poetic amateurism, remarks that “ ‘George Gordon, Lord Byron, a minor’ is sometimes willing to employ his ‘hours of idleness’ in more solid enjoyments than that of scribbling” (Sat I:409–10). In March 1808, the magazine included “Address to the Satirist,” which applauded its “Daring hand” that “Scourges the rampant follies of the land” (Sat II:7). Clarke claims he delayed “considerable time” before deciding to publish—although since it cites a review from the prior month, both the poem’s authorship and the editorial explanation are suspect. The poem commends the “strict review” given when “a Lord step forth, whose Idle Hours / Display, midst petty wits, his minor powers,” and footnotes the couplet with: “The Hours of Idleness, by George Gordon, Lord Byron, a minor, justly reprobated in The Satirist” (Sat II:8). Such ridicule might have motivated Byron to change “Hours of Idleness” in the next edition, but the Satirist revives that title in its review of Poems, Original and Translated and continues to name him “a minor,” despite Byron having dropped the appellation. The review invents the title “Prayer of George Gordon, Lord Byron, a Minor” for [“May Heaven so guard my lovely Quaker”] (III:82). Further insisting on the durable trace of Idleness, this review discusses—and quotes at varying lengths—six of the poems omitted from the Poems, Original and Translated. 17. These lines invoke competition not with Garrick, but with the celebrity child-actor, William “Master” Betty (Elledge 164). Byron, in one of many complaints of being overidentified with his characters, notes that writing is a theatrical impersonation: “My ideas of a character may run away with me: like all imaginative men, I, of course, embody myself with the character while I draw it, but not a moment after the pen is from off the paper” (BLJ 9:118–19). 18. In another misleading redaction, the reviewer quotes the footnote to the first line of “Damaetas,” without mentioning the poem, and transforms the note into Byron’s special pleading: “He tells us in a note,

256

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 5 – 1 6 6 “that by law every person is an infant who has not attained the age of 21!!! Now for that information the world are truly indebted; nobody could guess that, till the magnanimous George Gordon Lord Byron, a minor, came from Harrow school to declare it to the world” (Sat I:79–80). The poem, anticipating Childe Harold’s youth, undermines the stability of the meaning of age: “Old in the world, though scarcely broke from school; / Damaetas ran through all the maze of sin” (8–9). The Satirist calls the line “Then Morpheus envelope my faculties fast” (from “To M.S.G.”), the “quintessence of poetry,” and speculates that it reveals that Byron “intends Morpheus to seal up his faculties fast, in a two-penny post letter, and thus, in an envelope, send him a pleasant dream for his next night’s amusement” (Sat I:79). The accusation is the same Byron would level at Keats, that he is “f[ri] gg[in]g his Imagination” (BLJ 7:225). While at Cambridge, Clarke published The Saunterer. In its Preface, Clarke requests: “The reader should remember, whatever may be the imperfections of the following pages, that they were composed by a youth, who, when he first commenced their publication, had only just completed his seventeenth year.” Clarke recognized the convention of youthful authorship, and his insistence on a biographical reading of Byron’s Preface would have seemed unfair. Clarke’s 1808 review of Poems, Original and Translated highlights their Cambridge connection, and ends by intimating personal knowledge: “There is still one beloved and intimate friend left to his lordship besides his bear; one, whose counsels, wild, dangerous, and plunging as they have hitherto been, Lord Byron has never slighted” (Sat III:86). Byron, retrospectively, recalls events differently: I remember the effect of the first Edinburgh Review on me. I heard of it six weeks before,—read it the day of its denunciation,—dined and drank three bottles of claret, (with S. B. Davies, I think,) neither ate nor slept the less, but, nevertheless, was not easy till I had vented my wrath and my rhyme, in the same pages, against every thing and every body. (BLJ 3:213) Hobhouse took Byron’s despondency seriously; he wrote in the margin to Moore’s biography, “he was very near destroying himself” (Marchand I:148). “A disease characterized by general debility of the body, extreme tenderness of the gums, foul breath, subcutaneous eruptions and pains in the limbs, induced by exposure and by a too liberal diet of salted foods; . . . Now recognized as due to insufficient ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in the diet” (OED). Colin Horne unpacks the complex literary genealogy of this citation (310–13). Nicholas Mason, relating the marketing of Byronism to the advances in Romantic advertisement, notes that

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 7 0 – 1 7 8

25.

26.

27.

28.

257

the prepublication marketing campaign suggests that both [Murray and Byron] had internalized the rules and methods of the new advertising system in general and of branding in particular. They worked diligently, if not always collaboratively, to differentiate Byron from the other poets of the day, to establish a consistent “brand identity,” and, most important, to use every means of publicity at their disposal to make the Byron name widely recognized prior to the poem’s release. (“Building Brand Byron” 425) Galt intimates Byron’s own contributions to the prepublication of the poem: Although few men were more under the impulses of passion than Lord Byron, there was yet a curious kind of management about him which showed that he was well aware how much of the world’s favour was to be won by it. Long before Childe Harold appeared, it was generally known that he had a poem in the press, and various surmises to stimulate curiosity were circulated concerning it: I do not say that these were by his orders, or under his directions, but on one occasion I did fancy that I could discern a touch of his own hand in a paragraph in the Morning Post, in which he was mentioned as having returned from an excursion into the interior of Africa; and when I alluded to it, my suspicion was confirmed by his embarrassment. (GLB 171) The reviewer tells another parable, in which he encounters a person “who maintained that he was Wordsworth” but was clearly an “impostor”: after kicking him and being told by him that “the evening being calm, we should pursue our journey,” Blackwood’s later learns that “he had actually written” some sonnets in imitation of Wordsworth’s, and “really had some sort of reason to believe himself a Lake poet” (BM XIII:437–8). What one writes, Blackwood’s implies, with its adverbs of “actually” and “really” becomes who one is. The Scot’s Magazine called Cantos IX–XI “nothing but measured prose with bad puns, stale jests, small wit” devoid of “those redeeming bursts of true poetic inspiration” (RR 2217). Mary Poovey discusses the role of the dialogue between statistics and political economy (and other social sciences) in the development of the “modern fact” (Chs. 5–6). The adjective is ambiguous in the context of Juan’s undisclosed diplomatic mission. An intellectual war is a war of wits, but it is also a cold war of information and economics. In the interstices of their hot wars, England and France spread false information through counterfeited money and documents, and deployed spying networks (both internal and international) to garner military advantages. Byron recognized that the intellectual wars of the periodicals were part of both the culture of wit and the battle for nationalist power.

258

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 8 2 – 1 8 8

6

Abraham Goldsmid: Financial Magician and the Public Image

1. The anti-Semitism of Hunter’s remarks is confirmed by a letter three days later in which he complains about a “Bailie’s” economy in preferring the simpler chariot over a more fashionable barouche-landau: he “would not go the price. He’s a Jew” (Constable I:128). 2. Burke continues: We know who it was that drove the money-changers out of the temple. We see, too, who it is that brings them in again. We have in London very respectable persons of the Jewish nation, whom we will keep; but we have of the same tribe others of a very different description, house-breakers, and receivers of stolen goods, and forgers of paper currency, more than we can conveniently hang. (Letter 15) 3. FC 47 “Aug 22nd 1806” [date penciled]; from the Archive at Morden Lodge. 4. Apparently, the “French” Goldsmith was a paid British propagandist, and in England, he was released from a charge of high treason through the intercession of Abraham Goldsmid, “who introduced him to Spencer Percival, the Prime Minister” (Rubens, “Portrait of AngloJewry” 41). 5. In 1803,the Goldsmid firm was one of five that gave £ 1,000 (about 10 times the average subscription, and in the 99th percentile) in support of the war effort, an amount that put their name, along with Baring’s, at the top of a list of roughly five hundred subscribers that was published and distributed to the newspapers (Fairburn 9). The “Newy Tozadik, or House of Justice,” which bore the Hebrew inscription, “Keep ye judgment, and do justice” “arose from the philanthropic exertions” of the Goldsmids (Brayley III:120). Comparing modern financial merchants to Cosmo De’Medici, P. Williams declares, “With what rapturous admiration does the mind dwell on the princely clarities, the unbounded benevolence of a Peele, a Baring, and a Goldsmid” (17). 6. In his 1806, two-volume edition, Hughson indicated that “the generous and opulent proprietor” had “spared no expense” in making the villa “perhaps one of the most complete and elegant in this kingdom”; besides noting six pillars, he mentions “a curious well, two hundred feet deep, with an inscription alluding to Abraham’s finding water” (quoted in Fretwell). The association of pillars and financial stability continued, as seen in an 1829 print of Nathan Rothschild beside a pillar, titled “A PILLAR of the Exchange.” 7. Endelman discusses Van Oven’s plans and Goldsmid’s interests in them (231–6). The scheme that Van Oven had proposed to combat Jewish “poverty and criminality” was “the creation of a communally

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 8 9 – 1 9 8

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

259

financed, government-supported agency for the relief and the control of the Jewish poor”; this entailed the creation of a “Jewish poor relief board to be invested by Parliament with quasi-governmental powers” including that of taxation of wealthier Jews (231–2). A less ideologically trenchant illustration of the public force of Goldsmid’s name appears in the Newgate Calendar. In 1810, Levi Mortgen and Joseph Luppa were convicted of conspiring to swindle a Piccadilly innkeeper. Posing as agents of Russian princes, they “borrowed” eight pounds to obtain appropriate passports for the Russian aristocrats and concocted the story that Mortgen “had got an order to draw on Abraham Goldsmid, esq., to the amount of five hundred pounds, and that on his return in the evening he would deposit one hundred pounds in order to ensure the keeping of the rooms” (Newgate 5:82–3). Cole details Cobbett’s prosecution and imprisonment for sedition based on his articles in the Political Register that protested the flogging of British troops (Chs. 9–10); Paper against Gold, “a full examination of the paper-money system,” was “the main literary labour” of Cobbett’s imprisonment (169). Cobbett’s anti-Semitism frequently focused on the increased visibility of Jews—”the pride of our assemblies, the arbiters of our amusements”—and included variants of the charge that “nine tenths of the press” is “absolutely in the pay of the Jews” (Herzog 300–01) The European Magazine reported the inquest’s summary: “On Thursday, while on change, he betrayed more than usual impatience and irritability, and spoke very incoherently as to the revenge he proposed to himself, in the punishment of the two parties opposed to him in the money market” (58: 314). This scandal had prompted a parliamentary investigation that found that, though Goldsmid acted improperly, he was not discounting his own bills and his profit was modest (Cope 189). Paulding’s various literary skirmishes are contextualized in Reynolds (40–54). His Childe Roeliff’s Pilgrimage: A Travelling Legend (1832) exposes Byronic melancholy in a formula reminiscent of Cobbett’s contempt for Goldsmid: Childe Roeliff having got rich by a blunder . . . subscribed liberally to all publicspirited undertakings that promised to bring him in a good profit; attended upon all public meetings whose proceedings were to be published in the newspapers, with the names of the chairman, secretary, and committee; and gave away his money with tolerable liberality where he was sure of its being recorded. (112) Goldsmith died in 1774. Goshawk’s reference to the “Great Unknown” as one of the four “poets” he knows—the others being Byron, Moore, and himself—appears despite the historical detail that Walter Scott was as yet not “Unknown” since the anonymous Waverley had not been published and he was famous for his poetry.

260

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 0 1 – 2 0 4

7

Spying James Hogg’s Bristle in B L ACK WOOD’S M AGA ZINE

1. The gradual characterization of North is summarized by Wilson’s daughter, Mary Gordon: The first conception of that remarkable personage was, however, as purely mythical as the “Shepherd” of the Noctes, and “C.N.” notes and criticisms were freely supplied by other hands, under the direction of the really responsible editor, Mr. Blackwood. As my father gradually invested his imaginary ancient with more and more of his personal attributes and experiences, the identification became more complete, till at length John Wilson and Christopher North were recognized as names synonymous. (II:51) Gordon highlights one part of the equation; the other is the extent to which North, as a publically known persona, shaped Wilson. In February 1822, a “Letter from London,” begins, “Are we to see you in town this spring? Or is the gout inexorable” (9:236); it concludes with a PS sending “Jemima’s best regards” despite her being “so utterly shocked” at the “ ‘real Irish Melodies’ in the Magazine.” 2. Simmons notes Lord Bolingbroke’s formulation from 1841 that “History is philosophy teaching by examples” (17). Although Simmons demonstrates that the formulation of institutional Tory history belongs properly to the mid-nineteenth century, to see its formative outlines in the determined toryism of Blackwood Magazine is justified by both the Magazine’s (and its owner’s) political commitments and its recurrent explorations of both history and historiography. 3. As the series developed, cameos by Byron, De Quincey, and others were mixed with regulars, literary characters, and fictitious inventions. The dialogues were located initially at William Ambrose’s tavern, a “real place” with “a real landlord of that name in deferential attendance” (Miller 163, Ch. 11 sketches the publication history of the Noctes). 4. Reinforcing the parallels of the sheep market and the literary market, this remark echoes Constable’s equally chiastic comment to Hogg: “I know as well how to sell a book as any man, which should be some concern of yours; and I know how to buy one, too!” (Hogg Memoir). 5. Blackwood’s frequently deploys descriptions with symbolic overtones, and even parodies its own method. It refers to “pimpled Hazlitt” and then has “A.Z.” the reviewer of Hazlitt’s Lectures on English Poetry in May 1818, declare “How ‘pimpled’ may be interpreted with reference to mind, we are not able to divine” (BM III:75). Reviewing the Works of Charles Lamb the next August, Blackwood’s deploys the adjective as a settled epitaph: “To ‘pimpled Hazlitt’. . . [Lamb] does not condescend to say one syllable” (III:599). Benjamin Haydon’s “hair curled over his shoulder in the old Italian fashion” (III:520); in the context of Lockhart’s attack on Hunt’s Story of Rimini, the reference connotes artistic pretentions and unnatural desires. Lockhart, in a letter

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 0 5 – 2 1 7

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

261

to Wilson proposing a sequel to his “On the Gormandizing School of Eloquence,” describes Maria Edgeworth in similarly physical terms, as if to emphasize the continuity between his public and private writings: “a little, dark, bearded, sharp, withered, active, laughing, talking, impudent, fearless, outspoken, honest, Whiggish, unchristian, good-tempered, kindly, ultra-Irish body. I like her one day, and damn her to perdition the next . . . I have invited Hogg to dine here tomorrow, to meet Miss Edgeworth. She has a great anxiety to see the Bore” (Gordon 58–9). Each issue ended with an announcement of the publisher and the price. As the periodical developed, Hogg added signposts to orient the reader, including titles and subtitles to tales (e.g., “The Country Laird” No. 24). The poetic narrative is complicated by a historical footnote, considerably longer than the poem, that points out that Lochiel had gone to Charles to dissuade him from the battle, and only agreed to join it when the Prince declares that Lochiel “may stay at home, and learn from the newspapers the fate of his prince.” In the juxtaposition between wizard and newspaper as the bringer of news, Campbell’s poem plays on the professionalization of prophecy that both Jeffrey and Hogg exploit. In April 1809, the Edinburgh Review, noting that “there are probably few readers of English poetry” not already familiar with “Lochiel” characterized it as “by far the most spirited and poetical denunciation of woe since the days of Cassandra” (14:17). Russett details a variety of intertextual relations between the two authors, including Hogg’s “aggressive tribute,” a “novel about ‘Walter Scott’ ” (Fictions 183) and their various raids on one another’s poetry (155–84 in passim). Hogg uses other images of physical embodiment to articulate the metonymic relations of individuals to corporate bodies. Regretting that Scott’s heir did not keep his steward on at Abbottsford, he opines, “without [William] Laidlaw that grand classical estate is a carcass without a head” (68). Within the Anecdotes, Scott serves as a loyal contrast to the editors and authors (with whom he is sometimes confused) who plagued Hogg. Having once “promised” to review one of Hogg’s poems in a periodical, he explains to Hogg why it was impossible: I began the thing and took a number of notes marking extracts but found to give a proper view of your poetical progress and character I was under the necessity of beginning with the ballads and following through THE WAKE and all the rest and upon the whole I felt that we were so much of the same school that if I had said of you as I wished to say I would have been thought by the world to be applauding myself.” (61) Deploying his frequent theme of doppelgangers, Hogg imputes to Scott a fusion of identity; the recognition of Hogg’s own

262

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 1 8 – 2 2 0 integrity—requiring the transition from scattered “notes” to a summary of a career— outstrips Scott’s ability to write and in turn confirms Hogg’s own powers of production. Ian Duncan has detailed how their complex relationship, as patron and liege, yet literary rivals, is woven into Hogg’s writing (163–73). Margaret Oliphant notes that at the formation of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, Hogg was “very much en evidence about Edinburgh,” and “it is most probably that it was he who introduced the two pseudo-literary men to the publisher. Pringle was from Hogg’s own country, a rustic genius like himself, though of superior education; and Cleghorn was known as the editor of a Farmer’s Magazine, probably therefore a countryman too” (98). The Old Friend “forswear[s] the whole swinish multitude,” but through a complicating allusion: Fare thee well! And if for ever, Still for ever, Fare thee well! In quoting Byron’s notorious poem about his separation from his wife, Wilson implicitly compares the dynamics of authors and editors with that of spouses. As Russett recognizes, in her account of Wilson’s review of Hogg’s The Three Perils of Women in which he complains of the juxtaposition between the “song of the nightingale” and “the grunt of the boar” that invariably betrays Hogg’s presence, Wilson would have known that “Hogg” is “a northern word for a young sheep” (Fiction 177). In “The Steamboat, No VI,” “Duffle” describes an interruption that thematizes this tension: “While we were thus speaking on the beneficial consequences of the coronation, a most termagant rioter came up, bawling one minute, ‘The Queen for ever!’ and then turning his tongue in his cheek, and roaring, ‘God save the King!’ ” Caricatures by Cruikshank circumscribed the “Queen Caroline Affair” for the public (Wood 149–54, 161–7). With Napoleon’s death in May 1821, the coronation represented an opportunity to display British superiority, and to use French funds to underwrite it, as more than half of the L240,000 was appropriated “out of Money received from France on Account of pecuniary Indemnity” (GM 93:77). Cumming indicates the extent of careful staging for the event, including renting of a horse—“a trained and docile beast used to crowds”—from “Astley’s circus” for the ritual appearance of the king’s champion (43). “It combined all the gorgeous splendour of ancient chivalry with the intense heroic interest of modern times;—every thing that could effect or excite, either in beauty, heroism, genius, grace, elegance, or taste; all that was rich in colour, gorgeous in effect, touching in association, English in character or Asiatic in magnificence was crowded into this golden and enchanted hall” (quoted in Cumming 48–9). So the painter Benjamin Haydon, a consistent contributor to the London

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 2 2 – 2 2 6

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

263

Magazine, described the king’s coronation in his diary. Performing a unity of past and present, nation and empire, this description indicates those continuities that could confirm, for Blackwood’s, the Tory conception of history. Yet, for Maga, that Haydon could regard the ceremony with equanimity and pleasure suggested that its gestures of reconciliation toward the Whigs were legible and unnerving. Publius Secundus was a Roman general and poet during the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius. The article reiterates the sameness of children’s games across time; A footnote speculates that “Homer and Virgil had dozed taps and pirics;—that Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret had played at tig” (BM X:37). In the November 1821 issue, an article, “Treason” exposes a “plot” by the “Fourteen Contributors” directed against ourselves, it aimed at the subversion of our supremacy in the periodical world, and was intended to bring into contempt us, the contributors’ Sovereign Lord the Editor, our Magazine, and dignity. . . . a shallow-pated junto of disappointed correspondents, who had cockered themselves up by a give-andtake system of self-eulogy, till they fancied themselves constrained by an unanimous feeling of their own surpassing merit, to prescribe to us what we ought to insert. (BM X:406) Robin MacLachlan has noted that Hogg made a “brand name” of the Shepherd (6), so the misidentification of him as swineherd disrupts that marketing ploy. In the sixth installment of the “Cockney School of Poetry” articles, Z (Lockhart) had matter-of-factly announced Hunt’s demise: “This is a posthumous publication, and has been given to the world, we understand, by the author’s executors, Mr. John Keats, Mr. Vincent Novello, and Mr. Benjamin Haydon, Such, at least, is the town talk” (Oct 1819; BM VI:70). He laments that they have not supplied either “a life or a Face,” despite Hunt’s allegedly having written “a quire of hot-pressed, wire-wove, gilt Autobiography” and there being “no man [who] admired his [own] face more than poor Hunt.” As Karen Fang’s analysis of an Egyptological theme in the novel and the Chaldee Manuscript underscores, the novel is concerned with history and historiography (166, 171–2). Its action occurs during the Covenanting Revolution, an epoch that, as Ross MacKay notes, is incorporated “into the greater narrative of the constitutional crisis in England.” Hogg’s Brownie of Bodsbeck and Scott’s Old Mortality had debated the novelistic representation and historical meaning of the events and their agents, and this “lively exchange sets the standard for the debate of the Killing Time—an issue contentious enough to induce John Galt to weigh in with his novel, Ringhan Gilhaize, in 1823” (58–9). Hogg’s turn to that moment situated the problem of identity as an historical one, and undermined the Blackwoodian contention of Hogg’s own position as an historical artifact.

264

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 2 7 – 2 3 1

21. For Hogg, or at least for the “Ettrick Shepherd,” there was a reputed pleasure as well as shame in this treatment; Shelton Mackenzie, in his Life of the Ettrick Shepherd, appended to his 1856 edition of the collected Noctes Ambrosianae, maintains that Hogg was “somewhat proud of the position he was made to occupy” and relates an anecdote, told by someone who “loved” Hogg “dearly as a brother” in which Hogg “had alighted upon one of Wilson’s raciest personifications of himself, and could not restrain his appreciation of its skill and genius” (Noctes xviii). 22. Like Robertson and his printers, the crowd of the Noctes encourages him to lose himself; Odoherty declares, “Coleridge over again for all the world . . . henceforth always write our songs when you are dazed, as you call it.” Hogg responds, “I need scarcely be after bidding you read the songs I write, when you find yourself in that same honorable and praise-worthy condition” (XIII:599); the emphasis on “read” alludes to the Blackwood’s coterie’s propensity for writing Hogg’s songs. Mark Parker notes that the “Noctes put the [other] articles [in the issue] into an intensely dialogical relation” and “do not simply blur the boundaries between popular and elite cultures; they locate one culture within the other” (Selections 3:146). 23. The first use of the term is Old Wringhim’s mistaken impression that Dalcastle has “confess[ed] his backslidings” (21). Of the roughly two dozen uses of the word “confess,” most are demands that another confess or plots to elicit a confession. When Wringhim does confess, the confessions are vague (“That I was a great, a transcendent sinner, I confess” 170); late in the novel, the contemplation of suicide is framed as a confession: “I shuddered at a view of the dreadful alternative, yet was obliged to confess that in my present circumstances existence was not to be borne” (359). In the only other paragraph that uses the formulation “I confess” twice, he confesses his disdain for his mother’s weak theology and “motley instruction” in terms that make her the guilty party: “If this was a crime in me, I never could help it. I confess it freely, and believe it was a judgment from heaven inflicted on her for some sin of former days, and that I had no power to have acted otherwise toward her than I did” (172; my emphasis). Being seduced by Gil-Martin, he confesses to being “greatly flattered” by the compliments of the “superior youth” (189). 24. His surname Wringhim plays on the sense of “wring” as a winepress—a common figure for a printing press—that links creativity with the social rituals of drinking. That Hogg himself was a Robert’s son adds a layer of nominal play; Petrie’s “Odd Characters” discusses Robert Hogg’s contribution to his son’s writings. 25. Peter Garside provides a review of the printing procedures of the Confessions (“Printing Confessions” 25–6). Although he does not discuss the Advertising sheet, he notes other ways in which the printing is implicated in the narrative.

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 3 7 – 2 3 8

265

26. Hogg emphasizes the unstable teleological significance of the suicide by retitling the 1828 edition The Suicide’s Grave, making the moment of textual and bodily exposure (of which, per force, Wringhim, the primary narrator knows nothing) the titling moment of the novel. 27. Saintbury’s guess at Lockhart’s qualified contribution is magnified in Ernest Albert’s A Guide to the Best Fiction: “Prof. Saintsbury suggests that Lockhart had a principal hand in the book” (28). Peter Garside discusses the debate on whether the Fanatic alterations are authorial (Hogg, Confessions lxxiv–lxxx). And the beat goes on. The online Questia.com (2007) cites the entry from the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition (2004) that offers this biographical source: “See his [Hogg’s] memoirs, Confessions of a Fanatic (1824).”

This page intentionally left blank

Wor k s C i t e d

Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. Selected Essays from “The Tatler,” “The Spectator,” and “The Guardian.” 1709–14. Ed. D. McDonald. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1973. Additional Memorial for David George, Alexander Cowie, James Anderson, William Aitken, and William Fleming, . . . Edinburgh: Mundell & Son, [1804]. Ainslie, Donald. “Hume’s Reflections on the Identity and Simplicity of Mind.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62 (May 2001): 557–78. Ainsworth, Horace. Thomas De Quincey: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. Albert, Ernest. A Guide to the Best Fiction in English. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1913. Alexander, J.H. “Hogg in the Noctes Ambrosiane.” Studies in Hogg and His World, 4 (1993): 37–47. Alexander, Levy. Memoirs of the Life and Commercial Connections, Public and Private, of the Late Benj. Goldsmid, Esq. of Roehampton, Containing a Cursory View of the Jewish Society and Manners, Interspersed with Interesting Anecdotes of Several Remarkable Characters. London: Printed by the Author, 1808. Andreades, Andreas and Herbert Somerton Foxwell. History of the Bank of England. Trans. Christabel Margaret Meredith. London: P.S. King & Son, 1909. Archer, Thomas. William Ewart Gladstone and His Contemporaries: Seventy Years of Social and Political Progress. London: Blackie and Son, 1883. Arkin, Marcus. Aspects of Jewish Economic History. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1975. Austen, Jane. Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bagehot, Walter. “The First Edinburgh Reviewers” I: 1–40. Literary Studies. 2 vols. Ed. R. Hutton. London: Longmans, 1879. Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. M. Holquist, trans. C Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas, 1981. Barrett, Eaton Stannard. The Heroine: Or Adventures of Cherubina. 3 vols. 2nd ed. London: Colburn, 1814. Nineteenth-Century Fiction FullText Database. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1999; 3rd ed. London: Colburn, 1815.

268

Wor k s C i t e d

Barrow, John. Auto-Biographical Memoir Sir John Barrow, Bart., Late of the Admiralty; Reflections, Observations, and Reminiscences at Home and Abroad, from Early Life to Advanced Age. London: John Murray, 1847. Bauer, Josephine. The London Magazine, 1820–29. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1953. Beckett, John. Byron and Newstead: The Aristocrat and the Abbey. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Bell, Alan. Sydney Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Bentham, Jeremy. “Draught of a New Plan for the Organization of the Judicial Establishment in France.” 1790. In Vol. IV. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Ed. John Bowring. 11 vols. Edinburgh: Tait, 1843. ———. “Essay on Political Tactics” 1791. In Vol IX. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Ed. John Bowring. 11 vols. Edinburgh: Tait, 1843. Bermant, Chaim. The Cousinhood: The Anglo-Jewish Gentry. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Boone, James Shergold. Men and Things in 1823: A Poem in Three Epistles, with Notes. London: Hatchard and Son, 1824. Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. 1791. Ed. R.W. Chapman and J.D. Fleeman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Brayley, E.W. A Topographical and Historical Description of London and Middlesex . . . Accompanied with Biographical Notices of Eminent and Learned Men. 5 vols. London: Sherwood and Co, [1810]. Bromwich, David. Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Burke, Edmund. “A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, Answer to Some Objections to His Book on French Affairs.” 1791. In Vol. 4. The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke. Boston: Little, Brown, 1877. ———. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. 1757. Ed. J. Boultom. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1968. ———. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Ed. Frank M. Turner and Darrin M. McMahon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Byron, George Gordon Lord. Byron’s Letters and Journals. 12 vols. Ed. Leslie Marchand. London: John Murray, 1973–82. ———. The Complete Poetical Works. 7 vols. Ed. Jerome McGann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93. Carlyle, Thomas. “The Hero as Man-of-Letters.” Lecture V. On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. New York: Wiley and Co, 1849. Centlivre, Susanna. A Bold Stroke for a Wife. Ed. Nancy Copeland. New York: Broadview, 1995. Cheeke, Stephen. “Geo-History: Byron’s Beginnings.” European Journal of English Studies, 6 (2002): 2, 131–42. ———. Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave, 2003.

Wor k s C i t e d

269

Christensen, Jerome. “The Mind at Ocean: The Impropriety of Coleridge’s Literary Life.” Romanticism and Language. Ed. Arden Reed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984, 144–67. ———. Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career. Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. ———. “Theorizing Byron’s Practice: The Performance of Lordship and the Poet’s Career.” Studies in Romanticism 27 (Winter 1988): 477–90. ——— Lord Byron’s Strength. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ———. Romanticism at the End of History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Clive, John. Scotch Reviewers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. Cobbett, William, 2nd ed. Paper against Gold, Containing the History and Mystery of the Bank of England, the Funds, the Debt, the Sinking Fund, the Bank Stopage, the Lowering and the Raising of the value of Paper-Money. . London: Cobbett, 1817. ———. Cobbett’s Political Register. London: Richard Bagshaw [and others], 1802–35. Cockburn, Henry. Life of Lord Jeffrey: With a Selection from His Correspondence. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1852. Cole, G.D.H. The Life of William Cobbett. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co, 1924. Coleman, Deidre. “Re-Living Jacobinism: Wordsworth and the Convention of Cintra.” Yearbook of English Studies, 19 (1989): 144–61. Coleridge, E.H. and R.E. Porthero. Works of Lord Byron. 13 vols. London: John Murray, 1898–1905. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. 1817. Ed. J. Engell and W.J. Bate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. ———. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71. ———. Statesman’s Manual; or the Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon. 1816. Lay Sermons. Ed. R.J. White. Vol. 6 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. ———. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen. 4 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957–90. Colman, George. The History of King Lear. London: R. Baldwin and Co., 1768; English Verse Drama Full-Text Database. Cambridge: ChadwyckHealey, 1994. Constable, Thomas. Archibald Constable and His Literary Correspondents: A Memorial. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1873. Cope, S.R. “The Goldsmids and the Development of the London Money Market during the Napoleonic Wars.” Economica, 9 (1942): 160–206. Cornish, W.R. and G. de N. Clark. Law and Society in England 1750–1950. London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1989.

270

Wor k s C i t e d

Cox, Jeffrey. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle. London: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cumming, Valerie “Pantomime and Pageantry: The Coronation of George IV.” London–World City, 1800–1840. Ed. Celina Fox. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992, 39–50. Cutmore, Jonathan, Ed. Quarterly Review Archive. Romantic Circles Scholarly Resource. July 28, 2008, www.rc.umd.edu/reference/qr/index.html. Dallas, R.C. Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron from the Year 1808 to the End of 1814. London: Charles Knight, 1824. Damrosch, Leo. Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. D’Israeli, Isaac. Flim-Flams! Or, the Life and Errors of My Uncle, and the Amours of My Aunt. With illustrations and Obscurities, by Messieurs Tag, Rag, and Bobtail. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1805; 2nd ed., 1806. Dennie, Joseph, Ed. Oliver Oldschool, [pseudo], The Port Folio. Philadelphia: John Watts, 1806. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derick Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992, 221–53. Duncan, Ian. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Eldon, John Scott, Lord. Lord Eldon’s Anecdote Book. Ed. A. Lincoln and R. McEwen. London: Stevens and Sons, 1960. Elledge, Paul. Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out, Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing Out. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Emden, Paul. “The Brothers Goldsmid and the Financing of the Napoleonic Wars.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 14 (1935–39): 225–46. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. English Traits. 1857. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1904. Endelman, Todd. The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society. 1979. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Erdman, David. “Lord Byron as Rinaldo.” PMLA, 57 (1942): 189–231. Erickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Erinaceus. [pseud]. Remarks on the Present State of Public Credit and the Consequences Likely to Result from the Decease of Mr. A. Goldsmid & Sir F. Baring. London: Johnston, 1810. Eversley, George Shaw-Lefevre and Valentine Chirol. The Turkish Empire from 1288 to 1914 London: T. F. Unwin, 1923. Fairburn, J. [Firm]. Fairburn’s Selection of Loyal and Patriotic Papers: Containing the Proceedings and Declaration of the Merchants, Bankers, &C. at the Royal Exchange. London: John Fairburn, 1803. Fang, Karen. “A Printing Devil, a Scottish Mummy, and an Edinburgh Book of the Dead: James Hogg’s Napoleonic Complex.” Studies in Romanticism 43 (2004): 161–86.

Wor k s C i t e d

271

Ferris, Ina. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Flynn, Philip. Francis Jeffrey Neward: University of Delaware Press, 1978. ———. “Early Blackwood’s and Scottish Identities.” Studies in Romanticism, 46 (2007): 43–56. Fontana, Biancamaria. Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1832. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Foote, Samuel. The Liar, a Farce. New York: Charles Wiley, 1824. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. of Les Mots et les choses. 1966. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Francis, John. Chronicles and Characters of the Stock Exchange. London: Willoughby and Co., 1849. Franta, Andrew. Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Fretwell, Katie. “The Fete of Abraham Goldsmid: A Regency Garden Tragedy.” The London Gardener, 5(1999): 56–60. Galt, John. Life of Lord Byron. London: Colburn & Bentley, 1830. ———. The Autobiography of John Galt. 2 vols. London: Cochrane and M’Crone, 1833. Garside, Peter. “Printing Confessions.” Studies in Hogg and His World, 9 (1998): 16–31. Gilmartin, Kevin. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790– 1832. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Godwin, William. 1794. Things as They Are, or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams. Ed. Maurice Hindle. New York: Penguin, 1988. Gordon, Mary Wilson. Christopher North, a Memoir of John Wilson, Late Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh; Comp. from Family Papers and Other Sources. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1862. Greig, James. Francis Jeffrey of the “Edinburgh Review.” Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1948. Gunzenhauser, Bonnie J. “Reading the Rhetoric of Resistance in William Cobbett’s Two-Penny Trash.” Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture. Ed. Kim Wheatley. New York: Routledge Press, 2003. Hale, Susan. Men and Manners of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Flood & Vincent, 1898. Harvie, Christopher. Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707 to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2004. Haydon, Benjamin. Correspondence and Table-Talk. 2 vols. Ed. Frederick Wordsworth Haydon. Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1877. Hayek, F.A. “Henry Thornton.” The Trend of Economic Thinking: Essays on Political Economists and Economic History. Ed. W. Bartley and S. Kresge. Vol. 3. Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. 19 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

272

Wor k s C i t e d

Hazlitt, William. An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in Favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. London: J. Johnson, 1805. ———. Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters. London: William Hone, 1819. ———. Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits. London: Colburn, 1825. ———. Lectures on the English Comic Writers. 1818. London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845. ———. “On Different Sorts of Fame.” 1816. The Round Table. Ed. W. Carew Hazlitt. London: Bell and Daldy, 1871, 132–39. ———. Table Talk, or Original Essays on Men and Manners. 1821–22. Vol. 8. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P.P. Howe. 21 vols. London: J.M. Dent, 1930–34. Heinzelman, Kurt. “Self-Interest and the Politics of Composition in Keats’s Isabella.” ELH, 55 (Spring 1988): 159–93. Henderson, Andrea. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Herzog, Don. Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Heward, Edmund. Lord Mansfield. Chichester, England: B. Rose, 1979. Higgins, David. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2005. Hilton, Boyd. A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England 1783–1846. London: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hinde, Wendy. George Canning. London: Collins, 1973. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Age of Revolution: 1798–1848. New York: New American Library, 1962. Hofkosh, Sonia. “Commodities among Themselves: Reading Desire in Early Women’s Magazines.” Romanticism & Gender. Ed. Anne Janowitz. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. Hogg, James. “A Scot’s Mummy.” Blackwood’s Magazine, 12 (August 1823): 188–92. ———. Memoir of the Author’s Life (1st ed. 1806, 2nd ed. 1821, 3rd ed., 1832) and Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (1834). Ed. Douglas Mack. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press Ltd., 1972. ———. “Poetic Mirror.’ (1816). The Works of The Ettrick Shepherd: Poems and Ballads. Vol II. Edinburgh, 1865; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1973. ———. The Spy: A Periodical Paper, of Literary Amusement and Instruction. 1810–11. Ed. Gillian Hughes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. ———. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Written by Himself, with a Detail of Curious Traditionary Facts and Other Evidence by the Editor. 1824. Ed. Peter D. Garside. Afterward Ian Campbell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Horne, Colin. “The Biter Bit: Johnson’s Strictures on Pope.” Review of English Studies, ns 27 (1976): 310–13.

Wor k s C i t e d

273

Horner, Francis. Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Horner, M. P. 1843. Ed. Leonard Horner. 2 vols. London: Murray, 1853. ———. The Horner Papers: Selections from the Letters and Miscellaneous Writings of Francis Horner. Ed. Kenneth Bourne and William Banks Taylor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994. Horner, Francis et al. Report, Together with the Minutes of Evidence and Accounts from the Select Committee on the High Price of Gold Bullion. London: J. Johnson, 1810. Hughes, Gillian. “The Spy and Literary Edinburgh.” Scottish Literary Journal, 10 (1983): 42–53. ———. “James Hogg, the Spy, and the Edinburgh Whigs.” Studies in Hogg and His World, 10 (1999): 48–58. Hughson, David. London; Being an Accurate History and Description of the British Metropolis and Its Neighborhood, to Thirty Miles Extent. 6 vols. London: J Stratford, 1805–09. Hume, David. Treatise of Human Understanding 1739. Ed. L.A. SelbyBigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896. ———. “Of Public Credit.” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. 1777. Ed. Eugene Miller. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987. Hume, David and Adam Smith. “The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself.” Philosophical Works. Boston: Little, Brown, 1854. Hunt, Leigh. The Literary Examiner: Consisting of the Indicator, a Review of Books, and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose And Verse. London: HL Hunt, 1823. Hunter, Richard and Macalpine, Ida. Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535–1860: A History Presented in Selected English Texts. Hartsdale, NY: Carlisle Pub., 1982. Izenberg, Gerald. Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787–1802. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Jamilly, Edward. “Anglo-Jewish Architects, and Architecture in the 18th and 19th Centuries.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, 18 (1953–55): 127–41. Jeffrey, Francis. Contributions to the Edinburgh Review 1844. New York: Appleton and Co., 1873. Johnson, Edgar. Sir Walter Scott; The Great Unknown. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Johnson, Samuel. Letters of Samuel Johnson. Ed. Bruce Redford. London: Oxford University Press, 1992. Johnston, Kenneth. “Romantic Anti-Jacobins or Anti-Jacobin Romantics?” Romantic Parody. Ed. J. Strachan. Romanticism on the Net 15 (August 1999). August 8, 2008. http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/. Jones, Christine. “Fantasy and Transfiguration: Byron and His Portraits.” Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Culture. Ed. Frances Wilson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.

274

Wor k s C i t e d

Jones, Mark. “Double Economics: Ambivalence in Wordsworth’s Pastoral.” PMLA, 108 (1993): 1098–1113. ———. “Parody and Its Containments: The Case of Wordsworth.” Representations, 54 (Spring 1996): 57–79. Junius [pseudo]. Junius: Including Letters by the Same Writer, under Other Signatures . . . 3 vols. Ed. George Woodfall. London: Mawman, 1812. Keach, William. Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Keen, Paul. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kernan, Alvin. Printing Technology, Letters, & Samuel Johnson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Kirchhofer, Anton. “Revolutionizing the Review? British Periodical Genres of the 1790s and the Edinburgh Review.” Reactions to Revolutions: The 1790s and Their Aftermath. Ed. Ulrich Broich et al. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007, 177–202. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. ———. “Discriminations, or Romantic Cosmopolitanisms in London.” Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 65–84. Koenigsberger, Kurt. “Libert, Libel, and Liber Amoris: Hazlitt on Sovereignty and Death.” Studies in Romanticism, 38 (1999): 281–309. Koss, Stephen. The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain. Vol. 1. The Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Kropf, David. Authorship as Alchemy: Subversive Writing in Puskkin, Scott, Hoffmann. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Kyd, Stewart. A Treatise on the Law of Corporations. 2 vols. London: J. Butterworth, 1793. Lang, Andrew. The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner, 1897. Lapp, Robert. Contest for Cultural Authority: Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the Distresses of the Regency. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Leps, Marie-Christine. “Critical Productions of Discourse: Angenot, Bakhtin, Foucault.” Yale Journal of Criticism, 17:2 (Fall 2004): 263–86. Lockhart, John.Gibson. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 7 vols. London: John Murray, 1837–39. Longman [firm]. A List of New Works, and of New Editions: Published in the Month of June, 1824, and Sold by Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme, Brown, and Green, Paternoster-Row. London: Longman, 1824. Lynch, Deidre. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. London: John Murray, 2002. MacKay, Ross. “The Scattered Ruins of Evidence: Non-Eventworthy History in Old Mortality and the Brownie of Bodsbeck.” Studies in Hogg and His World, 12 (2001): 56–79.

Wor k s C i t e d

275

MacLachlan, Robin W. “Hogg and the Art of Brand Management.” Studies in Hogg and His World, 14 (2003): 5–15. Magnuson, Paul. Reading Public Romanticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Mahoney, Charles. “Periodical Indigestion: Hazlitt’s Unpalatable Politics.” Romanticism and Conspiracy. Ed. O. Wang. Romantic Circles Praxis Series. August 1997 [February 2008]. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis. Manning, Peter. “Touring Scotland at the Time of the Reform Bill: William Wordsworth and William Cobbett.” Wordsworth Circle, 31(2000): 80–83. ———. “Detaching Lamb’s Thoughts.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 25 (2002): 137–46. Marchand, Leslie. Byron: A Biography. 3 vols. New York: Knopf, 1957. Martin, Philip. Byron: A Poet before His Public. London: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Martin, Raymond and John Barresi. The Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An intellectual History of Personal Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Mason, Nicholas. “Building Brand Byron: Early-Nineteenth-Century Advertising and the Marketing of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” MLQ (December 2002): 411–40. Mason, Nicholas et al. 6 vols. Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–25: Selections from Maga’s Infancy. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006. Matthews, Samantha. Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press, 2004. Mawman, Joseph. An Excursion to the Highlands of Scotland and the English Lakes: With Recollections, Descriptions, and References to Historical Facts. London: J. Mawman, 1805. Maxwell, William. Of The Portraits, Busts, Published Writings, and Manuscripts, of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Edinburgh: W. Paterson, 1874. McCutcheon, Roger. “The Beginnings of Book-Reviewing in English Periodicals.” PMLA, 37 (1922): 691–706. McGann, Jerome. Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. McKerrow, Mary. The Faeds, a Biography. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1982. Melikan, R.A. John Scott, Lord Eldon, 1751–1838: The Duty of Loyalty. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Miller, Karl. Electric Shepherd: A Likeness of James Hogg. London: Faber & Faber, 2003. Mole, Thomas. Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958. Montgomery, Robert. The Age Reviewed: A Satire with the Runaways. London: W. Carpenter, 1827.

276

Wor k s C i t e d

Moore, Thomas. 1830. Life of Lord Byron, with His Letters and Journals. 6 vols. London: Murray, 1851. Mulvihill, James. “Hazlitt and the Idea of Identity.” Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays. Ed. U Natarajan, T. Paulin, and D. Wu. New York: Routledge, 2005. Murphy, Peter. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Murray, John. The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron. Ed. Andrew Nicholson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Napier, George. The Homes and Haunts of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1897. Napier, Macvey and James Grahame (attr). Hypocrisy Unveiled, & Calumny Detected: In a Review of Blackwood’s Magazine. Edinburgh: F. Pillans, 1818. Newgate Calendar, rpt. Tarlton Law Library, Law in Popular Culture Collection, Website Reproduction of The Complete Newgate Calendar. London: Navarre Society Ltd., 1926, http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/ lpop/etext/completenewgate.htm. Newlyn, Lucy. Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Oliphant, Margaret. William Blackwood and His Sons. Their Magazine and Friends. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897. Owen, W.J.B. “Wordsworth and Jeffrey in Collaboration.” Review of English Studies, ns, 15:58 (May 1964): 161–7. Parker, Mark. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Paulding, James Kirk. Chronicles of the City of Gotham, from the Papers of a Retired Common Councilman Containing the Azure House. The Politician. The Dumb Girl. New York: Carvill Press, 1830. ———. Childe Roeliff’s Pilgrimage: A Travelling Legend. New York: J. J. Harper, 1832. Pearson, Hesketh. The Smith of Smiths; Being the Life, Wit and Humour of Sydney Smith. London: The Folio Society, 1977. Penelum, Terence. Themes in Hume: The Self, the Will, Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Petrie, Elaine. “Odd Characters: Traditional Informants in James Hogg’s Family.” Studies in Hogg and His World, 1 (1990): 136–52. Philo-Judaeis. A Letter to Abraham Goldsmid, Esq. Containing Strictures on Mr. Joshua Van Oven’s Letters on the Present State of the Jewish Poor. Pointing out the Impracticability of Ameliorating Their Condition through the Medium of Taxation and Coercion, with a Plan for Erecting a Jewish College, or Seminary, &c. London: Blacks and Parry, 1802. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 1944. New York: Beacon Press, 1957. Pollins, Harold. Economic History of the Jews in England. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.

Wor k s C i t e d

277

Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Porter, Noah. Books and Reading: Or, What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881. Pratt, Willis. Byron at Southwell: The Making of a Poet; with New Poems and Letters from the Rare Books Collections of the University of Texas. Austin: University of Texas, 1948. Privateer, Paul. Romantic Voices: Identity and Ideology in British Poetry, 1789–1850. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Probyn, Elspeth. Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1993. Poynder, John. Literary Extracts from English and Other Works; Collected during Half a Century. 3 vols. London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1844–47. Q. [pseudo]. “Literary Notices.” Ed. (and possible author) Henry Leigh Hunt(?). The Examiner, (August 1824): 482–83. Raymond, Robert. “Genesis of the Corporation.” Harvard Law Review, 19 (1906): 350–365. Redekop, Magdalene. “Beyond Closure: Buried Alive with Hogg’s Justified Sinner.” ELH, 52 (1985): 159–84. Reid, Thomas. “Of Memory.” Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D., Now Fully Collected. 2 vols. Ed. William Hamilton and Dugald Stewart. Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart, 1863. I: 339–360. Reiman, Donald. The Romantics Reviewed; Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers. Part A, 2 vols. Part B, 5 vols. Part C, 2 vols. New York: Garland Publishers, 1972. Reynolds, Larry. James Kirke Paulding. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Ricardo, David. Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo. Vol III. Pamphlets and Papers 1809–10. Ed. Piero Sraffa and M.H. Dobb. Cambridge: Royal Economic Society, 1951. Ring, John. The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, Alias the Stinkpot of Literature. London: Symonds, 1807. Robinson, Henry Crabb. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers. Ed. Edith J. Morley. 3 vols. London: Dent, 1938. Roper, Derek. Reviewing before the Edinburgh: 1788–1802. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978. Rozin, Mordechai. The Rich and the Poor: Jewish Philanthropy and Social Control in Nineteenth-Century. London; Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 1999. Rubens, Alfred. Anglo-Jewish Portraits: A Biographical Catalogue of Engraved Anglo-Jewish and Colonial Portraits from the Earliest Times to the Accession of Queen Victoria. London: The Jewish Museum, 1935. ———. “Portrait of Anglo-Jewry, 1656–1836.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, 19 (1960): 13–52. Rubenstein, W.D. Britain’s Century: A Political and Social History, 1815– 1905. London: Arnold, 1998.

278

Wor k s C i t e d

Russett, Margaret. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Saintsbury, George. “James Hogg.” Macmillan’s Magazine, LXI (November 1889): 18–29. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol I: Theory of Practical Ensembles. 1960. Trans. A Sheridan-Smith, ed. J Ree. London: Verso, 1976. Scott, Walter. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott. 1934. Ed. H.J.C. Grierson. 12 vols. London: Constable, 1971. Scarre, Geoffrey. “What Was Hume’s Worry about Personal Identity?” Analysis, 43 (1983): 217–21. Shelley, P.B. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Roger Ingpen. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. ———. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. 2nd ed. Ed. D Reiman and N Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002. Simmons, Clare. Eyes across the Channel: French Revolutions, Party History and British Writing, 1830–1882. London: Harwood, 2000. Simpson, Kenneth. The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in EighteenthCentury Scottish Literature. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988. Smiles, Samuel. A Publisher and His Friends. Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray, with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768–1843. London: John Murray, 1891. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. Ed. Raphael and Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982. Smith, Christopher. “Robert Southey and the Emergence of Lyrical Ballads.” Lyrical Ballads, 1798–1998. Ed. N. Trott and S. Perry. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 9 (February 1998) (September 2, 2008) n.p., http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/. Southey, Robert. Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. 1850. Ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey. New York: Harper Brothers, 1855. Spenser, Edmund. The Fairie Queene. Vol. 2. Works Of Edmund Spenser in Eight Volume with the Principal Illustrations of Various Commentators. London: Cadell and Davies, 1805. Spirit of the Public Journals Being an Impartial Selection of the Most Exquisite Essays and Jeux d’Esprits. 21 vols. London: R. Phillips, 1797–1825. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Acting Bits/Identity Talk.” Critical Inquiry, 18 (1992): 770–803. Spragens, Thomas. The Irony of Liberal Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Stabler, Jane. “Against Their Better Selves: Byron, Jeffrey and the Edinburgh.” British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays. Ed. M. Demata and D. Wu. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Stafford, Fiona. “The Edinburgh Review and the Representation of Scotland.” British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays. Ed. M. Demata and D. Wu. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Wor k s C i t e d

279

[Stephens, Alexander et al.] Public Characters. 10 vols. London: R. Phillips, 1798–1810. Stewart, David. “ ‘We Are Absolutely Coining Money’: Commerce, Literature and the Magazine Style of the 1810s and ‘20s.” NineteenthCentury Contexts, 30 (2008): 21–37. Stoddart, Judith. “Cultures of Print: Mass Markets and Theories of the Liberal Public Sphere.” Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850. Ed. E.J. Clery, C. Franklin, and P. Garside. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Susser, Bernard. The Jews of South-West England: The Rise and Decline of their Medieval and Modern Communities. Exeter: Exeter Press, 1993. Sutherland, John. The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Terada, Rei. “Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction in Coleridge’s Notebooks.” Studies in Romanticism, 43 (2004): 257–82. Thelwall, John. A Letter to Francis Jeffray, Esq., on Certain Calumnies and Misrepresentations in the Edinburgh Review . . . . Edinburgh: Printed for the author by John Turnbull, 1804. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. 1963. New York: Penguin, 1980. Thornton, Henry. 1802. An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain. Ed. F.A. Hayek. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939. Treadwell, James. Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783– 1834. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Trelawny, Edward. Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. London: Edward Moxon, 1858. Twiss, Horace. Public and Private Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon, with Selections from His Correspondence. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1844. Valletine, N.I. The Discourse of the Three Sisters. London: Alexander, 1805. Webb, Samantha. “Appropriating the Literary: James Hogg’s Poetic Mirror Parodies of Scott and Wordsworth.” Studies in Hogg and His World, 3 (2002):16–35. Wellens, Oskar. “The London Review (1809).” Neophilologus, 69 (1985): 452–63. Wheatley, Kim. Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. ———–. “Reading the ‘Age of Personality’ in Biographia Literaria and Its Reception.” INCS Conference: George Mason University, Fairfax VA, 2002. Whipple, Edwin Percy. Essays and Reviews. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883. Williams, P. Remarks Suggested by the Perusal of a Pamphlet Entitled “Britain Independent of Commerce.” London: S. Tipper, 1808. Wolferstan, Elizabeth Pipe. Eugenia: A Poem in Four Cantos. London: Longman, 1824.

280

Wor k s C i t e d

Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Wordsworth, Jonathan. “Introduction.” Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem. 1817. Facsimile Edition. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. J. Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and S. Gill. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. Wordsworth, William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Arranged and edited by Ernest de Selincourt. 2nd ed. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–93. Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor. Lyrical Ballads with a Few Other Poems. 1798; 2nd ed., 1800. Ed. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones. London: Metheun, 1963. Wyhe, John van. “Was Phrenology a Reform Science? Towards a New Generalization for Phrenology.” History of Science, 42 (2004): 313–33.

I n de x

Extended discussions of a topic are indicated by bold type; the index uses the abbreviations indicated at the front of the volume and occasional shortened titles. Articles are listed under the periodicals in which they appeared and the entries for authors are cross-referenced to the relevant journals. accents, verbal, 62, 131, 206 Addison, Joseph, Spectator, 40–2, 83, 206–9, 211, 232 Ainslie, Donald, 251n2 Albert, Ernest, 265n27 Alexander, J. H., 228 Alexander, Levy, 181, 185, 187–8, 191–2 Allan, William, ix Ambrose’s Tavern, x Analytic Review, 5 anonymity, 23, 53, 125, 146, 164–5, 208 law regarding, 41 and literary value, 233, 237 Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 255n14 antidote for liberal press, 89 attacks on ER, 5, 50, 239n1 competition with Edinburgh Review for audience, 80 use of Burkean terms, 61 ARTICLES: “Review of Mounier’s French Revolution,” 66–7, 247n16; “Reviewers Reviewed” (R. C. Dallas), 80–2 Anti-Jacobin Weekly: corporate effort, 61 organization of, 60–1

on power of belief, 61–2 predecessor of ER and AJ, 56 ARTICLES: “Finance” on taxes and integrity, 62; “Prospectus” on Truth, 60–1 Archer, Thomas, 46 Arkin, Marcus, 185 artificial person, 42, 87–8 see also corporations Austen, Jane, 241n8 authenticity, 5, 103, 143 and Byron, 139, 144–5, 148–9 of facts, 69 of history, 106–7, 122 and James Hogg, 204–5, 230–1, 237 in mercantilism, 56–7 of self, 18, 42, 122 see also impersonation authorship, corporate structure of, 33–5, 86–7, 108, 214, 231–2 autobiography, 31, 234, 243n15, 263n19 Bacon, Francis, 27, 65 Bagehot, Walter, 39, 53 Bakan, Joel, 27 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18, 25–6, 35, 168 Ballantyne, James, ix–x, 90, 94, 206–7, 237, 250n9

282

Index

Bank of England, 57–8, 64, 75, 194 see also Banking Crisis of 1797; Cobbett, William Bank Restriction Act, 56, 59 Banking Crisis of 1797, 6–7, 14, 55, 56–60, 124 and ER, 59–60 and Goldsmid, 184–5 Horner’s assessment, 64–5 merchant and periodical response, 58–9, 64 Baring, Francis, 190, 193–5, 223, 258n5 Barresi, John, 3, 117 Barrett, Eaton Stannard: Comet, 6 Heroine, 6, 18–24, 26, 127, 241n8 and heteroglossia, 24–5 on print culture, 19 spoofs reviewers, 22–3 Baudrillard, Jean, 24 Bauer, Josephine, 38 Becher, J. Thomas, 135–7, 140, 150–1 Beckett, John, 161 Bentham, Jeremy, 38, 39, 244n20 Bermant, Chaim, 192 Betty, William, child actor, 255n17 Blackett, Joseph, cobbler poet, 204, 217 Blackstone, William, 26, 87, 249n5 Blackwood, William, 2, 78, 84, 99–100, 107, 123, 127–8, 217–18, 260n1 Blackwood’s Magazine, ix–xi, 1, 7, 31, 39, 83, 99, 169–70, 217 on Byron and Cockneys, 169–72 challenge to ER, 17, 78 on coronation, 219–23, 262–3n15 on economics, 105–6 effect on Hazlitt, 124 on ER’s limitations, 101–2 exploits character, 201–2 founding, 8, 84, 99–100, 218–19

historical consciousness and personality, 99–108, 203, 260n2, n5 history as model for, 106–7 invention of Hogg, 218–19, 227–8, 263n20, 264n22 and literary assassination, 226–7 methods anticipated by Hogg’s Spy, 205, 217–19 praises Horner, 218 use of multiple identities, 17–18, 104, 252n9, 257n25 use of Wordsworth, 17–18, 241n6 on Wat Tyler, 107–8 ARTICLES: “Antiquarian Repertory” (Scott and Pringle), 106–7; “Boxiana” (Wilson), 38; Chaldee Manuscript (Hogg), 84, 100, 107, 203, 218, 263n20; “Cockney School” series, 263n19; “Familiar Letter of Hogg’s Memoirs” (Wilson), 203, 219, 222–9; “Humour of Our Ancient Songs,” 107; “Hymn to Christopher North,” 218–19; “Letter from London,” 260n1; Noctes Ambrosianae, x–xi, 9, 128, 203–5, 218, 225, 228–9, 231–2, 237, 260n1, n3, 264n21, n22; “On Periodical Criticism of England” (Lockhart), 100–2; “Rev of CHP IV” (J. Wilson), 168–9; “Rev of Peter’s Letters to His Kinfolk,” 127–8; “Rev of Stories for Children,” 107–8; “Scot’s Mummy” (Hogg), 203, 230–1, 236; “Scottish Gypsies” (Scott and Pringle), 102–4; “Steamboat” (Galt), 221–2; “T. Tickler on new cantos

Index of DJ, 171–2, 178; “Time’s Magic Lantern,” 104–6; “Treason,” 263n17; “When This Old Book Was New” (Lockhart), 102 Bloomfield, Robert, 202, 204 body politic, 41, 65, 72, 77 AJW view of, 61–2 and banking crisis, 57–8 and individual bodies, 63–4, 126 monetary circulation through, 66 periodical as disease of, 239–40n2 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 60, 85, 91–2, 96, 186, 223 Boone, James, Men and Things in 1832, 33, 35, 41 Boswell, Alexander, 146, 224 Boswell, James, 161 on Hume’s death, 113 London Journal, 251n3 Braham, John, 187 British Critic: on Hogg’s Confessions, 237 reviews of Byron, 166, 171–2, 255n14 broadsheets, 5 Bromwich, David, 251n4 Brougham, Henry, 2, 51, 53, 80, 91, 99, 163, 167, 221, 246n6 and economics, 73–4 see also ER Bullion Report, 189–91, 218 Burdett, Francis, 24 Burke, Edmund, 28–9, 38–9, 61, 251n3 Abridgement of English History, 104 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 184, 258n2 On the Sublime and Beautiful, 116–17, 210 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 67, 184, 186, 242

283

Burns, Robert, 17, 93, 202, 204–5, 233, 250n9 Byromania, 166 Byron, Annabella Millbank, Lady, 130, 167, 262n12 Byron, Catherine Gordon, 131–2, 149–50 Byron, George Gordon, (sixth Lord), x, 7–8, 15, 126, 129–79 (and notes), 198–9, 225 and anachronism, 137–8, 147, 168, 170 body of, 131–2, 136–7, 149, 151 clubfoot, 131–2, 171, 217, 253n4 on death of Shelley, 174 on deaths of Keats, 172–3, 175–9 debut in London, 137–8 fame of, 34, 131–3, 134, 137–8, 144–6, 150–1, 158–9, 166–70, 175–7, 253n6, n7, 255n17 and House of Lords, 134, 138, 152–3, 155, 157, 161–3, 253n5 on “lower empire,” 1, 2–3, 178 name, 142–3, 150–1, 159, 178, 253n4, 257n24 public identity, 129–31, 133, 139–40, 142, 144, 152–3, 166–9, 171–2, 179, 198, 257n24 reaction to ER, 149–52 reviews of Hours, 140–7, 149–52 satire of Jeffrey, 158–62 and Southwell criticism, 135–7 WORKS: Age of Bronze, 169–70; “Answer to Some Elegant Verses,” 136–7; British Bards, 145–6; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 130,

284

Index

Byron, George Gordon—continued 133–4, 138, 142, 143, 166–71, 253n5, 257n24 “Damaetas,” 255–6n18 Devil’s Drive, 244–5n26 “Distant view of Harrow,” 143, 148 Don Juan, 1, 7–8, 59, 111, 127, 129, 133, 169–72, 174–9, 253n2, 254n10, n12, 257n28 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 80, 95, 145–7, 152–60, 162–6, 172, 244n22 Fugitive Pieces, 133, 135 Hours of Idleness, 51, 95, 133, 134–51, 153, 163, 253n4, 254n8, n13, 255n16 “On Leaving Newstead Abbey,” 137–8, 143, 148–9, 255n14 “The Tear,” 144–5 “To a Knot of Ungenerous Critics,” 137 “To M.S.G.,” 145, 256n19 “To the Sighing Strephon,” 136 Byron, William (fifth Lord), 252–3n1 Byronism, 4, 34, 131–2, 165, 198 Campbell, Thomas, 34 Gertrude of Wyoming, 94–5 “Lochiel,” 213, 261n7 Canning, George, 2, 33, 61–2, 88, 218 founding of AJW, 60 and QR, 89, 91–2 and war of representation, 85 Carlisle, Frederick Howard, Lord (Byron’s guardian), 139, 152–7, 162 Carlyle, Thomas “Hero as Man of Letters,” 38–9, 46 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Lord, 33, 100, 171–2

Centlivre, Susan, Bold Stroke for a Wife, 183 Cervantes, Manuel, Don Quixote, 21–2, 168, 241n8 cities: heteroglossic structures, 29–30, 205–6 see also Edinburgh; London Clark, G de N, 242n11 Clarke, Hewson, x, 142, 145–7 Saunterer, 256n20 see also Satirist Cleghorn, James, 100, 218, 262n11 Clive, John, 53, 70, 91, 246n9 Cobbett, William, 4, 14–15, 27–8, 46, 221, 244n21, n22, 259n13 Anti-Semitism, 8, 182, 191, 194, 259n10 celebration on release from prison, 259n9 compared to Addison and Paine, 41–2 fashionableness, 42–3 on Goldsmid’s public image, 190–6 on identity, 189 on mystification of Bank of England, 57, 190–1, 194 Paper against Gold on Goldsmid, 57, 189–94, 259n9 and public self, 37, 41, 124, 196, 259n9 coffee-house, 37, 80 Cole, G. D. H., 244n21, 259n9 Coleridge, Hartley, 157–8 Coleridge, S. T., 16, 31–2, 59, 108, 123, 128, 264n22 Biographia Literaria, 51, 252n7 effected by Reviews, 15 on effects of Reviews, 14, 239–40n2 on empiricism, 245n3 on ER, 50–1, 68, 245–6n4 periodical contrasted with Cobbett’s, 37

Index Statesman’s Manual, 239–40n2, 252n10 on structure of nation, 27–8 Colman, George (1732–1794), King Lear, 44–5 Colman, George (1762–1836), John Bull, 86 Commercial Habits of the Jews, 191 Confessions of a Justified Sinner (J. Hogg): as answer to Maga, 203, 225–6 and authenticity, 230–1 confession in, 228 desire and identity in, 226–7 doubts of authorship, 237–8 Editor in, 231, 233–5, 237–8 extratextuality of, 230–2, 264n25 facsimile and justification in, 233–4 Gil-Martin in, 210, 219, 226–8, 230, 234, 264n21 naming and textuality in, 229–31 reviews of, 231–3, 237 revisions of, 237–8, 265n26, n27 see also Hogg, James consensus, in empiricism, 113–15 Constable, Archibald, ix–x, 2, 84, 86, 100, 217, 260n4 in Chaldee MS, 100 credit issues, 88–9 as “entrepreneurial publisher,” 30, 245n1 in Flim-Flams!, 87 pay scale for ER, 54, 82 Cope, S. R., 185–6, 259n12 Cornish, W. R., 242n11 corporations: anthropomorphism of, 87–8 character of, 28–9, 36–7 as ideal, 242n11 and individuals, 6–7, 28–9, 39, 42, 58, 88, 261n9 and institutional heteroglossia, 24, 26–8, 34–5

285

periodicals as, 17, 29, 50, 60, 68, 73, 77, 99, 127, 172 psychopathology of, 27, 29, 219 sole, 26–8, 39, 249n5 speech of, 28–9 Courier, 14, 187, 192, 240n2, 247n11 Cox, Jeffrey, 171 Critical Review, 16, 141, 146 Cumberland, Richard, 242n12, 250n9 Cumming, Valerie, 222, 262n15 Currie, James, 17 Cutmore, Jonathan, 92, 249n7 Dallas, Robert Charles: counter-attacks ER in AJ, 80–1, 248n1 critique of ER’s “Advertisement,” 81 friendship with Byron, 141–3, 162–3, 255n15 History of the Maroons, 80 and publication of English Bards, 155–7 Damrosch, Leo, 113, 251n3 Darwin, Erasmus, 27–8 De Quincey, Thomas, 2, 111, 123–4, 240n4, 252n7, 260n3 and periodical selves, 19, 31–2 see also LM death, see identity and self; under specific individuals Derrida, Jacques, 30, 252n7 Dighton, Robert: Portrait of A. Goldsmid, 186 DiscoverArchive (archive of primary sources for book), xi D’Israeli, Isaac, 96, 181 Flim-Flams!, 30, 50, 53, 86–7 dueling, 146–7, 159–60, 165, 213, 224, 243n17, 252n1 metaphor for periodicals, 39, 159, 164, 178 Duncan, Ian, 30, 204, 225, 261–2n10

286

Index

Eagleton, Terry, 31 Eclectic Review, 141–2 economics, 5–8, 21, 42, 65 and anti-Semitism, 183–4, 186 of information, 36, 43, 51, 58, 65–9, 72–3, 83, 97, 158, 209, 246n9, 257n28 and modernity, 29–30, 104–6 as science, 63–6, 73–4 transformation of commodities, 55–6, 59 Eden, Frederic Morton, State of the Poor, 74–5 Edgeworth, Maria, 22, 261n5 Edinburgh (city), 30, 52–3, 85, 205, 209, 228, 262n11 Edinburgh Magazine: “On Fashion” (Hazlitt), 117 Edinburgh Review, x, 1–2, 4–5, 7, 14, 34, 98–9, 124 attacks on, 14, 49–50, 80–1, 92–3, 101–2, 157–61 Byron’s reaction to, 149–52 corporate extension of Horner, 65, 72 corporate identity, 3, 50, 73, 127 correspondence to QR, 34, 97–8, 100–2, 214 “duel” with Eldon, 39 economics and epistemology of, 52, 54–6, 66–78, 84 on facts and theory, 53, 69, 72–3, 77, 80 myths of inevitability and founding, 49–53 “Scottish” character, 53, 202, 250n13 and taste, 1, 50–1, 54, 69, 75–6, 80, 94–5, 211–12 Whig allegiances, 23, 45, 92, 150, 248n17 on Wordsworth, 17–18 ARTICLES: “Advertisement,” 79–81; “On the Periodical

Press” (Hazlitt), 240n5; “Rev of Analysis of a New Metal” (Brougham), 74; “Rev of Cevallos on the French Usurpation of Spain,” 84–5, 91, 93, 147; “Rev of CHP IV” (J. Wilson), 167–9; “Rev of CHPI-II” (Jeffrey), 51; “Rev of Coleridge’s Lay Sermon” (Hazlitt), 240n2; “Rev of Gertrude of Wyoming” (Jeffrey), 94–5; “Rev of Guineas an Incumberance to Commerce” (Brougham), 73–4; “Rev of Hours of Idleness” (Brougham), 51, 95, 130, 135, 137, 147–9, 151–2, 163, 253n4; “Rev of Marmion” (Jeffrey), 90, 95; “Rev of Mounier’s Influence . . . on the French Revolution (Jeffrey), 66–8, 70, 247n16; “Rev of Playfair’s Huttonian Theory (Jeffrey), 72–3; “Rev of Pratt’s Bread; or the Poor” (Horner), 74; “Rev of Southey’s Thalaba,” 50, 74–7; “Rev of Thornton’s On Paper Credit” (Horner), 66, 68–70, 73; “Rev of Utility of Country Banks” (Horner), 70–1; see also Horner, Francis; Jeffrey, Francis; Smith, Sydney; BM; QR Egan, Pierce, Life in London, 30 Eldon, John Scott, Lord, 3, 6, 38, 187, 242n11, 243n19 and Byron, 134, 152–3, 157, 161–2, 244n26 on Cobbett, 41–3, 244n21, n24 and press, 39, 42–3, 47 and regency crisis, 43–6

Index reputation for public crying, 46, 244n26 Elia, see Lamb, Charles; LM Elledge, Paul, 133, 244n23, 252n7, 255n17 Ellis, George, 60, 85, 90–1, 94, 97, 99 see also QR Emden, Paul, 185 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 243n18 empiricism, 3, 50, 114–15, 176, 202, 229, 245n3 Endelman, Todd, 258n7 Erdman, David, 165 Erickson, Lee, 14 Erinaceus, Public Credit and Decease of Goldsmid, 194–5 Eversley, George, 176 facts, 7, 39, 194 and belief, 61–2 “modern,” 52, 55, 257n27 and theory, 69, 72–3 “unvarnished,” 74 Faed, James, viii, ix Faed, Thomas: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, x Walter Scott and his Literary Friends, viii, ix–xi Fairburn, J., 258n5 fame, 32–3, 43, 120, 122–3, 178, 182–3, 191, 198, 201, 206, 217, 239n2, 247n12, 248n2 see also Byron, George Gordon, (sixth Lord) Fang, Karen, 263n20 fashion, 21, 117, 151, 167, 216–17 Ferguson, Adam, ix–x Ferris, Ina, 219 Flynn, Philip, 53, 246n9, 249–50n8 Fontana, Biancamaria, 62, 248n17 Foote, Samuel, The Liar, 248n2 Foucault, Michel, 252n8

287

Franta, Andrew, 31 Fretwell, Katie, 187, 258n6 Galileo, 104–5 Galt, John, 131, 161, 252–3n1, 257n24 Autobiography, 129–30, 252n1 “Epigram” on Byron, 129–30 see also BM Garden, Margaret Hogg, 237–8 Garrick, David, 120, 144, 255n17 Garside, Peter, 264n25 genres: novelization of, 26 Gentleman’s Magazine, 30, 171, 201 George III, King (1760–1820): insanity, 43–5, 134, 244n23 meets S. Johnson, 161 George IV, King (1820–1830) Regent (1811–1820), 30, 134, 223 coronation of, 120–1, 220–2, 262n14, 262–3n15 Gifford, William, 2, 74, 77, 91–2, 101–2, 248n4, 249n6 critical blindness to history, 101–2 editor of AJW, 61 editor of QR, 97 on effects of QR on ER, 96 Gillray, James: Midas, 57–8 Political Ravishment, 57–8 Gilmartin, Kevin, 42, 243n16, 244n25 Godwin, William, Caleb Williams, 18–19 gold, 65–6, 124 as ink, 23 materiality of, 71, 73–4 and monetary policy, 56–9 and Wordsworth’s “daffodils,” 54 see also Banking Crisis of 1797; Cobbett, Paper Against Gold

288

Index

Goldsmid, Abraham, 7–8, 181–99 (and notes): balances Jewish and British allegiances, 192 and bank crisis, 184 Cobbett’s attacks on, 190–5 depression corresponds with stock depression, 194 firm’s development, 184–5 managed philanthropy, 183 posthumous reputation, 195–9 and press, 191–2 public identity of, 187–9 public visibility, 186–7 suicide and reactions to, 182–3, 192–3, 223 Gordon, Mary, 260n1, 261n5 Grahame, James, 212, 214 Great Synagogue of London, 187 Greig, James, 53, 245n1 Grey, Charles, Lord, accusations against Eldon, 45–6 Groves, J. T., 187 Gunzenhauser, Bonnie, 243n14 Habermas, Jurgen, 239n1, 243n16 habits, 114, 117, 123, 211–12 and character, 17, 47, 63–4, 112, 171, 191, 209–10, 225 of reading, 21–2, 40–1, 73, 75, 80, 83, 98 Hale, Susan, 19 Halevi, Uri, 185 Harrington, James, 27 Harvie, Christopher, 249–50n8 Haydon, Benjamin, 121, 260n5, 262–3n15, 263n19 Hayek, F. A., 58 Hazlitt, William, ix, 4, 7, 47, 108, 113, 239–40n2, 251n4, 252n10 on Byron’s self “travestie,” 126–7, 135, 170 on corporations, 28–9 dialogue with Lamb, 35–7 as Edinburgh Reviewer, 125

on identity, 2, 117–24 on industrial image of periodicals, 32–3 “pimpled,” 260n5 public self as textual, 112, 117, 119–20, 122, 132, 178 on QR and ER as indistinguishable, 97–8, 100 on uncertainty of character, 118–19 vulnerable to representation, 123–4 on Wordsworth’s deformed genius, 15–16 WORKS: “Character of Cobbett,” 42; Liber Amoris, 121–2, 178, 251n5; “On Character,” 121; Principles of Action, 117–18; Spirit of the Age, 2, 16, 36, 126–7, 170, 240n5, 244n22; Table Talk, 13, 28, 33, 36, 42, 118–23, 251n1; “What Is the People?,” 117; “Whether Actors Ought to Sit in the Boxes,” 119–21, 167; “Will-making,” 251n1; see also EM; ER; LM Heinzelman, Kurt, 121–2 Henderson, Andrea, 55 Herzog, Don, 46, 259n10 heteroglossia, 33, 77, 108, 210, 243n14 of cities, 29–30, 206–7 of English, 242n10 of genre, 206 “hybrid construction,” 25 monoglossia as, 38 in novel, 25–6, 32 see also institutional heteroglossia Heward, Edmund, 243n19 Higgins, David, 17 Highley, Samuel, 86–7 Hilton, Boyd, 57 Hinde, Wendy, 60

Index hoaxes, see identity and self; impersonation Hobbes, Thomas, 121 Hobhouse, John Cam, 146, 150, 158, 256n21 Hobsbawm, E. J., 29 Hofkosh, Sonia, 243n14 Hogg, James, ix–xi, 8–9, 124, 127, 201–38 (and notes): Anecdotes of Scott, 202–3, 215–17, 261n10 associated with Cockneys, 225 body of, 204–5 career, 203–4 conceives Chaldee MS as “sly history,” 218 drinking as trope for, 227–8 handwriting of, 233 as historiographic agent, 203 Memoirs of the Author’s Life, 203, 217, 219, 222–5, 226–7, 233–4, 260n4 Poetic Mirror, 203–4, 225 and Scott, 215–16, 261n8, n10 and “Shepherd” in Blackwood’s, 205, 225, 228–9 on textual identity, 216–17, 223–4, 227 see also Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Spy, The; BM Holland, Henry Richard Vassal-Fox, Lord, 2, 164–5 Horne, Colin, 256n23 Horner, Francis, 6–7, 94, 204, 218, 246n6, n9, 248n18, 249n8 on Bank Crisis, 64–5 criticizes Pitt and Fox’s speech, 247n13 on economics of knowledge, 55–6, 65–6, 70 education, 62–6, 77, 247n12 and ER’s economic policy, 54–5, 70–1 and ER’s system, 65, 67, 70, 72 “Londonized,” 247n14 proposes motto for ER, 53–4

289

on science and economics of “will,” 63–4 see also ER House of Lords, 134, 152, 157, 161–3 and Regency crisis, 43–6 Hughes, Gillian, 206, 222, 232 Hughson, David, 188, 258n6 Hume, David, 7, 28, 46, 126, 169, 210, 246n9 History, 247n13 on identity, 52, 63, 111–16, 118, 127, 227, 247n15, 251n2 “My Own Life,” 112–13 on revision, 113–14 Humphry, Davy, ix Hunt, John, 130, 169–72, 175, 178 Hunt, Leigh, 31, 130, 134, 170–2, 174, 178 Examiner, 46–7, 231–2, 237 Liberal, 178 and literary assassinations, 226, 263n19 Story of Rimini, 260n5 Hunter, Alexander, 181–2, 258n1 Hunter, Richard, 44 identity and self, 2–3, 61, 128, 224–6, 231, 238 and body, 63, 116–17 and death, 45, 87, 105, 112–13, 138, 174–6, 183, 193–4, 223, 226 and dreams, 32–3, 114–15 and erasure, 128 and forgery, 77, 118 as heteroglossic, 33–4, 88 hoaxes of, 107, 127, 132–3, 225, 230 as incorporated being, 117–18 literary replications of, 18–19, 20–2, 112–13, 232–3 of public performer, 119–21 and repetition, 111–12, 118–19, 122 and sameness, 111–12, 115

290

Index

and social discourse, 114–16 and sole corporation, 26–7 and symbolic performance, 32–3, 39, 45, 157 and textuality, 29, 113–15, 119, 121–3, 203–4, 216–17, 223–4, 227, 234 see also corporations; impersonation impersonation, 17–18, 33, 122, 133, 154–5, 207, 230, 244n24, 255n17 institutional heteroglossia, 6, 87–8, 108, 220 contrasted with authorial, 25–6, 127 and genre, 30–1 of modern corporation, 26–8, 34–5 of periodicals, 26, 37–8, 53–4, 77, 95, 168–9, 210, 220–1, 243n14 in QR, 95 intentionality: corporate, 32, 36, 68, 90 and heteroglossia, 6, 25–6, 30 and will, 63–4 Irving, Washington, x, 196 Izenberg, Gerald, 3 Jamilly, Edward, 187 Jeffrey, Francis, ix–x, 6–7, 17–18, 52, 70, 84–5, 88, 90, 101, 125, 219, 240n4, 241n7, 250n12, 261n7 on challenge of QR, 93–4, 250n9 and empiricism, 50–1, 246n9 Hogg’s critique of, 211–14 metaphors for the ER, 51, 53, 73, 77–8, 246n5 on public and private character, 51 see also ER; Byron, George Gordon, (sixth Lord) Jeffrey, George, 158–9

Jews: and English patriotism, 183, 186, 258n2 and financial markets, 183–5 and philanthropy, 188 and performance of identity, 181–2, 189 Johnson, Samuel, 28, 113–14, 161 Johnston, Kenneth, 241 Jones, Christine, 131 Jones, Mark, 18 Junius, 23, 41, 243n19 Keach, William, 59 Keats, John, xi, 2, 15, 178, 217, 256n19, 263n19 death, 129, 172–7 and review poem, 30–1 Keen, Paul, 239n1 Kernan, Alvin, 46, 161 Kingwell, Mark, 27 Kirchhofer, Anton, 5–6 Klancher, Jon, 2, 15, 33, 41, 114, 126, 243n13, n16 knowledge, see economics Koenigsberger, Kurt, 251n5 Koss, Stephen, 247n11 Kropf, David, 25 Kyd, Stewart, Law of Corporations, 27 Lamb, Charles, x, 4, 122, 124, 260n5 Elia’s alleged murderer, 36, 243n17 on print production, 235 see also LM Landry, Donna, 202 Lansdowne, William Petty, Lord, 57 Lapp, Robert, 108, 252n10 Le Beau Monde, 255n14 legal fiction, 27–8 Leigh, Augusta Byron, 130, 132–3, 155, 253n7

Index Lennox, Charlotte, Female Quixote, 19 Leps, Marie-Christine., 36 literary assassination, 225–7 Locke, John, 117, 201, 242n10 Coleridge on, 28, 50 on identity, 27, 114–15, 126 Lockhart, John, ix–x, 99, 101, 102, 127–8, 203, 238, 243n15, 260–1n5, 265n27 see also BM London, 29, 37, 57–8, 76, 124, 175, 188–9, 192, 209, 252n6 London Magazine, x–xi, 1, 29, 33, 124, 243n17 Hazlitt and Elia juxtaposed, 35–6 monoglossic tendencies, 37–8 ARTICLES: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (De Quincey), 19, 26, 31–2; “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” (Lamb), 35–6; “Literary Police Office,” 36, 243n17; “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist” (Lamb), 222; “Much Ado about Nothing,” 38; “On Consistency of Opinion” (Hazlitt), 117; “Old Benchers” (Lamb), 29–30; “Oxford in the Vacation” (Lamb), 234–5; “Prospectus” (John Scott), 37–8; “Sign of the Times” (John Scott), 222 London Review, 242n12, 250n9 Longman, Thomas Norton, 84, 86, 88 Lord Chancellor: speaks for king, 39, 43 see also Eldon, John Scott, Lord Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, 113 Lynch, Deidre, 54

291

Macalpine, Ida, 44 MacCarthy, Fiona, 170 MacKay, Ross, 263n20 MacLachlan, Robin, 263n18 Macpherson, James, 106, 151–2, 215 Magnuson, Paul, 226 Mahoney, Charles, 240n2 Manning, Peter, 36, 124 Mansfield, William Murray, Lord, 39–41, 43, 46, 243n19 Marchand, Leslie, 140, 146, 150, 256 Martin, Philip, 171 Martin, Raymond, 3, 117 Mason, Nicholas, 256–7n24 materiality, 194 and continuum with symbolic, 30, 58–9, 64, 73–4 and economics, 59, 66, 70–1 Matthews, Charles, 120 Mawman, Joseph, 252n6 Maxwell, William, viii McCutcheon, Roger, 5 McKay, Charles, 125 McKerrow, Mary, viii Melikan, R. A., 45, 244n24 merchants, 61, 69, 76, 183–4, 186 analogy to “man of letters,” 46 bolster paper money, 58, 64, 184, 193, 246n10, 258n5 metonymy, 78, 80, 152, 187 Mill, James, 250n13 Milton, John, 14, 23, 27, 76, 131, 241n6 Mole, Tom, 17, 239n2 monarch, 52, 58, 92–3, 107–8, 120–1 see also George III; George IV money: and circulation, 70–3 dung as, 70–1, 248n18 as fictional commodity, 55–6, 124, 185 and magic, 76–7, 193 manure as, 70–1

292

Index

money—continued in mercantilism, 56–7 paper, 57–9, 61, 64–6, 67–9, 98, 194, 196–7 and public credit, 64, 86, 184, 191 monoglossia, 35, 38 Montaigne, Michel, on death, 112–13, 251n1 Montefiores, 195–6 Moore, Thomas, 1, 7–8, 34, 134, 155, 165, 166, 173, 174, 177, 253n5, 256n21 on Byron, 130–2, 157 duel with Jeffrey, 146, 159–60, 213 Morning Chronicle, 62, 82, 218, 244n21, n24 on Lord Eldon, 45 “To a One Pound Bank Note,” 58, 77 Morning Herald, 82 Morning Post, 257n24 obituary of A. Goldsmid, 191 Mounier, Jean J., 66–8, 70, 75, 247n16 Mulvihill, James, 117 Murphy, Peter, 3, 205, 252n9 Murray, J. A., 63 Murray, John, 1–2, 78, 94, 130, 172–3, 217 early years, 85–7 public character, 84, 97, 99 publisher of Byron, 130, 169–71, 174–5, 178, 256–7n24 publisher of QR, 7, 78, 83, 90–2, 96–7, 248n4, 249n7 and Scottish journals, 86–9, 99 Napier, George, viii, ix Napier, Macvey: Hypocrisy Unveiled, 99 Newgate Calendar, 259n8 Newland, Abraham, 185

Newlyn, Lucy, 4 newspapers, 22, 40–1, 43, 47, 60, 108, 182, 192–3, 198, 244n20, 258n5, 261n7 North, Christopher (pseudonym), 2, 107, 224–5, 222, 227, 231, 241n6 contrast to Sylvanus Urban, 201–2 frailty as literary, 217, 219 persona developed collectively, 218–19, 261n1 Northumberland, Hugh Percy, Duke, 39–40 Opie, Amelia, 3–4 Owen, W. J. B., 239n1, 240n4 Paine, Thomas, 42, 102 palimpsest, 101, 241n7 form of institutional heteroglossia, 30 Parker, Mark, 35, 37–8, 222, 264n22 passions, 14, 18, 34, 116–17, 209 Paulding, James Kirke: Childe Roeliff’s Pilgrimage, 259n13 Chronicles of Gotham, 196–9, 259n13 Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan, 196 Penelum, Terence, 251n2 Peter’s Letters to His Kinfolk, 127–8 Petrie, Elaine, 264n24 Philo-Judaeis, Letter to Abraham Goldsmid, 188 Pigot, Elizabeth, 137, 140, 142, 145–6, 154, 254n13 Piranesi, Giovanni, Carceri d’invenzione, 31–2 Pitt, William, 28, 56, 59, 60 death, 85, 89 misunderstood press, 97 parodied by Gillray, 57–8

Index Polanyi, Karl, 55–6, 68, 87, 105, 185, 197, 204, 252n8, 305, 321 Pollins, Harold, 184 Poovey, Mary, 52, 246n6, 257n27 Pope, Alexander, 3, 28 Byron on, 1 Dunciad, 137, 160 Epistle to Arbuthnot, 154 Essay on Criticism, 137 possessive individualism, 121 Poynder, John, 27 Pratt, Samuel Jackson: Bread, or The Poor, 74 “Death of Benjamin Goldsmid,” 182 Pratt, Willis, 135 Pringle, Thomas, 100, 217–18 see also BM; QR print culture, 19, 40, 161, 197–8 allegorized in Barrett’s “Preface,” 19–24 and class structure, 127 industrialized, 239n2 and Whigs, 23 Privateer, Paul, 33 Probyn, Elspeth, 124 pseudonymity, 3, 17, 41, 78, 203 and Hogg, 203, 231–2 implicit in authorship, 122 Steele’s use of, 125 Public Characters, 2, 186 public opinion, 1, 2, 15–16, 35, 84, 117, 172, 239n1 publicity, and justice, 38–9 publishers, 7, 82, 87, 232, 235 entrepreneurial, 30 and legal liability, 41, 223, 243n19, 244n21 as public figures, 7, 84, 99 as seductive, 227–8 tensions among, 84, 86, 88–9, 99 see also Blackwood, William; Constable, Archibald; Murray, John

293

Quarterly Review, ix, 1, 7–8, 34, 39, 77, 78, 83, 98–9, 122–4, 196, 214, 243n15 accused of killing Keats, 172–3 challenge to ER, 78, 96–7 compared to ER, 100–2 conditions ripe for, 84–5, 89 on ER’s historiography, 93 first number, 92, 249n7, 250n9 ideological character, 89–91, 249n8 response to ER’s Cevallos article, 91–4 on reviewers as “cobblers,” 93–4 on reviewing etiquette, 95–6 and Wat Tyler, 107–8, 226 ARTICLES: “Rev of Affaires d’Espagne,” 92–3; “Rev of Gertrude” (W. Scott), 94–6; “Rev of Reliques of Burns” (W. Scott), 250n9 Radcliffe, Ann, 22 Raphael, School of Athens, x Regency crisis: and king’s identity, 39 and public perception, 43–8 Reid, Thomas, 114–15 Reiman, Donald, 170 Rembrandt, 104–5 repetition, 18, 20–1, 31–3, 74, 104, 132, 134, 241n7 historical, 92, 102 see also identity and self Restraining Mischiefs in the Press (38 Geo III), 41 review poem, as mixed genre, 30–1 reviewer: as corporate entity, 34–5, 51, 67, 84, 90, 168–9 fantasy of displacing author, 35 Ricardo, David, 168, 191, 196 Ridge, John, 146, 254n13

294

Index

Ring, John, Beauties of the ER, 50, 55 Robinson, Henry Crabbe, 119, 241n8 Rogers, Samuel, 8 Rothschilds, 195–6, 258n6 Rubenstein, W. D., 220 Russett, Margaret, 3, 18, 27, 32, 218, 252n7, 261n8, 262n12 Saintsbury, George, 238, 265n27 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36 Satirist, x, 3, 147, 165–6 “Rev of Byron’s Hours” (Clarke), 142–6, 255n16, 255–6n18, 256n19 see also Clarke, Hewson Scott, James, 127–8, 252n9 Scott, John: editor of LM, 37–8 on Elia’s political valence, 222 fatal duel with Christie, xi, 146, 220, 243n17 see also LM Scott, Walter, ix–x, 34, 91–2, 99, 202, 206, 215, 229, 235, 240n3, 246n9, 259n14, 261n8, n10 analysis of ER, 77, 89–90 “author of Waverley,” 26, 88, 124–5, 216, 237, 259n14 on Byron, 250n10 compared to Byron, 126–7 on coronation, 220 disgust at ER, 85, 90–1 on English as “compounded” language, 242n10 as “Great Unknown,” 26, 31, 125, 259n14 historicism of, 26, 103 on Hogg as rustic, 204 on independent Reviews, 83–4 parodies modern review, 95–6 as QR and ER reviewer, 94 relation with Jeffrey, 84, 248n3

role in founding QR, 84–5, 89–90 on Scottish assimilation, 249n8 as “Small Known,” 125 staging George IV’s Edinburgh visit, 30 see also QR Scottish culture and authenticity, 100, 106, 148 and literary personae, 202, 205 Scottish Enlightenment, 6–7, 30, 53, 111–13, 246n9 self, see identity and self Shakespeare, William, 14–15, 27–8, 33, 101, 128, 168, 205, 210, 242n10, 247n13 Henry V, 61 King Lear, 44–5, 120, 132–3, 144, 244n23 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 15, 31, 39, 129, 172–3 death, 174–5 “Mask of Anarchy,” 46–7 Shlovsky, Victor, 128 Simmons, Clare, 104, 106, 203, 260n2 Simpson, Kenneth, 202 Simulacrum: in Barrett’s “Preface,” 24 and Byronism, 131, 138 heroes as, 170–1 Hogg’s Spy as, 210 readers as, 98 Smith, Adam, 65, 70, 105, 112–13, 116, 251n3 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 116–17 Smith, Christopher, 239n1 Smith, Sydney, 52, 97 advises pay for ER, 54 on ER’s founding, 53 on readers as lazy, 70 “social text,” 2, 4, 27, 52, 113 South Sea Scheme, 68 Southey, Robert, 31–2, 34, 85

Index on Coleridge and Wordsworth, 15–16 and ER, 89–90 literary assassination, 226 on reviews as detrimental, 14–15 Thalaba, 50, 74–6 Wat Tyler, 107–8, 226, 241n7 Spenser, Edmund, 27, 170 Spenser, Edmund, Fairie Queene, 166, 171 Spiller, James, 187 Spirit of the Public Journals, 58, 187 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 111, 114 Spragens, Thomas, 125 Spy, The (J. Hogg), 8, 202, 205, 215–6 bodies and dress in, 211, 214, 225 compared with Spectator, 205–11, 232 and Hogg’s career, 203, 210–11, 215 on Jeffrey, 212–14 laughter in, 208–9 muses embodied in, 214–15 Spy’s imitative traits, 209–10 see also Hogg, James Stabler, Jane, 160 Stafford, Fiona, 250n13 Steele, Richard: Tatler, 125, 251n4 Stoddart, Judith, 39 Stuart, James, 146, 224 style, 8, 21, 25, 90, 170, 251n4 of ER, 77, 81 Hazlitt criticizes Byron’s, 126–7 Hazlitt’s as antithetical, 28, 117–18, 122, 212 Hogg’s, 216–17, 237 paranoid, 31 QR calls ER’s arrogant, 93 Sutherland, John, 89, 244 Swift, Jonathan, 27

295

Terada, Rei, 245n3 theatricality, 34, 36, 92, 119–20, 144, 167–8, 255n17 Thelwall, John, Letter to Jeffray, 49–50 Thornton, Henry, Paper Credit, 66, 68, 70, 73, 77, 248n19 Tories, 42, 47, 85, 89, 91, 97–8, 150, 214, 220–1, 224, 232, 244n25, 248n17 historiography, 7, 100, 203, 221–2, 260n2, 263n15 Treadwell, James, 243n15 Trelawny, Edward, 174 Tyler, Wat, 107 Universal Magazine, review of Byron’s Hours, 140–1 Valletine, N. I. “Discourse of the Three Sisters,” 189 War, as metaphor for periodical culture, 5, 8, 51, 85, 91, 93, 97, 178–9, 239n1 Webb, Samantha, 204 Wellens, Oskar, 242–3n12 Westminster Review, 100 on Cobbett, 191 on confederacy of ER and QR, 98 on influence of criticism, 33–4 on transition from “people” to “public,” 41 as “voice of people,” 35 ARTICLES: “Men and Things in 1823,” 33–5, 41, 191; “On the Instrument of Exchange,” 98–9; “Periodical Literature” (James Mill), 98–9 Wheatley, Kim, 31, 245n4 Whigs, 23, 97–8, 100, 159, 164, 220–3, 263n15 Wilkie, David, ix, 220

296

Index

Williams, Edward, 174 Wilson, John, ix–x, 17–18, 99, 101, 167–70, 203, 219, 222–3, 225, 229–30, 238, 245–6n4, 262n12, 264n21 see also North, Christopher; BM Wolferstan, E. Eugenia, 231 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 240n4, 241n7 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 108 Wordsworth, William, ix, 2, 6, 13–18, 27, 34, 119, 127, 134 “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” 124

The Excursion, 17–18, 32, 240n4 “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” 75 Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, 17–18 Lyrical Ballads, 13–14, 16, 54, 123 “Michael: A Pastoral,” 18–19, 71, 241n7 Poems in Two Volumes, 16, 54 “The Thorn,” 59 Wringham, Francis, 16, 54 Wyhe, John van, 246n7